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Ferenc gave a subtle “let’s go” sign to his wife. The small, sturdy woman in her mid-20s with a pretty, well-proportioned face, wearing no other makeup than pale lipstick, leaned forward in the comfortable armchair, extinguished her cigarette and stood up.

The get-together they were about to leave was not pure fun. It was an official function where presence, if not required, was definitely advisable. Comrade Kovacs, secretary of the communist party organization at the Lenin Institute in Budapest, Hungary had initiated it. A discreet, early departure was possible because they were sitting with a few other people in the salon, isolated from the heated discussion that raged in the dining room.

Earlier, during the afternoon on this warm May day in 1962, the almost two dozen guests present in Kovacs’ luxury residence on Castle Hill on the West side of the Danube attended a court hearing and sentencing in Marko Street, the judicial center of the Hungarian capital. An instructor at the Institute who had failed to return from a conference in Frankfurt last year was on trial in absentia. He had asked for political asylum in West Germany. In short, he had “defected.”

Hearing that Magda and Ferenc were saying goodbye to everyone, including a German Shepard police dog that a state security man brought along, Mrs. Kovacs returned from the kitchen. As she accompanied them to the door, they could hear the unending remonstration from the crowded dining room.

“Heads will roll, rest assured.”

“I don’t see why! Peter Szabo had all the signs of being a good communist. He joined the party shortly after the counterrevolution. How could we know? He was a member of the workers militia, an excellent academic without family or money problems.”

“Who could prevent or foresee such a thing?”

Mrs. Kovacs, wearing a fashionable silk scarf around her shoulders, was not as disturbed as her husband. With a “so what?” expression on her face, she calmly remarked as she unlocked the door:

“Everybody is the master of his or her own fate.”

Peter Szabo received a three-year prison term in case he was apprehended.

The couple had decided to walk over to the Pest side where they lived.

Ferenc, just like Peter Szabo, was an instructor at the Lenin Institute — a pharaoh-befitting palatial building that served as the Budapest Stock Exchange before World War II. Magda was the daughter of a noted political figure. He fought in the Spanish Civil War and, barely escaping capture by Franco’s forces, had spent the war years in the Soviet Union.

When the Red Army extinguished Hungary’s bid for freedom in 1956, Magda and Ferenc still did not know each other. Magda never thought of going to the West. Ferenc’s story was quite different.

He was an English major at the Eötvös Loránd University during his freshman and sophomore years then switched to philosophy. Soon realizing that unless he specialized in Marxism, he could never have a decent teaching position, he jumped into Marxist-Leninist studies with both feet. But the deeper he penetrated communist philosophy the more he saw it as “a utopian fancy that substituted bureaucracy for the economy and terror for politics.”

“56” came during the Fall Semester of his senior year. This anti-Marxian disciple of Marx did not mount the barricades although, like all physically-fit college students, he had spent two summers in the boot camps of the Hungarian People’s Army. When the Russians re-invaded the country on November 4, he felt like joining the mass exodus to escape communist restoration.

“Yes, yes, it would be nice to get out,” Ferenc thought, “but what would I do in the West as a budding expert on “scientific socialism”?

True, his ability to speak English was a tremendous advantage. Go, not to go? His father encouraged him but not his mother.

“Why not wait for a better opportunity, Ferenc,” she told him with tear-soaked eyes.

“A better opportunity? Mom!”

He hesitated until December when the border with Austria was sealed off again. He tried and was caught; put on a military truck with two dozen other would-be émigrés to be transported to a “Home Relocation Center.”

Ferenc knew that if he allowed himself to be processed by the authorities he would have the equivalent of a police record and would be black-listed. His career would be over.

His ability to scale walls, jump, and march for miles was put to good use. The truck stopped at a railroad station upon the captives’ insistence on a toilet. Ferenc climbed through the men’s room window, jumped out and hid. Rain began to fall, there was thunder and lightning and the group ran to the truck that was covered by canvas. By the time the headcount showed that one was missing, Ferenc was far away. The first lieutenant in charge remarked only that he remembered the face of that guy quite well and they better not meet again, at least not at the border.

“If he wants to return home on his own,” he concluded the incident, “. . . he saved us a day’s meal and a train ticket.“

When Ferenc met Magda at a university ball the next fall, and found out whose daughter she was, he did not tell her about his little ’56 intermezzo. But by the time they were walking home from the house of Comrade Kovacs they had been married for three years and had no secrets.

They reached the Chain Bridge. There was practically no traffic and only a few people on the sidewalks. A gust of wind hit their faces. She put her arm in his and made a quick jump to fall in step with him.

Ferenc said casually:

“A two-week tourist package is available in July: East Germany mostly, but also three days in Copenhagen at the end.”

She nodded and squeezed his arm as strongly as she could.

It was a turning point in their lives. And like all historical events, even personal ones, it was both clear and dreamlike.

They got home and went to bed, but sleeping was out of the question. The night had lifted them on dark wings and with arms around one another they whispered in festive, defiant tones.

What they had learned that afternoon at the trial of Peter Szabo was that the authorities evidently did not harass the defector’s family. His parents, present at the trial, were allowed to remain silent on the advice of their counsel in order to avoid self-incrimination. (No one had doubted that Peter did say good-bye to his family before taking off.)

“I feel sorry only for Kovacs” said Magda. “First Peter, then us. . .”

“Don’t worry darling,” Ferenc assured her. “Peter’s case had already finished him. Rumor has it that Greczula will take his place but they had been waiting for the trial to be over.”

The rumor could not have been more correct. Greczula, an intensely disliked, ruthless careerist became the Institute’s party secretary. On the first day of his office he had called for an all-hands meeting. Without mentioning why Kovacs had to leave, he pointed out the importance of vigilance:

“Comrades,” he said, “the international situation is becoming increasingly complex. As Vladimir Ilyich had taught us, imperialism is the last stage of capitalism. Well, we may add that we are witnessing the death struggle of imperialism itself. The scales of history are turning in favor of the socialist camp led by the glorious communist party of the great Soviet Union. It is quite obvious that the imperialists are losing both the space race and the economic competition. Learning about our successes, while seeing the decay of their own, permanently crisis-ridden bourgeois order, Western powers are in a panic mode. In their desperate fury, they try to undermine the unity of working people in the socialist lands. Workers and peasants, conscious of their historical role in resolving the dialectical contradiction of capitalism in its totality, are immune to their vulgar propaganda, so they concentrate their efforts on the intelligentsia. This is the central point of view. As Comrade Kadar emphasized in his speech at the party conference two weeks ago:  ‘The working class needs to be extremely vigilant these days.’  . . . Vigilance, comrades, vigilance above all  . . .!”

Ferenc joined the burst of hypocritical applause.

After they signed up for the tour they feared that their apartment might be bugged. They met at the Magda’s workplace, the “Majakovskij bookstore and reading room,” dedicated to the Hungarian aficionados of Soviet literature.

Ferenc would take the bus and arrive at “Majakovskij” just as it closed.

Magda, a trained librarian, hated the job that the party higher-ups secured for her in deference to her father’s past in the “Movement.” Not only was the place ignored by the public, but most people walking near the establishment, located in the heart of the inner city, preferred the other side of the street. And no hour passed without hateful, searching glances through the shop window.

The couple would walk around while discussing their plans or have a cup of coffee somewhere before going home. Magda’s passport, stamped with the appropriate visas, had arrived in the mail two days ago, but Ferenc did not receive his. And it was already mid-June, only three weeks before the trip. Then there was some development, but not what they had hoped for. When they returned home one evening, their mailbox contained a letter from the Ministry of Interior Affairs, asking Ferenc to report at one of their offices at 9 a.m. on Monday.

What if they had found out about his aborted attempt to flee in 1956? What if they knew that, using his uncle’s address, he had maintained contact with Andreas, a childhood friend who had escaped to Australia? Before stopping the correspondence for fear of consequences, Andreas, a microbiologist at the famous university in Melbourne, had assured him that if he could “come out,” it would be quite easy to arrange a fellowship for him since Australian social scientists were very interested in “alternative economic systems.” What if by a horrendous coincidence, the same officer whom he had evaded at the railroad station would greet him from behind his desk?

And it was only Thursday. Four more nights till the interview. The next day he was scheduled to give a progress report to faculty, visitors from other academic institutions, and interested students on his research project: “Attempts of bourgeois economists to cover up capitalist exploitation: The Marxist critique of John Bates Clark’s neoclassical apology.”

Then, during the weekend he had to finish an article for the Marxist-Leninist Review that elaborated on Lenin’s theory about how and why financial capital becomes dominant over industrial capital shortly before capitalism collapses.

An intangible air of agony settled on the couple. Did their application attract attention to themselves?  Did someone in their respective families do or say something that spilled over into their political record? They roamed the city, their rushing minds associating every blemish they might possibly have with catastrophic scenarios of losing their jobs, ending up in a factory, a collective farm — pushing wheelbarrows at some construction site. Could the church incident have any bearing on their request?

About a year ago, Ferenc was summoned by the Institute’s party organization to a closed door meeting, where Kovacs confronted him without hesitation:

“Do you know that your wife attends church?”

“No,” answered Ferenc. “I cannot imagine  . . .”

“Well, last Wednesday someone saw her going into one, way out in the third district, in Old Buda, where probably she did not expect to be spotted.“

Silence.

“Look Ferenc, our constitution gives freedom to anyone to make a fool of themselves if they so desire. But you must understand that we, here at this Institute, are the guardians of Marxist-Leninist philosophy and cannot condone behavior in our families that perpetuates the mechanism that helped oppress the people of this country for a thousand years.”

”Maybe she wanted to look around, examine the architecture . . .”

“Ferenc,” someone said with a malicious glee “she was seen kneeling at a Virgin Mother side-alter, clasping her hands, deeply immersed in prayer.”

Later in the afternoon, one of his colleagues told him in confidence that it was Greczula’s 20-year old college student daughter, Klara, who turned in Magda. She was a police informer who took it upon herself to visit churches across town on weekdays to see “if she could catch a comrade sinning against atheism.”

“Greczula demanded your immediate dismissal,” the office ally continued in a low voice, “but Kovacs objected and, supported by the majority of the party committee, ruled to give you a chance to talk to your wife, who comes, after all, from an old communist family.”

Oh yes, Magda’s family could very well be another reason why the search lights of vigilance landed on the couple.

A journalist by profession, Magda’s father had joined Hungary’s underground communist party in the early 1930s. Later he fought the fascists in Spain in the 13^th international brigade’s Rakosi Battalion, escaping to the Soviet Union in 1938. There he had met George Lukacs, the legendary Marxist philosopher, who worked at the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow. This association may have saved his life. Lukacs and his coworkers were spared from the purges that had killed an estimated 80 percent of foreign communists who sought asylum in the Soviet Union. Lukacs was too well known internationally to vanish without a trace.

Magda’s father returned to Hungary immediately after the War, but he no longer professed to be a communist. Outraged at what he had witnessed in the USSR, he chose the path of peaceful reforms and joined the Social Democratic Party. He became an undersecretary at the Ministry of Education. The multiparty life was short-lived and when the high tide of terror came, social democrats were declared to be the worst enemies of the international proletariat.

During the spring of 1950, the doorbell rang in the wee hours of the morning. Four members of the dreaded AVO (State Security Authority) stood in the door. Magda’s father was taken away. He returned three days later, very pale and speechless. Eventually he told his wife and Magda, who was 13 at the time, that he did not want to discuss politics or public affairs ever again, asking them to convey this wish to visitors, friends and relatives. The man had received a small pension; Magda’s mother continued to work as an accountant, and the family could keep its apartment overlooking the Danube on the Pest side.

In October 1956, George Lukacs, already in the provisional government of the liberal communist Imre Nagy, visited the family, asking his old friend to return to the Ministry of Education. He never had the chance. Two days later the Red Army returned and the   “counterrevolutionary” government was arrested. Nagy and several members of his cabinet were executed. In 1957, Magda’s father was taken away for interrogation, but then there was a strange turn of events.

Once again, his fame as one of the founders of Western Marxism helped Lukacs to talk himself out. He also cleared the name of Magda’s father who, by that time, became a virulent anticommunist, encouraging Magda to find a way out of the “socialist camp.”

But back to Ferenc. Finally it was Monday!

At 8:55 a.m., he approached the front desk at the passport office of the Ministry of Interior Affairs.

