The Travellers

by Ann Swinfen

  She cheered up as they climbed the Bastion for further views over the Danube.

  ‘I knew the ice-cream sellers would speak English,’ she said.

  For Kate the best part of the visit to the square beside the Mátyás Church was the eye-to-eye view from the Fishermen’s Bastion of the great bronze equestrian statue of King Stephen I.

  ‘Look,’ she said. ‘He’s wearing both a crown and a halo. That’s an unusual combination.’

  ‘He was an unusual man, István... Stephen,’ said Sofia. ‘King and saint. I will tell you about him some day. We still possess his crown, nearly a thousand years old. The royal treasure was carried off to America after the war, but it was returned at last, after more than thirty years.’

  The interior of the Mátyás Church was a disappointment. Its repeated transformations from church to mosque to church again, from its mediaeval origins to its nineteenth-century and post-war restorations, had robbed it of its dignity. Sofia explained that it had a special significance as the coronation church, but Kate muttered under her breath that it reminded her of a tattooed lady.

  After leaving the church they wandered away into a maze of little streets in the heart of old Buda, and found themselves virtually alone. This was how Kate had imagined the old city might be. She was entranced by the small but elegant houses painted in muted shades of green and pink and ochre, with steeply sloping slate or tile roofs from which crescent windows peered out like heavy-lidded eyes. The roads were cobbled. Here and there small squares and triangles of grass set off the architecture, which was on a comfortable human scale.

  ‘You are very fond of arches, aren’t you?’ said Kate. ‘You Hungarians? I love the way the arched openings break up the severity of the straight lines. What do you suppose is through here?’

  They went through an arch into a dim paved entrance, beyond which another arch opened on to a cobbled courtyard between pale cream walls, where bushes and trees in tubs cast a pattern of shadows. A tabby kitten was curled up in the shade of a bulbous terracotta pot holding a lemon tree.

  ‘Perhaps it’s a private house,’ Kate said, retreating. And then as her eyes adjusted to the shadowed vestibule between the two arches she saw that it contained a small collection of gravestones.

  ‘That’s Hebrew,’ she said, peering more closely at the lettering. ‘Oh, of course. The Jews of Budapest... But these gravestones are very old, I think.’

  She knew of Raoul Wallenberg, who had saved a hundred thousand Jews from the Nazi butchers during the last desperate days of the Third Reich in Budapest. But it was only now, standing here in this ancient place, that she felt the knowledge as a shock, as a living awareness of the tyrannies of East and West meeting in this city – and of their victims.

  ‘Yes,’ said Sofia. ‘I think they are very old. You were remembering the Jews of Budapest murdered by Eichmann during the last war.’

  ‘But they would have had no gravestones.’

  ‘No. They would have had no gravestones.’

  * * *

  ‘You are so like your father,’ said Ferenc, ‘so like Lancelot, that I could not believe my eyes. You must be much the same age as he was then, I suppose.’

  ‘I’ll be fifty this autumn.’

  ‘He would have been about forty-five or six when I first met him, but of course he was not looking his best!’

  ‘I don’t understand. You’re surely much too young yourself...’

  ‘I’m sixty-five. I was just fifteen when we pulled your father out of the river. Many of the partisans were youngsters like me. You have to remember that Hitler had forced all Hungarian men of fighting age to be drafted into his armies in January 1942. Some of them went into hiding and later joined the resistance, but lots of us were under age. I was strong for my years – it’s a good thing I was, or I would never have been able to pull your father out of the water. When I spotted him he was struggling through the floating ice, trying to reach the edge of the river where more ice was forming around the boat jetties. But almost as soon as I caught hold of him he passed out again and then he was a dead weight. He was a tall, slender-built man, but he was being dragged down by his waterlogged clothes.’

  They were sitting in Ferenc’s comfortable but shabby apartment, drinking coffee and looking out of the window which opened on to a tiny balcony.

  ‘Don’t stand on it!’ Ferenc had warned. ‘It isn’t safe.’

