He and other authorities on immigration procedures were working for change, but no change would come quickly enough to benefit Dr. Groszman. Hungary was a pressure cooker right now, ready to explode any minute. Only that morning the Times had carried a long article that again discussed the unrest in the Budapest intellectual community. There were clandestine student groups and simmering discontent. There seemed to be general anger against Gero, the premier, and the name of the discredited Imre Nagy was invoked with dangerous longing. The Times correspondent had attempted an interview with Yuri Andropov, the Soviet ambassador to Hungary, but the Russian had been mysteriously noncommittal. “He reminds me of a cautious, taciturn cook who watches a boiling pot, prepared to clamp a lid down just at the overflow point,” the journalist had written in a burst of simile designed to substitute for hard news. Aaron supposed that it had been easier to write a news story during Stalin’s regime. It was axiomatic then that the Russian reaction would be in favor of force and repression. Stalin’s iron curtain had been impenetrable, and only perceptions of black and white had been permissible. Men like Khrushchev and Andropov were still less defined, and there were those who believed that they might see areas of gray, might countenance small pockets of dissidence.
“But of course special statutes can be introduced for special cases—is that not so? I have even heard of bills proposed by congressmen in the case of a particular individual which allowed for embassy hearings in the country of emigration,” Reuven Greenstein persisted.
Aaron snapped his pencil in half. He was annoyed. Clearly, the Israelis had been well briefed on the intricacies of American immigration law. Why, then, were they playing this elaborate game of cat and mouse with him?
“Yehuda, perhaps we can discuss the purpose of your visit—of this so-called important mission. Surely we can be direct with each other.”
“It’s rather simple,” Yehuda said. “We want you to go to Hungary. A special congressional bill has been introduced on behalf of Dr. Groszman, and a hearing will be held at the American embassy in Budapest. We want you to represent Dr. Groszman at that hearing.”
“I really don’t think that’s necessary,” Aaron said. “If you have a bill in progress, it’s a rather straightforward situation. But I can give you a bit of added insurance. A former Harvard classmate of mine, Tom Hemmings, is at the American embassy in Budapest. I’ll drop him a note and tell him of my special interest in the Groszman case.” He did not want to appear unhelpful, and he and Tom had been close friends once. They had strolled through the streets of Cambridge together, with the girls who became their wives. They had danced at each other’s weddings, and Betty Hemmings had written a kind note, postmarked Budapest, when Katie died. Kind, yet somehow unsurprised. She had known Katie well.
“That would not be sufficient.” Almogi’s tone was clipped, impatient. “Dr. Groszman’s knowledge is vital to Israel’s security. We cannot risk the slightest possibility of error. An attorney with your skill and reputation will guarantee the success of the hearing and safe entry into this country. It is very important that you go to Hungary.”
“You really want me to go to Hungary?” Aaron said as though the import of their request was finally real to him. “Do you think I can just leave my obligations and take off?” He motioned vaguely toward his desk, which was littered with documents and correspondence. Reuven Greenstein shrugged.
“We know, of course, that you are a busy man, an important man. But surely one of your associates could assume the daily operation of your office for a short period,” he said. “Just as someone manages my gallery, Almogi’s business. Just as your brother-in-law’s kibbutz manages without him.”
The parallels were an unsubtle reminder of priorities, a nudge toward acquiescence. Surely, Aaron wanted to be counted among those who set aside their own petty professional interests for a larger good.
“But of course, you may be troubled by other aspects of this mission,” Greenstein continued smoothly. “It is not an assignment without risks. That is one of the reasons for our haste. Budapest is an unsettled city just now. We all read the morning papers. It will grow more unsettled, perhaps even explosive. And an American will be especially vulnerable. Mr. Dulles and his talk of massive retaliation has not increased American popularity in Eastern Europe just now. You can be frank with us. Tell us if you feel it will be too dangerous.”
“I’m not worried about the danger,” Aaron replied curtly. There was no need for Greenstein to manipulate him with his tough-guy innuendos. Danger frightened only men who had something to lose.
