The Magyar Venus

CHAPTERELEVEN

January 08

My hopes and dreams have been dashed. I am told by those more skilled and knowledgeable than I, that what we have found is the skeleton of a man who died a mere 200 years ago. A gypsy, most likely, as these people wander through this region of the world. I am also told they are a bellicose people, much given to violence and other crimes, which would perhaps explain the blow this departed soul endured. I find this very difficult to accept, however well meaning and well schooled the individuals who espouse these opinions may be. I have seen these gypsies, do not consider them any more violent than the rest of society, but more to the point, I have never seen anything on their persons that would hark back to the beads buried with the man in the cave, nor, in my discussions with them—for I have tested this hypothesis with the gypsies themselves despite warnings not to do so—has there been any mention of a tradition of staining their dead with red dye.

I had hoped that this discovery would enable me to join with others of like interests, and perhaps allow me to augment my allowance through some teaching opportunity or the like. Instead I find myself rejected by those whose approval I sought, and, worse still, almost penniless.

I believe I must also admit to myself that T will never join me. When I was busy and excited about my work, I did not notice as the months passed. My expectations were no doubt unreasonable, but still I am lost. I fear that the cold dark cloud will descend on me again. I am not certain I will survive it this time.

September 20/21

The next morning I was out at Gatwick and on to a flight to Edinburgh. I knew who had written the diaries. It was a simple process of elimination. They were, after all, written in English. The author of the diaries had described the excavation team as Zoltan Nadasdi, son of the landlord in Budapest and Lillafiiired, Peter and Pal Fekete, sons of Fekete Neni. The diaries made it pretty clear none of these people spoke English, and even if they did, to write with such facility in a second, or maybe even third language was almost impossible to believe. That left, among the team members, S. B. Morison. S. B. Morison was not identified, no adjectives or descriptors were attached to the name. That was because there was no reason to do so. S. B. Morison was the author of the diaries.

Morison had written three letters to the Bramley Museum, one asking them to look at the skull, and theories as to its age, the other to tell them how it was to be delivered, and that drawings of the skeleton in situ were with the skull, so that Mr. Piper would see how it was found. There was no record of a reply. The diaries made it clear what that reply had been: the skeleton was a gypsy, dead for only two hundred years. A third, sad letter asked to be considered for employment at the Bramley, given the author's constrained circumstances. A job offer, I am sure, never came.

It was all relatively easy, once one was disabused of the notion that the author was Piper. The clues were there. Right at the start, for example, the author talked about coming down to London and on to Budapest. Piper was from London. He wouldn't have had to go to London first. There were several hints that I, and others, missed.

S. B. Morison's letters to Piper had given addresses in both Edinburgh and Budapest. I'd simply gone to the British Telecom online directory, keyed in the name and Edinburgh address and found there was an S. M. Morison living there. I called the number from my hotel in London, spoke to a very nice woman, told her I was doing research on Morisons with one r, that being an unusual spelling, and that I was particularly interested in an S. B. Morison who had traveled to Eastern Europe around 1900 to do some scientific research. Within five minutes, I had an appointment for tea the next afternoon.

From the airport, I took a taxi to a townhouse on Moray Place, a circle of lovely Georgian homes in a crescent surrounding a private park, in what is generally referred to as the New Town of Edinburgh, although there, new is a relative term. An elderly woman, well into her eighties, answered the door at my ring. Her hair, once red, had faded to a lovely soft beige. I rather thought she had just had it done, perhaps because of my visit. I handed her my card and was shown into a rather dark parlor. A man in a leg cast, his crutches propped up against a piano, was sitting in a chair by the window. "Sit doon, why don't ye," she said. "There's my young neighbor, Nigel," she said. "Nigel, this is… ooh I've forgotten your name already."

"Lara McClintoch," I said. "How do you do."

Young Nigel, who wasn't a day over fifty, got out of his chair with some difficulty and shook my hand.

"I got the scrapbook out last night," she said, pouring me some tea. "When you've had your tea and biscuits, I'll show you the pictures. There are letters, too. How did you hear about my aunt Selena?" she asked. "No one has asked about her before."

