The Atlantic and Its Enemies (59 page)

Tibor, as she presented the case, had had a horrible time. Karman is a name to conjure with, as I later discovered: one of them set up the
Minta
(‘Model’, meaning Teachers’ Training) school, and his son was one of the two dozen Hungarian Nobels (it is a tribute to the relationship of Hungary and the Jews that an abnormally high percentage of Hungarian Nobels were non-Jewish, namely 17.5 per cent). As I remember it, Andrea told me that Tibor’s family had had rubber plantations in Indonesia, which is quite credible. They had met, she said, during the war. Her father was a (hugely tall) Transylvanian nobleman, her mother a Viennese Jewess, and owner of a sanatorium on the Semmering, a fresh-air place for ailments, south of Vienna. The father had got the honorary consul-generalship of Monaco, and therefore flew a large neutral flag from the block on a Pest boulevard. There, when the Nazis started attacking Jews, they stuffed the house, and the Karmans must have belonged to their set. Tibor stayed there during the siege of 1945, when old Hungary collapsed. Communists took over, and were no more friends of the Rózsadomb Jews than the Nazis had been. He was then, she said, imprisoned by the Communists and tortured. There were nasty marks on his back. He had been held in Szolnok, and therefore not released in 1956, because it was under Russian control, but he had met János Kádár in prison, and played chess with him, and Kádár had let him out. Then he had been given the sort of job - hospital portering - that released prisoners got. He had, in the evenings, betaken himself to old haunts, the Grand Hotel on the Margaret Island, where the barmen and the waiters were all part of old Hungary. Foreign journalists ended up there. Andrea, escaping from writs from the Ritz, ended up there as well, reporting for RIAS in Berlin (the
Daily Express
was I suspect something of a fantasy, but she had had some sort of affair with a married English peer in London, whose photograph, of him on a horse, she kept by her bedside). She and Tibor met in that red plush and gold bar. It was Ortrud and Telramund. There was money, once the West was reached. The West Germans were offering compensation for the horrors of 1944. More: there was a
Herr Generaldirektor
in Vienna to whom, as an SS officer, the Karmans had entrusted property, in particular some Dutch paintings, and he had deposited them for safe-keeping in the national bank of the then Independent State of Croatia, in Zagreb. That
Herr Generaldirektor
would have some explaining to do. They would get married. They went to the Hungarian government and asked for an exit visa - refused. What they needed was a useful idiot,
der Geist, der stets bejaht
. And she met me on that train.

It was not a good moment in my existence. Someone said that you can only do central Europe if you are very young or very old, and I was getting beyond my first youth. More, I had written an article in
History Today
, and Peter Quennell had been very encouraging, though the article - it was about the Habsburg army - was probably romantic tosh (the Austrian army is a very good subject, to which, now old, I would very willingly return: anything that knocks provincial nationalism on the head is a good thing). Out of the blue in Vienna came a letter signed Michael Sissons, of the literary agency A. D. Peters, the authors of whom represented a roll-call of English literature. It said that Hodder and Stoughton wished to publish a history of the twentieth century, and would I take care of the bit up to, as I remember, 1930. Five hundred pounds on signature, $5,000 to follow - huge sums. Tail wagging, I had asked Jack Plumb, who was enormously helpful to young men, what to do, given the obvious difficulty of combining proper respect for scholarship with
etc.
He said take it. I did, and the signing ceremony was witnessed by the Hodder grandees - the Attenborough dynasty - with a certain amount of disbelief. They were right. Back in Vienna, I went down to the British Council library in the Harrach Palace and took out Churchill’s speeches of the war, which moved me to tears. Then I took E. H. Carr’s three-volume
Russian Revolution
and started to take close, handwritten notes, which took weeks (it is a very boring and even silly book). Poor old Hodder and Stoughton were not going to flourish, as I plodded through Carr’s account of the problems of the Mensheviks with the trade unions, one packet of Senior Service untipped after the other, and tins kicked down the Kärtnerstrasse. I was an idiot.

