"Perhaps, but not all of them deluded themselves that their parents didn't exist. I don't know if you remember, but I didn't attend our graduation ceremony, because I didn't want to have my name—my real name—read out."
"I remember you weren't there. It was a big disappointment for me, but I thought you had a job interview in Paris, or something like that."
"I know. As for your recollection I was in Paris, that's probably what I said. When I went to university, I created this whole new persona—I changed my name, although not legally, and just pretended I was someone else. Part of me just got tired of always having to correct the pronunciation of my name everywhere I went. I always got Carollee. That sounds like a line of frozen cakes, if you ask me. 'Karroy,' I was always saying. 'It's pronounced Karroy Molenar, emphasis almost always on the first syllable in Hungarian.' I got really tired of saying that."
"I can understand that. I don't much like Lera, either. It sounds like a video game. It's Lahra. I'm named for the character in Dr. Zbivago, the one played by Julie Christie in the movie. My mother was reading the book while she waited for my arrival. I never did understand why I don't look like Julie Christie, with a name like that."
"You have just proved my point," he said. "Your parents read Boris Pasternak. Mine didn't. I wanted parents who read things like that. I'd have settled for parents who knew who Boris Pasternak was!"
"I don't know what you're going on about," I said. "My parents claim to this day that it was the Hungarians that made Toronto the cosmopolitan city it is. There wasn't a coffee house in Toronto before 1956 when so many Hungarians fled the country during the revolution. They brought the first whiff of European sophistication the city had ever seen. Budapest was one of the most cultured cities in Europe at one time, maybe it still is, for all I know. My father was there, in Austria, I mean. It was his first foreign posting. He was there in 1956. He told me often how some time in 1956 the people rose up to throw off their Communist oppressors, and—"
"October twenty-third," Charles said.
"October twenty-third, then. He said that for several days the country was united against the Communists, and for a few wonderful days, it seemed as if the country would be free. But then the Communists came back."
"The night of November third," he said. "The Communist tanks which had circled the city of Budapest moved in. I can remember my mother telling me there was a tank in Pannonia utca, Pannonia Street, at Szent Istvan koriit, which was very close to where we lived, and how frightened she was."
"Yes. And then people found whatever transport they could—buses, trucks, cars, and they headed for the border. And when they couldn't get any further, they got out and walked, streamed across the border into Austria. My dad was there. Maybe he met your parents! Western countries had set up kind of mini-consulates in tents just across the border in Austria, and my father was a low-level cultural attache working in the Canadian tent. They worked day and night to process the applications. He was very proud that so many Hungarians—tens of thousands of them!—chose Canada."
"They emptied the jails you know, in those heady days when they rather naively thought the Communists would allow them their freedom. There were lots of political prisoners, certainly, but there were also common criminals who went free. No doubt some of those streamed across the border, to use your term, and hence to Canada too."
"I'm sure some of them did. You could say the same thing about Castro letting people leave Cuba. The criminal element came with them. But, on balance we have been enriched by the people who came, their art, their culture, their food."
"Maybe," he said. "You are obviously the kind of person who sees the cup as half-full."
"I think that's probably true. I tend to be optimistic more often that not." Not that I was feeling particularly optimistic these days, but why bother to mention it?
"I, I'm afraid, am a cup-half-empty kind of guy. All I'm saying is that people had many reasons for leaving Hungary in 1956, not all of them positive. I must tell you, though, that I owe my life here to a goose. Don't laugh. It's true. The way my mother told the story, they had a wonderful apartment in Budapest. You'll understand that was an accomplishment during that time. Still, when the revolution came, my mother and father wanted to leave Budapest while they could, while my grandmother, who was living with them, didn't. They were very hungry. The Soviet forces had surrounded the city and cut off the supply of food. My grandmother, according to my parents, was a wizard at finding stuff on the black market. She said she knew where to find a goose. My father said he was going to get a truck to carry us to the border. It was agreed that if my grandmother got the goose, they'd stay. If not, they'd take the truck and make a run for it. My grandmother lined up for the goose, but they ran out of them just two people ahead of her in line. So here I am. I have always thought of that as a metaphor for my life, the role that fate seems to play in it from time to time, but also there's something about it all hinging on a goose, a certain farcical element that dogs my steps."
I laughed. "So why go back now, then, to your real name?" I asked. "My mother thought you were absolutely divine, by the way, when she met you."
"Thank your mother for me. She's well, is she? Yes? Good. I guess I just acquired enough credentials—I got my doctorate in fine arts as you may know, and a fancy wife and job, enough polish, maybe, that it didn't matter anymore. Or maybe I just couldn't go on the way I was. It catches up to you. You can't maintain the facade, at least I couldn't. And, to be perfectly honest, there was some advantage in it. I was only one of hundreds, thousands of curators in Britain, but after the fall of Communism, there was a great deal of interest in seeing what kind of art exhibits one might put together with the new regimes in Eastern Europe. I volunteered that I could speak Hungarian, so they sent me off to Budapest. I made contacts reasonably easily, given I could speak the language, although Hungarians do say I speak it very well for someone who wasn't born there—I remained silent on the fact that I was born there—and I got to curate a very popular exhibit on the hidden treasures of Eastern Europe. Moved right up the hierarchy with that one."
"And the fancy wife?" I wasn't going to ask that question, but somehow it just popped out of my mouth.
"Still in England. We are legally separated, and not particularly amicably, I'm afraid. I'm sure that even as we speak she is telling her lawyer what he has to do to make my life a misery."
"Perhaps not right this minute," I smiled. "It's the middle of the night in England."
"If I told you that she now sleeps with her lawyer, would you believe me? I gather that relationship was going on a lot longer than I knew," he said ruefully. "But never mind. I have recreated myself anew, as the suave, debonair eligible bachelor. Lady's man, even," he laughed. "I'm thinking about having laser surgery on my eyes, so what happened that night at the museum won't happen again. What do you think? Foolish to be a lady's man who can't see the beautiful ladies, isn't it?"
"I suppose," I said. "But speaking about being a lady's man, what was all that garbage the other night about being in love with a much younger woman, and the little Venus who wouldn't reveal her age and everything," I said. "That was a bit over the top." My tone was light, but I was really interested to hear what he'd say.
"Wasn't that awful?" he said. "The things I have to do."
"It was rather…"
"Sexist? Insincere? I hate to think of the impression I must have made on you, but I am required to look at it a different way. My job is to flatter. Do you know how many people that evening wrote a check to the museum, how many people became members? Forty-five. We got almost $60,000 in pledges that one evening alone, and a well-known art collector told me he wants to come and talk to me about donating his collection of Shang bronzes. A rather fabulous collection it is, too. Look at the audience. They were, by and large, older and rich. My job is to help them part with a tiny bit of their money. God knows we need it. Cottingham donated his collection and built the place, but like so many people who build these monuments to ego, he didn't give anything to keep it operating. Lillian is a real dear, a very generous woman, and she loved it. For me, that is what counted. I adore her. Have you met her, by the way?" He looked right at me as he said that, and I had the distinct feeling he knew the answer. I was lobbing questions at him that I hoped would reveal something I needed to know about him, and he was doing exactly the same thing to me.