There it was, you see. Rereading the diaries the previous evening in light of what I now knew, I realized I should have known they were written by a woman. Karoly had missed it, Frank had missed it, but I shouldn't have. It harkened back to that story Cybil had told the first time we got together only a few weeks ago, the one about the man and his son in an accident in which the man was killed, and the surgeon refusing to operate on his son. The surgeon, of course, was a woman. We just couldn't see that in 1900 an explorer and person of science could be a woman. But it was so obvious when, unfettered by that prejudice, you read them. T was her lover. It was as straightforward as that. I would hazard a guess that he was married. That's why she was never going to marry. She went to Budapest, not because it was the obvious place to find evidence of early man, but because she wanted to be with him. That there were limestone caves in the vicinity must have seemed a happy coincidence.

"I came across your Aunt Selena while I was doing some research in Budapest," I said, "It was on a different matter entirely." I was determined to come as close to the truth now as I could. There'd been enough lies told on this subject over the past hundred years. "I found her name on a list of people working on what I guess you'd call an archaeological dig in Hungary. I thought at first it was a man, you know, and of course the spelling was unusual and a Scottish name in Budapest at that, so I suppose I just became very curious about this woman and what she would be like. This is very good of you to talk to me about her."

"Oh, it's my pleasure, especially since you're interested in the Morisons. A 'dig' you say. I wouldn't have thought women would have been allowed on such things then."

"It was a bit unusual, I'm sure," I said. "A lot of people will be surprised to hear about her."

"There are Morisons in Canada you know, with one r, the same as us. No doubt one of the cousins emigrated. I'm the last of this particular branch of the family. My two older brothers died in the last war, as did my fiance. One brother died at Dunkirk, the other in Holland somewhere. My Mick was shot down over France. They never found the body. For a long time I hoped he was taken prisoner, and I waited for him to come home for years after the war ended. It wasn't to be. I never met anyone after that I could love as much as him. That's them, my brothers and Mick, in their uniforms in that photograph on the mantelpiece. Go have a look."

"They were all very handsome," I said, taking the photo down for a close look.

"Ay," she said. "They were that. But you didn't come to talk about my troubles. You came to hear about my aunt. Selena Boswell Morison, that's her name. I'm Selena Mary. The Mary is for my mother. I never met her, you know, my aunt. She was long gone when I was born. My father talked about her a great deal, though, so I have a sense of her. She was his only sister, there was just the two of them, and with both parents dying when he and Selena were young, they were very close. He never understood why she left like that. Myself, I've often wondered if it was because of a man. We'll never know, I suppose.

"I think you're right about the man," I said. "His name started with a T. He may have been Hungarian, Tamas, perhaps."

"You have done your research, haven't you, hen? What did I tell you, Nigel? Nigel is here because when I told him yesterday I'd invited you to tea, he thought you might be planning to rob me, that it was a scam of some sort. I told him I didn't think he'd be much help when it came down to it, what with his broken leg, and anyways you sounded right nice on the telephone, but he insisted on being here."

Nigel laughed. "In truth, it was the shortbread I wanted. She always brings it out for company."

"It's delicious," I said. "May I have another?"

"Of course you can, hen," she said. "But to get back to my aunt. She must have been very brave to go off to the continent all by herself like that, and in 1900! I've read since about Victorian lady travelers, Mary Kingsley and the like, but still, I think my aunt must have been a very special person. I wish I'd known her. The sad thing is, she never came back. A terrible accident. Would you like to see the scrap-book? I got it out for you. It has the letter from someone in Hungary telling my father, her brother, that she'd died. In Hungarian, it was. He had quite a time finding someone in Edinburgh to translate it for him, and when he did, it was very bad news. There's a picture of her, there on the wall, a portrait. My father told me about her often. He told me she was very pretty and very smart but that she'd some funny ideas in her head, about science and also about marriage, which she insisted was not for her. Why she went to Europe my father never understood. She met some Hungarian boys who put crazy ideas in her head, according to my father, so maybe what you're telling me about this man, Tamas, is a fact. Here it is, the letter. It's dated as you can see. April 30, 1901. She was only twenty-four, poor thing." I got up and walked over to the portrait as she spoke. Selena Morison had been more than very pretty. She was beautiful, with red hair and green eyes and pale, pale skin. It seemed to me that there was both a strength and yet a fragility to her. She had a strong mouth, a determined gaze, but there was something a bit tremulous, vulnerable, perhaps, about the eyes. I turned back to read the letter Selena held out to me.

Dear Sir:

I am writing to you with very bad news as to the health of your sister. There was a terrible accident. She was walking in the hills and lost her footing. It was a treacherous spot on Molndr Peak, and she fell a great distance. Despite all efforts by doctors, she was taken by the angels yesterday. She was a very fine lady, and not one to be taken lightly. I am sorry to be the bearer of such bad news. She was very brave at the end. My employer has seen to a Christian burial, so you can set your mind at rest on that score.

