Plootered? I suppose that meant plastered. I was having almost as much trouble following this conversation as I did Hungarian.
"I would like to go, to see if I could find her," Selena said. "Her grave, I mean. I am, after all, named for her. I suppose it will never happen, just like my father never got there. For years I couldn't, what with the Communists and everything. Now I'm just too old."
I spent at least an hour or so more with Selena and her young friend, Nigel. I told her about the Magyar Venus, about how I was trying to trace its provenance, and in so doing had happened upon her aunt. And I promised her I would make it right.
I left Edinburgh that afternoon with a box of Selena's shortbread cookies in my bag, and headed back to London, and on to Budapest. I should have been pretty happy. While I had uncovered the perfidy of C. J. Piper, a fact that could not help but be embarrassing to Karoly, I was also very close to establishing the provenance of the Venus. What, after all, did it matter that Piper hadn't written the diaries, as long as I could prove that someone had, that the Venus had really been found in the Biikks?
It mattered, because Mihaly Kovacs had sold the Venus to Karoly Molnar, and Mihaly Kovacs was dead.
The next afternoon I was on Falk Miksa with Laurie Barrett who had agreed, at my request, to come with me and translate. It was late in the day when we got to the address on Selena B's letters. The Divas had done well. It was one of the three they'd found. Laurie and I had met at a coffee house on Szent Istvan kdrut, and as we walked past the flower stalls and turned toward Honved utca, I knew I'd found the right place. Honved lit becomes Pannonia utca on the other side of the kbrut, and Pannonia was where, according to Karoly, his mother had told him there had been a Russian tank during those terrible days in November 1956, when the Communists rolled back into Budapest.
I had terribly mixed feelings as we approached the building. I kept thinking how Laurie had told me the day I first met her at the Gerbeaud, that people in Budapest don't move houses the way we North Americans do, and I was hoping against hope that in this case, that would be true. Even if it wasn't, as long as someone here remembered the Nadasdi family, or for that matter, the Feketes, and knew what had happened to them, I might just have closed the loop on the Magyar Venus's provenance, or at the very least come close to doing so. If I could somehow prove that a descendent of the original Nadasdis had sold the Venus to Mihaly Kovacs, who had in turn sold it to Karoly, then it would be not entirely, but almost, impossible to dispute the Venus's authenticity. Yes, Selena B. Morison could have made it all up, but somehow, I didn't think so. I was still feeling betrayed in some way by Karoly, but I knew it was possible that his failing was one of poor scholarship, faulty research, rather than deliberate misrepresentation, or worse than that, a crime.
"Thanks for this," I said to Laurie as we rang the bell.
"My pleasure," she said. "I think it's fascinating to think it might be possible to trace the provenance of the Venus through a hundred years. There's no Nadasdi here, as you can see, nor Fekete. But I've buzzed the superintendent."
She spoke to the woman who came to the door for some time before finally turning to me. "I think we may be on to something here," Laurie said. "This woman is asking me why you want to know. I'm not entirely sure what I would say, so I told her I was only the translator and I would have to ask you. What do you want me to say?"
"I think you should tell her that I am doing research on a woman, a Scot, by the name of Selena B. Morison who was a tenant in this building at the turn of the last century, and who knew the Nadasdi family and their employees, Sandor and Marika Fekete. You can say that Selena stayed with the family both here and at their country estate, and that I was hoping I could speak to a descendant of the family. It's true, after all, even if certain details are missing."
"Okay," she said, and began speaking rapidly in Hungarian.
The woman said something, closed the door in our faces, and her footsteps faded away.
"I guess that was a no," I said.
"No, it wasn't," Laurie said. "She said she'd be back in a minute."
It was considerably more than a minute, but the door did open again, and we were beckoned in. We creaked and groaned our way up to the top floor in a tiny elevator where we were ushered through a door. We found ourselves standing in a rather austere hallway, a tiny kitchen visible to one side. Ahead of us was what I suppose we'd call a bed sitter, or a studio apartment. We just stood there for a moment wondering what to do, until a man of about sixty or so, poked his head around the corner and signaled us to come in.
The place was very small, but it had a little balcony where the last flowers of summer still bloomed. The room was in sore need of paint. You could see the spots where art had once been displayed on the walls, just a stain on the wallpaper, and an empty hook, witness to that now. There were books everywhere, and on the floor a threadbare, but once elegant carpet. I thought that this room, or one just like it, had been home for awhile to the author of the diaries.
Laurie did the talking. "This gentleman is Janos Varga and that," she said nodding in the direction of the bed where an elderly woman lay propped up against the pillows, is his mother Agnes, also Varga. If I have this right, she is a Nadasdi."
"Ask her what her father's name was?" I said.
Laurie asked the question. "Zoltan," the woman said. Of course, I thought, one of the diggers at the site, son of the family that owned this building in Budapest, and the country estate.
"Ask her if she's always lived in this apartment," I said. Laurie did.
The man grunted, and then spoke rather angrily.
"He says if you are asking if this is the family home, then, yes it is," Laurie translated. "If you are asking if they have always lived here, then he says you don't know your Hungarian history."
"Tell him I'd like to learn," I said.
"He says that while the building is rightfully theirs, it was stolen from them. His mother has been given the opportunity—lovely phrase that!—to reacquire it. He says they can't afford to do that, but that he was able to move her back into the building in one of the tiny apartments. It is tiny, isn't it?"
"Her family would have lived on the first floor, the piano nobile," I said. "Apparently it was a really beautiful home."
Laurie told them what I'd said. "There was a particularly lovely painting, a landscape with mountains, the area where the family's country estate was located," I said.
Laurie translated. The man said nothing, but the old woman suddenly struggled to sit up.
"She wants to know how you know that," Laurie said. Through Laurie, I told her about the reference in the diaries. Then I took out a picture of the Magyar Venus and showed it to the old woman. She pulled it up close to her face and her son brought the lamp over so she could see it. She looked at it a very long time. "Yes," she said at last. "Yes, this was ours."
"Ask her if she sold it to an antique dealer on Falk Miksa by the name of Mihaly Kovacs," I said, holding my breath while I waited for the answer.
"She says she didn't have it to sell to anyone," Laurie said, finally. "She said it was taken with the rest."
"Ask her what happened—to the building and the art, everything. How she lost them, why she is now in this little apartment," I said.
And then, through Laurie Barrett's mouth, Agnes Varga began to tell her story. "I have come back here for Janos," Agnes Varga said. "My other boy, the younger, is in Baltimore where his father took him more than fifty years ago. He comes now to see me, once a year, and he's going to help me reclaim this place. I came back here for Janos. I want him to have it, to make a life for himself here in Budapest. This apartment was in ruins. Animals must have lived here, not people. But my son has worked hard. He remembers how it was when he was a little boy and he is trying to make even this little apartment like that. For me, I suppose. We do this for each other.