by Alan Furst
They didn’t really talk until the next morning. In the living room, the rugs were still up for the summer, so when his mother spoke there was a faint echo. She sat, perfectly composed, on a spindly chair in front of the French doors, a silhouette in garden light. She was, as always, slim and lovely, with ice-colored hair set in steel and pale skin that showed in the vee of her silk dress.
“And do you see Lillian Frei?” she asked.
“Now and then. She always asks for you.”
“I miss her. Does she still wear the suits from De Pinna?”
“Where?”
“A store on Fifth Avenue, in New York.”
Morath shrugged politely, he had no idea.
“In any event, you’ll kiss her for me.”
Morath drank a sip of coffee.
“Would you care for a pastry, Nicholas? I can send Malya to Gundel’s.”
“No, thank you.”
“Bread and butter, then.”
“Really, just coffee.”
“Oh Nicholas, what a Parisian you are. You’re sure?”
Morath smiled. He’d never in his life been able to eat anything before noon. “How long has it been, anyuci, since you’ve seen Paris?” This was mother, very much her preference. She had never been mama.
His mother sighed. “Oh a long time,” she said. “Your father was alive, the war just over. 1919-could that be right?”
“Yes.”
“Has it changed? People say it has.”
“There are more automobiles. Electric signs. Cheap restaurants on the boulevards. Some people say it’s not as nice as it was.”
“Here it is the same.”
“Anyuci?”
“Yes?”
“Janos Polanyi feels that, with the situation in Germany, you, and perhaps Teresa, should consider, should find a place …”
When she smiled, his mother was still incredibly beautiful. “You haven’t come all the way here for that, I hope. Ferenc Molnar has moved to New York. He is living at the Plaza and is said to be utterly miserable.”
A long look, mother and son.
“I won’t leave my house, Nicholas.” And how can you not have known it?
They went to the movies in the afternoon. A British comedy, dubbed in Hungarian, from the 1920s. It had a cruise ship, nightclubs with shiny floors, a hound called Randy, a hero with patent-leather hair called Tony, a blonde with kiss curls that they fought over, called Veronica, which sounded very strange in Hungarian.
Morath’s mother loved it-he glanced over and saw her eyes shining like a child’s. She laughed at every joke and ate caramels from a little bag. During a song-and-dance sequence at the nightclub, she hummed along with the music: Akor mikor, Lambeth utodon
Bar melyek este, bar melyek napon,
Ugy talalnad hogy mi mind is
Setaljak a Lambeth Walk. Oi!
Minden kis Lambeth leany
Az o kis, Lambeth parjaval
Ugy talalnad hogy ok
Setaljak a Lambeth Walk. Oi!
Afterward, they went to the tearoom of the Hotel Gellert and had acacia honey and whipped cream on toasted cake.
3:30 in the morning. In the rambling, iron-gated gardens of the villa district, some people kept nightingales. Other than that, he could hear wind in the autumn leaves, a creak in a shutter, a neighbor’s fountain, a distant rumble of thunder-north, he thought, in the mountains.
Still, it was hard to sleep. Morath lay in his old bed and read Freya Stark-this was the third time he’d started it, a travel narrative, adventures in the wild mountain valleys of Persia.
He’d always stayed up late in this house, his father’s very own son. He used to hear him, sometimes, pacing around the living room. Often he played records on the Victrola while he worked in his office-sliding stamps into glassine envelopes with a silver tweezers.
They weren’t rich, but his father never worked for money. He had been one of the great philatelists of Hungary, very strong in both nineteenth-century Europe and colonials. Morath supposed his father had traded in the international markets, perhaps he’d made some money that way. Then, too, before the war, nobody really had to work. At least, nobody they knew.
But, after Trianon, everything changed. Families lost the income they’d had from land in the countryside. Even so, most of them managed, they simply had to learn to improvise. It became fashionable to say things like “If only I could afford to live the way I live.”
Then, on a June day in 1919, the communists killed his father.
In the spasms of political chaos that followed the loss of the war, there came a Soviet Republic of Hungary-a government born of a national desperation so deluded it persuaded itself that Lenin and the Red Army would save them from their enemies, the Serbs and the Roumanians.
