The Travellers Page 9

  * * *

  It did not take Kate long to grasp the basic principles of handling the dinghy, and the outing – which she had agreed to simply out of pleasure at spending some time with Tom – began to take on its own excitement. The tiller under her hand was not a dead piece of varnished wood, but quivered and throbbed with life. The sheet, a length of faded blue rope, linked her to every whim of the breeze as it filled the sail. The slightest shift in strength or direction ran down the nerves and muscles of her arm, so that she felt herself slipping into a union with the boat, no longer woman and object, but some mingled creature like the centaurs of mythology.

  Ahead and to their right the sea stretched open and inviting, unmarked by any sail or ship. The swell was slight, but here and there, due to some freak of current and tide, or a sudden breathing of the wind, small whitecaps would break and curve over, their undersides green and glittering, their crests white with blown surf. Out here amongst them, it was easy to see why they were called white horses. The foam leapt and ran down the curve of the breakers with the same graceful yet powerful line as a horse’s mane flowing over the arch of its neck. Somewhere out there, where the colour of the sea deepened to purple grey on the edge of sight, lay the sea lanes to Scandinavia. The wide expanse of sea, the sky stretching cloudless and high, filled Kate with a sense of buoyant freedom. Away from the land she felt weightless, as though she could float away down those sea lanes without a backward glance.

  As the boat rounded the far end of the promontory and headed up the coast, she saw that the seal colony was occupying a different sandbank today, further out from the shore. They were unperturbed by the sailing boat, although she had seen them plunge in panic into the sea when one of the new jet bikes roared past, with the sound of its engine bouncing and reverberating off the rocks. She sailed as close to the sandbank as Tom would allow her, warning that they might run aground. The big bull seal, whom Kate supposed to be the patriarch of the colony, lifted his head once and gazed at them steadily. He shifted his great body, heaving it awkwardly round so that he could view them more easily, then he lowered his head again, satisfied that they posed no threat.

  Kate was reluctant to hand back the tiller to Tom.

  ‘Can’t I carry on a bit longer?’

  ‘We need to be starting back now. Once the tide turns, the combination of the river current and the ebb tide is very powerful. There isn’t enough wind to carry us back across it, and it would be a long hard row.’

  ‘I could go on steering, couldn’t I?’

  ‘No, not this first time. The wind has shifted, and it’ll be coming from directly astern. That makes it quite difficult to avoid gybing, so I’ll take her back.’

  ‘Gybing?’

  The technical explanation took them back past the headland. If only, Kate thought, the rest of our life together could be as straightforward as this. Out at sea here we’ve been at ease with each other again. We’ve been able to talk without the furtive hidden meanings behind the words. If only...

  ‘Have you enjoyed it?’ asked Tom.

  ‘Brilliant! I’m converted. You were right, and all the old fishermen of my childhood were wrong.’

  * * *

  István had taken the box containing his parents’ papers back with him to Sopron after his weekend in Szentmargit. He wanted to look through them quietly, and had persuaded Magdolna that they should not decide what action to take until he had considered everything carefully.

  At first he was too busy to spend time on them. The continuing heat wave was causing problems in the little town. Children stayed outside too long playing, and came home with painful sunburn. The group of expectant mothers who attended his pre-natal clinic were showing signs of heat exhaustion. Although his Austrian patients who came over the border were generally wealthy, and could afford the comforts wealth can buy, many of the local Hungarian women were still at work far into the late stages of pregnancy. Their families needed the money, and he had to exercise his persuasive skills to curb the damage they were doing to themselves. Like most of his fellow citizens, these women welcomed freedom from the occupying Russian troops and the growing sense of liberation in the new democracy. But money was very short and unemployment – once avoided by over manning in communist state industries – was now rising at an alarming rate.

  Some of the old people, too, were finding the heat trying, especially those with heart conditions or breathing difficulties. All of these problems, in addition to the usual casework of his practice, left him little time to himself. His young partner, Endre Wolff, had excellent qualifications but little experience. He had been in Sopron just six months, and the patients still felt safer with Dr Rudnay, who had looked after them for twenty-four years.

  Today, however, he had left Endre in charge of the baby clinic. The younger doctor was quite capable of administering injections and it would give him an opportunity to get to know some of the patients better. During István’s summer holiday Endre would have to take charge, with assistance from the usual locum, a semi-retired lady doctor from Budapest who liked to spend a month every summer in Sopron, walking in the wooded hills during her free time.

  The whole ground floor of the house was given over to the practice, but upstairs István had his own flat, which László had shared with him until he had left home six years ago for Pannonhalma. István lived a pared-down life here. He had come to Sopron with his baby son after Maria’s death. In his first weeks of grief and anger, he had destroyed everything that reminded him of her, ruthlessly burning her clothes and tearing up letters and photographs. Her few pieces of humble jewellery he had given to Magdolna to put away, with the unformed notion that one day László might want them for his wife. It was years now since László’s boyhood clothes and toys had been passed on to András. The bed in his room was kept made up, but he had not slept in it for years. Alone in the flat, István lived like an ascetic bachelor, as though he had never had a wife and child. It suited him this way.

