They began shouting things like What are you doing here? Do you not know that it is forbidden? How did you scale the fence? Even if I had had any intelligent answers for these questions, it would have been impossible to give them; as soon as one asked a question the other chimed in with yet another question, and no one waited for me to say anything.
They were badgering me in Hungarian, so I jabbered back at them in Slovenian. Hungarian border guards would be apt to understand Serbo-Croat, but Slovenian, spoken only in the westernmost province of Yugoslavia, was likely to be outside their ken. They would recognize it, I guessed, but would be unable to follow it. They were certainly unable to follow what I gave them, which was a rough approximation in Slovenian of the 1916 Proclamation of the Irish Republic. They listened to a few moments of this and then began putting the same questions to me in horribly accented Serbo-Croat.
I stuck with Slovenian and gave them a few more sentences of Padraic Pearse’s magnificent speech. It sounds quite marvelous in Slovenian. I swung my arms more wildly than ever, giving what I hoped was a fairly convincing imitation of a lunatic. If I could succeed in assuring them I was a harmless madman, they might not bother to turn me over to their Yugoslav counterparts but might be content to tuck me back into Yugoslavia on their own account, thus saving themselves some red tape.
In which case I could scoot around through the Rumanian border, then hop into Hungary, and with luck rejoin Milan Butec in Hungary. Evidently he had made good his escape. The two Hungarians were paying all their attention to me and hadn’t so much as glanced through the fence.
I kept talking, feverishly, earnestly, arms high in the air. The one who had been driving sighed heavily and holstered his pistol. The other lowered his rifle.
And, a few yards to my right, Hungarian words rang in the air.
“Drop your guns, fools! Hands in the air or you die like dogs! You are covered. Quickly!”
The driver’s arms shot over his head as if yanked by invisible wires. The rifle slipped from the other guard’s hands and clattered upon the gravel. He too held his hands high overhead.
“Get their guns, Evan.” This in Slovenian, incredibly.
I scooped up the rifle, then snatched the pistol from the driver’s holster. I backed off a few paces and turned to see the shining round face of Milan Butec. He was crouching at the side of the fence, bravely covering two terrified guards with one of our wooden stakes.
“Turn around,” I told the pair in Hungarian. They did, and I marched them back to their jeep. I gripped the pistol by the barrel and tapped them each in turn, not too hard, at the base of the skull. They went out like snuffed candles.
The key was in the ignition. I started the jeep and drove it to the side of the fence where our stakes formed a ladder. By standing on the hood of the vehicle, it was a simple matter to climb the rest of the way over the fence and drop safely into Hungary. No acrobatic roll this time, though; I landed on my feet, lost my balance, and landed flat on my behind.
“Are you all right, Evan?”
“I think so,” I said. I took his hand, and he helped me up. His wig had loosened up again, and his cap was tilted at a rakish angle, but he did not look foolish at all. He was still holding the silly wooden stake. He followed my eyes to it and smiled shyly. “An old Partisan technique,” he said. “The Nazis had all the guns, you see, but we of the Resistance had all the intelligence. And brains will get you guns, but guns will never get you brains. I could not leave you, Evan. How would I ever find Budapest myself? And what was that nonsense you were spouting in Slovenian? Something about Ireland?”
“The Proclamation of the Irish Republic.”
“One does not often hear it rendered into that tongue.” The two of us began removing the remaining stakes from the fence. “Was it necessary to kill them, Evan?”
“No. They are alive. They’ll wake up within the hour.”
“Is it safe to leave them alive?”
“I think it’s safer than killing them. Their memories should be rather hazy when they come to. And they won’t have to explain what happened to them. Easier for them all around if they simply forget to report the incident. But if we put a couple of bullets into them, someone else will discover them, and then the alarm will go out.”
“I would prefer not to kill them,” he said thoughtfully. “One gets tired of killing. You left them the rifle?”
“Yes.”
“Perhaps you ought to leave the pistol as well. So the young man will not have to report the loss of his weapon.”
“It might be handy to have.”
“Perhaps.”
I thought it over. All in all, I decided, a pistol could do more harm than good. It was easier to avoid trouble than to shoot one’s way out of it. And the simpler we left things for the two border guards, the easier it would be for them to forget the incident. Since 1956 the Hungarians have grown quite accustomed to the periodic escape of part of the citizenry. Two more men crossing the border would be easily ignored if we did everything possible to facilitate it.
I engaged the safety catch and tossed the pistol over the fence. It landed just a few feet from the form of its unconscious owner.
“Good,” Milan Butec said. “Weapons make me nervous.”
“Wooden stakes are safer, eh?”
“Undoubtedly. And, of course, should one encounter a vampire, they are more effective than guns, are they not?”
“They are.”
“Simple peasants that we are, we must of course believe in vampires.”
