It was when he was transferred to the English/Hungarian section that he first came across the lovers. He said the word to himself with an inward curling of his lip—lovers were part of the culture of the typical bourgeois, capitalistic West, a media filled with romantic rubbish to divert people from the truth of real political needs.
However, he was interested in the lovers because, in the English section, you didn’t get much correspondence between people who thought they were in love. Mostly the letters were from sons and daughters who had defected to the West. When he had been in the German section—he was fluent in both languages—there was the occasional sentimental letter but inevitably they petered out. He was very good at spotting when correspondence was becoming dangerous and had once prevented a high ranking party member from defecting to West Germany, for which he had received a commendation and a rise to Censor, status two.
But these lovers interested him, partly because—he gathered from delving into the back files—that it had been going on for some time, but more than that because the English woman was a classical singer and he had been to one of her concerts about three years before when she had come over on a British Council visit. Music was his one indulgence. In the evenings or at the weekends he often took work home; he enjoyed it, and he read a lot, mostly histories and political volumes and he listened to Radio Budapest. But he did permit himself to go to concerts—not the opera, he hated all vulgar emotional rubbish, but pure music, well performed. He had enjoyed the singer’s concert—Mozart, Handel, Bach and some early English music that he hadn’t heard before. She had been good and he would like to hear her again.
The Hungarian lover was a chemical engineer with a teaching post at the university. Not a grade one risk but, nevertheless, a distinguished scientist who, if he defected, would bring bad attention to the government. So he reported to the Director, pointing out that this had been going on for some time and that his predecessor hadn’t seen fit to treat it as a special case.
The Director had looked at the file and said that they would monitor the professor’s apartment and treat the case as priority two. And so every time a new letter arrived the Censor would push all his other work aside and read the letters from the lovers. He remembered her well—she was a striking woman and the voice was pure and accurate. He could recall her looks, tall and slender with very long fair hair. She had worn a plain black dress which, he had thought at the time, was correct. He didn’t know what the man looked like, although he did research the file, but it was obvious that, although he was a professor of chemical engineering, he also knew a lot about music. Their letters were mostly in English—the professor was fluent—but she had learnt a little Hungarian, a difficult language that she’d mastered rather well. A lot of their correspondence was about what concerts she was preparing for, what recitals he had attended. The Censor got very interested and often found himself taking part in their ‘discussions’, sometimes angrily because he didn’t agree and sometimes nodding at their descriptions of certain passages of music. The letters were not really sentimental at all. They told each other that they loved, but not too often, and their more intimate passages were intelligent and—it was not a word he liked to use very often—sincere. She had never been married, he had married young and divorced in his late twenties. She was in her late thirties and he was fortythree. He had been to London twice to attend conferences and that was obviously where they had met, but it was impossible to find out how—again the fault of the predecessor.
Then the correspondence changed. She was coming to Budapest again, part of another British Council tour, and there was much agitated liaising because he wanted her to stay in his apartment in Pest and the Cultural Attaché at the Embassy was trying to control her residency at an approved hotel. The Censor got very involved with this and found himself getting irritated with the Cultural Attaché. Did he think Hungarians were so barbaric that they didn’t know how to treat a distinguished artiste? Eventually the lovers won out and it was settled—she would remain with him for the ten days of her visit. That was all right with top security. The professor’s apartment was already monitored. She gave the time of her arrival, she was coming on from Vienna by train and as the time for her visit drew near the Censor became more and more restless.
She would be arriving at nine-thirty in the evening and he couldn’t settle that night, switching the radio on and off, pushing his meagre meal away untasted. Eventually, he put his coat and hat on and walked all the way to the Western Railway Station, arriving at nine-twenty. There were crowds of people there so he couldn’t begin to guess which one was the professor. Sometimes the emerging passengers exited from the side entrance but he guessed she would be in one of the first class carriages so he waited at the end of the platform. The train came in and heaving crowds surged to the barrier. He couldn’t spot her anywhere and began to grow anxious—perhaps she had exited from the side entrance, after all. And then, when the crowds had thinned, he saw her, walking up the platform with a smallish suitcase. She didn’t hurry. She stopped just inside the barrier and a slow radiant smile spread over her face. The Censor turned and there was the professor, a tall rangy man, thinning hair and deep set brown eyes. He knew it was him because he wasn’t moving, either, and her smile was reflected in his face. They just stood and looked at each other for several moments, then he beckoned and she came forward.