  On the promenade below them a boy was walking his dog, and two elegant women were heading towards the shops in Váci Utca.

  ‘But you called me “Juliska’s boy”. How did you know my mother?’

  ‘I suppose you wouldn’t have been told about those days. Better for the children not to know, of course.’

  István looked at him. Ferenc was only fifteen years older than he was, but what a crucial and dangerous difference in age that was.

  ‘More coffee?’ Ferenc refilled their cups. They were, István noticed, fine Herend china.

  ‘We sent Lancelot back via a chain of partisan helpers once he was well enough to travel. It was dangerous, I can tell you! The Germans and the Russians were shooting the city to pieces, and heaven help any Hungarian who happened to get caught in the middle. I knew roughly where he was going, and his code name – I never knew his given name, not even later on. After he sent word and I wrote that letter back, things began to get a bit hot for me in Budapest. The Russians were here by then, but I wasn’t a Russian lover any more than a Nazi lover. I’d been very impressed by your father – both his active service and his underground newspaper. Word got through to us, you know. So with three friends I decided to try to get through to the area where he was operating, west of Györ. Two of us made it.’

  He smiled reminiscently, and István realised that he had been mistaken in thinking he might reawaken painful memories. Ferenc was an old soldier, and recalled his exploits with the same pride and detachment as many old soldiers, somehow managing to dissociate his personal feelings from the horrors of warfare.

  ‘I lived in the camp with your parents and the others, and I’ve carried you around on my shoulders many a time. Bright little kid, you were. Started talking very young. After the Russian army had driven the Germans out, most of the partisan groups disbanded and went home, but Lancelot didn’t trust the Russians. We stayed together, mainly producing and distributing Freedom!, which was campaigning for Hungary to get the same kind of post-war deal as Austria – partition between the four occupying powers – but nothing was going to shake the stranglehold the Russians had on us. It became clear pretty quickly that Rákosi was going to be a puppet of the Kremlin. What none of us realised was that he was going to out-Stalin Stalin himself in his ferocity.’

  ‘But just a minute.’ István tried to stem the flow of reminiscence. ‘After the war we went to live with my mother’s parents in Szentmargit. We didn’t stay on at the camp in the woods. My sister was born there, in the village.’

  ‘That’s right!’ Ferenc grinned and took a deep gulp of his coffee. ‘Little... wait a minute, it’ll come to me... Magdolna, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And... she’s all right, is she?’

  István recognised the polite way of asking whether someone had survived the purges of the post-war years.

  ‘She’s fine. She’s married to a farmer and has two children – a girl studying law here in Budapest and a boy still at school.’

  ‘Wonderful, wonderful.’ Ferenc’s eyes were moist, and he blew his nose discreetly. ‘It means a lot to me that you children survived.’

  He tucked his handkerchief back into his breast pocket.

  ‘Yes, you’re quite right. After the war we moved our base of operations to Szentmargit for a couple of years. Your family lived there, all perfectly legitimate, and many of the others from the group – those who hadn’t been killed during the war – came from the village or the surrounding area. Nominally, I worked for one of the local shopkeepers, but I continued to be the courier carr
ying copies of the newspaper to Budapest for distribution. My parents were living in this flat. They never meddled in politics, and they didn’t know that I did, so my cover was fairly safe.’

  ‘So what happened in the end?’

  ‘Someone betrayed us. I was here when it happened, but we knew who it was. He was a communist – always had been, quite openly during the war. He left the group after the war, but he had seen copies of Freedom! condemning the communist regime in Hungary and calling for an uprising to set the country free. The Ávó and the NKVD were wild to get hold of your father, and this fellow probably got a fat reward for betraying him.’

  He smiled grimly into his empty cup.

  ‘He didn’t have much time to enjoy it, though.’

  István looked at him steadily, waiting.

  ‘Yes. We took care of him. He was shot while he was buying flowers at the market in Györ.’

  ‘Who did it?’

  For the first time Ferenc looked uncomfortable.

  ‘We keep names secret after operations.’

