Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [3]
My decision to go to Hungary brought tears to the eyes of Alexa (who had agreed to buy the medical supplies) and to those of my father, who, having survived two earlier Hungarian revolutions by the skin of his teeth, had a good idea of exactly what we were getting ourselves into. Except for Alexa, the only adult who seemed enthusiastic about this adventure was the writer Graham Greene, an old friend of my father’s and something of a mentor to me, who believed that young men had the right, if not the obligation, to seek danger anywhere, however remote. The cause, as such, did not seem to him important—the main thing was to be “in the thick of things,” with the heady sound of bullets whistling past one’s ears.
In the spirit of his later spoof of the British Secret Intelligence Service, Our Man in Havana, Greene introduced me to a member of MI6 over drinks at the Ritz Hotel bar, on Piccadilly. Greene himself had been a wartime spy for SIS, as well as one of Kim Philby’s oldest (and most loyal) friends. Intrigue was second nature to him, and he reveled in mystery, so it was not surprising that I never learned the name of his companion, a military-looking gentleman with a Brigade of Guards tie who urged me to photograph the unit markings on any Soviet vehicles I saw, as well as the collar and shoulder flashes of the troops.
What, I asked, should I do with the exposed film? “Place the film cartridges in a French letter and insert it into your rectum,” the gentleman from SIS whispered. “Vaseline helps,” he added delicately, sipping at his pink gin.
He also told me the telephone number of a man in Budapest who might be able to help me in case of need, although, he warned, I was to use it only in the direst of emergencies. I must memorize the number, right then and there, since it was far too secret to write down.
“You’ll see,” Greene said contentedly, as we watched the SIS man stroll down Piccadilly, merging into the evening crowd with his neatly furled umbrella and his bowler hat—no doubt on his way back to the SIS building on Shaftesbury Avenue, which was supposed to be top secret, but was in fact so well known that London taxi drivers pointed it out to tourists—“they always look after their own.”
More sensibly, my father gave me the telephone number of Zoltán Kodály, the famed composer—who would be respected, he said, by any regime—and promised to call the new prime minister, Imre Nagy, on my behalf, if necessary. Resigned to the inevitable, he advised me that the important things in a revolution were to wear plenty of warm clothes, to carry a street map, and to take as much food with me as possible. Alexa worried about my keeping warm too and gave me the heavy fur-lined jacket that Alex had used during the war to keep him warm on his journeys back and forth across the Atlantic in unheated bombers. I was going back to the city in which he had first become famous, wearing his coat. I wondered if there was any symbolism to this, and, if so, what it was.
I FOLLOWED my father’s advice, loading up the car in Munich with as much delicatessen as could be crammed into what little space remained, and very good advice it turned out to be. Most roadblocks and barricades were manned by Hungarians who carried bottles of baracs, a peach brandy with a faint aftertaste of turpentine and the kick of jet fuel, in one coat pocket and spare ammunition or a grenade in the other. Cans of sardines and salamis were useful in calming tempers.
Driving around Budapest at night was to experience all the thrills of danger, even during the brief truce when the Russians weren’t shelling the city. At every street corner, armed civilians stuck their heads—and more important, their guns—into the car, punctuating their questions with clicks of their safety catches. On the discovery