There are people who deliberately set out to make a legend of themselves. But Zoltan had remained a mystery simply because he was so private.
‘The Russians were crazy, Budapest was crazy, the whole world was crazy, us more than anybody. Life was unreal. We lived in a dream and didn’t want to wake up. We each had a different fantasy about Uncle Zoltan. To Tibor Kassack he was a spy, a Western agent. Ferenc thought him a defrocked priest. You imagined he was a tragic actor. Nearly, Babushka said, nearly but not quite. He was a film producer. “Take my word for it, he is a metteur en scene, I have known several.” That was her. That was Babushka.’
At the first mention of Babushka, Ilona had gone very still. ‘You haven’t forgotten her, surely?’
Ilona shook her head. No, she hadn’t forgotten.
‘Her proper name?’
‘Natalya Zelenaya.’
‘Another crazy Russian. Or not so crazy. She got out of Russia a long time before. Why are you frowning? You were her darling.’
‘Her husband had been an officer in the Tsar’s navy.’
‘What? And fired on revolutionaries?’ This was delivered with great scorn. ‘You were happy enough with her then.’
‘Nothing was real. You said that yourself.’
‘We lived with her for a week.’
‘Steven, I know, I was there.’
But nothing would stop him. ‘All of us in her sprawling apartment. Lazlo, Sandor, Matyas, Ferenc, Anna the Palomino, Ilona, Tibor Bihari, Tibor Kassack, me.’
They could have been kings in history, always to be recited in the same order. He’d lived that time again and again, Ilona understood, and the names had turned into a roll-call.
‘It was even your idea to call her Babushka,’ Steven pressed on. ‘We lost Uncle Zoltan and gained Babushka. Babushka, for God’s sake. As if she was some peasant grandmother in a black shawl and not a jewel at the court in St Petersburg.’
‘Leningrad,’ Ilona murmured.
‘To her it was St Petersburg.’
‘Don’t you mean St-Petersbourg? Isn’t that what she called it? After all those years she still spoke French better than Hungarian.’
‘She blessed us,’ Steven said.
‘With her claw of a hand.’
‘She understood and she blessed. She had a dark eye that missed nothing. Nothing.’
14 Budapest, then
Inside it was perpetual twilight.
That was part of the problem. Tibor Kassack needed a broad stage and an appreciative crowd and brilliant lighting, and in here he was confined. He prowled between heavy furniture in the sitting room, circled the table in the dining room, inspected the bedroom and the kitchen, detoured onto the landing and bumped his way back into the sitting room. There was a potted fern in a tall wooden plantholder in his way and he moved it to a corner.
‘Too damned dark to see anything.’
‘Darling,’ said the voice from the chaise longue, ‘we could have the light on if there was electricity. Myself, I am content. I have reached an age when, franchement, darkness is a woman’s friend.’ She drew on her cigarette and muttered: ‘Though perhaps it is at any age.’
‘We are trapped. Caged in.’
‘My poor wild beast.’ There was contentment in her voice because she approved of Tibor Kassack. He had style. He had verve. He had craziness.
‘The apartment is a cage. Budapest is a cage. The whole of Hungary is a cage. But the wild beasts are roaming outside. It is we who are trapped behind bars.’
Nagy had broadcast again. According to the Prime Minister, Soviet troops were withdrawing from the city and he was negotiating with the Russians for proper independence. It made Tibor Kassack very angry.
‘What is there to negotiate? How can you negotiate about independence? Either you are free or you are not. To negotiate is to compromise. If you compromise, then you are no longer free.’
‘Darling, how clever.’
‘There is only one virtue. What use is humility and patience and the rest of the mouse-nibbles? The one true virtue is patriotism. This land is ours and we fight for it.’
Natalya Zelenaya, ‘Babushka’ by virtue of her Russian birth, fitted another cigarette in the black holder. Tibor Kassack went down on his knees to light it.
‘Do you know what they would have us believe, these Nagys and Munnichs and Apros?’ he asked in a conspirator’s whisper.
It was hard for her to keep the cigarette holder steady. She gripped it between twisted fingers while her other hand guided Tibor’s match towards the tip of her cigarette. Her fingers explored the black hairs on his wrist while her tired eyes worked round his face.
