ESCAPE FROM FRANCE

By Barbara Kent

It had become my habit, on those evenings when the weather was particularlysympathetic, to visit with my neighbors two flights up. Tereza and Karoly were an older, married couple, with three young children. With them lived her brother Eddie and their mother, whom I never heard referred to by name, but whom the children called "Yaya."

We lounged on the terrace and watched the lights of the Whitestone Bridge first waver in the uncertain summer twilight, then surge brightly as evening melted into night. Tereza served mugs of sweet tea and Yaya brought out trays of powdery and butter-rich pastries. Near the holidays, there were unfamiliar strong, sweet wines and snifters of cognac.

As hospitable as these people were, they seemed to maintain a vow of misery. Nothing was as good, as clean, as bright or as amusing as it had been in Hungary. Karoly complained that there was never enough work and even when there was enough work, there was never enough money. In America, the schools were deplorable, and the children as ill-mannered as their parents. The wines here could not hope to be as fine, or the meats as high a grade, or the clothing as well-made, as any of it was in Hungary.

One evening after a particularly bitter tirade by Karoly I naively asked why he had left Hungary if things were so much better there. He made sounds that were mock laughter, "hoo, ha, hoo, ha! See how stupid you are? What kind of an education do you have that you are so stupid to believe that I 'just left' Hungary?" His "hoo-ha's" became real laughter and tears steamed up his glasses. I was embarrassed. Was I supposed to know something? Tereza sensed my uneasiness and sat next to me.

"You must not pay too much attention to Karoly," she said quietly, and shot him a glance of reproval "he does not understand the Americans."

He waved his hand, as if he were pushing an issue aside. "Ho, you are so wrong Tereza! I understand Americans, much to their shame!" He sat up and wiped his eyes on his sleeve, then leaned close to me, so that his face was no more than a few inches from mine. "You are amusing. You are a diversion. You are young and attractive and the only entertainment I can afford." He leaned back in his chair and studied me critically. "So. Why don't you speak Hungarian?" Of course, I had no answer, and the hot glow of embarrassment crept up my blouse, to my neck and stained my face. He put his glasses back on and let out a whine of resignation. "Your grandparents spoke Italian, and probably Spanish, German...French if they had any education. Did they teach any of this to you?" I nodded. "Some." He looked at the Whitestone Bridge, and somewhere past it. Perhaps he could see all the way back to Hungary from that spot. "You speak only American. You Americans think that your country is so big and far away from the rest of the world that you need only speak one language." Tereza stood up, and harshly said something to him in Hungarian, but I did not sense that anything had been said in my defense. He replied "No, I am going to tell her a story. Get my chess set please."

She disappeared into the house and he leaned his face into mine again. "You know, it was on a night like this that we first saw the planes." His voice was low and calculated. I was afraid to say anything, to prove to him that I was as stupid as he suspected. He pulled back, and refocused his gaze on the horizon, his voice now spilling out of the dark, eerily disembodied and wondering. "We laughed when we saw the planes. We were sitting on the roof on a summer night just like this and we laughed. It can happen here too, just like it happened in Hungary."

I did not know what had happened in Hungary, but I knew that it had something to do with war, and with the confidence of a young American I assured him, it most certainly could NOT happen here. I told him that America was ringed with ICBM's on every shore, that we had an early warning system that could detect any aircraft hundreds, perhaps thousands of miles away. We had radar in space, and besides, who would dare attack us? For what reason? The sheer immensity of the United States alone must be a deterrent to any would-be attacker. Who could possibly have the technology to penetrate our defense system? The Soviet Union was too primitive, a lumbering power, Japan too dependent on us economically to seriously consider such a far-fetched idea, and China remains deeply interested in Capitalism. No, Karoly, I assured him, we are safer here than anywhere in the world.

In the gathering dark, his eyes were lost behind the glasses and his pressing voice chilled me to the bone. "Do you think there are no Communists in America?" he asked. "Do you think that there is not more than one hungry fanatic who would like nothing better than to see you and your family dead?"

I sputtered and dismissed him. "Karoly, this is NOT Hungary! The only Communists we have here are disillusioned academics, secure in the cradle of tenure! They don't carry guns, they carry subway tokens and they are Americans, not Russians or Germans!" I believed that was the bottom line. I believed that ALL Americans ultimately believed that bottom line. Even the effete intellectuals who played footsy with other ideologies were in their hearts, Americans.

