Kingdom of Shadows (17 page)

*

It took two cars to get them all to the railroad station, the maids and the gardener stood by the door when they drove away. The thirty-first of August turned out to be, of course, a diabolically perfect day. The sky chalk-blue, the children’s-book clouds with chiseled edges, the little train from another time. Simon shook his hand and said, “We’ll hope for the best, right?” Morath nodded. Cara dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief and held on to Francesca as the train pulled in. And Simon’s mother took his hands in hers. She had cool gray eyes and gave him a good long look. “I’m so glad you could come,” she said. “And we do want you to come back, Nicholas. You’ll try, won’t you?”

He promised he would, and held her hands.

NIGHT TRAIN TO BUDAPEST

P
ARIS THAT
S
EPTEMBER WAS TENSE AND BROODING, ON THE EDGE OF
war, darker than Morath had ever known it. The
retour,
the return to daily life after the August vacation, was usually a sweet moment in Parisian life, but not that autumn. They came back to the office, the dinner party, the love affair, but Hitler was screaming at them from every newspaper stand and they had no taste for any of it. At Morath’s morning café the waiter said, “Let them come and drop their bombs, I’m tired of waiting.”

They couldn’t bear it, the idea of another war—they’d never really recovered from the last one. The man who came home from the trenches and made love to his wife on the day the war ended in 1918 now had a nineteen-year-old son, just the right age for the army. On the sixth of September, the morning papers wondered if the Sudeten issue was really worth a world war. The next day, a
Times
of London editorial supported partition.

In Germany, the annual Nazi party rally in Nuremberg began on the sixth and was to end on the twelfth, with torchlight parades, gymnastic maidens, and, the grand finale, a speech in the colossal Hall of the Fifty Thousand, where the Führer promised to reveal what he had in mind for the Czechs.

On the tenth, Parisian radio reported Roosevelt’s statement that it was “one hundred percent wrong” to assume the United States would join Britain and France in a war over Czechoslovakia. On the eleventh, the proprietor of the stationery store on the rue Richelieu showed Morath his old Lebel revolver from the Great War. “Well, here is
my
answer to all this,” he said. Which answer was that? Suicide? Shooting a German tourist? Sniping at the Wehrmacht?

“He has us where he wants us,” Polanyi said, at lunch on the quai de la Tournelle. “Did you see the newsreel of Horthy’s arrival at Kiel station?” Morath hadn’t. “You get a glimpse of me, just over Count Csaky’s shoulder.” Then he described how Hungary had been offered a return of disputed territories if she would agree to march into Slovakia when Hitler attacked the Czechs.

“Horthy declined. On the basis that we barely have an army, and what we have barely has guns and bullets,” Polanyi said, then went on to repeat Hitler’s remark about the meal and the cooking.

They were eating
blanquette de veau
at a table on the terrace of a Norman restaurant. Polanyi waited while two young men hurried past. “So naturally,” he said, “some units are being recalled to service. But I made sure you weren’t included in
that.
” He ran a forkful of fried potatoes through a dish of mayonnaise, then paused before eating and said, “I trust I did the right thing.”

Morath didn’t bother to answer.

“Why waste your life in a barracks?” Polanyi said. “And besides, I need you with me.”

Eight-thirty in the morning on the fourteenth of September—Chamberlain had flown to Berchtesgaden to consult with Hitler—the phone rang in Morath’s apartment. It was Cara, in a voice he’d never heard her use. “I hope you will come over and say good-bye to me,” she said.

He started to say “What—” but she hung up on him.

Twenty minutes later he was there. The door was open, he walked in. Two men in blue smocks were packing Cara’s clothing in the drawers of a large steamer trunk, its wardrobe side already crammed with dresses on little hangers. A third man, bigger than the others, stood and watched them, his arms folded across his chest. A chauffeur or a bodyguard, Morath thought, with a heavy face and a collarless jacket. When Morath came into the room he took a half step toward him and let his arms hang by his sides.

Cara was sitting on the edge of the bed, the Picasso nude in its gold frame held on her knees. “Monsieur Morath,” she said, her voice dull and flat, “allow me to present my father, Señor Dionello.”

A short man, sitting in the bedroom chair, got to his feet. He had a black-and-white mustache and wore a double-breasted suit with black and white stripes and a black Borsalino-style hat. He said “Sir” in Spanish, tipped his hat, and shook hands. It was clear to Morath that he was not pleased to meet his daughter’s forty-four-year-old lover, Hungarian lover, Parisian lover, but he would agree not to make a scene if Morath didn’t.

