Burning Cold

CHAPTER ONE-2

I’d invited Gray, who was living in London at the time. Blacklisted Hollywood people, my brother among them, had flocked to Europe in the early 1950s to avoid testifying before HUAC. Colonies of expatriate Americans were established in England, France, and Italy, each taking on the complexion of the culture in which they found themselves. The Paris contingent had attached themselves to the circle of Left Bank artists and intellectuals surrounding Jean-Paul Sartre. It was from them Gray learned, on the very evening of our performance, that a popular revolt had broken out in Budapest.

“Have you heard? Hungarians have taken to the streets,” he proclaimed, bursting in on our dress rehearsal. “They’ve started a revolution to drive out the Communists!”

“Qu’est-qu’il y a?” Lázár shouted in irritation from behind the puppet stage. Jakub was still out on a gig with the trio—I’d begged off that night to help with the last-minute preparations for the show—and my schoolgirl French was not up to the job of conveying Gray’s news. The puppeteer was genuinely alarmed, firing off one question after another, not waiting for the answers. His sister and her family lived in Budapest and strongly opposed the current regime.

“Who told you this?” I translated. “He takes Le Monde and saw nothing about a revolution in Hungary in this afternoon’s edition.”

“It wasn’t in Le Monde. It was on the radio. They were talking about it at La Coupole.”

“La Coupole!” Lázár picked up on the name before I’d rendered the sentence into French. The existentialists’ favorite gathering place was right around the corner. The countess, who had been on the verge of lecturing an oafish butler on mollusks, of all subjects, went limp. Draping the controller over her inert body, the puppeteer went dashing out the door, still wearing his long black gloves, to get the story firsthand.

Needless to say, the uprising in Hungary eclipsed our little production. The show went on, but without zest. No scenery, no matter how fabulous, no dialogue, however scintillating, not even an original score performed impeccably by some of Paris’s finest musicians could compensate for the listlessness of the marionettes. The countess flubbed her lines in the mollusk monologue, lumping squid in with gastropods such as snails and slugs, ignoring bivalves altogether. Señorita Margarita was supposed to flirt scandalously with the monocled gentleman in the second act, but when the orchestra launched into a spicy paso doble, you’d have thought the couple were dancing a waltz, so chastely did they move around the stage. I felt sorry for the audience, who dutifully stayed until the very end of the play, but more sorry for the people who’d worked so hard behind the scenes to make it happen. I’d experienced that kind of camaraderie when I was touring with a repertory company in England, the director’s vision combining with the talent of my fellow actors to inspire everyone’s best work. The Théâtre de Minuit must have been magical in its day, judging from the glimpse we’d been given, but there would be no resurrecting it again after this fiasco.

Lázár was too despondent to care. He’d disappeared without taking a curtain call and as soon as we could extricate ourselves politely from the group of well-wishers in the café, the three of us went upstairs and knocked on the door of his apartment. There was no response.

“Try talking to him, najdroższa,” my husband prompted. “He’s fond of you.”

“Monsieur Lázár?” Still no answer. Was he okay? I hoped he hadn’t harmed himself. Raising my voice, I knocked again. “Monsieur Lázár?”

“J’arrive.” We heard the sound of approaching footsteps. “C’est toi, Cara?”

“Oui, monsieur. Pouvons-nous entrer?”

“Je vous en prie.”

The door opened and a disheveled Lázár appeared in his shirtsleeves, looking as if he’d aged a decade since we’d seen him last. Wearily he ushered us into a room cluttered with broken antiques. He gestured toward a set of more-or-less-intact Louis XV salon chairs, but sitting on the Persian rug on the floor seemed like a safer bet. With Jakub translating for Gray and me, the puppeteer filled us in on the crisis. The police had opened fire on the protesters, he told us, killing hundreds and wounding thousands more. Soviet forces stationed in Hungary had been summoned to the government’s aid. The first Russian tanks were already rolling into the city. Russian planes flew overhead.

We all sat there, stunned. Tanks and planes and soldiers, all massed against the people of Budapest. They didn’t have a chance.

“What about his family?” I asked. The puppeteer was so downcast I was afraid something terrible had happened to someone he loved.

Jakub explained that Lázár had telephoned his sister in Budapest the minute our production had ended. She and her husband were safe, but their son, a student at the technical university, had been wounded in the battle outside the radio station. His friends had managed to carry him home and his injuries, fortunately, were not fatal, but our landlord was sick with anxiety. I wished there were something I could say to raise his spirits—he was so low—but I’d experienced enough sorrow in my twenty-three years to know there are times when keeping company in silence is the most we can do for one another.

My beautiful mother, Vivien, had drowned when I was ten. The loss of her became part of who I was, tinging even my happiest moments with regret. I’d grown used to her absence, I’d been motherless for so long, but that didn’t stop me from wondering what it would have been like to have had Vivien in my life as I was growing up. She would have consoled me, the first time my heart was broken, I was sure of it. Wasn’t that what mothers did? Instead, I’d run off to England with Gray, burying my pain inside. I’d tried so hard to convince myself that I didn’t need anyone, but it didn’t work. I’d plunged into another love affair and was hurt again. Then Jakub came along and I discovered I wanted to be with him every minute of every day. Needing somebody wasn’t a bad thing if that person needed you too.

