Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies . . .
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
THE TALL, HAGGARD man waits for the number 21 bus at the Freedom Hill stop. A small cluster of commuters hangs nearby, not people to waste smiles or conversation on strangers. Nor are the Hungarians any longer surprised by the American in their midst. Though Noel Field does his best to blend in, murmurs “jo reggelt,” good morning, to his fellow commuters, he will never be one of them. His great height; long, ashen hair; high, domed forehead; and elongated features are too obviously Anglo-Saxon, his accent too American, to ever pass unnoticed in Budapest. What precisely brought this man to their bus stop on a hillside in Buda, in this forlorn corner of Central Europe, they do not know. There are too many human wrecks in Hungary in the late sixties. Curiosity can be dangerous.
If the Hungarians searched Noel Field’s features more closely, they would see a face haunted by unacknowledged regret. They would also be surprised to learn that he is not so very old at all. In his early sixties, Field, slow of movement and stooped, looks much older. All his fellow commuters know is that—though they see him nearly every morning—he remains a stranger, the American.
Yet Noel Field has done everything to distance himself from the faraway country where his family settled over three hundred years earlier. The America he identifies with—a utopia where property and income are equitably distributed among workers—does not exist, and never has. Neither does it exist in those countries calling themselves workers’ states, including the one he has chosen as his home. But this Noel Field will not acknowledge. He has spent a decade and a half here without ever once criticizing a system much of its own population reviles. Human aberrations—not the faith itself—were to blame for millions of lives wrecked by mass arrests, fake trials, torture, and executions. Nor has Field ever expressed regret for abetting one of history’s most murderous experiments.
Inside the lumbering bus, wheezing its way down Freedom Hill toward the Danube and Pest, Noel daily admires the shimmering panorama, the play of light on the Danube reflecting the architectural fantasies lining the riverbank. This man, who passionately loved mountains—the Alps in particular—is locked in a country of gentler hills, without an outlet to the sea. Noel, however, survives by avoiding the trap of self-examination and self-reproach. He prefers to focus on the beauty of the ancient city he calls home.
Budapest in the late sixties is somber and wounded, with much to forget. The city cleaned up the postrevolution rubble fast. Nobody wanted reminders of that failed uprising, not the people and not those who extinguished their hopes. Resignation replaced hope. The Soviets will never leave; János Kádár, who assumed power on the back of Soviet tanks, may not be such a bad man—we have seen far worse here—Stalinist terror is in the past. Pleasures are small, but people no longer live in fear. A popular television thriller even features a dog named Stalin. Those who could not accommodate themselves to Kádár’s “goulash Communism” have fled or are in jail. The state practices soft repression. The people—like so many agnostics forced to worship—dream of passports and cars, not revolution. Hungary—indeed, the Soviet empire—inches toward a petit-bourgeois, consumer society. The espresso is good. A dozen Turkish baths scattered around the city offer a range of relief. Not even the KGB has figured out how to bug steam baths, so in those watery intellectual cafés there is outlet for dissent. An InterContinental Hotel has risen on the Danube Corso, a source of hope and excitement. Lake Balaton beckons in the summer. Like the rest of the population, Field takes his modest pleasures where he can find them.
The Fields and J. Peters—a relic of Noel’s days as a young Soviet agent in Washington—share some convivial evenings at the Matyas Pince, a wine cellar where Gypsy fiddlers scrape out old Hungarian folk tunes and the chicken paprika is the best in town. “Pete,” as Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss knew him, never fully approved of Field. “Naïve,” Pete said of Noel. “Like all the other Quaker communists.” In truth, Noel was not much of a spy—he tried his best to serve Moscow, but he lacked the smooth, hard veneer of pros like Pete. There was always a touch of the romantic idealist about Field. Nor was he reluctant to betray his country, however. When called upon to assist in the assassination of a good Communist who disagreed with Stalin, Field was willing to do his part. Others may have hatched the plot against Ignaz Reiss, and still others pulled the trigger, but Field was prepared to help.
Pete added another notch to his belt in 1972. The famed American film director Joseph Losey was in Budapest to film The Assassination of Trotsky. Starring the legendary British actor Richard Burton as the Soviet revolutionary leader and Stalin’s nemesis, with scores of other international stars, it was a lavish production, and Losey, a former Communist himself, hired Pete as consultant. The film is a sympathetic portrait of Stalin’s archrival. But Moscow’s former agent now served Hollywood, and Pete’s reward was an invitation to Budapest’s most glamorous postwar social event: a birthday party hosted by Richard Burton in honor of his wife, Elizabeth Taylor. Held in the capital’s gleaming new InterContinental Hotel, on February 9, 1972, Burton and Taylor—the most celebrated couple of the day—were joined by Princess Grace of Monaco, Ringo Starr, Michael Caine, and Raquel Welch, among other members of the international glitterati. Sipping champagne imported for the occasion from France, Pete, his Hungarian-accented English still shaded by his years in Brooklyn, mingled easily with Hollywood royalty. Who remembered that four decades earlier, the jovial little man with the Harpo Marx mustache tracked Trotsky’s supporters in the streets of New York and Washington, DC? Times had changed. J. Peters survived.
