Burning Cold

by Lisa Lieberman

  Gray’s interest was piqued. “Kun knew Lenin personally? I never heard that before.”

  “Oh, yes. Lenin trained him and sent him back to his own country to instigate a revolution,” said Nicholas. “He promised to send the Red Army, to help Hungary reclaim the territories it had lost by the terms of the armistice. Unfortunately, Lenin was too busy putting down the counterrevolution in Russia to keep his promise. Kun was overthrown and his supporters were purged when Admiral Horthy took power.”

  I shivered involuntarily as the meaning of the word “purged” sunk in. “All of Kun’s supporters were killed, do you mean?”

  “Not only Kun’s actual supporters, but anyone suspected of sympathizing with the Reds.” Nicholas shook his head. “Horthy’s forces were quite brutal. In addition to being a Bolshevik, Kun was a Jew. There were pogroms, I’m sorry to say. A bloodbath is what it was. No other word to describe it. Worse than now. Your father was lucky to have left Hungary when he did. The rest of the revolutionaries were slaughtered.”

  “Father?” Gray shook his head. “He was no Bolshevik, I can assure you. He left Hungary because he was having an affair and his mistress was pregnant.”

  A narrowing of his blue eyes indicated Nicholas’s disapproval, but he said nothing. The silence grew awkward and I found myself wanting to speak up in Father’s defense.

  “I think he regretted leaving Zoltán behind,” I said. “Maybe not at the time, but afterward, although by then it was obviously too late.”

  Both Gray and Jakub knew what lay behind this remark of mine. I sensed their concern, and didn’t dare turn my head to look at either of them for fear I’d end up crying in front of Nicholas. At seventeen, I’d had a baby out of wedlock. The baby’s father was a famous actor whose career would have been ruined if word got out that he’d seduced a minor. My own parents had gotten married under the very same circumstances, but the father of my son had no intention of marrying me. He was, in every respect, a cad. The studio employed a fixer whose chief responsibility was to keep his name out of the papers, and more than one paternity suit was lodged against him. I was told all of this, but it made no difference in my feelings. Like most girls my age, I’d been in love with Taylor Reed forever. There wasn’t one of his pictures I hadn’t seen, and I’d memorized the best lines in many of them. My school friends and I took turns acting out the ending to Remember Me, Darling, the tearful scene where the girl he’d left behind to marry an heiress lies dying in his arms and he confesses—too late—that he still loves her.

  The real scene between Taylor and me played out quite differently. “I’ll pay for you to get rid of it,” he said when I told him that I was expecting. There were ways of getting an abortion in those days if you had money, private clinics where women went, some of them in Switzerland. Father had offered to send me to one of these places, but I wanted Taylor’s baby. Both he and Gray would have supported me, no matter what decision I made, but they both believed the baby would be better off growing up in a stable home with two parents, a married couple, and in the end I allowed myself to be persuaded. I often thought of my son, especially at this time of year. He’d been born in October and would have just turned five.

  “A good many of us have regrets about choices we made in our youth,” said Nicholas kindly. “I’m sure your father will be glad to be reunited with his son. Tell me his name and I’ll see if I can’t expedite a visa. You’re leaving with the convoy tomorrow, is that right?”

  “Tomorrow morning, yes,” said Gray. “And the name is Szabó. Zoltán Szabó.”

  “Zoltán Szabó? Could it be?” The blue eyes widened in disbelief. “How old did you say your brother was?”

  “He would have been born in 1915.”

  “1915.” Our companion did a rapid calculation in his head. “He would be the right age. But this is unbelievable. He’s still alive, that devil!”

  “Do you mean to tell us that you know him?” I asked.

  Nicholas laughed with delight. “I believe so. Zoltán Szabó. Yes, it must be him. It was years ago, mind you, during wartime. We were in Marseille, and he was using a nom de guerre, but I’d known him originally under his own name.”

