“I don’t know exactly,” he said. “In a few weeks, perhaps. Hold the fort and drink a lot of milk shakes.” He had noticed for the first time that she was too thin. Many such things were catching his attention now, as though he were emerging from a long hibernation.
He had seen that the fabric on his living room sofa was frayed and that his apartment needed painting. He would organize things when he returned.
Only Yehuda and Almogi came to his office on Friday. Yehuda looked tired, and Aaron noticed that Almogi’s jacket was too small. When he went to the window, he saw Greenstein on the street below, watching the entry to the office building. Their conspiratorial vigilance amused him.
“I’ve made all my arrangements,” Aaron said brusquely. “I will go to Budapest.”
“Good.” Yehuda opened his attaché case and withdrew a travel agent’s packet. A first-class reservation on Air Hungary. A letter from the Grand Hotel on Margaret Island in Budapest confirming Aaron Goldfeder’s reservation for a “suite with a scenic view.” A map of Budapest and a road map of Hungary.
Almogi spoke rapidly, advising Aaron on the details of his contact meeting with Dr. Groszman. Aaron listened as he spread the literature out on his desk. His name on the airline ticket was spelled incorrectly—Aron instead of Aaron. Otherwise they had made no mistakes. He was perversely annoyed. The cocky bastards had assumed his acceptance and had arrived fully prepared to send him on his way. Still, he was surprised at the warmth in Almogi’s handshake, the tension in Yehuda’s arms when he embraced him.
“We shall perhaps be in touch, in Budapest,” Yehuda said, and Aaron felt strangely reassured.
“Shalom,” he said softly. “Shalom.”
*
AARON stood on the heights of Budapest and looked down at the tiny crowns of foam that crested the wavelets of the Danube River as it hugged the hills on its winding descent. He shivered and wondered if they were flecked with ice. After the gentleness of the early New York autumn, he had been unprepared for the harsh, wintry cold and the icy rains that slashed their way across the helpless and dreary facade of Budapest. He focused his camera on the panorama of the city spread before him like the miniature towns that Joshua Ellenberg’s children liked to build with intricately shaped blocks. He discerned the green canopies of the Grand Hotel on Margaret Island and the wide embankments on either side of the river. The somber Gothic buildings that lined the broad quays stared haughtily up at the frowning hills. Cars and buses moved slowly across the graceful bridges.
The acacia trees, their leafless branches straining skyward in a tangle of blackened veins, quivered against a fierce and sudden gust of wind. Aaron’s hat was blown off his head. He scurried after it and found it nesting on a sheet of yellow mimeograph paper. The handbill was closely printed in Hungarian and decorated with a crude drawing of the Hungarian tricolor. The Soviet hammer and sickle at its heart had been angrily crossed out. A vagrant wind had blown the propaganda sheet up to this silent plateau, but Aaron had noticed others since his arrival in Budapest.
On his first night in the city, Tom Hemmings had dutifully taken him for a routine sightseeing tour to the Leopoldstadt Basilica, and he had watched a team of green-coated police officers confiscate a pile of leaflets from a group of young people, who rushed away. An overweight officer had halfheartedly given chase to an auburn-haired girl and then wearily returned to collect the papers, which were placed in a leather pouch.
“What do the sheets say?” Aaron had asked.
Tom, a tall, angular-faced man, had shrugged uneasily as though the unrest in the country of his posting was somehow his fault. Betty, his petulant blond wife, had kicked at one with her boot, smiling as the police officer scurried after it.
“Oh, the usual,” she said. “Ruszhik horza! Russians go home!” She had been an apt language student at Vassar and had decided to marry Tom Hemmings when she discovered he wanted a career in the foreign service. She had envisioned herself in Paris and London, in Rome or Vienna. Almost anywhere but Budapest. Dull, shabby Budapest, where fashions were at least two years behind the times and discussions centered on when the next shipment of sugar would arrive. The opening of a new bakery sent embassy wives scurrying to the telephone to proclaim the exciting news. There was not much else they could discuss on the phones, which were of course tapped.
“Funny to use police to pick them up,” Aaron observed. “More of a job for the sanitation department, isn’t it?”