“Comrade first lieutenant will see you immediately,” said the receptionist upon glancing at the letter.

“That will be the same damn first lieutenant! I’m lost!” thought Ferenc as he approached the indicated room, body trembling, beads of perspiration glistening on his forehead.

He knocked on the door.

“Enter!”

No, it was someone else, thank God! A man in civilian clothes stood up from his chair to shake hands with him.

“Please have a seat comrade. You have applied for a passport. Correct?”

“Yes, comrade first lieutenant!”

The man with a permanent smile on his smooth-shaven face nodded almost imperceptibly.

After a little pause, he asked Ferenc to tell him about his work. He listened attentively while Ferenc summarized his activities at the Institute. Then without any transition:

“Do you have any enemies?”

Now Ferenc had to smile as he wondered whether the question was to be answered by making reference to “class enemies” or the “imperialists”? The man followed his train of thought and laughed.

“So, you and your wife want to see Copenhagen” he said, as if thinking aloud.

“In addition to the German Democratic Republic,” Ferenc replied politically.

“And what happens if we don’t give you a passport?”

“Then I don’t go!”

That was the right answer. The man laughed again, pulled out the top drawer of his desk, took out a passport and playfully tossed it to Ferenc.

Once on the street, he realized that the interviewer hid so successfully behind a frozen smile and an occasional frightening laugh that he could not recognize him now, only a few minutes after their encounter.

Next morning, the couple went to the state tourist office to pay for the trip.

Only ten days were left until departure but their fear did not subside. Something could still intervene. They were especially afraid that Magda’s father, who in private conversations no longer hid his hostility towards communism and the Soviet Union, would say something to someone. Did that veteran survivor forget in his old age that there is no such thing as private conversation in a dictatorship? Did he drop a hint to his friend Lukacs, who, by 1962, was firmly ensconced in the favors of the Kadar regime? Lukacs had an office at the Institute and knew Ferenc, of course. One week before the trip the two had met on the stately stairwell. Lukacs was walking down, Ferenc was walking up. As they passed each other, the elderly philosopher whispered to him in a conspiratorial sotto voce without turning his head:

“Kafka was right.”

The tourist group was to assemble at nine o’clock in the morning of July 3d at the West Railroad Station, ironically next to a traffic circle named after Marx. The trick the authorities used to cut down on defection was to make the short stay outside the Iron Curtain fall on a weekend when embassies were closed. Of course, there was some presence in the silent buildings, leaving the door ajar for asylum-seekers.

The countdown had begun in earnest. One of the tasks on their checklist was to study the map of Copenhagen to identify the location of their hotel relative to the Australian Embassy and police headquarters in case they had found the embassy closed or unreceptive. Magda had contacts at the National Library and, after deploying some ruse, she got hold of a detailed map of Copenhagen and the city’s telephone book among the dusty back stacks. She made adequate sketches, wrote down street addresses and slipped out of the building to avoid the curious.

They both went on vacation starting Friday afternoon and everything seemed to proceed smoothly until Saturday morning when upon opening the Nepszabadsag (the Hungarian Pravda) Ferenc’s eyes were caught by the title:

“They accepted the consequences.”

The article reported that Peter Szabo, along with two other men and a woman, had returned to Hungary. Disappointed by capitalism, tortured by homesickness and regret for betraying the socialist homeland, they had accepted the consequences for their irresponsible, ill-considered actions.

The whole story sounded fishy and not only because of the customary rhetoric and propaganda. The description of the alleged return through contacting Hungarian officials in West Germany was porous and self-contradictory.

Later that evening the couple visited with Magda’s parents. Her father told them what he had learned from Radio Free Europe. Undercover agents posing as plainclothes West German policemen lured the four individuals from the hotel where the Red Cross arranged them to stay along with other refugees from the communist block. The West German government protested, the Hungarian regime claimed that the returnees had asked for protection and safe escort back to their country. How they were brought back had remained a mystery. If by car, they had to cross at least one frontier (East German or Czech) to enter the Soviet Block. Another possibility was that they were put into crates stamped “diplomatic” and were smuggled on board a plane operated by the Hungarian airline, MALEV.

Magda’s father was certain that Peter Szabo and the three others would repeat the party line in order to reduce their prison sentences.

This surprising episode did not discourage the couple but they knew it wouldn’t be a “cakewalk.”

On Sunday they said adieu to Ferenc’s family and Monday evening to their beloved metropolis.

Wading through shiny bluish puddles of light under wrought iron candelabra, they scaled the broad winding stone steps to the Citadel to take in the beauty of Budapest once again, probably for the last time in their lives. They looked across the Danube at the prominent quai on the Pest side with the Parliament, the vast space behind it, subdivided with centuries of meticulous toil; then one more glance at hilly Buda, the castle, and the Fishermen’s Bastion. Looking north, they could discern a dark mass that divided the river behind a strangely obtuse-angled bridge. It was, of course, Margaret Island, where they had their first kiss.

The venerable old city seemed to wave them an understanding farewell through the lukewarm, motionless air.

“What were you praying about when that bitch Klara Greczula caught you,” asked Ferenc, in a laughing mood.

“I prayed to the Holy Mother: My soul is pure; my intentions have been noble, I did not realize that I had been consorting with murderers, torturers, oppressors and hypocrites. From now on I want to live according to what my heart dictates . . .”

They closed their eyes and felt themselves already having gone far away into the inscrutable, exciting future. The long-sought treasure of freedom attracted them; their euphoria began to trump their pain, but Ferenc advised caution:

“Nothing is sure until we cross the frontier.”

Potential travelers to the West often got telephone calls from the Ministry of Interior Affairs during the night before their intended departures informing them that their passports had been suspended.

They could barely sleep and kept glancing at the telephone. But it remained silent, and by eight they were at the railroad station where a sign indicated the gathering point. The tour guide, a fluent German speaker, cheerfully introduced herself to every new arrival. “Was she an informer?” “Who else might try to defect?” Magda and Ferenc wondered. A mother and daughter duo had attracted their attention. The daughter was carrying a violin case. No one had asked the obvious question or made a comment and soon the train moved out of the station.

The first stop on the program was Eisenhüttenstadt on the Oder River. It was East Germany’s answer to the call from Moscow in 1950 demanding that every country in the Soviet Block should build a gigantic new steel mill. The town where it was located, or at least a section of it, had to be named after Joseph Stalin. One could hardly imagine a drabber and more suffocating place than this socialist model city. The sightseeing was a total bore and the tourists were back in their hotel by late afternoon. After dinner they gathered in a small bar where they obediently listened to a trio consisting of two accordion players and a drummer. By nine they had all disappeared in their rooms.

Around 10 o’clock, Magda and Ferenc heard conversation from the deserted street. Very carefully they peaked through the crack of the curtain. Two policemen were checking the I.D. of a young man who stood in a loose attention pose. Through the open window they could hear the admonition: “Why aren’t you home, Genosse (comrade), resting to face tomorrow’s challenges at the workplace?”

Then came Potsdam, with its historic Rococo palace, “Sansouci,” and magnificent museums. The couple marveled at how a defining moment in their life could live side by side with genuine interest in aesthetic pleasures.

After a few days in miserable East Berlin, the moment to flee socialism had finally arrived. The train took the tourists to the harbor city of Rostock, where a ship would ferry them to Denmark across the North Sea. Before boarding the vessel, East German border police studied every passport with arrogant, intimidating scrutiny.

After the group checked into their hotel in Copenhagen early in the evening, Magda and Ferenc went for a walk. In 20 minutes they were at City Hall Square, from where they could spot the avenue leading to the Australian Embassy.

The next morning, after breakfast, the tourists went sightseeing. When they spotted City Hall Square, the couple stayed behind as if preoccupied by something. Then they ran!  Direction: Australian Embassy. They got turned around on the way and Ferenc had to ask a passerby for directions in English. Characteristic of Danish hospitality, the man who was walking in the opposite direction insisted on accompanying them so that they would not get lost again.

The embassy was closed; they had to ring the bell. As soon as the man in charge saw that he was dealing with educated, well-mannered people who wanted to defect from the Eastern Block in order to restart their lives in Australia, he made telephone calls and soon other embassy personnel appeared.

The two were told what they knew already: They could not go from Copenhagen to Australia without being processed by the Danish authorities and that involved being arrested and spending about a month in jail while the Interpol investigated them in Hungary. Although it had remained unmentioned, the rationale was perfectly understandable. They could have been escaping convicts or communist intelligence operatives.

“If you change your minds,” they were told, “you can walk out of here and we won’t say a word to anyone about your visit.”

“And if not?” asked Ferenc.

“Then we will have to call the Danish Police.”

Ferenc looked at Magda, who nodded.

“Please make the call,” said Ferenc.

Everybody smiled.

The couple was arrested. The two plainclothes policemen drove them back to the hotel to pick up their belongings. That went without a glitch. The group was still not back from sightseeing.

After lengthy hearings through a translator, and spending almost a month behind bars (Magda in the women’s wing, of course), Denmark granted them political asylum. Thanks to the Red Cross, they were housed in a decent hotel that had been reserved for refugees. There they met the suspicious mother and daughter team again. The daughter was a violinist who did not want to leave behind her expensive instrument. They were headed to Canada to join family. Another man in the group also defected. (Thus, there were five out of a total of 20.)

Alertness was a permanent order of the day in the hotel. On the cafeteria wall there was a large map of Copenhagen, circles drawn around Soviet Block embassies. The tenants were warned not to walk near those locations and to stay in a group whenever they were outside. Although constant police surveillance of the area effectively prevented the trick that resulted in the kidnapping of four Hungarians from West Germany two months ago, everybody living in that epoch knew that communist governments had sly boots.

Those who wanted to settle in Denmark soon began to work in unskilled jobs, but the majority of the new expatriates had immediate plans to go overseas.

Andreas came through with flying colors. He managed to obtain a one-year fellowship for Ferenc and sent the couple airplane tickets as a loan. By the end of September they were in Australia, where the local association of Hungarian immigrants helped them make the new beginning as painless as possible.

During his year at the university, Ferenc audited courses and assisted research on the Eastern Block mainly by translating academic articles from Russian and German. He even had an offer to teach Marxist economics and philosophy in Papua New Guinea where students had expressed an interest in the subject.

But as much as he loved philosophy and academia, the idea of remaining a Marxist scholar repulsed him. Did he abandon his native land to end up teaching a credo he did not believe in, to spend his life with ideas that reeked of a perennial misreading of reality? That seemed more of a punishment than a reward for choosing freedom.

A consortium of multinational chemical companies had offered a two-year vocational training program to turn new immigrants with college degrees into technicians of industrial plastic production. Ferenc was accepted and upon graduating with honors, he found employment with one of the companies that financed the program.

Magda was working at a senior center as a combination waitress and cleaning woman. The work was not very exacting and she had the time to expand a meager bookshelf into a little library for the residents. Her enthusiastic volunteer activity had attracted the attention of the director at the local public library and soon she was hired there as a librarian’s assistant.

In short, the couple started well.

Their son, Thomas, was born in 1965. After that, life moved on an even keel. Whatever seemed as an intrusion had been chased back into the chaos of the external world. But by metabolizing the dramatic transition into rational babble, routine engendered dissatisfaction, especially in Ferenc.

His promotion to the rank of a supervisor did not do much for his self-esteem as he had remained subordinate to anyone with a degree in chemistry or industrial engineering. The thought had never stopped nagging at him that from a purely academic profession he had parleyed himself into a stinking factory, wearing a yellow hard hat, breathing poisonous fumes during the day, then going home on a crowded train to a distant outskirt of Melbourne to a low ceiling apartment crammed with simple furniture. The sight of his modest book case was salt in the wound. In addition, he suffered of daily acid reflux; stubborn phlegm lodged in his throat had made his breathing difficult from time to time. He regretted not accepting that teaching job in Papua New Guinea. In a few years he could have diversified into one of the several respectable philosophical schools that used Marx as a permanent reference.

The couple was homesick, and while knowing full well that they could not and would not go back to Hungary; they kept on dreaming about a sudden regime change there. First they placed their hopes in the Vietnam War. That faded, of course. But when the violent confrontation broke out between India and Pakistan in late 1971, they were convinced that that was it! Somehow, through a chain of events the conflict would spread, leading to the collapse of communism. They had no answer to the question “and then what?”

