The days passed and light rains fell, but still Lydia and Aaron walked each afternoon. The fallen leaves crackled beneath their feet, and sere hedges rimmed the stripped and barren flower beds of the famous rose garden. The air was heavy with the rotting sweetness of decay, yet Margaret Island seemed beautiful to him. It was peaceful compared with the incipient unrest of Budapest. He noticed how pedestrians glanced nervously over their shoulders as they walked and how people in cafés huddled close to each other and spoke in hissing whispers. On Margaret Island they were at ease, unrestrained. One afternoon a mist rose from the Danube, and they walked through the silver web of its moisture. Droplets glittered like jewels in Lydia’s dark hair. She talked that day of her hopes for Paul. She wanted him to live a good life, free of the sadness that had darkened his childhood. She wanted him to realize his gifts, to live in an ambience of freedom and joy. Aaron recognized that she wanted for Paul what Leah Goldfeder had wanted for her children.
He was growing up so quickly, she said, and spent so much time away from home. He had a girlfriend, she knew. Genia. A nice girl but a bit frivolous. They had gone to grade school together. But of course he would have many other girls. He was so young—they were both so young. Nothing at that age was serious.
“Sometimes such relationships are,” Aaron said carefully. He had not been much older than Paul Groszman when he imagined himself in love with Lisa Crowley.
Lisa had been his sister Rebecca’s classmate, and she and Aaron had come together in innocence and desperation. Children themselves (as Paul and Genia were), they had conceived a child. He had not known of Lisa’s pregnancy and had gone off to war. Years later, he learned that the child had been born dead. He had never seen Lisa again. Poor Lisa. Her hair had turned milk-white in the summer sun and her laughter rang with careless joy. Perhaps Paul Groszman and his Genia laughed with such spontaneous gaiety. He pitied them and envied them as he pitied and envied all young lovers who walked hand in hand through the sunlight without anticipating the shadows.
“They will be all right,” he said to Lydia, and that night he dreamed of Katie. There was neither terror nor passion in this dream in which Katie walked behind Lydia and himself in the Japanese rock garden. She sang as she trailed them, and wildflowers like those she had carried in her marriage bouquet were threaded through her hair. He awakened feeling strangely peaceful and oddly unworried. He glanced at his watch and saw that he had slept late, but he was not regretful. Like an invalid recuperating from an illness, he relished the quiet, empty hours that preceded Lydia’s arrival at the hotel.
*
HE phoned Tom Hemmings to institute inquiries about Paul, and Tom invited him to a party.
“A de rigueur thing, actually,” he said apologetically. “Betty hates them, and it would help to have a friendly face there. You might even find it interesting. Yuri Andropov is coming.”
“The Soviet ambassador?”
“The same.”
“Isn’t that unusual?”
“Not really. We try to keep up appearances. You would be surprised at how the cold war heats up when there are good whiskey sours and hot canapés. And between sips and bites the ambassador might even pick up a scrap of information about Israel’s scenario for the Suez. And if we’re very lucky, we might learn something about developments in Poland. Bearing in mind, of course, that such scraps may be dropped because they are patently untrue. Still, even false leads may give us a clue to the truth. And the Russians are very nervous lately. They don’t seem to know which way to go with Hungary. The Swiss chargé d’affaires gave a supper party after the Kodály concert last week, and one of the rumors I picked up there was that there are plans under way to reinter Rajk. I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of him. He was one of the victims of the purge trials of 1949.”
“No, I haven’t,” Aaron said, although his bed at that moment was littered with leaflets urging the people of Budapest to assemble for a ceremonial reinterment of the martyred leader. He had spent the last two evenings helping Lydia distribute the leaflets at specified drop points. Did Yehuda know of his involvement? he wondered. Probably.
“Well, if the Soviets allow the reinterment, it might be a sign that they are softening their position toward more autonomy for Hungary. I plan to mention the Rajk situation casually to Andropov when he has a mouthful of deviled egg. He’s very partial to deviled egg. He thinks it’s an American specialty, and he’s partial to a lot of things American. They say he never missed a broadcast of Radio Free Europe and he knows the words to every song in Oklahoma. Not that anyone has ever heard him sing anything in any language. Mysterious, unpredictable fellow, Andropov. No one knows much about him, although there are rumors of a dark lady in his past. A Muscovite Jewess, they say, but I don’t believe it. He’s got ice water in his veins, I think. Still, if he gets angry about the Rajk business, we’ll assume that there’ll be troops there. If he just nods and finishes his egg, we’ll assume a softening. That’s the world of diplomacy, Aaron—it revolves on the axis of good scotch and canapés.”