“Then you will go, Aaron?” Yehuda leaned forward. He alone had not expected Aaron to refuse them. Aaron was Rebecca’s brother. He shared her profound sense of responsibility, her spontaneous instinct to protect the vulnerable. Leah’s legacy of courage and caring.
“Damn it, Yehuda. I can’t give you a decision this minute. I have to think about it.” He was angry suddenly. The bastards wake him up, pump him full of guilt, and put him on the spot. Who the hell did they think they were?
“Of course you need some time,” Almogi said smoothly. “The problem is that we don’t know how much time we have. Things are moving swiftly over there.”
“Look,” Aaron said reasonably, controlling his irritation, “I’ll need a couple of days. Today is Tuesday. Let’s talk again on Friday morning at my office. Fair enough?”
“All right,” Yehuda said, deciding for all of them as Aaron had known he would. “We can gamble with two or three days.”
They all shook hands with Aaron before leaving. Greenstein’s features were frozen. He would be a formidable adversary in a poker game, Aaron thought. Yehuda spoke to him softly.
“I will be in contact with you, in Budapest,” he said.
Aaron shrugged; his brother-in-law clearly presupposed his acquiescence. Yehuda was accustomed to recruiting volunteers. He had, after all, even recruited Rebecca.
Aaron made his bed, using fresh sheets. He took a hot shower and did twenty push-ups, aware that he felt electric with an excitement he had not known since before Katie’s death.
He brewed real coffee for the first time in months, then took a cab downtown, and by the time Eileen Manning, his secretary, arrived, he had placed two calls to Washington, arranged a luncheon date with Joshua Ellenberg, and called a bookstore to order a history of Hungary, a guidebook to Budapest and its environs, and a Hungarian phrase book. He had also sent a clerk to the law library to take notes on all immigration cases during the past year that had relied on special congressional petitions.
Eileen, a thin blond girl who had worked for Aaron Goldfeder since her graduation from secretarial school, was pleased with the flurry of excitement. She had long felt that the best remedy for Aaron’s lingering melancholy would be a new interest, an absorbing involvement. She had said as much to her fiancé, Kenneth White, the previous evening as they shared the specially priced dinner at Toffinetti’s.
“I think he needs a girl,” Kenneth had said.
“Oh no.” Eileen did not want Aaron Goldfeder to have a girl, for reasons that were not entirely clear to her. “He just needs to get caught up in something.”
Now she was pleased to think that in some mysterious way her theory had communicated itself to Aaron, who was dashing about the office checking files, making phone calls, and dictating letters to her rapid-fire, as though it were urgent that all outstanding correspondence be answered at once. They worked frantically all morning, and she was relieved when he left to meet Joshua Ellenberg. It gave her a chance to catch her breath, to restore order to his desk, and to make neat piles of his notes and papers. She unpacked the books that had been delivered by the bookstore and then went to the large atlas and studied a map of Eastern Europe. Hungary was a great blob of orange bordered by the blue mass of Czechoslovakia and the green expanse of Austria. Eileen concentrated on the names of the Hungarian cities, but only Budapest was at all familiar to her. There had been a story about Budapest in t
he newspaper that day, she remembered, and she was sorry now that she had given her newspaper to the elevator man. Still, it was probably not important. She went to the office strongbox, removed Aaron Goldfeder’s passport as he had asked her to, and ascertained that it was up-to-date.
Aaron and Joshua had lunch in the private dining room at Ellenberg Industries, which overlooked the East River. They glanced southward, toward the street where they had grown up.
“I wonder if our house is still standing,” Aaron said.
“It is,” Joshua replied. “And somehow they still manage to get a minyan at the synagogue. Of course, most of the tenants are Puerto Rican now, and Librach’s candy store is a bodega. The Settlement House is in bad shape—used mainly as a drug rehabilitation center. Something is needed to replace it.”
“How do you know?” Aaron asked, surprised.