‘Tell me.’
‘They have politicians’ souls. They swear the only virtue allowed in the twentieth century is survival. No mention of patriotism, or courage, or sacrifice.’
The flame of the match guttered and died when it reached his thumb and forefinger. Babushka noted that, and the smell of singed skin and the steadiness in Tibor Kassack’s face.
‘Darling,’ she murmured. Wars and dictatorships and purges and revolutions had been her experience of the twentieth century. Survival had been her only virtue. But she smiled and let him go. Twenty years ago, even ten years ago, she would have held this young man’s wrist a little longer.
Tibor Kassack strode to the window and flicked the dead match into the street. The Palomino, crouching on the floor, caught his hand to kiss the scorched skin. She said nothing. Tibor Kassack’s eyes forbade it.
They had been two days in the Russian woman’s apartment. She was a stranger to them all. Coming out of St Rokus Church she had tripped. Tibor Kassack had caught her arm and righted her. ‘An angel may stumble but mustn’t be allowed to fall,’ and Tibor Kassack swept off his beret to give a low bow.
It would have been a classic romantic encounter except that she was old enough to be his grandmother. She wore a black coat of that severe simplicity that ages gracefully. Underneath was a dress of mad purple. Round her neck a ghastly fox chased and bit its own tail. When she moved her right hip jutted out all over the place. She’d been too vain to go about in public with a stick and too vain to refuse Tibor’s arm.
‘Madame, a gentleman should have a pretty woman on his arm for a stroll through the streets of Budapest.’
Such extravagance took ten years off her hobble.
In Puskin Street, a block away from the captured radio station, was a building with a façade of chipped plaster. Raise your eyes above the first level of windows and the luxury of plaster gave way to sooty bricks. Here was where the old woman lived. She bobbed her head and leaned on Tibor Kassack’s arm as if she was being led to the ballroom floor. Ilona, fascinated by such demure coquettishness, scarcely took in the building. It was only later, when her Russian origins became known, that Ilona suggested to Istvan: ‘She must have chosen this place because of its name.’ It had no other charm. They followed her up to the second floor. We’re her entourage, Ilona decided. Here the old woman pressed them to tea, calling them ‘darlings’ and ‘my heroes’. So they entered the brave old world of the émigré.
She was a woman with a past and it lay all round them in the apartment. Tables were cluttered with japanned boxes, glassware, books in French and Russian with paperknives to slit the pages, vases of dried honesty, a doll with button eyes and a ruffed dress, painted Easter eggs, carved ebony heads, a faded postcard of the Sphinx, a lace mat laid under glass, snuff boxes and cigarette boxes. There was a glass-fronted chinoiserie cabinet that held a bracelet (were they really emeralds?) and something fragile by Faberge, a madonna in tarnished silver and a curving bridge being crossed by a family of ivory elephants. There was no rest for the eye on the walls: three paintings of the same nude girl with a strange long neck and slant eyes, dim ikons, a piece of tapestry so dowdy that Ilona took it to be valuable, three or four framed photographs of gentlemen (one, in uniform, turned out to be her husband). In the bedroom were silver-backed hairbrushes, empty bottles with simple
Chanel labels, and a very un-Hungarian bed with a sumptuous satin headboard.
Among all these mementoes there were no photos of Natalya Zelenaya herself. ‘Why?’ asked Istvan. ‘Her men-friends, her trinkets, her souvenirs — but nothing of herself as a young beauty.’
‘Because she doesn’t want to be reminded,’ was Ilona’s under-standing. ‘No mirrors either, do you notice?’
They stayed. They recounted the past days and became not only heroes but daredevils. She brightened with their movement and talk and youth. She offered, without saying it, a home without parental restrictions. It was what they needed to keep them together; if they separated the spell would be broken. ‘We’ve become a village,’ Ilona said to Istvan, ‘and this corner of the room is where our house is.’ They were days of make-believe — fantasies of politics and military victory mingling with private dreams. There was a new beginning out in the world and in here with each other. Innocents, mused Babushka as she watched, and sighed at the memory. And not so much as a kiss.
She became Babushka to them all. She didn’t mind in the least, though it took a wild imagination to see her as a peasant grand-mother. The name seemed to bring back an echo of a forgotten Russia.