“May I bring a friend?” Aaron asked.
Tom Hemmings’s hesitation was almost imperceptible, and then he said, “Yes. Of course. The beautiful Dr. Groszman, I assume.”
Aaron breathed deeply, but he did not know why he should be surprised. In Budapest, where everyone talked in whispers and glanced furtively over their shoulders, there were few secrets.
Aaron and Lydia arrived late at the party. A smiling maid, wearing a traditional embroidered Magyar blouse and a ruffled red skirt, escorted them into the Hemmingses’ living room, which was crowded with members of the Budapest diplomatic community. The women wore their most elegant dresses. Taffeta rustled and silk skirts sighed as they moved about the room. Jewels glittered at their wrists and throats. They had worked hard to combat the sad, gray afternoon, the shabby, weary city.
They spoke of the new American film at the Corvin Cinema. Bus Stop, with Marilyn Monroe. Was it typical of small-town America? they asked Betty Hemmings, whose only experiences in American hamlets were confined to the villages in the Hamptons where her family summered. She smiled distractedly and nodded. She had not come to Europe to discuss Marilyn Monroe or small-town America. They talked about the new café on Museum Boulevard and the children’s shop on Béla Bartók Avenue.
Their husbands spoke of the forthcoming election in the United States. They were all certain that Eisenhower would be reelected. They puzzled over the turn of events in the Middle East. There were rumors of an alliance among France, England, and Israel. They nodded sagely as they reached for the canapés, refused another drink. Nasser had gone too far when he nationalized the Suez Canal. The Belgian envoy confided that he had heard that Anthony Eden was very ill.
“Not true,” the British vice-consul replied curtly.
They told harmless, bitter jokes. The French ambassador showed the Chilean military attaché a mock ledger sheet from Zahony, the Russian-Hungarian border post: Departed from Hungary for the USSR: 100 carloads of wheat, 200 carloads of corn, 5,000 barrels of wine, 250 trucks, 90 optical instruments. Arrived from the USSR: One Moiseyev folk-dance and -song group.
The two men laughed, but they did not share the joke with the Hungarian journalist who joined them.
They spoke of everything except the uneasiness that permeated the streets of Budapest. They did not mention the posters that were nailed into place at night and ripped to shreds by the morning, the handbills that were swept away by green-coated security officers, the small gatherings that so abruptly dispersed. All of them had seen AVO agents making swift, silent arrests. All of them had heard the dim buzzing on their phones, and some of them had heard police officers knocking harshly at their neighbors’ doors. Imminent dangers shadowed this ancient city of their posting, but they remained silent. A danger unacknowledged might disappear.
“I’m so glad you came, Aaron.” Betty Hemmings, trained from childhood to be a hostess, wore the white satin cocktail dress tha
t an ambitious Bergdorf’s designer had created for diplomatic receptions. Her eyelids drooped beneath blue shadowing. She had grown too thin, and the snowy fabric hung about her body like an elegant shroud. She wore too much makeup, to cover the tiny lines that crept insidiously about her eyes, and her powder was too white against the shadows that crested her cheekbones.
He kissed her. He had known her during her college days and always liked her. She had laid her plans well and envisaged a life of drama and excitement, but life had betrayed her, and she was relegated to supervising supplies of hors d’oeuvres and discussing new children’s shops with overdressed women in a dull and desperate city.
He introduced her to Lydia, and she smiled thinly. Katie had been her friend, bridesmaid at her wedding.
Near the window that overlooked the Chain Bridge, a quartet of Gypsy violinists played love songs. Lydia hummed and swayed gently to the music. She looked especially beautiful, Aaron thought, in a dress of turquoise velvet, the color of her eyes. The small birthmark was a matching jewel that mysteriously adhered to her snow-white skin. A scene flashed back, across the years, to Aaron. He was again the small boy in the library on East Broadway, listening to the story of Snow White, whose skin had been as white as the flakes of winter and whose hair had been as black as charcoal. “Like my mother’s,” he had told the disbelieving librarian then. Like Lydia’s, he thought now. He watched her move in her solitary dance—his secret princess who could not conceal her natural royalty.