“This is Budapest, Aaron, not New York,” Tom said impatiently. “In New York those leaflets would be so much annoying litter, but in Budapest they’re sedition. Those officers are not ordinary police. They’re AVO men—security, secret service. That propaganda will be on Yuri Andropov’s desk within the hour. The Soviet ambassador takes a keen interest in the political climate of Budapest.”
Aaron carefully folded the yellow sheet and put it in his pocket. Perhaps Dr. Groszman would translate it for him. He glanced at his watch. In another hour he was to meet the scientist at the coffeehouse near the zoological gardens. He hurried to the funicular railway and turned his head as it descended so that he could look up at the domed citadel and the royal palace. It was, he thought, despite Betty Hemmings’s discontent, a beautiful city, and he felt oddly grateful to Dr. Groszman, whose predicament had brought him there.
How would he know Groszman? he worried as he strode up fashionable Andrassy Avenue to the municipal park. The Israeli agents had provided him with neither a photograph nor a dossier. Instead, there had been uncharacteristic mutterings about a delay in the transfer of papers, a foul-up in communications.
“You will not miss each other,” Almogi had assured him. “Just be in the café at five o’clock on the appointed day. Hold up the financial section of the international edition of the Herald Tribune. Dr. Groszman will recognize you.”
Stupid cops-and-robbers tactic, Aaron thought now, remembering his near-panic that morning when the last copy of the Tribune had been sold before he reached the Grand Hotel concierge. It was pure luck that a British banker, staying on Margaret Island for the mineral baths, had sourly offered him his copy. Much safer to have had a photo, a phone number, an address. The Israelis were not as smart as they thought they were. He felt a vengeful satisfaction. It would not be his fault if things went wrong.
He paused at a vendor’s kiosk and bought a postcard of the archangel Gabriel on the millennium monument at the entrance to the park. Willfully, he turned away from the huge bronze colossus of Stalin that dominated the area. The sculptor may have conceived of the Russian leader as a benevolent figure, but the final effect was alien and threatening. Aaron had no doubt that his mother would prefer the winged angel. In fact, Leah would like Budapest. He imagined her walking across the suspension bridges that connected the banks of the Danube, perhaps sketching the river from the Franz Josef quay, where he had watched artists at work. Once Leah had concentrated on designs, on intricate geometric shapes that had been translated into the textiles and fabrics that had contributed to the success of both S. Hart, Inc., and Ellenberg Industries. But more recently she had been fascinated by landscapes and urban scenes. Her brushstrokes were broad and daring, her colors bright; she painted with a new optimism, a new strength.
Aaron bought additional cards for the Ellenbergs and for his brother, Michael, and as he shuffled through the assortment searching for a scenic view to send to Eileen Manning, he glimpsed a pile of the familiar mimeographed sheets. The kiosk keeper swiftly covered them with a stack of the afternoon edition of Szabad Nép, whose front page featured a candid shot of a smiling Premier Gero seated companionably on a park bench with Yuri Andropov, the Soviet ambassador.
Aaron walked at a steady pace and passed the terminus where the yellow streetcars stood in weary convoy, ready to maneuver the winding streets of the capital. The battered vehicles were the transport lifeline of the poor. On every corner, queues of weary men and women awaited the trundling streetcars. They were laden with clumsy
bundles and swaddled in layers of clothing because no single shabby garment was heavy enough to ward off the damp, invasive cold. Yet they stood on line quietly, acquiescently. They accepted the inevitability of their wait with the pragmatic resignation of the poor and the powerless. Their lives were an endless series of queues. Perhaps they would have to wait in line for death itself.
On one such line, as he returned from the Hemmingses’ flat, Aaron had seen a small redheaded boy who stood beside his mother holding a burlap sack of vegetables. Abruptly, he remembered himself as a youngster, standing beside his mother and his aunt Mollie as they waited for the Avenue B bus. They, too, had been poor and burdened with strangely wrapped packages, but Leah Goldfeder and her sister had been fiercely impatient during that wait. They had stamped their feet, peered anxiously into the street, muttering angrily to each other and complaining at last to the unfortunate bus driver. Anger was a powerful ingredient in the struggle for change, Aaron thought, but the only anger he had seen in Budapest was contained on the scrawled messages on the clandestine rainbow-colored sheets of mimeograph paper. He had been conscious of nervousness, of furtive backward glances, of a subtle, subdued tension.
