by Anna Porter
“He uses a hearing aid.”
“We all use them now,” he said, smiling again. “Géza and I were on the same train afterward. Cattle cars with a hole in the middle and a bucket of water that froze. We slept on shelves with no blankets. Some people froze to death before we got there.”
“You remember any of the guards?”
“On the train? No. But most of them were Soviets. A lot of Mongols. Maybe Tajiks. Short, powerful men.”
“No one spoke Hungarian?”
“Not until we arrived.”
“The mine?”
He nodded. “Vorkuta Gulag. Siberia. A coal mine. We worked sixteen hours a day underground. For four years we barely saw the sun. Didn’t Géza tell you?”
“He did.”
“Then why do you ask?” He looked past her through the window.
“Sometimes he can’t trust his own memory.”
“And why is that important? I don’t trust mine either, but it doesn’t matter.”
“Géza wants to find out about the men in charge at the camp,” she said.
He looked down at his entwined fingers. “I try not to remember everything,” he said almost apologetically.
“Géza had trouble with that, too,” she said. “He had willed himself to forget. Now, he wants to remember.”
“Why?” Gábor leaned closer to Helena. “What good does it do him to remember?”
“There was someone in Vorkuta he wants to find.”
“One of the prisoners?”
“He may have been both a prisoner and a guard.”
“Hmmm, one of those,” Gábor said.
“What was their job? To make sure no one escaped?”
Gábor laughed. “Escape was not a problem. Some of the men tried during the summer. A few of them were shot. Others disappeared. Either they froze to death or the hunger took them. I used to know all their names. In the first months we all had names. Later, only numbers. In the winter, it was like it used to be in the ghetto. We stacked the bodies behind the toilet ditch, six or seven deep. Had to wait for spring for the ground to thaw before we could dig down to bury them. They had us bury the bodies in the spring because they didn’t like the smell. But me, I hardly noticed it. I was used to it from the ghetto.”
“Géza asked about the Hungarian guards.”
“Yes,” Gábor said. “The Hungarians. They were prisoners like us, but they volunteered for extra duty. They got better treatment for working in the system. They took our food rations, our clothes, and beat us if we didn’t do exactly what they ordered. They wanted the Russians to treat them better. I shouldn’t call them Russians — most of them weren’t Russians, you know. They were Ukrainians, Kazakhs, Mongols. A lot of Ukrainians. They wanted preference, favours, but all they got was what they stole from the rest of us. The Soviets had no use for them, and they had no use for us. When we died, they got replacements. More Hungarians, Slovaks, Székelys, Germans, Czechs. It was simple. All they had to do was wait for the next cattle cars.”
“The Hungarian guards,” she said. “Géza remembered some of the Hungarians. He said they had been criminals before the war. Do you remember them?”
“Some. But they were packed into the trains with the rest of us. When the prison doors opened, it was easy for them, the Arrow Cross, to blend in with their victims. All of them. They took off their uniforms, those who didn’t leave with the Germans. The Russians didn’t care who you were. They had a quota for how many to pick up every day. It was an Arrow Cross man who broke my fingers. He was our guard in the Gulag.” He lifted his right hand to show her. The last two bones of his forefinger were missing, and the middle finger was bent into the space where the forefinger used to be. “I was trying to write to my mother. We thought for a time that we could send letters. But they were never mailed.”
“What was his name?”
He shook his head. “I’m not sure . . . now.” He made a small choking sound between the last two words. Nervous. Anxious. Or afraid.
“Do you know what happened to them?” she asked after a while.
“The guards? They were among the survivors. Most of them learned to speak some Russian. They ate better and got more rest than we did. Some of the prisoners were so hungry they ate the dead. Have you read Solzhenitsyn?”
She nodded. She had read about Stalin’s Gulag before she took this job. There were not many Hungarian stories.
He stood with some effort. “Would you prefer tea?” he asked, looking at her unfinished wine.
Pouring tea would give him time to recover. She nodded, and while he was out of the room, she examined the small collection of black-and-white photographs on the rolltop writing desk. One of them was of a young dark-haired woman with two small children. Another was of a group of duffle-coated figures sitting on a park bench, with the Fisherman’s Bastion in the background. There was an artfully posed sepia photo of an elderly woman with a child on her lap and a shaggy dog gazing up at her. “You’re a photographer?”
He shook his head. “Sugar?” he asked.
The tea was very dark, the leaves had been brewing too long while they talked. It tasted bitter.
“I saw one of them in ’65. It was the middle of the Kadar era. He was wearing a Party pin in his lapel. He was with another man I recognized. We were in the same bar. It was dark, but I would have known this man anywhere. In the camp, they called him Bika but that was not his real name. He was big, with a thick neck, flat nose, low forehead. Looked just like a bull.” János Krestin, she knew, was thin with receding hair and a high forehead, but time changed people. “He ordered some of the prisoners to beat Géza again. He said he didn’t like the way Géza looked at him. Is Géza trying to find him? Why?”