Perhaps when you are feeling more consoled, you will tell me what you would wish me to do with her belongings. There is not much, a few items of clothing and some unusual stones, some bones she found, and a carving, rather strange. If you would like me to send these items to you in Scotland, I would be most grateful if you could send me the postage as I am not a person of means. I have returned your letter, unopened. It is from this I have your address. She spoke of you often.

Your servant, Fekete Marika.

"He wrote back, of course," Selena said. "Here is his letter in English, and I suppose the same person who translated the first letter wrote back for him in Hungarian. That's why we have the English letter, not signed, you see. June 15, 1901, it was."

Madame—I thank you for your kindness in writing to me regarding my sister Selena's death. She was, as you say, a very fine lady. As to your question about her belongings, may I suggest that you keep for yourself what you would like, and distribute the rest to the poor of your city. It is, I'm sure, what my sister would wish. I have enclosed a bank draft payable to you which I hope will cover any outstanding expenses my sister might have incurred, and to cover the cost of the burial. With gratitude for your kindness once again, I remain, faithfully yours, etc.

"I don't know where this Molnar Peak is, do you?" Selena said.

"It's in the Biikk Mountains in Northern Hungary, near a little town called Lillafiired," I said, thinking what a perverse little cosmic joke that name was.

"What would she be doing there, do you suppose?"

"Your aunt Selena was a woman way ahead of her time, an amazing person. She was interested in science, particularly in finding evidence of ancient man. She explored the limestone caves in the Biikk Mountains, and she did, in fact, find a skeleton that dates back twenty-five thousand years."

"Nooo!" Selena Mary said.

"Yes. She also found an ivory carving just as old."

"Nooo!" she said again.

"You mean hunner, don't ye?" Nigel said.

"Thousand," I said. "Twenty-five thousand years old."

"That would be Neanderthals?"

"Not Neanderthals, Homo sapiens, ancestors of ours who lived in caves."

"I think this calls for a wee goldie, hen," Nigel said. "You're looking piqued." He hoisted himself up and hopped over to side table, returning with a bottle of Scotch and three glasses. He poured one and handed it to Selena, then at my nod, poured one for me, and for himself.

"How do you know these things?" Nigel said, suspiciously.

"I have her diaries," I said. "And I am going to give you a copy, Ms. Morison."

"Call me Selena, hen," she said. I'd decided by now that hen meant something like dear. "I'll have another, Nigel," she added, holding out her glass. It made me think of Lily Larrington, what seemed so long ago, passing out birdbath-sized glasses of sherry. I reached out for a wee bit more myself, seeing as I was no longer concerned about my drinking habits.

"I am going to leave you with this book," I said, taking The Traveler and the Cave out of my bag. "I have to warn you, though, that someone else took credit for finding the skeleton, a fellow by the name of Cyril Piper." Both of them looked at me as if I was a creature from outer space.

"She's away with the fairies, isn't she?" Selena said, turning to Nigel.

"Sorry," I said. "I know that this sounds implausible."

"It does," Nigel agreed. "Why should Selena here believe ^ou?"

"I don't suppose you'd have something in her handwriting, would you?" I asked.

"I think I would," Selena said. "Here, further on in the book. A letter to my father on his birthday. He was younger than she was."

Dear Robert, the letter said. "I hope this letter reaches you in time for your nineteenth birthday, so that you know you are much in my thoughts on the day. You will have to think of marriage soon enough. Choose a girl with a pleasant disposition above all, and virtuous too. If she is comely and has a dowry of some value that would also be well. As always you are in my heart. Your loving sister, Selena

P.S. Thank our uncle for me for sending the draft for my little inheritance so promptly. I will put it to good use. S

"He loved her very much, didn't he?" Selena said. "And she, her brother. You can tell from the words, can't you, the love that comes off the pen?"

"Yes, you can," I said. "Have a look at this letter. I had it copied at a museum in London. Does the writing look similar to yours to you?" I had, with some difficulty persuaded Hilary to let me copy just one. I chose the letter Selena sent asking for a job, perhaps because it rankled the most and I wanted to stay mad.

Both Selena and Nigel peered at the two letters. "I would say yes," Selena said at last. "And you, Nigel? You see better than I do."

"Looks like," Nigel said.