The Censor had imagined they would rush into each other’s arms, the kind of thing you saw in vulgar Western films. But they just stood smiling at each other and then, very slowly, he took her hand and raised it to his lips, his eyes still locked onto hers. Then he put her hand under his arm, picked up her suitcase and led her away. There was some confusion because two representatives from the British Embassy had come to greet her and the Censor found himself getting annoyed with them. Why didn’t they just leave the professor to look after her and get her home? He followed them through the station and finally they got into a car together and drove away and the Censor went home, feeling curiously deflated and cross. He had never liked the British Embassy anyway, especially the Cultural Attaché who represented the British Council. He was sure some of their members in Budapest were subversives, spying for the West.
He went to two of her concerts; he couldn’t manage all of them because some were during the day and one was in Miskolc, too far for him to go. There was also a performance in the Matthias Church and he went to that, although he didn’t approve of religious performances. But it was the last concert that she sang in Dowland. The accompanist moved away from the piano and picked up what the programme said was a lute. And she began to sing. The Censor felt a strange pain swelling inside him—a pain that made him close his eyes and clench his fists together. In Darkness Let Me Dwell—sadly the voice rose and fell and died away and the Censor felt all the things he wanted to forget stirring in his heart. He recalled his mother, whom he had deliberately pushed out of his mind for many years and for many reasons. She was dead now but he could recall her quite clearly and he wished…oh, he wished so many things. As silence fell over the hall he opened his eyes and the pain receded a little. The audience began to applaud but he couldn’t. He stared at her on the platform and wondered why her voice had hurt him this way. He could see the back of the professor sitting in the front row and she looked directly at him again, that radiant smile spread over her face.
He knew when she was leaving; it had been in the letters. This time she was flying out, directly back to London, and he got there in plenty of time to wait for them at the airport. Again they didn’t embrace; the professor just held her hand again and kissed it and then she put her other hand up and touched his face. He watched her through the control gates and, as she went up the steps to the plane, she looked back once, smiled and raised her hand.
When the Censor got home he realised that, although she had come in with one suitcase, he had seen her put three into the luggage check-in. He felt a twinge of unease but then dismissed it. It was very possible that she had sent luggage ahead when she came from Vienna and it was more than likely she had been given gifts during her stay. The thought wouldn’t quite go away and he wondered if he should report it to the Director. No. The Director had said it wasn’t a priority case. He would just keep a watchful eye on the letters from now on.
The correspondence began again, musical, interesting, sincere, just as it had been before. Sometimes she wrote little bars of music to illustrate a point she was making and the Censor, who could read music, would hum the bars to himself. Once she sent a poem by an English poet called Elizabeth Barrett Browning, How Do I Love Thee? and she had it set to music, a melody of her own devising, which the Censor found he could not get out of his head. Then there was an exchange which was different—it was sad and stemmed from her.
Although the world for me is a happy place because you are in it, sometimes I am filled with despair because there is no hope that we can ever be together. We see each other once a year, twice if we are lucky, and when you leave my life is empty. We write, we speak on the telephone and these contacts warm my heart, but still I am sad.
The Censor read that passage several times. It disturbed him, though he couldn’t think why, and he waited impatiently for the professor’s reply.
Beloved, sometimes I, too, am consumed by despair about our impossible future. But then I try to tell myself that what we have is more than many have. I know you, the most important person in my life, are there. I can reach out to you in some way or other and feel blessed. I have a vivid memory of you which I can recall whenever I wish. It is not you standing on the concert platform, so remote, so lovely, creating a world of beauty with your incredible voice, but you in the rain, in the Bukk mountains five years ago, your hair wet, your body drenched and your eyes filled with tears of anger because the hunter had shot the deer. I loved you so much then and I love you still. I know one day we will be together, I don’t know how but we will and I hold fast to this as you must, too.
Five years ago in the Bukk mountains! He went back to the file but there was nothing about how this had come about, just letters over four or five years, and he felt again an impotent fury that he was unable to chart their contact from the beginning.
Then there came hints in the letters that the Censor found disturbing. She was selling her apartment in London and buying a bigger one. She sent greetings from a colleague who was a chemical engineer and whom he had met when he was attending the London conferences. She was arranging her future engagements to be centred in London for the next two years. There was one indiscreet line from him in a letter. ‘I cannot wait to be with you again’. But how could he be with her again? She wasn’t coming to Budapest and he wasn’t listed as going abroad. The Censor’s sixth sense—the one that had alerted him to the party member defecting to Western Germany—was aroused. He felt the professor should go to security alert and every night he determined to report to the Director the next morning, but then he decided he would just wait for the next letter.