‘Say it again, darling.’
‘Babushka,’ repeated Ilona dutifully.
‘I like it when you call me that. But yes, I like it.’
Babushka had her favourites: Ilona and Istvan, Tibor Kassack and the Palomino. Some she didn’t approve of.
Sandor had hated the place from the moment he first stepped inside. He stared at the clutter, locked in indecision, unable to pull back or go forward, awkward among so much he didn’t understand. Her eyes snapped up his unease and the roughness of his hands and the odd jerkiness of his speech.
‘Take care with your rifle. That figurine on the table is Dresden.’ She never called him ‘darling’.
And Lazlo, with his coarse soldier’s haircut, she watched with darting looks. Lazlo gaped at the silver and porcelain. To her way of thinking his fingers might go where his eyes did.
The others were the supporting cast. She’d never had anyone to call her Babushka. The famine of grandchildren was turned into a glut and she couldn’t love all these new grandchildren equally. Matyas and Ferenc certainly saw her as a grandmother; after all the apartment smelled of grandmother. Tibor Bihari was half-frightened, seeing her as a witch. He amassed evidence: the darkling eyes and crooked hand, the humped walk, the cracked laugh, the tarot cards. But he didn’t run away. They were all bewitched.
‘Does she give you the shivers?’ Istvan asked.
‘Do you mean frighten me?’ Ilona said. ‘No.’
‘Nor me,’ Istvan agreed quickly.
Then they both fell silent, contemplating the mystery of such a strange life in the middle of Budapest.
Tibor Kassack was the first with information on her, gathered from the tailor who lived in the attic. Babushka’s father was reputed (though perhaps no reputation attached to it) to have been a colonel in the Preobrajensky; he had sent his men to advance down the throats of the German artillery at walking pace. For such stupidity, in the tailor’s story, he was made a Knight of St George and wore a white cross on his uniform lapel. But the tailor lived with a friend, a male friend who ‘kept house’ in Tibor’s scornful phrase, who later denied the whole thing. Babushka’s father had been a great hero on the Yalu River against the Japanese and followed this with a distinguished (meaning ruthless) career in the Okhrana. Both agreed that the beautiful and youthful Natalya had married a certain Captain Zeleny who had gone down with the rest of the Tsarist Navy when the Bolsheviks came to power.
She never talked of her long-vanished husband. It was unlikely she had ever loved him. The photo on the sitting room wall showed a drunken face. Or rather, as Tibor Kassack had it, ‘the fellow had a permanent hangover’. At any rate 1920 found the young widow in Paris (this she confided to Ilona), one more White Russian emigree, though considerably more alluring than most.
‘And darling,’ she murmured to Ilona, unpicking a tangle in the girl’s long dark hair, ‘a pretty woman need never lack for a good dinner, a good breakfast and a warm bed in between. Ça t’épate, hein?’
This was beyond Ilona’s comprehension. She must learn French. She must redouble her studies. She must become famous. She must see the world. She must be free of conventions.
‘Darling, Paris in the Twenties was wonderful, except for the Americans and the Jews. Berlin was also wonderful, except for the Germans and the anti-Semites. But I followed my star to Budapest, which was the best of all.
Budapest has become provincial but before the war it was gay and dazzling and romantic. I had my apartment in Ferenc Liszt Square, with a salon every Thursday. I kept a box at the opera. During one year there was even a villa in the hills near Obuda. Everything was possible, darling, because I didn’t lack for friends. You never knew Gundel’s, did you?’
‘Not to go inside.’ Ilona had gaped at Gundel’s from outside. It stood at the edge of the City Park, within sight of the tumbled Stalin statue. Gundel’s was a restaurant designed by an architect who was practising to build an opera house. But Babushka didn’t mean the gloomy shadow it presented today.