“And werewolves, too.”
“To be sure.”
And like simple peasants, we trudged on through the vineyard north into Hungary.
Chapter 8
In the late afternoon, clouds covered the sun, and the air turned cold. We had walked a few miles cross-country after entering Hungary, then switched to the roads. We were never on the road for more than a quarter of an hour before someone would stop and give us a ride, but the rides were invariably in farmers’ wagons and rarely carried us more than three or four miles at a clip. It was slow going, and I could see that it was getting to Butec. He didn’t complain – indeed, most of the time he said nothing at all – but I knew he was tiring.
I hoped he could hold out until we reached Debrecen, the chief city of Hajdu Province in the northeast. There was a man named Sandor Kodaly in Debrecen who knew of me and whom I could trust. I was fairly sure he could provide shelter for the night and either he or friends of his could ease our way across the border into Czechoslovakia. Fence-climbing left one with a sense of accomplishment, but it was also damned dangerous, and I didn’t want to push our luck any more than I had to.
But by nightfall we were no further than Komadi, a good forty miles short of Debrecen. Had I been by myself, I might have pushed on, but Milan Butec was an old man who, after the day’s efforts, had every right in the world to be a tired old man. He was walking more slowly now and with visible effort. And yet he had not offered a word of complaint.
“We will not go any further,” I told him. We had taken to speaking Hungarian to one another to get ourselves in the habit. His Hungarian was rather heavily accented but otherwise sound. He had told me that he could speak passable Czech as well, which might or might not be helpful; we would be crossing through Slovakia, where they speak a very different tongue from the language spoken in the western sectors of Bohemia and Moravia. Once we entered Poland, he had added, I would have to do the talking for both of us. He spoke no Polish, no Lithuanian, and no Lettish. He could read and write Russian but was unable to converse in it.
“We will stop here for the night,” I explained. “Here in Komadi. Tomorrow we can continue to Debrecen and find friends who will help us across the border.”
“We could push on tonight if you wish.”
“Tomorrow is time enough.”
“I know that I am slowing you down, Evan.”
“There is no hurry,” I said. And, I thought, that was true enough. The faster we moved, the sooner we would get to Latvia. And the sooner we got to Latvia, the sooner we would find ourselves unable to rescue Sofija, and would thus have to turn around and head for home. I was in no hurry to get back to New York. There was a pudgy little man who had a habit of turning up there with undesired assignments, and I was in no rush to see him for some time.
“I am beginning to tire, Evan.”
“So am I.”
“Is there a hotel in Komadi?”
“Hotels are dangerous,” I said. “They want to see one’s papers and we haven’t any. Guest houses are as bad. I think we’d do better to cross through the town and put up at a farmhouse to the north.”
“Do the farmers take in guests?”
“We shall see.”
The first farmer we approached was gracious enough but explained he had no room for us. But he had a cousin just a quarter mile down the road who, he assured us, would make us welcome. Just a few pengo and we would be given comfortable beds, a hearty dinner, and a good country breakfast in the morning.
The cousin, it turned out, was a young widow with black eyes and hair and milk-white skin. She had been in the country eleven years, having moved there just before the birth of her one child, a daughter with the same plain good looks as the mother.
“We were in Budapest,” she told us after dinner. “My husband and I, we were married almost a year. I was from this part of the country and went to Budapest to the University, and met Armin and married him, and after the Revolution he was taken with the others and put up against the wall and executed. And so I did not care to remain in Budapest any longer. Will you have more coffee?”
Dinner was a thick veal stew on a bed of light noodles, all highly spiced and very filling. Milan made an effort to stay awake after dinner but was not quite equal to the task. Our hostess showed him to his room. I suspect he fell asleep on the way to the bed.
The daughter went to sleep shortly thereafter. Eva – I never learned her last name – sat with me in the living room before the fireplace. When the fire burned down, I went outside for more wood. I returned with the wood, and she appeared from the kitchen with a bottle of Tokay. We drank a few glasses. She talked of art and literature and the cinema. There were few persons with whom one could discuss such subjects in the country, she told me. She missed Budapest, with its busy coffee houses and its bubbling culture. But she did not miss the political hubbub of the city or the memories of 1956.
“It is lonely here,” she said. “But people are good, and I have much family in the area. This was my own father’s house, I am used to it, it comforts me. But one grows lonely.”
“You will marry again.”
“Perhaps. I have been ten years widowed. Sometimes a man comes to help me work the farm for a season and stays with me for a season. There have been those who would have stayed longer, but I was married to a fine and intelligent man, and when one is used to gold, one does not care for silver.”
I said nothing.
“Married at twenty and widowed at twenty-one, and now I am thirty-two and alone in the world. There is but a little wine left in the bottle. Shall we finish it?”