Morath sought Cara’s eyes—
What do you want me to do?
Family was family, but he was not going to allow her to be abducted against her will.

She shook her head and closed her eyes. It was subtle, a small, fragile gesture of surrender, but she’d told him what he needed to know.

His heart sank, he’d lost her.

Señor Dionello spoke to her in rapid Spanish, his voice not unkind.

“It’s the war, Nicky,” Cara said. “My father expresses his regrets, but my mother and grandmother are sick with worry, he says, that I will be, hurt.”

Señor Dionello smiled ruefully at Morath as Cara spoke, in his expression a plea for understanding, a plea that he not be forced to use power or money to get his way.

“My father is staying at the Meurice, I am to join him there for a few days, until the boat leaves.”

Morath nodded to Señor Dionello, forcing himself to be as gracious as he could.

Señor Dionello spoke again and smiled at Morath. “My father would be pleased if you would join us for dinner at the hotel.” She hesitated, then said, “It’s a lot for him, Nicky.”

Morath declined. Cara translated, then said,
“Un momentito, por favor.”

As they went out into the hall, Señor Dionello made a small gesture and the bodyguard stayed where he was.

In the hall, Cara clenched his shirt in her fists and sobbed, silently, with her face pressed against him. Then she pushed him away, wiped the tears off with her hand, took two steps toward the door, looked at him one last time, and went back into the apartment.

On the twenty-first of September, Chamberlain tried again. Flew to Bad Godesberg and offered Hitler what he said he wanted. The Sudetenland, with French and British approval, would become a German possession. But the Führer didn’t quite work the way Chamberlain thought he did. Once he got what he wanted, he wanted more. Now it was military occupation, by October 1.

Or else, war.

So, on the twenty-ninth, Chamberlain flew back to Germany, this time to Munich, and agreed to the occupation. The Czechoslovakian army abandoned its forts and moved back from the mountains.

18 October.

Morath stared out the train window, a tiny village slid away down the track. Was it called Szentovar? Maybe. Or that was another place, a hundred kilometers and a hundred years away from Budapest, where the peasants still rubbed garlic on barn doors to keep the vampires from milking the cows at night.

On the road, a Gypsy wagon. The driver looked up just as Morath’s window went by. Prosperously fat, with three chins and clever eyes, perhaps a
primas,
a clan leader. He held the reins loosely in his hands and turned and said something to the women in the wagon behind him. Morath never saw their faces, simply the red and yellow colors of their clothing as the train clattered past.

October was a dead month, he thought. The brutal politics played out in the newspapers. The French relaxed, congratulated themselves on having done the right thing, the
smart
thing, for once in their dreamy lives. Morath smoked too much and stared out the window when he woke up in the morning.

He was surprised at his broken heart. He had always told himself that the love affair with Cara was a passing thing that stayed. But now she was gone, he missed what he’d taken for granted, and he ached for what she’d lost. “When I lived in Paris,” she would say to her friends in Buenos Aires.

Count Polanyi didn’t care for this mood and let Morath know it. “We’ve all been thrown off the horse,” he said. “The thing to do is get back in the saddle.” When that didn’t work, he tried harder. “This is no time to feel sorry for yourself. Need something to do? Go back to Budapest and save your mother’s life.”

Keleti Palyuadvar. The east railroad station where, this being Hungary, all important trains arrived from the west. There were cabs in the street but Morath decided to walk—in the late afternoon of an autumn day, what else.
It is your nose that tells you you’re home,
he thought. Burnt coffee and coal dust, Turkish tobacco and rotten fruit, lilac water from the barbershops, drains and damp stone, grilled chicken, God only knew what it really was. A deep breath, another—Morath inhaled his childhood, his country, the exile returned.

He walked for a long time, taking the cobbled alleys, heading more or less across the city, toward a villa in the hills of the Third District, on the Buda side of the Danube. He dawdled, stopped to look in shop windows. As always, this time of day, a melancholy, speculative idleness settled over the city and Morath slowed down to meet its rhythm. At five-thirty, when the sun hit the windows of a tenement on Kazinczy Avenue and turned them flaming gold, Morath took the number-seven tram across the Chain Bridge and went home.

They didn’t really talk until the next morning. In the living room, the rugs were still up for the summer, so when his mother spoke there was a faint echo. She sat, perfectly composed, on a spindly chair in front of the French doors, a silhouette in garden light. She was, as always, slim and lovely, with ice-colored hair set in steel and pale skin that showed in the vee of her silk dress.

“And do you see Lillian Frei?” she asked.

“Now and then. She always asks for you.”

