The Travellers

by Ann Swinfen

  That evening, when they return to their hotel laden with parcels and pleasantly tired, there is a telegram waiting for them at the reception desk.

  ‘It is from Papa. He wants us to return home at once and not wait for the weekend.’

  ‘Whatever can be the matter?’ wonders Sofia.

  Her mother suddenly looks grey and tired.

  * * *

  The curtain of paper lace was swept aside and the young man returned with a much older one, stooped but bright of eye, who was holding Sofia’s receipt delicately, as though it might crumble away. Kate noticed that the fingers of his right hand were damaged in some way. They seemed to be twisted out of shape. He bowed formally to Sofia and Kate.

  ‘Can I help you, Madam? You have shown my grandson this receipt.’ He cleared his throat. ‘You realise that it refers to a transaction made many, many years ago.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sofia. ‘I realise that. My mother was never able to collect the violin because my father sent us out of the country. This is the first time I have returned.’ She gripped the counter as if to steady herself, and the younger man, standing watchful behind his grandfather, hurried to bring her a chair.

  ‘Thank you.’ She smiled at him wanly. ‘I know the likelihood that the violin is still in your possession is very remote, but I felt I must try. And in order to establish my credentials, I have my passport here, and I have also brought my mother’s old passport, from before the war.’

  She opened her handbag and began to search in it. Kate was surprised. She had thought of Sofia as vague and unworldly. Bringing the old passport with her showed remarkable shrewdness and foresight. The old man turned aside and murmured something in Hungarian to his grandson, who slipped away into the back of the shop. Once again Kate could hear his feet on a staircase, this time going downwards.

  Sofia laid the documents on the counter: her own crisp new passport and a faded old document, dog-eared and, it seemed, water-stained. The old man opened this passport and looked at the photograph inside. Kate leaned over Sofia’s shoulder to see. The photograph showed a woman who was clearly the same as the lovely young woman with the violin in Sofia’s photograph album, but older and dressed in ordinary street clothes instead of evening dress. The suit jacket had padded shoulders, and showed a blouse beneath it with a neat Peter Pan collar.

  ‘Eva Tabor,’ the old man breathed, not as if he was reading the name from the passport, but as if he had recognised her. Indeed, Kate could see that the name on the passport was ‘Eva Niklai’.

  He looked up and seemed almost unable to speak, but at last he said, ‘You are Eva Tabor’s daughter?’

  The grandson had reappeared behind the curtain, Kate saw, but he seemed shy of coming into the shop.

  ‘Yes,’ said Sofia. Her voice too was unsteady. ‘I am Eva Tabor’s daughter Sofia. And I believe I have met you before, Jakob Stern, when we left the violin here.’

  ‘I remember,’ he said. ‘An impatient daughter, eager to hurry away to more interesting shops!’

  Sofia smiled. ‘I was eighteen, and just out of school. But...’

  ‘The Guarneri?’

  He hesitated, his eyes filled with faraway thoughts. ‘After the Germans came, we knew, we in the Jewish community, that we would not remain safe for long. My father and I stored all the instruments in the vaults below the shop, and a friend who was a builder had his men brick up the entrance and plaster over it. The work wasn’t done long before we were ordered to close the shop, and we were forced to leave the flat upstairs and move to the ghetto.’

  Sofia stretched out her hand to him instinctively, and he touched it briefly with his maimed one.

  ‘We Jews in Budapest were left alone longer than those in most of the countries occupied by the Nazis, but when Eichmann came in the spring of 1944 he was determined to wipe out every Jew in Hungary.’

  He drew in his breath sharply.

  ‘Raoul Wallenberg... he saved so many... and the first time the SS tried to round up my family, he managed to save us. We lived in the ghetto for some months after that. But later we were taken.’

  He laid the receipt down on the counter, and his hands were trembling.