The Soviet was led by a Hungarian journalist named Bela Kun who, while serving in the Austro-Hungarian army, had deserted to the Russians during the war. Kun, his henchman Szamuelly, and forty-five commissars began a rule of one hundred and thirty-three days, and shot and burned and hanged their way from one end of Hungary to the other. They were then chased out of the country-across the border and, eventually, into the Lubianka-by a Roumanian army, which occupied Budapest, wandered aimlessly about the countryside, and spent its days in desultory looting until it was shooed back across the border by a Hungarian army, led by Miklos Horthy. The counterrevolution then gave birth to the White Terror, which shot and burned and hanged its way from one end of Hungary to the other, paying particular attention to the Jews, since Jews were Bolsheviks (or bankers), and Kun and a number of his comrades were Jewish.
It was one of Kun’s wandering bands that murdered Morath’s father. He had gone, one weekend, to the country house in the Carpathian foothills. The communist militia rode into the yard at dusk, demanded jewelry for the oppressed masses, then bloodied the farm manager’s nose, threw Morath’s father into a horse trough, took three stamp albums-1910 commemoratives from Luxembourg-all the cash they could find, several shirts, and a lamp. They chased the servant girls into the woods but couldn’t catch them and, in one corner of the kitchen, set a fire, which burned a hole in the pantry wall and went out.
Morath’s father dried himself off, calmed the servant girls, put a cold spoon on old Tibor’s neck to stop the bleeding, then poured a small glass of plum brandy and sat down in his favorite chair, where, with his glasses folded up and held gently in one hand, he died.
Morath went to his sister’s house for dinner. A new villa, also in the Third District but up in the newly elegant quarter known as Rose Hill. His sister, in a low-cut dress and red felt boots with tiny mirrors on them-oh, Cara-gave him a sexy hug and a warm kiss on the lips. “I’m so happy to see you, Nicholas. I am.” She didn’t let him go until a maid came into the room.
This was not new. She was three years older than Morath. When he was nine and she was twelve, she liked to comb his hair, would slip into his bed during a scary thunderstorm, would always know when he was melancholy and be tender to him.
“Teresa,” he said. “My only love.” They both laughed.
Morath looked around. There was too much furniture in the Duchazy house, much too expensive and much too new. How his sister could have married that idiot Duchazy was beyond him. They had three children, including a ten-year-old Nicholas-the absolute image of that idiot Duchazy.
Still, Teresa had married him, and her days of worrying about money were long over. The Duchazy family owned flour mills-thirty years earlier there’d been more mills in Budapest than in any other city in the world. Morath’s mother, who disliked Duchazy even more than he did, would refer to him in private as “the miller.”
Not the typical miller. He strode toward Morath and embraced him. He was a sinewy man with uncomfortably stiff posture, a pencil mustache, and strange, pale-green eyes. Well then, how was Paris? Still in the advertising business? Still a bachelor? What a life! The children were brought out, shown off, and put away. Duchazy poured brandies
and had the fire lit.
The conversation wandered here and there. The Duchazy family was not exactly nyilas but close enough. Teresa warned him with a glance, more than once, when he was headed into a sensitive area. By the end of the second brandy, Duchazy had thrown a second log on the fire, which blazed merrily in a newly installed surround of yellow tile.
“Janos Polanyi thinks Mother ought to leave Budapest,” Morath said.
“Why is that?” Duchazy was annoyed.
“War,” Morath said.
Teresa shrugged. “She won’t go.”
“Maybe if you two considered it, she might.”
“But we won’t,” Duchazy said. “We’re patriots. Besides, I think it’s going to go on this way for a long time.” He meant diplomacy, marches, street fighting-the sort of thing they’d seen in the Sudetenland. “Hitler means to dominate the Balkans,” he continued. “Someone’s going to, it might as well be him. And he wants it quiet in Hungary and south of here-that’s the granary, and the oil fields. I don’t think the British dare to fight him, but, if it comes to that, he’ll need the wheat and the oil. Anyhow, if we’re smart, we’ll stay in his good graces, because the borders are going to start moving.”