  ‘I need to know. It was forty-six years ago. No one can hurt her now. It was, wasn’t it? It was my mother?’

  ‘Yes. It was Juliska. The man had betrayed your father to the gulags. It was justice.’

  * * *

  On Wednesday, Kate and Sofia decided they would explore the centre of Pest at a leisurely pace on foot, starting at Vörösmarty Tér and visiting the Basilica of St Stephen before trying to find the instrument shop in one of the back streets behind the opera house. It was on the steps of the Basilica that they saw their one and only beggar in Budapest. A frail old woman in decent black stood apologetically at the side of the steps with a hesitant hand extended. Kate felt a sudden, overpowering rush of pity and shame. She had never felt very strongly about the beggars she had seen on the streets when they had lived in London. There they seemed to fall into two main categories: the true down-and-outs – filthy, red-eyed and torpid – and young runaways living rough. She always wanted to reason with the youngsters and say, ‘For heaven’s sake, go home!’ But she never did. A friend who had once tried to speak kindly to a pretty girl of about fourteen had been met with a torrent of abuse and foul language.

  The woman on the steps of the Basilica was of a different type altogether. She might have been anyone’s granny – threadbare but clean, with patched shoes and her white hair twisted into a neat bun. As Kate dropped some coins into the outstretched hand, lowering her eyes in embarrassment, she noticed that the woman’s fingers were dreadfully swollen and distorted with arthritis. If her hands had remained undamaged she would probably have been selling embroidery, like the women around the hotels and beside the Mátyás Church. Sofia had paused at the top of the steps and was looking at Kate and the old woman with a curious expression on her face. When Kate caught her up, she said:

  ‘It is sad, is it not, that freedom, when it has come at last, has not been good for everyone.’

  ‘Do you think she would have been better off under communism?’

  Sofia shook her head. ‘Who can say?’

  Inside the church it was cool and peaceful after the heat and the traffic outside. Kate found this interior much more to her taste than the Mátyás Church – ornate, indeed, but with a certain restrained dignity. Her eyes were drawn again and again to the great dome overhead, through whose arched windows the sun flooded the church, lightening the effect of the marble and gilding. Turning to the left from the high altar she caught sight of a huge painting of the crucifixion on the wall. She had never much cared for crucifixes of any kind, but this painting was eerily compelling. Wherever you walked within sight of it, the twisted body of Christ seemed to turn towards you, forcing your eyes back to the image of pain, the knotted muscles standing out from the arms as they bore the weight of the body – the head bowed, it appeared, in defeat. Kate shuddered, and walked back to the door and the sunlight.

  Sofia joined her a few moments later and they descended the steps soberly, each occupied with her thoughts. The old woman was still there, and she gave Kate a tentative smile. Kate smiled back.

  In their search for the instrument shop they started from the Opera in Andrássy Út. This fine street, also constructed for the millennium, stretched in a straight line from Deák Tér to Heroes’ Square far away out of sight, at the entrance to Városliget, the great green lung of the city, with its museum and art gallery, its zoo and Gundel’s restaurant, and its acres of parkland and paths and lake. The street, lined by elegant buildings dating from the last decades of the nineteenth century, was as fine as any boulevard in Paris. They found the Opera without difficulty, just a short walk from the Basilica, but here Sofia faltered.

  ‘I remember the shop being two or three blocks over, behind the Opera, but I am not sure... If we walk in that direction, perhaps I will recognise the street.’

  ‘We could ask,’ Kate suggested sensibly, but Sofia seemed curiously reluctant. Perhaps, Kate thought, she does not want to hear the answer. She knew these people who owned the shop. She does not want to hear that they were driven away on one of the death marches, when as many people died on the way to the border as died in the concentration camps when they arrived.

