Paris: A Love Story (4 page)

Late one night a few days later, my cell phone rings. This is the precise time when Richard would call from wherever he was, to say good night. “The State Department Operations Center calling,” the voice informs me, as his calls did. For an instant, my heart skips a beat. “Secretary Clinton would like to speak with you,” the operator announces.

Hillary is calling to let me know she is about to announce Richard’s successor. Our friend Marc Grossman, an able diplomat, a good choice. “I wanted you to hear it from me, and not from the papers,” she says. “Marc has no illusions about replacing Richard.” Then, she adds, “You know, the White House now realizes what Richard was trying to do.”

I thank her for another act of kindness, in a long string of them.

•   •   •

He was away so much, my friends say. You must be used to being alone. But I never felt alone. Our conversation, begun in Paris seventeen years ago, ended abruptly on December 13.
I am loved, therefore I am.
That was me. Now who am I? Why did no one tell me that we have love on loan? People should be told this. It is not the grand romantic moments that forge a couple. Those are easy, and they pass. It is the daily, granular sharing of the most trivial details of life—of little or no interest to anyone else—that forged our bond. The freedom to share my least worthy thought, knowing that even when we disagreed, he was on my side.

In March, a postcard addressed to Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke from the Democratic National Committee arrives in the mail. “Your membership has expired,” the message reads. “We need you back.”

I am having lunch at a café near Columbia University with an old friend. She is full of plans and ideas, fellowships and teaching jobs for me. I am getting excited about life. A lady at the next table leans over. “Excuse me for interrupting,” she says, “but that was the most beautiful memorial I have ever seen.” I am taken aback so she says, “I saw it on C-SPAN and recognized you. Your husband was a great man.” Thank you, I say and get up to go to the ladies’ room. “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” is playing on the bathroom speaker. A nice jazzy version. I had never realized it is a sad song. It’s really about death. “Somewhere” is really about Nowhere. And only in death do “troubles melt like lemon drops.” I start crying—not weeping, but crying really hard. I cannot go back out there. I lock the door and let the sobs pour out in waves. The weeks of public composure at wakes, memorials, and speeches—washed away by an old song.

I need to get away. Paris seems the right place. It is where Richard and I started our lives together and lived our happiest times. But, well before that, it is where I became who I am. In a life of multiple uprootings, Paris has been my one fixed point. Once before, I found happiness and beauty in Paris. I was a young girl then, the child of political refugees who settled in America. I longed for the interrupted European childhood. Someone once said that we breathe in our first
language. Though my English vocabulary is far richer now, I learned French and Hungarian simultaneously as a child in Budapest. In Paris I found proximity to all that we were forced to abandon.

Of course I am no longer young. Richard’s death has made me more sharply conscious of time’s passing. Paris is the place where good things seem to happen to me.

In a way, every story with Paris at its heart is a love story. So is mine. It is where I fell in love, first with the city, then with the man who became the father of my children. Then, in middle age, I found lasting love in Paris with Richard.

So, in Paris, I will relearn how to live.

That was the end of the first part of Paris. Paris was never to be the same again although it was always Paris and you changed and it changed.

—Ernest Hemingway,
A Moveable Feast

Along with bottomless grief, death brings a rich bounty of practical problems. I decide to sell my home of twenty-five years. The Central Park West apartment, which once housed four people, is much too big for me, and too crowded with the ghosts of past lives. Nor can I afford it. I do not let myself imagine what it will actually feel like to pack up twenty-five years of accumulated life and pull another door shut behind me. During this first year after Richard’s death, I am not looking for more pain. But I have to start pruning. This is akin to an archeological expedition. The visible part of our home, consisting of furniture, pictures, and books, is just the most recent layer of civilization. There are invisible layers beneath. I begin in our building’s storage room. There, under the broken cane chair from our Budapest apartment, wedged between my ex-husband Peter Jennings’s grandfather’s sea chest and Richard’s ancient ski boots, is a plastic storage bin. The label, in my father’s handwriting, says “Kati—Paris Letters.”

So my parents saved those long-ago missives! Of course they would. We left so much behind when we abandoned our homeland in 1957. They weren’t about to toss out any precious
mementos of our new lives in America. My father spent his final year living here with Richard and me after my mother’s death. This box must have accompanied him from Washington. In those days (only five years ago!) I was living my life on fast-forward and paid little attention to dusty boxes of youthful correspondence I did not plan on ever opening. Now I do. Along with my letters to my parents, there is a cardboard file shoved in the bin. “Kati’s Letters to Peter,” the large manila envelope says. While the letters to my parents are typed on onionskin using the Olivetti typewriter that was Papa’s parting gift to me when I left for Paris, my letters to Peter are handwritten on blue airline stationery, on flights mostly to and from Paris. Hence their place in the Paris bin. Peter returned these letters to me when we parted after fifteen years of marriage.

Hands and jeans covered in dust, I pick up the box and let the iron bars of the storage room clang shut behind me.

Upstairs, I start reading.

I am meeting a young girl—neither child nor yet woman—plunging into life on her own. A time and a place I had long forgotten, rush in with her. At eighteen, I was avid for life and unprepared for the dramas to come.

“I just spotted the coast of Normandy!” I wrote my parents on September 11, 1967. I was traveling with a group of American students aboard the
Queen Mary.
“I know I feel differently from everyone around me, I can tell by their lack of fire,” I wrote at the sight of my old continent for the first time in a decade.

