CHAPTER FORTY-TWO. A Name
THE MORNING was crisp and blue, early December. From the window of their building on Pozsonyi út, Andras could see a line of schoolchildren being led into Szent István Park -gray woolen coats, crimson scarves, black boots that left herringbones of footprints in the snow. Beyond the park was the marbled span of the Danube. Farther still was the white prow of Margaret Island, where in the summertime Tamás and Április swam at Palatinus Strand. When, on a walk through the park last spring, he’d told them that the pool had once been closed to Jewish swimmers, Április had looked at him with pinched brows.
“I don’t see what being Jewish has to do with swimming,” she said.
“Neither do I,” Andras said, and put a hand at the nape of her neck, where her little gold chain closed. But Tamás had looked through the fence at the pool complex, his hands on the green-painted bars, then turned to meet his father’s eyes. He knew by now what had happened to his family during the war, what had happened to his uncles and grandparents. He had gone to Konyár and Debrecen with his father to see where Andras had lived as a boy, and where Andras’s parents had lived; he had watched his father place a stone on the doorstep of the house in Konyár as if at a grave.
“I’m going to train for the Olympics here,” he said. “I’ll set a new world record.”
“Me too,” Április said. “I’ll set a record in freestyle and backstroke.”
“I have no doubt you will,” Andras said.
That was before the escape had come to seem like a reality, before the children had begun to envision their future lives taking place on the other side of the Atlantic. It wouldn’t be long now; only a few details remained, including the business Andras would conclude that morning at the Ministry of the Interior. Tamás had wanted to come along with Andras and Klara and Mátyás to pick up the new identification cards. Last night he’d stood before Andras in the sitting room with a grave expression on his face, his arms crossed over his chest. He had already prepared his lessons for the next two days, he announced. He’d miss nothing at all by going with them.
“You have to go to school,” Andras said. He rose from his chair and put an arm around Tamás’s shoulders. “You don’t want the students in America to get ahead of you.”
“I’m not worried about that,” Tamás said. “Not if I miss just one afternoon. They get Saturdays and Sundays off every week.”
“I’ll leave your new papers on your desk,” Andras said. “They’ll be waiting for you when you get home from school.”
Tamás sent a glance toward Klara, who sat at her writing desk by the window; she shook her head and said, “You heard your father.”
Shrugging, sighing, declaring it all to be unfair, Tamás gave up the argument and loped off down the hallway to his room. “As if I’d get behind,” they heard him say as he closed the bedroom door.
Klara lifted her eyes to Andras, trying to restrain her laughter. “He’s been a grown man for years, hasn’t he?” she said. “What on earth will he do in America, among those kids with their banana splits and their rock and roll?”
“He’ll eat banana splits and listen to rock and roll,” Andras predicted, which turned out, in fact, to be true.
Andras and Mátyás had taken the day off work to go to the Ministry of the Interior. They were employed at Magyar Nation, one of the secondary communist newspapers, where they directed the design department; they had been up late the previous night judging a contest of winter-themed drawings by gimnázium students. The winning drawing had depicted a skating race, athletics being a safe subject under the judging regulations, which disqualified any drawing that made reference to Christmas. That holiday belonged to the old Hungary, at least officially. Of course, people still celebrated it; they were relying on that fact, all of them-Andras and Mátyás, Klara and Tamás and Április. In a few weeks, on Christmas Eve, they would take a train to Sopron, and then they would walk six miles in the snow to a place where they might cross the Austrian border unnoticed; they would slip through while the border patrol drank vodka and listened to Christmas carols in their warm quarters. In Austria they would catch a train that would take them to Vienna, where Polaner had been living since his own border crossing in November. From there they would travel together to Salzburg, and then to Marseilles. On the tenth of January, if all went well, they would board an ocean liner for New York, where József Hász had secured an apartment for them.
But first they had to settle the business about the name change and the new identity cards. They had submitted the application eight weeks earlier, in October; it had gotten delayed, like all other government business, in the confusion surrounding the abortive revolution that fall. Even now, less than a month after it had been quelled, Andras found it difficult to believe the revolution had occurred-that the public debates of the Petőfi Society, a small group of Budapest intellectuals, had blossomed into vast student demonstrations; that the students and their supporters had unseated Ernő Gerő, Moscow’s puppet, and had installed the reformist Imre Nagy as prime minister; that they had pulled down the twenty-meter-high statue of Stalin near Heroes’ Square, and planted Hungarian flags in his empty boots. The demonstrators had called for free elections, a multiparty system, a free press. They wanted Hungary to disengage from the Warsaw Pact, and more than anything they wanted the Red Army to go home. They wanted to be Hungarian again, even after what it had meant to be Hungarian during the war. And at first, Khrushchev had conceded. He had recognized Nagy as prime minister, and began to call the occupying troops back to Russia. For a few days in late October it seemed to Andras that the Hungarian Revolution would be the swiftest, the cleanest, the most successful revolution Europe had ever known. Then Polaner came home one afternoon having heard a rumor that Soviet tanks were massing at the Romanian and Ruthenian borders. That evening, in the Erzsébetváros café where Andras and Polaner went to hear Jewish artists and writers argue long into the night, the item of hottest debate was whether the Western nations would come to Hungary ’s aid. Radio Free Europe had led many to believe it would be so, but others insisted that no Western nation would risk itself for a Soviet-bloc state. The cynics turned out to be correct. France and Britain, preoccupied with the Suez Crisis, scarcely cast an eye toward Central Europe; America was caught up in a presidential election, and kept to itself.
More than twenty-five hundred people were killed, and nineteen thousand wounded, when Khrushchev’s tanks and planes arrived to crush the uprising. Imre Nagy had hidden himself in the Yugoslav embassy, and was imprisoned as soon as he emerged. Within days the fighting was over. In the weeks that followed, nearly two hundred thousand people fled to the West-among them Polaner, whose image had appeared in one of the many newspapers that had arisen during Hungary’s fortnight of freedom. He had been photographed tending a young woman who’d been shot in the leg at Heroes’ Square; the woman turned out to be a student organizer, and Polaner had been tagged as a revolutionary. Grim tales of torture had emerged from the Secret Police detainment center at 60 Andrássy út; rather than test their truth, Polaner had decided to risk the border crossing. To his good fortune, and that of the two hundred thousand refugees, the brief conflict had left the Iron Curtain riddled with holes: Many of the border guards had been called in to fight smaller uprisings in the towns and cities of the interior.
Those conflicts, too, had since been put down, but the border remained more permeable than it had been for years. It was decided that the rest of the family would follow Polaner. How long now had they been waiting for a chance to leave? There was no future for them in Hungary. They’d known it to be true before the revolution, and it was all the more apparent now. József Hász, who had made his own escape to New York five years earlier, had been at pains to convince them that they were fools to stay. He had found them the apartment and promised to help them find work. Tamás and Április were old enough to make the border crossing on foot; Christmas Eve would provide the aperture. So at last they decided to take the risk. They had written the news, in carefully veiled language, to József and Elisabet and Paul. And now, on the other side of the ocean, Elisabet was beginning to prepare the apartment, furnishing the rooms and laying in everything they would need. Andras had resisted thinking about the flat itself; such detailed imagining of their future lives seemed to invite bad luck. But he and Klara told the children about the junior high and high schools they would attend, the movie theaters with their pink neon-lit towers, the stores with great bins of fruit from all over the world. Elisabet had been writing to them about those things for years; by now they had attained the quality of images from a legend.