Burning Cold

by Lisa Lieberman

  The job took less than ten minutes, during which time the mechanic insisted we wait in the heated office. Fortunately, he made no mention of József; I didn’t know what Gray would have told him. He’d recovered himself after the stinky slave remark and was still in full propaganda mode as we set off for Pesterzsébet, regaling us with snippets of Marx hauled out from some limitless storehouse in his mind. Alcohol opened many doors, it seemed.

  “Capital is dead labor that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labor, and lives the more the more labor it sucks.”

  “Marx wrote that? How fascinating,” said Jakub. “Do you think he read Dracula?”

  “Don’t humor him,” I warned. Too late.

  “Marx had been dead for fourteen years by the time Bram Stoker wrote Dracula,” my brother informed us. “But he and Stoker had a common source: Vlad the Impaler. I’m sure you can guess Vlad’s favorite form of execution. Do you know, he once killed a pair of Turkish emissaries by nailing their turbans to their heads? Not what you’d call a welcoming guy. Needless to say, this angered the Sultan, but he was no match for Vlad, of course.”

  The drive went on like this, Gray prattling away and showing no signs of flagging. We’d reached the industrial zone on the outskirts of the city, the last familiar landmark. We were already off the Budapest inset on the map.

  “There’s the factory where the workers took over.” I recognized the site by its graffiti-covered walls. Two days earlier, the building had looked deserted. Now groups of men milled around out front, taking turns warming their hands over a fire in a metal barrel.

  Jakub pulled over. “Maybe we should ask for directions?” he suggested.

  Gray was keen to approach the workers. “Let me handle this,” he said, rolling down the window. “Brothers!” he shouted. “Testvérek!” Two or three of the workers turned to look and he gave them a friendly wave. The next thing we knew, he was bounding out of the car, pálinka in hand, to join the group by the barrel. The bottle began making the rounds, more workers drifting over as they saw what was going on. Soon he was at the center of a boisterous throng and we lost sight of him entirely. The gathering appeared friendly enough. We could hear laughter, and bursts of song, including one melody that sounded vaguely familiar.

  “Is that ‘Waltzing Matilda?’” I strained to hear the singing over the carousing.

  “Waltzing Matilda?” my husband echoed. I explained it was a ballad about a hobo in the Australian bush, which somehow led me into a lengthy digression about hobos hopping freight trains during the Great Depression and Woody Guthrie’s folk songs of the Dust Bowl era. Jakub knew next to nothing about the American folk tradition and, being a musician, begged me to sing one of Guthrie’s anthems. I’d dredged up the first verse of “This Land is Your Land” and was just about to launch into the chorus when Gray came staggering back, supported by a pair of burly working men, one on either side. My brother’s muffler had come loose from around his neck and was flapping uselessly about his shoulders. After assisting him into the back seat of the Škoda, one of his new friends undid the top button of his overcoat, tenderly tucking the ends of his muffler beneath the lapel. The other spoke to Gray, patiently and at length, pausing after every sentence so he could translate for us—a painstaking process—and watching our faces to be sure his message was getting across.

  We were looking for Pesterzsébet, was that right?

  “Yes,” I said. “Pesterzsébet. And there’s a great big church in the center, isn’t there?”

  Gray somehow succeeded in conveying my question and both men smiled and nodded. “Igen-igen, a nagy templom.”

  “They want to show you something on the map,” I understood my brother to say. I told him to tell them that the Budapest side of the map didn’t show Pesterzsébet, and the Hungary side wasn’t detailed enough to indicate streets, but the men insisted on seeing it anyhow. I passed it back to them.

  “Ez az,” said the older of the two, pointing to a street that ran parallel to Üllői út for a short distance before diverging sharply away in the direction of the Danube.

  “He’s telling you that this street will take you to the church,” Gray translated, making a valiant effort not to slur his words.

  “That’s all we need to know,” said Jakub. This little escapade had cost us precious time. He turned the key in the ignition, signaling to Gray’s pals that we meant to be off.