“They already are,” Teresa said.
That was true. Hungary, having supported the occupation of the Sudetenland, was to be rewarded with the return of some of its northern territory, especially in lower Slovakia, where the population was eighty-five percent Magyar.
“Laszlo’s brother is fighting up in Ruthenia,” Teresa said.
Morath found this puzzling. Duchazy gave his wife the look that meant you’ve been indiscreet.
“Really?” Morath said.
Duchazy shrugged. “Nothing’s secret around here.” He meant, Morath thought, the house, Budapest, the nation itself.
“In Ruthenia?”
“Near Uzhorod. We’re in it with the Poles. They have irregulars, in the north, and we have the Rongyos Garda.” The Ragged Guard.
“What’s that?”
“Arrow Cross men, the street-corner boys and what have you, led by a few army officers in civilian clothing. They’re fighting the Sich, the Ukrainian militia. The next thing is, local Hungarians demand an end to the instability, and we send in the regular army. This used to be Hungary, after all, why should it belong to the Czechs?”
Jackals, Morath thought. Now that the prey was down they’d tear off a piece for themselves.
“The world’s changing,” Duchazy said. His eyes sparkled. “And about time.”
Dinner was exceptional. Deviled carp with onions, cabbage stuffed with ground pork, and a Medoc from the Duchazy estates near Eger.
After dinner, Teresa left the men to themselves, and Morath and Duchazy sat by the fire. Cigars were lit, and for a time they smoked in companionable silence. “One thing I did want to ask you,” Duchazy said.
“Yes?”
“A few of us have gotten together to support Szalassy. Can I put you down for a contribution?” Szalassy was one of the leaders of the Arrow Cross.
“Thank you for asking, but not right now,” Morath said.
“Mmm. Oh well, I promised some people I’d ask.”
“I don’t mind.”
“Do you ever see Colonel Sombor, at the legation?”
“I’m hardly ever there.”
“Oh. He asked for you. I thought maybe you were friends.”
Tuesday. In the late afternoon, Morath took a trolley to the Kobanya district, where factory walls rose high above the track on both sides of the street. There was a smoky haze, as evening came on, and a light rain dappled the surface of the river. A young woman sat across from him, she had the liquid radiance of some Hungarian girls and long hair that blew across her face as the trolley went around a curve. She swept it back with one hand and glanced at Morath. The trolley stopped in front of a brewery, and the girl got off in a crowd of workmen. Some of them knew her, called her by name, and one of them gave her a hand down from the high step.
The slaughterhouse was at the next stop, where a metal sign bolted to the brickwork said GERSOVICZY. When Morath got off the trolley, the air was like ammonia and made his eyes water. It was a long way to the entrance that led to the office, past loading docks with open doors where he could see red carcasses hung on hooks and butchers in leather aprons. One of them rested a sledgehammer in the sawdust, the iron head beaten flat at both ends, while he took a minute to smoke a cigarette.
“The office?”
“Upstairs. Just keep going till you see the river.”
In the Gersoviczy brothers’ office there was a desk with a telephone and an adding machine, an ancient safe in one corner, a clothes tree behind the door. The brothers were waiting for him. They wore black homburgs and heavy suits and silver ties, and they had the long sidelocks and beards of Orthodox Jews. On the wall was a Hebrew calendar with a picture of a rabbi blowing a ram’s horn. Across the top it said, in Hungarian, Gersoviczy Brothers Wish You a Happy and Prosperous New Year.
A soot-blackened window looked out over the Danube, lights twinkling on a hill above the far bank. The brothers, both smoking oval cigarettes, peered at Morath through the gloom of the unlit office.
“You are Morath Uhr?” He used the traditional form of address, Morath Sir.
“Yes. Count Polanyi’s nephew.”
“Please do sit down. I’m sorry we cannot offer you anything.”
Morath and the older brother, his beard streaked with silver, took the two wooden swivel chairs, as the younger brother leaned on the edge of the desk. “I am Szimon Gersoviczy,” he said. “And this is Herschel.” The older brother gave him a stiff nod.