  ‘Because I was young and strong, I was sent to the forced labour battalion, and the rest of the family was driven away on the march to the Austrian border, the death march. It was winter. There was no food, no water, and no protection from the ice and snow. At night they lay in the open by the roadside, and each morning fewer continued the march. The bodies were left there, where they had died in the night. My mother and sisters died before they reached the border. I met up with my father when the slave labourers were marched to join the others, and we were all herded together in a wooden shed at Hegyeshalom. My father died later, in the camp. They kept us working until we became too weak, and when he developed flu he knew he would be sent to the gas chamber. Before they took him, he made me promise, if I survived, to come back and carry on the business. It has been in our family for four hundred years.’

  ‘I remember. But... Jakob... your hand?’

  ‘I was tortured in the camp,’ he said briefly. ‘They broke the bones of my hand, one by one. My friends did what they could to set it, but it mended like this.’ He laughed grimly. ‘Not much good for an instrument maker, is it?’

  ‘But you came back, after the war?’

  ‘Yes. The building had been looted, but they had not found the entrance to the vaults. All our tools were there, and our seasoned timber. And the instruments.’ He looked over his shoulder. ‘Tamás?’

  The young man came through into the shop carrying a violin case and laid it on the counter. Jakob Stern fumbled with the catches, and raised the lid. Kate caught sight of the warm copper glow of polished wood as he lifted out the violin and laid it in Sofia’s hands.

  ‘The Guarneri,’ he said.

  Chapter 8

  The next day, Thursday, was their last in Budapest, but Kate and Sofia found it difficult to get up in the morning, feeling both physically and emotionally drained after the previous day’s discoveries. They had stayed to have lunch with Jakob Stern and his grandson Tamás, in the flat on the second floor above the instrument shop. Tamás’s young wife Sarah was perhaps a little taken aback when two strange women arrived in her home, but on learning Sofia’s identity and hearing the full story of the Guarneri kept hidden in the vaults all these years she welcomed them warmly and set about making a rich gulyás with salad. Tamás was sent out to buy fresh bread and fruit, and the five of them sat down very companionably to lunch.

  Sarah spoke little English and the conversation slipped more and more into Hungarian. Kate did not mind. This was part of Sofia’s story, and she had merely a walk-on part in it. She fed the baby in his high-chair while Sarah served them, and attended only dreamily to the bits of the discussion she could understand. From the moment the young woman in the street had pointed out the Sterns’ shop to them, it had seemed inevitable that Sofia should find her mother’s violin, against all the odds. Nothing, Kate felt, would surprise her in this country, which seemed every minute to grow more extraordinary. With her rational mind she understood the horror that had been experienced here, experienced by this very family, but this was outweighed by the charm of the people, the grace of the buildings, the majestic flow of the Danube through the heart of the country.

  ‘Of course the Guarneri has not lain untouched all these years,’ Jakob explained. ‘As soon as we opened the vault again – myself and Mischa Kocsis, who was the only one of our craftsmen I was able to find again during the first year after the war – we set about caring for the instruments. They were in surprisingly good condition. The cellar of this building has always been cool and dry, that is why we were able to use it to store instruments. Sealing the only entrance had kept out any damp that might have got in during those war years.’

  He paused to hold out his glass to Tamás for more wine.

  ‘Most of the instruments were our own stock, of course. A
few which had been left here for repair when we closed down were reclaimed in the next year or two. Finally we were left with just your mother’s violin and a flute of no great value. The flute is there still.’

  ‘You are a very honourable man, Jakob,’ said Sofia, ‘to have kept that violin so long and so faithfully, when you knew how much it was worth.’

  He shrugged. ‘To have betrayed your mother’s trust would have been to behave no better than the Nazis, who looted all the treasures they could lay their hands on. And while the Russians had their troops stationed here I would never have risked allowing even a whisper of its existence to creep out. But during these last three or four years – now that we have a democratic government, and contact again with the West – I have thought of trying to discover through people within the music world whether your mother’s heirs could be traced. It was rumoured at the time of the Anschluss that she had fled to France, but no one knew where. And when she did not reappear on the concert platform after the war, we all feared the worst.’

  ‘She died in 1944,’ said Sofia.

  The old man made a grieving noise in his throat and Kate lowered her eyes.

  ‘Ah, that is sad. She must have been so young – just in her early forties, yes? Such gifts, to be lost to the world!’

