Burning Cold

CHAPTER ONE Sárvár, Hungary November 4, 1956 Through me the way to the suffering city; Through me the way to eternal suffering; Through me the way among the lost. Dante, Inferno Canto 3: The Gates of Hell I never saw the newsreel footage of Budapest after the siege of World War II, when the Russians and Germans battled it out and Hungarians hid in their cellars. I was only twelve at the time. But I have no trouble imagining the ruined city as it was then, its buildings ripped open by cannon fire. The grand boulevards strewn with rubble and shattered glass. Charred trees and the eerie silhouettes of metal street lamps twisted in the explosions. Turning a corner, you’d come upon the remains of a burnt-out tank. Abandoned trolley cars stopped in their tracks, cables dangling from the overhead wires. Crumbled barricades blocked your way. And the makeshift morgues, the most terrible sight of all. Bodies spread on the frozen ground awaiting burial. Freedom fighters, a good many of them students, teenagers. Sometimes you’d see people wandering among the rows of corpses, searching for their missing children. Lost souls, all of them. We were there in 1956, when the Soviets came back and crushed the Hungarian revolution. Fleeing the country in a borrowed Škoda sedan the color of dried blood, we passed scores of refugees escaping to the West. Some rode in carts piled with belongings but most walked, carrying a suitcase or two, small children trudging alongside the adults on the muddy roads. Hungarians held no illusions about their fate when order was restored. They’d been “liberated” once before by the Russian Army. “I could have told you it would end like this,” said Zoltán. He was pacing the floor while the three of us, Jakub, Gray, and I, sat crammed together on the bottom bunk bed in a basement cell of Sárvár’s police station. The building was silent; everyone seemed to have gone home. Or perhaps they’d been waiting until nightfall to join the exodus and were halfway to Vienna by now. Sárvár was a stone’s throw from the Austrian border. We ourselves would have crossed into safety hours earlier, had our luck held. My brother Gray was in no mood to be scolded. “We risked our lives trying to get you out of Budapest. If you had any gratitude, you’d thank us.” “Gratitude,” said Zoltán. “From the Medieval Latin gratitudo. Gratitude figures in most religious worship, but notice how the word acquires a mercenary flavor in the mouth of an American. We might be bankers tallying accounts on a balance sheet.” He stopped pacing and stood over us, menacingly close. “Is that why you came on this ill-conceived mission, to settle our father’s debt?” “Your father had no part in it,” said Jakub. “If you need to blame someone, blame me. Rescuing you was my idea.” “Your idea! What were you thinking, bringing your bride into this hell? You’ve seen war, for God’s sake.” In the scant light coming in off the corridor, I couldn’t read Jakub’s expression, but I didn’t need to see his face to gauge the depth of his remorse. “You’re right,” he said quietly. “I should have known better. Forgive me, Cara.” He never called me Cara. From the day we met, he’d used a Polish endearment, najdroższa, the tenderness in his voice so plain, it hardly mattered that I didn’t speak his language. Anyhow, he spoke English beautifully, and several other languages besides. I took his hand and raised it to my lips. I couldn’t bear to see him suffer because of me, and I wasn’t being noble or self-sacrificing. Really, it was quite the opposite. I needed Jakub to be strong. Twice before, he’d gotten me out of trouble, and I was counting on him to save me again, to save all of us. Even in jail, not knowing whether we’d been left to rot as Sárvár’s population scattered in advance of the Soviet onslaught, even fearing that Russian soldiers might burst in at any moment and shoot us, even so, in Jakub’s presence I wasn’t afraid. This makes me sound like the heroine in a melodrama from the silent era, Lillian Gish or some other damsel in distress. I must admit, I watched far too many of those movies growing up. Father specialized in the genre during his early years in Hollywood and the screening room at the lodge was stocked full, reels and reels of long-forgotten pictures from his early years at Famous Players-Lasky. But I felt uncannily like Lillian Gish at that moment: helpless, naïve, and in peril. The problem was, my savior courted danger as ardently as he’d courted me. Jakub had a reckless streak. During the war he’d been a courier in the French underground, passing messages practically under the nose of the Gestapo. Repeatedly—and unnecessarily, in my opinion—he would go out after curfew. One night he was apprehended near the Sorbonne while disguised as a priest. Some priest! With his dark eyes and that sensuous mouth of his, I can imagine his female parishioners swooning at the communion rail, women lining up ten deep outside the confessional, awaiting their turn to whisper fantasies in the darkness, fabricating sins and revealing their secret desires, all of them vying to be the one who enticed the young cleric to break his vows. At least I didn’t have to invent steamy scenes out of thin air. If I closed my eyes, we were back in our atelier in Paris, undressing one another when we’d scarcely gotten inside the door. Jakub played jazz violin in a trio that also featured a bass player and a pianist. I’d joined them as their vocalist right after our marriage at the end of September, and my renditions of American standards went over pretty well in the touristy Saint-Germain-des-Prés nightclubs that were the trio’s bread-and-butter. “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” “Stardust,” “Night and Day,” “Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye.” These were the ballads people wanted to hear, and I loved singing them, even if I was no Juliette Gréco. She was all the rage in those days and I adored her; at my urging, the fellows had added “Autumn Leaves” to the repertoire. I’d practiced against the record of her singing the French version, “Les Feuilles mortes,” until I could replicate Gréco’s phrasing, note by note, breath by breath, including