Paris: A Love Story (9 page)

•   •   •

I flew back to Bonn, to my work and to my love—determined to succeed at both. The two were proving increasingly less compatible. I seemed to be forever letting Peter down, and pleading for forgiveness. During the week, I wasn’t with him. I was traveling with mostly male camera crews, working with male producers. Peter, used to his girlfriends/wives waiting for him at home, was not happy about this. If, in a feeble attempt to keep my personal and professional lives a millimeter apart, I followed my (mostly male) producer’s advice, he took it personally. “I’ve been in this business a hell of a lot longer than that guy,” he would say. “You’re going with
his
word?” Few producers enjoyed being in that position. Working with me was becoming hard duty. On May 31, this time on blue Lufthansa stationery, I wrote to Peter: “I felt such agitation in your voice all day. I’m so plugged in to whatever you are thinking, feeling and suppressing that I’ve shared that agitation all day. I have never before depended on another human being for so much of my own emotional and physical well-being. When you said that I had let you down—the world suddenly went to black. The very last thing I ever, ever want, is to let you down.”

Reading this now I wonder what happened to the feisty girl who a decade earlier had written home from the same city, “I am just overflowing with experiences and feelings that I want to share with you! I am savoring every instant to its fullest. Today is my first real day as a scholar at the Sorbonne. I am so excited to take my place in one of those huge amphitheaters and soak up the wisdom of great minds.”

Our love story, played out against the backdrop of world events, was never anything but a high-wire act. I had my dream job and I was loved by one of the world’s most dashing men. I was leading such an exciting life I brushed off warning signs.

Was it my thirtieth birthday when I realized that maybe I was fooling myself, that possibly beneath its glossy surface, my life wasn’t making me happy? We were in Paris, and Peter had arranged a surprise birthday celebration for me. We dined at Maxim’s, where a chilled magnum of Dom Perignon, compliments of Pierre Salinger, awaited us at our table. Afterward, Peter took me to the city’s most fashionable cabaret, the Crazy Horse. I recall sitting in the front row and gazing at the perfect, cantaloupe-shaped orbs of the dancers’ bottoms, swiveling in front of me. Suddenly, I was swept by an inexplicable sadness. Tears started flowing, but I dared not move. Later, peering in the mirror, I felt as if I were looking at a deranged stranger. Was I mourning the end of my youth? But everything was ahead of me! Marriage, children, a brilliant life—exceeding all my fantasies!

So what was the problem here? I had no answer, and did not spend time searching for one. We were passionately in love. We would work things out. His bouts of jealousy were proof of his love for me, I told myself. He was possessive because he adored me. I, the insecure refugee girl, yearned for the sort of uncompromising love he offered. But at times the price seemed too high. When Peter retreated inside an icy shell of hurt and disappointment, which neither humor nor charm nor tears could coax him out of, I was miserable. At such times, there was nothing I could say to reassure him of my love.

•   •   •

My letters to Peter reveal agonizing highs and lows. “Everything seems eminently solvable this morning,” I wrote to him in Lebanon. “I mean everything that counts. Not minor problems—like the fighting along the Litani, and four hundred miles of oil spilled off the coast of Brittany—but you and me. I know I won’t always feel this patient when you’re in a Lebanese ghost town and I’m in London, Bonn, Monrovia—wherever. Your daffodils are still alive, though your tulips look sad.”

A month later, he too had been called back to New York. ABC News wanted to entice him to a bigger job. I didn’t think we were ready. “From Somewhere Between Berlin and Bonn” I wrote him, “I really feel like we belong in Europe now. New York and Washington seem almost foreign places. I think it’s because Europe is where you and I happened . . . Everything I do now is with Us in mind. When I’m writing a script, it’s not for ABC’s millions (hopefully) of viewers. It’s for you. When I dive into a pool, and swim twenty laps fast—it’s so I’ll be healthy and strong—for you. It’s an absolutely new and wonderful way to feel. Five days is my outside limit without you.” Peter turned down Roone Arledge’s offer of a job in New York.