When we got married, I wore the pearls Father had given Vivien on their wedding day. She was already pregnant when she’d walked down the aisle, carrying me. “Imagine that you are carrying her,” said Father, fastening them around my neck. He’d loved her dearly and for his sake, I attempted to conjure her presence, but wearing those pearls next to my skin stirred up old feelings of abandonment. You’re missing everything, I found myself thinking. So many years had passed—and I know this sounds unfair—but I could not bring myself to forgive Vivien for dying and leaving me to grow up without her.

Lázár could not forgive himself for being in Paris, safe and sound, instead of joining the struggle in Budapest. “J’aurais dû revenir,” he lamented. I should have gone back. Ever since Stalin died there’d been signs of unrest, he told us, some subtle, others too obvious to ignore, indications that his countrymen were uniting to throw off the Soviet yoke. And yet he had ignored all of them.

“Ask him what kind of signs,” said Gray. He made a point of being up-to-date on world events, but very little of what went on behind the Iron Curtain was reported in the West.

Jakub reeled off a series of events related to him by the puppeteer. Following Hungary’s defeat to West Germany in the 1954 World Cup, hundreds of thousands of disappointed soccer fans protested in the streets. They weren’t only upset about their team’s loss; they were manifesting their dissatisfaction with the regime. Next came the discontented rumblings of students, artists, and intellectuals, who began holding public forums to air their grievances, meetings that attracted hundreds, then thousands. Soon they were publishing their criticism in pamphlets and underground newspapers that circulated hand-to-hand.

Abruptly, Lázár got up and went to rummage through the drawers of a walnut secretary, returning with a sheaf of mimeographed pages fastened at the corner with a brass rivet. “Regardez ceci,” he said, thrusting the manuscript at Jakub. It was a copy of a clandestine magazine that published the work of enemies of the Hungarian state. A Rideg Valóság was the title. The Cold Truth. Lázár’s brother-in-law was one of the editors and had smuggled him out a copy of the first issue.

“Does he mean presumed enemies of the Hungarian State, or are we talking about bona fide traitors?” Gray wanted to know. Most of the time he viewed world events with cynical detachment, but I could see he was really wrapped up in this story.

“Presumed enemies,” my husband answered after consulting with our landlord, “but in Hungary, you must understand, that meant just about anybody.”

Lázár proceeded to explain, via Jakub, how so many Hungarians had come to be branded as enemies. The country’s Stalinist leader, Mátyás Rákosi, had jailed thousands in the early 1950s, tyrannizing the population into submission with the help of his ruthless secret police, the ÁVH, who recruited a network of informers. Friends and neighbors betrayed one another at the drop of a hat; people you’d known for years cut you dead, crossing to the other side of the street to avoid you. Nobody was above suspicion and nobody could be trusted. Not even relatives.

Some of the regime’s victims had composed poetry while they were in prison, recollections of sunlit days in the past, preserved in words like amber. Lacking pencils or paper, they’d spoken their poetry aloud, committing it to memory. And when one of their fellow inmates died, the others strove to capture his spirit in a poem. Jakub was holding the result of their labors.

The sky outside was lightening with the approach of dawn, and I thought we should all be getting to bed, but now that we’d gotten him going, Lázár seemed to want us to stay. He’d ordered a bottle of whiskey from the bar downstairs and he and my brother were keeping apace with their drinking, sip for sip, glass for glass. Jakub had barely touched his glass, I was glad to see; at the rate Gray was going, it would take the two of us to get him back to his hotel. It seemed like the right moment to interrupt the history lesson.

“Please,” I said, “s’il vous plaît, monsieur, nous lire un poème.” I wanted to hear the sound of one of those poems, even if I couldn’t understand the words.

Lázár leafed through the typewritten pages. He seemed to be looking for one poem in particular. “Voilà!” he said when he came upon it. He recited it first in Hungarian, then in French. It was quite short, almost a haiku. Translating it required very little effort on my part.

“Winter death

“Your name is no secret.

“War could not claim him

“Only this: cold despair

“Oh, brave Jónás.”

Well before the puppeteer gave us the words in French, Gray’s eyes had filled with tears. “Who wrote that?” he asked, setting his glass of whiskey on the rug to fish a handkerchief out of his trouser pocket and blow his nose.

I understood why the poem had affected him so deeply. It moved me too. Three years earlier, racist thugs in England had murdered a man he loved, Dory, a Trinidadian who sang with a calypso band. My brother wrote a play to honor our friend’s memory, just as this unknown poet had done for his fellow inmate. “Out of Place” was still playing on the West End. I’d seen it several times, and every time the Dory character died, I grieved for him all over again, so fully had Gray brought the man we knew to life. I envied him his gift, the way he used words to reveal what was in his heart. Nobody who saw his play could fail to emerge from the theater unaffected by the terrible tragedy of Dory’s death. He possessed the power to make people pay attention to what really mattered.