  “Goodbye, goodbye. Köszönöm, testvérek!”

  “Szóra sem érdemes,” they replied.

  “Such sweet guys,” said Gray, smiling to himself as we pulled away.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Lights burned within the children’s home but all was quiet outside. The early morning mist had turned to midmorning drizzle as we made our way into Pesterzsébet, and the few passersby we glimpsed were either huddled under umbrellas or else they had their heads down and were in too much of a hurry to notice us stationed out front in the Škoda.

  “I could go into that shop on the corner and see if anyone there speaks another language,” said Jakub. He and I were weighing our options. We didn’t have a plan for approaching Dr. Szabó, but sending Gray to the door in his inebriated state, even if one of us accompanied him, seemed like a very bad idea. He may have gotten along fine with the workers, but after the imbroglio with the garage mechanic, we didn’t dare trust him with the sensitive matter of warning Zoltán’s wife that she and her daughter were in danger.

  “We don’t want to involve a stranger in this, do we?”

  “No, I suppose not,” he conceded. “They might make things worse for the family later on. If only there were someone we could rely on.”

  My brother gave a shout from the back seat. “Cara! Jakub! Look over there, at the church.”

  “Not now.” I was thinking about priests. How close were Italian and Latin? Could a priest, who presumably knew Latin, understand Jakub’s Italian well enough to serve as a go-between with the doctor? Surely we could trust a priest not to betray her.

  “Isn’t that the girl?” interrupted Gray. “The one we saw the other day?”

  “Shhh!” I turned around to quiet him down.

  Gray was pointing at a small figure who was making her way toward us. “I’m sure it’s her. She’s on crutches.”

  He was right; I recognized the girl. A satchel containing two loaves of bread was slung across her chest, leaving her hands free to maneuver the crutches. She was quite proficient on the wooden sticks, her pace steady as she swung one arm forward and then the other, dragging her left leg, which was considerably shorter than the right one, her small feet encased in clunky black shoes that must have taken considerable effort to lift.

  “Come on,” said Jakub, getting out of the car. Gray and I followed, crossing the street to meet her.

  The girl beamed when she saw me. Talking a mile a minute, she allowed me to relieve her of the satchel, which was heavier than I expected because it contained not only bread, I realized, but also a cabbage along with some unlabeled canned goods.

  “What’s she saying?” I asked my brother.

  “Her name is Juicy. No, that can’t be right, can it? Juicy?”

  The girl laughed. “Zsuzsi (jiu-gie),” she corrected, pronouncing the z’s like half-swallowed g’s.

  “Hello, Zsuzsi. I’m Cara,” I said, tapping my chest and repeating my name for good measure. “Cara.”

  “Carrra,” she repeated, rolling the r in a pleasant way, like a cat’s purr.

  Gray was struggling to make sense of what she said next. “She’s our niece?” He turned to face her and repeated the word she’d just used. “Unokahúgunk?” Zsuzsi nodded vigorously.

  So I was right! I pulled the framed family photograph out of my purse and showed it to her. Excitedly Zsuzsi pointed to the little girl and then to herself. Regarding her more closely, I could see the resemblance to her you
nger self, although her hair was loose now, her face no longer the round-cheeked toddler’s, and of course the girl in the picture was not on crutches.

  “Apám,” she said, indicating Zoltán. Then she tugged my hand and looked beseechingly up into my eyes, her own eyes brimming with tears. I put the satchel on the ground, bent down, and hugged her. The furious way she hugged me back brought to mind her adoring expression in the photo. So much had changed since that sunlit day. Her father’s arrest and imprisonment, his years-long absence, her own bout with polio (I could think of no other explanation for the crutches). Now the revolution had upended her life once again.

  “The daughter,” said Jakub. “But she seemed to know who we were even before you showed her the picture. How is that possible?”

  “Zoltán must have told her about us,” I speculated, although this wouldn’t explain why her mother had driven us away. Unless our brother was hiding in the house? Was he still there? I allowed myself a glimmer of hope, but I couldn’t sustain it for long. If that were the case, why the tears? Had he taken a turn for the worse since checking himself out of the hospital? He might be inside dying. Poor Zsuzsi! Maybe the girl had been praying in the church for her father’s recovery.

