Kingdom of Shadows

Count Polanyi didn’t care for this mood and let Morath know it. “We’ve all been thrown off the horse,” he said. “The thing to do is get back in the saddle.” When that didn’t work, he tried harder. “This is no time to feel sorry for yourself. Need something to do? Go back to Budapest and save your mother’s life.”

Keleti Palyuadvar. The east railroad station where, this being Hungary, all important trains arrived from the west. There were cabs in the street but Morath decided to walk-in the late afternoon of an autumn day, what else. It is your nose that tells you you’re home, he thought. Burnt coffee and coal dust, Turkish tobacco and rotten fruit, lilac water from the barbershops, drains and damp stone, grilled chicken, God only knew what it really was. A deep breath, another-Morath inhaled his childhood, his country, the exile returned.

He walked for a long time, taking the cobbled alleys, heading more or less across the city, toward a villa in the hills of the Third District, on the Buda side of the Danube. He dawdled, stopped to look in shop windows. As always, this time of day, a melancholy, speculative idleness settled over the city and Morath slowed down to meet its rhythm. At five-thirty, when the sun hit the windows of a tenement on Kazinczy Avenue and turned them flaming gold, Morath took the number-seven tram across the Chain Bridge and went home.

They didn’t really talk until the next morning. In the living room, the rugs were still up for the summer, so when his mother spoke there was a faint echo. She sat, perfectly composed, on a spindly chair in front of the French doors, a silhouette in garden light. She was, as always, slim and lovely, with ice-colored hair set in steel and pale skin that showed in the vee of her silk dress.

“And do you see Lillian Frei?” she asked.

“Now and then. She always asks for you.”

“I miss her. Does she still wear the suits from De Pinna?”

“Where?”

“A store on Fifth Avenue, in New York.”

Morath shrugged politely, he had no idea.

“In any event, you’ll kiss her for me.”

Morath drank a sip of coffee.

“Would you care for a pastry, Nicholas? I can send Malya to Gundel’s.”

“No, thank you.”

“Bread and butter, then.”

“Really, just coffee.”

“Oh Nicholas, what a Parisian you are. You’re sure?”

Morath smiled. He’d never in his life been able to eat anything before noon. “How long has it been, anyuci, since you’ve seen Paris?” This was mother, very much her preference. She had never been mama.

His mother sighed. “Oh a long time,” she said. “Your father was alive, the war just over. 1919-could that be right?”

“Yes.”

“Has it changed? People say it has.”

“There are more automobiles. Electric signs. Cheap restaurants on the boulevards. Some people say it’s not as nice as it was.”

“Here it is the same.”

“Anyuci?”

“Yes?”

“Janos Polanyi feels that, with the situation in Germany, you, and perhaps Teresa, should consider, should find a place …”

When she smiled, his mother was still incredibly beautiful. “You haven’t come all the way here for that, I hope. Ferenc Molnar has moved to New York. He is living at the Plaza and is said to be utterly miserable.”

A long look, mother and son.

“I won’t leave my house, Nicholas.” And how can you not have known it?

They went to the movies in the afternoon. A British comedy, dubbed in Hungarian, from the 1920s. It had a cruise ship, nightclubs with shiny floors, a hound called Randy, a hero with patent-leather hair called Tony, a blonde with kiss curls that they fought over, called Veronica, which sounded very strange in Hungarian.

Morath’s mother loved it-he glanced over and saw her eyes shining like a child’s. She laughed at every joke and ate caramels from a little bag. During a song-and-dance sequence at the nightclub, she hummed along with the music: Akor mikor, Lambeth utodon

Bar melyek este, bar melyek napon,

Ugy talalnad hogy mi mind is

Setaljak a Lambeth Walk. Oi!

Minden kis Lambeth leany

Az o kis, Lambeth parjaval

Ugy talalnad hogy ok

Setaljak a Lambeth Walk. Oi!

Afterward, they went to the tearoom of the Hotel Gellert and had acacia honey and whipped cream on toasted cake.

3:30 in the morning. In the rambling, iron-gated gardens of the villa district, some people kept nightingales. Other than that, he could hear wind in the autumn leaves, a creak in a shutter, a neighbor’s fountain, a distant rumble of thunder-north, he thought, in the mountains.

Still, it was hard to sleep. Morath lay in his old bed and read Freya Stark-this was the third time he’d started it, a travel narrative, adventures in the wild mountain valleys of Persia.

He’d always stayed up late in this house, his father’s very own son. He used to hear him, sometimes, pacing around the living room. Often he played records on the Victrola while he worked in his office-sliding stamps into glassine envelopes with a silver tweezers.

They weren’t rich, but his father never worked for money. He had been one of the great philatelists of Hungary, very strong in both nineteenth-century Europe and colonials. Morath supposed his father had traded in the international markets, perhaps he’d made some money that way. Then, too, before the war, nobody really had to work. At least, nobody they knew.

But, after Trianon, everything changed. Families lost the income they’d had from land in the countryside. Even so, most of them managed, they simply had to learn to improvise. It became fashionable to say things like “If only I could afford to live the way I live.”

Then, on a June day in 1919, the communists killed his father.

In the spasms of political chaos that followed the loss of the war, there came a Soviet Republic of Hungary-a government born of a national desperation so deluded it persuaded itself that Lenin and the Red Army would save them from their enemies, the Serbs and the Roumanians.

The Soviet was led by a Hungarian journalist named Bela Kun who, while serving in the Austro-Hungarian army, had deserted to the Russians during the war. Kun, his henchman Szamuelly, and forty-five commissars began a rule of one hundred and thirty-three days, and shot and burned and hanged their way from one end of Hungary to the other. They were then chased out of the country-across the border and, eventually, into the Lubianka-by a Roumanian army, which occupied Budapest, wandered aimlessly about the countryside, and spent its days in desultory looting until it was shooed back across the border by a Hungarian army, led by Miklos Horthy. The counterrevolution then gave birth to the White Terror, which shot and burned and hanged its way from one end of Hungary to the other, paying particular attention to the Jews, since Jews were Bolsheviks (or bankers), and Kun and a number of his comrades were Jewish.

It was one of Kun’s wandering bands that murdered Morath’s father. He had gone, one weekend, to the country house in the Carpathian foothills. The communist militia rode into the yard at dusk, demanded jewelry for the oppressed masses, then bloodied the farm manager’s nose, threw Morath’s father into a horse trough, took three stamp albums-1910 commemoratives from Luxembourg-all the cash they could find, several shirts, and a lamp. They chased the servant girls into the woods but couldn’t catch them and, in one corner of the kitchen, set a fire, which burned a hole in the pantry wall and went out.

Morath’s father dried himself off, calmed the servant girls, put a cold spoon on old Tibor’s neck to stop the