“Szabó Zoltán,” Lázár replied when Jakub asked the name of the poet. Then he corrected himself: “Zoltán Szabó.” For some reason, Hungarians put the last name first.

“Szabó,” I said. “What a funny coincidence.” Szabó was Father’s name before he changed it to Walden. The word meant tailor, a not uncommon profession for Jews in Europe. The family had been in the clothing business for generations, rising from humble tailors to found a menswear line that was sold in Hungary’s finest shops. I’d probably come by my skill with a needle genetically.

Gray was shaking his head in disbelief. “It’s more of a coincidence than you realize, Cara. Zoltán Szabó is the name of our Hungarian half brother.”

“Half brother! What are you talking about?”

“I didn’t think you had any relatives left in Hungary,” said Jakub.

“Qu’est-qu’il y a? Savez-vous de lui?”

Jakub turned to Lázár. “Pas moi, mais ils pensent qu’il est leur frère.”

“Leur frère? C’est incroyable!”

“Unbelievable,” I echoed, having gotten the gist of the exchange. Surely I’d have known if I had a brother somewhere in Hungary.

“I didn’t say he was actually our brother,” corrected Gray in the patronizing tone that used to drive me crazy. “I just said he has the same name as Father’s son by his first marriage.”

“First marriage! Are you telling me he was married back in Hungary? And there were other children?”

“Just the one child, Zoltán. He was still quite small when Father left his family for another woman. It caused a terrible scandal at the time, his absconding. Come to think of it, I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s the reason he changed his name.”

“How did you find out?” It bugged me, that Gray knew something about our Father that I didn’t.

“My mother was the other woman. When he ran off with that Vegas showgirl, she told me everything.”

“Out of spite, do you mean?”

My brother shrugged. “Indubitably.”

I’d never met Gray’s mother, but I had no difficulty believing she had it in her, judging from her onscreen presence. Dark-haired and exotic-looking, she was cast as a vamp at the outset of her Hollywood career, but her strong accent consigned her to dragon lady parts when talkies came in. I found her terrifying in those pictures and couldn’t imagine her in the maternal role. Like me, Gray had been shipped off to boarding school at a young age. Unlike me, he still had a mother, although he kept her at a distance.

“Your father certainly buried the past,” observed Jakub. “Didn’t he ever look back?”

Gray shook his head. “He and my mother spoke Hungarian in the house, and I knew all about her family, parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, but not his.”

“He never talked about his family,” I agreed. “The subject was off-limits, especially after the war.” Father’s parents and all three of his siblings had perished in Auschwitz. He’d kept the terrible information to himself for close to a decade, only revealing it when he learned Jakub’s family had met the same fate in Poland. Even then, he’d shared little more than the names and ages of his brother and sisters. He’d never mentioned a Hungarian wife and son. How would Father react to the news that this son had survived, assuming our poet was indeed the same person? We’d want to know for sure before we told him, but I couldn’t imagine he’d be anything less than overjoyed.

“What are the odds?” I mused.

“Are you asking how common a name is Zoltán Szabó?” said my husband, preparing to translate the question into French.

“Well, yes. And I’m thinking about his age. He’d have to be a couple of years older than you,” I said, turning to Gray.

“That would make him around forty.” My brother did the math. “So, he’d have been in his twenties during the war.”

“That would fit, because this Zoltán Szabó knew war. It’s in the poem, don’t you agree?”

“Je le connais,” Lázár interrupted.

I looked at Jakub, to confirm that I’d heard correctly. Was the puppeteer saying he knew the poet personally?

“C’est vrai?”

“Oui, oui. Il est le copain de mon beau-frère.”

The poem’s author, we now learned, was also an editor of The Cold Truth. He and Lázár’s brother-in-law, József, had been inmates together in one of the regime’s most notorious prisons, where they’d forged an indelible bond. József would know if this Zoltán Szabó was our relative and, what’s more, we could ask him ourselves because he spoke English. They both did. A facility with Western languages was evidently one of the things that got you branded an enemy of the state during the Rákosi era.

“What if he turns out to be our brother?” I asked Gray as we left the apartment. “I’d like to meet him. Wouldn’t you?”

“Very much.” He grew thoughtful. “I used to feel badly about Zoltán, as if it were my fault that Father abandoned him.”

Jakub looked at him in disbelief. “Your fault? Please explain to me how that’s even possible.”

“I’m not saying it makes sense, but you need to remember, I was still a kid when I found out about him. A pretty lonely kid. I’d try to imagine what he looked like, this forgotten sibling in Hungary, whether he shared my interests.” My brother paused on the landing and turned to face us. “Pure fantasy, but you know, after hearing his poem, I think we might have been friends. We chose similar paths, he and I, but mine was so much easier.”

“Oh, Gray,” I said, moving to hug him. “That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard.”

“It is, isn’t it?”

“Budapest isn’t all that far from Paris,” said Jakub. “If this man is your brother, we ought to go there and bring him out while there’s still time.”