  “Cara.” My brother’s voice pulled me back to the present moment. The rain was picking up, and we all moved into the shelter of the car, Jakub and I in back with the child sitting between us, her crutches and the satchel of food on the front seat next to Gray.

  “Ask her about her father, find out if he’s okay,” I said, once we were settled.

  “Hogy van az apád? Hogy érzi magát?”

  “Nem tudom,” Zsuzsi sobbed. “Eltünt.”

  “Oh, sweetie.” I put an arm around her and patted her back.

  “Zoltán’s gone missing,” my brother translated. He was doing very well, I thought, our niece’s tender age keeping him focused on the here and now. “The reason she was so happy to see you the other day, Cara, is because she thought you’d been sent by her father. She says they were expecting you, she and her mother.”

  This was news. “They were?” my husband and I said in unison.

  A look of doubt crossed my brother’s face. “Well, I’m pretty sure that’s what she said. She talks fast, and I might have gotten it wrong.”

  “Ask her again,” Jakub said. “And see if you can’t pin her down on exactly when she last saw her father.”

  “Are you sure that’s a good idea, darling?” I objected. “She might not know that he was shot. We don’t want to upset her unnecessarily.”

  “Good point. Don’t ask her directly, but listen carefully to what she says.”

  “Oh, boy.” Gray steeled himself for the ordeal. A series of questions, each answered at length by our garrulous niece, served merely to add a new wrinkle to the story. Not only had Zoltán informed his wife and daughter that we were coming, but he’d promised them that we would take them out of Hungary.

  “She wants to see America,” my brother reported.

  Zsuzsi nodded enthusiastically, picking up on the word. “Amerika,” she parroted. “Elvisztek engem oda veletek”

  “She’s asking if we’ll take her there.”

  “Why not?” said Jakub. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you, najdroższa?”

  I smiled at him over the top of Zsuzsi’s head. Why not indeed? It was the perfect solution: to bring the girl and her mother with us now and hope that Zoltán would find a way to join them later. We’d left the visa where he was sure to find it, and there had to be someone Dr. Szabó trusted enough to pass along the information of where they’d gone. She and Zoltán had to have established some way of communicating. We’d phone Father from Vienna. I was sure he’d welcome them at the lodge —he could invite them himself, in Hungarian. I was already picturing his delight, when he met his granddaughter.

  “Cara,” said Gray, once again disrupting my train of thought. “Are you listening? There’s more. Zsuzsi told me that her parents were arguing a lot in the days leading up to his disappearance. Her mother didn’t want to leave Hungary—”

  I finished his sentence. “Because of the home.” I wasn’t really surprised. Dr. Szabó’s devotion to the abandoned children under her care had been obvious from our first visit.

  “That might have been part of it, but I got the impression that it had more to do with us.”

  “How so?” asked my husband.

  “Her mother was furious with him—and she hasn’t mentioned anything about Zoltán being wounded, by the way—so I’m guessing that he didn’t go home after he checked himself out of the hospital. He must have gone right into hiding.”

  “Either that, or he went right back out and got himself killed,” I said with a sinking heart. “Zoltán had it in him. If he’d come across another battle on his way home, I could see him launching himself right into the thick of it, couldn’t you?”

  Zsuzsi pulled on my arm, alarmed by our repeated use of her father’s name, combined with the worried tone of my voice.

  “Valami baj van?”

  “Az apádról beszéltünk,” Gray said soothingly. “Szeretnénk tudni hol van.”

  “Anya tudja.”

  “Anyád tudja?”

  “Igen. Anya tudja, de nem árulja el.”

  “Miert nem?”

  Our niece succumbed to a fresh bout of tears. Pulling her onto my lap, I gave Gray a dirty look over Zsuzsi’s shoulder as I rubbed her back. “Shhh, it’s okay. Don’t cry.”