“I miss her. Does she still wear the suits from De Pinna?”

“Where?”

“A store on Fifth Avenue, in New York.”

Morath shrugged politely, he had no idea.

“In any event, you’ll kiss her for me.”

Morath drank a sip of coffee.

“Would you care for a pastry, Nicholas? I can send Malya to Gundel’s.”

“No, thank you.”

“Bread and butter, then.”

“Really, just coffee.”

“Oh Nicholas, what a
Parisian
you are. You’re sure?”

Morath smiled. He’d never in his life been able to eat anything before noon. “How long has it been,
anyuci,
since you’ve seen Paris?” This was
mother,
very much her preference. She had never been
mama.

His mother sighed. “Oh a long time,” she said. “Your father was alive, the war just over. 1919—could that be right?”

“Yes.”

“Has it changed? People say it has.”

“There are more automobiles. Electric signs. Cheap restaurants on the boulevards. Some people say it’s not as nice as it was.”

“Here it is the same.”

“
Anyuci?
”

“Yes?”

“Janos Polanyi feels that, with the situation in Germany, you, and perhaps Teresa, should consider, should find a place . . .”

When she smiled, his mother was still incredibly beautiful. “You haven’t come all the way here for
that,
I hope. Ferenc Molnar has moved to New York. He is living at the Plaza and is said to be utterly miserable.”

A long look, mother and son.

“I won’t leave my house, Nicholas.”
And how can you not have known it?

They went to the movies in the afternoon. A British comedy, dubbed in Hungarian, from the 1920s. It had a cruise ship, nightclubs with shiny floors, a hound called Randy, a hero with patent-leather hair called Tony, a blonde with kiss curls that they fought over, called Veronica, which sounded very strange in Hungarian.

Morath’s mother loved it—he glanced over and saw her eyes shining like a child’s. She laughed at every joke and ate caramels from a little bag. During a song-and-dance sequence at the nightclub, she hummed along with the music:

Akor mikor, Lambeth utodon

Bar melyek este, bar melyek napon,

Ugy találnád hogy mi mind is

Sétalják a Lambeth Walk. Oi!

Minden kis Lambeth leany

Az ö kis, Lambeth parjäval

Ugy találnád hogy ök

Sétalják a Lambeth Walk. Oi!

Afterward, they went to the tearoom of the Hotel Gellert and had acacia honey and whipped cream on toasted cake.

3:30 in the morning. In the rambling, iron-gated gardens of the villa district, some people kept nightingales. Other than that, he could hear wind in the autumn leaves, a creak in a shutter, a neighbor’s fountain, a distant rumble of thunder—north, he thought, in the mountains.

Still, it was hard to sleep. Morath lay in his old bed and read Freya Stark—this was the third time he’d started it, a travel narrative, adventures in the wild mountain valleys of Persia.

He’d always stayed up late in this house, his father’s very own son. He used to hear him, sometimes, pacing around the living room. Often he played records on the Victrola while he worked in his office—sliding stamps into glassine envelopes with a silver tweezers.

They weren’t rich, but his father never worked for money. He had been one of the great philatelists of Hungary, very strong in both nineteenth-century Europe and colonials. Morath supposed his father had traded in the international markets, perhaps he’d made some money that way. Then, too, before the war, nobody really had to work. At least, nobody they knew.

But, after Trianon, everything changed. Families lost the income they’d had from land in the countryside. Even so, most of them managed, they simply had to learn to improvise. It became fashionable to say things like “If only I could afford to live the way I live.”

Then, on a June day in 1919, the communists killed his father.

In the spasms of political chaos that followed the loss of the war, there came a Soviet Republic of Hungary—a government born of a national desperation so deluded it persuaded itself that Lenin and the Red Army would save them from their enemies, the Serbs and the Roumanians.

The Soviet was led by a Hungarian journalist named Bela Kun who, while serving in the Austro-Hungarian army, had deserted to the Russians during the war. Kun, his henchman Szamuelly, and forty-five commissars began a rule of one hundred and thirty-three days, and shot and burned and hanged their way from one end of Hungary to the other. They were then chased out of the country—across the border and, eventually, into the Lubianka—by a Roumanian army, which occupied Budapest, wandered aimlessly about the countryside, and spent its days in desultory looting until it was shooed back across the border by a Hungarian army, led by Miklos Horthy. The counterrevolution then gave birth to the White Terror, which shot and burned and hanged its way from one end of Hungary to the other, paying particular attention to the Jews, since Jews were Bolsheviks (or bankers), and Kun and a number of his comrades were Jewish.