In any case, there were two more immediate problems holding me back from leaving: I didn't know how to do it, and I was scared.
Manci addressed the second problem in a roundabout way when she told me that I would be in danger if I stayed. If I could be picked up merely for being at the wrong street at the wrong time and taken away to heaven knew where and for who knew how long, I might as well take my chances and try to get out of Hungary.
Manci also proposed a solution to my first problem. Always a collector of acquaintances and connections, she told me about someone she knew who came from Szombathely, a small town about fifteen miles from the Austrian border. This woman had a daughter named Angela who was about my age and was also looking to get out. Angela had never actually been to Szombathely, but her family would equip her with the name and address of friends who still lived there so that we would have a jumping-off point. It wasn't exactly a smooth plan of getting across the border, but it was better than anything I could come up with on my own.
I called Jancsi and told him my aunt's scheme and asked him if he was ready to strike out with Angela and me. Without hesitation, he said yes.
We went over to the railroad station that afternoon and looked up the schedule of trains leaving for Szombathely the next day. Then we arranged to meet Angela at the station.
My parents had encouraged me to leave as long as the discussions were theoretical. Now that reality hit, they became extremely somber. My father said in a tone of earnest determination, “You should do it. You may never have a better chance.” He gave me the note with the message to his friend's Viennese business associate, as well as the name and address of Viktor, a friend of his and Manci's from their Kiskoros days who now lived in Vienna. I folded them up as small as possible and put them in my wallet. My mother agreed with my father, but her tone was shaky. I felt that if I changed my mind, she would have been elated.
That night was very tense. I was busy figuring out what clothes I was going to wear, what I was going to take with me, and how I was going to dispose of what I left behind. I asked my mother to go to the university when it reopened and find out what grade I got in my latest lab project. Despite all the turmoil in my life, that organic chemistry lab was still very important to me, and I wanted to know whether my success in the first-year lab was a fluke or whether I could repeat it. My mother wrote down the information about whom she needed to see and what she was to ask.
We were trying to be thorough and efficient in our preparations, but we were just going through the motions. It was difficult to concentrate on these details when we were struggling with the unstated fact that we might never see each other again.
That night, before I went to bed, I walked quietly around the apartment. I looked over every room. I straightened up my chemistry set. I checked with my hand under the windowsill in the light shaft to make sure my prized bullets were still safely hidden. I silently said good-bye.
Early the next morning, I dressed in the warmest outfit I had: a baggy pair of brown corduroy pants that a neighborhood tailor had lined with my mother's old padded silk bathrobe and a jacket also lined with the remains of the bathrobe. Underneath, I wore my best winter suit. It would get wrinkled, but in the meantime it would give extra warmth and might come in handy if I needed another pair of pants and a jacket. I packed a change of underwear and some extra socks in my school book bag and put on a short winter coat. My father gave me all the Hungarian currency he could scrounge up on such short notice, and I hid the notes inside my clothes. Then Jancsi showed up and it was time to go downstairs, Jancsi and I to head off to the station and my parents to go to work.
We said good-bye at the corner as if it were any normal morning. We didn't dare make a big production of it; it would not have been a good idea to suggest that I was doing anything out of the ordinary. We parted, then I stopped in my tracks. I had automatically put the key to our apartment in my pocket. Now I fished it out, turned around, and ran after my parents. I handed it to my mother and said awkwardly, “I probably won't need this anymore.” My mother nodded. She looked as if she wanted to say something, but she didn't speak. I saw that there were tears in her eyes. I turned and ran back to Jancsi.
We set out for the station. We met up with Angela, bought our tickets, and with great self-consciousness headed for our train. We had concocted all sorts of elaborate alibis as to why we were going to Szombathely, but when we got to the platform, these alibis suddenly appeared ridiculous. Everybody boarding the train looked like us, all dressed in their heaviest winter clothes and all seemingly on a similar mission. It was a train of would-be emigrants, all heading to the country but showing their origin as city folks.