  “Jeez, I’m sorry,” he apologized.

  “What did you say to upset her?” I demanded in a loud whisper.

  “I didn’t mean to upset her. Really, I was just trying to figure things out. It’s not easy talking to a kid in a situation like this. You want the job, go ahead. I resign.”

  Jakub stepped in to calm things down. “What did she say that confused you?”

  “She thinks that her mother knows where Zoltán is. She knows—I should say—but she won’t tell Zsuzsi.”

  “Why not?”

  “That’s the question I asked her when she fell apart.”

  “Oh.”

  I was getting a bad feeling about all this. Did Dr. Szabó suspect that her husband was dead? She might have been waiting for confirmation before she broke the news to her daughter, but the girl was perceptive enough to have sensed the truth. I looked at Zsuzsi, who was just then blowing her nose on the handkerchief I’d given her. Gray had a point: it was wrong of us to pump her for information. The person we should be talking to was her mother, and we needed to do it soon, before the effects of the pálinka wore off. At the very least, we’d warn her that she might be in danger, but maybe once she heard about József, she’d realize we were on her side and trust us enough to share her suspicions regarding her husband.

  Saying goodbye to Zsuzsi was hard. As I was handing the child back her crutches and helping her on with the satchel, I wished I had the words to tell her we wanted to take her with us. But even if I’d spoken her language, I wouldn’t have dared to get her hopes up when her mother was so set against us.

  “Ne hagyjatok itt!” Our niece’s face expressed her unwillingness to part from us so eloquently, I didn’t need Gray to decipher her words.

  I had an inspiration. “Ask her how many children live in the home.” The answer came back: kilenc. Nine. I got out of the Škoda and went around to the trunk, removed ten bars of French chocolate from the stash of luxury goods, and put them in the satchel with the food. Zsuzsi smiled despite herself.

  Dr. Szabó ran a clinic in the church basement on Fridays. It was free, but people brought what they could to compensate the doctor for her time; our niece’s satchel had contained food donations the cook would use to make lunch.

  There must have been thirty patients waiting their turn to be examined when I entered the clinic, and more sick people kept wandering in. Dr
. Szabó and an assistant, a rosy-cheeked young woman no older than me, were managing the entire operation by themselves. They’d set up some portable screens in one corner of the basement, creating two makeshift examining rooms separated by a narrow “corridor” to provide patients with a modicum of privacy. The assistant kept things moving, ushering a new patient into one of the “examining rooms” the minute the doctor had finished with the previous patient and had stepped across the “corridor” to the other “room.”

  I watched her for quite some time. As was true in our earlier encounter, Dr. Szabó projected a formidable presence. Babies cried, small children darted through the waiting area, chased after by older siblings. Some of the patients seemed quite sick; I heard coughing and wheezing, but the clinic remained orderly with only the two women running it. Every so often, the assistant would fetch a pan of water from some offstage source—the operation in the church basement was so well-choreographed, I felt as if I were watching a performance—and the doctor would break away from her back-to-back consultations to wash her hands.

  It was during one of these intervals that she finally noticed me standing a bit to the side of the doorway, inside the room but out of the flow of traffic. She’d taken a towel from the rosy-cheeked young woman and I saw her pause in the middle of drying her hands, distracted, as she tried to place me. A moment later she was conferring with her assistant and hanging up her white smock on a rack by the radiators. She was not exactly smiling as she approached, but I imagined she was not someone who smiled much. At least she was willing to talk to me on this occasion. I indicated that I wished for her to follow me outside and she complied.

  Jakub was drumming his fingers on the steering wheel while Gray drowsed in the Škoda’s passenger seat. Between carousing with the working class outside the factory and keeping up with Zsuzsi, he’d expended most of his pálinka-fueled energy. I opened the door to the back seat and invited Dr. Szabó to get in out of the rain, then went around to the other side and joined her. The doctor accepted a cigarette and a light, but made it clear she could only talk to us for as long as it took to smoke it, looking pointedly at her watch after every few puffs.