Burning Cold

by Lisa Lieberman

  “By poking around, asking innocent questions, making people nervous. Americans are remarkably good at that kind of thing.”

  Jakub whispered something I didn’t quite catch. It sounded like a phrase in French.

  “What was that?” I whispered back.

  “La chèvre.” This time he said the words loudly enough for the others to hear. “It means goat. From what I understand, they’re sometimes used as bait. To attract wolves.”

  I was watching Zoltán. A flash of something—triumph?—appeared in his eyes, but before he could open his mouth, Gray had leapt up from the table and was grasping our brother with both hands by his elegant satin lapels.

  “You bastard!”

  “Technically, I’m afraid that you’re the bastard,” said Zoltán, calmly removing Gray’s hands from his person. “You and your sister both.” He took care smoothing down his jacket while my brother fumed. “Our father was still married to my mother when he left for America. To the best of my knowledge, he never asked for a divorce. My mother would have refused to grant it, in any event. He was her first love and I don’t believe she ever got over him.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  November 2-3, 1956

  “Zoli, sit down.” György pointed to a chair at one end of the long table. “You, sir,” he ordered my brother, indicating a chair at the other end. “Over there, please.” He waited until both men were settled as far apart from one another as possible before taking a seat himself.

  Jakub had risen from the table, prepared to come between them to avert a fight. He remained standing, vigilantly dividing his attention between the two of them as they sat, stone-faced, in their respective chairs. Finally, Gray broke the impasse. From his jacket pocket, he extracted a familiar-looking sheaf of notebook pages and waved them in Zoltán’s direction.

  “I believe these belong to you,” he said. “Some of your secret files, no doubt. So very clever of you, leaving them inside the Inferno for us to find.”

  Zoltán refused to be baited. “I didn’t leave them for you. I meant for József to have them.”

  József. I covered my mouth with my hand, a gesture that did not go unnoticed by our Hungarian brother. He looked all huddled in upon himself, as if someone had punched him in the chest. He’d guessed the truth, but he still needed to hear it from one of us.

  “Your friend József—” I started to say, but there was no gentle way to put it. From across the room, where he was standing, Jakub watched me with concern.

  “What happened to him?” said Zoltán.

  “He’s dead.” Gray wasn’t concerned with the niceties.

  A sharp intake of breath. “How?”

  “Someone slit his throat. That’s what came of your little game. Setting us up like decoys to flush out your enemies. We flushed them out, all right. I hope you’re satisfied.”

  Zoltán put his head down on the table and wept, great wrenching sobs coming from deep inside. The sight of him torn open like that, so raw, terrified me. It was rage I was seeing, scorching rage turned inward, and it was consuming him the way fire consumes dry timber. This very same rage, turned outward, had impelled him to get hold of a gun and join the insurgents, not caring whether he survived the battle. He’d lost everything: faith in his wife, belief in the power of words to change things, trust in the shared struggle, in comradeship. Everything that sustained him, suddenly gone. The life he was struggling to rebuild after Recsk. All that remained was his tie to József. Now József was gone too.

  “Kedves gyermekem.” György got up from the table and came to stand behind him, resting a hand on his shoulder. “You’re not alone, dear child.”

  “Gyuri bácsi!”

  Long past midnight, after we’d finished the third bottle of wine, we sat in the warm kitchen and Zoltán talked about his friend. “His father had a post in Károlyi’s cabinet after World War I,” he told us. “One of those liberal aristocrats, like Károlyi himself. Kún’s people murdered him, and the entire family suffered during the Red Terror. József was taken in by relatives who’d emigrated to Britain. He read law at Cambridge, but there was never any question of his remaining in England, once the war ended.” Here our brother paused, to clear his throat. “He would have made a superb statesman if they’d given him a chance.”

  “He thought quite highly of you,” said Jakub.

  “I’m afraid his confidence was misplaced.” Zoltán’s voice cracked and he could say no more. I saw that he would never forgive himself for József’s death, and it would be useless to point out that we all shared in the blame. I remembered what József had said in the car on the way to the hospital. A small comfort, perhaps, but I offered it up regardless.