  “Marseille?” Jakub was suddenly alert. “What were you doing there during the war, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “I was working with a relief agency, helping refugees get out of France.”

  “‘Helping them’ as in smuggling them out of the country, do you mean?”

  Nicholas gave him an appraising look, as if noticing him properly for the first time. He rattled off a question in French, to which my husband replied curtly, and quite pointedly in English. “No,” he said. “I was in Paris.”

  “But you’re not French, are you? I detect a slight Slavic intonation.”

  “I’m Polish.”

  “Ah, yes. I hear it now. You form your vowels in the front of your mouth, whereas with English or German—and the romance languages, for that matter—the sounds come from further back in the throat.”

  Now it was Jakub’s turn to probe. “How many languages do you speak, Mr. Miner?”

  “Fluently? Only English and French, I’m afraid.”

  “And not fluently?”

  Nicholas mumbled something about speaking versus understanding, the gist of it being (if I understood him properly) that he’d read modern languages at university and had a working knowledge of Spanish, Italian, German, and Hungarian.

  My brother let out a whistle of appreciation. “That’s quite some résumé!”

  “Not Russian?” said Jakub in a low voice. Something about the man was clearly rubbing him the wrong way, offsetting his habitual politeness. I could feel the tension in his body although we were not touching.

  Nicholas acted as if he hadn’t heard the question. “Zoltán Szabó,” he repeated, addressing himself wholly to Gray and me. “Your brother was absolutely indispensable to our work, I’ll have you know.”

  I was having a hard time putting together all the facets of Zoltán we’d been shown. Poet, prisoner, and now, evidently, an underground operative who traveled under an assumed name, no less. I definitely wanted to be on hand when he and Father met.

  “What did he do?” I asked.

  “He was a guide. We recruited him to ferry people over the Pyrenees. He knew the escape routes. He’d fought in Spain, you see, with the International Brigades.”

  “Did he!” exclaimed Gray. “I can’t wait until Father hears that.”

  During his college days, my brother had demonstrated against fascism in Spain, at one point toying with the idea of joining the International Brigades himself. This activity had put him at odds with Father at the time, and was what got him blacklisted in 1951. Premature anti-fascism (as it was called) branded you as pink, regardless of whether you had been a card-carrying Communist or merely a fellow traveler like Gray.

  Next to me on the sofa, Jakub was fidgeting with a button on his cuff. “How did you come to recruit Zoltán, Mr. Miner?” he asked offhandedly. “Were you in Spain too?”

  Our companion stood up, a signal that the three of us were to follow him back downstairs. “I’m afraid I’m wanted at my post, but I will personally see to it that Zoltán Szabó is issued a visa this very morning. I had a great deal of respect for your brother. He was a bit of a dreamer, but he proved himself on more than one occasion to be absolutely fearless.”

  “Fearless or reckless?” I wondered aloud, falling into step beside him as we walked down the corridor.

  Nicholas gave a slight chuckle. “I’ll admit, it was sometimes hard to tell the difference. I will say this: your brother went by Icarus and the name suited him to a T.”

  “He flew into the sun, didn’t he?” Knowing that Zoltán had chosen this name for himself filled me with foreboding. Why, out of all the possible figures of classical antiquity, had he chosen this myth? It mad
e him sound like even more of a risk taker than my husband.

  “Oh, I wouldn’t be too concerned, if I were you,” said Nicholas, still amused. “Icarus knew how to disappear.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “What is it?” I asked Jakub the instant we were outside. “Why don’t you trust him?” Once again, I was out of my depth, but it’s amazing how quickly you can get used to living in a state of perpetual confusion. Hungary was so unlike the world I knew. Nothing I’d learned as an actress seemed remotely relevant to the drama playing out here. In the theater, reading between the lines meant going deeper into a character to find her motivations. Inventing a history that felt plausible and then inhabiting it on stage: challenging enough to do well, night after night, but the stakes were hardly life and death. Sooner or later the run would end, you’d discard the role, and step back into your ordinary self.

