"We had some happy times here, when I was still with the boys' father. But then he left me, took up with another woman across the river in Buda. In 1950, he took our eldest son and his new wife and escaped across the border. These were terrible times, then, neighbor spying on neighbor, encouraged to report even the smallest of transgressions to the Communist authorities. I was suspect already because my husband had escaped with his new wife and our son to America. I don't blame him for that. Before the Russians came, my husband had been a very successful business person. Our home here was beautiful. But to be successful was, in those days, a curse. His business was taken over by the party, and instead of the fifteen workers Andras—that was his name, my husband, Andras—had employed, there were six times that, all lazy louts who felt entitled to a paycheck without having to work for it, accomplishing less, much less, than the original fifteen. And of course, my husband no longer owned the business. It belonged to the state.
"He was taken to that terrible place, you know, the secret police building at Andrassy lit 60. It was a lovely place once, but not now. The National Socialist party, the people of the arrow cross, used it as a headquarters, and when the Russians came to replace them after the war, they just moved right in. There were basements and subbasements of terrible cells, and some say they had a giant meat grinder to get rid of their victims. I don't know if that is true, but a lot of people went in there and never came out. To this day, I have never walked on the sidewalk in front of Andrassy ut 60. Always I crossed the street, so as not to walk too close. We all did. But they took Andras there, just because he had once been successful. He was one of the lucky ones. He got out, and when he did, he began to plan his escape. He said he would send someone back for us, for Janos and me, but it never happened. Perhaps that person was captured, perhaps he just never came. Or perhaps he never existed." The woman stopped for a moment and reached for her son's hand.
Laurie took a deep breath. "This is awful, isn't it?" she said to me. "I can hardly bear to translate it."
"Even though we were divorced, it didn't matter," the woman went on. "I was suspect, just because he had gone, and because we had a beautiful home. And they were right for suspecting me of incorrect thinking. Every day Janos would come home from school and he would tell me what he had learned. It wasn't true what they were teaching him. I tried to make sure he understood what the real truth was, not that version made up by the party cadre. I tried to undo, every day, the damage they had done. But I had to tell him to keep what I had told him in his heart and never to speak the words at school.
"I had a job, not a good one, but still a job, and I knew how to work the black market to see that my son was fed.
He wanted to be a dancer, was accepted into the ballet school where they trained the best dancers. It was across from the Opera House. The children took classes in the Opera House itself. Janos was a member of the Communist young people's organization. We tried to fit in while not forgetting who we really were. Our family was landed gentry, you know. We had owned land, and servants, and we treated them well.
"Maybe it was something Janos said. He was just a boy, and when his father sent him a photograph of his car in America, he wanted so badly to show it to his friends. Maybe that was it. Or perhaps it was simply that my former husband had escaped. Despite all the care I took, something happened. It was 1951. They came in the night, you know, always in the night in those dangerous hours just before dawn when sleep is its deepest and the pounding on the door brings only confusion and not resistance or flight. Although where to flee and for what purpose to resist? We were given two hours to get ready and allowed only 250 kilos to take with us. What to choose? What to leave behind?
"And then there was the journey to the countryside, to hardship and pain, death for many, loaded into trucks with others whose eyes were as confused or pained as yours. But that is not what you came to hear about, not what you want to know. You want to know about what was left behind? The art, the furniture, the once precious objects that suddenly, in those terrible circumstances, no longer held any value for those who were taken. They were given to people deemed more worthy by those who came in the night.
"So what happened to the lady you showed me? Someone deemed more worthy got her. I hope she was a curse," the woman hissed.
"Ask her if she has any idea who was deemed more worthy," I said. I waited a moment for the translation.
"She says she cannot say about the lady, but she did find out who moved into the apartment. It was a man and a woman and her family," Laurie said. "You'll understand that I'm not translating word for word. She called them rather more unpleasant things than a man and a woman, because she thinks there is a possibility that they betrayed them just to get the apartment. The couple's name was Molnar, Imre and Magdolna Molnar."
CHAPTERTWELVE
September 22
THE DANUBE WAS A DOVE-GRAY RIBBON BELOW ME, AS I sat, hands wrapped around a cup of coffee against the early morning chill. Behind me, Szent Matyas Church towered over the Fisherman's Bastion where once again I sat to greet the dawn. The mist on the river, the stillness of early morning, would be like a painting etched on my memory forever.
They'd be here in a few minutes, all of them, the Divas, Karoly, and Frank. The scene was set, the chairs in a little circle around the table on which Stalin, in his box, lay. I felt the cold of the stone floor beneath my feet edge its way up my body, heading, I was convinced, for my heart.
I heard the footsteps behind me. They were all on time. "Beautiful!" Cybil said. "How did you find this fabulous spot?"
"Frank brought me here," I said.
"What's that?" Frank said, pointing toward the box, and they all went over to look.
"Ew," Cybil said. "Is it real? Tell me it isn't."
Karoly slid the cover off the better to see it and stared at it for several seconds before turning toward me. "It can't be, can it?" he said.
I shrugged. "It's possible," I said. "I found it in the right place."
"Does it have a name?" Morgan said, laughing.
"Stalin," I said.
"Oh, come now," Grace said. "Why have you brought us here? Surely not to see that grotesque thing. Tell us the truth!"
"Truth?" I said. "Now that's an interesting word for you to use, Grace. Or should I call you Dr. Thalia Lajeunesse?" Karoly looked amused.
"What are you talking about?" Grace huffed.
"The author of that article that implies the Venus is a fake?" Morgan said. "Is that who you're talking about? You mean Grace wrote it?"
"Thalia," I said. "One of the three Graces, along with Aglaia and Euphrosyne, companions of the goddess of love. Lajeunesse, French word for youth. Grace Young, disappointed lover of Karoly Molnar."
"Tsk, tsk," Morgan said. "Caught in a lie, are we, Grace?"
"You are in a rather vulnerable position on that score yourself, Morgan," I said, as Grace burst into tears. "You see, I believed your story, at least part of it, about how Karoly was blackmailing you because you had had an affair with him. You knew I'd overheard a conversation that night at the Cottingham, didn't you? I assumed the woman Karoly had broken up with that night was you. But in fact he never confirmed my assumption, when I thought back to the conversation. He was actually very discreet. It was Grace he had just given the old heave-ho to, wasn't it?"