The Historian

The Historian Page 40

"Since my meeting with her - I saw her only three times - I have often thought of Helen's aunt ?va. There are people who stick in one's memory much more clearly after a brief acquaintance than others whom one sees day after day over a long period. Aunt ?va was certainly one of those vivid people, someone my memory and imagination have conspired to preserve in living color for twenty years. I have sometimes used Aunt ?va to fill the shoes of characters in books, or figures in history; for example, she stepped in automatically when I encountered Madame Merle, the personable schemer in Henry James's Portrait of a Lady.

"In fact, Aunt ?va has stood in for such a number of formidable, fine, subtle women, in my musings, that it is a little difficult for me to reach back now to her real self as I encountered her on an early summer evening in Budapest in 1954. I do remember that Helen flew into her arms with uncharacteristic affection, and that Aunt ?va herself did not fly, but stood calm and dignified, embracing her niece and kissing her soundly on each cheek. When Helen turned, flushed, to introduce us, I saw tears shining in the eyes of both women. '?va, this is my American colleague, whom I told you about. Paul, this is my aunt, ?va Orbán.'

"I shook hands, trying not to stare. Mrs. Orbán was a tall, handsome woman of perhaps fifty-five. What hypnotized me about her was her stunning resemblance to Helen. They might have been an older and much younger sister, or twins, one of whom had aged through hard experience while the other had stayed magically young and fresh. In fact, Aunt ?va was only a shade shorter than Helen and had Helen's strong, graceful posture. Her face might once have been even lovelier than Helen's, and it was still very beautiful, with the same straight, rather long nose, pronounced cheekbones, and brooding dark eyes. Her hair color puzzled me until I realized that it could never have had its origins in nature; it was a weird purplish red, with some white growing out at the roots. During our subsequent days in Budapest, I saw this dyed hair on many women, but that first glimpse of it startled me. She wore small gold earrings and a dark suit that was the sister of Helen's, with a red blouse underneath.

"As we shook hands, Aunt ?va looked into my face very seriously, almost earnestly. Maybe she was scanning me for any weakness of character to warn her niece about, I thought, and then chided myself; why should she even consider me a potential suitor? I could see a web of fine lines around her eyes and at the corners of her lips, the record of a transcendent smile. That smile appeared after a moment, as if she could not suppress it for long. No wonder this woman could arrange additions to conferences and stamps in visas at the drop of a hat, I thought; the intelligence she radiated was matched only by her smile. Like Helen's, too, her teeth were beautifully white and straight, something I was beginning to realize was not a given among Hungarians.

"'I am very glad to meet you,' I said to her. 'Thank you for arranging the honor of my attending the conference.' "Aunt ?va laughed and pressed my hand. If I had thought her calm and reserved the moment before, I had been fooled; she broke out now in a voluble stream of Hungarian, and I wondered if I was supposed to understand any of it. Helen came to my rescue at once. 'My aunt does not speak English,' she explained, 'although she understands more than she likes to admit. The older people here studied German and Russian and sometimes French, but English was much rarer. I will translate for you. Shh - ' She put a fond hand on her aunt's arm, adding some injunction in Hungarian. 'She says you are very welcome here and hopes you won't get into any trouble, as she put the whole office of the undersecretary of visa affairs into an uproar to get you in. She expects an invitation from you to your lecture - which she will not understand that well, but it is the principle of the thing - and you must also satisfy her curiosity about your university at home, how you met me, whether I behave properly in America, and what kind of food your mother cooks. She will have other questions later.'

"I looked at the pair of them in astonishment. They were both smiling at me, these two magnificent women, and I saw a remarkable likeness of Helen's irony in her aunt's face, although Helen could have benefited from a study of her aunt ?va's frequent smile. There was certainly no fooling someone as clever as ?va Orbán; after all, I reminded myself, she had risen from a village in Romania to a position of power in the Hungarian government. 'I will certainly try to satisfy your aunt's interest,' I told Helen. 'Please explain to her that my mother's specialties are meat loaf and macaroni-and-cheese.'

