Tibor, as she presented the case, had had a horrible time. Karman is a name to conjure with, as I later discovered: one of them set up the Minta (‘Model’, meaning Teachers’ Training) school, and his son was one of the two dozen Hungarian Nobels (it is a tribute to the relationship of Hungary and the Jews that an abnormally high percentage of Hungarian Nobels were non-Jewish, namely 17.5 per cent). As I remember it, Andrea told me that Tibor’s family had had rubber plantations in Indonesia, which is quite credible. They had met, she said, during the war. Her father was a (hugely tall) Transylvanian nobleman, her mother a Viennese Jewess, and owner of a sanatorium on the Semmering, a fresh-air place for ailments, south of Vienna. The father had got the honorary consul-generalship of Monaco, and therefore flew a large neutral flag from the block on a Pest boulevard. There, when the Nazis started attacking Jews, they stuffed the house, and the Karmans must have belonged to their set. Tibor stayed there during the siege of 1945, when old Hungary collapsed. Communists took over, and were no more friends of the Rózsadomb Jews than the Nazis had been. He was then, she said, imprisoned by the Communists and tortured. There were nasty marks on his back. He had been held in Szolnok, and therefore not released in 1956, because it was under Russian control, but he had met János Kádár in prison, and played chess with him, and Kádár had let him out. Then he had been given the sort of job — hospital portering — that released prisoners got. He had, in the evenings, betaken himself to old haunts, the Grand Hotel on the Margaret Island, where the barmen and the waiters were all part of old Hungary. Foreign journalists ended up there. Andrea, escaping from writs from the Ritz, ended up there as well, reporting for RIAS in Berlin (the Daily Express was I suspect something of a fantasy, but she had had some sort of affair with a married English peer in London, whose photograph, of him on a horse, she kept by her bedside). She and Tibor met in that red plush and gold bar. It was Ortrud and Telramund. There was money, once the West was reached. The West Germans were offering compensation for the horrors of 1944. More: there was a Herr Generaldirektor in Vienna to whom, as an SS officer, the Karmans had entrusted property, in particular some Dutch paintings, and he had deposited them for safe-keeping in the national bank of the then Independent State of Croatia, in Zagreb. That Herr Generaldirektor would have some explaining to do. They would get married. They went to the Hungarian government and asked for an exit visa — refused. What they needed was a useful idiot, der Geist, der stets bejaht. And she met me on that train.
It was not a good moment in my existence. Someone said that you can only do central Europe if you are very young or very old, and I was getting beyond my first youth. More, I had written an article in History Today, and Peter Quennell had been very encouraging, though the article — it was about the Habsburg army — was probably romantic tosh (the Austrian army is a very good subject, to which, now old, I would very willingly return: anything that knocks provincial nationalism on the head is a good thing). Out of the blue in Vienna came a letter signed Michael Sissons, of the literary agency A. D. Peters, the authors of whom represented a roll-call of English literature. It said that Hodder and Stoughton wished to publish a history of the twentieth century, and would I take care of the bit up to, as I remember, 1930. Five hundred pounds on signature, $5,000 to follow — huge sums. Tail wagging, I had asked Jack Plumb, who was enormously helpful to young men, what to do, given the obvious difficulty of combining proper respect for scholarship with etc. He said take it. I did, and the signing ceremony was witnessed by the Hodder grandees — the Attenborough dynasty — with a certain amount of disbelief. They were right. Back in Vienna, I went down to the British Council library in the Harrach Palace and took out Churchill’s speeches of the war, which moved me to tears. Then I took E. H. Carr’s three-volume Russian Revolution and started to take close, handwritten notes, which took weeks (it is a very boring and even silly book). Poor old Hodder and Stoughton were not going to flourish, as I plodded through Carr’s account of the problems of the Mensheviks with the trade unions, one packet of Senior Service untipped after the other, and tins kicked down the Kärtnerstrasse. I was an idiot.
But useful. Andrea and I met in Vienna, in a hotel near the Franz-Josephs Bahnhof. She did not tell me about the portable property in Zagreb, and it was all presented on an emotional leveclass="underline" ‘I knew the British would not refuse.’ It also all seemed quite easy. There had been a well-dramatized affair in Berlin, where someone had been squeezed into the dicky-box of a low-slung Karmann (coincidental) Ghia sports car and driven below the bar at Checkpoint Charlie, on the Friedrich-strasse in Berlin. The driver had got through the first barrier in the usual way, showing his passport, and had driven in second gear through the barbed wire towards the final barrier, then revved up quite suddenly, and driven under the boom. Could I hire a Karmann Ghia, and we would squeeze Tibor into the boot? There was a twist. It would not be the Austro-Hungarian border, but the Czechoslovak. At that moment, the first drips of the thaw were coming off the ice, and there had been a deal, to earn Austrian money, on the Czechoslovak side. From Vienna, you could go for the weekend to Bratislava, the main town in Slovakia, and so close to Vienna that, in the old days, there had been a connection so easy that you could go for the night to the Vienna Opera and be back afterwards. No visa was needed, nor was one needed from Hungary, such that Austro-Hungarian encounters took place in Bratislava. All depended upon the car.
I could not drive. However, there was someone who could, called Jan Wilson. She was Australian, and had come to teach in the English school in Vienna, an outfit that had been opened up in Heiligenstadt, near the Beethoven House (there were, as it turned out, forty-seven of those, because landladies turned up screeching about dog’s hair when he was in the middle of a sonata). It was run by a Lancastrian, who had been a sergeant and had married an Austrian; he spoke Lancastrian Viennese (‘Righty-oh, ’nabend’). Waifs and strays turned up, and I was teaching French to waifs and strays, some of whom — as happens, bizarrely, with these odd schools, like Russell’s — went on to great things. I taught a Count Gudenus who now owns much of Guatemala, for instance, and whose ears I boxed almost mortally. Jan Wilson was, like me, hanging around, and wondering what on earth life was about. When I asked her to drive, she said yes with alacrity. I went down to a car-hire place, Liewers, on the Triester Strasse, and politely asked whether they had a Karmann Ghia. They did not, but there was a Volkswagen 1500, a car not very large — in fact, the classic symbol of the Wirtschaftswunder. We drove off, past these huge villas in Heiligenstadt where once Richard Cobb had wept and sung. When he was very young, in about 1934, his mother had packed him off on a Quaker network to learn German, and he had found himself in the Heiligenstadt villa of one Felix Saltén, a Budapest Jew and the creator of Bambi. He and his wife did not have a relationship of pure love, and she took it out on the young Richard, who spent his time in the back kitchen eating bread and dripping — the fat of fat — with the maid. His mother had given him pamphlets to distribute to the working-class quarters of Vienna, telling people where, in Czechoslovakia, they could get help. Round Richard went, and was picked up by the police. Men in loden coats, hats with a feather in them, dragged him, kicking, the length of the Ottakringer Hauptstrasse and he said later on that what he had remembered from it all was the huge-faced women, fox-fur-eyed, holding their heads in their hands and just staring out of the double-glazed window. To accommodate the habit, there was even a little hollow built into the window sill, holding the elbows that held the head, so that it could stare. Then he was expelled, the first and not the last time in that very remarkable life. We drove past the Saltén house, and got on our way past Hainburg, where, in 1889, the Austrian Social Democrats had launched their bid for the future, which turned out so tragically wrong. The scene was of course central Europe in Prisoner of Zenda mode, and we went through the Slovak border without difficulty. Hotel Devin, Tibor, dinner, what do we do next?