Burning Cold

by Lisa Lieberman

  “Aren’t we, though?” I pursued. “József said they’ll go for the ringleaders first. She doesn’t want to lose him again, and can you blame her? If speaking English is enough to draw suspicion down on somebody, having your American relatives show up at your front door is bound to get you arrested.”

  Jakub put his hands on my shoulders and pulled me in for a kiss. “Of course! If there’s an informer in the neighborhood, she’d have needed to be extra careful. Not only would it have been dangerous to be seen talking with us, but she wouldn’t have wanted anyone to know that Zoltán was injured.”

  “Because that would be a dead giveaway he’d been involved in the fighting,” I said, completing the thought.

  “Exactly!”

  “Do I get another kiss?”

  “Correct me if I’m wrong,” said my husband, kissing the tip of his finger and running it down the bridge of my nose, “but it sounds to me as if you have something more in mind.”

  I caught his finger and brought it into my mouth, feeling myself grow moist as I sucked it. Aware, too, from the change in his breathing, that Jakub was growing aroused.

  “Go play in your own room, children,” said Gray with an indulgent smile. “I’m going to try and get some sleep.”

  Jakub pulled himself to his feet in preparation to leading me off to bed, but I ignored the hand he was offering. Something was nagging at me, some crucial detail I’d overlooked. The girl on crutches: why didn’t Dr. Szabó want her talking to us? What did she know? She wasn’t much older than the other girls in the courtyard and I could see no reason why she’d have been privy to information Zoltán and his wife hadn’t shared with the others. Unless she was their daughter? Unlikely. The girl in the picture was standing on two good legs. Had she contracted polio since the photo was taken? I still had a clear image in my mind of the girl on crutches to compare to the photograph, but my handbag was in the adjoining room.

  I stood up and moved toward the connecting door between Gray’s room and ours. One hand on the knob, I turned, expecting Jakub to be right behind me, but he was standing facing Gray, who was now stretched out on the bed, eyes closed, drifting off into unconsciousness. That’s how it happened with him when he’d had too much to drink. One minute he’d be voluble, wired. The next thing you knew, he’d be flat out and there’d be no rousing him.

  “What about this Frankie?” my husband said, a frown marring his handsome face. I badly wanted to be alone with him in our room, but he was still troubled by the Hungarian stringer. “How did he get to be such an expert on ÁVH files and surveillance tactics?”

  My brother covered a yawn as he struggled to remember what the Hungarian reporter might have confided about his own background. “He used to work for the Communist newspaper, I believe. The state paper. Something-or-other Nep, it was called.”

  “He wrote propaganda, you mean,” said Jakub.

  “Well, yes. He didn’t call it that, but he didn’t brag about it either. He fed stories to the United Press, too, on the side. I don’t imagine his bosses at Nep would have been too happy about that. He told me he could have been tried for treason, if they’d found out. Incidentally, the paper’s been shut down by the new regime. He’s hoping to get hired full-time by United Press. I think he initially took me for one of their reporters and wanted me to put in a good word for him.”

  Jakub was still frowning. “I wonder who fed him the stories that he fed to UPI?”

  “What are you saying?” I asked, my anxious tone causing Jakub to pause before he answered.

  “I’m sorry to scare you, najdroższa, but a little fear is probably a good thing, under the circumstances.” Here he fixed Gray with a stare, and I saw my brother wilt. “Either your friend Frankie was very stupid, or he had more than one employer.”

  “Hmmm,” said Gray. “You think the government was using him to funnel disinformation? I’m not sure I buy that.”

  My husband lost his temper. “Nobody with half a brain, least of all a reporter for the state-run newspaper, would have risked moonlighting for a Western news organization during the Rákosi years. Or, to put it another way, if he had been slipping them stories without sanction, I very much doubt he’d still be around to brag about it.”

  “So what’s he doing, hanging around with the likes of us in the Duna bar?”

  I was surprised to see Gray standing up to Jakub. I myself was intimidated, it was so rare to see him angry, and I think he was regretting the outburst, because when he spoke again, his tone was calmer.