The professor now began to write little bars of music of his own. They weren’t good, not like hers, not melodic and after a while the Censor didn’t bother to interpret them. Nothing happened, and then he learned, quite accidentally from a colleague who cleared category two subjects for foreign travel that the professor had been invited to Vienna, to give a lecture at a symposium. It wasn’t London, of course, and there was no mention of it in his letters but the mood of the writing changed; there was an excitement, carefully concealed, but it was there. The Censor was alerted and he was able to find out quite easily the date of the symposium. He would marshal all his facts before passing them on to the Director. The one thing that was strange was that the professor made no mention to her in his letters that he was going to Vienna for two days. Why wasn’t he telling her this so she could come to Vienna and be with him? He got the transcripts of their telephone calls but there was no mention of Vienna. He decided that now he must report to the Director. His instincts were very good about incidents that could become dangerous and so he prepared his report, sent it upstairs and waited to be called. The Director seemed pleased with him.
‘Of course he will be monitored by the security officer from the Hungarian Embassy in Vienna,’ he said, looking at the Censor through his pebbled glasses. ‘But, in view of your suspicions, I think we had better send two security officers to accompany him on the train.’
‘I should like to accompany the guards, Director.’
‘Why?’
‘I know these people. I have studied them. I’m sure when we get to Vienna the woman will be there. I can be extra vigilant.’
The director whirled a pen in his fingers.
‘I think I could be of assistance, Director. And I speak fluent German.’
The pen whirled a bit more. ‘It is most unorthodox but your record is very good. Very well. We shall arrange for you to travel with the security officers and stay in the same hotel.’
‘Thank you, Director.’ He felt elated. He had never been to Vienna and now he was going on an official assignment. He would be senior to the security officers and if anything happened he would be credited with the success of the operation. He would most probably be promoted again to Censor category one and possibly become a more influential member of the party.
They all sat together on the train. The professor knew at once what was happening when he saw them. His face became strained and angry and he took papers from his briefcase and buried himself in them.
When they arrived in Vienna, she was waiting for him at the station. The Censor suddenly realised how it had happened—it flashed into his brain and he cursed himself for not picking it up sooner. It was the music—the bad music from him. It was a code they had arranged and he had told her when he was coming to Vienna. That was why neither of them had mentioned it in their normal letters.
The professor went straight to her and tried to take her hand but the security guards bustled him away, through the station and into the car from the Hungarian Embassy. She was following behind and the Censor had never been so close to her before. She was taller than he was and there was a point, when he was waiting for the others to get into the car, when he could have touched her. He looked back out of the car window as they drove away and saw her standing there. She seemed very alone and sad.
They monitored him carefully at the hotel. That evening the professor had to attend a reception with the other members of the symposium but they never left his side. He telephoned her when he got back to his room and they listened carefully, but nothing alarming was said. Just, ‘I wish I could see you’ and ‘I love you’ and then the professor put the phone down, knowing, of course, that they were listening in.
The following morning they sat in the lecture hall beside him, listening to the delegates droning on about things they didn’t understand. The professor’s lecture was the last of the day. The Censor sat in the front row; he had been quick to place himself there but the guards had been too late and the front row was filled. In Hungary, of course, they could have turned out two delegates from their seats but here they were powerless so they were two rows behind, one at each end.
The professor began to talk and the Censor allowed his thoughts to drift away, wondering what she was doing and if she would be at the station when they left. He glanced out of the window and saw that snowflakes were whirling past the glass. He was sure she would be at that station.
The professor finished his lecture and began to answer questions. Then, as the chairman stood up, the professor suddenly turned and ran, not down the platform steps where people were waiting to congratulate him but to a small door at the side of the platform. The Censor was instantly on his feet, climbing the steps and running towards the side door. He looked back and saw that the delegates from the front two rows were surging to the platform and the security guards, in spite of pushing, couldn’t get through. The Censor ran through the door and down a passage to where he could see swing doors leading outside into the snow. He was right behind the professor when he saw the car waiting outside—a large black car with the British diplomatic flag flying from the bonnet and the engine running. And she was standing by the open rear door, standing with snowflakes whirling around her fair hair piled high on her head. She wasn’t smiling. She beckoned to the professor and he saw her mouth the word ‘quickly’.
He was level with the professor. He could put his foot out and trip him, he could grab his jacket and pull him back. He knew the guards were not far behind. Instead, he placed himself squarely in front of the swing doors so the guards would be delayed. He watched the professor run, throw himself into the car and she slipped in beside him. As the swing doors slammed into his back and pushed him to the ground the car pulled away and he caught one last glimpse of them through the car window. She was in his arms, her head buried on his shoulder.
Afterwards, when he had been demoted to Censor status four and received an official reprimand—and he knew he was lucky that nothing else was going to happen to him—he thought of her often, standing by the car in the snow. He knew it was unlikely she would ever come to sing in Budapest again but they had made a recording of her last concert and he frequently played the record, especially In Darkness Let Me Dwell, as he looked at her photograph on the old programme.