  “He told us your poetry saved his life.”

  “Not my poetry. Dante’s. He described the dark wastes so elegiacally in the Inferno, one felt he was there with us, in Recsk. A companion whose words made us feel less alone.”

  Gray was moved by this short speech. “József was right,” he said. “You are a poet.” I knew he regretted his harshness. They were so alike, he and Zoltán, that he’d known instinctively where to aim his words to cause the maximum damage.

  Our brother looked away. “I once thought so,” he murmured.

  “And you’ll think so again in the morning,” said György briskly. “He was so morose as an adolescent,” he confided in the three of us. “I couldn’t fathom it, how the sunny boy who used to make everyone laugh with his silly jokes had turned into a dour creature who went about dressed in black, reciting lines from Edgar Allan Poe’s Fleurs du mal.”

  “You’re confusing Poe with Baudelaire, Gyuri bácsi.”

  “Poe, Baudelaire, and that other one you liked. The German philosopher who went mad. What was his name?”

  “Nietzsche.”

  “Nietzsche! What on earth did you see in him? The man was a Nazi.”

  Zoltán couldn’t let this ride. “You’ve got him wrong. Nietzsche would have hated the Nazis and everything they stood for. He was deliberately misread.”

  “Misread? Him and his talk of blond supermen, a master race. Don’t fool yourself. Hitler found the prophet he was looking for in your friend Nietzsche.”

  “Ha!” Our brother had a smug look on his face. “You read it, didn’t you? I win after all.”

  “Win what?” said Jakub, who had been following the conversation with amusement.

  Zoltán explained, “Years ago, when I was a morose adolescent, I used to slip books into Uncle György’s shelves, in an effort to enlighten him.”

  “Indoctrinate is more like it,” said our host. “What use did I have for Marx and Lenin, I ask you? And that lunatic Leon Trotsky. Stalin was right to have him assassinated.”

  “Wait a minute. Did I just hear you defending Stalin?” He looked to us for support. “You heard it too, didn’t you? Since when is assassinating one’s rivals justifiable?”

  György broke out laughing, and an instant later, our brother was laughing too.

  “Damn it, Gyuri bácsi!”

  It was an old strategy of György’s, apparently, to lift Zoltán out of his dark moods by provoking him into an argument, and it had worked on all of us. Spirits lifted, we bid our host goodnight and went upstairs to bed, where my husband promptly fell asleep. I’d gone down the hall to use the bathroom and returned to find him conked out, still fully dressed, and with the lights in the bedroom blazing. He must have stayed awake the entire night in Ian’s suite, keeping watch over me as I dozed in his arms. Such devotion, and I hadn’t even known. Carefully, to avoid waking him, I got him undressed and under the covers, turned out the lights, and slipped in beside him. Brushing the back of his neck with my lips, I spooned against his body and tried to match my breathing to his.

  I myself could not sleep, thinking about Zsuzsi. It felt so wrong, leaving her behind, like giving up my son
all over again. Worse. Although I regretted my decision, I still believed my son was being raised in a loving home. He would have opportunities, growing up in America, but what kind of future could our niece look forward to, with her parents estranged and her country returning to dictatorship? All night I fretted, but it was like the popular folk song about the old lady who swallowed the spider to catch the fly, and on and on. We needed György if we were to get Zoltán to come with us, we needed Zoltán and Anna to reconcile in order to get Zsuzsi. But György wasn’t about to leave Mád, and Zoltán wouldn’t abandon György to come with us. Even if we miraculously persuaded both of them to go, Zoltán wasn’t ready to forgive Anna for betraying him, although I thought there had to be more to the story than he was seeing.