"Look, I know this is very presumptuous of me," I said. "But I would very much like to have a copy of your letter. I must have one. If you will permit me, and can direct me to a copy shop, I promise to bring it back in a few minutes. You see, the original diaries are now in Toronto. They are handwritten. I could arrange to have the handwriting on both compared. I am certain they will match, and I hope it will prove to you that what I say is true."

"You say my aunt found something important?" Selena said.

"Very important," I said.

"Nigel?" she said. "Your advice, please."

"Take my key, hen," Nigel said, handing a key chain to Selena. "You know where my fax machine is. It'll make you a copy, too."

Selena was a little breathless by the time we'd negotiated our way to the second floor of Nigel's place, but she was a determined little woman. She couldn't operate the fax, and neither could I, but between us we figured it out. In a few minutes I had the writing sample I needed, and we went back for another wee goldie.

"I know this next question is the worst yet," I said. "I'm going to ask it anyway. Was there an indication, anything you remember, about mental illness in your family?"

Nigel looked rather bothered.

"I'm asking because the diaries make reference—well, I'll read it to you. There are two: madness does not always pass from generation to generation, is the first. The second isI must believe that madness is not an inevitable result of procreation of those who are stricken by it. Perhaps I should say there are three references. The last written words say something to the effect that she fears the cold, dark cloud descending, and she may not survive it this time. I really don't think she wasn't referring to the weather, but rather to acute depression. Could I be right about this?"

"You don't have to answer that, hen," Nigel said.

"I don't mind," she said. "My father told me that his mother, my grandmother, suffered greatly from depression, and his sister did as well. He told me once that he feared his sister might not be in heaven because she had taken her own life, that it wasn't a fall, you understand. There was no way to bring the body back. The family she had been staying with had seen to it that she was buried properly, a Christian burial. But there was that reference that you've seen, about not worrying on that score. I think my father always wondered if they knew she had jumped, and not fallen. You go to the Bad Fire for that.

"He said many times when I was young that he was going to look for her grave, but he never did. He would have to have gone right away, wouldn't he? A few years after that, and there was a war, and then another. He lost two sons in the Second, and never really recovered. Perhaps he suffered from the curse of depression, too. I used to worry about that. Happily it seems to have passed me by. If I were going to lose my mind I would have when Mick and my brothers died."

"You're the sanest person I know," Nigel said. "Although perhaps a wee bit plootered by now."

"You're a bad boy, Nigel, for making mention of it. Nigel's from Glasgow," she said. "He has these quaint expressions."

Plootered? I suppose that meant plastered. I was having almost as much trouble following this conversation as I did Hungarian.

"I would like to go, to see if I could find her," Selena said. "Her grave, I mean. I am, after all, named for her. I suppose it will never happen, just like my father never got there. For years I couldn't, what with the Communists and everything. Now I'm just too old."

I spent at least an hour or so more with Selena and her young friend, Nigel. I told her about the Magyar Venus, about how I was trying to trace its provenance, and in so doing had happened upon her aunt. And I promised her I would make it right.

I left Edinburgh that afternoon with a box of Selena's shortbread cookies in my bag, and headed back to London, and on to Budapest. I should have been pretty happy. While I had uncovered the perfidy of C. J. Piper, a fact that could not help but be embarrassing to Karoly, I was also very close to establishing the provenance of the Venus. What, after all, did it matter that Piper hadn't written the diaries, as long as I could prove that someone had, that the Venus had really been found in the Biikks?

It mattered, because Mihaly Kovacs had sold the Venus to Karoly Molnar, and Mihaly Kovacs was dead.

The next afternoon I was on Falk Miksa with Laurie Barrett who had agreed, at my request, to come with me and translate. It was late in the day when we got to the address on Selena B's letters. The Divas had done well. It was one of the three they'd found. Laurie and I had met at a coffee house on Szent Istvan kdrut, and as we walked past the flower stalls and turned toward Honved utca, I knew I'd found the right place. Honved lit becomes Pannonia utca on the other side of the kbrut, and Pannonia was where, according to Karoly, his mother had told him there had been a Russian tank during those terrible days in November 1956, when the Communists rolled back into Budapest.

