Secret Kingdom (17 page)

‘I haven’t seen you here before. Did you come in for a reason?’

‘It was raining.’

‘The rain stopped an hour ago.’

An hour? Had she been there that long? It seemed like a few moments.

‘I wanted to be alone to think.’

‘Are you in trouble?’

We are all in trouble, she wanted to say. We live our lives in the grip of a power that kills innocent men and women for no reason, that changes names on a file, a momentary act which either ends your life or lets you live. There is nothing we can do to stop it because we have buried our consciences and lost the will to refuse. Of course I’m in trouble.

Before she could say anything, she was crying. The priest touched her arm briefly. ‘Is there anything you want to tell me?’

He was a thin man, probably in his fifties. He had white hair, his face was lined and pale, his eyes deep-set and sad. He had witnessed the agony of a nation reduced to its knees and he carried the pain of it in his expression.

‘I had a friend,’ she confessed. ‘We met in Moscow in 1939. We shared a room in a hostel during the war. We came back to Budapest in 1946. She taught Russian at a school not far from here. She was a good woman. We were very close. She never harmed anyone in her life. One night, more than a year ago, the police called at her apartment and took her away. I never saw her again.’

‘You didn’t come here to tell me that,’ he said. ‘Nor did you come to pray.’

‘What are you asking me to tell you?’

‘The truth,’ he said simply. ‘This is the only place where you may speak the truth in safety. You did not come here to grieve for your lost friend. Tell me what is truly on your mind.’

Could she tell him what she was almost too afraid to admit to herself? She felt an unbearable need to break out of her isolation, to tell someone the truth, to share the burden. Could she trust him? At this moment, she no longer cared. The need to break her silence overcame any objection she might raise.

‘I have seen her file,’ Eva said. ‘Please don’t ask me how. The name on the file is hers. The details in the file are mine. Someone instructed that the names were changed and she died in my place. She was murdered to save me.’

‘You feel guilty at being alive?’

‘Yes.’

‘Your sense of guilt is destroying your life.’

‘Yes.’

‘What are you doing about it?’

‘Trying to find who was responsible.’

‘Does that matter?’

‘I must discover the identity of whoever changed the names. Then I will know who killed her.’

I must know why I am alive, she wanted to say.

‘Then what?’

She had no answer to that. She shook her head. It was a moment she had never had the courage to imagine.

‘If you discover the truth, then you must forgive,’ he said. ‘Without forgiveness, the soul dies. You can forgive a crime without knowing the identity of the person who committed it.’

She looked into his dark, sad eyes. He had heard other stories like this, too many probably. He carried the burden of broken lives in his heart. He knew that words are no barrier to the rule of injustice, that in the end each of us individually must stand up for what we believe in and hope that by our example others may follow so that one day evil may be conquered.

‘Forgive murderers?’

He looked at her. ‘Especially murderers. Forgiveness is the way of life, the path forward. Not forgiving means living in the past, and that in itself is a form of death. The living must always choose life over death. That is what your friend would tell you.’

That was always the position of the priests; some mysteries can never be solved, so don’t try. She had rejected religion in her youth for the same reason. To her surprise she found some comfort in his words.

‘Will you tell me your friend’s name?’

She was surprised at his request. ‘Why?’

He took his time to reply. ‘I am compiling a list of the missing. It is important to record the history of evil in the hope that some day, and in another time when the darkness lifts, our Book of the Dead will come to light and lessons may be learned from our suffering. Unless we are brave enough to act as witnesses of the truth, how can we stop this evil happening again? If we cannot save ourselves, we must try to save future generations from making the same mistakes.’

Again the thought flashed through her mind: could she trust him?
She had little choice if she wanted answers. Confronting the truth meant taking risks.

‘Julia Kovacs.’

He wrote her name in a black notebook which he buried in the folds of his cassock.

‘Thank you. I hope you find the peace of mind you are looking for.’

On that warm day in June, Martineau slipped silently across an invisible border that separated the world he knew from the secret kingdom of his passion for Eva. He was now in a dangerous, unmapped territory from which, had he thought about it, he would have known return was unlikely. He was in the grip of a madness whose strength he was powerless to deny, and it made him reckless. Lovers never give any thought to the future, lost as they are in the eternal present of their senses. Martineau was no exception. If he was risking everything, so what? How could you live without risk?

In the hours he spent away from her, he had brief moments of sanity when he recognized the dangers in this relationship. He was an intelligence officer and she a foreign national and very likely a communist. (Come on, admit it. Of course she was a communist.) Forbidden territory. On that basis alone, theirs was an illicit union. Once he would have stopped short before the cries of his conscience and listened to their warnings. Now he ignored them, banishing his anxieties as he had banished caution. He couldn’t give her up, there was no question of it. He was prepared to risk his life, his career, anything for this woman.

Why the sudden abandonment of prudence? He had only to feel her body, respond to her touch, her smile, her sheer physical enjoyment of their lovemaking, to know in his heart that this was love without disguise and without compromise. He was consumed by it, empowered by it, obsessed by it, lost to it. What he felt for Eva reduced the world beyond her to a desolate and empty landscape, its warning cries fractious whispers that his passion drove him to ignore. Outside the impulses she aroused in him, nothing else mattered
because nothing else existed. In her arms he forgot who he was. All he knew was this woman, all he wanted was what she had to give him. Hers was the only world he lived in.