The train ride was quite long—the train never went very fast, and it stopped many times, sometimes for no apparent reason. For a while, people kept to themselves and avoided even looking at each other, but as time went on and nobody interfered with us, everybody dropped their guard a bit. People started making oblique references about getting out, usually talking about friends or acquaintances who had made it and the adventures— or misadventures—that had befallen them. I struck up a conversation with a girl about my age, who said that she had been talking with the conductor, who turned out to be from Szom-bathely, and that for a small amount of money he had offered to guide her to wherever she wanted to go. The girl's problem was that she didn't have anywhere to go. We did. So we promptly formed an alliance. All four of us would have the conductor guide us to the address that Manci's friend had given Angela.
A little later, I introduced myself to the conductor and asked him how hard it would be to get out of the station. He was not very encouraging. I wondered if he made it sound worse than it was in order to justify his fee.
Eventually, we arrived at Szombathely station. The sun set early in December, and it was already dark. People got off the train and started heading to the exit, a gate at the end of the platform. The conductor came for us and motioned for us to follow him off the other side of the train onto the tracks. He led us to another platform, away from the Budapest passengers. He whispered that there were soldiers at the main entrance examining everyone's papers, but he would take us out a different way. We held our breath as we followed him through a series of back doors and deserted corridors behind the public part of the station; then suddenly we were out on a dark street. The conductor told us which direction to go in and said that he would follow us. “Don't worry,” he assured us, he would keep us in sight and tell us when to turn.
It sounded like a strange arrangement, but he was emphatic, so we followed his bidding. For a while, we kept glancing back and he was behind us. Then, he was gone. We stopped and huddled together and waited. There was no conductor. Other than an occasional passerby, nobody was on the street. It was now seven-thirty and there would be a curfew at eight o'clock; we couldn't wait any longer. We stopped someone to ask for directions to our address. He told us where to go—it turned out that it wasn't very far away—then he quickly headed off. We started walking rapidly, too.
Just about eight o'clock, we found the house. We knocked on the door. A middle-aged woman opened it. There was some discussion between her and Angela. The woman checked the street to the left and to the right, then quickly motioned us into the house. We could stay overnight, she said—in fact, we had to because the curfew had already started—then in the morning she would take us to someone who would give us directions to the border. Meanwhile, she fed us dinner, gave us some blankets, and left us to settle down for the night. We each took a corner of the room. No one slept much.
At daybreak, the woman walked us a few blocks to the house of a relative who was a railroad engineer for a spur line. He knew the area very well. He had just come back from a night shift and was already in bed, but the woman woke him up. Once he understood what our situation was, he agreed to help. The woman motioned us into the room. He stayed in bed, yawning, with tousled hair and in his underwear.
The engineer told us he would
give us the names of a sequence of villages. There was, however, one condition: We had to commit it to memory. Under no circumstances would we be allowed to write it down. Quite clearly, he wanted to ensure that there would be no incriminating evidence against him if we were captured.
The four of us memorized half a dozen or so very strange-sounding names, muttering them to each other to keep the memory fresh. Then we set out toward the first town in the sequence. We took back roads, because the railroad engineer had told us that the main roads were patrolled by Russian troops. The back roads weren't paved. Within a short while, we were splattered with brown mud up to our knees.
In each town, we asked someone for directions to the next town, then we hurriedly walked on. And on. We may have walked ten or fifteen miles, but we were so tense that we were hardly conscious of being tired. By midafternoon, we reached the last village on the list. It was already getting dark and we quickly left in the general direction of what we thought was west. Pretty soon we were walking through an area of small woods alternating with plowed fields and pastures. It didn't look like we were about to cross a border. It looked like we were lost.