“I go down there every so often.” Joshua’s answer was casual. He did not tell Aaron that he had bought the tenement building where he and his family had once shared an apartment with the Goldfeders. He had had the building gutted and rebuilt, had fitted it with a new oil burner and a fire alarm and sprinkler system. Once a year he took his children down to Eldridge Street and showed them the landmarks of his childhood, the corner where he had hawked his merchandise, the playground where he had once wiped Rebecca Goldfeder’s tears and kissed her on the cheek (he remembered still that her skin had tasted of chocolate and Ivory soap), the empty lot, overgrown with weeds, strewn with debris, where once the Rosenblatt factory had stood. He had instructed his attorney to buy that neglected patch of land, although he was not clear about why he wanted it. The charred foundation of the building protruded from the earth like a blackened welt. He wondered if Aaron ever had the need to make such small pilgrimages to the past, to remember where it had all begun and how far they had come.
“Joshua, what do you know about Hungary?” Aaron asked abruptly now.
“Hungary?” Joshua shrugged. “A couple of bad jokes, maybe.” He looked at Aaron curiously and noticed that his friend was eating with a gusto that he had not displayed since Katie’s death. Aaron poured ketchup lavishly across his hamburger and asked the waitress to bring a second order of french fries. Joshua remembered now that Sherry had complained, after the Labor Day party, that Aaron ate, the way he did everything else, as though it were a chore.
“When is he going to rejoin the living?” Sherry had asked impatiently. She liked Aaron too much to see him still cloaked in an enervating grief, narcotized by his loss.
Well, Joshua thought, he seems to have done just that.
“Hungary,” he repeated thoughtfully now. “We have very little contact. It’s not one of our major markets, but we do sell there, just enough to keep a very small operation going. A salesman, a forwarder, a small staff. And we buy a little. They make a wonderful aquamarine dye, excellent rickrack. Their currency is stable enough now, thanks to the Russians, florins. That’s about all I can tell you, Aaron.”
“That’s about what I wanted,” Aaron said. “Just a businessman’s feel for the country. Would you say it’s in a dangerous situation?”
“There are rumors,” Joshua said. “The usual talk of political unrest, revolution. We’re keeping very little capital there—transferring what we can to Austria. But with Stalin gone there’s a softening of positions in Eastern Europe. Khrushchev is supposed to be more lenient—at least everyone thinks so except John Foster Dulles and your mother.”
“But my mother, after all, is the only one of us who’s been behind the iron curtain recently,” Aaron said. “That is, so far.”
“Ahh, Aaron,” Joshua said quickly. “Are you planning a trip to the land of goulash?”
“I don’t know,” Aaron said. “Yes. Perhaps I am. Is your Budapest man Jewish?” It did not occur to him that he was betraying his mission by confiding in Joshua. He trusted his childhood friend as he trusted himself.
“Yes.”
“What does he say about the Jews of Hungary?”
“You mean what’s left of the Jews of Hungary?”
“Yes.”
“They walk a thin line, like all the Jews who remain in Eastern Europe. They behave themselves and pay their taxes. They keep a kosher soup kitchen going, and they replace the bulbs in the memorial lights in the synagogue. They send their kids to Israel, and they try to get their money out of the country. That’s what I’ve managed to pick up from him. What else do you want to know, Aaron?”
“Can you give me his name and address and a letter of credit drawn on your Budapest account?” This would be his insurance policy, he told himself, acknowledging for the first time that he might be entering a danger zone. Reliance on Joshua was, after all, a family habit. Aaron represented Joshua, and Joshua routinely did business in Hungary. A letter of credit would be standard procedure.
“Why not?” Joshua made a note in a pad that he drew from his breast pocket. “Is Rebecca enjoying her visit?” he asked.
It was Aaron’s turn to be guarded, although of course Joshua had gotten over Rebecca long ago. They were both happily married. Still, he discerned a special edge in Joshua’s voice when he mentioned her name.
“She’s having a wonderful time,” he said. “My mother took her and Yehuda to see Look Back in Anger, and Jakie sent them tickets to Separate Tables.”
