Burning Cold

by Lisa Lieberman

  Zsuzsanna had probably been too much for him, in the end. He hadn’t liked it when Vivien embarked on a course of self-improvement that led her to challenge his decisions over what was best for her career. And for all his encouragement of my efforts to launch myself as an actress, I knew he was relieved to have married me off. Not that he didn’t respect Jakub. He admired his new son-in-law, and was genuinely happy with the life we proposed to lead, traveling and performing together throughout Europe, but the key thing in Father’s mind was that I would be properly looked after when he was no longer around.

  Magda cleared away the empty cups and plates and Zoltán returned to sorting through the crate. He removed a set of white linen napkins, each embroidered with the letter S, the monogram intricately worked inside a floral frame. The motif was repeated on a tablecloth, which he extracted with great care. I saw there was something wrapped inside, a light but fragile object, judging from the way he handled it. Pulling away the fabric, he revealed a violin and bow.

  Jakub’s eyes lit up. “Do you play?”

  “I’m afraid not. It belonged to my grandfather.”

  “May I?” Barely waiting to receive permission, my husband reached for the instrument and began to appraise it. The next thing we knew, he was tuning the strings and sliding the bow across them, coaxing sound from the old violin. A familiar melody filled the room, bright and ominous at the same time, with its military rhythm. “The Rákóczi March.” I felt as if he were honoring József’s wish to hear it again, and it was almost as if he were in the room with us, that fine, fine man. Jakub played for several minutes, and when he finished nobody spoke. In the corner by the stove, Magda was pressing Zoltán’s shirt, the thumping of her heavy iron as she passed it across the fabric the only sound in the room.

  György broke the silence. “You play so beautifully. You must have trained somewhere professionally.”

  “I studied in Paris.” Jakub’s formal training was cut short by the war and he was not inclined to talk about his career as a classical musician. For all the joy he took in performing with his trio, there were moments when I sensed his regret for what might have been.

  Zoltán looked up from his unpacking. “At the Conservatoire?”

  My husband nodded. “You know it?”

  “I was living a stone’s throw from the rue de Madrid at the end of the war.”

  “Really?” said Gray. “We heard you were in Marseille.”

  “Where did you hear that?” Our brother’s tone was sharp with suspicion. The easy rapport we’d established that morning had evaporated in the space of a few seconds, but it was important for Zoltán to know about Nicholas.

  “We met a man who knew you in France. He was running some kind of relief agency during the war,” I said. “Jakub could tell you more about it.” I felt a little guilty about delegating to Jakub the task of explaining how we’d come to learn of Zoltán’s underground activities in France, but he knew that clandestine world intimately and was the only one of the three of us who understood fully the threat that Nicholas represented.

  “Nicholas Miner!” Zoltán was clearly dismayed by the news. “You met him here, you say? What’s he doing in Hungary?”

  My husband put down the violin and answered him bluntly. “Spying on the Americans for the Soviet Union, as near as I can tell.”

  “Shrewd of you to pick it up from a single encounter.” Our brother eyed Jakub with new appreciation, the familiar moment of reckoning I’d come to expect, when people realized that my husband had a past in the shadow world of wartime resistance.

  “I’ve encountered his sort before.”

  “Have you now? His ostensible employers in France hadn’t a clue as to who he was actually working for.”

  “Who were his ostensible employers?” György wanted to know, alarmed to learn of the precarious existence that Zoltán had led during the war.

  “He was hired by an American missionary organization to head up their refugee office in Paris. The women who worked with him were sturdy minister’s wives who spent their time handing out clothing and canned goods. They couldn’t have cared less who was in charge; they just went from one crisis to the next. From time to time, the church leadership sent someone over to check up on things.”

  Gray interrupted him. “Were they aware of the smuggling operation?”

  “I presume so, in a vague way—they were funding it, after all—but they left Nicholas to his own devices, which suited his purposes. Then, when the Germans occupied the city, they moved the enterprise, lock, stock, and barrel, to the southern zone.”