  “Ingratiating himself with Westerners must be the way he’s used to operating, playing both sides. Now he’s in a position to sell his knowledge of the regime to our side, maybe earn himself a ticket out of Hungary.”

  “Or he’s hoping to gain information that he can sell back to his side,” muttered my brother, a guilty look on his face as he mentally reviewed what he could remember of the conversation he’d carried on with the ÁVH informer.

  For my part, I was thinking that this high-minded little rescue mission behind the Iron Curtain was turning out to be far more complicated than any of us could have anticipated.

  CHAPTER SIX

  November 1, 1956

  We stepped out of the hotel the next morning into a different Budapest, a sunlit city no longer in the throes of a revolution. All along the riverfront we saw people cleaning up, sweeping the pavements of broken glass, piling rubble at the curb, moving debris off the tracks to allow the trams to run again. Downed wires still dangled from the overhead power lines, but someone had wrapped white paper around the live ends. Shops were reopening—amazingly, it seemed as if nothing had been looted in the week of fighting—and the cafés were full of patrons.

  “Would you take a look at that!” exclaimed Gray, indicating a fancy establishment whose fin-de-siècle allure was somewhat marred by the heavy shelling that had pitted the building’s marble facade. Yet inside, impeccably groomed waiters wearing starched aprons were serving coffee and pastry in a room furnished with velvet upholstery, gold leaf glittering from the fixtures and reflected in the many mirrors that hung from the walls.

  I’d stopped to watch the scene, dazzled by this glimpse of an earlier, more civilized time. This must have been the way Budapest looked when Father lived there. No wonder he got nostalgic when he and his Hungarian friends in the film industry got together.

  “Can’t you just imagine Father in this froufrou café?” I asked my brother.

  “In Warsaw we had such cafés,” said Jakub. A casual comment, but behind it, I knew, lay his entire history. Before the war, Jakub’s parents were well-to-do. He and his sister had been brought up by a French governess and the family traveled quite a bit, summering on the Riviera and skiing in the Swiss Alps. These excursions had instilled a wanderlust in my husband, or so I’d assumed; his jazz trio never stayed in one place for very long and I’d reconciled myself to adopting their itinerant lifestyle. Now an alternative explanation for his restlessness suggested itself. Jakub’s Warsaw was gone, destroyed, and I could only think he’d found it less painful to move about, retrieving the odd memory by visiting places he’d known in happier days, rather than brooding over his vanished past.

  “Were you taken there as a boy?” Bit by bit, I was assembling a picture of his childhood.

  “As a boy, yes, wearing short pants. My sister Bracha used to make fun of my knobby knees and once, to get even, while sitting in a pastry shop very much like this one, I dipped the end of her braid in whipped cream.”

  “She must have really tormented you to have deserved that,” said Gray.

  “Oh, yes. She knew all my weak points.”

  Bracha had been studying medicine when the Germans invaded Poland. She continued her studies clandestinely in the ghetto, in an underground school set up for Jewish students barred from Warsaw University. Jakub had met one of her professors after the war, a
non-Jew who’d risked a lot to keep the school going. “This country will never recover,” he’d told my husband. “People like your sister. We’ve lost our life’s blood.”

  We’d been alone when Jakub recounted this story, and I remembered holding him in my arms for a very long time, grieving in silence for my beloved’s unbearable loss. Here on the street, the only comfort I could provide was to take his hand, aware as always of the sheltered life I’d led in comparison to his, and to everyone around us.

  Budapest too was taking stock of its losses. It was All Saint’s Day, an occasion for solemn remembrance, and the plaza in front of the Parliament building was filled with candles. Groups of mourners clustered here and there, women in their kerchiefs, the men’s collars turned up against the damp chill coming off the river. Here, where Soviet tanks had fired on the demonstrators on the second day of the uprising, killing dozens and wounding several hundred more, the mood was somber. Black flags hung from the windows of the buildings overlooking the plaza. For years, Hungarians had been prevented from practicing their religion, but of course they hadn’t stopped believing in God. Now the Hungarian cardinal, József Mindszenty, imprisoned by the regime in 1949, was finally free and for the faithful, a demonstration of devotion was long overdue.