Some evenings when a whistling blast of cold air from the South Pole swept the streets, they wanted to scream. But they looked at Thomas and smiled.

In the 70s, they became Australian citizens. Going through the process and the festive ceremony with the “Pledge of Commitment” instilled loyalty and gratitude in them.

By the mid-80s their parents were gone, and having no siblings, contact with the old country had gradually tapered off. Seeing that Thomas would have a happy childhood and later a good education became the main purpose of their lives. Their old, worn-out European patience had been replaced by a brand new Australian one; they joined the proud and optimistic mentality of their adoptive land.

Magda was the first to reintegrate her personality. She became a full-fledged librarian who loved to go to work every day impeccably dressed. Gradually, a soft, supportive smile replaced her suspicious, searching frown.

For Ferenc it was photography that finally did it. He delved into the art of digital cameras to a point of obsession. They traveled to see Australia’s natural wonders and astonishing wildlife, and he would take pictures. Phillips Island; national parks, botanic gardens, fairytale caves, and mountains! Then they ventured along the Eastern Seaboard, seeing the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Queensland. Later they discovered the “West,” and finally the island world of Tasmania. A collection of Ferenc’s photos was published in an anthology that referred to him as an “Aussi” photographer.

Thomas turned out to be a bright boy of unusual dynamism and personal charm. He won a stipend to study in one of the country’s finest business schools but dropped out in the second year, asserting that he had already knew what he needed to know. With his friends, he established a commodity trading company. One of them had Chinese background and spoke three dialects fluently. The young entrepreneurs discovered that China was superabundant in rare earth elements — used in catalytic converters, medical devices, oil refining, with an unlimited horizon of further applications — whereas there was no “rare earth” mining in the U.S. The light bulb went on: “Hello! Melbourne is closer to Beijing than Los Angeles in more ways than just geographically. Let’s become the middlemen!”

“My dad wanted the reds to disappear from the face of the Earth,” Thomas liked to say, “but I prefer to get rich on them. According to Lenin, the capitalists are ready to sell the rope with which the communist revolutionaries would hang them. It looks pretty much the other way around.”

He married a lovely Australian girl and in 1990, their daughter, Amanda, was born.

The Soviet Block collapsed and the possibility of going back for a visit became wide open. Magda and Ferenc planned to do that in 1995.

They were considered the luckiest people in the world. Life on the payroll was winding down; their son was a highly successful businessman who bought them a brand new condominium in South Yarra, one of Melbourne’s most prestigious suburbs. They had a beautiful grandchild and expected more. Their marriage was a masterpiece of lifetime partnership.

“How charming they are,” people remarked wherever they went, sensing the romantic passion between them.

They felt more and more that their path was not freely chosen. They only followed their destiny, written in the stars a long time ago.

Then tragedy struck. Ferenc was diagnosed with lung cancer.

First it seemed that the disease had been brought under control. He took early retirement and stayed home, but soon his condition deteriorated.

His hair fell out, his skin turned yellow. With watery eyes, mouth turned down, bitter twitches running through his tortured face, his whole appearance became an eloquent complaint about the whirling mass of fearful sensations that accompany life’s bleak conclusion.

But at the very end, when he was closer to heaven than to his deathbed, his customary calmness and wisdom raised majestic waves that washed over the solitude of dying.

***

Last summer Magda and Amanda, a third year medical student at the University of Melbourne, went on a European tour. Budapest was their last stop. Magda showed her around. They walked by the apartment building near Saint Stephen’s Park on the Danube where her parents lived and she grew up; the place that she and Ferenc had abandoned on that early July day in 1962.

“Majakovskij,” in the heart of inner city, had been taken over by Christian Dior. The Beaux Art ex-Lenin Institute was in the process of renovation by a New York architectural firm. Once restored to its original beauty, it would become a premier business address.

While Amanda enjoyed the tour immensely, Magda became restless. The familiar had become so distant over half a century that it seemed weirdly unfamiliar. Why did she have to return? Old wounds came alive and aligned themselves with the heartbreak of losing her husband. She missed Thomas and was homesick for the protective womb of her everyday surroundings; craving the nearness of Yarra River, the Block Arcade, Collins — the whispered rapture of lush ferns when fingered by the east wind in the Botanic Garden: “I want to go home!” her inner voice cried out.

On the night before leaving, they walked over the Chain Bridge. When they reached the middle, Magda stopped and said:

“This is the place where Grandpa Frank suggested that we defect.”

The din of cars and the milling of passers-by faded away. Leaning against the rail, arms around each other, they stared at the water below, at the tassels of reflected light that remained unperturbed amid the endless flow of busy waves.

Amanda visualized her paternal grandparents as a young daring couple in love forever, and a teardrop fell into the gulf that separates past and present.

It was a rainy November day when Joseph Staufenval, attorney at law, noticed the blanket of suffocating pain around his waist. Dark sadness settled in his throat. He knew instantly that he was in the shadow of death. Although his was only 56, and seemed quite healthy and energetic, he had absolutely no doubt. Experience taught him to trust ill omens.

The office manager called for an ambulance, and soon the stretcher left the building amidst commotion and gawking. Not a single speculation or opinion could be heard, but the engines of theorizing worked at full capacity. What’s more, they all ran in the exact same direction.

At the university hospital in Washington, D.C., Staufenval was subjected to an extensive battery of tests. The next day he learned that his fate was sealed. A rare form of cancer, originating in the adrenal gland, had spread through his intestines. An elderly professor of medicine and international authority on cancer research closed the door behind him, sat at his bedside and informed him that there was practically no research on this extremely rare illness. The few case studies available from around the world revealed only that those who suffered from it had a short time to live.

A small consolation: The agony that accompanied the recurring spasms could be suppressed by a new pain killer. It was developed by the same pharmaceutical company that had an adversarial relationship with Staufenval’s law firm. Ironically, Joe was the lead attorney in the class action suit that victims of a cancer-curing drug brought against the multinational giant.

The pain was gone, and feeling quite comfortable, Joe was allowed to go home if he so desired. With his wife, Irene, at his side, loaded up with medications and instructions, he left the hospital.

The same evening a senior partner called him, relieving him of his duties — his full pay to continue. Irene found this satisfactory, if not generous. Joe had his own thoughts, which, for the moment, he kept to himself. The next morning, much against Irene’s protests, he went for a walk in Georgetown where they lived.

As he left his house, he ran into a neighbor who hated his guts. The man had lost a law suit involving a large sum of money to Joe’s firm. Previously, when they saw each other Joe felt uncomfortable and turned his head away. But now, he looked at this person with utter indifference.

He strolled toward his alma mater, Georgetown University, shielding his eyes from the sun’s blood-soaked glare. The intense mental activity of observing everything could not suppress the thought that his interior had undergone a complete change during the past 48 hours. His whole being had been displaced. He remembered once walking away from an open air concert on campus. At one point he could no longer hear the music, but the sound of brass instruments still kept slamming his eardrums with sorrowful incoherence. The music he no longer heard was his life.

He returned to his favorite bench — the one he used to sit on when he was an undergraduate. Over the decades he had found it a good place to tally things up, make important decisions.

“Let’s see, just what happened here: Today is Friday. The luncheon with Cliff took place on Monday.”

Clifford, also a lawyer by training, quit the practice a couple of years ago and started his own “private security service” company. He had asked Joe to meet him at a popular sushi restaurant downtown. When Joe suggested that the place was overrun during weekday lunch hours, Cliff assured him that he knew the owner and they would have a private banquet room to confer. He had something important to communicate.

Soon after they placed their order, Joe’s cell rang. It was his office. The senior partner who supervised him asked if he was alone. Joe understood that the exchange was to be privileged and immediately left the small banquet room with apologies to Cliff who signaled his unreserved understanding. Joe stepped out onto the sidewalk. He was told to return to the office before 3 p.m. The pharmaceutical company’s counsel had requested an urgent meeting. Probably they wanted to renew their request for a consent decree that would end the litigation. They had become very anxious since the Food and Drug Administration had revoked their “blockbuster” concoction, giving rise to much negative publicity, including damaging articles in the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times. As a result, their stocks had lost value.

On his way to the table, Joe saw someone leave the private room. When he entered, the dishes and drinks were already on the table and Cliff was politely waiting for him.

During the next hour, Joe learned that he was in danger. Under a solemn pledge of confidentiality, Cliff told him that the indicted corporate powerhouse had employed “strong hands to shake down those who threatened its interests.”

The “security apparatus” was not “in-house;” it could not be found on organizational charts. People doing the dirty work were layers removed from the visible business facade. Most likely the deepest insiders (the largest owners with generations of affiliation to the company) formed an “independent” front that would retain a private security firm with operatives around the world:  “These would hire the animals.”

“For the record,” Cliff added, “my company does not engage in such activities.”

Joe was not entirely surprised.

He told Cliff about two instances of mysterious whistling in garages, one in his office building one late Sunday afternoon, the other near the courthouse where a hearing related to the case was being held. Even if empty garages (or full ones without people coming and going) were not known from blood-chilling action thrillers, an invisible man whistling in a slow, persistent, intimate way carries the personal message: “I know who you are and I don’t like what you are doing.” The exact same sound heard for the second time becomes even more ominous.

Joe never told Irene about these incidents. He did not want to scare her or appear to be a ridiculous wimp. After all, not only hired thugs whistle in garages. Yet he had no doubt that the defendant was trying to intimidate him. Cliff fully agreed.

Remarkably, instead of frightening him, the whistled threats had infuriated Joe.

While it was doubtful that it would cure anything, the hastily developed and aggressively marketed medication had horrific side effects, resulting in hundreds of hospital admissions (dizziness, wild blood pressure fluctuation), several strokes, and even some deaths. Over the past 16 months, Joe had met many victims and what he had heard astonished and shocked him.

His determination to bring the “pharma-gangsters” to justice was reinforced when two employees of the indicted company approached him: A woman biologist who was involved in testing drugs on monkeys and a high-ranking executive. They both requested absolute confidentiality, fearing severe consequences if they were found out. They did not seem to know about each other’s whistle blowing, if their scared whispering could be called by that name at all.

Joe met the biologist at the library of Georgetown University Medical School. With beads of perspiration on her forehead, indignant to a point that she could hardly form sentences, she told him that the firm’s research policy was to find relief only for symptoms, never for the disease. Complete cure would choke off profit.

The executive, whom Joe had met in an off-the-beaten-track restaurant in rural Maryland, began by repeating his plea for unconditional secrecy. After being reassured, the man informed him that sloppy research procedures and falsified results were behind the fiasco. The firm was determined to avoid entanglement with the Justice Department at any cost.

The “source” also seemed to know that Joe’s law firm was inclined to wrap up the case with a quick settlement. That took Joe aback. His insistence that the drug-maker should not get off the hook with a civil suit had encountered only minor scoffing in-house. No one had raised serious objections.

As he sauntered homeward on weak knees, Staufenval recalled that a former Russian KGB agent was murdered by being tricked into ingesting radioactive material. Yes, it happened in London, in 2006, and the name was Litvinenko — his web search confirmed. Wow, also in a sushi restaurant! Why sushi? Perhaps because it is easy to hide hemlock among multiple fillings and toppings mixed with loosely packed rice? And, of course, spices hide the altered flavor.

He vividly remembered how Clifford’s eyes came together in a sharp focus when he asserted with the gravitas of a cheesy salesman that he did not engage in such activities –“No, no, no, not his firm!” Then how does a private security outfit become prosperous? By sending minimum wage night watchmen to slumbering offices and frigid warehouses? And who was that boneless, faceless man who slid out from the banquet room?  “He had to be the one who actually poisoned me!”

The next day, Joe sat on his bench again, watching a sparrow’s futile picking at the dust.  Students rushed by with the naive determination of somnambulists, pursuing their private little dreams. Once upon a time, he was one of them.

We go through life, he brooded, without noticing how romantic and elastic it is until that certain exuberance we did not even know we had crashes on a rigid obstacle, natural or manmade.

His youth had been full of false starts and unfulfilled cravings.

He studied violin until he was 15 and wanted to become a celebrated concert artist, like Niccolo Paganini. Then he wished to become another Picasso. He was barely 16 when his painting that showed a woman with two heads and 11 fingers on each hand, won a prize at a junior art competition.

Later he conjured up careers in politics, the military, or perhaps in the sciences, settling finally on the ambition to become a writer, perhaps a playwright, given all those beautiful actresses he could meet.