“Do you know the song they are playing?” a man asked her. He spoke to her in heavily accented English, although Aaron had heard him converse in a Slavic language minutes before.
“Yes. When I was a child the Gypsies often played it. My father would sometimes take us to their encampments on the Buda hills when they held a festival. He was a doctor, and once they called him because their queen was in difficult labor. He saved her and the baby, but probably they were killed at Auschwitz.” Her voice was dry, as though drained of anger and bitterness. Some men worked to preserve life and others practiced its destruction. She was simply stating fact, quoting from a ledger that could never be balanced.
Aaron stepped forward.
“Please. Let us introduce ourselves. I am Aaron Goldfeder and this is Dr. Lydia Groszman.”
“I am very pleased to meet you. And I am Yuri Andropov.”
Aaron restrained himself from staring hard at the Soviet ambassador. He had anticipated a much older man, a man of commanding girth, of dominating height. Yuri Andropov was slender and only a few years older than Aaron himself. He wore a steel-gray suit that exactly matched his eyes, which glinted with metallic sheen behind his rimless spectacles. He and Aaron shook hands, and his fingers remained rigid, unyielding rods within Aaron’s grasp. His skin had the pallor of a man who seldom feels the touch of air and sunlight, and his finely chiseled features were trained to an absence of expression. When he spoke, he scarcely moved his thin, chalk-colored lips.
“I, too, remember the Gypsies,” he said to Lydia. “They roamed through the Ukraine when I was a boy. I forget who it was who said that he could imagine a Europe without Jews but that he could never forgive Hitler for killing the Gypsies.” He laughed, the thin, bloodless chuckle of a humorless man who has startled himself by saying something he considers to be amusing.
“Dr. Groszman and I are Jewish,” Aaron said stiffly.
“I spoke without prejudice. Please understand that,” the Russian said. “We have deep feelings for your people in my country, Mr. Goldfeder.”
“My parents were born m your country. They emigrated from Russia to America,” Aaron replied. He was possessed of an irrational desire to unsettle and fluster this smooth, passionless man. “My mother visited her family only recently. Many of them would like to leave for Israel, and they cannot obtain visas.”
“Can you blame Mother Russia for wanting her children to remain? All Russian citizens are vital to the country. There is no discrimination in Russia. There is no reason for Jews to leave.” The Russian’s voice was cool, controlled. He spoke with the conviction of a man who has repeated a lie so often that he has come to believe it to be the truth.
“My natural father was killed in a pogrom in 1919,” Aaron continued. He struggled to keep his voice as controlled as that of the ambassador, to restrain himself from adding that his mother had been raped in the same pogrom and that his own childhood had been bitterly poisoned.
“There were no pogroms in 1919,” the ambassador corrected him. He might have been a professor, patiently chiding an erring student. “There were, perhaps, misguided demonstrations against certain ethnic groups, triggered perhaps by perceived injustices. The proletariat is bound to resent a prosperous and parasitic aristocracy.”
“Mr. Ambassador,” Aaron protested. “My father was himself a revolutionary, an organizer. He and my mother were very young and newly married. They were as poor as their attackers.”
“You have my sympathy, Mr. Goldfeder,” the ambassador said. He studied the small gold pin in Aaron’s lapel, the menorah insignia of the Jewish Brigade.
“An interesting design,” he observed. He was a man with an eye for detail.
“I earned it when I fought with the Jewish Brigade in the British army.” The tinge of boastfulness in his own voice embarrassed Aaron. He was impatient with men who told war stories and revealed their military pasts at peacetime cocktail parties. But the Russian had provoked him. He had stared too contemptuously at Aaron, too openly at Lydia. Now he plucked a deviled egg from the tray of a passing waitress and chewed it carefully. Tom Hemmings was right about his partiality to the delicacy, Aaron thought, and he watched the Russian methodically move his jaw as though operating a machine. He was not a man who spoke with food in his mouth. His manners were impeccable, and his words were carefully and deliberately calculated. Assertions masqueraded as denials, and denials were qualified with obscure promises. He wiped his mouth delicately.