“It’s just an unfinished chapter,” Helena said carefully. She could hardly blame Gábor for asking, but she was not going to risk telling him anything she wouldn’t say to Géza’s enemies. If Géza’s assumption was correct, the foes he had when he left Hungary may still be influential. And Gábor may have given in at some point. He could have been blackmailed or threatened. Prisoners sometimes assume the colouration of their guards, if only as a survival strategy. Gábor had lived here for a long time after Géza left.
“Do you have any idea what this Bika’s real name was?”
“No.”
“Or where he lives? Or what he did after he came home from the Gulag?”
Gábor shook his head. “But I think he was in the state police service.”
“The ÁVO?”
“Yes. In the ÁVO,” Gábor said, lowering his voice to a whisper.
“Why do you think he was in the ÁVO?”
He shrugged. “You hear things . . .”
“And after 90? Did you ever see him again?”
“Never.”
“Have you any idea what happened to him?”
“No.” He was looking at the photos on the desk. “And it doesn’t matter now.”
“Have you seen some of the other men from Vorkuta?”
“A few of us had drinks in ’90, toasting that the Soviets had left. A celebration. But after that we made no effort to see each other.” Gábor leaned closer to Helena and studied her face. “Have you ever been in a prison?”
“No.”
“If you had, you would understand. None of us wish to relive the humiliation.”
He held his cardigan together over his chest, still studying her face. A small, frail man with a deeply lined, pale face, broken by the past.
“Would you know the men you saw in the bar if you saw them again?” she asked.
“My memory is not so good anymore,” he said softly.
“The man in the bar with Bika?” she repeated.
Gábor stood, using the arms of his chair to help him. He walked slowly to the window, his hands in the pockets of his bagg
y cardigan.
“Do you remember a man called Krestin?” she asked.
He stayed at the window, his head down as if he was trying to see something on the pavement.
She joined him at the window and showed him the small black-and-white, head and shoulders photograph of a man staring at the camera — a passport photo or a mugshot. Géza had given it to her, together with the photo of the possible Titian.
“I don’t think so,” he said, barely glancing at the picture. “I can’t see him in the Vorkuta uniforms. It’s been almost fifty years since we came home.”
“I could send you another photo,” she said. “You have a computer?”
“Never saw the need,” he said. “I suppose all the kids use them these days. But I don’t teach anymore.”
“Did Géza talk to you about a big painting his family owned? Religious. Christ entering Jerusalem. He says it was by Titian.”
“No. Why?”
“He wants to buy it back.”
Gábor’s smile widened. “Good luck with that.”
“Could we meet again?” she asked.
“I am not very busy,” he said.
“Géza sends his best wishes,” she said.
“He could have come himself. He could afford to fly first class. There’s nothing to be afraid of now, I think.” But he hesitated over the last sentence.
“When did you see him last?”
“He was here in the late ’70s, when we had a spell of goulash Communism.”
Géza had failed to mention that to her.
“Even in Vorkuta, Géza talked about getting out of the country. He said he couldn’t live here anymore after what happened. But I stayed. There was a girl I wanted to see again. She was what kept me alive. The thought of her long brown hair. Her smile. I needed to know that she had waited for me.”
“Is that her in the photos?” she asked.
He nodded. “She died last year. I visit her every Sunday.”
She waited a few moments in case he decided to say something else. But he seemed comfortable saying nothing. A man at the end of his life, she thought. Nothing left to wish for, nothing left to prove.
Géza Márton was different.
CHAPTER 5
It was a small building close to the old synagogue, in an area that had once been part of the ghetto. Some of the houses had been converted into apartment buildings. One of the developers who had sprung up like weeds after ’89 had laid claim to much of the land around here, but he had not yet succeeded in evicting the tenants from this building.
There were no names on the board, only apartment numbers, but Attila had no problem identifying the man Helena had met. The old pre-democracy police files were still useful, when needed. Gábor Nagy, eighty-four years old. He lived alone, a retired school teacher. He had spent three years in Vorkuta, one of the Soviet labour camps. He was lucky to be alive. He got in trouble again in 1956, joining a group of students he had taught — or so the indictment said. He was tried and jailed for ten years but got out after only five. He couldn’t return to teaching, so he had moved to Eger and worked in the state winery. He had been married. His wife had taught engineering at the university, but she gave up her job when they moved to Eger. Two daughters who both left the country in November 1956. After 1989, they visited every Christmas. His wife died in 2014 and he came back to Budapest.
“Is this some sort of Jewish thing?” Attila asked Tóth.
“What do you mean, Jewish thing?”
“I mean is this woman, Marsh, is she of interest because she is after some Second World War Nazi or a homegrown Arrow Cross man? Something he stole from the Jews? Is that whom we are protecting?”
Tóth sighed theatrically before he answered.
