Paris: A Love Story (15 page)

I cannot add to the volumes written about Mandela’s near-miraculous humanity and genuine love of life. How different from those other leaders—from Khomeini to Milosevic to Mugabe—I have known, who missed their moment, and left only a legacy of carnage and destruction.

After attending a string of our parties, Sir Jeremy Greenstock, the British ambassador to the UN, wrote me, “I am not sure whether you really enjoy being a diplomatic hostess, but you certainly give a great impression of doing so—so please don’t stop. We seem to have been to a succession of great parties given by the Holbrookes and we are very grateful to have been included.”

I was often exhausted, since by day I researched a book on presidential marriages, traveling the country to interview former First Couples and their aides. One former First Lady continued to resist my many interview requests. On March 5, 1999, the
Washington Post
’s legendary editor, Ben Bradlee, wrote me, “Damned if I didn’t get a call the other day asking for a character assessment of you! The questioner stated you were writing a book about first ladies. The questioner was acting on behalf of Nancy Reagan. The questioner—what the hell—was [former director of central intelligence] Dick Helms.
So I told him that your bomb-throwing days were pretty much behind you.”

Thanks in no small measure to Bradlee, I did get the interview with the cautious and controlling Mrs. Reagan. She revealed a powerful personality, which strengthened my own judgment that she was one of the most influential of all our First Ladies.

On Monday, January 24, 2000, after a dinner for several African leaders, I was too exhausted to get out of bed. Richard taped this note to my mirror: “Katika! I wish I could stay in bed with you (who coughed
not once
) all morning, but [Zimbabwe president Robert] Mugabe and [Congo president Laurent] Kabila call. I will keep the evening free and we can go out for dinner. I love you so! Signed, T. PS Keep the cellphone with you so I can reach you!”

And after such a day he wanted to take me out to dinner!

We were of course bitterly disappointed by the Supreme Court’s decision to stop the Florida ballot recount and hand the 2000 presidency to George W. Bush. But Richard never wasted much time on regret and might-have-beens. Back in private life, he threw himself into running the Asia Society, the American Academy in Berlin (which he had founded at the end of his tenure as ambassador to Germany), and the Global Business Coalition Against HIV/AIDS.

I had my own share of humanitarian work with Human Rights Watch, the Committee to Protect Journalists, which I chaired for five years, and, from 2003 to 2008, as head of International Women’s Health Coalition. I also began a new book
about a generation of gifted Hungarians who changed the world.

Richard dreamed of new places for us to explore: Antarctica! The outer islands of Indonesia! Patagonia! But he would also say to our friends, Kati is more Kati in Paris than anywhere else. So Paris remained our place.

The Dayton Accords and his high-profile role at the UN had catapulted Richard to the world stage. It did not seem to make much difference that he no longer had a government job. In Europe, he was the American with the single name, Holbrooke. He had negotiated the end to Europe’s bloodiest war since World War II. Strangers who recognized him in restaurants would send over bottles of wine or champagne. He wore it lightly. “I’m glad to be known for something real,” he’d say, “not famous for being famous.” He still had large ambitions, but as a historian of himself, he knew he had his place in the history books.

In Paris, we had our rituals. We usually stayed with our friends journalist Christine Ockrent and her partner, the founder of Doctors Without Borders, Bernard Kouchner. The Kouchners loaned us the top floor of their Parisian duplex, overlooking the Luxembourg Gardens. They are a remarkable couple and we formed a close foursome. Bernard, the irrepressible and irresistible raconteur and passionate humanitarian; Christine, his brilliant and lower-key partner, his perfect foil. We often dined with them at the Closerie des Lilas, so often that Richard’s signature and note, “Dîner avec Christine et Bernard, au Closerie, quel rêve de
Paris!” was printed on the place mats of Hemingway’s fabled brasserie.

One evening, Bernard whisked us off to a little village green where old men played
boules
in the twilight: la place Dauphine—a provincial square tucked in the middle of Paris, surrounded by cafés. Montand and Signoret lived there, Bernard told us, pointing to an apartment over a café. The iconic actor, singer, and activist Yves Montand and his actress wife, Simone Signoret, were Kouchner’s great friends and comrades in many human rights battles. The square is one of those Parisian secrets that catches you by surprise and to which we returned often.