There was Linda, the pretty drama major! Between kisses, they talked about their complementary plans of success in the theater. She married an elderly state senator from Georgia.

Oh, those ancient lustful times, when he sailed through the perilous summer seas of his golden season with hunger for glory!

When, at the age of 30, Joe realized that he would never make it as a writer, he had gone through law school with the support of Irene, whom he married out of gratitude.

He was a so-so professional, never fully giving himself to his work. After more than a decade with the D.C. law firm he had remained a “long-term associate” without any prospect of becoming a partner.

The big change came with “the case.” The minute he understood that the complaints against the drug-maker were real, his veins thickened on his forehead. Suddenly his life had a meaning: “Go after the rotten sociopaths.”

He worked night and day, over weekends. Before, he and Irene had spent their summer vacations in North Carolina, in her mother’s house on Hatteras Island. Not this year. Irene went alone and stayed for months. She took a lover there, a retired professor of philosophy from Ohio. Her guilt-ridden chitchat amounted to a confession, but he let it pass. As during most of his life, he was somewhere else.

Irene could not have children and that was just fine with him. Until this moment, that is.

Now, on the threshold of nonexistence, his old desires and ambitions to rise from the colorless mud of mediocrity came alive and collided with his sense of nullity. He regretted everything he did in his life, except for making a stand against murderous greed.

The raging tempest of disjointed recriminations lasted for only a couple of days. As he fell into the remainder of his time, the past turned into an enchainment of rigidly foreordained events and lost its significance: Neither future nor past! His promenade through ineffable wretchedness had come to an end. Eyes closed, he turned inward, perceiving the reality of his life in its unsurpassable fullness like a glass filled to the brim — not a drop more.

On Monday, he drove to his other favorite place of solitary reflection, Roosevelt Island.

The second he pulled out from the curbside another car half a block behind him did the same. Its driver was a middle-aged man with a clean shaven head and gold-rimmed designer sunglasses.

Joe sat on a bench facing the Kennedy Center across the Potomac.

“What is life?”

The motionless noon gave no answer, only the pebbles glistened mysteriously after the rain, and a sudden gust of wind whipped up a dazzling arabesque on the river’s surface. Being in the world is absurd but this does not render death less incomprehensible. Anyway, what’s the use of harping on abstractions? Thoughts about infinity and the absolute always deceive us. They have no center; they cannot elucidate the present. A sudden stabbing pain in his chest that left him out of breath filled his heart with pride. By being in contact with almighty death, he became the representative of inescapable human reality.

A middle-aged man wearing sunglasses walked by, looking at him studiously.

“Who the hell is this? What on Earth do they want from me, kill me for the second time? Or perhaps they want to know if I’m talking to someone. My God, but of course, that’s what I should have been doing all along.”

He decided to walk into FBI Headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue the next day to make a private statement about the infamy and his suspicion of having been poisoned.

That did not happen. Lacking stamina, he no longer left the house. He just sat by the window and, surrounded by the somber aura of the morgue, buried his wrinkled face in his palms. He reluctantly lay down on his bed. Facing the wall, as if turning his back on this vile world, he succumbed in heroic solitude.

Legal action against the drug maker was settled out of court. The patients and survivors received token damages while the law firm raked in a munificent sum. Its senior partners were sweating bullets to hide this, making high-visibility charity donations left and right. They portrayed Staufenval as a failed lawyer who fell into the error of sensation mongering. The case should not have taken such a long time, they maintained, although whenever he came up in a conversation, which they invariably kept curt, they always said “he was a decent man.”

Helplessness is the mother of myths. The short-changed victims came to regard Joe their saint. Irene, most people at the law firm, and practically everybody familiar with the case suspected the coincidence between his sudden death and the consent decree that followed with lightning speed. They all kept their mouths shut. It is better not to get on the wrong side of the Invisible Hand.

The funeral fell on a bright Wednesday morning. The sun sparkled in all windows, on glass and metal surfaces. This is how heaven always celebrates the passing of a generous soul

Although I met his parents and his sister Cecile, Milan was not exactly a friend. Not a close one anyway. So, when I state categorically that what follows exhausts my knowledge of his deeds and fate, please take it for fact. I am not in the possession of any document, address, lead (domestic or foreign), or any other information whatsoever concerning music historian Milan D. Kunst or any other person who may resemble him.

After this well-advised motion of legal self-defense, let’s lighten up. The story, after all, has a happy beginning. It is 1989, a time when those of us who could never imagine the Cold War going away began to smile. It was also not a bad year for the Philadelphia Symphony and all the organizations, foundations, and the artistic community associated with this world-renowned orchestra. Music Director Ricardo Muti has just returned from a triumphant tour of the crumbling Soviet Union where he conducted La Scala’s musicians to the applause of Mikhail Gorbachev and representatives of Russia’s intellectual elite (including Andrei Sacharov), galvanized by the loosening ballast of communist dominion. The Symphony’s finances brightened up. All of a sudden there was money for everything, from urban beautification projects around The Philadelphia Academy of Music on Broad Street to research grants given for the asking. Milan received one too.

He had a master’s degree in music history from the famous state university located in Philadelphia and was on the verge of formally joining the doctoral program. He set out to study U.S.-Hungarian cultural relations as part of East-West tensions during the Cold War. His mother was Hungarian. He had spent months with relatives in Budapest and spoke the language fluently. As a credit to his finesse, he obtained funding for a project that would provide (based on preliminary agreements with his department chair and graduate advisor) building blocks for his dissertation.

I had three substantive conversations with him during the roughly two-month period before his departure for Budapest in the early spring of 1990. Lodging with relatives, he would spend a year there to conduct research in association with the Hungarian State Opera, the Franz Liszt Academy of Music, and the National Archives of Hungary. Some of his work would involve tracking down and interviewing individuals who were in contact with or were knowledgeable about the two central figures of his planned project, African-American singer, actor Paul Robeson and Hungarian born baritone Alexander Sved. He talked about these persons with great enthusiasm. As he put it “taking them together you get more than the sum of the parts.” By the end of our last conversation I got the idea.

You may recall the tormented life of Renaissance man extraordinaire and civil rights activist Paul Robeson (1898-1976). His performances in the title roles of Shakespeare’s Othello and O’Neil’s Emperor Jones were probably the highpoints of his professional history. As a singer he appeared in musicals and on concert stages; he sang Negro spirituals and folksongs in different languages. Less known is that, after he was allowed to leave the United States in 1958, he stayed for a while in Hungary where people were still stunned by “1956,” the twentieth century’s bloodiest armed opposition to communist rule. Paul Robeson went on record condemning the revolution. In public statements and interviews he reprised the main theme of communist propaganda: People egged on by subversive lies, broadcast through the antennas of Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, carried out a “counter-revolution.” Ultimately, American imperialism was responsible for the whole bloody affair.

“That must have been his low point . . . ,” I ventured.

“You mean besides moving back to Philadelphia?”

“Imagine, a victim of oppression condoning the oppression of others.”

After a thoughtful silence, perfectly justified by the three-Martini haze, we changed the subject and began to analyze the women in the lounge. Milan was a Lothario-class gallant. He came across to the opposite sex as a benefactor. Until I hung out with him, I never knew that someone could tell a beautiful young woman standing next to him in a singles bar “I’m not sure I want to get involved with you.” Now what? I feared an unpleasant remark or a burst of sarcastic laughter. Instead, she turned into a reprimanded school girl, lost in visible thoughts of self-doubt: “Why? Is it my dress, my makeup?”

Our penultimate conversation took place during a leisurely stroll through town. Milan talked about the other central character of his study trip; the legendary baritone Alexander (or Sandor) Sved (1906-1979). Following his debut in the Hungarian Royal Opera in 1927, Sved had a spectacular international career. (He performed in Vienna, Berlin, Munich, Paris, London, Rome, Salzburg, Bayreuth, Buenos Aires, and Rio de Janeiro.) After a short stay with the Chicago Civic Opera, he moved to New York in 1940 and joined the Metropolitan Opera. He spent the war years in the Americas and continued to perform with the Met until1950 when he made one big mistake: He went to Hungary for a nostalgic sojourn and concert tour.

By that time communist governments were firmly ensconced throughout Eastern Europe. In Hungary, Matyas Rakosi became the figurehead and the State Security Organization (AVO) acted as the main executor of a reign of terror and state hooliganism the likes of which may be observed today only in Kim Jong-il‘s North Korea. Most Hungarians knew that lips had to be tightly zipped. People perceived as enemies even in the slightest possible way (telling a joke about Stalin or Rakosi) disappeared in large enough numbers to make rumors of torture and labor camps, whispered among trusted neighbors and colleagues, credible.

Sved was advised by the U.S. embassy in Budapest to leave the country while the going was good. He was told that the communists considered anyone with Hungarian citizenship free game and, technically, Sved was a Hungarian. He ignored warnings until it was too late. They took away his passport and invited him to a meeting at the Hungarian State Opera (the former Royal Opera). There he was, in essence, coerced to feign defection to the “Camp of Peace.” In practical terms this meant breaking his contract with the Met and joining the Hungarian Opera’s cast.

“Sved burst into sweat and wanted to protest.”

“What made him acquiesce, after all?”

“The fear he detected in the eyes of his future colleagues.”

While some of those present, according to Milan, timidly repeated the communist party line, others threw in a modicum of patriotism (something like “Your country needs you in these trying historic times”).

“Looking at the downcast eyes, feeling the chill of mortification and mutual suspicion in the air, he knew that if he did not cooperate he would not be the only one paying a huge price. In the end, he was not really confronted with a rational choice.”

In a few weeks Sved became the “singing prisoner.” Gossip had it that he wanted to finish his scheduled concerts and appearances (instead of leaving with the first train for Vienna) because he was money hungry. Milan disagreed:

“Sved was too much of the trooper to break engagements, let down organizers, colleagues, and audiences. As a world celebrity with a stable position at the Met, he was financially well off. What would he do with a pile of inconvertible forints that he could not spend anywhere except in war-ravaged Hungary? Things were not that simple.”

Milan’s level of information astonished me. This was early 1990. Democratic rights had just begun to emerge in the former communist block. What I heard from him was clearly not available from print or broadcast media. (As a journalist intern in Philadelphia at the time, I was in the position to observe the rise of investigative journalism in post-Cold War Eastern Europe.) He guessed my curiosity and came forth with a surprising explanation.

For many years and until the end of his stay in Hungary in late 1956, when the Hungarian-Austrian border was briefly opened, Sved had a live-in-maid called Matild. Milan’s mother was related to her. I never understood the exact relationship but, as I learned later, they were both born in the same village somewhere along the River Tisza, and, despite the difference in their ages (Milan’s mother was younger), they were very close during the decade that followed the war. In fact, Milan’s mother, who joined the mass exodus after the Soviet invasion in November 1956, had begged Matild to go with her. Sved bolted out of the country at the first possible opportunity, leaving Matild alone in the elegant home. Unfortunately, she stayed.

No contemporary writer of action melodrama could conceive a more erratic and trying lot for a hard-working, honest soul than what befell Matild. Born before the First World War, she became a chambermaid at the age of 14. The Second War found her in the household of a well-to-do Jewish industrialist, the general manager and major stockholder of a considerable manufacturing firm in Gyor, a town on the Danube between Vienna and Budapest. The man was divorced and Matild became his mistress. Before his deportation by the Nazis in 1944, he left his earthly possessions to Matild who used the large apartment to save Jews. Her employer/lover miraculously survived the concentration camp and, upon his return, he married Matild. The union was short-lived. Just a few months before the Iron Curtain descended and the nationalization of factories (which involved, on occasion, the defenestration of “capitalists and their lackeys”) began, he traveled to London where his grown daughter from his first marriage lived. He never returned.

Disconcerted and angry, Matild left Gyor to join Milan’s mother who worked in a factory in Budapest. She was soon employed by Sved as a combination house cleaner, cook, and gardener.

They lived alone in a large villa. Their relationship, which by now, so many decades later appears somewhat comical, is characterized by the following exchange (based on a report published in the 10/15/05 edition of the Hungarian daily “Nepszabadsag”). After the departure of a man who paid them a surprise visit, Sved summoned Matild:

“You know who this man was?”

“No, Sir.”

“Then why did you let him in?”

“Because you told me, Sir.”

“But why didn’t you demand an ID before letting him in?”

“Because I don’t work for the police, Sir!”