  The big airy sitting room had windows opening on to a wooden balcony overlooking the garden. These were flung open now, letting in a little movement of air, as István sorted the papers on his modern table of pale polished fruitwood. In the box the papers had been jumbled together in no sort of order. He made four piles: the cheap school notebooks filled with his father’s writing, which seemed to form a sort of diary; a few letters; copies of his father’s underground newspaper, Freedom!; and miscellaneous cuttings from official newspapers. The other items from the box, like the watch and the jewellery case, he had left with Magdolna.

  The last of the four piles was the least interesting. All the cuttings referred to partisan activities of one kind or another, either during the Nazi regime or in the first few years of the Russian occupation. As they had been cut from propaganda publications, the reports were almost certainly distorted, but they did give hints of considerable partisan activity in the area around Györ, some twenty-five kilometres south-east of Szentmargit, where his father’s group had mainly operated.

  The copies of Freedom! were cyclostyled in purple ink on thin, greyish paper, and were undated, although they were numbered. The sequence ran from number one to number ninety-seven, with only one, number fifteen, missing. It was impossible to say with certainty at what dates the individual copies had been printed, but in looking through them István found references to successful operations which seemed to have some links with the items from the newspapers. He thought that with a little time and patience it might be possible to date them by using these cross-references. He knew that his father had started the paper in 1941 as a forum for democratic but clandestine opinion during the regime of the Nazi puppet government. The declared purpose of the paper had been to serve as a rallying cry for a free and democratic Hungary, which would shake off the yoke of foreign, Germanic rule – a rule which had started with the Hapsburg Empire and extended to the Third Reich. After the war, his father had continued the newspaper intermittently as a voice of protest aga
inst the invading forces of Soviet Russia until he had been arrested and taken away. The irony of being liberated from Hitler by the troops of Stalin had not been lost on István’s father, as could be seen in the cartoons he himself had drawn for the paper. His mother had carried on publishing Freedom! until restrictions on life had become a little easier after the downfall of the butcherous Rákosi in the spring of 1956 – a time when it had seemed at last that the hopes of a brighter future might be realised.

  The letters were a miscellaneous lot. There were one or two from his father to his mother, but during their seven years together they had rarely been separated for more than a few days. István scanned a few of the letters at random. One, dated 11 April 1945, caught his eye. It had been sent by hand, a week after the last German troops had left Hungary, and addressed to his father via the priest of the Church of Szent Margit in the village. The priest, a courageous protector of the partisans, had later been executed as an enemy of the state after one of Rákosi’s show trials in the early fifties. Inside, the letter was addressed to ‘Lancelot’, his father’s partisan code name.

  I was greatly relieved to receive word that you’d reached home safely and that the gunshot wounds to your chest and side are healing. You ask me if I can help you to fill in the blanks in the story of that terrible night in December last year, since your memory is confused. Not all the details are clear, but this is what I have been able to piece together. Some of it, I am sure, you remember.

  Early in the evening you were with Wallenberg when word was brought that the Arrow Cross were planning raids on several of the Jewish safe houses outside the ghetto. You set out with fifty of the simplified Schutzpasses that he had managed to have printed earlier that day. You were intending to hand them out in three of the houses where Jewish families without Swedish papers had taken refuge in the last few days. As you yourself remembered, you managed to reach two of the houses without difficulty. On your way to the third, in Deák Ferenc Utca, not far from the Danube, you were seized by one of the Arrow Cross bands who were roaming the streets during those last days while the Nazis still held Budapest.

  You’ll remember that the forced marches of the Jews had been stopped on 24 November, and there were no transport wagons left to ship them to the labour camps – by then the retreating Germans were using the wagons to carry off all our heavy machinery and raw materials they could lay their hands on. The Arrow Cross were rounding up Jews and anyone else they didn’t take a fancy to. After they had stripped them of any valuables they shot them and dumped the bodies in the Danube.

  As you hadn’t reached the last house, you were still carrying some of the Schutzpasses (we found a few in your pockets later). This marked you out as a ‘Jew-lover’ in their terms, so they kicked you around for a bit. We found someone who’d seen you lying in the road, being kicked in the head and kidneys by a crowd of the Greenshirts. Much of the bruising must have happened then. Maybe they got tired of beating you. Or maybe they saw some other victim. They shot you and threw what they thought was your dead body into the river. Our witness didn’t try to save you, because she thought you were dead, but she did send word back to Wallenberg, who raised hell with the authorities. They weren’t in a mood to pay attention, because by then they must have realised it was only a matter of days before the Russians drove them out.

