A few months before this scene becomes real, running along the hotel corridor, knocking on his door, at first politely, then in tears, Coach, please open for me, Nadia gets glimpses of the first signs, without reading them: Béla often finds a stand-in to take his place, he is called to Bucharest ‘on business’, he receives official documents that he tears up furiously before reading them; Márta silently picks up the pieces.
One evening the two of them are in the empty gym putting away the mats when Béla suddenly takes Nadia in his arms and cradles her for a moment.
She will recount the scene for years as if it was from a film. She ran along that corridor carpeted in dark blue and when she got into his empty, empty, empty room she looked everywhere. Several times behind the doors, even though it made no sense. Béla was too big to hide behind any door, even one in a big American hotel.
She very quickly gets a grip on how the story ends. Refuses to comment on the defection of the person who sometimes, when she was a child, she would call ‘Papa’, only to cover her mouth with her hand and giggle, I’m sorry, Coach.
On the last day of their tour in New York, Béla confesses to Nadia that he is not returning to Romania. She bursts into tears, begging him to take her with him. He refuses, she is too young, how could he guarantee she would have a proper life in that country, Béla writes in his memoirs.
That’s false, she says categorically. She was ‘trained’ (that’s the verb she uses) not to react to anything Béla said, that distance was an indispensable protection, she didn’t believe Béla would leave, so she didn’t cry, she insists, as if it was a crucial detail. Károlyi’s defection looks as if it will be a hard episode to unpick.
All the sentences devoted to the event in the Securitate’s Katona Dossier start with the phrase ‘it appears that’: it appears that Béla suggested to Nadia that she leave with him. It appears that the Americans helped Béla flee, they had been in contact ever since 1978. It appears that the many purchases the Károlyis made in New York were intended to avoid arousing suspicion, just like Geza’s call to his wife asking her to come and wait for him at the airport because he has too many bags to carry himself.
In the end I reconstitute a plausible version: at 9.30 on the day of departure the whole team visits a shopping mall five hundred metres from the hotel. Béla and Márta are seen for the last time outside a jeweller’s, then they vanish. At noon, three people are missing from the roll-call: Béla, Márta and Geza. At three in the afternoon, the Romanian authorities are alerted, it’s time to head for the airport.
‘These details, all these details,’ says Nadia, perplexed when she calls me, ‘I’m afraid they just obscure the essential! How are your readers going to understand how difficult the decision was for Béla? You have always travelled with a return ticket in your pocket. Deciding to go over to the West meant abandoning his family, his friends, in the knowledge that they would face redoubled surveillance. It was a terrible decision to take, that sense of guilt… I only understood what had happened the moment everyone began looking for Béla. It was as if I was waking up. I ran to Reception, invented some excuse so that they would give me the key. His room was empty. It was… the end. I thought he… would never leave. On the plane, the girls were crying, the Securitate agents were in a panic, arguing with each other, trying to work out a story to cover themselves.’
The Katona Dossier ends like this: harassment by those in power, his reputation on the slide after Moscow, and above all the strained atmosphere with Nadia, whom the Son of Ceauşescu has taken over completely, all these reasons explain why…
The Romanian press accuses Béla of high treason, his possessions are impounded, and those close to him, as well as his gymnasts, are placed under increased surveillance.
I have the impression that Nadia was wholeheartedly behind Béla’s defection, but she sets me straight. ‘He left slamming the door behind him, and all of a sudden I found I was locked in. I was… a prisoner, but in my own country. Exiled. But an internal exile.’
‘But… All the same, you must have suspected he was going to stay in the United States, after that moving speech he gave on the eve of his defection to all of you gathered together, when he told you you must carry on working hard, even without him…’
‘What? No… Who says that, he does? OK…’
(She takes a deep breath.)
‘I’ve already explained: yes, the night before in the hotel corridor he whispered to me that he was going to stay, but I thought it was a joke, some kind of provocation.’
‘Provocation? Did you think he was setting a trap for you like those Securitate agents who claimed to their friends they were going to flee so that they would give themselves away?’
Nadia doesn’t answer my question, but lowers her voice because she remembers ‘something interesting’: a call she receives when she goes back up to her hotel room to get her case (at that moment, no one can find their coaches, they’re being looked for everywhere).
‘That woman – I’ve no idea who she was – told me she was getting in touch with me through Béla to know if I wanted to stay in the United States with him, or to go home. I hung up on her, of course!’