Back at the Kouchners’ that evening, Bernard put on a Montand CD. He and I sang along with his old friend in the background, vying to see who recalled more lyrics. Bernard knew them all. I can hear his rich baritone crooning, “Les feuilles mortes se ramassent à la pelle, Tu vois je n’ai pas oublié . . .” With Richard his rapt audience, it was a moment of perfect Parisian happiness.

•   •   •

Perhaps inevitably, the high drama and intense interaction of our Bosnian and UN days evolved into a more conventional union. Our tight bonds loosened. We were no longer full partners in our personal and professional lives. In 2004, Richard pitched himself headlong into the presidential campaign of his friend Senator John Kerry, writing foreign policy papers and crisscrossing the country speaking on behalf of Kerry and other Democratic candidates for office. He was itching to return to public life. At the same time, I was writing
The Great
Escape: Nine Jews Who Fled Hitler and Changed the World.
Researching the lives of nine influential Budapest Jews pulled me deeper into my own and my native country’s history. I was spending weeks at a time in Budapest, doing interviews and translating archival material. I loved speaking Hungarian and I was soon making new friends in Budapest—friends who had no connection to my New York life. Richard was the center of my life and we talked on the phone at least every day, wherever we were. But as our tenth anniversary approached, we began to treat each other as best friends.

Ours was a conventional story. We were on automatic pilot, and the door to temptation was ajar. I allowed someone to walk in. He was handsome, witty, and, above all,
Hungarian
at a time when I was engrossed in the history that had been kept from me for much of my life. We spoke the language of my childhood, and laughed at the same things. He knew the words to my favorite childhood song about a lonely fisherman on Lake Balaton, and he knew the word for the small crevice in the collarbone,
so tarto,
salt cellar, which my grandmother taught me. All his stories were new to me—and yet familiar. Walking into his villa in Buda, the western section of Budapest near where I had spent my childhood’s most dramatic years, I recognized the faded Persian carpets, the dark oil paintings on the walls, and my parents’ silver pattern. It felt like home.

A snapshot: My friend and I are driving to his country house. I spy a narrow slice of water in the far distance. I ask him to drive down to the shore of Lake Balaton. In the back of his Jeep, I pull on my bathing suit, then jump out and sprint
toward the lake of my childhood. I feel something close to ecstasy as I swim farther and farther away from the shore. I am a child again paddling around this lake in an inner tube during the summer before my parents’ arrest. My mother, father, and sister and I are still a family, we are still whole. I feel that if I swim far enough out, I will find that child and that family. With my friend standing and watching me from the shore, I might fulfill the primal urge to mend the broken childhood.

But like the mist that shrouds the Balaton in the early morning, that vision soon evaporated. I had made a different life. I loved a turbulent American. It was too late to undo all that.

Richard was my best friend and I could not keep anything from him for long. He had given me such confidence, such unlimited support, how could I keep our first crisis from him?

Sitting on the grass at our house in Bridgehampton, I admitted I had let a friendship go too far. We both wept. I felt small and knew I had made the biggest mistake of my life. “I told you when we got together,” Richard said, “that I would have to forgive you, if something like this happened, because you are
it
for me. So, since you got us into this, you have to get us out of it.” He got up and left, and I heard him drive away. But he had said, get
us
out of this. He said it was
our
problem. So I knew
we
were not over.

It would be too easy to blame this episode on my genetic inheritance. But in 2004, I did often recall the summer before my parents’ arrest. My mother and father had each fallen briefly and recklessly in love: my mother with a much younger
man, my father with the beautiful wife of a British diplomat. Yet from prison Papa had smuggled out a letter written with the stub of a pencil on cigarette paper: “I miss you horribly and am worried sick about you. Under no circumstances should you ever set foot in this place! Do everything in your own and the children’s interest . . . and only then think about me . . . I love you more than ever, but that should not sway your decision and please forgive my stubborn stupidity in assuming we would be spared. Only you three matter. I don’t. The children should forget me.”