  You remember what a terrible winter it was. The river was half frozen, with borders of ice building up around Margaret Island and lumps of the stuff floating downriver from higher up. It was the freezing water that saved you, as it saved quite a few others. Your wounds were frozen, the flow of blood staunched by the ice. The shock of the cold water must have revived you, and you managed to swim near to the bank just opposite my building. I knew that anyone shot by the Arrow Cross had to be a friend, so I pulled off my shoes and jumped in to get you. A couple of my friends gave me a hand to pull you out. It was just as well because I couldn’t have held on to you much longer. Cold! I don’t think I’ve ever known the meaning of the word before! Despite the shortages I’ve always been shaped like a tub of lard, and that probably helped me, but I don’t know how you survived. Though as I’ve said, I’ve heard since a

  bout a lot of other cases where the freezing waters saved victims of the Arrow Cross bullets. Perhaps it was our Danube protecting her own against those vermin, those Nazi Hungarians who would eat their own mothers if it suited them.

  We carried you back here to my parents’ apartment, stripped you and wrapped you up in blankets, and got a decent doctor to come and dig out the bullets. You regained consciousness on the third day, and the rest of the story you know.

  Copies of Freedom! have reached us here in Budapest. If you need distributors, you know where to find us.

  Your friend,

  Ferenc Kalla

  István laid the letter down on the table. The calm, matter-of-fact way in which it narrated the story of the attempted murder of his father by the Nyílas – the Arrow Cross – left him numb. The terror of those weeks when Nazis and Stalinists had fought over Budapest must have paralysed people’s normal feelings, so all that mattered was the bare fact of survival. The letter had been written nearly fifty years ago, and Hungary had undergone occupation, police brutality, Stalinist terror, civil war and the slow path to freedom during the intervening years. Yet people had survived. He wondered what had been the fate of Ferenc Kalla. The address on the letter he recognised as being in one of the elegant eighteenth- and nineteenth-century blocks overlooking the Danube on the Pest side of the city.

  Much had been made, in recent months, of confiscated apartments in Budapest being returned to their rightful owners after half a century of neglect, and of the difficulty the private owners were now having in trying to repair broken pipes and shattered roof tiles. He knew many such homes himself from his student days in Budapest and more recent visits – homes where electric wires in cracked and perished insulation hung in loops from ceilings, toilets would not flush and damp patches spread green tentacles across bedroom walls. Outside, the buildings were still beautiful, adorned with plaster scrollwork and caryatids, with balconies and doors of delicate wrought iron portraying beasts and fruits and ancient gods.

  Searching his memory, he thought that the address on the letter was one of the apartment buildings just down river from Petöfi Square – after the Belvárosi Templom, the oldest church in the city, but before Freedom Bridge, Szabadság Híd. Despite the bombing of the bridge during the struggle for the city between the Nazis and the Soviets, many of the buildings along that stretch had survived. Might this Ferenc Kalla have survived also? From the reference to his parents, it sounded as though he might have been one of the student partisans. István folded the letter and returned it to its envelope. He thought he might make a few discreet enquiries.

  * * *

  After they had returned the dinghy safely to the water sports centre, Tom said he was so hot that he needed to replenish the household supply of beer. While he went to the off-licence, Kate looked in at the bookshop. Apart from a customer turning over the pages of cookery books, it was quiet. The two downstairs rooms of the cottage, which now formed the shop, had been painted a soft green, with white woodwork and bookcases. On the dark moss-green carpet a few wicker chairs were scattered amongst the bookcases, so that customers could sit down and browse in comfort. Tom had viewed these with amusement during the launch party, his only visit to Harbour Steps Books.

  ‘I’m not sure those chairs are a good idea. People will come in and read the books here instead of buying them to take home. She’ll lose business.’

  Kate had shaken her head impatiently.

  ‘The whole idea is to make it as homey as possible, so people will come in and spend time here. Linda wants them to be sure about a book before buying it. She isn’t going to hustle them into making a wrong choice. They’re more likely to come back if they’re happy with what they buy. She’s going to offer them a free cup of coffee or tea if they spend a long time browsing.
And look, she’s made this corner for the children.’

  She pulled him over to a Wendy house and a group of miniature Windsor chairs arranged around a low table.

  ‘The children’s books are here for them to look at, or else they can play while their parents are looking.’

  Tom shook his head and laughed.

  ‘All very cosy.’

  Kate felt a spurt of annoyance at the patronising tone in his voice.

  ‘Not everybody is out to milk their customers of every last penny, like Crossbow Computers,’ she began crossly, but fortunately they were interrupted by Chris with a wine bottle in each hand, eager to top up their glasses.

  Coming in now, she saw that Linda and Beccy were behind the counter looking at some sheets of paper Chris was flourishing in front of them.

  ‘Look at this, Mum,’ said Beccy. ‘I never would have believed such things could have gone on in Dunmouth!’

  ‘What is it?’ asked Kate.

  ‘I thought I’d have a look through the newspaper archives, Mrs Milburn,’ said Chris. ‘To see if I could find anything interesting that I could use for a new feature I’ve suggested to the editor. You know: “Twenty Years Ago Today” or “Fifty Years Ago in Dunmouth”, that kind of thing.’