Burning Cold

by Lisa Lieberman

  “Miért vannak itt?”

  “She wants to know why we’re here,” my brother translated.

  “Már megmondtam, hogy menjenek el.”

  “She told us to go away once already.” Poor Gray was perspiring.

  “Nem fogok beszélni, mert maguk amerikai kémek!”

  “This is too much! Now she’s accusing us of being American spies. What should I tell her?”

  Jakub shrugged. “How about the truth? Her husband was supposed to meet us in his office, but when we got there, the place was all shot up and he was nowhere in sight. We came here with József the first time because we were worried about him.”

  “And now we’re worried about her and Zsuzsi,” I added. “Because of what happened to József. They’re in grave danger. Make sure you tell her that too.”

  “You ought to tell her about József right away,” my husband agreed. “She’ll remember him, and it will explain why we came back a second time.”

  Gray sighed dramatically. “You expect me to say all that in Hungarian? We might be here all day.”

  “Just do the best you can,” said Jakub. “She’ll get the general idea, I’m sure.”

  “I wish I hadn’t shared all my pálinka with the working class.”

  Jakub and I watched the cross-examination. Dr. Szabó looked angry at first, firing questions at my brother that left him flustered and stammering, half in English, half in a language that I wasn’t sure was Hungarian, but he soldiered valiantly on and gradually her hostility dissipated. She must have decided we were innocent of whatever subterfuge she suspected us of. When Gray mentioned József’s name, the doctor had been momentarily at a loss for words. Remembering the cigarette in her hand, she took a long drag, allowing the smoke to seep slowly out of her nostrils. She smoked it down to the filter, then stubbed it out in the ashtray.

  “Tudom, hogy hol van,” she said finally.

  “Ki?”

  “A báttya.”

  “Tényleg tudja?”

  “Igen.”

  “Zsuzsi was right. She does know where he is!” my brother announced.

  “So he’s alive.” I breathed a sigh of relief.

  Dr. Szabó snapped her fingers. “Adjanak egy térképet..”

  “She’s going to show us on the map!” He handed it to her, but she waved it away.

  “Nem a Budapestit. Magyarország térképét!” With her index finger, she sketched a jagged, vaguely circular outline in the air.

  Jakub realized what she wanted. “She wants to see the Hungary side.”

  Gray flipped the map over and attempted to smooth out the creases, flattening the paper against his thigh as he unfolded it, panel by panel. Impatiently, the doctor reached over the back of the seat and took the map from him. Holding it up against the side window so we could all see where she was pointing, she indicated a spot in the northeastern region of the country.

  “Itt,” she proclaimed, stabbing at the place with her index finger. “Zoltán Mádon van”

  We all squinted at the spot where she was pointing. It was a tiny town and the print was pretty small. “Mad,” I read, amused. “It must not mean the same thing in Hungarian.”

  “Mád,” she repeated. She pronounced it mard, adding an r to the middle of the word and opening her mouth to lengthen the sound.

  My brother was astonished. “Jesus Christ! What was he thinking? Look at where he’s gone. Mad’s practically in the Soviet Union! He really must be mad.”

  “Mád,” Dr. Szabó repeated. A strand of hair had come loose from her bun and I watched her pin it back in place with a practiced gesture. “Biztonságos utazást.” She reached for the door handle. Satisfied that we’d understood where our brother had gone, she was now eager to get back to her clinic.

  “She wishes us a safe journey,” translated Gray. “If you want to say ‘thank you,’ the word is Köszönöm.”

  “Köszönöm,” I repeated, trying to get the intonation right. The stress was on the first syllable in Hungarian. I wished I knew how to say more, but ‘thank you’ would have to suffice. Seeing how far we had to travel, I too was eager to be on our way.

  Gray was visibly relieved when she’d gone. “Whew! Am I glad that’s over.”

  I allowed Jakub to get back behind the wheel before I spoke. “Can we make it there and back by nightfall, do you think?”