“Did you get his name?”

“Yeah, some Thomas Nagy.”

“And do you know who this certain Thomas Nagy is?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Well, this certain Thomas Nagy is an agent of the AVO. He is a big fan of mine, and based on this fact he took upon himself to warn me that I am under constant AVO surveillance. They listen to my telephone conversations, open my letters; his office receives a continuous stream of reports concerning my person.”

“Oh, my God…”

“Oh my God what?”

“Then he too had a finger in the pie . . . I’m sorry, Sir.”

“Sorry, hah? Do you know my dear who rats on me?”

“No, I don’t know, Sir.”

“You, Matild, you!”

“This is not true, Sir, it is not true.”

“Au contraire, it is true!”

“No, it is not! Just the other way around, it is you who know everything about me. I don’t go anywhere during the day. How could I possibly . . . with whom and where would I communicate about you? To impute such a ghastly thing to me . .  It’s a shame. Now, really, Sir . . .”

Sved fired Matild a couple of times but he always called her back. As she told Milan’s mother “The great artist is totally helpless. He could not scramble an egg. He is my dependent. He misses me when I am not around.”

Discretion surrounds their degree of intimacy. Nevertheless, it became known that the two had long conversations deep into the night after Sved’s return from the opera. And, as the following dramatization (based also on published Hungarian reconstructions) confirms, their relationship was argumentative while always retaining Matild’s servant status. Sometime in 1954, Sved said with a sigh:

“You know everything about me, Matild.”

“I must say ‘yes,’ to be truthful, but it is still not true that I report on you, Sir.”

“Sure, sure. Then how on Earth do they happen to know that I sold my honorary tickets to the Hungary-England soccer game? You can be the only source, my dear.”

“Oh, how would they know?” replied Matild with hands on hips: “You announced it in the buffet of the Opera House. I heard with my own ears when you offered tickets on the phone. You even called the British Ambassador. The whole town knows about this. If you would excuse me for saying so, Mr. Artist, everybody knows everything about you. You are so incredibly transparent. But please, please believe me I am not an informer.“

Shortly after Sved’s departure in November 1956, Matild was murdered in the abandoned villa, a crime that remains unsolved to this day.

By now it has been confirmed that Matild’s protestations were sincere. She was not an AVO plant although she must have observed many particulars of the surveillance. Sadly, Sved, who once in the West, was debriefed and interviewed about his nearly seven years of life in Hungary (the source of reconstructed dialogues with Matild) went to his grave with the wrong belief. My hunch is that Milan’s mother, unable to get over Matild’s death, inspired her son’s interest in the Hungarian-related research project. She hoped to find out something about the reasons and circumstances of the tragedy. If so, the inspiration was in memoriam.

Mrs. Kunst died of cancer in the early 80s. She was divorced from her husband who escaped from Albania via Berlin before the wall went up. He changed his name to Kunst in West Germany and immigrated to America in the mid-60s, where he made his living (and by all appearances quite a decent one) from running an Albanian émigré organization and a network of social clubs in major U.S. and Canadian cities. Father and son got along well. (Milan was also fluent in Albanian.) “Kunst” was the only bone of contention between the two. He once joked that he wished his father chose Kampf instead of Kunst. He considered changing his surname back to the family’s original Albanian version.

Our last meeting began with cocktails and ended with another walk. Sved’s defection was faked, Milan opined, but the applause was real. The fortune he was amassing in inconvertible forints made him locally rich.

“Just think. With public acclaim, relative wealth, celebrity status … how long would any of us wake up every single morning feeling miserable, questioning the reason to live?”

“Do you mean he began to cooperate?”

“Yes, I suspect, inadvertently.”

“Did he buy the communist propaganda?”

“I wouldn’t say that. Like many others, he kept his political views in abeyance. Most people were not locked up in labor camps, after all, and there was a flood of delusive information about great economic progress. Just another 5-year plan, with emphasis on heavy industry, and shelves would cave and tumble under the weight of luxury goods in department stores named after Lenin and Stalin.”

“Agitation and propaganda coupled with fear worked for a while.”

“Fear and hope. We tend to counteract moral degradation even if takes a good dose of irrationality and denial.”

Somehow I guessed where he was going:

“Are you suggesting that if Sved was not a pure victim then Paul Robeson was not as bad as it seems …?”

“That’s right,” Milan concurred. “Tyranny turns victim into volunteer and volunteer into victim.”

He argued that a man with Robeson’s intelligence and worldliness must have arrived at the realization (explaining probably his subsequent physical withering) that his bitterness over pre-Civil Rights race relations led him down the path of becoming a worse victim than Othello. The mind of the Moorish General in Shakespeare’s drama was simply poisoned by Iago, the lying manipulator. But the Iagos in service of “real socialism” turned Robeson into one of them.

“Beyond Good and Evil,” I ventured. “But how does this relate to music?”

Milan stopped in the middle of the sidewalk for emphasis.

“That’s exactly the point.”

His exposition bristled with erudite references. He talked about Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, and Freud; how the discovery of irrational drives, the inconsistencies of human motives, will-to-power, and the chronic imbalance of mental energy reflect the emotional puzzlement and world-feel of anti-dogmatic modern music, the atonality of Schoenberg,  Berg, Webern; Bartok’s atavistic pulsations and unpredictable bursts of violence; the serialism of Boulez and “our fellow-Philadelphian Babbitt;” the provocative electronic nihilism of Stockhausen; the micro-polyphony of Gyorgy Ligeti (one of his favorite composers who, by the way, also fled Hungary in 1956).

“Precise melody and formulaic harmony,” he explained, “reduces behavior to an idealized model. Those who can readily believe that an individual is basically either good or bad, like the readers of Dickens and Balzac back in the first half of the 19^th century, are incapable or ill-equipped to access and appreciate the audacity of multiple harmonic planes, poly-tonality, irregular meters and offbeat accents; the barbarous and illogical impulses that endure in the human spirit.”

“You are not going to put all this into your study?”

“No,” he said, “maybe in the dissertation. But who knows. Life is one uninterrupted mental confusion, isn’t it . . . deformed melody and altered harmony. On the psychic scale, reason is not the dominant. Expect no resolution to a gravitational center. If reason characterized history we would be living in permanence, orbiting each other on set, non-intersecting paths like Newton’s heavenly bodies. Believe me, modern music is the true language of the human condition because the irrational is the quintessence of our existence.”

“And, so?”

“And so as Ligeti – you know the fellow who composed the anti-opera Le Grand Macabre? – once said ‘I cannot decide whether death is a tragedy or a farce.’ ”

With this humorous ambiguity we shook hands and went our respective ways. I never saw him again. The reason I can render his thoughts with sufficient accuracy here is that, as soon as I got home, I jotted them down, even looking up names and music-theoretical expressions that sounded Greek to me. When I heard that people incapable of appreciating modern music tend to divide individuals and actions into good or bad, positive or negative, I felt as if I had been slapped. Ever since that conversation, whenever I catch myself pronouncing verdicts so simplistically, I try to reexamine circumstances,, discover their complexity and avoid judging without listening to the internal voice of appeal, hearing from the witness-box of personal experience. (But with regard to music, I would still prefer Mozart or a good rock band.)

Sorry about that Milan, and also for what I am about to say: “I knew it! I knew it! I could have, I should have bet on it.” My hope for indulgence is with those criminal anthropologists who insist that physiognomy is destiny.

You might expect a library-dwelling music historian, a relentless pursuer of indolent academic sophistication, and esquire of polished taste to look like the superintendent of botanical gardens at a women’s college. But with a prominent, forward projecting jaw, high cheekbones, and hawk-like nose, Milan reminded one of a mounted robber baron of noble Anatolian descent, a roguish libertine warrior leaping ditches under the blood-stained flags of marauding rebels. And what do we get from the entanglement of deep spiritual and aesthetic strivings and untamed materialistic ambitions? We get “Arsene Lupin,” the gentleman burglar, a criminal with panache and some basic sense of honor.

The common wisdom whereby people crave for wealth and distinction glosses over the importance of the mix. It may well be that the altruist wants more status than wealth and the criminal, who represents by and large the opposite to altruism, is more concerned with what gold can buy than the social status it may secure. In these individuals, and I rank Milan one of them, wealth is decoupled from vanity and luxury becomes a birth right. To obtain it, with whatever means available, is nothing more than assuming one’s projected natural state in life.

************

About one year after we parted company near Rittenhouse Square, the telephone rang in the cubicle that I shared with another intern. It was Cecile, Milan’s sister (and as far as I know, his only sibling). Between sobs she told me that Milan had disappeared from his hotel in Rio de Janeiro.

“Excuse me? Wasn’t he doing research in Hungary?”

After a long pause:

“Would you please come over?”

Cecile lived with her fiancée and later husband. When I arrived at the door, she told me in tears that Milan had checked into the Hotel Palace on Copacabana’s Avenida Atlantico about a month ago, and then vanished.

“Who contacted you?” I asked.

“His girlfriend. Why are you grinning?”

I had to smile because once when I told Milan that he would eventually become a Benedick (Shakespeare’s young Lord of Padua who, after swearing to remain a bachelor for life, falls headlong into love and marriage) he answered that the only woman capable of breaking him in would be a Brazilian blond. (I told Cecile about this on a later occasion when I also learned that the girlfriend was a police officer of rank.)

On the late morning of his presumed disappearance, two eyewitnesses saw Milan heading north toward downtown Rio, instead of to the beach where he usually went that time of the day. The Brazilian police-officer girlfriend sent Cecile Milan’s diary, which had been found in his hotel room. I was allowed to read it (but not to remove it from the premises). I perused the diary and made notes after leaving the apartment, which was also Milan’s address until his departure for Hungary in 1990. (Cecile’s boyfriend/fiancé moved in after Milan left.)

************

Years passed, but the disappearance continued to bother me. The last sentence in Milan’s diary seemed to be addressed to me: “I wish that one day someone would delve into the gross shenanigans that occurred after the collapse of communism. A young, idealistic journalist who speaks Hungarian and had never lived under Soviet occupation would be the ideal person for the job. I knew someone in Philadelphia who fits these requirements.”

In the mid-90s I visited Hungary, a country whose language I speak, and, through the serendipity of personal contacts, I conducted about a dozen interviews with people close to the “Kunst affair.” I gathered sufficient information to piece together the broad outlines of Milan’s post-Philadelphia story. To repeat, the information gathered is “sufficient” as opposed to being complete. The sheer fact that I detected, on occasion, subtle stonewalling or polite manipulation by the sources of this report confirms my belief that Milan got himself involved in a dangerous, high-stakes financial gambit and lost control. The moral is simple for us average persons with modest needs and expectations in this life: Don’t insist on playing with the big boys.

To understand Milan’s fate, let us turn back the pages of history to the heady days when the world watched the eclipse of the red monster with incredulous relief.

Soon after the Iron Curtain fell (if not while it was falling), a window of opportunity to get very rich very quickly opened up in East European countries, formerly under Soviet boots, now respected members of the European Union.

State- owned enterprises were allowed to become joint-stock companies. Since the enactment of laws to this effect preceded full operations on reopened stock exchanges, shares could be sold through other channels, essentially controlled by a few individuals representing various state organizations. (The stock exchange in Budapest, shut down in 1948, reopened in June 1990 with small-scale experimental operations.) There was neither a complete legislative framework nor an effective enforcement mechanism to regulate deals and the better angels of national governance throughout the region remained silent out of concern for raising the specter of corruption, spoiling ongoing negotiations with Western governments, multilateral agencies (like the International Monetary Fund and The World Bank), or frightening away foreign business firms ready to bring in much needed capital.

Persons involved in suspicious deals were among the higher-ups and it was not easy to prove that they were operating unethically. Often they were friends, party comrades or colleagues, and criminal investigations with indictments would have caused damaging scandals if not daunting political crises. Such anxieties combined with the impossibility of distinguishing clearly between lawful and lawless deals resulted in public inertia. Transactions involving large blocks of “commercialized state property” went through and details sunk without a trace.

Not only was the playing field of financial aggrandizement uncontrolled and grossly uneven but it was also extremely sparse. People in general did not aspire to become millionaires. After decades of socialism, the ideal personal situation was a relatively well-paid job with foreign travel; perks such as a new dwelling given free by the state, a telephone, and permit to buy some Soviet-Block-made automobile (such as the East German Trabant, nicknamed the “up-engineered soap box”). When the starting pistol of entrepreneurship sounded, only a handful could move without the mental shackles of engrained imagery about the good life.