  Reading between the lines was no exercise in make-believe in Communist Hungary. It was a daily necessity and it didn’t look as if the run of this particular drama would be ending anytime soon, optimistic pronouncements from the provisional government notwithstanding. Neophytes such as Gray and myself were left with no choice but to take our cues from a seasoned player like Jakub.

  “A man of his sort,” he replied after giving the matter some thought. “Well, let’s just say it’s hard to know which side he’s on.”

  “I’d have thought he was on our side,” said Gray.

  “The American side, you mean?”

  “Well, yes. Seeing as how he works at the embassy, I assumed …”

  Jakub’s reply was terse. “Don’t assume anything.”

  I found myself looking anxiously around us, although there didn’t appear to be anyone within earshot. We’d had to wait for Zoltán’s visa to be processed and in the length of the time we’d been inside the embassy, the weather had turned blustery, with a hint of snow in the air. The candlelighting vigil in Parliament Square had dwindled to a handful of mourners. On the opposite bank of the Danube, perched on the crest of a hill, loomed Buda Castle, shrouded in fog.

  Gray paused in his march across the plaza to light a cigarette, cupping his hand around the flame to keep it from blowing out, and we all stood shivering on the sidewalk until he’d got it lit. I watched him inhale, pulling the smoke deeply into his lungs as he weighed the evidence for himself.

  “The language business is worrying you,” he said to Jakub, smoke mingling with his frosty breath as he exhaled.

  “Not only that. Did you notice the way he sidestepped my question when I asked how he and Zoltán met?”

  “He sidestepped a number of questions, as I recall.”

  “True, but I found his evasiveness when I tried to pin him down on Spain most telling. He didn’t deny being there, but he certainly didn’t want to talk about it.”

  My brother drew pensively on his cigarette. “You think he was with Comintern?”

  “Hold it,” I interrupted. “What are you two talking about?”

  Gray took a final puff and tossed his cigarette into the gutter. “You remember the last time we talked about the spread of Communism after the Russian revolution, Cara? Communist parties sprung up all over the place, but these were homegrown affairs. Autonomous. Each had its own concerns, and its own way of working for change, depending on conditions in the country where it was born.”

  Too late, I realized I’d let myself in for one of his lectures on politics. Granted, he’d taught me a great deal over the years, but I wasn’t sure that a windy street corner in the heart of strife-ridden Budapest was the place to resume my political education. Unfortunately, I wasn’t given a choice.

  “Comintern was set up by the Soviet Union to bring the local outfits into line. Its agents infiltrated Communist parties around the world in order to control them. During the Spanish Civil War, they recruited volunteers from all over Europe and America to defend the Spanish Republic.”

  “They also set up a number of bogus relief agencies as fronts to funnel arms to the Republican side,” Jakub noted. “I suspect Miner worked for one of them.”

  “Is that such a bad thing?” I didn’t know a lot about the Spanish Civil War, but I remembered from an earlier lecture of Gray’s that the Soviet Union had been the only nation willing to aid the doomed Republic. You had to stand up for what you believed in, he’d said. The rest of the world stood by and watched while Hitler and Mussolini bombed the country to bits, all in support of their fellow dictator, Generalissimo Franco, who still ruled Spain with an iron fist. But now Gray was telling me Miner’s activity was a very bad thing, reminding me the Communists were only one party in the coalition that made up the Popular Front, as the government of the Spanish Republic was called.

  “They wanted to run the show so badly that they sabotaged their own side! My God, the stories Orwell told in Homage to Catalonia were enough to turn your stomach. And the show trials! Well, they had them here, too, didn’t they? But the writing was already on the wall with Bukharin.” He seemed prepared to discourse at greater length on the Russians’ treachery, but Jakub guided the conversation back to his suspicions regarding Nicholas.