The man who sobbed, “All gone, all gone,” during the long night of his torment in the Villa must surely have occasionally wept over his life’s misbegotten trajectory. There was no one but Herta with whom Noel might share his anguish at the way his life turned out, and she was really an extension of himself. The once-sparkling intellect who dashed through a four-year Harvard curriculum in two years, and of whom one of his State Department chiefs had written, “Mr. Field is one of the most brilliant men we have ever had in the [West European] Division,” the man who had drafted speeches for two secretaries of state (Stimson and Hull) now spent his days proofreading the rough English translations of Hungarian writers. Asthma, lumbago, heart trouble, ulcers, and, finally and fatally, cancer were his postprison companions. His final consolation was not Marx, but music. In the land of Liszt and Bartók, there was plenty of that.
“That last day,” Herta wrote to his family of Noel’s quiet passing on September 12, 1970, “was particularly lovely. Noel slept most of the time, but in the evening we listened to a beautiful performance of [Beethoven’s] Fidelio—in each other’s arms.” How ironic that the last piece of music Field heard was Beethoven’s ode to freedom, whose hero, Fidelio, languishes in a dungeon, the prisoner of a ruthless dictator.
At the very end, as he was drifting in and out of consciousness, Noel asked for Erica one final time. “I made a big mistake not to visit him. I utterly regret that,” Erica said when she heard this of the man who cost her five years of freedom and untold distress. Once, decades before, however, Field had been a loving surrogate father to a lost girl. “I wonder now,” she said, still confused by a man of so many parts, “who was he?”
He died with only the faithful Herta by his side. An exile his whole life—not quite Swiss, not quite American, certainly not Hungarian—the deepest roots he planted were in a toxic soil. How could he bring himself to admit such a tragic mistake? Without his faith, who was he?
In death, however, Noel Field realized his cherished dream. Accorded a funeral fit for a Communist hero, Field was hailed in the Hungarian press as “the courageous fighter of the international workers’ movement” and, with unintended irony, as “the true son of the American people.” He lay in state in the pantheon of Hungary’s Communist notables, at the Kerepesi Cemetery. (After many purges, there were too few Communist heroes to fill the many planned crypts, so, over the years, philosophers, physicists, and a celebrated chef, Károly Gundel, joined them). László Rajk—another of Stalin’s “rehabilitated” victims—rests in their midst.
An honor guard of blue-uniformed Workers’ Militia, brandishing AK-47s, flanked Field’s coffin. At the request of the deceased, they sang long-out-of-fashion revolutionary marching songs. Among the mourners was a motley assemblage of the country’s surviving old-time Communists, and Noel’s colleagues from the New Hungarian Quarterly. Respecting Noel’s final request, they joined together in singing the “Internationale.” Decades before, the words of this nineteenth-century French anthem to the workers’ movement had so stirred Noel he memorized it in Russian, and belted it out in front of the Lincoln Memorial—to the consternation of his Soviet handler, Hede Massing. “This is the final struggle,” the Hungarians now sang. “Let us group together, and tomorrow the ‘Internationale’ will be the human race.” Their voices, however, lacked all conviction.
“Frankly,” Noel’s colleague Rudi Fischer, one of the mourners, recalled, “most of us didn’t even know the words anymore. So we just kind of mumbled it. It was pretty embarrassing.” Even Moscow had long since discarded the “Internationale,” the musical expression of the ideals of the October Revolution, in favor a nationalistic “Hymn of the Soviet Union.” But on September 18, 1970, they buried one of the “Internationale’s” last true believers.
Herta lived a decade longer. When she died, her ashes were placed in a small marble urn next to her husband’s at the Farkasréti Cemetery, a far less exclusive burial ground than the Kerepesi, where Noel’s remains were moved shortly after his brief stay in the Communist pantheon. Their ashes remain there, united in death, as they had been in their strange life.
Noel was spared the 1989 funeral of the empire he served. Nor was he was alive when the heroic sculptures of striding, muscular workers, and the demigods Lenin and Stalin preaching to the masses, were hauled from their pedestals, heaved on trucks, and deposited in a park in the outskirts of Budapest. There they still stand in Statue Park, a popular tourist attraction for generations with dimming memories of these bronze giants. Of Noel’s empire, far fewer reminders remain than of the Ottomans, who left Budapest scores of magnificent public baths.
Noel Field began life with the best intentions, embracing Communism as the way to prevent another calamity on the scale of World War I. The most powerful figure in his formation—his father—might have guided the passionate youth toward a gentler cause. There was no one else who exercised that moderating influence—and there were so many in the thirties preaching the opposite message. But as Marxism curdled into Leninism, then hardened into Stalinism, Field failed utterly in his youthful ambition to help build a classless society. He never criticized the system he served, never showed regret for his role in abetting a murderous dictatorship. At the beginning, his deception was motivated by idealism. Life changes all of us, of course. Field’s remorselessness in inflicting pain on his family and excusing mass murder as “the mistake of a few” points, however, to a more fundamental alteration. Years of deception and self-deception had soaked into his character, washing away the humanity his father tried to implant.
At the end, Noel Field was still a willing prisoner of an ideology that captured him when his youthful ardor ran highest. A man who set out to change the world ended up a stranger in a strange land.