  He turned to Kate. ‘She could wring the heart in your breast with her music, or lift you to a transport of joy beyond this earth. My father took me first to hear her play here in Budapest when I was five years old, and I vowed I would become a violinist. Alas, I had not the talent! In the camp, when things were very bad, I used to close my eyes and hear her playing inside my head.’

  ‘I have heard a recording of her playing the Mendelssohn and Bruch violin concertos,’ said Kate. ‘I know exactly how you must have felt. Such power and tenderness at the same time.’

  ‘A record of Eva Tabor? But surely... her recordings were made so long ago, before the war...’

  ‘It’s recently been reissued on CD. My daughter Roz bought it – she is studying violin.’

  ‘But this is wonderful,’ said Jakob. He drew out his card-case and gave Kate his business card. ‘When you are back home again, would you send me the details of the CD? I used to own every recording she made, but like everything else we had in the ghetto they were lost.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Kate, tucking the card away in her bag. She would send him the CD as a gift, and any others she could find of Eva’s playing.

  They lingered at the table over hand-made local chocolates, and as the talk turned to Budapest and the state of the country under the new regime, the others drifted more and more into speaking Hungarian almost without noticing it.

  It was four o’clock in the afternoon by the time they left. Tamás had returned to the shop and Kate had helped Sarah with the dishes after the baby had been taken away for his afternoon nap. They left the two older people to talk, sitting inside the half-shuttered window, and speaking quietly.

  Tamás offered to drive them back to their hotel, but Sofia refused, saying that she had taken up enough of the Sterns’ time. The Guarneri was left behind to be checked thoroughly; she would collect it when they returned to Budapest on the last day of the holiday, before catching their flight home. Jakob said that he would also see to the export papers, and sort out any difficulties there might be.

  ‘As the violin has always been the property of your family, I don’t think there will be any problem,’ he said, ‘but perhaps you would give me a phone number where I can reach you in, let us say, ten days’ time, so that I can speak to you if I need to.’

  Sofia explained that they had not yet booked a hotel after their visit to Györ, but promised to ring him instead.

  Before they were halfway back to the hotel, Kate was regretting that they had refused the lift. The hot pavements made her shoes too tight and her feet were throbbing. Sofia was silent and abstracted, and Kate herself felt exhausted by the day’s events. Back at the hotel at last she took a cold shower and then lay down to ease her feet. Sofia had fallen asleep on her bed and, although Kate tried to read the guidebook, she found herself sinking down into the pillows as if she had not slept for a week.

  At dinner she felt giddy and slightly sick, as she always did after sleeping in the daytime, so she was irritated when a gypsy band importuned them while they were eating out on the terrace. Their playing was barely adequate and seemed an anticlimax to the strange events of the day. Sofia sent them off sharply, refused to pay for their unwanted music.

  When they went up to their room just before ten o’clock, Kate tried to telephone home. Her anger with Tom had faded since they had arrived in Hungary, and she felt slightly shamed by the intensity of her feelings when he had abandoned their holiday together. She ought to check that everything was all right in her absence, that Beccy and Tom were coping without her. But although the phone rang and rang, no one answered. Beccy must be out with Chris, she thought, and Tom not back from the office yet, or else away in Manchester or London.

  And now here it was Thursday morning, and neither of them had any energy to do anything on their last day in Budapest.

  ‘I know what we should do,’ said Kate, spreading honey on a piece of toast as she watched a hydrofoil heading up the Danube for Bratislava and Vienna. ‘I think we should take a boat trip. I couldn’t walk anywhere this morning, but I don’t want to waste today.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sofia with a smile. ‘That is an excellent idea!’

  As the small pleasure steamer puttered gently upriver, Kate knew they had made the right choice. From the water you had a new perspective on the city, and could appreciate how high the cliffs on the Buda side towered above the river, making them the natural site for a citadel. Franz Josef, last of the great Hapsburg emperors, had had the gates of the citadel blown up as a symbolic gesture. ‘A good emperor,’ he said, ‘has no need of a citadel.’ His wife, Queen-Empress Elisabeth, Sissy, was still recalled with affection by the Hungarians. She had learned the language and spent much of her time in the country, pursuing her favourite pastime of hunting in the woods – lover of Hungary and (it was whispered) of a certain Hungarian count.