  “If Miner was in Spain during the civil war, we have to assume he was a Soviet agent.”

  “Was or is?” I wanted to know.

  “It’s not something you pick up and discard like a hobby, najdroższa.”

  József was pacing the sidewalk in front of the Duna. “How did it go at the embassy? Were you successful?”

  “We got the visa,” said Gray, pulling the document out of its envelope to show him. “What about you? Any news of Zoltán?”

  “I’m afraid not. I thought we might go to the magazine’s offices and see if he hasn’t been back there since yesterday. It’s possible he’s left you a message.”

  Jakub had wanted to wait until we were en route before giving his account of our visit to the embassy. As it turned out, József was so busy giving directions it wasn’t until we were parked that my husband had the opportunity to share his suspicions that Nicholas was a Soviet agent of long standing.

  Our companion was skeptical. “The man is no amateur,” he commented. “Assuming you’re correct, he’d have to have spent years burrowing his way into a position of responsibility at the embassy. All of that work would come to nothing if he were exposed, and the Americans would hardly take kindly to the discovery of a spy in their midst. I sincerely doubt he’d have unmasked himself to the three of you. It would’ve been like slitting his own throat!”

  “He did it inadvertently,” said Jakub. “Miner’s skilled at languages. He picked up on my accent, pegged me as a Slavic speaker.”

  “It takes one to know one, eh? Sorry, I’m still not convinced. He might just as easily speak Serbo-Croatian or Czech.”

  “I’m willing to bet he speaks Russian.”

  “What if he does? A knowledge of Russian isn’t damning in and of itself. For all we know, he’s spying for the Americans and using his post at the embassy as a cover. That’s how it’s done these days, apparently.”

  My husband refused to back down. “In that case, he must be a double agent. Would you like to know what he did during the war? He was in France, heading up some kind of refugee agency, and before that he seems to have been in Spain, although I couldn’t get him to admit it outright.”

  This got József’s attention. “You weren’t foolish enough to press the man over his political affiliations?”

  Jakub looked down at his lap. “I didn’t hide my suspicions.”

  “There’s such a thing as being too clever for your own good,” József rebuked him. “If he is what you say he is, you’ve as good as told him you’re onto him. What do you expect him to do now, wait for you to report him to the ambassador?”

  “You’re not suggesting that he’ll be coming after us, are you?” Gray’s question came out louder than he’d inten
ded, betraying his alarm.

  József didn’t even bother to reply. Reaching into a pocket of his overcoat, he extracted a pack of cigarettes and tipped one out. Gray had to light it for him, his hands were shaking so badly. The man wasn’t cut out for subterfuge; he was meant to be working a desk job in some government bureaucracy. We watched him smoke, each of us lost in our own thoughts.

  I was feeling shaky too, and not only because of the threat posed by Nicholas. Jakub sat at the wheel, staring out through the windshield in utter despair. I didn’t know how to reach him in this black mood. Was he blaming himself for his lapse, for failing to protect me in the same way he believed he’d failed to save his family? Useless to point out that Gray and I had made more than our share of mistakes over the course of the past two days. There was ample guilt to go around; none of us was blameless. Wasn’t it József who’d sent us on the errand to get Zoltán a visa? If we hadn’t gone to the embassy, we’d never have met Nicholas. We’d have been on our way back to Paris by now, abandoning Hungary to its tragedy. Jakub shouldn’t have to bear the entire burden of keeping me safe.

  “What’s stopping us from leaving this afternoon?” The solution offered itself up to me and it was so simple I found myself giggling. By the time Nicholas realized we weren’t joining the convoy, we’d be long gone.

  My brother was giddy with relief. “Cara, you’re brilliant! Isn’t my sister brilliant?” he asked the others.

  “Absolutely,” agreed Jakub, planting a kiss on my lips. Even József liked the idea. He thought we should leave immediately, without going back to the Duna to retrieve our belongings, in case someone was watching the hotel.