  “How did you get into it?”

  “I first met Nicholas in Spain. I was a volunteer with a Hungarian unit of the International Brigades. We were all Communists and he was our liaison, the officer who conveyed Moscow’s orders. After the Republic fell and we were forced to leave Spain, I ran into him in Marseille. A number of us from the battalion had ended up living there illegally: the French wanted to deport us, but we couldn’t go back to Hungary. Horthy would have put us in jail. Nicholas offered us work, and false papers. A chance to reenlist in the cause and do some good.”

  “Comrade to comrade?” said my brother with smirk.

  Zoltán acknowledged the smirk with a slight inclination of his head. “Comrade to comrade, yes. Nicholas had a list of foreign nationals and it was our job to get them out of France through Spain and into Portugal, using routes known to the brigadistas among us. By the end of ’42, every one of our escape routes had been closed down. Every last one. We’d lost operatives, good men and women. Maybe we’d been infiltrated, or maybe the French police were getting better at tracking us down.”

  “They had the Gestapo helping them by that time, don’t forget,” said Jakub.

  “How could I forget? The Gestapo gave them the incentive to do their job properly.”

  “Yes, that was my experience as well,” said my husband drily. “Miner seemed surprised to learn that you’d survived the war and made it back to Hungary. Was your unit compromised in some way?”

  Zoltán shook his head sadly. “It was, but I was no longer part of it when that happened. It reached the point where I decided the risk wasn’t worth it any longer. I wanted to serve the cause, but I wasn’t suicidal. The chances of surviving a mission were growing slimmer by the day. Nicholas knew it; how could he not? Of the fourteen original couriers, only three of us remained. But he showed little concern for our safety and kept sending us out. ‘Just this one last mission, and then we’ll dissolve the unit,’ he’d promise. One mission, and then another, and then another one after that. All he cared about was pleasing his Soviet masters. In the overall scheme of things, our lives mattered not a whit. Moscow would add more names to the list, but we could only transport so many without drawing attention to ourselves. One route would be sabotaged and we’d need to find another, or the Gestapo would raid a safe house and arrest everyone, so we’d have to start over, build a new network, find people we could trust. Some of us realized that we couldn’t trust Nicholas.”

  I recalled Nicholas’s words in the corridor of the embassy. “You disappeared, didn’t you?”

  “How did you guess?”

  “I didn’t have to guess. He told me: ‘Icarus knows how to disappear.’”

  Zoltán absorbed this piece of information. “So he knows,” he said, frowning.

  “What does he know?”

  “He knows I deceived him.” Absentmindedly, our brother picked up one of the lead soldiers from the discard pile.

  “He sounds quite ruthless,” commented György. “You did well to be rid of him, Zoli.”

  Jakub nodded in agreement. “I’d like to know how you managed it, though.”

  “It took some conniving, I’ll admit, and a good deal of luck. I started stockpiling a few necessities in a room I’d rented under a different name. I had a set of false docum
ents made for me in yet another name. One day I failed to show up at a designated meeting place. I went to ground instead, avoided my old apartment, just left my things there hoping he would assume I’d been killed or arrested. I laid low for a week, then I made my way to Paris. A big city offers many places to hide, if you’re not particular about your bedfellows.”

  Gray raised an eyebrow. “Bedfellows?”

  “You may have noticed that a certain type of establishment is found in the vicinity of train stations.” Zoltán paused, and glanced in my direction, measuring his words. “The neighborhood behind the Gare Saint-Lazare was ideal. Any Germans I encountered were there for, er, recreational purposes, and unlikely to look too closely at my papers.”