  Cutting through Parliament Square to reach the embassy, we passed a marble obelisk adorned with a hammer and sickle, a bronze relief at its base commemorating the liberation of Hungary by the Red Army. The monument had been defaced with the slogan Ruszkik haza! Russians go home. We’d seen the slogan painted defiantly on the side of a burned-out tank in Republic Square the day before, but the message appeared almost wistful to me, and well on its way to becoming a relic. As if to underscore the need for haste in getting ourselves out of Hungary, a plane flew overhead at that very moment, the roar of its engines loud enough to make everyone in the square glance upward.

  “Christ! That was a MiG,” said Gray, once the noise had diminished.

  Jakub was disconcerted by this information. “Are you sure?”

  “Positive. It was too high to see the markings, but it’s the same model they used against our B-29s in Korea.”

  We weren’t the only ones rattled by the Soviet fighter jet buzzing the city. Most of the people around us seemed to be on edge. Our initial impression that Budapest was returning to normal had been dispelled within the space of a fifteen-minute walk. The situation was even more tense at the embassy, where a handful of overworked clerks stationed behind a counter at the far end of the busy lobby strove to maintain order: American citizens in one line, Hungarian dependents in another. Anyone not affiliated with an American through blood or marriage was asked to come back another day, which was as good as telling them not to bother coming back at all, and many did not go willingly. A harried white-haired man seemed to have been assigned the job of reasoning with the most recalcitrant of the petitioners.

  We reached the front of the line for American citizens and were directed to a collegiate-looking fellow with a crewcut whose name tag identified him as Bud Stilton. The young clerk didn’t bother to ask our business; he just assumed we wanted to get out of the country like everyone else.

  “You’re in luck. We’re putting together a convoy bright and early tomorrow morning to evacuate the wives and children of embassy employees. I’ll put you on the list. Where are you staying?” he asked, after checking our documents. “You’ll need to be here at seven.”

  Gray gave him the name and address of the Duna and told him we had our own car.

  “That’s excellent. Would you be willing to take an extra passenger? We’re short on vehicles.”

  “We might have a fourth passenger,” my brother said. “If we can find him.”

  “How’s that?”

  “We were supposed to meet a relative of ours, but he’s gone missing.”

  A worried expression crossed Bud Stilton’s face. “A relative, you say?” He pulled a piece of lined paper from the drawer beneath the counter, took out a pen, and prepared to take notes. “How did you get separated?”

  “We didn’t get separated,” Gray explained. “He lives here and we were hoping to get him a visa—”

  “You mean he’s not an American?” interrupted the clerk, noticeably less worried. He screwed the cap back on his pen and laid it down on the counter.

  “No, he’s Hungarian. But his father—our father, I should say; he’s our half brother—is an American citizen. We were hoping to procure him a visa.”

  Bud Stilton had no interest in figuring out our relationship to Zoltán, but he did take pity on us. “I’m not able to issue visas, unfortunately, but I won’t make you wait in line again. Park yourselves over there,” he said, indicating a roped-off section of the lobby. “I’ll send my colleague over as soon as he’s free. And remember: be here tomorrow at 7 a.m. sharp.”

  We found a bench along the wall in the roped-off area, next to a flag stand displaying the stars and stripes, and settled down to wait. Behind us hung a framed photo of President Eisenhower, the standard Ike portrait you’d see in any courthouse or government building back home. I found it reassuring, these indications that we were on United States territory. After two days of needing constantly to be on my guard, I felt I could relax a bit, exhale. For the first time in my life, I appreciated what it meant to live in a democracy.

  Gray extracted a pack of Player’s from his flap pocket. “Cigarette?” he offered. He shook one out and passed the pack to Jakub, who took two, gave one to me, and lit it with a flick of his Zippo. I loved his old-world manners.