the whispery bits at the end of a stanza. I wore black, of course, and rimmed my eyes with kohl, fully inhabiting the role, and something of the sultry chanteuse I impersonated onstage carried over into our lovemaking. We couldn’t get enough of one another. After our last set, the trio and I would head off to a café in Montparnasse, Chez Lázár, to jam with the house musicians. The sessions were purely instrumental, but I was content to sit off at a side table by myself, smoking and nursing a cognac while I watched Jakub play. The room might be crowded, but I felt as if he were performing just for me, seducing me with the sounds he coaxed from his violin. The soulful vibrato, the virtuosic riffs, bow sliding along the strings, tension mounting steadily, inexorably, to resolve at last in a sensuous purr. He seemed utterly absorbed in the music, but I found ways of distracting him; it was part of the game. When he finished a solo, I’d toast him with my glass, holding his eyes as I brought the snifter to my lips and drank. The first sip was harsh, but its sweetness would soon spread across my palate, warming and emboldening me. I imagined kissing him, the peppery taste of his tongue in my mouth, the heat of his body as we drew close. Just the thought made me yearn for him, a longing I conveyed through my gaze alone, appraising him from head to toe as I drew languorously on my cigarette. Flustered, Jakub would somehow manage to tear his eyes away from mine and return to his playing, but the awareness we would soon be in bed together lent his performance an exquisite edge. Soon I’d catch him sneaking glances at me, missing cues, pausing to tune his instrument with trembling fingers. Then we’d be hurrying upstairs to our studio, Jakub’s mouth on mine, his hand sliding up beneath my dress before we’d reached the attic landing. This was also part of the game, the risqué part, because our landlord, Lázár himself, lived on the floor below. “Let’s not make it too easy for him,” I’d say, attempting to pull away. Or half attempting. Father had schooled both Gray and me in old-world manners. Born into a good Jewish family in Hungary during the waning years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he had an immoderate respect for the rules of propriety—except when applied to himself. Since emigrating to America in 1918, he’d had three wives, Gray’s mother, my mother, with one short-lived marriage in between, and numerous dalliances. Walden Lodge, his Hollywood estate, was notorious for wild parties, champagne flowing morning to night, scantily clad starlets cavorting around the pool. My childhood was quite bohemian, but at the age of twelve I was sent to a snooty boarding school in Connecticut to learn decorum and ladylike subjects such as English literature and art history, along with a smattering of French and Italian. All to no avail; the bohemianism was too deeply instilled. Half of me wanted to be a proper young lady, but the other half didn’t care if we made an exhibition of ourselves in the hallway, Lázár be damned. Our landlord was, in fact, a voyeur who had a habit of letting himself into the studio with his key at random hours, obviously hoping to catch us in the act, and once or twice he’d succeeded. But even without him walking in on us, I always felt as if we were being watched because of the puppets: marionettes dangling from the ceiling, Balinese shadow puppets decorating the walls, elaborate box puppets with mechanisms controlled by keys you played like a piano, hand puppets whose carved and painted faces conveyed distinct personalities. The café downstairs had started as a puppet theater between the wars, the creation of avant-garde artists fleeing fascist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe. They’d formed a little troupe under Lázár’s direction, painters, designers, sculptors, writers, and composers experimenting with new forms, new tableaux. The result was Le Théâtre de Minuit. The Midnight Theater. Performances started well past midnight and lasted until the wee hours of the morning, a tradition that carried over into its current incarnation as a jazz club. Lázár, as it happened, was a Hungarian émigré just like Father—nobody knew whether Lázár was his first name or his last name—and our studio had been his workshop. Tucked away in the cabinets were scraps of fabric, silks and velvet in many hues, starched linen, antique lace, and a treasure trove of notions, from tiny mother-of-pearl buttons, sequins, beads, and feathers to satin ribbons and rickrack. I’d been taught to sew at the Wentworth Academy for Young Ladies. It was my most ladylike skill. Having such luscious materials at hand, and seeing the tattered state of the puppets’ garments, I undertook the project of repairing their wardrobes, beginning with the marionettes. I pitied them most of all, hanging over us, dusty and disheveled, heads bowed in shame. They used to be dressed quite grandly, you could tell, and I labored to restore their costumes to their former splendor, attentive to the smallest detail. A satin lapel for the monocled gentleman’s tuxedo jacket, a shimmering shawl for the one I called the countess, to cover her décolletage. A silk rose I constructed for Señorita Margarita to wear in her black chignon. When she danced a flamenco, she might clench it between her teeth, or toss it to one of her admirers. Needlework filled the idle hours when the trio was rehearsing without me, and Lázár was delighted with the results. Soon we were planning a revival that would bring the old Théâtre de Minuit back to life for a single night. Some of the artists who’d comprised the original troupe still resided in Paris. Lázár gathered them together and within a week we had sets and lighting, a sketch commissioned from a Romanian playwright known for his absurdist dramas, with a score composed by a professor at the Paris Conservatoire, who recruited half a dozen musicians virtually overnight to perform the piece. We’d scheduled the event for a Tuesday in late October. There was no need to advertise; the café was barely large enough to accommodate the friends and relatives of all who’d had a hand in putting the show together.