  “I’d imagine so. It’s still early,” he said.

  “You two can’t be serious,” my brother protested. “Mád must be hours away, and in the completely wrong direction to boot.”

  Knowing I had Jakub’s support made it easier to argue with him. “We can’t leave without Zoltán, now that we know where he is. He’s the whole reason we came. We’ve got to help him and his family.”

  “Cara, you’re not suggesting that we bring them all with us to Vienna.”

  “Yes, I am.” Daringly, I played my last card. “Why do you think she told us where he is? It’s obvious she wants us to find him. She realizes she’s in trouble and she has nowhere else to turn. How can we say no?”

  Gray made an appeal to Jakub. “Are you on board with this cockamamie scheme? Driving all the way to Mád—when the tanks come, that’s the direction they’ll be coming from—you know that, right? You don’t seriously believe we can outrun them.”

  “I’m hoping it won’t come to that,’ my husband replied, “but if need be, I’m sure we can find an alternate route to the border. Zoltán asked for our help, and it looks to me as if he needs it more than ever. He and his family.” He turned the key in the ignition. “I agree with Cara: it would be wrong to abandon them.”

  “Oh, very well.” My brother pulled his hat down over his eyes and settled his limbs as best he could across the seat. “Wake me when we get there. I feel the beginning of a massive headache coming on.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  En Route to Mád

  “What are those clumps?” I asked my husband, pointing to a mass of dark green vegetation clustered high in the branches of a leafless tree.

  “Clumps? What is a clump?” Every so often, I used a word he did not know.

  “That’s a clump. We’ve seen a lot of them. What are they, some kind of bird’s nest?”

  “Those clumps,” said Jakub with a mischievous smile, “are mistletoe.”

  “Are they really? So that’s how it grows.”

  We were driving along a two-lane highway, a flat expanse of road bordered by muddy fields, stone houses abutting the edges. In summer I imagined it would be quite lush, green stretching all the way to the horizon, but our view that day was unrelentingly bleak. Once we’d gone beyond the city’s outskirts, the few towns we passed through seemed deserted. I imagined their inhabitants were all huddled indoors behind drawn curtains, bracing for the Soviet onslaught.

  At Aszód, where the train line paralleled our route for several miles, we stopped at a railroad station for a bite to eat. Gray was sleeping soundly in the back seat and I was not eager to wake him. In his semi-inebriated state, he hadn’t thought to question the particulars of our cockamamie scheme, as he termed it, but finding Zoltán wouldn’t be easy. Once we reached Mád, we could hardly go around knocking on strangers’ doors. I’d broached this problem with my husband, who’d assured me there were other ways of finding someone, although he’d declined to elaborate on what those ‘other ways’ might be, saying only that he’d figure something out, once he saw the town and got the lay of the land.

  The station’s café wasn’t much to write home about. Located at one end of the battered stone building, it consisted of two or three flimsy tables and a bar manned by a rough-looking fellow with an impressive mustache, like you’d see on a hussar. The place was bustling with railroad workers taking a midmorning break. After gulping down some coffee, we managed to communicate that we too would like to order some
of the thick slices of bread heaped with bacon and onions that we saw our fellow patrons enjoying.

  “Trzy,” said Jakub, holding up three fingers.

  The hussar mimicked the gesture. “Három,” he said, holding up three fingers of his own. Then he looked more closely at Jakub. “Lengyel?”

  My husband repeated the question, carefully imitating the man’s intonation in the hopes that he would elaborate. Instead, the hussar chose simply to restate it more emphatically, several times, raising his voice with each repetition as if dealing with a person who was hard of hearing.

  “Polski,” called out a wizened railroad worker sitting at the table behind us.

  An expression of pure delight came to my husband’s face as he turned around to face the worker. “Tak, jestem polskim.”

  “Jestem polskim zbyt,” came the reply.