"'Ah, meat loaf,' Helen said. Her explanation to her aunt brought an approving smile. 'She asks you to convey her greetings and congratulations to your mother in America on her fine son.' I felt myself turning red, to my annoyance, but promised to deliver the message. 'Now she would like to take us to a restaurant you will enjoy very much, a taste of old Budapest.'

"Minutes later, the three of us were seated in the back of what I took to be Aunt ?va's private car - not a very proletarian vehicle, by the way - and Helen was pointing out the sights, prompted by her aunt. I should say that Aunt ?va never uttered a word of English to me throughout our two meetings, but I had the impression this was as much a matter of principle - an anti-Western protocol, perhaps? - as anything else; when Helen and I had any exchange, Aunt ?va often seemed to understand it at least partially even before Helen translated. It was as if Aunt ?va was making a linguistic declaration that things Western were to be treated with some distance, even a little revulsion, but an individual Westerner was quite possibly a nice person and should be shown full Hungarian hospitality. Eventually I got used to speaking with her through Helen, so much so that I sometimes had the impression of being on the brink of understanding those waves of dactyls.

"Some communications between us needed no interpreter, anyway. After another glorious ride along the river, we crossed what I later learned was Széchenyi Lánchid, the Széchenyi Chain Bridge, a miracle of nineteenth-century engineering named for one of Budapest's great beautifiers, Count István Széchenyi. As we turned onto the bridge, the full evening light, reflected off the Danube, flooded the whole scene, so that the exquisite mass of the castle and churches in Buda, where we were headed, was thrown into gold-and-brown relief. The bridge itself was an elegant monolith, guarded at each end by lions couchants and supporting two huge triumphant arches. My spontaneous gasp of admiration prompted Aunt ?va's smile, and Helen, sitting between us, smiled proudly, too. 'It is a wonderful city,' I said, and Aunt ?va squeezed my arm as if I had been one of her own grown children.

"Helen explained to me that her aunt wanted me to know about the reconstruction of the bridge. 'Budapest was very badly damaged in the war,' she said. 'One of our bridges has not even yet been fully repaired, and many buildings suffered. You can see that we are still rebuilding in every part of the city. But this bridge was repaired for its - how do you say it? - the centennial of its construction, in 1949, and we are very proud of that. And I am particularly proud because my aunt helped to organize the reconstruction.' Aunt ?va smiled and nodded, then seemed to remember that she wasn't supposed to understand any of this.

"A moment later we plunged into a tunnel that appeared to run almost under the castle itself, and Aunt ?va told us she had selected one of her favorite restaurants, a 'truly Hungarian' place on József Attila Street. I was still amazed by the names of Budapest's streets, some of them simply strange or exotic to me and some, like this one, redolent of a past I had thought lived only in books. József Attila Street turned out to be as politely grand as most of the rest of the city, not at all a muddy track lined with barbaric encampments where Hun warriors ate in their saddles. The restaurant was quiet and elegant inside, and the ma?tre d' came hurrying forward to greet Aunt ?va by name. She seemed used to this sort of attention. In a few minutes we were settled at the best table in the room, where we could enjoy views of old trees and old buildings, strolling pedestrians in their summer finery, and glimpses of noisy little cars zooming through the city. I sat back with a sigh of pleasure.

"Aunt ?va ordered for all of us, as a matter of course, and when the first dishes came, they were accompanied by a strong liquor called paálinka that Helen said was distilled from apricots. 'Now we will have something very good with this,' Aunt ?va explained to me through Helen. 'We call these hortobàgyi palacsinta. They are a kind of pancake filled with veal, a tradition with the shepherds in the lowlands of Hungary. You will like them.' I did, and I liked all the dishes that followed - the stewed meats and vegetables, the layers of potatoes and salami and hard-boiled eggs, the heavy salads, the green beans and mutton, the wonderful golden-brown bread. I hadn't realized until then how hungry I'd been during our long day of travel. I noticed, too, that Helen and her aunt ate unabashedly, with a relish no polite American woman would have dared to show in public.