  “You hid out in a brothel,” I said, unruffled. If there was one thing I couldn’t tolerate, it was being treated as a fragile young lady. I knew all about prostitutes from Italy, and plenty more besides. I knew about the poverty that drove girls and women into selling their bodies for money. I’d seen it up close in Sicily, people still living in the ruins of towns and cities damaged during the war, hungry children begging in the streets, their arms and legs covered in scabs. What wouldn’t a mother do to help them survive?

  György was troubled by our brother’s story. “It would appear that you trusted your own side no more than you trusted the Germans.”

  “With good reason, Gyuri bácsi.” Zoltán set the lead soldier to stand on the table in front of him. A flick of his finger sent it toppling over, face down. His meaning was plain: they’d have killed him just like that.

  “You’re still dangerous to Miner,” warned Jakub. “You may be the only person alive who can link him to the Soviets. You see that, don’t you? Miner knows you survived, thanks to us. If you stay in Hungary, sooner or later he’ll find you.”

  “Not if I find him first,” said Zoltán.

  “Zoli!”

  “I’m sorry, but it’s a lesson one learns early on, when fighting a war: don’t wait for the enemy to attack. Surprise him when he thinks he has the advantage. Your best chance is to strike fast, when his guard is down.”

  Our host absorbed this. “Where did you say you ran into this awful man?” he asked us.

  “He works in the American embassy, processing visas to the United States,” said Gray. “We were trying to figure out how to get Zoltán his visa, in case he turned up after we left Hungary.”

  “We didn’t want to leave the country without him,” I hastened to add, “but we were warned not to stay.”

  “You’d have been wise to heed the warning,” said György. “The noose is drawing tighter. This morning there were tanks on the road to Miskolc. They were talking about it in town when I went out to get bread. Go with them, Zoli. Please, for my sake.”

  To my surprise, our brother put up no fight. All he asked was to visit the synagogue one last time, to say a prayer for his loved ones. Magda gave him his clothes and he went upstairs to change out of György’s smoking jacket. Our host urged the three of us to pack our suitcases and put them in the trunk of the car. We’d only stop back at the house long enough to drop him off before proceeding to the border. Keeping to the smaller roads and avoiding the cities, we’d be lucky to make it out of Hungary by nightfall, and there remained the perpetual problem of finding gas, although we were fortunate in that Mád’s one gas station was open for business that morning. We’d stop there to fill up on the way to the synagogue.

  Jakub drove, with György directing. Sitting between my two brothers in the back seat of the Škoda, I tried not to think about Zsuzsi. Of course there was no question of going back for her. I knew that, and yet I was determined to press Zoltán about his daughter, once we were underway on our journey to the border. She was his only child and he should want the best for her. That meant getting her to the West.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  By night, the ruined synagogue had been tragic enough. By day it was heartbreaking. You could see how exquisite the sanctuary had been, a baroque jewel box. The vaulted ceiling was once brightly painted, repeating patterns picked out in crimson, turquoise, ochre, and rose. Stars and flowers, clusters of leaves, fleur-de-lis designs painstakingly carved into the cornices. Above the ark, a sculpted tablet bearing the Ten Commandments was flanked on either side by golden lions, and above these flew fantastic winged creatures, also golden.

  “Those are the seraphim that grace the throne of God,” said György. “You can’t see it now, the soot has blackened everything, but they’re holding a crown and written upon it is the word Adonai, which is God’s name. ‘Holy, holy, holy,’ they proclaim.”

  I think it was his casual mention of the scouring fire that was intended to destroy every last trace of Mád’s Jewish community, when the members of that community had already been sent to their deaths—suddenly, I was having trouble breathing. All of these people were murdered, my ancestors among them. Standing in this sacred place where they’d come together to pray, I was overwhelmed by sadness. Soot and ash might obscure the building’s splendor, but the embers of the congregation’s beliefs glowed through. There’d been joy in the fanciful adornments; pleasure and wonder and delight in the world outside the temple walls had carried into the celebrations that took place inside the sanctuary. Our father had married Zoltán’s mother in this room, I realized. His parents, and their parents before them, would have gathered to mark both happy and solemn occasions. Looking around at the charred remains of more than a century of religious observance, I glimpsed vestiges of my own history, and Gray’s. Some part of us had died along with the Jews of Mád.