  The hussar frowned. He seemed to disapprove of patrons who spoke languages other than Hungarian, perhaps with good reason. No doubt he’d be serving a fair number of Russians in the coming days and weeks. For all he knew, we were with the invaders.

  “Cara, that gentleman’s Polish.” Jakub was like a kid who’d just made a new friend. He was so good at languages, it hadn’t occurred to me that he might miss speaking his native tongue, but I could see he was itching for a conversation.

  “Go ahead, talk to him,” I urged. “See what you can learn.”

  He needed no further encouragement. Picking up his coffee cup, he walked over to join his countryman, who was patting the empty chair beside him. An instant later they were engaged in an animated exchange.

  I left them to it and went to freshen up. The restroom in the train station was unheated, but it had running water. Traveling in southern Italy two summers ago, I’d come across so-called bathrooms that were nothing more than a hole in the ground that you squatted over. Here there was a toilet and a sink, with separate facilities for men and women. I relieved myself and washed my hands, then pulled out my compact and powdered my nose, fluffed my short hair with my fingertips, and reapplied my pink lipstick. I wanted to look presentable for Zoltán.

  Jakub was bidding his new friend goodbye as I returned to the café. We all shook hands before going our separate ways, the railwayman to his job, the two of us to the Škoda, where we found Gray sprawled across the back seat exactly as we’d left him. In addition to the food, Jakub had purchased a fresh bottle of pálinka “for emergencies,” as he put it. I tucked the bottle alongside the packet containing our sandwiches by my feet, hoping fervently that an occasion to use it would not arise.

  The Polish railwayman had given Jakub a crucial piece of information. The Soviets might have pulled out of Budapest, but elsewhere they were firmly entrenched, occupying key junctions throughout the country. Forewarned, we were not unprepared when we encountered a battalion of soldiers and a fleet of armored vehicles in the very next town. Hatvan stood at the intersection of two major routes. The road we were traveling on, from Budapest, continued eastward to the border with the USSR, but another artery branched off to the north, heading into Czechoslovakia. The Soviets had set up a roadblock at the crossroads, flanked on either side by soldiers equipped with machine guns. We had no choice but to stop and endure their scrutiny.

  “Let me handle this,” my husband said.

  A young recruit in a fur cap stepped up to the driver’s side and indicated that Jakub should roll down the window. His Asiatic features confused me. The only Russians I’d ever met were a pair of émigrés from Moscow, the European part of the Soviet Union. It hadn’t occurred to me that people from the eastern reaches of that vast empire would look Chinese.

  “Vy Nemetskiy?”

  Jakub shook his head. “Polski.” I recognized the word he used because it was the same word I’d heard the railwayman use in the café to identify himself as a fellow Pole. He must have been trying to defuse a potentially dangerous situation—a carload of Americans confronting an armed company of Soviet troops sent sub rosa to quash a revolution—by passing the three of us off as Polish. But how had he deciphered the soldier’s question? I couldn’t believe he’d made a lucky guess.

  “Oni Polskiy,” announced the sentry. The others greeted this statement of our nationality with hoots of laughter. A series of what appeared to be wisecracks ensued, accompanied by rude gestures impugning my husband’s manhood. I’d seen a good deal of this sort of thing in Italy and paid them scant attention, and was glad to see that Jakub too remained unfazed. We had a moment of uneasiness when several of the soldiers approached the Škoda to get a closer look at us, but the sight of Gray conked out in the back seat sent them into another round of hilarity.

  “Could you give me that bottle of pálinka?” said Jakub.

  The gift was accepted. “Do svidaniya, Polyaki.” Still snickering, the soldier waved us through, calls of domoy Polyaki erupting from the group behind him.

  “Do widzenia,” said Jakub quietly, rolling up the window. He put the car in gear and slowly pulled away.

  “Don’t let it bother you. Those men were cretins.” I thought he must have felt insulted after all, but he ignored my reassurances and continued to ponder the encounter. “What are you thinking about?” I asked.

