June 1940
Heaven’s Gate Internment Camp
Port Erin, Isle of Man
It felt like going on holiday. His suitcase packed for a summer week by a lake in Hungary with his parents. It wasn’t a holiday. It was one prison to another. As prisons went Szabo had liked Heaven’s Gate. It had been home for six months. Ever since the British declared him an enemy alien and stuck him on a train to Liverpool last November. Hungary hadn’t joined the Axis. It would, inevitably—under Hitler’s wing Hungary had seized its slice of Czechoslovakia, had swallowed the Subcarpathian Rus whole after but a single day of independence. It hadn’t joined yet, but it would. He had had the misfortune to be born in Vienna—capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, that other “sick man of Europe”—an empire that had dissolved itself before the last war had even finished, when he was just a boy. Many of his fellow prisoners were Viennese. He had family in Vienna—great aunts, aunts, uncles, and cousins—and had visited it many times in his childhood. “Viennese” was not a badge he would wear with any pride—it was an inappropriate label not worth the effort it took to shrug it off.
Once, a guard had asked, “Hungries, Austrians, Krauts. Wossa difference, then?”
He had replied in Magyar, a language few Englishmen had ever heard and which resembled no other language in Europe.
“Wossat mean then? That ain’t no German.”
“It means—Hungary is a large, faraway country of which you know fuck all.”
He had liked Heaven’s Gate. He had not gone hungry, no one had hit him, no one had even shouted at him. He had found time to practice his flute. He had found time to study, although not the texts or materials he needed to study, so study had perhaps become merely reading. Not the same thing by any stretch. He had arrived utterly ignorant of the work of Dornford Yates and P.G. Wodehouse and was leaving thinking of them as an important insight into the lives and mores of his captors—the English.
Arthur Kornfeld—the real Viennese—came in and threw himself down on the cot that Szabo had just stripped back to mattress and pillow.
“I know where you’re going.”
“How many cigarettes did that cost you?”
“None. I just asked Jenkins. Far too decent even to think of hinting at a bribe.”
“Decency? It will be the death of men like Lieutenant Jenkins.”
Kornfeld bounced up again like a jack-in-the-box.
“Karel, do you have no curiosity about your own fate? I tell you I know and you launch a debate on the English character!”
“Australia,” Szabo said simply. “It’s bound to be Australia.”
“Well, you’re wrong. You’ve got the wrong pink bit. All the others are going to Australia. You’re going to Canada. A ferry back to Liverpool, then a ship to Canada.”
Szabo unhooked his overcoat from the back of the door and draped it across his suitcase. All his actions saying “ready” and frustrating Kornfeld.
“I’m sure they have their reasons,” he said almost casually.
“I’d be more inclined to say they have a plan.”
“Plan? No, Arthur. If they had a plan they would never have locked us up. We were far more use to them in universities and laboratories than we ever were here. Do you think they even know what a nuclear physicist does? Do you think they’ve even heard of Schrödinger or Dirac?”
“Depends on who you mean by they. The home secretary? The prime minister? Probably not. Jenkins, our immediate captor—he only knows because we’ve told him, and he’s logged it in what passes loosely for his mind because it might come in handy for filling in a crossword puzzle some day. But somewhere out there somebody knows and pretty soon they’ll realize who we are . . . what we are . . . what we have . . . what we know. Think of them as children. Think of Europe as the drawing room and England as the kindergarten of Europe. They are innocents. They actually boast of not having been invaded since 1066. When in fact all that means is that they have lived outside of the mainstream of Europe. They are innocents.”
“Innocents or blunderers. And can we trust either to win this war?”
“Trust me. They have a plan.”
Szabo looked out of the window. A charabanc was parked on the tarmacadam that had been the rounders court when Heaven’s Gate had been a girls’ school. He surely did not have long now.
“Why do people say ‘trust me’? Simply to ask for something or state something implies trust, as trust is the basis of such intercourse. But to emphasize trust implies distrust. Invokes distrust. Saying ‘trust me’ has the opposite effect. It begets distrust. Saying ‘trust me’ means you cannot trust me. As certainly as, ‘I will still respect you in the morning,’ means that I most certainly will not.”
“You know, Karel, I do hope you find good company on the ship. A week with no one to listen to your aphorisms will drive you insane.”
Down on the tarmac, Lieutenant Jenkins had appeared with a clipboard, wearing his uniform, as Kornfeld had once so pithily put it, “thrown on like a couple of potato sacks.” He was gazing around in his habitual lackadaisical way in the hope that someone would turn up without him having to go and look for them. He didn’t need to scratch his head; metaphorically, Jenkins was always scratching his head. And even at this distance Szabo could hear the soft sighs of bafflement and exasperation. The clipboard surely held a list of names. And his name was surely on that list. He would not keep Jenkins waiting. The thought that the fate of Europe lay in the hands of Englishmen like Rowly Jenkins and Bertie Wooster was an awful prospect.