Only yesterday he had seen police officers approach a small group standing on a street corner and disperse them. There had been no violence. One officer had raised his nightstick, and the other had opened a pad and searched for a pencil; that had been sufficient to send everyone hurrying away. A harmless enough group, Aaron had thought. Housewives holding plastic shopping bags and workingmen carrying small iron lunch pails. Still, they had been frightened, and their running footsteps had echoed down the wide boulevard.
And in the evening, as he returned from dinner at the Hemmingses’—a weary meal during which Betty had apologized endlessly for the toughness of the meat, the wilted salad greens, the overcooked compote—a young couple, walking ahead of him hand in hand on the Margaret Bridge, had been stopped by two men wearing raincoats and brimmed hats. Aaron had watched them produce their papers, heard the harshness of the questions they were asked, and as he passed, he noticed the pallor of the young woman’s face, the glitter of fear in her eyes. What kind of a country was this, he had wondered, where lovers could not stroll peacefully across a moonlit bridge on an autumn evening?
He crossed the road now and entered the Budapest Wood, hurrying through the patterned pathways so reminiscent of an English park. The carefully pruned box hedges were covered with protective sacking, and the bound stalks of iris and chrysanthemum were bleached and brittle. Yet, even in this season of desuetude, lovers strolled through the park hand in hand and sat, shoulders delicately touching, on the bright green benches. An old woman carried a sack of crumbs, which she tossed to the ash-colored sparrows that winged their way down through the barren branched trees. There were few solitary strollers, but several meters ahead of him he noticed a woman following the path that led past the amusement park to the zoo.
He was arrested by her purposeful gait, the forward thrust of her shoulders beneath a scarlet cape. The courage of the color against the blanched landscape pleased him. Her hair was as black as once his mother’s had been, and she wore it twisted into a neat yet luxuriant knot that rested in a swirl of ebony against her graceful neck. She carried an envelope, and as she walked it slipped to the ground, yet she made no effort to retrieve it, as though unaware of the loss.
Aaron hurried after her.
“Madame, vous avez perdu quelque chose.” His French was rusty and his voice muffled as he struggled with the unfamiliar language.
She did not turn, and before he could reach the fallen envelope, a black Chaika, its fender dented and its left headlight smashed, paused for an instant. A door opened, and the fallen envelope was swiftly plucked up. Helpless and angered, Aaron watched the car speed away and then hurried after the woman, catching up with her before an ancient elm.
“Madame, you dropped an envelope. I meant to retrieve it for you, but a car stopped and someone took it and sped away. I hope it was not an important document.”
She turned toward him. Her oval face, framed by the black wings of hair, was porcelain white, and her large turquoise-colored eyes were wide with surprise. He thought that she had not understood his English, and he struggled to formulate the sentence in French, but she interrupted him, speaking an excellent and charmingly accented English.
“So careless of me. But truly it was of no importance. I thank you for your concern,” she said.
She smiled in dismissal and walked on, choosing a path that led to a distant copse. Confused and annoyed, he stared after her until her scarlet cape vanished in a cluster of evergreens. He shrugged then and cursed himself for his naiveté. He should have known better than to stop her. Yehuda Arnon would have ignored her, as he himself should have. This was Eastern Europe, he reminded himself, where telephones were routinely tapped and groups of housewives were dispersed by threatening police officers. He walked on, remembering the throaty quality of her voice, the lilting cadence of her English, in which she had so charmingly and gracefully lied to him.
The zoological gardens were deserted except for two small boys who stood aimlessly before a cage inhabited by a single sad mandrill. There was nothing in the animal’s desultory antics to engage their interest, and they wandered over to the lake and studied the slate-gray sheet of water. In the summer they had perhaps boated here, and later, when true winter arrived, they would skate across its shimmering surface. But now they were trapped in this colorless season and could only wait for something to happen. It seemed to Aaron that all of Budapest was waiting for something to happen.