Behind-the-scenes financial machinations remained veiled from the public. The newly liberated press, still cautious about its limits and possibilities, lacked the culture of investigative journalism — the bane of corrupt statesmen in open societies. By the time elaborate mansions under construction and other visible signs of extraordinary wealth appeared, the window had closed. As suddenly as it had betrayed itself, the opportunity to fill purses big time became invisible. All that was absent from societies living by the rule of law became increasingly present. (Public sector employees throughout the EU, just as in the U.S., must file mandatory asset statements). Temporarily practicable proceedings became strictly extrajudicial, and, irony of it all, the strict enforcement of sacrosanct property rights made the bounties of ex-comrade-plutocrats legitimate and safe.

During 1989/91, foreign and domestic pressure was on to denationalize industry throughout Eastern Europe. Many state-owned companies initiated and conducted their own “corporatization,” engaged in what became known as “spontaneous privatization.” They issued stocks and sold them to Western business firms, often passing complete control to the buyer. (One company that took this route to private ownership was the Hungarian light bulb manufacturer Tungsram. In late 1989, General Electric purchased 51 percent of its shares for $150 million.)

************

In Budapest, Milan joined the network of classical music aficionados who were regulars at the Opera. As a trustworthy U.S. citizen of good social standing, with excellent education and manners, and an obvious talent for handling matters efficiently and discreetly, his social advancement was rapid. He frequented the homes of high domestic office holders and diplomats from other East European countries. There were rumors about a romantic affair with the wife of a deputy minister of defense. He deflected the noise by telling people that “she is like a sister to me.” (The diary mentions the family but there is no hint of any love liaison.)

All these dignitaries of the Soviet satellite world huddled together in feverish anxiety amidst the cascading disintegration of the “Ancien Regime.” They were ready to dispense unlimited energy and boldness; deploy wile and make use of back-stairs influence to transplant their privileges into the emerging social and economic order.

A large state-owned company that transformed itself into a corporate entity with marketable shares was central to the events that engulfed Milan. I tried to find out the name of the company but met with no success. Mouths turned into narrow slits when I ventured to ask if, perchance, the firm happened to be located in Gyor.

Let us refer to the state-owned industrial enterprise in question as Company X.

The scheme had five components: Top executives of the firm X, key office-holders in one of the pre-reform, semi-private commercial banks; and senior officials at state agencies in charge of overseeing the devolution of public ownership in industry and commerce. The fourth group consisted of national-level party bigwigs whose occupation during the socialist regime was purely political. They were most likely members of the Central Committee of the communist party (or held positions close to that level), above the fray of administrating the economy. They secretly formed a domestic investment firm. As public personas they could override possible objections of state agencies (part of the economic administration and, therefore, below them) against particular actions undertaken by their outfit.

Group number five comprised some members of the UN delegation living in Geneva. According to the information I gathered in person, amply confirmed by Milan’s diary, he was assigned to this group. After only a few months in Budapest, he traveled to Switzerland where his American passport allowed him to stay for 90 days without a visa. He became the general manager and treasurer of a “Western” investment company that would buy Company X’s shares. (Milan’s often chatty journal entries full of anecdotal slices of life and impressions never refer to the research task that he was supposed to accomplish under the grant that took him to Hungary in the first place. His involvement in the business at hand must have occupied his entire attention very soon after his arrival.)

Shortly after the turnabout, a semi-private commercial bank, like the one cited, was sufficiently sovereign to extend convertible currency-denominated loans. The domestic investment company (run by the paragons of anti-capitalism) borrowed such funds, probably in U.S. dollars or West German Marks, which it would then re-loan to the “Western” investment company that opened an account in one of Switzerland’s 24 so-called cantonal banks. (The schemers knew very well that the largest Swiss banks, despite the country’s famed, legally-enforced banking secrecy, are closely scrutinized by national authorities.)

Thus, the basic idea was to make the investment company buy the majority of Company X’s shares at their original very low forint price and “sell” it to the “Western” investment company again at a very low price denominated in hard currency. After improving the firm’s organization and enhancing its attractiveness, resell ownership to a bona fide Western business or put the shares on the global capital market through an independent broker-dealer. The profit derived from the difference between the ridiculously low, original forint price of the shares and their normal sale’s price would be distributed among the participants. The initial bank loan could be paid back quickly because the investment firm that transferred the borrowed funds to its bogus component would receive it again as a result of “selling” the shares. The investment company, along with its Western foil, would dissolve and all records would vanish.

A contract in a language that only the initiated understood contained the formula of distribution. It was drawn up and kept in the safe of a lawyer and joint tenant. Members of the group attached their signatures and swore to secrecy.

This ingenious bunch of light-fingered socialist gentry forgot to take into account only one thing: a fault line amidst their own ranks. Not that repentance or rekindled fear of justice or twinges of remorse (inexplicable coughing spells and dreams of black falcons or demons with sharp hooks at the dawn of sleepless nights) would have made any of them run to the police. Oh, no. The UN component that included Milan, who was indispensable in accessing the “Western” investment company’s bank account, simply decided to abscond with the borrowed funds.

The entire delicate operation may have involved as many as two dozen protagonists (not an unusually large number if we add up major shareholders, directors, and officers of a substantial business entity). However, it is hard to imagine that the Geneva contingent within the broader cabal included more than three persons besides Milan. They must have struck up a friendship — or some semblance of it — and decided that defrauding a racket is not only a forgivable imperfection but it would also remain unpunished. (It is possible that these persons, including Milan, did not actually sign the contract.)

Where would the other conspirators go to complain, to the Red Cross? Now, of course, if all this happened in Moscow or Saint Petersburg, there would have been shots from slowly cruising limos with one-way glass windows; dead bodies in three-piece suits on sidewalks. There were occasional murders, vengeful and coercive actions in the course of East European transition too. But compared to the blood-soaked convulsion that accompanied the foundation of mafia-style financial dynasties in the Wild East, the moral blackout that shadowed denationalization in today’s European Union-East would be best characterized as a flood of white-collar crime.

The bits and pieces of information I could obtain led me to speculate of yet another betrayal, one within the “Geneva Quartet.” After getting Kunst’s signature in order to clear the Swiss bank account, the diplomats may have decided to get rid of him. How could they do it? One possibility is that they set the country’s intelligence service on him, proving that he had committed a major economic crime against the homeland. During the Cold War, East European spy organizations (“brotherly organs of the KGB”) did have the capability of dispatching individuals (Bulgarian agents fired poisoned darts into political dissidents walking around London under the false impression that they were safe). Why would East European countries rush to dismantle such capabilities as the Cold War was winding down?

This solution allowed the “Geneva Trio” to blame Milan for the disappearance of funds.

The semi-private commercial bank that extended the loan to the domestic investment firm was still not private enough to live with the consequences of its actions. Allocation from the state budget would cover the hole left in its assets as a result of the bad loan, meaning that the domestic components of the plan did not incur the loss of even one forint.

How relations between the “Geneva Trio” and the rest of group evolved is an open question.

***********

I felt sorry for Milan. He became the victim of his reckless vaulting for the mega-buck, a life of super-splendor — Icarus flying toward the sun with wings of wax and feathers. Although I have a perfect explanation (a sort of biological determinism), I still ask myself: Why couldn’t he become a respected college professor or a noted music critic? So what if you walk around with chalk stains on your coat sleeves and have to fly in coach? At least you are alive and can savor the sweet nectar of youthful pleasures for decades. You don’t need to check into Copacabana’s most expensive hotel in order to dance extreme samba with bikini-clad Brazilian beauties. There are travel packages . . . Besides, isn’t it repulsive to be stuck for life in a milieu of deceitful, semi-illiterate, dimwitted worshippers of Mammon?

Alright, alright, I got carried away. Sour grapes! Let me look calmly at the illusions and simplifications that hide in the sediments of my own consciousness. Yes, I would also like to enjoy the impeccable cleanliness and profuse catering of five-star hotels. Yes, I would like to be among those who are called to board the aircraft first; to dine in exquisite restaurants and meet important people. And, of course, we all know that famous actresses and glamorous women would never go on dates with a poor Joe like me who eats his corned beef sandwich in front of a screen saver showing the fancy woodwork of London pubs.

Upon completing my internship in Philadelphia, I moved to a small town in the South, where I became a full-time reporter covering the fire department, zoning board, real estate, local court, and high school sports. (I write things like “The woman who spat on the county sheriff’s wife on the parking lot of Wal-Mart was sentenced Monday to 10 days community service” and the “Loss to the Beulah Pistons in a heart-pounding finale during their last home game of the season dimmed conference chances for the Hillsboro Tigers.”)

I do not complain. My living conditions are good, I am surrounded by decent people, and the work is more challenging and satisfying than you, dear reader, might first think. But still, I readily admit that I long for something more (call it “wealth and fame” if you must) and I know very well, if I just stop and think for a second, that the blanket generalization about the wealthy being worthless in a non-materialistic sense is eminently flawed.

Let’s face it; most of us would like to escape mediocre conditions that seem pretty shabby when compared to life in the “palace-castle-chateaux” circuit. Wouldn’t you like to be at home in the Ritz of London and Paris and cruise for weeks in the first class of QE2?  I, for one, would love that life, but not if the price was to be lured into an ominous-looking black car by cauliflower-eared goons on my way from the beachfront to downtown Rio; taken to a secluded building; injected with a lethal mix, and after becoming bubble-eyed and displaying crimson blotches on my skin, chopped up by meat cleavers, put into plastic bags, and thrown into one of Rio’s overflowing landfills.

No sir, it’s not worth it!

************

Recently I returned to Hungary once again and had a long conversation with a history professor who lived through the ignominious dissolution of Marxist utopia. He listened attentively — a burned out cigar stub in the corner of his mouth — to my question, which proved to be ill-informed and naïve:

“Are people still mad at Paul Robeson for calling 1956 a counter-revolution?”

“Mad at Robeson? First of all, he was only one among many international personalities who were so enamored of communist idealism that they slavishly repeated official propaganda. Even then Hungarians understood this clearly. They were happy that famous artists visited the country at all. They felt depleted and abandoned because they lost so many talented people through emigration.

“And second . . .?”

He answered slowly and with great conviction:

“You guys living in far away America did not grasp the essence of transition from socialism to capitalism, did you?”

“? ? ?”

“People who called the revolution a counter-revolution before 1989 have since then been elected democratically to high offices.”

After digesting this, I timidly asked:

“And do folks still remember Sved and the terrible thing that happened to him?

“Sure. Some do. There has been some research about his life and times, but if you look at the CD jackets of his recordings or read descriptions about his appearances you will find only the list of honors the Rakosi regime bestowed on him.

“No commiseration or apology?”

“Nope. Sved lived and performed in Hungary from 1950 to the end of 1956. The rest of the story? Not many care anymore.”

What I learned next I found even more amazing. The professor assured me that most of those who became personally rich as a result of privatization through what I have labeled conspiracy, plot, or scheme did not believe for a moment that they were deceiving or harming the public. They thought they were simply entrepreneurial.

State property, which was augmented significantly by economic growth since nationalization in the late 1940s, had to go to some people other than the former owners under the rather sparse restitution programs voted in by national assemblies. Self-organized units of new owners, harnessing extant circumstances was the only way by which capitalism could be restarted. Attempts to create enterprise-based ownership (where every employee gets an equal share) and the egalitarian distribution of stock entitlements (vouchers) among citizens, tried in various forms throughout the region failed to revitalize sagging socialist industries. In the end, the most resourceful individuals with the best understanding of and easiest access to institutional controls over public property plucked the fruit that would not have fallen in their laps.

While East European societies apparently accept this rationalization, some residual suspicion and blame still lingers, awakening reactions that range from violent outbursts to polite resignation and everything in-between. Indeed, one may ask, how can individuals who preached the moral purity of socialism and considered private property theft one month stuff their pockets with millions from the communal cookie jar in the next, and keep a straight face? Are they not ashamed?