But useful. Andrea and I met in Vienna, in a hotel near the Franz-Josephs Bahnhof. She did not tell me about the portable property in Zagreb, and it was all presented on an emotional level: ‘I knew the British would not refuse.’ It also all seemed quite easy. There had been a well-dramatized affair in Berlin, where someone had been squeezed into the dicky-box of a low-slung Karmann (coincidental) Ghia sports car and driven below the bar at Checkpoint Charlie, on the Friedrich-strasse in Berlin. The driver had got through the first barrier in the usual way, showing his passport, and had driven in second gear through the barbed wire towards the final barrier, then revved up quite suddenly, and driven under the boom. Could I hire a Karmann Ghia, and we would squeeze Tibor into the boot? There was a twist. It would not be the Austro-Hungarian border, but the Czechoslovak. At that moment, the first drips of the thaw were coming off the ice, and there had been a deal, to earn Austrian money, on the Czechoslovak side. From Vienna, you could go for the weekend to Bratislava, the main town in Slovakia, and so close to Vienna that, in the old days, there had been a connection so easy that you could go for the night to the Vienna Opera and be back afterwards. No visa was needed, nor was one needed from Hungary, such that Austro-Hungarian encounters took place in Bratislava. All depended upon the car.

I could not drive. However, there was someone who could, called Jan Wilson. She was Australian, and had come to teach in the English school in Vienna, an outfit that had been opened up in Heiligenstadt, near the Beethoven House (there were, as it turned out, forty-seven of those, because landladies turned up screeching about dog’s hair when he was in the middle of a sonata). It was run by a Lancastrian, who had been a sergeant and had married an Austrian; he spoke Lancastrian Viennese (‘Righty-oh,
’nabend
’). Waifs and strays turned up, and I was teaching French to waifs and strays, some of whom - as happens, bizarrely, with these odd schools, like Russell’s - went on to great things. I taught a Count Gudenus who now owns much of Guatemala, for instance, and whose ears I boxed almost mortally. Jan Wilson was, like me, hanging around, and wondering what on earth life was about. When I asked her to drive, she said yes with alacrity. I went down to a car-hire place, Liewers, on the Triester Strasse, and politely asked whether they had a Karmann Ghia. They did not, but there was a Volkswagen 1500, a car not very large - in fact, the classic symbol of the
Wirtschaftswunder
. We drove off, past these huge villas in Heiligenstadt where once Richard Cobb had wept and sung. When he was very young, in about 1934, his mother had packed him off on a Quaker network to learn German, and he had found himself in the Heiligenstadt villa of one Felix Saltén, a Budapest Jew and the creator of
Bambi
. He and his wife did not have a relationship of pure love, and she took it out on the young Richard, who spent his time in the back kitchen eating bread and dripping - the fat of fat - with the maid. His mother had given him pamphlets to distribute to the working-class quarters of Vienna, telling people where, in Czechoslovakia, they could get help. Round Richard went, and was picked up by the police. Men in loden coats, hats with a feather in them, dragged him, kicking, the length of the Ottakringer Hauptstrasse and he said later on that what he had remembered from it all was the huge-faced women, fox-fur-eyed, holding their heads in their hands and just staring out of the double-glazed window. To accommodate the habit, there was even a little hollow built into the window sill, holding the elbows that held the head, so that it could stare. Then he was expelled, the first and not the last time in that very remarkable life. We drove past the Saltén house, and got on our way past Hainburg, where, in 1889, the Austrian Social Democrats had launched their bid for the future, which turned out so tragically wrong. The scene was of course central Europe in
Prisoner of Zenda
mode, and we went through the Slovak border without difficulty. Hotel Devin, Tibor, dinner, what do we do next?