•   •   •

Then, in late May, despite precautions, I was pregnant. We both wanted desperately to have a child. We were in love and committed to each other, but I knew it was too soon. I had just persuaded ABC of my dedication to my job. I was working hard to prove to the network I could handle my job and
my relationship with their star reporter. Abortions were illegal in Germany, so I asked my sister to help arrange one in Paris. Peter met me at the private clinic in the sixteenth arrondissement. He was sad and sweet and held my hand during the procedure. The doctor said I could not fly in a drugged state, so I went without anesthesia. I wanted to be back in Bonn before
New York
noticed my absence. In Bonn, I was alone, and the pain was excruciating. I was depressed for some time, and determined that I would not repeat the experience. But no one at ABC ever found out.

Our bosses did their best to send me on assignments where Peter could not follow me, but he generally showed up anyway, if even for just one night.

My moment of broadcasting glory was to be when I was assigned a multipart report called “Budapest Revisited,” the first network report from that dateline since Soviet tanks rolled in 1956.

From on board my Budapest-bound flight, I wrote Peter, “The slow acculturation has begun. The plane is filled with the strange yet familiar sounds of my childhood. Hungarian babies gurgle differently, their mothers comfort them in a tone that is strange to American ears—yet it is all so familiar to me. At the airport in Frankfurt, I had a sudden moment of panic: Why am I doing this alone? You are so far . . . In front of me sits a pretty, red-haired Hungarian woman traveling with two very small children. Does she miss their father as much as I miss you this moment? I envy her. I have only my typewriter in the seat next to mine.”

I landed in the city I had fled as a frightened child who had only recently been reunited with her jailed parents.

Two decades later, Budapest seemed eerily unchanged. Wrapped in the dark night of Cold War Eastern Europe, only a few pale neon signs broke the perfect gloom of Budapest at night. A red star still glowed atop the parliament building, Europe’s largest, and one of the emptiest. I was bombarded by powerful memories of waking up to find my father gone, of my mother grabbing my sister and me by the hand, to begin a futile search for the man all three of us called Papa. Memories of fear and abandonment crashed just beneath the surface, as I craned my neck out the rickety taxi window en route to my Budapest hotel.

“Let’s go by Csaba Utca first,” I directed my taxi driver, up to our old house in Buda. Jumping out of the car, I sprinted up the stairs to the house from where my parents had been taken and from where we began our journey to America. In an instant, the intervening years melted away. I was again the little girl suddenly alone, with only my sister, crying on the curb, where the taxi now waited. My head was spinning with memories, and with unexplored emotions. Nostalgia for my broken childhood, sadness that I was alone for this important trip, and pride, too. I was back in the place that tried to destroy my family, not as a tourist, but representing an American television network.

I did not get a chance to unpack that night. “How fast can you get to Cracow?” the night editor from the New York assignment desk demanded once I reached the Hilton. White
smoke above the Sistine Chapel in Rome had just signaled the election of a new pope. His name was Karol Wojtyla, a fifty-eight-year-old Pole, a former archbishop of Cracow. As a Hungarian, a child of the Cold War, raised as a Roman Catholic, I understood this was a momentous, history-making event. The Vatican had outfoxed Leonid Brezhnev’s shaky gerontocracy! But to leave Budapest after such a brief glimpse, and after so many years, was emotionally wrenching.

So began my long journey from Budapest to Cracow by plane, train, and car. I arrived the next morning and sent this telegram to room 428–429 in the Hotel Excelsior in Rome. “Dearest Love, Just arrived Cracow. It is dawn. I love you.” Unfortunately, the new Holy Father had already left for Rome. Pushing on to his hometown of Wadowice, I was determined to find a story. What I found was a town in the throes of euphoria—literally dancing in its cobblestoned streets. No one had anticipated this bold papal pick. I scored an exclusive interview with the pope’s housekeeper, Maria, who had just received a call from the pontiff inviting her to attend his induction in Rome. My crew and I flew there with her, filming her emotional journey, culminating in her reunion with the new pope.

“I thought Kati’s Cracow story was very good,” Papa wrote Peter, “and both she and her pictures were superior to NBC’s. I always was and remain—as she knows—a harsh critic of the family’s performances. I wonder whether she and crew will be able to go back to Hungary? The story in Cracow, as far as I can judge is over and tomorrow is the anniversary of the Revolution.
There
should
be a story: perhaps nothing more than the memories of someone who was there as a child.”

But instead of Budapest, the network rewarded my enterprise by keeping me in Rome to cover the papal induction. We were about to learn that this pontiff, in answer to Stalin’s long-ago taunt, had plenty of divisions behind him. John Paul II, as he called himself, was, by papal standards, a young, vigorous, and charismatic leader who would represent a very real challenge to the Soviet monolith. A great story.