Bring the bloody deeds of Shakespeare’s Macbeth or Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov down to the level of incorporated governance (white-collar crime) and you will still find that an inner authority, which we can neither silence nor lose, shadows our every move more closely than the AVO ever watched and followed Sved. Perhaps self-condemnation and punishment is milder than Macbeth growing mad and Raskolnikov, who becomes choppy and lightheaded, flirts with the police until, to his great relief, he is arrested and charged with murder and robbery. But as so many great artists, scientists, and philosophers have shown and explained, and as all of us who had ever experienced involuntary self-punishment know very well, our conscience is our innate, custom-tailored, vigilant authority. As long as the perpetrators of fictitious deals and gross falsifications regard their conduct and handiwork as sinful, their crimes will remain punishable because they consider themselves accountable to justice.

Upon hearing my allegorical meditation about filthy business deals and unavoidable guilt that must – like unaccomplished fate – hover over those who engaged in them, the professor answered with a story.

Back in the 70s, one of his high school mates distinguished himself as being destined for a great political lifework. He was the school secretary of the League of Young Communists (the youth movement in Hungary, which was similar in concept and organization to the Komsomol in the USSR). He got the rhetoric down pat and talked about the superiority of socialism over capitalism. He walked around with volumes of Lenin under his arm in the hallway, saying things like “You either have a socialist or a capitalist heart.” Teachers, even the school principal, were afraid of him; they considered his opinion — which he expressed as if he alone represented the lofty goals of the international proletariat and world revolution — a factor whenever they made decisions affecting the student body.

“Here is a curious thing: We, his fellow students were not afraid of him. Being of the same age, we could sniff out the ruse. His opinions in matters of policy, which the school administration had to heed, were somehow in our interest as students, always on the prowl to ease the load and remove restrictions. He even confirmed our suspicion that he used ‘commi’ rhetoric and mannerisms to intimidate the grown-up powers-that-be by winking at us after delivering an opinion. Although he must have overheard remarks about the Soviet Union, 1956, and jokes galore about our rising living standards soon after the next five-year plan, he never informed on anyone.”

“What happened to him?”

“He studied political science at the University of Economics. He was very bright. Had the regime change not happened, I’m sure he would have ended up in the top echelons of the party. But ’89 came and guess what he does now? He owns a multimillion dollar export-import company, has a newly-built mansion on Rose Hill (an exclusive residential district on the Buda side of the Danube), and drives a Bugatti Veyron.

“Does he talk to you at all?”

“Oh yes, he comes to class reunions and picks up the check for the entire old-boy gang.”

“Does he talk about socialist and capitalist hearts anymore?”

“Politics? Never! He is proud of providing employment for a hundred people. He says he helps improve living standards by importing quality products at affordable prices; he bolsters the national economy by opening up new export markets.”

“You mean his conscience is clear.”

“It is.”

“Just for the sake of argument,” I suggested, ”what would he say if you confronted him with this? But comrade, you live off profit. Didn’t you call profit ‘expropriated surplus value’ just a few years ago? Is this where the victorious struggle of workers and peasants (in close alliance with the progressive intelligentsia) has led us, to the usurpation of the commons and damaged social protection; communist ideologues, organic products of the  class struggle becoming pillars of a bourgeois republic? Would Karl Marx be dismayed! I can see him looking at Das Kapital on his desk, hitting it with his fist, while yelling ‘Damn! That’s not how I imagined human nature!’ What would he say to that?”

“He would laugh.”

“Heh-heh?”

“Heh-heh.”

“And what would be your answer to that?”

“Heh-heh!”

“Would you elucidate the deeper meaning of this penetrating intellectual discourse?”

“Society-wide transvaluation in the interpretation of reality, my friend, if you want a fancy diagnosis of what happened in this part of the world during the past two decades. Look, this fellow had always been an entrepreneur, but his creative talents were stymied and distorted by socialist institutions. The regime change simply redirected his gifts and rich blood to the market place. The very same guy would have prevailed in America’s 19^th century’s Wild West or become a bishop, had he chosen the field of ecclesiastic endeavor.”

“I understand that he wants to laugh up his inconsistency. What I don’t get is why you all go along with it. I hope it’s not because he picks up the check.”

“His generosity is an expression of personal guilt — no doubt about that. It may even be a form of apology. But there is more. He is not the only one who changed. The whole society did. We had to adapt to the ‘people’s democracy’ if we wanted to get an education and a decent job, and adaptation rubs off on the individual.”

“There is something shared between the oppressed and the oppressor?”

“Something? Oppressed and oppressor under both fascism and communism became bundled into one fortuitous skein. Your political consciousness, my friend, is full of illusions . . . .”

“Maybe so, but I still don’t get why you allow him to laugh up his past. He did get ahead of you under false pretenses. He intimidated you and his entire environment for years.”

“Certainly. But keep in mind that he never injured anyone then and now he is beneficial to society. He takes risks and provides employment. He and his likes got the stuff that made it possible for Eastern Europe to join the EU and become part of free-market-based, liberal democratic modernity.”

“Well, if society has made your former classmate’s conscience burden-free then, in my estimation he has committed the perfect crime.”

“Some people think your way all the time and most people think that way some of the time. But when it comes to telescoping average attitudes through electoral politics, the fallen regime is redux; it keeps on breathing in the shadows of our minds.

“Explain! Please.”

“Before the turnabout it seemed that socialism would never go away, and, therefore the next best thing was to try, at least, to reform it. That meant acceptance in one way or another. There was mute assent, unvoiced, whispered, or maybe even denied among family members or close friends; and there was the in-your-face, boisterous, chest-banging embracement, complete with red-star-adorned Lenin chapeaus. There was a big difference between the two patterns of self-conduct, yet they were bound together by a shared understanding of the main underlying circumstance, the overpowering, radical presence of Soviet occupation. From forced symbiosis came some measure of common interest, from that a complicity and cooperation in maintaining clear rules for the game of personal interactions, competition, and advancement. And so, my friend, through the daily intercourse of civil society, the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ reinforced itself, appearing as eternal to the majority of our population as Euclidean geometry. Of course, all this became clear only after we began to look backwards, sometimes with incomprehension, sometimes with shame, and sometimes with nostalgia. Yes, nostalgia because we were young back then and even memories of light-heartedness are embedded in the behavior and common places created by social institutions. Consequence: Most social scientists, artists, writers, and people in the media — in other words, those who express public thinking and shape the opinion of the masses — could not condemn the ex-socialist “nouveau riches.” They could not brand them as a bunch of chameleon-like apostates without appearing to be strikingly at odds with what was known about their own pre-1989 words and activities. The hypocrisy of editorialized damnation would have been flatly obvious to everyone. Yes, my friend, reality hereabouts is that both the individual and society evolved in certain ways during the socialist decades . . . and evolution is path dependent . . . history matters . . . whatever we do now or will do in the future cannot be done independently from what we have become in two generations.“

“What’s the lesson for us in the rest of the world? What stones has the collapse of the Berlin Wall brought to the edifice of human spirit?

“The rolling disorder of democracy with its ugly conflicts and glaring injustices is still better than the fixed idea of a select group becoming institutions, as under any totalitarian regime, gradually degrading the community and infecting its mental health with unrealistic obsessions. And, if you don’t mind my saying: What you call ‘the edifice of human spirit’ is a dark, impenetrable enigma.”

“Is this a prophecy of doom?”

For the first time he looked me straight in the eye.

“No, it’s a celebration of bad conscience . . . our unspoken hope.”

I remembered my last conversation with poor Milan when he tried to impress on me that things are never purely black or white. While Othello-turned-Iago broke down, Sved, the innocent victim, became confused. His inner judge, unable to create harmony between deeply held beliefs and values and the ones that were needed for immediate survival, became a cagey fence-straddler and hung out the sign: “Court adjourned for deliberation. Do not disturb!” But who could, in good conscience, allocate praise and blame between the two individuals more than half a century later?

After observing the vagaries of personal lives and unexpected turns in the theatre of history over the years, I am beginning to see why modern music’s wickedly disturbing sounds of dissonant metallic screeches, weeps, moans, and heartbeats from deep space; the alternation of earsplitting crescendos and shades of silence reminded poor Milan of the inexplicable series of prodigious adventures the philosopher calls “being in the world.”

************

Dear reader, I think I know you well enough by now to tell you what compelled me to go public with this story.

A few days ago I traveled to Philadelphia and visited with Cecile. She lives with her husband and two children in a multimillion dollar home on tree-lined Delancey Place near Rittenhouse Square. (The sumptuous elegance of the interior made me absolutely confident that their house was not purchased with a teaser loan and is now not menaced with foreclosure.) We chatted up a storm about old times and new ones, and, of course about the ones yet to come; we laughed and turned serious, then laughed again, but we never mentioned the name of Milan. If she does not bring up the subject, I thought, why should I remind her of the painful wound in her heart? Our encounter was utterly conventional — until the last minute, that is. As we said our goodbyes at the door (when I feared the most that she might just break down or at least become teary), I detected a distinct smirk on her face. Was it contrived? I don’t know but it certainly achieved one thing. In a split second my mind shed the “poor” from Milan’s name. The conviction that he was an unwitting victim, a martyr of his rapacious appetites became suspended.

Later that day, out of sheer curiosity, I walked into the office of the foundation that gave him the grant in 1989. They call themselves an “endowment” now and are very polite with visitors. (They probably never know who is about to make a tax deductible contribution in support of the arts.) The PR officer invited me into her office and offered coffee. After glancing through a folder that she took from a safe drawer, she told me in a satisfied tone that, shortly after Milan’s disappearance, the grant was fully refunded and a sizeable contribution was made in his name.

Hey, I thought, this reminds me of someone I knew; a guy who left his credit card with the bartender long before I declared my intention to pick up the tap for the martinis … and that smug, condescending leer on Cecile’s face … Have I just caught sight of the white plume of a long lost horseman, heard one or two hollow hoof beats from the ghostly plains of sinking time?

“In whose playful hands are we?” (Rainer Maria Rilke)

It was early dawn — a little after three — when the young prostitute began to walk homeward in the relentless drizzle. Bitter and mortified, she shivered and pulled the collar of her raincoat tighter. Pain over her humiliating lot was no longer a coherent thought. It just filled up her interior with the weight of aimless brooding.

Wanting to reach her one-room apartment as soon as possible, she sped up her steps, carefully balancing herself on the wet, uneven cobble stones of this sadly neglected Transylvanian town.

She fumbled in the dark for the keyhole then entered the moist kitchen. The voices of men heard from inside lost none of their raw brutality across the closed door. No peace even at home! Gritting her teeth, she stepped into the thick cigarette smoke and smell of brandy.

At the table two men played cards, her ex-convict lover Vladimir and a pock-marked man with heavy muscles bulging under his jacket. Her arrival was barely noticed.

Agnes threw her coat on a chair and sat on the edge of the bed. First she put her elbows on her knees and then just allowed her arms to dangle between them. She leaned forward, head bowed — a strand of wet hair across her painted, debauched face — the deep decolletage of her dress allowing a clear glimpse of shapely, youthful breasts.

Without lifting his head from the cards, Vladimir addressed her:

“Join the game, Agnes.”

“I don’t want to,” she answered glancing malevolently at the two men.

After taking a swig from his bottle and a long drag from his cigarette, Vladimir said casually:

“Yet it would interest you. This man, Sergei, from the traveling circus, already took all my money, now you are the bank.”

Agnes lifted her head and looked at the man in wonder.

“Rotten pigs!” she mumbled.

The petroleum lamp cast a deadly yellow glow around the filthy room. The rain continued to knock on the window. As the two men slammed one card after another, Agnes nervously tightened her dress and furrowed her eyebrows. Nothing made any sense anymore. She wanted to die.

Vladimir threw down his remaining card and hit the table with his fist:

“Undress Agnes, I have lost you!”

She straightened herself, eyes burning with the bitter fire of hurt dignity.

The man from the traveling circus observed her with undisguised sarcasm.

“This is not a joke,” bellowed Vladimir, “that was the agreement.”

Agnes did not move.

“Don’t be tasteless, Vladimir!” she whispered in a begging tone.

Vladimir stepped up to her and slapped her face with hateful force. Her nose began to bleed. She looked with helpless despair at the man from the traveling circus who said very calmly in Russian:

“Ne nado! (Not necessary!)

He then told Vladimir that Agnes would go with him. Vladimir seemed to protest but the menacingly quiet demeanor of the bulky man had convinced him that acquiescence was in his best interest.

As the two stepped into the grey, wet autumn morning, the man said:

“I’m Sergei.”

“Agnes,” was the answer and the two shook hands.

Two months later they were married.

Sergei was 27 at that time.