He glanced at his watch and saw that it was exactly five o’clock. Dr. Groszman had most probably already arrived at the small coffeehouse. Aaron had no doubt that the scientist would be on time, and he imagined him already consulting his watch, straightening his too-wide and somber tie, buttoning and unbuttoning the vest of his grim gray academic suit. Aaron’s feelings toward this unknown client seesawed. Now, at the moment of meeting, he was briefly and irrationally annoyed with the man who had jolted him from the cocoon of his grief, from the narcotizing intellectual involvement of his work, into this shabby city with its dusty, decrepit buildings, its trundling yellow streetcars, and its threatening ambience of simmering danger.
The café was dimly lit and almost empty. The cashier held a sheet of paper, which she thrust beneath the counter when he entered. The waitress, a middle-aged woman in a shapeless black uniform, guided him to a table at the rear of the room. Glumly, he ordered a café au lait and a Sacher torte. He glanced at the photographs on the wall—the Hungarian leaders Gero and Rakosi, the Soviet premier Khrushchev. One photograph, newly removed, had left the rectangular stain of its imprint on the patterned paper. Stalin, he supposed, and congratulated himself on living in a country where it was not the custom to adorn the walls of coffee shops with political portraiture.
A bell sounded as the café door swung open, and Aaron was surprised to see the woman in the scarlet cape hesitate in the entryway. She studied the room, her eyes resting briefly on his shadowed figure, but she chose a table close to the door. She did not look at him again, and he felt saddened, disappointed, as though he had been cursorily judged and found wanting.
When his coffee arrived, he stirred it carelessly, allowing the whipped cream to drip onto the tabletop in foaming tears. He opened his newspaper. The front page of the Tribune carried an article on the creation of a new Suez authority. Prime Minister Anthony Eden had announced the decision in the House of Commons.
Just like the British, Aaron thought, to lock the barn door after the horse has been stolen. There might have been a chance for such an authority before Nasser nationalized the canal, but now…He shrugged and turned to the financial page.
“Mr. Goldfeder, how very good to see you.” The woman in the scarlet cape smiled at him as though they were old friends. She extended her hand. Her fingers were icy to his touch, yet her grip was firm. It wa
s a conspiratorial clasp at once both monitory and reassuring.
“It is so dark in this café that I did not see you at first. May I join you?”
“Of course.”
She slipped into the seat opposite him and gesture to the waitress, who brought her tea to Aaron’s table. A small shaded lamp stood on the table, and she pulled at the dangling cord and lit it. In the new circlet of light, Aaron saw a pale crescent of a scar on his companion’s wrist; a turquoise birthmark that matched her eyes was soft as velvet at the curve of her neck. The waitress brought a plate of croissants, a dish of strawberry confiture.
“C’est assez, Dr. Groszman?” She smiled deferentially, a dull silver tooth filling a gap between two missing molars.
“C’est assez.”
The woman withdrew and Aaron smiled.
“They didn’t happen to mention that Dr. Groszman was a woman.”
“Then let me introduce myself,” she said. “I am Dr. Lydia Groszman. Would it have made a difference if you had known?”
“I’m not sure,” he replied honestly.
“Then perhaps that is why they did not mention it.”
“Possibly.”
He wondered what else they had omitted to mention in view of the psychological profile they had drawn up on him. He imagined them meeting and talking about him in cautious, analytic tones: “This Goldfeder has been funny about women since the death of his wife…wants no closeness…perhaps it will be best not to make him apprehensive…once we’ve got him in Budapest he can hardly turn around and come home.” Clever bastards. His own brother-in-law had felt no compunction about recruiting Rebecca, so young and naive then, totally untrained—yet Yehuda enlisted her as an agent in his rescue work. They were single-minded in their goal. Jewish survival took precedence over everything. Still, one had to admire them. Their techniques worked.
“Do you mind?” she asked.
“Not now,” he replied and was surprised at the spontaneous truth of his answer. He was glad to be in Budapest, glad to be sitting opposite this beautiful woman in a deserted, tree-bound café.
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