It was clear to one and all that this was not on. The car was absurdly small, the frontier obstacles serious. Next day, we trundled round the countryside, and it is an interesting area, as I later learned. The Csállókőz (Vel’ky Žitný ostrov in Slovak), an island in the Danube, had once had German villages, filled with harmless people (whom I later encountered, speaking a mixture of Hungarian and German, in Nassau). A scene of desolation in the snow (‘Dieses Dorf hiess seinerzeit Modern,’ said Tibor). None of us had quite the courage to say that this was preposterous. Tibor lay down on the back and Andrea put a coat over him; she then sat upon him, and rehearsed a line to the effect that she was suffering from an inflamation of the ovaries -
Eierstockentzündung
- which she thought would defeat the Slovak frontier guards. We then approached the frontier. It was the ides of March, 1964. So many people had that same experience - deep snow, barbed wire, guards in long coats with long rifles and red stars in uniform caps, barking Alsatians. The first barrier opened up, and we were in a column of cars going back to Vienna, which Andrea had banked on. Second barrier. Andrea had expected that there would be one guard, who would probably just have waved us through - the Slovaks’ instincts are decent - but, the authorities knowing what they were doing, there were several. One looked into the back of the car, and wondered. Andrea said, ‘Eierstockentzündung’. A hand went to the coat underneath, and hair was obvious. ‘Sie chaben eine vierte Perzzoon in diesem Wagen.’ I said to Andrea that there was no point in contesting it, and we were all led towards the customs building. Tibor stood shoeless in the snow, and bit his fingernails to the quick: he knew what would have happened otherwise, as sticks went under them. There was an interrogation that night, all of us in separate rooms. Morning came, and the customs people - decent Slovaks: I heard them say about me, ‘Simpatický’ - rang up the Czech Ministry of Justice people in Prague. The Czech Ministry of Justice people in Prague were pigs, insisted on rules, and so we were stuck. A police car took Jan and me to the prison, the Prokurátorská väznica v Bratislave. We stopped on the way, at a café, and they gave us an enormous
slivovica.
Then the prison gates opened, and the formalities started: belongings handed over, medical inspection, prison clothes put on - a brown number, smelling (I can recall it now) of washing, with flat shoes that you cannot run in. You go along the corridors, and if there is another prisoner coming, you are turned, face to the wall, until he has passed. Warders click keys to warn each other that they are coming. Then a cell - it was 283, and I later went back, post-Communism, Monte Cristo fashion, to see it, to wonder if the inmates needed some cigarettes. The cell then contained four young men, and I complained to the governor that the cell was too small for that number. He agreed, but said, what could he do? They were gypsies. In the old days, the gypsies used to get themselves put into prison in November, because they were fed and heated. Now there was a free market, and it was September. There was therefore overcrowding in the Prokurátorská väznica v Bratislave. I could not criticize, and wandered down that well-known staircase reciting the
St Matthew Passion
, which, somehow, I knew by heart:
Wenn ich einmal soll scheiden, so scheid’ Du nicht von mir
, in the old Klemperer version. I thought of my poor old mother, a war widow, with me as the only child - my father had been killed in the RAF in ’42 - and what she must be feeling. Your first week in prison is awful, and the chap they had moved in with me was very sympathetic as I wiped away the tears that were not entirely to be stifled. He was quite an interesting lad, Kornel Karpacky by name. Our common language was Hungarian. The authorities let me have the grammar book I had arrived with, Banhidi-Jókai-Szabó,
Tanuljuk nyelveket
, and I had reached lesson ten, where they explain that the verb changes according to whether it is transitive or intransitive followed by an indirect article or a dative. The translation passages were about a Palestinian going round a textile factory. At that time, the second language in Bratislava was Hungarian. It had been the second capital, until 1918, and the Jews, a quarter of the population, had spoken Hungarian; there were also Germans who had taken to it easily enough. Kornel spoke it, with a thick Slovak accent which I myself have never, to this day, entirely lost, because his mother had come from Transylvania and his father was Slovak. He explained that life had been very difficult, that he had made three of the local girls pregnant, had had three mothers chasing after him, had made for the frontier with wire-cutters. I should not have believed this, because Kornel - who was not I think entirely balanced in mind - must have been that phenomenon of Communist prisons that everyone knows, a
Spitzel
- someone planted to find out what you are about. He did not get anything much out of me, and must have got quite sick of the
St Matthew
(I also knew the Verdi
Requiem
). At some stage, he must have been told to try a homosexual approach. The prison pants came down, and a foot-long Pan-Slav number stretched before my eyes. On it had been tattooed the badge of Fascist Slovakia, some sort of double-headed lobster. I expressed no interest, and there we were. The weeks went by. I got to know the guards. The librarian, who had good German, trundled round his books, and I said, ‘Seitdem ich hier sitze, kann ich nicht umhin,
Das Kapital
zu lesen’, which I then did. H. G. Wells was not really any better, though, in later life, I would gladly read both of these men, especially Wells. Forty years later, Penguin asked me to do an introduction to his
Short History of the World
, a superb performance, and he is the writer whom I should want to recall from the dead. He competes with Orwell, but Orwell never dies.