“I’ve already told you this has nothing to do with Jews. We took care of them years ago. That 2011 conference dealt with all their remaining claims.”
“What about the Herzog lawsuit?”
“Never heard of it.”
“A bunch of paintings in several museums that used to belong to a guy called Herzog. They were confiscated by the Nazis, shipped to Germany with all their loot. Now Herzog is suing the government.”
Tóth rolled his eyes with frustration. “He is damned lucky his stuff wasn’t reclassified as Soviet loot. If it were hanging in the Kremlin, he’d have no chance of ever seeing it again. But I told you, this woman is not here about Nazi loot. It’s nothing to do with Herzog or whoever else. And I am not sharing any more information with you unless it helps you find her and get her out of the country. We want no fuss.”
“The man she met on Dob Street seems to be Jewish,” Attila said.
Tóth shrugged. “There are still a lot of Jews about.”
“Any idea what the connection is between her and Nagy?” Attila asked. “She wouldn’t go to see him if there is no connection. Right?”
Tóth paced the room, then dropped back into his chair (the one that used to be Attila’s chair), his balls slapping on the wood as he sat down, legs wide apart. On full display. “Look, Fehér,” he said, trying for a more considerate tone, “what we have here is a foreign national on some sort of private mission invading the home of someone who was once close to the prime minister and to the former prime minister. Meanwhile, the Ukrainians are claiming that she may be a threat to their peace of mind. We don’t need to know why. We need to encourage her to leave the country. Encourage her hard, if that’s what it takes. That’s where you come in.”
“The former prime minister?” Attila raised his eyebrows in exaggerated astonishment. “Which one? The young Commie or the dictator?”
“That’s on a need-to-know,” Tóth said, not quite succeeding in hiding his grin under the ridiculous moustache. There had been a time when had Attila used those words in this office both of them would have laughed openly. “You are wasting time. The Ukrainians didn’t sound very patient, and I gave them my word that we were using one of our best. That’s you. But tomorrow, it may have to be someone else.”
“You could arrest her.”
“No. We can’t.”
Attila sighed. There was no sense pushing Tóth once he had dug his heels in. He tried another tack.
“The lawyer she met at the Gerbeaud is known for selling antiques. And art.” Attila had been assigned to watch him once before. Nothing came of the investigation, because everyone had been paid a share of the profits. They had been handsome profits, with several zeros at the end, and the antique credenza was, for sure, happier where it landed than in the storage space of the old Buda building where its former owners used to hide stuff before the Soviets came.
Tóth nodded.
“So, she is after something valuable,” Attila prompted.
“Could be.”
“And the thing is in the former comrade’s house, where it’s been safe and sound for many years, but someone now wants it. And the thing stays unguarded when the former comrade is out for an evening. Why?”
“You were on the job, so it wasn’t supposed to be unguarded.”
“And you are absolutely sure this is not about recovering Jewish stuff from the Second World War.”
“I told you those fucking cases were settled long ago,” Tóth shouted. “Dammit. You know that. Not our job.”
“Do you know who she’s been talking to on her cell?”
“No. She is very careful. She uses only disposable phones.”
“What about those handy little listening devices the state police installed in the guest rooms?” Attila had helped remove a number of them from hotel washrooms and overhead lights in ’90, but there would have been thousands more all over the city. The Communists displayed an almost insatiable curiosity about everyone, including tourists.
“No. The touristy ’56-ers had them all removed from the hotels.”
“Even in the
toilet bowls?”
“Especially the toilet bowls.”
“Well, as you said, the lawyer is only interested in buying and selling stuff. He tells us something now and then just for business insurance. I expect he could tell us more.”
Tóth threw a navy blue business card on the desk between them. “Don’t damage the golden goose,” he said and answered his cell phone, signalling the end of the meeting.
The silver type on the card read, “Dr. Ferenc Kis, Counsel and Specialist in European paintings and antiquities.” Hungarian on one side, English on the other. No address, just a phone number for downtown Pest. It had been a few years since Attila’s last visit.
In the hall outside Tóth’s office, Attila called Ferenc Kis and politely asked the secretary for an appointment in an hour. After a short pause and a disbelieving gust of breath, the secretary told him that Dr. Kis was busy and asked the reason for this appointment. She sounded like the sort of self-important, management-school type Attila specialized in irritating, so he got rolling with his least polite voice, accent tending to the lower prairies near the Serbian border, descending to the offensively familiar, and advised her that his business was strictly between Mr. (he refused to call anyone with a law degree “doctor”) Kis, and that if Mr. Kis valued his ass, he would be in his office in exactly forty-five minutes, which is how long it would take Attila to get to — where was it again?
She gave him some dead air, then an address at the high end of Váci Street, and hung up. He used that tone of voice to persuade petty bureaucrats of some impending doom breaching their comfortable horizons. Members of local organized crime gangs often spoke that way. Grand bureaucrats usually had their own enforcers, so scum threats rarely worked with them.