  The commentary on the boat trip, however, was romantic to the point of silliness. The guide spoke of Buda as the man and Pest as the woman, embracing each other across the river. He pursued this analogy relentlessly, and Kate let her mind drift, admiring the parliament building, even more impressive from the boat, with its reflected dome and perfect symmetries upside down in the river at its feet. At Margaret Island they decided to disembark and return by a later boat. There were gardens and lawns here, and couples holding hands under the trees. They lunched at an open-air café under a canopy of weeping willows beside the river, where it was difficult to believe you were in the centre of a busy European capital city.

  At two o’clock they caught a return boat, where they were served a wine cup with chunks of oranges and strawberries floating in it, and then everyone was given the ‘magical water of youth’ in tiny handle-less ceramic pots about an inch high. Laughing, Kate drank hers down – it was chilled mineral water – and handed the cup back to the girl in national costume.

  ‘Please,’ said the girl, smiling and shaking her head, ‘it is for you to keep. To remember Budapest.’

  Sofia sipped at hers.

  ‘I could certainly benefit from the water of youth!’

  ‘You don’t need it,’ said Kate. ‘You are looking younger every day. Your native air must be good for you.’

  Carefully she wrapped her scarf around her tiny cup, which was copper-coloured, and Sofia’s, which was deep blue, and stowed them in her bag.

  ‘I shall treasure this,’ she said.

  After they returned to the hotel they indulged themselves with tea and magnificent Hungarian cakes – as many as they could eat for 375 forints.

  ‘I have been promising myself this since we arrived,’ said Sofia. ‘When I was a child, a visit to Budapest always meant cakes at Café Gerbeaud, and I do
believe these are just as good.’

  ‘They’re wonderful!’ said Kate. ‘So light, you can be really greedy. I’ve had three. My children would go quite mad here, especially Stephen. He eats like a ravening wolf but never puts on an ounce of fat. I do hope he and Mick are managing all right in France.’

  Sofia decided to rest until dinner, because of the long drive the next day, but Kate felt refreshed and said she would stroll past the elegant shops she had glimpsed only briefly in Váci Utca. She set out from the hotel feeling a little nervous. It was the first time she had been on her own, without a Hungarian-speaker to rescue her from any difficulties, but soon she was absorbed into an international crowd, enjoying the inexpensive pleasure of window-shopping.

  Many of the shops were truly Hungarian, although the American chains had begun to gain a foothold, and she was amused to see a tiny branch of Marks and Spencer. In a food shop she bought hand-made chocolates for her parents, and then wandered into a gallery displaying paintings, carvings and ceramics. A landscape in pastel caught her eye. It showed the puszta, with high grasses bowed by the wind all in one flowing curve and – just hinted at by fluid shapes in browns – a group of galloping horses on the skyline. The price was very low, less than £100, but she hesitated at the thought of trying to struggle with it on the plane going back.

  As she turned away from the painting she noticed a smaller room opening off the main gallery, subtly lit and displaying a few ceramic figures. There was no one else in the room, and Kate went from figure to figure, astonished by what she saw. The figures were vigorous, original and full of passion. Each one was clearly unique, but there was a kind of family relationship between them, and though there could not have been more than a dozen of them they created a powerful and consistent world of their own.

  Most of the figures were three or four feet tall, and displayed on tall plinths so that their heads were on a level with the viewer’s eyes. The forms were deceptively simple, the clothes falling in long loose curves which formed a continuous line for the eye, uniting arm, hand and skirt, the curve of a back flowing into the angle of a shepherd’s crook or a swineherd’s horn. A mother held her child nestled against her shoulder, her hand delicately cupping the back of the vulnerable head. The bodies of woman and baby locked together in one poignant whole. In a shadowy corner an old woman in rough peasant dress sitting on a stool was stretched out in a spasm of grief which held her whole body – from the top of her head and the hands pressed between her knees, to the battered shoes – in one tense arc of agony, taut as a strung bow.