"It would be a mistake to convey the impression that we simply ate, however. As all of this tradition went down the hatch, Aunt ?va talked and Helen translated. I asked the occasional question, but for the most part, I remember, I was very busy absorbing both the food and the information. Aunt ?va seemed to have firmly in mind the fact that I was a historian; perhaps she even suspected my ignorance on the subject of Hungary's own history and wanted to be sure I didn't embarrass her at the conference, or perhaps she was prompted by the patriotism of the long-established immigrant. Whatever her motive, she talked brilliantly, and I could almost read her next sentence on her mobile, vivid face before Helen interpreted it for me.

"For example, when we'd finished toasting friendship between our countries with the paálinka, Aunt ?va seasoned our shepherd's pancakes with a description of Budapest's origins - it had once been a Roman garrison called Aquincum, and you could still find the odd Roman ruin lying around - and she painted a vivid picture of Attila and his Huns stealing it from the Romans in the fifth century. The Ottomans were actually mild-mannered latecomers, I thought. The stewed meats and vegetables - one dish of which Helen called gulyás, assuring me with a stern look that it was not goulash, which was called something else by Hungarians - gave rise to a long description of the invasion of the region by the Magyars in the ninth century. Over the layered potato-andsalami dish, which was certainly much better than meat loaf or macaroni-andcheese, Aunt ?va described the coronation of King Stephen I - Saint István, ultimately - by the pope in 1000 AD. 'He was a heathen in animal skins,' she told me through Helen, 'but he became the first king of Hungary and converted Hungary to Christianity. You will see his name everywhere in Budapest.'

"Just when I thought I could not eat another bite, two waiters appeared with trays of pastries and tortes that would not have been out of place in an Austro-Hungarian throne room, all swirls of chocolate or whipped cream, and with cups of coffee - 'Eszpresszó,' Aunt ?va explained. Somehow we found room for everything. 'Coffee has a tragic history in Budapest,' Helen translated for Aunt ?va. 'A long time ago - in 1541, actually - the invader Süleyman I invited one of our generals, whose name was Bálint T?r?k, to have a delicious meal with him in his tent, and at the end of the meal, while he was drinking his coffee - he was the first Hungarian person to taste coffee, you see - Süleyman informed him that the best of the Turkish troops had been taking over Buda Castle while they were eating. You can imagine how bitter that coffee tasted.' "Her smile was more rueful than luminous this time. The Ottomans again, I thought - how clever they were, and cruel, such a strange mixture of aesthetic refinement and barbaric tactics. In 1541 they had already held Istanbul for nearly a century; remembering this gave me a sense of their abiding strength, the firm hold from which they'd reached their tentacles across Europe, stopping only at the gates of Vienna. Vlad Dracula's fight against them, like that of many of his Christian compatriots, had been the struggle of a David against a Goliath, with far less success than David achieved. On the other hand, the efforts of minor nobility across Eastern Europe and the Balkans, not only in Wallachia but also in Hungary, Greece, and Bulgaria, to name only a few countries, had eventually routed the Ottoman occupation. All of this Helen had succeeded in transferring to my brain, and it left me, on reflection, with a certain perverse admiration for Dracula. He must have known that his defiance of the Turkish forces was doomed in the short term, and yet he had struggled for most of his life to rid his territories of the invaders. "'That was actually the second time the Turks occupied this region.' Helen sipped her coffee and set it down with a sigh of satisfaction, as if it tasted better to her here than anywhere in the world. 'János Hunyadi overcame them at Belgrade in 1456. He is one of our great heroes, with King István and King Matthias Corvinus, who built the new castle and the library I told you about. When you hear the church bells ringing all over the city at noon tomorrow, you can remember it is for Hunyadi's victory centuries ago. They are still rung for him every day.'

"'Hunyadi,' I said thoughtfully. 'I think you mentioned him the other night.

And did you say his victory was in 1456?' "We looked at each other; any date that fell within Dracula's lifetime had become a sort of signal between us. 'He was in Wallachia at the time,' said Helen in a low voice. I knew she didn't mean Hunyadi, because we had also made a silent pact not to mention Dracula's name in public.

"Aunt ?va was too sharp to be put off by our silence, or by a mere language barrier. 'Hunyadi?' she asked, and added something in Hungarian.