  “Ah, Player’s.” The white-haired man approached our group. “I haven’t had one of those in donkey’s years. Would you mind?” he asked, his accent that odd blend of British and American inflections you heard in people who’d grown up in one of those countries and ended up living in the other. I’d noticed it happening to Gray, a lengthening of his vowels and a descending note at the end of a sentence, even when asking a question.

  Jakub handed over his own as-yet-unlit cigarette and offered the man a light. By the time he’d lit one for himself and returned the pack to Gray, our companion was puffing away, sunk in a nicotine fugue. I realized there was no ashtray nearby and went in search of one. When I returned, dragging a metal stand ashtray back to the bench where we’d been sitting, he and my brother were carrying on a lively conversation about cricket. Someone named Laker had taken forty-six wickets that summer in a five-Test series against Australia, and Gray’d been in the stands at Lord’s for the second match, which England apparently lost.

  “He wasn’t on top of his game that day,” my brother was saying. “I wish I’d seen him at Old Trafford. Nineteen for ninety!”

  Jakub gave me a quizzical look, but I hadn’t the faintest idea what they were talking about. I’d never managed to figure out the point of the game when we were in England, but Gray was keen on the sport. He’d made friends with some theater people who followed it avidly, traveling with them to matches on weekends.

  “It must have been quite something,” the white-haired man agreed. “I was fortunate enough to have attended the third Test at Leeds in 1930.”

  “Is that the match where Bradman scored a century before lunch?”

  “He did indeed. And he added a second by teatime.”

  Gray expressed his appreciation for the cricketer’s skill. Then he noticed me, and the ashtray. “Ah, so that’s where you went. Cara, this is Mr. Miner. My sister, Cara.”

  Miner transferred his cigarette from his right hand to his left and offered me his right hand to shake. “Nicholas, I insist.” His grip was loose, his attention elsewhere. I followed his gaze. A family in the line for Hungarian dependents—two parents, two small children, and an elderly woman struggling to keep hold of a squirming infant—were being directed his way. Stubbing out the remainder of his cigarette, he excused himself with an apologetic shrug and went over to deal w
ith them. As the only Hungarian-speaking official on the premises, Gray explained, he was in great demand as a translator.

  “One Hungarian speaker for an operation of this scale?”

  “I’m sure there are lower-level Hungarian employees,” Jakub assured me. “Janitors and secretaries. But Hungarian isn’t an easy language to learn. It’s pretty much in a group all by itself.”

  “Let’s find someplace a bit more private, shall we?” said Nicholas upon his return. He led us through a doorway marked “Authorized Personnel Only” to a back hallway, up a flight of stairs, down a corridor and into a formal reception room whose furnishings reminded me of the front parlor in the dormitory of my Connecticut boarding school, the only place where we girls were permitted to entertain male visitors. The same brass-studded leather sofas and upright armchairs, the tasteful oriental rugs, the standing lamps with their fringed shades that used to make me think of dowager aunts hovering close by, alert to the slightest impropriety. Potted ferns stood on either side of the room’s tall windows, whose floral drapes were drawn, giving the room a stealthy, nighttime feel although it was midmorning.

  Nicholas ushered us over to one of the sofas and seated himself in an armchair directly across from us. Leaning forward, he rested his elbows on his knees and gave the three of us his full attention. “So, tell me about this missing Hungarian relative of yours. I understand you’re trying to procure him a visa?”

  “Zoltán. He’s our half brother, our father’s son from his first marriage,” said Gray. “You may have heard of our father, Robbie Walden.”

  “Naturally I’ve heard of Robbie Walden! Your father is still viewed by many in Hungary as a national treasure, even if he did change his name like all the others.”

  “Which others?” Jakub asked. “Who else changed their name?”

  Nicholas went on to explain how the Austro-Hungarian Empire had fallen apart after its defeat in World War I. Hungary was dismembered, losing two-thirds of its territory, and the country was plunged into political disarray. Various factions vied to fill the void. A liberal aristocrat attempted to establish a Western-style democracy, which failed in a matter of months. Then came an equally short-lived Soviet Republic modeled on the newly established revolutionary regime in Russia whose leader, Béla Kun, had been a protégé of Lenin’s.