He persisted, first calmly and grimly, then swelling passion with each word until he screamed the last sentence at me. "They are the worst kind. The ones who speak your language well and who are over-educated and under-achieved. They are the hungriest and the evillest, and they would as soon crush you as look at you." He gave me goosebumps.

Tereza came out on the terrace and set up the chess-board on a little snack table. "Here," she said "do your fighting in wood. Then we'll see who's' right and who's wrong." She sat in the remaining webbed lawn chair and continued to work on something that she was crocheting.

I didn't want to play. I had lost to Karoly too many times and felt too much the fool tonight to prove my ignorance on one more field. Karoly opened with the King's pawn.

"I don't want to play tonight."

"Don't be absurd," Karoly laughed. "You're angry with me and this is the best way to fight."
I pushed out the King's pawn and complained, "You have the advantage already. If we must play, I want to be white."

"It is too late. You are black and you are going to lose." He pushed out the Queen's pawn. If I was going to play, it would be reluctantly and churlishly.

"So, Karoly, why did you leave Hungary if it was so much better than America?" I advanced Queen's Knight.

He surveyed the board. Enough dim light fell from the apartment onto the terrace so that we could see the chessboard and pieces. The white squares stood out as if they'd been painted fluorescent. "Did you ever hear of the '56 Revolution?"

I told him I had not. He traversed Queen's bishop to my Knight four. I complained about the attempted "Fool's Mate". "Look, Karoly, if you're going to play like that I really don't want to play."

"Sorry."
I blocked with my pawn.

He continued, "I was a young Party member. Loyal. Very loyal. And bright. My professors had great hopes for me." Tereza muttered something in Hungarian that sounded cautionary, and Karoly nearly spit at her. "I cannot be silent forever!" Did we do this thing for nothing?" He bellowed at her in Hungarian and I was totally lost, and ashamed that they were fighting in front of me.

Disregarding his rudeness to her, Tereza apologized for him and nodded her head, "I will help you to understand. Karoly gets so emotional about it." She put her crochet work down, and took a cigarette from her pocket and lit it. By the light of the match her face glowed for an instant. She spoke quickly, in a disciplined voice, with none of Karoly's urgency. Her English was better than his, but having never said any of it in English before, she paused now and again to search for a concept or a word.

"Karoly is right, we were good Party members, and as such, also members of the Bourgeoisie. The New Bourgeoisie, you must understand, for the previous revolution had crushed the members of the old bourgeoisie."

Karoly agreed, and proudly stated "We were the new order of things. We were the victors, young and invincible."

She shushed him and continued, "We were in University and very much in love. In love with our minds as well as our bodies. Hot with ideals. My mother was a seamstress and she made my wedding dress. We all went to the Youth Camp for the wedding." She smiled as any bride might smile, as I might smile one day.

Karoly broke in, "Tereza's mother was a private seamstress." He emphasized the word "private". "She would copy the new designs from Paris and sell them to the rich women of Budapest. You should really have seen that wedding dress. I believe that dress was the start of our problems. No Communist ever had a wedding dress like that."

I was developing my defense while I was listening. Karoly was a strong player, but he was also unscrupulous and would not think twice about distracting me with a tall tale in order to get the edge. Tereza agreed about the wedding dress with a nod of her head and went on, "When we returned from the..." She asked him something in Hungarian and he replied "Honeymoon." "When we returned from the honeymoon, we found out that my father had been arrested."

I asked why, and Karoly responded, "Because he was a professor of literature and he had been teaching the students about America through her literature.."

Tereza interrupted him, "No, no. That's not why they arrested him. They arrested him because he sold them the books!"

This was curious to me, highly illogical. I asked, "Why was he selling the books to the students and why was he arrested for it and who arrested him?"

Tereza slowed down, at a loss to explain it to me. Karoly asked "How do you obtain texts at your universities?" I explained it to him and he told me "What my father-in-law was doing was viewed as 'Capitalist endeavor'. Since the books were not available he had to order them for the students. Perhaps he made a small profit on them, but that's not likely."

"What happened to him?"
Tereza had been a marvel of calm, but her voice now slipped thinly out of the dark. "They shot him." I saw Karoly's white hand steal into Tereza's lap to take her hand in his.