‘That was the best place in the world to dine. I have stayed in Budapest through two inflations, a world war, two occupations and a revolution, for love of Gundel. Not the man, you understand, but what he stood for. Monsieur Charles was already bald when I first knew him; chins like pears, bowing in the manner of an old courtier, always calling me la comtesse. He was grave, like a doctor prescribing the correct treatment. ‘Pour vous ce soir, comtesse, j’ai réservé un Balatoni fogas, frais et léger comme le soupir d’un ange, avec la sauce aurore aux écrevisses. Merveilleux, comtesse, une fantaisie!’ And he would close his eyes and smile as if he was remembering some girl. Afterwards Gundel’s famous pancakes, with crushed walnuts, dried muscatel grapes and chocolate cream. The gypsy orchestra played stories to each other on their instruments, of love and desire and jealousy and bloodshed. And the primas with sad moist eyes would suddenly flash a look of fire, because he played his heart out for me. The champagne was always in magnums, of course, Roederer or Krug. Or it might be a little wine of the country, a Badacsonyi Kéknyelü, perfect on a magical summer evening on the terrace. Can you hear the laughter and music and the pop of corks, all the delicious sounds of intrigue? That was in the years before the Wehrmacht stabled their horses there, before the communists pigged it there.’
Ilona drank all this in, reeled from it. No wonder she needed to gulp fresh air.
The apartment made them restless. Ilona and Istvan found freedom in movement. In the street they held hands. There was the sound of gunfire still from the Kilian Barracks away on Ulloi Street. Never mind the radio propaganda: ‘There are no Soviet troops engaged in large scale military operations in Budapest. Military action is confined to a few nests of resistance.’ The radio told lies. Never mind the twenty-four hour curfew. The people knew better. They crowded the streets, guns slung over their shoulders, bandages and blood-splashes their veterans’ ribbons.
‘Why didn’t she leave before the Red Army marched into the city in 1945?’ Istvan wanted to know.
‘I’ve no idea,’ Ilona said. It wasn’t the sort of question you could ask.
‘Tibor Kassack says she had a protector, some Russian General.’ Tibor was always free with such speculations.
‘No one comes to see her now. The General must have returned to his wife in the Soviet Union. Her admirers from the old days are dead or gone. I suppose we’re a new family to her.’ Try as she might, Ilona couldn’t visualize the old Russian woman’s present life. Until they came, there seemed nothing to fill her days.
‘All I have left now are my memories and my mustard church,’ Natalya Zelenaya had said, referring to the yellowish-brown St Rokus, ‘though it doesn’t smell right; no church in Hungary smells right.’ And she’d pressed the mangy fox closer to her thr
oat.
‘It must be terrible to lose your family, then lose your friends, and end up alone.’
‘She should have chosen her friends with more discrimination,’ said Ilona with a spurt of the old morality. But she confessed to herself that faced with a choice between the tailor and his boy-friend in the attic and supper at Gundel’s, she would have chosen the music and the wine and the soft French of Monsieur Charles.
They walked without any particular aim. The fighting hadn’t finished but it had become more sporadic and seemed always to be in other streets. Or perhaps they chose quieter routes where toddlers played on the pavement and women queued in hope outside bakers.
They walked the length of a narrow street that turned into Kalvin Square. Here they found six Soviet tanks lined up, battened down as if for an offensive. If Uncle Zoltan hadn’t disappeared he would have involved them again. For now, their personal revolution was enough. They said nothing, turned back for the old woman’s apartment. It was a sanctuary away from the war.
‘Do you know, the old lady keeps a rocking horse in the bedroom,’ Tibor Kassack announced. ‘Damned great wooden thing jammed in beside the wardrobe.’
There was something profane about this revelation. Istvan muttered: ‘You shouldn’t go poking round in her room.’
‘Shouldn’t? What’s this shouldn’t, old son?’ For a moment Tibor was taken aback by schoolboy notions of morality. ‘Perhaps you shouldn’t be poking round in her kitchen. But this rocking horse: it’s not as if she has any grandchildren to entertain.’
Istvan agreed.
‘Big beast it is, with a green and yellow saddle, and flaring nostrils. Also there’s a whip, young Istvan, a leather whip. Makes you think. In the good old days she might have enjoyed a bit of a canter herself.’
‘I can’t see her on it.’
‘You’re right. Someone else would be doing the gallops while she encouraged with the whip.’
This was beyond Istvan’s imaginings and he turned back to the cupboard. There was only tea, sugar and stale bread. Yet a smell of cooking seemed to hang in the air of the kitchen, almost the sweetish smell of pork fried with the edernemes paprika his father loved.
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