  “He assumed we were German. Must have been the Austrian license plate.”

  “Wait a minute. You understood him?” My husband spoke French and Italian in addition to Polish and English, but this was the first indication that he knew Russian.

  “Not really. I picked up a bit of it during the war. The words for ‘German’ and ‘Polish’ sound pretty much the same in Russian. Goodbye, too.”

  Some of his fellow Communists in the French Resistance must have been Russian, I realized, but this phase of Jakub’s life was not one he dwelled upon. He’d left the Party several years before I met him; the show trials in Eastern Europe had turned his stomach, he’d told me. “They went after the Jews.” At the time, I hadn’t asked him to elaborate—it embarrassed me, how little I knew about politics—but I was getting an education on this trip, learning firsthand what Communism meant. Gray’s lectures and the debates among his blacklisted fellow travelers in London did not pertain to the lives of the people we’d met in Hungary. Nor did they help me understand the role the Party had played in my husband’s life. I wanted to know more, not simply from piecing together aspects of his wartime experiences from chance encounters with his former confederates in Paris or the random snippets he let drop from time to time. The risk-taking side of Jakub derived from those years and I couldn’t love him completely until I accepted all of him.

  We’d driven a few miles without encountering any more Russian soldiers. Jakub pulled over to the side of the road and studied the map, tracing our route with his forefinger as it wound northward to the city of Miskolc, another major junction. South of Miskolc, near the town of Nyékládháza, a spur road veered east, bypassing the city.

  “Do you see his road here?” he said. “It may add a little time to our journey, but I think we’d be wise to take it.”

  I nodded in assent. “I’d just as soon avoid any more Russian roadblocks. The next contingent might not find us as amusing.”

  “Exactly. And we’re out of pálinka.”

  The map indicated that we’d have to backtrack a bit when we reached the town of Tokaj. Then I made the connection: Father hailed from the Tokaj region. Proud of the area’s winemaking traditions, he never tired of educating his guests on the virtues of the Tokaji Aszú, the most esteemed variety of Tokaji. Popes and czars, emperors, kings, and queens all prized the wine, which was being produced to exacting standards for centuries, well before Port and Bordeaux. He might have taken an American name, but Father honored his Hungarian heritage in his own way.

  If Zoltán had gone back to the town where he was born, there might be a way of locating him after all. I turned and reached over the seat back to nudge Gray awake.

&
nbsp; “What? Are we there?” He sat up groggily and peered out the window.

  “Do you know where Father was born? The specific place, I mean.”

  “You roused me out of a drunken stupor to ask me that?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m sorry, but it’s important.”

  Yawning, my brother ran a hand through his hair. He stretched and rolled his shoulders, rotating his head in circles, first to the left, then around to the right. He seemed to be working out a crick in his neck.

  “The town?” I prompted, eager to get his attention before he could launch into the next exercise in the series of seated calisthenics that generally followed the head rotation sequence. As a writer, he spent a lot of time in his chair and had developed an elaborate ritual to loosen up.

  “Excuse me while I answer the call of nature,” he said, opening the car door. We watched him pick his way along the ruts of an adjacent field until he reached the cover of a stand of trees.

  “He must be freezing out there,” Jakub commented, turning up the heat in the Škoda. I noticed bits of ice in the rivulets that flowed down the windshield. Gray returned, shaking his head like a wet dog as he got back in, droplets scattering everywhere. Belatedly, I raised my forearm in an effort to shield myself from the spray.

  “Why didn’t you wear your hat?”

  “My hat!” He reached down and pulled the crumpled fedora from the floor, brushed it off with his sleeve and plunked it on his head. “Much better,” he said. “Now, what were you wanting to know about Father?”

  I showed him the map. “Look at where we’re going: Tokaj. Father grew up somewhere in the region; you know how he was always going on and on about the wine. Could he have come from Mád?”

  “He always seemed a little mad,” said Gray.