Szimon spoke heavily accented Hungarian. “We’re Polish,” he explained. “From Tarnopol, twenty years ago. Then we came down here. Half of Galicia came here, a hundred years ago. We came for the same reason, to get away from the pogroms, to get a little opportunity. And it worked out like that. So, we stayed, and we Magyarized the name. It used to be just Gersovicz.”
The older brother finished his cigarette and stubbed it out in a tin ashtray. “Your uncle came to us for help, that was in September. I don’t know if he told you.”
“Not then, no.”
“Well, he did. Through our brother-in-law, in Paris. He asked if we would help, help the country. He saw the handwriting on the wall, as they say.”
He paused a moment. Outside, the drumming of a tugboat engine, hauling a line of barges north on the river.
“We don’t ask for anything,” he went on, “but now Polanyi knows, and you know, so …”
Szimon went over to the safe and began to work the combination. Then he pulled the handles to the up position and swung the doors open. Herschel leaned close to Morath. He smelled strong, of sweat and onions, cigarettes.
“It’s in pengo,” he said. “Maybe if the community was more involved, we could make it in something else. But the Count wanted it kept close, so it’s just a few people. Szimon and me, our family, you know, one or two others, but mostly us.”
Szimon began stacking piles of pengo on the desk, each fifty notes pinned at the corner. He flipped the ends of the stacks, wet his thumb, then counted in Yiddish as he shuffled through the bills. Herschel laughed. “For some reason,” he said, “it’s hard to do that in Hungarian.”
Morath shook his head. “Nobody ever thought it would come to this,” he said.
“Forgive me, sir, but it always comes to this.”
“Zvei hundrit toizend,” Szimon said.
“What will you call it?”
“I don’t know. The Free Hungary Committee-something like that.”
“In Paris?”
“Or London. If the country is occupied, the best place is the closest place. Closest safe place.”
“So, do you like New York?”
“God forbid.”
Szimon finished counting, then squared the stacks off by tapping the edges on the desk. “Four hundred thousand pengo,” he
said. “About the same in French francs. Or, just in case God doesn’t forbid, eighty thousand dollars.”
“Tell me one thing,” Herschel said. “Do you think the country will be occupied? Some people say sell and get out.”
“And lose everything,” Szimon said. He slid the money across the desk-thousand-pengo notes, wider than French currency, with black and red engravings of Saint Istvan on one side and a castle on the other. Morath opened a briefcase, placed the stacks on the bottom, put Freya Stark on top.
“Don’t we have rubber bands?” Herschel said.
Morath pulled the straps tight and buckled them. Then he shook hands, very formally, with each of the brothers. “Go with God,” Herschel said.
That night, he met Wolfi Szubl at the Arizona, a nachtlokal in Szint Josef Alley on Margaret Island. Szubl wore a pale-blue suit and a flowery tie and smelled of heliotrope. “You never know,” he said to Morath. “It gets very late at night here.”
“Wolfi,” Morath said, shaking his head.
“There’s someone for everyone,” Szubl said.
Szubl led him to a table on a platform by the wall, then pressed a button which raised them ten feet. “Here it’s good.” They shouted down to a waiter for drinks, Polish vodkas, that came up on a mechanical tray.
The orchestra was dressed in white tuxedos and played Cole Porter songs to a packed dance floor, which sometimes disappeared into the basement to a chorus of shrieks and laughter from the dancers.
A naked girl floated past in a harness, dark hair streaming out behind her. Her pose was artistic, lofty, an insouciant hand resting against the wire that hung from the ceiling.
“Ahh,” Szubl said.
“You like her?”
Szubl grinned-who wouldn’t?
“Why ‘Arizona’?” Morath asked.
“The couple who own it got an unexpected inheritance, a fortune, from an uncle in Vienna. Decided to build a nightclub on Margaret Island. When they got the telegram they were in Arizona, so …”
“No. Really?”
Szubl nodded. “Yes,” he said. “Tucson.”
The drinks came. The girl went by again, headed the other way. “You see? She ignores us,” Szubl said.