“I know of the efforts of the Jewish Brigade. A courageous unit. Once I had a good friend, a Jewish woman. Her brother had migrated to Palestine and he fought with the Brigade. He was killed in Italy.” Yuri Andropov’s voice grew distant.
“I’m sorry,” Aaron said.
“Yes. It was very sad. I admired him. I admire men who fight openly. I do not like secret cabals, nocturnal escapades. Only thieves move through the night. But come, let us not talk so seriously while we enjoy your friend Hemmings’s hospitality.”
He smiled thinly and deftly changed the topic before Aaron could reply. Surely, that was Andropov’s technique when he met with activists and diplomats. He was a verbal acrobat, accomplishing great leaps with the skillful phrase, the swift diversionary compliment.
“Your dress is charming, Dr. Groszman. I admire your taste.” He bowed elegantly and moved across the crowded room to join Tom and Betty Hemmings.
Aaron toyed with his lapel pin and wondered about the Jewish woman whose brother had died in Italy. Tom Hemmings had spoken of a dark Muscovite Jewess in Andropov’s past. He thought suddenly of the carelessly replaced belt on the paisley dressing gown. Had Yuri Andropov’s steel-colored eyes studied photographs of that robe, of his room? Impatiently, he dismissed the thought. He was growing paranoid in this country where elderly gentlemen were members of the secret police and well-dressed businessmen distributed clandestine propaganda. Still, he was not surprised to see Yehuda enter the room with a blond woman. Again, they did not speak.
That evening he walked Lydia back to her flat near the Kulso-korut, in an ancient quarter of the city.
“Tom Hemmings told me that he can schedule a hearing on your petition any time now. And he is optimistic about Paul. A special congressional bill has been introduced.” Aaron reflected silently that Joshua Ellenberg’s political IOUs were paid with unprecedented swiftness.
“Aaron, please be patient. Tomorrow they reinter Rajk. That will be the turning point. And then, very soon, we will be able to leave.”
“Lydia, please be careful.”
“There is nothing to worry about. The government even says that it approves the ceremony.”
They had reached her block of flats, and instinctively they moved away from the circle of amber light cast by the weak bulb in the wrought-iron sconce of the concierge’s portal. The concierge, like all the concierges of Budapest, was almost certainly an AVO agent.
“I worry about you.”
He acknowledged now that he was consumed with concern for her. He worried about her as once he had worried about Katie. Was she all right? Would she be all right? He had claimed Lydia’s cause as once he had claimed Katie’s, yet he felt no disloyalty. She was so beautiful, so courageous. He ached with fear for her and for himself.
“Come with me to the demonstration.” Her plea was shy, almost fearful. His acceptance would mean the crossing of a new border.
“If you want me to.”
“I do.”
His hand moved toward her neck, and again his fingers found the velvet surface of the birthmark. Again, with remembered touch, he stroked it, his fingers tender against the tiny neck pulse near it. Her lifeblood coursed beneath his touch; her lucent skin matched the white autumn moon. Gently, he pulled her toward him, tasted her lips. Even more gently, his lips moved against the petal softness of her face, the curve of her ear, until they brushed the downward slope of her cheek and pressed at last against the blue tear-shaped kiss of birth that flowered at her throat.
*
LASZLO RAJK. Aaron repeated the name aloud that morning as he shaved and wondered if he were pronouncing it correctly. He smiled wryly at himself in the mirror. A month ago he had never heard of Laszlo Rajk, and today he was preparing to go to a Budapest cemetery to witness the reinterment of the Hungarian patriot. And a month ago he had sat in Joshua Ellenberg’s garden and watched the fairy lights splay prismatic paths of brightness across the night-dark lawn. That Labor Day evening had been warm, yet he had felt cold as death. His friends and family had surrounded him, yet he had felt isolated and alone. Now, a scarce few weeks later, he was a stranger in an unfamiliar city—a city besieged by fear and caught in the grip of unrelenting autumn rains and raw winds that coursed down from the frowning hills of Buda. But he felt warm and alive in the cafés of this foreign metropolis. He shivered as he ran through the streets, but he lifted his face to the falling rain and took a strange delight in the penumbral cloud formations that hovered over the city. He moved swiftly, startled by a verve that he had not expected to know again. His swiftness belonged to the young Aaron Goldfeder, the track star of Abraham Lincoln High School, but he had reclaimed it.
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