  Why had Dr. Szabó told us where to look for our brother? She had to know that if we succeeded in tracking him down, he would know she’d sent us. She’d given herself away as surely as if she’d signed a confession, and she was not a stupid woman. It baffled me: watching her at work in the basement clinic, I’d been impressed by her skill and efficiency. She thought things through. So, what had she been thinking when she pointed to Mád on the map? After Zoltán’s revelations, I could only come up with one answer. She wanted us to take both him and her daughter with us out of Hungary while she remained behind to tend to the children in the home. Honestly, it was the only explanation that made sense, but could I get our brother to see it? He’d been tight-lipped about Zsuzsi when we brought her up, displaying not a trace of fatherly pride or curiosity as to what we’d thought of his daughter. Well, I intended to let him know how I felt, the first opportunity I got. The child adored him, and I had no doubt that, were she asked to choose between her two parents, knowing she might never see one of them again, she’d go with her father without a second’s hesitation.

  Gray was sitting at the kitchen table when Jakub and I came downstairs for breakfast the next morning, a cup of tea growing cold in front of him. Magda poured tea for each of us as well, and offered to make eggs, holding one up and miming the action of breaking it into a frying pan. Sausage? She held up a string of them. Onions? Peppers? We smiled and nodded enthusiastically after each ingredient and she set to work at the stove. The woman looked ancient, thinning white hair scraped back into a bun, stooped posture, wrinkled skin, but she possessed remarkable vigor, doing the work of half a dozen people without a hint of complaint. I hadn’t seen her sit down for so much as a minute since we’d entered the house.

  “Don’t go overboard on the ingredients,” cautioned my brother. “You’ll offend her if you don’t eat every last bite.” He may have managed to clean his plate, but on closer inspection, he did look rather bilious. Gray had never been one for breakfast, apart from coffee. When he was working on a play, he required copious amounts to get his day started, but seemed to get through the morning otherwise on little more than dry toast and the occasional banana.

  “No coffee?” I teased. “How will you survive?”

  “I didn’t have the nerve to ask. I think she assumes we drink this stuff the way the Brits do because we speak English, but I happen to remember the Hungarian word for coffee, if either of you is feeling daring. It’s kávé.”

  Jakub raised a hand in demurral. “Tea’s fine. I wouldn’t want to put her to any more trouble. It looks to me as if she’s eager to get back to whatever she was doing before we interrupted her.”

  What Magda had been doing was mending and ironing Zoltán’s clothes, which she’d apparently washed and left to dry overnight by the stove after we went to bed.

  “Any word?” I asked Gray, stirring sugar into my tea.

  He passed me the milk. “I haven’t seen either one of them this morning.”

  I tried to decide whether that was a good sign or not. At György’s insistence, Zoltán would be accompanying us as far as the Austrian border. “You brought them here, and it’s your obligation to lead them safely out of Hungary,” the old man had commanded, adding direly, “and if you have any sense, you’ll go with them.”

  “Not without you,” our brother had replied.

  Magda set two plates of scrambled eggs with sausage, onions, and red pepper on the table and stood watching as the two of us dug in. She hovered long enough to refill our teacups from the pot, then returned to her ironing. The eggs were delicious, and I was hungrier than I’d realized.

  “Good morning, children. I trust you slept well.” György entered the kitchen, followed by Zoltán, who was carrying a large wooden crate, the kind used for packing fruit. Through the slats, I could see an assortment of odds and ends—keepsakes from his grandparents’ house, our host informed us, delivered by Vera years ago, presumably on a day when her husband was not around.

  “Thank you, yes,” said Gray, answering for the three of us.

  Our brother set the crate down on the floor by the far end of the table and began sorting through the contents, inspecting each item before placing it into one of two piles: keep and discard. He unwrapped a bone china figurine of a shepherdess, her costume hand-painted in painstaking detail. You could see the sprigs of flowers decorating the lace bodice of her dress and the frill of her petticoat peeking out beneath. In one delicate hand, she held a crook, which showed signs of repair work at the bend.

  “My mother’s favorite possession,” said Zoltán, noting my interest. “She’d had it since she was a little girl. I’m the one who broke it, and believe me, I suffered for that careless act of mine.”

  “She must have been very angry.” His willingness to impart such an intimate memory heartened me. Something had caused him to lower his defenses. Perhaps György had persuaded him to join us after all and he was trying to make himself agreeable, anticipating the long journey ahead.