"Yes. He was the first that we learned of. We were stunned," Karoly said. "They visited her mother and told her that she had to give up her business. She told them she would die first. That was when they informed her that her husband already had. She was then given the choice to surrender her business or emigrate." His hand fluttered to his mouth, in an almost feminine gesture. "I admire her, for even in that moment when her life was most crushed, she made the decision to emigrate, instantly."

I was amazed, but stubbornly did not wholly believe the story they were telling me. "But Tereza, you were a married woman. How did this affect you?"

She was not looking at either of us, but at some picture unrolling inside of her. "We were young Party members. We believed she should give up the business." She lost her composure for an instant and dropped her head and seemed to be studying her hands lying limply in her lap. "But they should not have killed my father."

Karoly swept up the board and took one of my pawns with his bishop, smiled. "You weren't watching."

I was engrossed in Tereza. I could just barely discern the outlines of her face and I was trying to trace her expression. She lit another cigarette and I could see that her eyes were tense with tears, but they had not yet spilled. I pushed another pawn and Karoly explained to me that he was considered a valuable asset to the Communist Party, and that he had a great future ahead of him.

Tereza said, "We believed everything they told us. I was to study medicine and the State would pay for everything. The State was my family. All of our friends were Young Communists. Our futures were assured..."

Karoly stopped her. "You are forgetting that your brother was dangerous. That your family always had an interest in Capitalism..."

She shot back at him "Yes, and they had an interest in what was happening around the world. You forget we had family in Austria and in America already?"

He shrugged. "Of course. The old bourgeoisie. All of your family was bourgeois and intellectual. I was a simple lawyer."
Not to be out-done, she explained to me "Karoly's father was a worker for the State. He comes from a long line of puppets."

The sarcasm was lost on me, but that it existed was unmistakable. Karoly had just made a sloppy move and I rushed in to take advantage of it. "Check."
"Check only," he said, and began to re-evaluate his position.
Pleased with my move, I stood up to stretch and asked Tereza if she had any coffee. She went into the house to start a fresh pot and I followed her. "You should stay with Karoly. He cheats."

"Oh, I'm not worried."
She arched one eyebrow high and smiled. "You should be. You are not so good at chess."
She was right. I went back out onto the terrace where he was still mulling over his next move, and sat opposite him. "What was it that finally convinced you to leave Hungary?"

He was very surprised. "I was not so much 'convinced' as i was, um, INSPIRED! My rating in the Party went down because I was married to Tereza, from a family of known 'sympathizers.'"

She returned with the coffee and filled in some details. "I was forced to leave my studies. They said I was a Capitalist also, and the State would no longer pay for my education."

The portrait they sketched of a nation that became so intimate with it's people fascinated me. I asked "Does that mean that if your mother had given up the business that you would have been able to continue medical school and Karoly would have kept his rating in the party?"

They consulted for a moment in Hungarian, and Karoly answered, "We do not know, but that is a large possibility. After my rating fell, I was no longer eligible for housing, and of course I made much less money. Then there was the real issue of Tereza's father. Who know if he was really dead when they told his wife he was? My reasons for coming to America were economic. I could not support my wife, or the children that we wanted to have, on what they would pay me."

I laughed at him. "You old hypocrite! You had me believing it was ideals you came searching for!"

"No," he said quietly. "my ideals were Communist, but I was disillusioned." Tereza handed out cookies and corrected her husband, "Yes, but that is not the story. Getting out of Hungary was no problem. They knew we had to leave, they made it so miserable for us."

Karoly's anger hit me like a wave as he turned on her. "How can you say that getting out of Hungary was no problem? You forget crawling on your belly and being shot at? You forget strapping our infant son around your waist and crawling out under barbed wire in the middle of the night? How could you forget these things? Is it not written on your hands and knees and scraped into your belly and lips by the rocks and the dirt that we ate? Is it not engraved into your scalp and the back of your neck where the wire bit into you? How could you forget?"

Tereza shushed him, "Karoly, " she implored, "...it was still easier leaving Hungary than it was leaving France."

"Oh, to be sure! I had to fight my way out of Hungary with a gun. We lived for three days on raw potatoes and then we lived on nothing until we reached Trieste."
Tereza moaned, as if feeling it anew, "We should have gone to Austria the way Yaya and Eddie did."

He shot back at her "Fool! They emigrated with the sanction of the State! We ran! We were fugitives! Besides, we could not be sure that they even wanted to know us considering the situation." He faced me and half-shouted, "It's true!" his face grey and stark, almost skeletal, he looked as if it had happened yesterday, "It was easier leaving Hungary because it took so much less time. A matter of days and we were out, but France..."