The hours they spent together were stolen from their daily lives. They would meet in her apartment for lunch, too hungry for each other to eat; during the afternoon he would have to go to the café across the square to appease his complaining stomach. Sometimes he would visit Eva after work (‘You must be away by seven, that is when Dora comes back’), sometimes he would spend the night knowing that he would be creeping out of her bed before six (‘Dora stays the night with her friend Elena but she will return here before going to school’).

On those mornings he would turn up at the embassy early, ready to lie about the operation he was involved in if questioned. He never was; the developing political situation in Budapest provided the perfect cover for his erratic behaviour. He would lock himself into his room for half an hour or so to give substance to the deception – nobody noticed, but it gave him a feeling of security and made the lie appear real – and then go out for a shave and breakfast before telephoning Christine to let her know he was still alive after working all night. Everything told him his life was building to a crisis, that this extraordinary intensity could not last. But he remained powerless to control it.

*

The idea of a weekend away was Eva’s. Dora, he learned, was going camping near Lake Balaton with members of her class.

‘We have never spent even one whole day together.’ She begged him to come to her summer house, the gift of a grateful State for her Olympic success. She wanted him all to herself, with no worry about when he had to leave, no anxious anticipation in her dreams of the sounds of Dora’s footsteps on the stair or a key turning in a lock. She would borrow a car from a friend. Couldn’t he arrange it, please, for her?

For the first time he panicked. In the last few days he had only been able to spend as much time with Eva because Christine had gone to their summer house to escape the heat of the city. Rachel Randall had been with her during the week but would return on Saturday morning when Martineau was expected. If he didn’t turn
up, Christine would be alone. She hated being alone, which, he admitted ruefully, was largely why they were still together.

How could he escape for the weekend? What lies would let him sleep in Eva’s bed knowing that Christine was only a couple of hundred yards away up the hill? It was absurd, too risky, he couldn’t possibly do it, but he hadn’t the heart to tell Eva that what she wanted was out of the question, and he heard himself agreeing. This is madness, he told himself, sheer madness, no good will come of it. But he went ahead all the same.

He lied to Hart. He was on to something, he said, it was too early to say what, he didn’t know how long it would take, would Hart mind the shop over the weekend? He’d be in touch as soon as he could. He lied to Christine. Something had come up, he said, London were making heavy demands, damn them, if things cleared up he’d join her. She should expect him when she saw him but not to worry if he didn’t put in an appearance.

He worked late on Friday night, locking himself in after Hart had gone home, left the office after ten (looking tired, anxious, preoccupied) and took a taxi to Vaci Street. She was waiting for him, as he knew she would be, her face and body alight with the inexhaustible energy that both delighted and terrified him. She kissed him and handed over the keys to her friend’s car. She leaned against him as he drove the borrowed Volkswagen. It was after midnight when they turned off the battered road, down a bumpy dirt track to park out of sight under a tree.

It was a still moonlit night, the stars hanging like a shroud in a black sky above him. No wind. The air soft and clear from the lake. He looked up the hill towards the house in which Christine was sleeping. No lights. She must have gone to bed. He experienced no sense of release in the knowledge, only breathless constraint. He felt Eva’s arms around him.

‘This is our time now,’ she whispered. ‘For these few days you are safe. No one can take you from me.’

She was wrong, only he couldn’t tell her. He was safe while it was night. With the dawn, danger returned.

*

He remembers only fragments of the days that followed, moments that stay in his mind, mental images in which he sees himself and
the girl and through which he can relive the voyage of discovery on which they launched themselves under the stars on the night of their arrival. Are they images of madness? Does he lose his mind in the hours they spend together? If this is madness, then he never wants to be sane again. What he experiences is his own rebirth, the finding of sensations and emotions he has not touched for half his lifetime. The essence of passion is to possess and be possessed. In that exchange, nothing is forbidden. Passion denies rules because it acknowledges no restraints. It is the freedom to discover oneself through another being.

*

He wakes to clear, sharp light pouring in through the window illuminating the whitewashed walls of the bedroom. It is early, not yet seven. Through the opened window he hears birds singing, otherwise there is silence. Eva sits at her dressing table, her back to him, drying her hair with a towel, unaware that he is looking at her. He watches the play of muscles under her skin, he hears her humming softly to herself some Hungarian tune he doesn’t recognize. Can this woman really be his? Or is he dreaming?

‘Did I wake you?’

She turns and he smiles at her. She wraps the towel expertly into a turban and comes over to the bed. She puts her hands around his face.

‘While you are here you are mine and mine alone,’ she says as she kisses him. Drops of water from her hair fall on to his face, like dew.

*

He gets out of bed. He can hear her next door in the kitchen making breakfast. He sees his reflection in the mirror on the wall. He is thin and white, his unshaven face furrowed, the hairs on his chest curling white and grey; there are lines and spots on his body, the marks of age that he cannot conceal. How scrawny he has become, how inelegantly old, the vibrancy and elasticity of her skin that he delights in is missing from his own. How can she want him? He rubs his hand across his chest. How can she bear to touch him? He is grotesque, ugly, spent, old. Surely she must see him for what he has become?