  “I might have preferred it, if she’d been angry,” he said. “No, it was the first time I made her cry and I felt quite dreadful about it afterward.” He gave a small shake of his head as the memory came flooding back. “I often tested her, but she had a blind spot where I was concerned. She refused to believe a single bad thing about me, not even when it was true.”

  György looked up from the task he’d begun, unknotting a length of butcher’s twine he evidently intended to reuse for some purpose. At home, we’d have thrown the tangled mess away, but Europeans were not so profligate. Here in Hungary, scrimping was probably necessary. There were shortages of nearly everything under the Communists, but even the well-to-do British and Italians I knew tended to save things like string, rubber bands, and paper bags.

  “She was very proud of you, Zoli.”

  “I know that.” Zoltán’s voice was so soft, he was practically speaking to himself. The figurine went into the “keep” pile on the right-hand side of the table. I watched him unpack a set of marbles in a leather bag with a drawstring, some toy soldiers, a model airplane, these boyhood mementos all consigned to the pile on the left, with the exception of a small pen knife, which he opened, testing the blade against his thumb before placing it in the pocket of his trousers. Next came a small collection of books, identically bound in Morocco leather, whose titles I could not read because they were all in Hungarian. He paged idly through the topmost volume, then pushed it across the table toward us.

  “Here’s something,” he said. “Our father might like to have it as a memento.” There it was. He’d made up his mind to stay. I fought my impulse to bring up Zsuzsi, clenching my hands so tightly together in my lap that I could feel my wedding ring cutting into the skin. The memory of the child swinging her way down the street on her crutches, her face brightening as she recognized me, came into my mind. I struggled to return to the conversation in György’s kitchen.

  Gray was reading aloud the author’s name of the book, which was stamped on the spine in gold letters. “Szabó, Z.” He looked up in surprise. “Yours?”

  “I’m afraid not. Look at the year of publication.”

  My brother ope
ned the book to the title page. “1915. It’s inscribed ‘Zsuzsanna.’ Wait, that was your mother’s name, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes. My mother wrote poetry. Our father had a small edition of her poems printed and bound. He presented them to her on the day I was born.”

  Jakub laughed. “She gave birth twice, you might say.”

  “She saw it that way,” said Zoltán. An indulgent tone had crept into his voice. “It was like having a rival, vying with her poetry for attention. When she was in the throes of inspiration, she’d be distracted for days, caught up in some line or other. My grandmother would complain that she was neglectful of her appearance. She couldn’t be bothered to fix her hair and would wander about the house wearing an old jacket over a pair of man’s trousers our father had left behind, repeating phrases to herself. My friends all thought she was rather . . .” He paused, hunting for the right word.

  “Unconventional?” suggested Gray.

  “For a mother, yes. Unconventional is a good word.” He smiled as a private memory took hold of him. “I don’t know where she got her ideas.”

  I envisioned Zoltán’s mother as a tomboy, much like the character of Jo in Little Women. I’d seen the movie with June Allyson in the role of Jo more times than I could remember. Everyone raved about Elizabeth Taylor as Amy—Villi and Ilona would have loved her, I’m sure—but Amy bored me silly. Beth too, although I had friends who wept every time Margaret O’Brien appeared in a scene, anticipating her character’s untimely demise.

  No, I admired Jo’s independence, and the message was not lost on me, that she found love with the forty-year-old German professor at the end of the picture. Maybe that’s why I fell for an actor twice my age when I was sixteen. Serious people sought mature romantic partners. On some level, I must have been following in Jo’s footsteps.

  Zsuzsanna was a serious person, just like Jo. A figure in the background until now, Zoltán had succeeded in bringing his mother to life with just a few details and I couldn’t help wanting to know more about her. Was it her mind that attracted Father? That would have made her unique among his wives. When it came to women, I’m afraid he was rather unenlightened, but here was evidence that he had supported one woman, at least initially, in her desire to create something for herself.