Tereza wiped powdered sugar from her lips. The control see-sawed between them. When one became grievously agitated, the other was a pillar of reason. "Four years it took us to get out of France. I always thought it was such a civilized country. To do things 'the French way' was always the best...in Hungary at least we were free. In France, they put us in prison."

Karoly made a bad move again, and I moved in. "Check."
"You are a very crafty little girl, taking advantage of my emotions like that." But we both knew that he would have done the same. I smiled brightly at him, and returned to the issue Tereza had raised. "Why did they put you in prison when you got to France? Why didn't you just tell them you wanted to become citizens, or that you were seeking political asylum?"

Karoly looked at me over the chess board, ignoring his wooden army for the moment. "We were stupid. We could have gone to Austria. The émigrés who went to Austria got to America within months. The Austrians, as a race, have integrity. We told the French we were going to America. We thought it would take less time. And then there was a time when we thought it would never happen."

Tereza interrupted to explain, "It wasn't really prison, like the Bastille. We arrived in France and headed straight for Paris. When we arrived, the government was very sympathetic and told us that they had quarters for us in Normandy where there were other Hungarian refugees. From there, we were told that we could go on to America. We thought that Normandy was a point of departure, on the sea, and that we would be there only a few days."

Karoly had discovered a way out of check and cried, "Aha! you see? Check doesn't mean a thing!" Tiny victory grin, he turned to his wife, "You forgot to tell her about the bastard." Indignation flickered across his face, "Never mind, I will tell you. It is good for your education that you should hear such things and know what the world is really like. There was this man, a soldier, from Le Havre, who we believe, was no longer a man, if you understand me." I did not, but Karoly continued without explaining. "There is no other reason for his cruelty. He as in charge of our building and it was his job to obtain for us the food and clothing."

Tereza interjected "It was an American organization. The American school children would send us toothbrushes, soap, toothpaste." Hard little laugh escaped her, "We were so hungry that we ate the toothpaste. We were starving to death, but we had pounds of the "Sweetheart" soap."

A very dim memory tugged at me. "You mean CARE!" I remembered in second or third grade we were told to bring in new, inexpensive items. I brought in three plastic, black fine-tooth combs. We wondered where all the goodies would go, and children all over the country were sending in pencils, rubber bands and dime-store handkerchiefs.

Scornfully, Karoly nodded "Yes, CARE. This little French bastard-sadist would get fifteen or twenty packages a week just for our building! And you know what that fascist did with them? He sold them! That miserable French sadist-bastard eunuch sold nearly everything! Plastic was as dear as gold in France, and he sold it!" He was heated and nearly knocked the chess board over. "That little bastard even took home the rotten meat we were supposed to get!"

Tereza agreed. "A little piece of meat no bigger than a cigarette pack...that was our weekly ration, and the little thief would steal everybody's meat and take it home with him."

I put Karoly in check again, but he didn't hear me and continued his tirade of incredulity about the soldier. I had ceased to exist for him, my identity blown out by his frustration. "I reported him to the Kommandant. The people who were with us elected me spokesman because I had been a lawyer, and I went to the Kommandant. I told him what was happening and do you know what? He *laughed* at me! He said that everybody stole and that I was no longer in Hungary and to be quiet."

He nearly shed tears, and I said somewhat more loudly, "Check."
This time he heard me. "Eh? Check again? You must be wrong. No, I see it, it is check again."

While he considered his next move, Tereza retrieved the thread. "Karoly asked the Kommandant how long it would take before we could come to America, and they told us it would be a few weeks. We waited six months in the filthiest conditions." Again, she was there, and her uncompromising Magyar face twisted in disgust. "We were afraid to sleep because there were big rats. We were in an old prisoner of war camp and there were a dozen people to each building, like a little house. There was no privacy, and then I learned I was pregnant again. We had only rotten potatoes to eat."

Karoly discovered a move, but it did not please him. "They were trying to kill us," he said. "That winter, more Hungarians died in Normandy than in all of Budapest. The baby got very sick and we were afraid that he would die too."

Tereza stood, and wrung her hands in a most peculiar way. "The family who slept next to us, they were filly people...filthy, filthy people. The mother died of a fever during the night and they didn't want to put the body out because their food ration would be cut. We were afraid that Mikhail got sick from the body and that he was going to die, too. I don't know where those people came from, but they must have been Czechs, or mountain people."