  For twenty minutes they wandered up and down the streets without any success. Sofia was beginning to look very tired and dispirited. At last Kate noticed a woman in her early twenties coming towards them, with a toddler in a pushchair. She was far too young to have any memories which might disturb Sofia. Kate drew the receipt gently out of Sofia’s hand and approached the young woman. With smiles and gestures she indicated that she was trying to find the shop. The woman peered at the faded paper in puzzlement, then her face cleared. She took Kate’s arm and led her back to the corner they had just passed. Beyond the next crossroads stood a building which looked older than those which lined Andrássy Út, more like the houses in the back streets of the Castle quarter in Buda which they had seen the day before. It was painted a faded salmon pink and looked rather shabby. This, her gestures clearly indicated, was the place they were seeking. Over the door the name ‘Stern’ could be read even from this distance.

  The shop occupied the ground floor and first floor of the building. Above were flats. As they entered, an old-fashioned bell tinkled somewhere in the back, but the shop was deserted. As Kate’s eyes grew accustomed to the dark interior she began to make out instruments hanging on the wall – violins, violas, cellos and a single double bass. Beyond them in a hand-carved rack was a complete set of recorders, from sopranino to bass. A glass-topped counter held wind instruments while several stands of dark varnished wood against the walls were filled with rows and rows of sheet music and albums. Behind the counter an open doorway was screened by a hanging strip curtain of lace. Then, as a young man brushed through it, Kate realised that it was not lace but paper, skilfully made like a child’s string of folded cut-paper dolls holding hands, though this cut-work was so fine it was almost an art form in itself.

  The young man was smiling and clearly asking if he could help them. Sofia stepped hesitantly forward and addressed him in Hungarian, then switched to English for Kate’s benefit. He responded in heavily accented but perfectly clear English.

  ‘An instrument left in our care many years ago, you say? And you have the receipt? It is possible it may be in the vaults. How long ago?’

  ‘1938,’ said Sofia, passing him the piece of paper.

  He blinked. If this sounded to him like the time of the Ark, he was too polite to show it.

  ‘I will fetch my grandfather,’ he said. ‘If you would wait one moment, please.’

  He disappeared through the paper curtain and they could hear his feet going up a staircase at the back of the building. In a tense silence they waited for his return. Kate turned over the sheet music. It would be fun to buy something for Roz here, but she was so ignorant. She didn’t know what Roz already had, or what would be suitable. She gave up and went to study the row of clarinets in the glass case. Sofia was staring
out of the window.

  * * *

  Sofia is bored and impatient and tries to conceal it by gazing out of the window. Mama is taking for ever talking to the young man in Stern’s, who is quite handsome in a dark, passionate, Jewish way. While they talk about the small repair to the bridge and the regular check Stern’s gives Mama’s violin, Sofia is planning what she will buy when they go shopping. Now she is eighteen, she wants some clothes that are smarter and more fashionable than anything she can buy in Györ, which is a provincial backwater. Sofia has only recently begun to take an interest in clothes since she left school. There she has been a little too earnest, a little too much of the budding scholar for her parents’ tastes. For Mama, music is the centre of life, second only to her love for her husband; Papa is interested in social and agricultural reform, and talks far into the night with his political cronies, and neither of them has Sofia’s passionate interest in books. Once or twice they have suggested, in an oblique way, that she should do something more active with her life now that she has left school, but she dreams away the hours reading in her room or – when the weather is fine – in the little Chinoiserie pavilion which stands in the clearing in the woods.

  At last the business is concluded and Mama puts the receipt in her handbag.

  ‘I will collect it in two weeks’ time, then,’ she says, giving the violin a farewell stroke. ‘My next concert is in Vienna in just over a month.’

  At the mention of Vienna, the young man looks suddenly disconcerted and opens his mouth as if to say something, but thinks better of it. He comes round the counter to open the door for them, and shakes hands as they leave.

  ‘Goodbye, and thank you, Madam. Goodbye, Miss Niklai.’

  ‘Goodbye, Jakob,’ says Mama as they step out into the sunny street.

  ‘At last!’ cries Sofia, with a skip of impatience. ‘Can we go and do our shopping now?’

  ‘Of course,’ says Mama, suddenly as pleased as Sofia at the prospect of the Budapest shops. She is, after all, only thirty-six, and is still more beautiful than her young daughter.