I turned to say goodbye to the professor, who had not spoken for some time.
“How long are you staying in Budapest?” he asked.
“The rest of the week. I return to England on Sunday.”
“Could you spare the time to join an old man for dinner one night?”
“I should be delighted.”
“How considerate of you,” he said, and he wrote out his full name and address in capital letters on the back of my program and returned it to me. “Why don’t we say tomorrow at seven? And if you have any old newspapers or magazines do bring them with you,” he said, looking a little sheepish. “And I shall quite understand if you have to change your plans.”
I spent the next morning looking over St. Matthias Church and the ancient fortress, two of the buildings that showed no evidence of the revolution. I then took a short trip down the Danube before spending the afternoon supporting the swimmers at the Olympic pool. At six I left the pool and went back to my hotel. I changed into my team blazer and gray slacks, hoping I looked smart enough for my distinguished host. I locked my door and started toward the lift and then remembered. I returned to my room to pick up the pile of newspapers and magazines I had collected from the rest of the team.
Finding the professor’s home was not as easy as I had expected. After meandering around cobbled streets and waving the professor’s address at several passers-by, I was finally directed to an old apartment block. I ran up the three flights of the wooden staircase in a few leaps and bounds, wondering how long the climb took the professor every day. I stopped at the door that displayed his number and knocked.
The old man answered immediately, as if he had been standing there, waiting by the door. I noticed that he was wearing the same suit he had had on the previous day.
“I am sorry to be late,” I said.
“No matter, my own students also find me hard to find the first time,” he said, grasping my hand. He paused. “Bad to use the same word twice in the same sentence. ‘Locate’ would have been better, wouldn’t it?”
He trotted on ahead of me, not waiting for my reply, a man obviously used to living on his own. He led me down a small dark corridor into his drawing room. I was shocked by its small size. Three sides were covered with indifferent prints and watercolors depicting English scenes, while the fourth wall was dominated by a large bookcase. I could spot Shakespeare, Dickens, Austen, Trollope, Hardy, even Waugh and Graham Greene. On the table was a faded copy of the New Statesman. I looked around to see if we were alone, but there seemed to be no sign of a wife or child either in person or picture, and indeed the table was only set for two.
The old man turned and stared with childish delight at my pile of newspapers and magazines.
“Punch, Time and the Observer, a veritable feast,” he declared, gathering them into his arms before placing them lovingly on his bed in the corner of the room.
The professor then opened a bottle of Szürkebarát and left me to look at the pictures while he prepared the meal. He slipped away into an alcove which was so small that I had not realized the room contained a kitchenette. He continued to bombard me with questions about England, many of which I was quite unable to answer.
A few minutes later he stepped back into the room, requesting me to take a seat. “Do be seated,” he said, on reflection. “I do not wish you to remove the seat. I wish you to sit on it.” He put a plate in front of me which had on it a leg of something that might have been a chicken, a piece of salami and a tomato. I felt sad, not because the food was inadequate, but because he believed it to be plentiful.
After dinner, which despite my efforts to eat slowly and hold him in conversation, did not take up much time, the old man made some coffee, which tasted bitter, and then filled a pipe before we continued our discussion. We talked of A. L. Rowse and his views on Shakespeare and then he turned to politics.
“Is it true,” the professor asked, “that England will soon have a Labor government?”
“The opinion polls seem to indicate as much,” I said.
“I suppose the British feel that Sir Alec Douglas-Home is not swinging enough for the sixties,” said the professor, now puffing vigorously away at his pipe. He paused and looked up at me through the smoke. “I did not offer you a pipe, because I assumed after your premature exit in the first round of the competition you would not be smoking.” I smiled. “But Sir Alec,” he continued, “is a man with long experience in politics and it’s no bad thing for a country to be governed by an experienced gentleman.”
I would have laughed out loud had the same opinion been expressed by my own tutor.
“And what of the Labor leader?” I said, forbearing to mention his name.
“Molded in the white heat of a technological revolution,” he replied. “I am not so certain. I liked Gaitskell, an intelligent and shrewd man. An untimely death. Attlee, like Sir Alec, was a gentleman. But as for Mr. Wilson, I suspect that history will test his mettle — a pun which I had not intended — in that white heat and only then will we discover the truth.”
I could think of no reply.
“I was considering last night after we parted,” the old man continued, “the effect that Suez must have had on a nation which only ten years before had won a world war. The Americans should have backed you. Now we read in retrospect, always the historian’s privilege, that at the time Prime Minister Eden was tired and ill. The truth was he didn’t receive the support from his closest allies when he most needed it.”
“Perhaps we should have supported you in 1956.”
“No, no, it was too late then for the West to shoulder Hungary’s problems. Churchill understood that in 1945. He wanted to advance beyond Berlin and to free all the nations that bordered Russia. But the West had had a bellyful of war by then and left Stalin to take advantage of that apathy. When Churchill coined the phrase ‘the Iron Curtain,’ he foresaw exactly what was going to happen in the East. Amazing to think that when that great man said ‘if the British Empire should last a thousand years,’ it was in fact destined to survive for only twenty-five. How I wish he had still been around the corridors of power in 1956.”
“Did the revolution greatly affect your life?”
“I do not complain. It is a privilege to be the Professor of English in a great university. They do not interfere with me in my department and Shakespeare is not yet considered subversive literature.” He paused and took a luxuriant puff at his pipe. “And what will you do, young man, when you leave the university — as you have shown us that you cannot hope to make a living as a runner?”
“I want to be a writer.”
“Then travel, travel, travel,” he said. “You cannot hope to learn everything from books. You must see the world for yourself if you ever hope to paint a picture for others.”
I looked up at the old clock on his mantelpiece only to realize how quickly the time had passed.
“I must leave you, I’m afraid; they expect us all to be back in the hotel by ten.”
“Of course,” he said, smiling, “the English public school mentality. I will accompany you to Kossuth Square and then you will be able to see your hotel on the hill.”
As we left the flat, I noticed that he didn’t bother to lock the door. Life had left him little to lose. He led me quickly through the myriad of narrow roads that I had found so impossible to navigate earlier in the evening, chatting about this building and that, an endless fund of knowledge about his own country as well as mine. When we reached Kossuth Square he took my hand and held it, as lonely people often will, reluctant to let go.
“Thank you for allowing an old man to indulge himself by chattering on about his favorite subject.”