“What about The Diary of Anne Frank? Sherry loved it.”
“Impossible to get tickets.”
“I’ll get a pair for Saturday night’s performance and have them delivered to the house,” Joshua said briskly. He had, he recognized, outgrown his love for Rebecca but not his proclivity to pamper her. And he liked Yehuda, her husband; he recognized him as a counterpart to Joshua himself—a man who knew how to get things done, a man who accomplished his objectives.
“I’ll send you my agent’s name and address and the letter of credit authorization tomorrow,” Joshua said as he and Aaron shook hands at the elevator. “And by the way, welcome back.”
“Welcome back?” Aaron was puzzled.
“Yeah. Welcome back to the land of the living. You’ve arrived, whether you know it or not.”
And then Joshua disappeared down the corridor, and Aaron grinned as he walked back to his office, thinking that Joshua Ellenberg the international magnate retained the wily wisdom of Josh the urchin entrepreneur.
Aaron flew to Washington the next day and kept the appointments he had set up with a journalist friend and a law-school classmate who had a middle-echelon job in the State Department. His journalist friend introduced him to a Hungarian correspondent, a dapper, mustachioed man who drank too much in the bar of Aaron’s hotel. Over dinner he talked expansively of the beauty of Budapest and the mists that veiled Lake Balaton in the fall. He had never heard of a scientist called Groszman, but then these Jews changed their names more often than their underwear. He caught his error and struggled to set it right. Some of his most treasured comrades were Jewish, he assured them, and he showed them a photo of his university debate society. The thin man on his right, his dearest friend, he confided, was half Jewish. And he remembered now that he had heard of a Groszman, after all. A radar scientist, he thought, but it seemed to him that the man was dead. He could look it up if they wanted.
“Not important,” Aaron assured him.
Aaron’s State Department friend did not think the situation in Hungary was particularly volatile.
“And even if there were trouble,” he said confidently, “they wouldn’t mess with an American tourist. I don’t like Dulles much myself,” he added, “but one thing is sure—he’s got the Bolshies scared to death. Tom Hemmings thinks so, at least. He likes the Budapest posting, by the way, but Betty hates it. Poor Betty. She saw herself wearing a Balenciaga and holding her hand out to de Gaulle on a Paris embassy receiving line. Instead she’s queuing up with a couple of shabby diplomatic biddies at the hard-currency store in old Buda.”
“I always liked Betty Hemmings,” Aaron said warningly. Be
tty had been Katie’s good friend, which meant that Katie had often called her in the middle of the night and had sent her rambling, incoherent letters.
Back in New York, he had dinner with his mother.
“I may have to go to Europe,” he said.
“I see,” she said carefully. Like Joshua, she did not ask him the nature of his business.
“You’d be alone here, with Michael in California and Rebecca back in Israel.”
“Hardly alone,” Leah said and dismissed his worry with a smile. “I have my work, my friends.” She gestured toward her desk, overflowing with folders and correspondence. Leah was involved in organizing an effort on behalf of Russian Jewry. She drafted letters, arranged parlor meetings, smiled brilliantly at congressmen and lobbyists. She did not ask him where he would travel to in Europe, nor did she discuss the purpose of his trip.
He was not surprised when a package arrived from Bloomingdale’s charged to his mother. Three no-iron white shirts and a tan cashmere sleeveless sweater. He called her.
“Thanks,” he said. “But why didn’t you just come over and pack for me?”
“Be careful,” she said. Not “Have fun,” but “Be careful.” That night he listened to a record by two young comedians named Mike Nichols and Elaine May and decided that whoever wrote the Jewish mother jokes had never met a woman like Leah Goldfeder.
He went over his calendar with Eileen. Pending cases were assigned to associates. All correspondence was up-to-date. The article he had promised to a law journal had been typed and delivered. It was a good thing he had declined to teach his Columbia seminar this semester.
“When will you be back, Mr. Goldfeder?” Eileen asked. She wanted to know so that she might begin counting the days.
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