My father’s letter did not reach my mother, since his cellmate was actually a state informer who took it only as far as Papa’s interrogator. My father was punished with solitary confinement for trying to contact my mother—who, unbeknownst to him, was already an inmate in the same prison. My mother always said that prison saved their marriage. Having burrowed deep inside the Hungarian secret police archives in writing their story, I now understand what she meant. My parents had observed each other’s behavior in prison and fell in love all over again.

Richard and I did not go to prison. But we did live our own private agonies after I confessed to a much too intense relationship with another man. When I ended that friendship, Richard wrote me, “I know it took real courage for you today. If you had not done so, our lives would have become increasingly distant and ultimately embittered beyond repair. You caused this crisis, but you have also given us another chance, even as we approach our tenth wedding anniversary. I have
never had any doubt about my priority; you are still the center of my life . . . And I do love you.”

He never mentioned the man, never even asked his name. He knew it was over—just as he had sensed that it was happening. He knew me better than any other human being had ever known me. And he loved me anyway! Though I continued to return to Budapest, Richard never asked if I had seen
him.
I admired and loved my husband more than ever.

Afterward, we were not quite the same couple. We had been tested. We had survived. We were each grateful to the other for making the right call. I do not recommend this kind of testing for others. But for us it was a perhaps necessary jolt. For a heartbeat, I had toyed with the idea of a more quiet life, with a less demanding, more placid soul. We faced the prospect of life without the other, and it was frightening. We never again took our eyes off the thing we prized most.

Though we may have lost some of our innocence, during the next seven years we were closer than in our first decade together. We had learned the hard way that we were irreplaceable to each other. Imperfect but irreplaceable. Who knows how to explain these things? We simply worked. I felt a supreme lightness when, on my next birthday, Richard said, “We’re still stronger than dirt,” as he often had before we actually knew that to be true. I knew we would be all right.

•   •   •

In Paris, away from Washington, away from New York and Budapest, we found each other again. A broken chair precipitated the purchase of our own Parisian place. Sometime in
2004, Richard landed with a crash on the Kouchners’ parquet floor, surrounded by the wreckage of a Louis XVI fauteuil. I finally found a rationale for my old dream of Parisian real estate. “That’s it,” I told my husband. “We have to get our own place. We’re dangerous houseguests.” The Kouchners did not disagree. Richard did not see why we needed an apartment in Paris. Because I am more Kati in Paris than anywhere else, I reminded him. As usual, he was ready to indulge me.

What fun to jump on the back of Bernard’s motorbike and careen around the Latin Quarter at dangerous speeds in search of a pied-à-terre. Several weeks later, my nephew Mathieu called us in New York and said he had found it. A little gem on the rue des Écoles, for a very good price. “Viens vite, Kati.” “Come quickly,” he said. “This will sell fast.” I asked Bernard and Christine to inspect it, before I hopped a plane. “C’est parfait,” Bernard pronounced. Too many people in
velours côtelé
(corduroys) in this neighborhood, said Christine—meaning academics. Down the street from the Sorbonne, the Collège de France, and the École Polytechnique, a short walk to the Jussieu Campus of the University of Paris, as well as its School of Medicine: this street isn’t called rue des Écoles—the street of schools—for nothing. I was back in my old neighborhood.

I was on a plane the next day and the owner of a pied-à-terre in the Latin Quarter by the week’s end. Thanks to the Kouchners, a master craftsman from Avignon named Eric soon transformed the bland walls of my small pad into the interior of a tiny
maison provençale.
Eric burnished terra-cotta and butter-yellow paint to a high sheen using a technique
called
marbre de Venise.
With rosy bricks on the floor and walls, I soon had a (minuscule) French country kitchen. I was so thrilled with everything that by now the Avignon autocrat was barely even checking with me.

Each morning, while Eric and his colorful crew of Ukrainian and Moroccan workers were plastering and painting my apartment, I sprinted from the Kouchners’—where I was still staying—across the Luxembourg Gardens, up to the Pantheon, down the rue de la Montagne Ste.-Geneviève to the rue des Écoles—wild with joy that I finally owned a little piece of Paris.