"'My aunt wants to know if you have a special interest in the period when Hunyadi lived,' Helen explained.

"I wasn't sure what to say, so I answered that I found all of European history interesting. This lame remark won me a subtle look, almost a frown, from Aunt ?va, and I hastened to distract her. 'Please ask Mrs. Orbán if I could put some questions to her myself.'

"'Of course.' Helen's smile seemed to take in both my request and my motive.

When she translated for her aunt, Mrs. Orbán turned to me with a gracious wariness.

"'I was wondering,' I said, 'if what we hear in the West about Hungary's current liberalism is true.'

"This time Helen's face registered wariness, too, and I thought I might get one of her famous kicks under the table, but her aunt was already nodding and beckoning her to translate. When Aunt ?va understood, she dropped an indulgent smile on me, and her answer was gentle. 'Here in Hungary, we have always valued our way of life, our independence. That is why the periods of Ottoman and Austrian rule were so difficult for us. The true government of Hungary has always progressively served the needs of its people. When our revolution brought workers out of oppression and poverty, we were asserting our own way of doing things.' Her smile deepened, and I wished I could read it better. 'The Hungarian Communist Party is always in tune with the times.'

"'So you feel Hungary is flourishing under the government of Imre Nagy?' Since I'd entered the city, I'd been wondering what changes the administration of Hungary's new and surprisingly liberal prime minister had brought to the country when he'd replaced the hard-line communist prime minister Rákosi the year before, and whether he enjoyed all the popular support we read about in newspapers at home. Helen translated a little nervously, I thought, but Aunt  ?va's smile was steady.

"'I see you know your current events, young man.'

"'I've always been interested in foreign relations. It's my belief that the study of history should be our preparation for understanding the present, rather than an escape from it.'

"'Very wise. Well, then, to satisfy your curiosity - Nagy enjoys great popularity among our people and is carrying out reforms in line with our glorious history.'

"It took me a minute to realize that Aunt ?va was carefully saying nothing, and another minute to reflect on the diplomatic strategy that had allowed her to keep her position in the government throughout the ebb and flow of Soviet-controlled policy and pro-Hungarian reforms. Whatever her personal opinion of Nagy, he now controlled the government that employed her. Perhaps it was the very openness he had created in Budapest that made it possible for her - a high-ranking government official - to take an American out to dinner. The gleam in her fine dark eyes could have been approval, though I wasn't sure, and as it later turned out, my guess was correct.

"'And now, my friend, we must allow you to get some sleep before your big ecture. I am looking forward to it and I will let you know afterward what I think of it,' Helen translated. Aunt ?va gave me a hospitable nod, and I couldn't help smiling back. The waiter appeared at her elbow as if he had heard her; I made a feeble attempt to request the check, although I had no idea what the proper etiquette was or even if I'd changed enough money at the airport to pay for all those fine dishes. If there had ever been a bill, however, it vanished before I saw it and was paid invisibly. I held Aunt ?va's jacket for her in the cloakroom, vying with the ma?tre d' for it, and we sailed back into the waiting car.

"At the foot of that splendid bridge, ?va murmured a few words that made her chauffeur stop the car. We got out and stood looking across at the glow of Pest and down into the rippling dark water. The wind had turned a little cool, sharp against my face after the balmy air of Istanbul, and I had a sense of the vastness of Central Europe's plains just over the horizon. The scene before us was the kind of sight I had wanted all my life to see; I could hardly believe I was standing there looking over the lights of Budapest.

"Aunt ?va said something in a low voice, and Helen translated softly. 'Our city will always be a great one.' Later I remembered that line vividly. It came back to me almost two years after this, when I learned how deep ?va Orbán's commitment to the new reform government had actually been: her two grown sons were killed in a public square by Soviet tanks during the uprising of the Hungarian students in 1956, and ?va herself fled to northern Yugoslavia, where she disappeared into villages with fifteen thousand other Hungarian refugees from the Russian puppet state. Helen wrote to her many times, insisting that she allow us to try to bring her to the United States, but ?va refused even to apply for emigration. I tried again a few years ago to find some trace of her, without success. When I lost Helen, I lost touch with Aunt ?va, too."