Karoly was getting worried about the game. "Eh. You must have read a book. Did you read a chess book this week? You did not play nearly as well last week." He found a feeble move and hesitantly called, "Check." When I saw what he had done, my heart pounded. It was his death knell! Could it be that he really did not see that my next move was mate? I was not sure, so I carefully weighed each possible move and each possible counter-move. I would feel the fool if I called out "mate" and was wrong. While I was doing this Karoly advanced the story. "I visited the Kommandant again and again, each time asking him when, when WHEN would be allowed to continue on to America? Each time he said a few more weeks. The last time I visited him I threatened him. I leaned into the son of a bitch's face, banged on the table with my fist and screamed at him, 'When I get out of here, Kommandant, I will tell the world, not how I escaped from Hungary, but how I escaped from France!' I didn't want the baby born there to remind me for the rest of my days of that time. It stretched into months, and years. The Hungarians in our compound lost their faith in me. They were a people accustomed to strong authority. They could not believe that the French were such barbarians. They began to whisper that we had done a bad thing, leaving Hungary." He slouched back in his chair, a fragile, crumpled being. I hesitated. Perhaps I did not have to see the mate. Perhaps I could be magnanimous about this stupid game. Then Karoly himself decided for me.

"We began to believe that it was America's fault that we were in this position! Why didn't the Americans do something about it? Surely they knew that we were waiting here! Didn't they send us packages of useless junk every week? We had family in America and we believed they had all been corrupted by Capitalism. All of America was a stinking corpse of Capitalism! Decadent with all your money and Hollywood stars while we, an intelligent and sensitive people, were being treated like criminals!" He had moved forward into the chair, and was glaring at me across the game.

I coolly brought my rook up the chess board, knocked over his bishop, and announced, "Mate."

Stunned, he put his hands over his ears and moaned "Aiee, is it really mate? Oh, you have done it! How stupid of me to let you win! Well, we shall play another and make it the best two out of three."

I was very pleased with my victory and did not want to take a chance on losing a game to him just yet. "I'm sorry Karoly, but not tonight. Maybe tomorrow night."
His voice came soft and gentle out of the night. "Surely you can play one more game? You have integrity and would not walk away without giving me a chance to win?"

I laughed. "No way my friend. Tomorrow."

He swept the chess pieces into the foot locker. "Bah! You are all alike! Security makes beasts out of people! But not to worry, for tomorrow night I will crush you!"

He decided to stay outside and brood in the night while Tereza and I went back into the house. I was helping her wash out the cups and put them away and asked her why, since she and Karoly had done so well in America, he was still so bitter. She looked at me with surprise. "What makes you think that we have done so well?"

I told her that they lived considerably better than many Americans. The apartment was beautiful, they were all well-clothed and well-fed, and they even had two cars. In short, they appeared to be in substantially better financial position than anyone in my own family, and we had been in America for three generations. She considered this for a moment and replied "Well, there is a big difference, you know."

What kind of difference? Struggle is a way of life, and they had not suffered any more than my grandparents or parents had. In fact, it seemed that they were suffering a great deal less. She reflected for a moment, and without looking at me said, "You have not understood what Karoly was trying to tell you. We left Hungary because his job was becoming intolerable. Out of pride! It took us four years to escape from France. Four years! Do you understand?" She searched my face as if she could look into me. "If we had stayed in Hungary for the four years we starved in France, our position would be infinitely better than it is now. Don't you see that we made the wrong decision? In America, Karoly will never be anything but what he is, a worker. But in Hungary, he would still have been an Official!" She had one fist clenched and her eyes shimmered with unfulfilled dreams. "We can never go back! Every year we apply to go back and every year they ignore us!"

She was right. I had not understood at all. I was suddenly very uncomfortable in her presence. "I have to go, Tereza."

"Will you come back tomorrow night so Karoly can have a rematch? He enjoys talking to you and playing chess."

I had to think about that. I wasn't at all sure I wanted to come back. Perhaps if I had been a better chess player and could be sure of a victory, I would. I said goodnight, and went downstairs to my tiny apartment. Settled comfortably in bed, I reached for the book on the night table. If I could absorb the contents, I would grant the re-match for tomorrow night. I was up to chapter nine of Vukovic: "The Attack on the Fianchettoed and Queen Side Castling Positions."