He doesn’t move when her hands slide around his chest from
behind. He feels the warmth of her body against him, her breasts against his back. She leans her chin on his shoulder and looks at the double reflection in the mirror. Then she smiles.

‘I know what you are thinking and it is not true,’ she says. ‘If it were, we would not be here together.’

*

She lies on her stomach beside him on the red rug, her head resting on her arms, asleep. He is on his back, hands behind his head, eyes screwed up against the bright sunlight, very much awake. He wears a pair of baggy khaki shorts that made her laugh when he put them on. His legs look like sticks, she says. She has put nothing on. He sees her walk from the house to the garden. He watches the movements of her body and wants her to remain like this for ever.

How many days is it, he asks himself, since I looked through my binoculars and saw you for the first time?

That day changed his life. He has decided that that was the moment when he fell in love with her. He glimpsed her beauty, never dreaming that before long he would possess it. Now, like a painter with his model, she allows him to see her in all her moods and movements. He wants to capture every moment with her, to hold in his memory a set of clear, living images. Eva at her dressing table. Eva washing her hair. Eva asleep. Eva loving him. She knows this instinctively, allowing him the freedom to look at her, to want her, to love her.

*

Can he see Christine sitting in their garden further up the hillside? Or is he imagining it? Can she see him? All she has to do is go into the kitchen, his binoculars are resting on the side table. If she were to look down the hill she would see him lying in a garden on a red rug, the naked body of an unknown woman asleep beside him. Would she cry out in pain? Run down the hill until she found him? He knows Christine. That’s not her way. She harbours bitterness and chooses her moment to use it. She would replace the binoculars in their place, pick up her book from where she had left it on the kitchen table, sit down once more on her deckchair and wait. Christine has always waited, though what for, God knows. She has the patience of the lost.

*

In the late afternoon, when the heat has relented, Eva insists they take bicycles and ride down to the lake. (He is reluctant to leave the house and she does not understand why. She has to work hard to persuade him.) The pale green water stretches away into a misty haze above which he can make out the tops of the distant hills. He sees the wooden chairs on stilts sticking out of the water and the seated fishermen patiently watching their lines. He hears voices of children shouting as they swim. (Is Dora among them? Will she see him with her mother?) He watches Eva adjust the shoulder strap of the swimming costume she wore when he saw her at the Gellert. She pulls the seat of her costume over her buttocks and he sees the tiny blemish on the skin of her thigh – how he wants to suck the poison from her – before she runs to the end of the wooden pier and dives in.

*

Water pours off her hair and body. She pushes the hair from her eyes and takes him in her arms. She kisses him, a deep, long kiss that leaves him gasping. She laughs with pleasure and pushes him backwards on to the bed.

‘We’re soaking wet,’ he says.

‘The sheets will dry,’ she replies as she climbs over him, blocking out the world from his sight. He is enveloped in a wave of sweet wet darkness. There is nothing else now, only the two of them and their passion as his body responds to hers.

*

They have dinner out of doors in a restaurant up in the hills. She sits beside him, a languid figure, saying little, eating slowly, leaning against him. The buttons on her skirt have fallen open; he sees her lean brown legs that only an hour before he has kissed with such longing. He refills her wine glass. She looks up at him, smiles, reaches up and kisses him softly on the cheek with the inside of her lips. In that movement, the strap of her dress falls off her shoulder and he sees her breast exposed almost to the nipple. She makes no move to pull it up. All the time he feels the heat of her, like an animal.

*

The moonlight throws the image of the leaves from the birch tree against the wall of the bedroom. A night breeze comes off the lake. He watches the movements on the wall, a natural film projected for his benefit. He feels her move against him. She sits up, pushes the hair out of her eyes, reaches for his hand and holds it against her cheek.

‘When I dream,’ she says sleepily, ‘it is always of oceans, great waves breaking over me, icy water on my skin, blue sea and skies, things I have never seen.’

*

He sleeps fitfully. In his dreams, Christine stands at the door of the bedroom and watches. He wakes full of anxiety, his heart beating fast. There is no one there, of course. He looks at the woman beside him. She has thrown off the sheet. He wants to touch her but is afraid that his fingers will wake her. He lies down again beside her, in wonder, as the moonlight plays across her body.

The knocking was tentative, exploratory, not demanding or insistent, but it frightened her as she went to answer the door. A woman in her sixties, unsmiling, said quietly: ‘May I come in for a moment? I would like to speak to you.’

‘Who are you?’

The woman put her fingers to her lips to indicate her unwillingness to give her name in the hall in case she was overheard.

‘Julia Kovacs told me you were her friend.’

‘How did you know Julia?’

The woman hesitated. The courage that had driven her here and made her knock at the door was suddenly deserting her. Eva watched the struggle make itself apparent through the changing contours of her face.

‘I was a warder at the woman’s prison.’

Then
you
must
know
how
Julia
died.
Maybe
you
know
who
killed
her.