I had terribly mixed feelings as we approached the building. I kept thinking how Laurie had told me the day I first met her at the Gerbeaud, that people in Budapest don't move houses the way we North Americans do, and I was hoping against hope that in this case, that would be true. Even if it wasn't, as long as someone here remembered the Nadasdi family, or for that matter, the Feketes, and knew what had happened to them, I might just have closed the loop on the Magyar Venus's provenance, or at the very least come close to doing so. If I could somehow prove that a descendent of the original Nadasdis had sold the Venus to Mihaly Kovacs, who had in turn sold it to Karoly, then it would be not entirely, but almost, impossible to dispute the Venus's authenticity. Yes, Selena B. Morison could have made it all up, but somehow, I didn't think so. I was still feeling betrayed in some way by Karoly, but I knew it was possible that his failing was one of poor scholarship, faulty research, rather than deliberate misrepresentation, or worse than that, a crime.

"Thanks for this," I said to Laurie as we rang the bell.

"My pleasure," she said. "I think it's fascinating to think it might be possible to trace the provenance of the Venus through a hundred years. There's no Nadasdi here, as you can see, nor Fekete. But I've buzzed the superintendent."

She spoke to the woman who came to the door for some time before finally turning to me. "I think we may be on to something here," Laurie said. "This woman is asking me why you want to know. I'm not entirely sure what I would say, so I told her I was only the translator and I would have to ask you. What do you want me to say?"

"I think you should tell her that I am doing research on a woman, a Scot, by the name of Selena B. Morison who was a tenant in this building at the turn of the last century, and who knew the Nadasdi family and their employees, Sandor and Marika Fekete. You can say that Selena stayed with the family both here and at their country estate, and that I was hoping I could speak to a descendant of the family. It's true, after all, even if certain details are missing."

"Okay," she said, and began speaking rapidly in Hungarian.

The woman said something, closed the door in our faces, and her footsteps faded away.

"I guess that was a no," I said.

"No, it wasn't," Laurie said. "She said she'd be back in a minute."

It was considerably more than a minute, but the door did open again, and we were beckoned in. We creaked and groaned our way up to the top floor in a tiny elevator where we were ushered through a door. We found ourselves standing in a rather austere hallway, a tiny kitchen visible to one side. Ahead of us was what I suppose we'd call a bed sitter, or a studio apartment. We just stood there for a moment wondering what to do, until a man of about sixty or so, poked his head around the corner and signaled us to come in.

The place was very small, but it had a little balcony where the last flowers of summer still bloomed. The room was in sore need of paint. You could see the spots where art had once been displayed on the walls, just a stain on the wallpaper, and an empty hook, witness to that now. There were books everywhere, and on the floor a threadbare, but once elegant carpet. I thought that this room, or one just like it, had been home for awhile to the author of the diaries.

Laurie did the talking. "This gentleman is Janos Varga and that," she said nodding in the direction of the bed where an elderly woman lay propped up against the pillows, is his mother Agnes, also Varga. If I have this right, she is a Nadasdi."

"Ask her what her father's name was?" I said.

Laurie asked the question. "Zoltan," the woman said. Of course, I thought, one of the diggers at the site, son of the family that owned this building in Budapest, and the country estate.

"Ask her if she's always lived in this apartment," I said. Laurie did.

The man grunted, and then spoke rather angrily.

"He says if you are asking if this is the family home, then, yes it is," Laurie translated. "If you are asking if they have always lived here, then he says you don't know your Hungarian history."

"Tell him I'd like to learn," I said.

"He says that while the building is rightfully theirs, it was stolen from them. His mother has been given the opportunity—lovely phrase that!—to reacquire it. He says they can't afford to do that, but that he was able to move her back into the building in one of the tiny apartments. It is tiny, isn't it?"

"Her family would have lived on the first floor, the piano nobile," I said. "Apparently it was a really beautiful home."

Laurie told them what I'd said. "There was a particularly lovely painting, a landscape with mountains, the area where the family's country estate was located," I said.

Laurie translated. The man said nothing, but the old woman suddenly struggled to sit up.

"She wants to know how you know that," Laurie said. Through Laurie, I told her about the reference in the diaries. Then I took out a picture of the Magyar Venus and showed it to the old woman. She pulled it up close to her face and her son brought the lamp over so she could see it. She looked at it a very long time. "Yes," she said at last. "Yes, this was ours."

"Ask her if she sold it to an antique dealer on Falk Miksa by the name of Mihaly Kovacs," I said, holding my breath while I waited for the answer.

"She says she didn't have it to sell to anyone," Laurie said, finally. "She said it was taken with the rest."

"Ask her what happened—to the building and the art, everything. How she lost them, why she is now in this little apartment," I said.

