Would Ute have to live like this? I did not and could not discuss it. Our lack of a common language meant that we still communicated on the most rudimentary level only. In some way, after all this time together, we remained strangers who shared an apartment. I needed someone trustworthy to bridge the language barrier. I telephoned a student, Zsolt. He sometimes translated Hungarian for me. He also spoke German. Zsolt had a square build and scratchy goatee and was helpful and reliable. He came over immediately.
When the bell rang, I ran down.
“Thank you so much,” I said and explained the situation as we climbed the stairs.
“She will be caught and thrown in jail. It will be a disaster,” said Zsolt.
I couldn’t deny this possibility but also discounted Zsolt’s comments given his predisposition for pessimism and hyperbole. Often when we attended demonstrations, Zsolt insisted that security service agents were following us and might arrest us. Such intrigue appealed to his imagination. I enjoyed Zsolt’s company despite this focus on doom.
Zsolt sat in the armchair that had been Sabine’s favourite. He grimaced when Ute explained her predicament and ran his hands through his lank blond hair. Zsolt and Ute spoke to one another in German. I only understood the word “Stasi,” the name for the East German secret police. During their brief conversation, Zsolt mentioned the word “Stasi” at least six times.
“Let me think about the situation,” Zsolt said. “I’ll telephone someone with connections tonight.”
I did not press him for details.
Zsolt arrived at 9 a.m. the next morning. When I let him in he said, “I saw a car with unmarked licence plates parked outside. The driver’s watching your entrance.” I didn’t respond.
“You’re being monitored by the security services.” Normally I acknowledged his latest espionage theory and then changed subjects, but today such speculation disturbed me. I did not want to hear it. We sat around the coffee table. Zsolt pulled an ink-blotched sheet of paper from his bag with a telephone number scrawled across the top.
“A border runner’s co-ordinates,” he told me in English. Then he translated and told Ute that for a fee, the border runner would take her to fields by the Austrian border near where Anna and I saw a portion of the Iron Curtain dismantled and lead her from Hungary into Austria at a remote and, he claimed, rarely patrolled location. A risky option, I thought.
As Ute absorbed the information, Zsolt detailed pitfalls in the plan. The border runner would flee with Ute’s money, leaving her destitute and stranded. A bleak assessment, but I sensed Zsolt’s full engagement and that he would help Ute escape.
Another option emerged. Ute often spent time in a neighbourhood adjacent to the West German embassy. Reluctant to approach the embassy, she thought that East German security agents photographed everyone who entered, so they could identify potential East German escapees. On her outings, Ute met other East Germans, also “on holiday” in Budapest. The West German government allowed East Germans West German passports. Some of the people that Ute had met applied for them inside the West German embassy. Since they knew they could not obtain an exit visa from the Hungarian government, which they needed in order to leave Hungary for a Western country, these East Germans declared themselves refugees once inside the West German embassy and refused to leave the embassy grounds. Ute opted for this tactic.
A line of like-minded East Germans now stretched down the road by the embassy. An official gave Ute a number and said she should return in three days for her embassy appointment. She felt nervous because she had seen men on nearby rooftops who photographed people in line.
I tried to distract Ute. She liked bars, especially the Fregatt. We went back. Once there, I suspected that she had bar-hopped earlier in the trip to find a Westerner who might marry her to help her escape. A day before her embassy appointment we returned home from the Fregatt around midnight. I turned the radio on. The BBC news reader said that the West German embassy in Budapest had now closed its doors to East Germans, citing overcrowding and unsanitary conditions. This, despite assurances from embassy officials that they would review Ute’s case. What a betrayal. I told Ute. She panicked. I also felt on edge.
In the morning Ute called the border runner. She had considered telephoning before but didn’t want to. Now she felt desperate. As they spoke and planned an escape, Ute lost confidence and trust in this man, abandoned the plan, and returned regularly, instead, to the West German embassy. East Germans in a similar situation congregated there. One day Ute came home with Agnes, an East German student. I thought of Agnes as a substitute Helga, a friend of Ute’s who spoke English, though Agnes, like Ute, lived the nightmare of trying to escape. Zsolt and I were mere witnesses to this predicament.
I could pick Agnes out in any crowd by her mass of frizzy hair that stuck up on end. Bold by nature, she had already tried to cross the Austro-Hungarian border three times. On her last attempt she tripped a wire one and a half kilometres from no man’s land. Border guards with dogs came after her. One guard fired a shot in the air. Such warnings were allowed, but shooting anyone trying to cross was not. Agnes might have escaped if she’d run but she was so scared, she stopped. The guards warned her against making another attempt. They said twice as many patrols would soon reinforce the border. The guards drove Agnes back to Budapest. Like Ute, she did not know what to do.
The West German and Hungarian governments began refugee crisis discussions. In mid-August, the Hungarian Maltese Charity Service opened a refugee camp in Budapest. Finally someone stepped in to take charge.
A few days after the camp opened, Ute, Agnes and I sat in the living room and discussed options. Ute said, “The camp is quite good.” I had not visited the site.
Agnes said, “Many people have already moved in. Perhaps we will go.”
I watched as Ute gathered her belongings. She folded and then rolled her clothes in compact bundles that she tucked in her knapsack. The shower curtain rack, draped these past weeks with damp laundered T-shirts and underwear, now lay bare. Her sleeping bag, now as familiar to me as my bedspread, hung in a tight roll strapped to the bottom of her bag. Ute checked documents, clutched her passport, hoisted that heavy pack on her back. Then Ute, Agnes and I walked down the stairs.
“I’ll visit you,” I said.
“We are thanking you so much for your hospitality,” Ute replied. Then they stepped across the threshold, into the street. I felt as if I had thrown helpless refugees out the door. I woke the next morning worried about Ute and Agnes. I needed to know they’d be okay, so I went to the camp.
It was situated on spacious grounds surrounded by a wrought-iron fence in an attractive residential neighbourhood. Tents stood everywhere. Refugees sat scattered among the flowerbeds. Some lay on towels with backpacks at their feet. Others stretched out on the grass. Portable latrines and small cabins dotted the landscape.
I broke the rules by entering the camp, but no one noticed as I still looked like a student. I met some families with children. Most of the refugees were young and single, like Ute and Agnes. Money was tight for many, but at least they now had free accommodation and food. Still, everyone seemed understandably stressed as they found themselves stuck in limbo. They worried about the repercussions for relatives in East Germany because of their decision to leave, and they remained desperate for a way out of Hungary to West Germany.
A few days after Ute and Agnes arrived at the camp I received a faxed notice about a pan-European picnic organized by a descendant of the last Austro-Hungarian emperor, Otto von Habsburg, and a Hungarian opposition group, the Hungarian Democratic Forum (MDF). The picnic would be held a few days later at the Austro-Hungarian border, near Sopron. I phoned for more information. Organizers planned to temporarily open a rural border post, closed for years, for a pan-European friendship meeting between neighbouring villagers on opposite sides of the border. Dignitaries and journalists from the Hungarian side would travel to the Austrian side in a bus through the border post for celebrations in Austria.