Best of all, Peter was already there. By day we worked side by side, and by night we gorged on spaghetti
alle vongole
and
caprese
salads at Peter’s favorite Trastevere trattoria, Piperno. My father wrote Peter and me on September 13, 1978, “Your Rome coverage was superb.” Striding out the Excelsior’s polished revolving door to the Via Veneto on those late summer mornings, with my camera crew waiting to begin another day’s work, and with Peter after work, was exhilarating. Life, for once, seemed balanced.

My mother wrote Peter on October 22, 1978, “My heart always beats faster when I hear you announce ‘Kati Marton reporting from . . .’ I can’t get used to the thrill of it.”

•   •   •

ABC did send me back to Budapest later that year. On three consecutive nights on
World News Tonight,
I did my best work yet for the network. It was easy. This was my story. It did not then occur to me that, for my parents, watching me reporting from the country that had jailed them for the same “crime” must have been a freighted moment.

Walking along the Danube, I knew my every step was followed, as my parents’ had been. Budapest was then still a city of peeling plaster and crumbling stucco, broken here and there by a few grimy neon signs of a garish blue—but it was still my hometown.

Meeting my childhood friends, I was surprised to learn they had reported our rendezvous to their bosses. That was the law of the People’s Republic of Hungary. But the Ice Age of Soviet rule—imposed by weapons and terror—was cracking. I filmed a Hungarian folk festival. A decade earlier, this sort of flamboyant Magyar patriotism would have been considered subversive anti-Soviet nationalism. I danced to a Hungarian rock ’n’ roll band in a smoky subterranean nightclub with old friends who still whispered when they spoke of their dreams of travel in the West. They had never left this city and they remembered everything. We stayed up until dawn, laughed at memories of our games, our deaf piano teacher, the drama of my parents’ arrest, and the weeks that transformed all our lives: the Hungarian Uprising. They had followed every step of my family’s escape and journey to the United States. They had more time and a more intense interest in me than my American friends did.

Strolling on Vaci Street—the Madison Avenue of Budapest—I found the dressmaker who in the fifties had kept my mother in the latest Western fashions. She was still in business. “Katika!” she shrieked when I stepped into her old shop. My reincarnation as an American melted away under her gaze. I was again the earnest, insecure child of parents the state deemed Enemies of the People.

My reporting captured some of the emotions I was feeling. New York showered me with “herograms” for my work. “First rate reporting,” anchorman Frank Reynolds wrote in a telegram. “All in New York and Washington bureaus send congratulations. Your father and mother receiving calls from all over the country. Come see them and us soon.”

I was exultant on so many levels. I had again demonstrated my value to the network. And I had reconnected with my childhood. Budapest, the city of my deepest fears and longing, was mine again. I had shattered the taboo on the past.

Typically, my father made light of the emotional content of my trip. “Dear Peter,” Papa wrote. “First, many thanks for your telephone reports about Kati’s meanderings on the other side of the Curtain. Needless to tell you how much they mean to us.”

As I left the scene of my triumph, I was preoccupied by Peter. He had filled my Budapest hotel room with roses and long, loving, encouraging telexes. But he sensed I had experienced a powerful personal journey—one from which he felt excluded. “At the end of a week rich and full,” I wrote him on November 14, “in a state of agony at your words—I know under the influence of temper and anger—they still ring in my ear. Oh God, I never want to stir such feelings in you. Of course I’m interested in sharing, and in showing vulnerability and need. Am I so bad at all that?”

I tried to pitch myself into my next big story: the delicate process of Germans confronting their own history. Astonishingly, the country’s first mass exposure to the Holocaust came
with the broadcast of an American television series of the same name. In the breathless style of television news, I reported on ABC: “It has been nothing short of a thunderbolt. The reaction of sixty-five million West Germans confronting their history’s most painful chapter for the first time. Incredibly, this national soul-searching has been triggered by an American TV series, seen by twenty million Germans—accomplished what scores of well-meaning documentaries have failed to do: provoked a long-overdue national debate about the past . . . Shock, bewilderment and surprise. Those were the immediate reactions of Germans as they watched the horrors of the Nazi rise to power . . . in their living rooms.