In one of the fields, a small man was plowing using a plow pulled by a single ox. We approached him, trudging through even more mud. When he heard us, he looked at us without the slightest surprise. He straightened up and we saw that he was a hunchback. We asked for directions to the border. He looked around in the dusk, peering at the surrounding woods for any possible eavesdroppers. Then he gestured in a particular direction and in a quiet voice, which seemed unnecessary as nobody was around us in the field, said his house was over there and we should go in and wait for him. We thanked him and set off in the direction he indicated. Soon we found the farmhouse.
We knocked. A voice told us to come in. A stunningly beautiful woman was cooking dinner. She was dressed in an elaborate traditional peasant costume that reminded me of folk dancers I'd seen in shows in Budapest. We told her, “The man outside sent us.” She nodded and invited us to sit down for dinner. In short order, the man appeared, cleaned up some, and joined us at the table. They seemed to be husband and wife.
The whole scene—the four of us city people from Budapest, sitting around a table in a small house with mud floors and a tiled roof, eating dinner with a hunchback peasant and being served by a colorfully dressed, beautiful woman—seemed like a fantasy. But we were not very inclined to marvel at the strangeness of the scene. We had only a single abiding interest: to get to the border.
The man told us that he got some of his income by smuggling and knew this area like the back of his hand. He could take us over, he said, but it would cost us. He left us to ponder what we would do. We really didn't have a choice. Between the four of us, we came up with the amount he wanted and handed it over. My share took half of what my father gave me. The man told us to settle down and wait; we would set off at midnight.
Time moved slowly. The man and his wife went about their business without a word. The four of us sat deep in thought.
As it got closer to midnight, I had to use the toilet. The man took me to the door and pointed out a shack with a door hanging open. Inside was a hole in the ground with a tree trunk fixed horizontally in front of it. You crouched on the tree trunk and did your business into the hole; there were a few pieces of newspaper for toilet paper. I had never seen that kind of latrine before, and it was pitch dark inside. But I managed. I looked up at the bit of sky barely visible through the doorway and I thought, This is probably the last of me that I'll leave in Hungary.
Shortly afterward, the man said it was time to go. As the train conductor in Szombathely did, he started us off in a particular direction and told us he would stay behind us and seek us out from time to time to guide us to the next post. Given our experience in Szombathely, this was not very reassuring, but again we did not have any choice. He was firm about how he wanted to do this, and we needed him.
We would walk for five or ten minutes in a field or through the woods, then he would materialize from the dark, tell us to head in a slightly different direction, and then disappear again. After another five or ten minutes, he would catch up with us again and direct us to the next step. And so it went. Every time we thought he had abandoned us, he would materialize out of thin air and give us our next instruction. It was cold and dark, so dark that sometimes we had to feel our way among the trees.
I lost track of the time. After a while, we emerged from the woods. I could see some faint lights far across an open field. The man came close to us. “Those lights are Austria,” he whispered. “Head toward them and don't take your eyes off them. This is as far as I go.” And he was gone.
I didn't take my eyes off those lights. I trudged toward them as if they were a magnet. The muddy field seemed endless. The lights never seemed to get brighter.
We stumbled across some ditches, then crossed a dirt road. We heard dogs barking at a distance, and suddenly a flare lit up the sky. We threw ourselves to the ground, holding our breath. Then the flare burned out and it was dark again. We picked ourselves up and continued.
After what seemed like miles and miles, the lights finally came close. Had we made it? We snuck up to the first house that we could see. Dogs immediately started barking in the dark. We again threw ourselves to the ground. A man came out of the house, holding a kerosene lantern over his head, and called out—in Hungarian—“Who is there?”
My heart stopped. I'd heard stories of people who had attempted to cross the border, gotten lost, and meandered right back into Hungary. Had this happened to us, too?
“Who is there?” the man repeated. We hesitantly picked our- selves up from the ground and forced ourselves to approach. When he saw us, he smiled a big, warm smile and said, “Relax, you're in Austria.”