As I listen to her, I get the strange feeling that the narrative is being taken away from me, that this story is bogus, I don’t believe it, this uninteresting detail is only there to add suspense to a B-movie spy film. She is directing it. She constructs the set and choreographs the actors, puts the finishing touches to their lines. Her own lines are terribly short or non-existent, the part of an awkward fairy who nudges decimal points and sees spectators, judges and presidents bellow as soon as she utters a few words, which are never the ones they want to hear. Like her ‘so what?’ to Béla when he tries to make her understand that he’s never coming back to Romania. The words of a tired adolescent, refusing to feel anything at the departure of the person who sees himself as a father, but whom she prefers to call a ‘manager’.
Our versions become entangled, our words vie for the upper hand, Nadia is evasive. Over the next few days, I don’t send her anything – perhaps to protect my narrative from her constant attempts to rewrite it. I have only a few dates left to describe, as Romania was completely closed to the media after 1981. I have almost no documentation, and will have to depend entirely on her and her memories for the 1981 World University Games and her retirement from competition that is commemorated with a huge celebration in 1984.
‘Do you know that Samaranch awarded me the Olympic Order?’
I reassure her that I will mention her prestigious titles, I’ll write about how the whole world celebrated you. Increasingly our conversations, meant to be exchanges, are nothing of the kind. Doubtless it’s also my fault, because that day, for example, I don’t dare share my unease with her. What am I supposed to say? I typed your name and that of Nicu C., the ‘Son of’, into the internet, and found several times the expression: forced ‘idyll’. How was I to ask her the question? What is an ‘idyll’? What is a ‘forced idyll’?
The Son of Ceauşescu is said to have tortured her. He confiscated her earnings so that she would depend on him. He showed her off to his friends. He wanted her at his beck and call at all times. Stuffed the apartment he offered her full of hypersensitive mikes so that not a single word she spoke would escape him.
The most sordid aspects of the relationship between Nadia and the person the Romanians in secret called the ‘kinglet’ have been made public since 1989. Unless the version to be believed is that of the kinglet’s neighbours, who, when interviewed by scandal sheets, recently declared: Nadia used to turn up without warning to his villa at Sibiu at the wheel of the Fiat he had bought her because she was obsessed by the idea of finding him with other women. She was jealous. Nasty.
Eeny-meeny-miny… whose body is it in 1981? Fought over by Béla and the ‘Son of’, who demands reinforced surveillance on Nadia. ‘I want to be sure she isn’t picking men up.’
‘Nicu C.?’ I write the name without any commentary in a mail, certain she’ll refuse to respond. But she calls me that same evening.
‘…You know, he was very ordinary.’
‘Ordinary? I’ve read some testimonies and…’
‘Yes, that’s what I mean. He was the typical pathologically jealous suitor, the sort who follows you everywhere and searches your apartment and your diary. Except that he was a minister and had more opportunities than your average youngster: he had an army and secret agents at his command! He had been obsessed with me ever since Montreal…’
I let her tell me some stories I already know about Nicu C. They’ve all appeared in the press. In fact, she isn’t telling me a thing. And I’m not asking for anything. It’s autumn now. Since I took on this project, the frequency of our contact could be represented by an oscillating, absurd graph: sometimes, we exchange mails three or four times a day, but if she doesn’t agree with what she has just read, three weeks go by – I’m being punished.
I delay telephoning or writing to her, I’m becoming too aware of her tone of voice, her silences, her reproaches, and at night when I go to bed, I go over her criticisms in my mind, like the day when I express concern about the young gymnasts’ sacrificed childhoods. ‘Sacrificing childhood? What did I miss out on exactly that was so fantastic? Sitting around in cafés? Going shopping? Going out with boys before I was ready to do so? Video games? Facebook? What do kids do between six and sixteen that I missed out on? If I had lived the kind of normal life you have, what would I be today?’
Increasingly, I am relegated to my ‘normal’ place, that space she sends me to the way one directs an annoying child to her room to get rid of her. She grows angry, cuts me short, the chapters I send her seem to her ‘subjective’, she is worried about my clichéd view of Romania, ‘Could you avoid expressions like dull clothes, grey streets. And stop reading Geza’s views for your book. Remember, he could have been a Securitate informer as well.’
I say nothing and take note. That evening, I watch old videos of her on the beam. Mute, precise, she fillets the impossible the way one might stab an enemy.
When I wake up, there is this brief email: ‘With regard to our conversation about Nicu C.: he was never a boyfriend. Really, please don’t use that word to describe what happened. Thank you.’