  Jakub had brought the violin into the sanctuary and asked if he might play a short piece of music, something to console us. The piece he had in mind was the Kol Nidre.

  “The Max Bruch arrangement?” said György. “Please do. It has been too long since that prayer was heard within these walls.”

  The Kol Nidre was a prayer of mourning recited on the eve of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, when Jews reflect on their conduct over the previous year and ask God to forgive their sins. Set to music at the end of the nineteenth century by a German composer, György told us that its poignancy was said to make the heart weep. Persecution, exile, and suffering were all woven into the ancient elegy, which penetrated where words could not go, reminding me of every loss I’d ever experienced. And yet the resolution of the piece was like a new dawn. How could one find hope after so much sorrow?

  When the last note had faded away, Jakub bowed his head over the instrument. He had given us the precious gift of peace, momentary but healing all the same.

  “Amen,” said György, the tears still wet on his cheeks.

  “Amen,” we echoed.

  A black sedan was parked across the street from György’s house. Inside, we could see the driver, smoking a cigarette.

  “Are you expecting someone?” asked Zoltán. “The mayor?”

  “Nobody in town drives a car like that.”

  Gray wanted to keep going. “We could try sneaking in some other way, surprise whoever’s inside.”

  “There’s no time for sneaking around,” said György. “Magda’s alone in the house.” He was quite anxious about her and refused to consider any tactics that might cost us time, leaving us no option but to drive in through the gate and walk into an obvious trap.

  Zoltán insisted on going first. “The rest of you stay here.”

  “I’ll come with you,” said Jakub, carefully avoiding looking at me.

  “Don’t be an ass,” snapped Zoltán. If there were people waiting inside György’s house who intended to harm us, we shouldn’t make it easy for them by sending in the best trained members of our group at once. Gray was to turn the Škoda around in the courtyard so that we were facing out, for a quick getaway. We were to keep the motor running. He would try and send Magda out, in which case we shouldn’t wait for him. We should drive away.
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br />   “Zoli, be careful—”

  Our brother already had his door open. “Gyuri bácsi.” A tender look passed between them. Then Zoltán set off across the courtyard, shoulders squared. We watched him approach the house. He paused on the doorstep before entering, looked our way as if reminding us one last time of his instructions, then disappeared inside. I was gripping Jakub’s hand, my desire to prevent him from rushing in overriding every other instinct, but it didn’t matter because Zoltán came out again almost immediately.

  “I’m sorry, but he wants all of us.”

  “He?” said Gray. “It’s just one man we’re dealing with in there?”

  Zoltán grimaced. “One man with a gun. And a hostage.”

  “We still outnumber him,” said my husband, his eagerness to sacrifice himself unnerving. “We should watch for an opportunity.”

  “I agree. Leave the keys in the ignition,” he told my brother. “We may need to leave fast.”

  Jakub put a protective arm around me as we entered the house, but as we approached the kitchen, he was forced to let go. A voice barked out a series of commands, first in Hungarian, then in English.

  “Lassan. Egyszerre csak egy! Slowly. One at a time!”

  Even had we not seen the black sedan out front, if we’d come in without being warned that all was not right, I would have known instantly that something was off because the first thing I saw was Magda sitting idle at the kitchen table. The gunman had positioned her close to the door, so that she, not he, would be the target, had we attempted an ambush. Stoically she sat, staring down her assailant, who stood with his back against the wall, pointing his gun at her chest.

  “Sit down, all of you,” said Frankie. He motioned to the empty chairs. “Hands on the table where I can see them.” We took our seats and did as we were told. “I’m happy to see that you found your brother,” he added maliciously, pulling out a chair for himself.