I suppose what separated me from the thousands of other
American students who come to Paris to finish their education or “find themselves” is that Paris felt like a homecoming to me. It was just a couple of hours’ flight, a day by rail, from Budapest. But in those Cold War days, I could not even dream of returning to Budapest, the place of my interrupted childhood.

•   •   •

On February 25, 1955, at two in the morning, following a game of bridge at the home of the United States military attaché, six agents of the Hungarian secret police abducted my father from a street corner near our Budapest home. My mother and sister and I did not know where he had been taken, but in those days when terror ruled Soviet-occupied Hungary, arrests were common. My parents’ professions as the last independent journalists in the country made them obvious targets of the state. I recall the night of my father’s arrest as the end of my childhood. I have never let go of the image of secret police agents ripping up our apartment in search of evidence against my parents, while my sister and I hid in our parents’ bed.

Four months later, our doorbell rang, and I answered it. Several men in workers’ overalls peered down at me. “We came about the meter,” one of them lied. “Your mother has rung. Please get her.” I had a feeling they weren’t who they said they were. Even to my six-year-old’s eyes these men did not belong in those too clean overalls. But I was eager to return to my playmate in the next room. “Mama!” I called out, and returned to my friend. Even now, decades later, I feel guilty about my mother’s arrest. I had called out to her too casually when her jailers came for her.

I did not see my mother for almost a year and my father for almost two years. They were held in the same maximum-security prison, convicted of spying for the United States. My sister and I were placed in the care of strangers, paid to look after us. Even after we were reunited as a family and began our long journey to freedom in America, nothing was ever the same again. That brutal separation from my parents at such an early age left a deep mark.

A decade of life of relative ease as a Hungarian refugee in suburban Washington, D.C., had not erased those memories.

“I’m home!” I wrote my parents at the sight of the European coastline. “10 years wiped away!”

•   •   •

My introduction to French life was in the ancient city of Tours, in the Loire valley. It helped that I already spoke the language. French had been drilled into me during my Hungarian childhood by a starchy French woman we called “Madame.” She and I did not like each other. I could not persuade my parents that she was too impatient to be our nanny. My mother was determined that we should learn French, even in communist Hungary, where Russian was the mandatory second language. Now, having read the secret police files on my parents, I am vindicated in my early judgment of Madame. She was an agent of the AVO, the Hungarian KGB, using my sister and me as her informants. She did, however, teach me French, and did plant the seed, which in Tours first began to flower.

Annoyingly mixing French, English, and Hungarian in the first of my weekly letters home, I described my impressions:
“The narrow winding streets, the aroma of fresh bread, the sound of pure French and the Cathedral down the street from where I live on the rue Jules Simon, flowers
partout.
” A late adolescent inhaling beauty, I was electric with excitement at being in Europe again. “The whole way of life is so different from what we have become used to in the US,” I wrote my mother and father. “It just feels much more natural for me. People live and talk and
enjoy
everything: flowers, food, wine—without shame. How different from the puritanical lives of so many Americans of comparable means!—just so they can save up for a new car or TV. Here, crumbling shacks are covered with flower boxes and rich and poor carry their fresh
baguette
and wine home from work.”

Lodged in a so-called
maison particulière,
a historic townhouse belonging to the faded aristocratic descendants of the Renaissance painter François Clouet, I preened at how smoothly I fit in with such august company. “The Clouets are wonderful people and I have met few families with whom I can be so totally and uninhibitedly myself. I can be almost as ‘
szemtelen
’ [Hungarian for fresh] with Baron Clouet as I am with you, Papa, and he even seems to enjoy it. They tell me that they’ve never met anyone like me, especially an American!—without any shyness and with opinions on every subject,” I boasted. “Somehow, I feel a closeness—meeting of minds and spirits—with the Clouets and with other French people I have met—that I seldom feel with Americans.”

There was nothing that did not enchant me about French life. “The Clouets have not changed their life style since before
the Revolution,” I wrote my parents on October 8. “Every weekend, Monsieur le Baron and his three sons perform the ritual of
La Chasse,
hunting. Then we have
gibier
[pheasant, rabbit, all kinds of strange birds] deliciously prepared, for the rest of the week. Madame la Baroness does even less than her husband,” I wrote, seemingly full of admiration. “It’s absolutely incredible to an American [which I have become] that these people can spend so much time, talking, eating, knitting, and giving orders to servants—now there is an art!” I marveled.

“The week’s most pleasant afternoon I spent at the château of an impoverished Count and Countess. They make their living entirely off the land and don’t have a car. Or a radio! But their
salon
is filled with masterpieces, and their land stretches for miles on a promontory overlooking the Loire. We sat on the grass surrounded by their
moutons
and horses, eating fruit from their trees and watching the sun set on the Loire. Really, it’s the simplest things in life that are most pleasurable to me—eating an apple in the sunset with sheep and a crumbling old Count and his château. Sometimes just walking home from classes when it’s getting dark, and inhaling the bakery smells and the flowers and the Loire River . . .”

I was also discovering French movies. “Last night we saw Jean-Luc Godard’s
La Chinoise.
Also have seen
Belle de Jour,
with Catherine Deneuve. The most fun was afterwards going to a café and feeling entirely in my element.”

On my last day in Tours, on October 25, “I took off on my bike to explore and ended up in Amboise, one of the most beautiful Gothic-Renaissance châteaux, built by Charles VIII,
where Leonardo lived and is buried. The town itself is charming, built on the Loire and retains its 13th Century appearance. I discovered several tiny villages along the River. In the cool tranquility of the village church I can’t help but kneel and pray. I feel someone will hear me say ‘thank you.’