When the Russian revolution engulfed his native Moldavia earlier in the decade, making it into a Soviet republic, he escaped to Romania where he joined a famous circus as an “Untermann” — the name given to the strongest acrobats who held up the agile ones. But drinking cut his performance career short. In the end, he was glad that the circus kept him as a member of the “tent crew.” In that capacity, he became a skilled carpenter and locksmith, trades that he could legitimately claim in his applications to emigrate to the United States. The application, filed in 1924 in Bucharest, was approved in 1928.

At the feet of Lady Liberty on Ellis Island, the immigration official took a glance at Sergei’s hopelessly long family name, written in some unpronounceable East European language, and he had made an offer that was not meant to be refused. “From now on you are John Smith,” he said. The name was written into the documents, stamped, and the official turned his attention to the next arrival.

The “Smiths” settled in the lower East Side. While Agnes worked diligently in a textile factory, “John” chose a very different path; he joined a gang that ran a bootlegging operation in Hell’s Kitchen.

By the summer of 1932, it became obvious that no matter which party won the presidential election in November, the speak-easy business, the mainstay of gangster profit at the time, would end.

All hell broke loose also in Hell’s Kitchen as different crime organizations encroached into each others’ territories for the last minute grab. “John Smith” was lured to the bank of the Hudson River and was shot in the head by rival gang members.

Agnes raised their only child, a daughter called Natasha, alone. No longer wanting to be known as “Mrs. Smith,” she assumed her German maiden name Roegen, which, at the urging of everybody around her was simplified into a better sounding, easier-to-spell “Reagan.” No one really knows how she survived the high-unemployment years as a single mother with a small child, but the fact remains that she never had a police record.  She remarried during the war and worked until her death in 1970.

In 1950, Natasha married John MacCulloch, a man 20 years her senior. When he announced his intention to turn a penniless beauty without college education or social standing into a MacCulloch, his family was understandably perturbed. They belonged to the highest stratum of New York society, where the ticket of admission had no dollar price.

Shortly after their son, Nigel William, was born, John divorced Natasha. Just like her mother she also had to raise her child alone, although under very different circumstances. Not only did Agnes help but the MacCulloch clan never abandoned her. She received monthly payments from an elderly aunt of John’s.

Natasha remarried but Nigel could never warm up to his stepfather, a Mexican businessman from New Jersey. And eventually, he got close to the MacCullochs who put him through college and Yale Law School. At age 61, with a family of his own, he is the executive director of New York’s most prestigious art foundation.

Natasha inherited Agnes’ diary and when his mother died early this year, Nigel came into its possession. He had it translated from a mixture of German and Romanian.

He kept the contents to himself.

What purpose would it serve to have an exchange like this in an exclusive social club?

“So your grandmother was a descendent of German settlers in Transylvania and your grandfather was a Russian, living in Moldavia. How fascinating! How did they meet?”

“Well, my grandma was a prostitute and grandpa won her in a card game, called Schnapsen.”

When he heard –

“So what’s your heritage Nigel, Scotch and Irish?”

He would answer –

“Yes, and perhaps also a little German.”

Agnes dotted on Nigel. She took him to the circus at Madison Square Garden, ice skating at the Rockefeller Center; to mesmerizing Christmas shows at Radio City Music Hall — and all those toys from FAO Schwarz. Memories of her lived in weird juxtaposition to knowledge about criminal depravation.

From the muddy penumbra of his conscience a strong sense of reality had emerged. Having a comfortable life is an accident of birth. Rivers of blood and tears ferry most genes in tiny paper boats to the vast ocean of oblivion. His grandmother, a magic pearl, came so close to being lost. If, way back, Sergei had not held on to the Jack of Hearts for some confused reason in the wee hours of a rainy November morning in that shabby town of Transylvania, would there be an honorable Nigel W. Reagan-MacCulloch today?

In the diary he found what Agnes considered the song of her life – (in translation):

“Forward bears! Time has come to move; the high mountains are waiting;

The brave never look back — forward, forward;

The high mountains are waiting; the high mountains are waiting . . .”

Sometimes he wishes he knew the melody.

The furniture they sold on eBay was picked up a week before formal eviction. They were left with a narrow bed, two laptops, two cell phones, and the usual accumulation of household chattel.

It was late afternoon. Golden sunshine poured on the bare parquet — reconciliation was in the air.

His firm steps echoing in the empty room, Allan approached the bed where she sat.

“Can we leave this place with our old love, exactly the way we were before this whole mess . . . ?”

She lifted her head, pushing strands of brown hair away from her face. The agreement in her glance was sincere and unconditional. Eda was not an eye-rolling woman. She came from strong Scandinavian stock; her silence was meaningful.

As foreclosure became inevitable, squabbling over finances spilled over into every little thing, sometimes assuming a hateful visage.

Alan lost his job as the general manager of a regional tanning studio franchise in Western Pennsylvania, not far from Pittsburgh. More than half of the outlets were closed. People in the area, having their share of blistering economic times, evidently decided to cut back on this luxury. All attempts to find another position, even if it involved relocation or cuts in income and status, failed.  He became despondent. A master’s degree in business administration was supposed to protect him against involuntary unemployment. And he still owed a good chunk of money on his student loan.

Eda’s one-person interior decorating business, called “Candlelight Farm,” had dried up. Yet she started well. As a graduate of the prestigious Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia, she quickly built up clientele in neighboring exurbia. But the recession sapped her business too. Even occasional inquiries had stopped and the bedroom she had turned into “office and studio” had been totally inactive since the “Bank Repo” sign appeared in the front yard.

Given the relentless rise in home prices until 2007, and their combined income at the time, they could not be considered reckless — only ambitious and trusting. The all too familiar trouble began when the elegant-looking property dipped under water. It carried a negative equity; they owed more on it than it was worth.

Their shared dynamism and go-get-it temperament made them collide over the smallest detail as they tried desperately to stop the ticking clock of foreclosure. The shrill voice of hidden threats and nasty insults snuck up on them with treacherous deliberation, like alcoholism in the old movie, “Wine and Roses.”

Savvy and practical as both were, they never knew what would happen next. For some days, even weeks, the situation did not look hopeless.

At one point, the lending bank suspended payment obligations for three months, allowing the couple to pull their finances together and explore the possibility of getting assistance under the “Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan.”

Nothing worked. The local HUD counselor determined that they were not eligible for direct support. The assistant manager at the bank kept repeating the options with growing impatience, knowing the answers beforehand. Qualification for any solution was contingent on a flow of income and that was not to be seen.

At least they escaped from the claws of a foreclosure rescue company that demanded up-front payment to take over their debt and turn them into renters. The real estate agent who sold them the house three years ago warned:

“You would see no end of complications. I’m telling you, I know how these people operate. They come up with a new demand and then with another until you default on them too. You would be throwing good money after bad. Believe me, I know what I’m talking about. Of course, this shouldn’t go any further. I’ve never said this, OK? Please!”
Finally, they had to throw in the towel. The bank manager asked them into his office and told them “you are insolvent” in a tone that sounded like “you are toast.”

Alan was the first college graduate in the family. They were so proud of him.

His father, a former noncommissioned army officer — with two consecutive tours of duty in Vietnam — had a good job at the county surveyor’s office until a stroke took him out of the labor force. His mother was a supermarket cashier. There were uncles and cousins but he could not ask them for help. He was close only to his parents and to a maternal cousin, a guy known for his entrepreneurial ambitions. Unfortunately, all his business ventures had capsized and the last one wiped him out.

He took out a business license as a trader, used his house as collateral to borrow money up to his ears, and imported a mother lode of gourmet chocolates from Italy, hoping to sell the stuff with a good markup to local restaurants, coffee shops, and boutiques. As  luck would have it, a storm knocked out the electricity in the area soon after the cases arrived on an unexpectedly hot early spring day. By the time refrigeration was restored, all the bars and tablets were deformed and unsellable. He gave away most and ate the rest. He probably meant it when he said that if he ever saw another piece of chocolate in this life it would be too soon.

On Eda’s side things were much better. Her parents lived near Bismarck, North Dakota and an uncle, down the Missouri River, on the East side of South Dakota. That’s where the solution came from, first tossed around as a joke, then discussed with disbelief, and finally accepted as the only reasonable alternative.

Uncle Joe had a 320-acre farm and ranch. When he found out about what was happening to Eda and her husband he invited them to move in with his family.

Eda politely refused but as things got worse, the exchanges with the uncle became more and more substantive. The question and answer sessions included Alan too, who sat next to Eda as she typed their answers on the computer.

Joe explained that because of “rural flight” it was impossible to get enough manpower to work the farm at its full potential. “There is plenty of room for more soybeans and corn, corn, corn.” His voice turned husky when he said: “They are building another ethanol plant just 27 miles from here.”

In a three-way phone conversation he told them:

“The greens you eat are as organic as you pick them and you can forget about factory farm eggs, ja?”

“Sounds good,” Edna and Alan answered in unison.

“Don’t expect frontier and pioneer life or ‘Grapes of Wrath.’ The combine I want to teach you how to operate, Alan, is air-conditioned. And there is music, theater, and arts in Sioux Falls. Kimberley and I go there often with the kids. Ja.”

“Wonderful, Uncle Joe,” Eda agreed.

“It’s a good life, serious and productive, and healthy. Plenty of fresh air . . . My high school English teacher told us way back  . . . now how did it go? . . . ‘We are the stewards of blossoming and fruiting Earth.’ It’s from some poem. We get our hands and boots dirty but we don’t ruin our nerves with multitasking. So, pardners, do we have a deal?”

Eda visited the farm as a young girl and remembered seeing beautiful sunsets through the branches of cedar trees; listening to the intermittent cluck-cluck of wild pheasants as she wandered the mossy shore of the pond.

It was a deal. It had to be.

Then the final notice without the possibility of reinstatement arrived. It specified the day. They decided to wait it out.

On the eve, Alan pulled down the Old Glory his father gave him, carefully folded it and put it along with the two laptops into the station wagon already loaded with clothes, utensils, and assorted objects of sentimental value. He drove the car out of the garage and parked it at the curb.

They sat at the fountain that Eda had designed. When lit, it could be seen from the house at night with the statue of a Greek athlete in the middle. Torso bent, the youth was eternally ready to throw his discus into the woods. People thronging on the terrace and around the kidney-shaped swimming pool during the house-warming party admired it as if it were fireworks on the Fourth of July.

Alan called his parents on the cell to say good bye. He repeated the promise to visit but could not stop his mother’s tears.

Dad talked again about “Nam.”

“I learned that man is at his best in crisis,” he said. “Malice, greed and pettiness disappear in combat. Danger and dependence on one another bring out the best in us.”

After hearing these words for so many years, Alan could finally relate to them. The electrifying tension of being on the edge, to confront the radical presence took him over. He became aware of juices he never knew existed. Now he felt like going right away, jumping with both feet on the ground from a hovering Huey — just like his father in the late 60s.

They did not leave. The original decision of “until the last minute” prevailed. They sat on their soon-to-be abandoned wrought-iron garden chairs, talking and joking, reminiscing and planning. It was love all over again.

They had coffee with stale doughnuts for breakfast next morning. Somehow they were certain that Eda got pregnant during the night.

Commotion outside.

The Sheriff Department’s cruiser arrived. Stir around the front door, then brutal, loud knocks on the open door.

Two deputies entered the house. They showed neither compassion nor contempt as they told them “Folks, it’s time to vacate the premises” and repeated the essence of the notice they were in the process of pasting on the wall: “You are enjoined from return for any reason or under any pretext — what-so-ever.”

Holding hands, each carrying a plastic traveling bag, the couple passed the neglected, weed-tangled bushes on the pathway to the front gate. There was a little crowd outside — some neighbors and curious passer-bys.

“Good luck, Alan, good luck Eda!” someone yelled. A woman with damp eyes pressed the two-year old boy she was holding closer to her chest.

But the pity streaming toward this presumed modern-day Adam and Eve — freshly chased from Paradise; shameful, in dire need of fig leaves — never registered. They were intoxicated with deliverance, as if they had passed an entrance exam to a higher plane of dignity and freedom.

Isn’t to be free, after all, to be open to all possibilities?

A single-engine plane buzzed high in the blue sky as their car rasped away without grief or scorn.

Will others follow them to touch the Earth, to reclaim a footing on it in a half-conscious act of homecoming? Goodness knows.