For a moment, my mind went blank, then I started breathing again, almost panting with relief. My clothes were suddenly drenched with sweat.
He invited us into his house and served us each a shot of slivovitz, a plum brandy. Then he told us what would happen next. Austrian gendarmes patrolled the area regularly. They would soon be by and would take us to the village schoolhouse for the rest of the night. Sure enough, the gendarmes soon appeared. We had been walking all day and half of the night, but we wearily got to our feet and started walking once again. After half an hour or so, we got to the village with the schoolhouse. The benches in the rooms had been cleared to the sides and straw was strewn on the floor, providing a bit of a cushion. There were no blankets. Several people were sprawled in the straw, asleep. Between Jancsi, the girls, and me, we spoke enough German to understand that the gendarmes wanted us to stay there until morning.
There was no heat inside the schoolhouse. Jancsi and I huddled next to each other and tried to sleep. A couple of hours later, I woke up shivering. I was worried. I didn't like the whole idea of the gendarmes and whatever procedure they had in mind. Now that we had made it across the border, I just wanted to get to Vienna, to the address that my father had given me. I noticed that Jancsi was awake also. I gestured to him that we should get out of there. We tiptoed out of the schoolhouse, leaving the two girls and everyone else behind.
It was deep, deep dark and bitterly cold as we explored the village, looking for the railroad tracks. All we could see was dark houses. Finally, we came upon a house that had a light in the window. We knocked on the door. A peasant woman, dressed to go out in an overcoat with her head wrapped in a kerchief, opened the door. She, too, spoke Hungarian. We asked her where we could get the train for Vienna, and she told us that that was where she was going, too. She was taking some foodstuffs in a wicker basket to the market there. She had a little girl with her, and in a few minutes, they were ready to go. The four of us walked in the dark and freezing cold until we came to the railroad tracks. There was no station, not even a sign indicating where we were, but the woman said, “The train will stop here.”
About fifteen minutes later, a train came along and it did indeed stop for us
. The woman explained to the conductor in German that we were fluechtling —escapees, refugees. The conductor shrugged and patted us on the shoulder, then continued through the car without demanding our fare. We were on our way to Vienna.
It was midmorning when we arrived at the Vienna railroad station. The woman directed us to the streetcars, and after some trial and error, we found somebody who told us which streetcar to take to the address I had fished out of my wallet. We told the streetcar conductor in broken German that we were fluechtling — we learned quickly. He looked us over, smiled at our mud-splattered clothes, and said, “Ich sehe” (I see). Then he said something about a graue karte —a gray card. It seemed we needed to get gray cards. Meanwhile, he didn't make us pay the fare.
It didn't take long to find my father's friend's business associate. However, his reaction was not at all what we anticipated. While all the strangers we had encountered up to that point had been helpful and encouraging, this man was quite clearly not pleased to see us. When I showed him the note my father's friend had written, he waved it away with the comment, “I know, I know, he gives that to everybody.” He could put us up for the night in a boardinghouse, he said, but beyond that, we had to find our own way. He told us how to get the gray card, which would enable us to ride the streetcars for free, and told us about various refugee organizations that might take care of us. Then he gave us a sandwich, took us to the boardinghouse a few blocks away, made the arrangements, and left.
Despite his sour attitude, he booked us each our own room. After our experiences of the last two nights, the rooms seemed incredibly luxurious. There was a bed with a thick comforter, frilly curtains on the windows that looked out onto a busy Viennese street, and a sink with a bar of soap. My first priority was to clean up. I undressed, took off my underwear and my socks, washed them out in the sink, and hung them up to dry. Then I washed myself as well as I could in the sink. When I finished, I was reasonably clean except for the mud that was caked on my corduroy pants. I sat on the edge of my bed, looked around at what would be my home for the night, and thought, I would be ecstatic to settle in a place like this and go to the university. If I could just do that, it would be more than I could possibly want.
Swimming Across: A Memoir Page 21