And then, through Laurie Barrett's mouth, Agnes Varga began to tell her story. "I have come back here for Janos," Agnes Varga said. "My other boy, the younger, is in Baltimore where his father took him more than fifty years ago. He comes now to see me, once a year, and he's going to help me reclaim this place. I came back here for Janos. I want him to have it, to make a life for himself here in Budapest. This apartment was in ruins. Animals must have lived here, not people. But my son has worked hard. He remembers how it was when he was a little boy and he is trying to make even this little apartment like that. For me, I suppose. We do this for each other.

"We had some happy times here, when I was still with the boys' father. But then he left me, took up with another woman across the river in Buda. In 1950, he took our eldest son and his new wife and escaped across the border. These were terrible times, then, neighbor spying on neighbor, encouraged to report even the smallest of transgressions to the Communist authorities. I was suspect already because my husband had escaped with his new wife and our son to America. I don't blame him for that. Before the Russians came, my husband had been a very successful business person. Our home here was beautiful. But to be successful was, in those days, a curse. His business was taken over by the party, and instead of the fifteen workers Andras—that was his name, my husband, Andras—had employed, there were six times that, all lazy louts who felt entitled to a paycheck without having to work for it, accomplishing less, much less, than the original fifteen. And of course, my husband no longer owned the business. It belonged to the state.

"He was taken to that terrible place, you know, the secret police building at Andrassy lit 60. It was a lovely place once, but not now. The National Socialist party, the people of the arrow cross, used it as a headquarters, and when the Russians came to replace them after the war, they just moved right in. There were basements and subbasements of terrible cells, and some say they had a giant meat grinder to get rid of their victims. I don't know if that is true, but a lot of people went in there and never came out. To this day, I have never walked on the sidewalk in front of Andrassy ut 60. Always I crossed the street, so as not to walk too close. We all did. But they took Andras there, just because he had once been successful. He was one of the lucky ones. He got out, and when he did, he began to plan his escape. He said he would send someone back for us, for Janos and me, but it never happened. Perhaps that person was captured, perhaps he just never came. Or perhaps he never existed." The woman stopped for a moment and reached for her son's hand.

Laurie took a deep breath. "This is awful, isn't it?" she said to me. "I can hardly bear to translate it."

"Even though we were divorced, it didn't matter," the woman went on. "I was suspect, just because he had gone, and because we had a beautiful home. And they were right for suspecting me of incorrect thinking. Every day Janos would come home from school and he would tell me what he had learned. It wasn't true what they were teaching him. I tried to make sure he understood what the real truth was, not that version made up by the party cadre. I tried to undo, every day, the damage they had done. But I had to tell him to keep what I had told him in his heart and never to speak the words at school.

"I had a job, not a good one, but still a job, and I knew how to work the black market to see that my son was fed.

He wanted to be a dancer, was accepted into the ballet school where they trained the best dancers. It was across from the Opera House. The children took classes in the Opera House itself. Janos was a member of the Communist young people's organization. We tried to fit in while not forgetting who we really were. Our family was landed gentry, you know. We had owned land, and servants, and we treated them well.

"Maybe it was something Janos said. He was just a boy, and when his father sent him a photograph of his car in America, he wanted so badly to show it to his friends. Maybe that was it. Or perhaps it was simply that my former husband had escaped. Despite all the care I took, something happened. It was 1951. They came in the night, you know, always in the night in those dangerous hours just before dawn when sleep is its deepest and the pounding on the door brings only confusion and not resistance or flight. Although where to flee and for what purpose to resist? We were given two hours to get ready and allowed only 250 kilos to take with us. What to choose? What to leave behind?

"And then there was the journey to the countryside, to hardship and pain, death for many, loaded into trucks with others whose eyes were as confused or pained as yours. But that is not what you came to hear about, not what you want to know. You want to know about what was left behind? The art, the furniture, the once precious objects that suddenly, in those terrible circumstances, no longer held any value for those who were taken. They were given to people deemed more worthy by those who came in the night.

"So what happened to the lady you showed me? Someone deemed more worthy got her. I hope she was a curse," the woman hissed.

"Ask her if she has any idea who was deemed more worthy," I said. I waited a moment for the translation.

"She says she cannot say about the lady, but she did find out who moved into the apartment. It was a man and a woman and her family," Laurie said. "You'll understand that I'm not translating word for word. She called them rather more unpleasant things than a man and a woman, because she thinks there is a possibility that they betrayed them just to get the apartment. The couple's name was Molnar, Imre and Magdolna Molnar."