Authortrek short stories

It was a rainy November day when Joseph Staufenval, attorney at law, noticed the blanket of suffocating pain around his waist. Dark sadness settled in his throat. He knew instantly that he was in the shadow of death. Although his was only 56, and seemed quite healthy and energetic, he had absolutely no doubt. Experience taught him to trust ill omens.

The office manager called for an ambulance, and soon the stretcher left the building amidst commotion and gawking. Not a single speculation or opinion could be heard, but the engines of theorizing worked at full capacity. What’s more, they all ran in the exact same direction.

At the university hospital in Washington, D.C., Staufenval was subjected to an extensive battery of tests. The next day he learned that his fate was sealed. A rare form of cancer, originating in the adrenal gland, had spread through his intestines. An elderly professor of medicine and international authority on cancer research closed the door behind him, sat at his bedside and informed him that there was practically no research on this extremely rare illness. The few case studies available from around the world revealed only that those who suffered from it had a short time to live.

A small consolation: The agony that accompanied the recurring spasms could be suppressed by a new pain killer. It was developed by the same pharmaceutical company that had an adversarial relationship with Staufenval’s law firm. Ironically, Joe was the lead attorney in the class action suit that victims of a cancer-curing drug brought against the multinational giant.

The pain was gone, and feeling quite comfortable, Joe was allowed to go home if he so desired. With his wife, Irene, at his side, loaded up with medications and instructions, he left the hospital.

The same evening a senior partner called him, relieving him of his duties — his full pay to continue. Irene found this satisfactory, if not generous. Joe had his own thoughts, which, for the moment, he kept to himself. The next morning, much against Irene’s protests, he went for a walk in Georgetown where they lived.

As he left his house, he ran into a neighbor who hated his guts. The man had lost a law suit involving a large sum of money to Joe’s firm. Previously, when they saw each other Joe felt uncomfortable and turned his head away. But now, he looked at this person with utter indifference.

He strolled toward his alma mater, Georgetown University, shielding his eyes from the sun’s blood-soaked glare. The intense mental activity of observing everything could not suppress the thought that his interior had undergone a complete change during the past 48 hours. His whole being had been displaced. He remembered once walking away from an open air concert on campus. At one point he could no longer hear the music, but the sound of brass instruments still kept slamming his eardrums with sorrowful incoherence. The music he no longer heard was his life.

He returned to his favorite bench — the one he used to sit on when he was an undergraduate. Over the decades he had found it a good place to tally things up, make important decisions.

“Let’s see, just what happened here: Today is Friday. The luncheon with Cliff took place on Monday.”

Clifford, also a lawyer by training, quit the practice a couple of years ago and started his own “private security service” company. He had asked Joe to meet him at a popular sushi restaurant downtown. When Joe suggested that the place was overrun during weekday lunch hours, Cliff assured him that he knew the owner and they would have a private banquet room to confer. He had something important to communicate.

Soon after they placed their order, Joe’s cell rang. It was his office. The senior partner who supervised him asked if he was alone. Joe understood that the exchange was to be privileged and immediately left the small banquet room with apologies to Cliff who signaled his unreserved understanding. Joe stepped out onto the sidewalk. He was told to return to the office before 3 p.m. The pharmaceutical company’s counsel had requested an urgent meeting. Probably they wanted to renew their request for a consent decree that would end the litigation. They had become very anxious since the Food and Drug Administration had revoked their “blockbuster” concoction, giving rise to much negative publicity, including damaging articles in the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times. As a result, their stocks had lost value.

On his way to the table, Joe saw someone leave the private room. When he entered, the dishes and drinks were already on the table and Cliff was politely waiting for him.

During the next hour, Joe learned that he was in danger. Under a solemn pledge of confidentiality, Cliff told him that the indicted corporate powerhouse had employed “strong hands to shake down those who threatened its interests.”

The “security apparatus” was not “in-house;” it could not be found on organizational charts. People doing the dirty work were layers removed from the visible business facade. Most likely the deepest insiders (the largest owners with generations of affiliation to the company) formed an “independent” front that would retain a private security firm with operatives around the world:  “These would hire the animals.”

“For the record,” Cliff added, “my company does not engage in such activities.”

Joe was not entirely surprised.

He told Cliff about two instances of mysterious whistling in garages, one in his office building one late Sunday afternoon, the other near the courthouse where a hearing related to the case was being held. Even if empty garages (or full ones without people coming and going) were not known from blood-chilling action thrillers, an invisible man whistling in a slow, persistent, intimate way carries the personal message: “I know who you are and I don’t like what you are doing.” The exact same sound heard for the second time becomes even more ominous.

Joe never told Irene about these incidents. He did not want to scare her or appear to be a ridiculous wimp. After all, not only hired thugs whistle in garages. Yet he had no doubt that the defendant was trying to intimidate him. Cliff fully agreed.

Remarkably, instead of frightening him, the whistled threats had infuriated Joe.

While it was doubtful that it would cure anything, the hastily developed and aggressively marketed medication had horrific side effects, resulting in hundreds of hospital admissions (dizziness, wild blood pressure fluctuation), several strokes, and even some deaths. Over the past 16 months, Joe had met many victims and what he had heard astonished and shocked him.

His determination to bring the “pharma-gangsters” to justice was reinforced when two employees of the indicted company approached him: A woman biologist who was involved in testing drugs on monkeys and a high-ranking executive. They both requested absolute confidentiality, fearing severe consequences if they were found out. They did not seem to know about each other’s whistle blowing, if their scared whispering could be called by that name at all.

Joe met the biologist at the library of Georgetown University Medical School. With beads of perspiration on her forehead, indignant to a point that she could hardly form sentences, she told him that the firm’s research policy was to find relief only for symptoms, never for the disease. Complete cure would choke off profit.

The executive, whom Joe had met in an off-the-beaten-track restaurant in rural Maryland, began by repeating his plea for unconditional secrecy. After being reassured, the man informed him that sloppy research procedures and falsified results were behind the fiasco. The firm was determined to avoid entanglement with the Justice Department at any cost.

The “source” also seemed to know that Joe’s law firm was inclined to wrap up the case with a quick settlement. That took Joe aback. His insistence that the drug-maker should not get off the hook with a civil suit had encountered only minor scoffing in-house. No one had raised serious objections.

As he sauntered homeward on weak knees, Staufenval recalled that a former Russian KGB agent was murdered by being tricked into ingesting radioactive material. Yes, it happened in London, in 2006, and the name was Litvinenko — his web search confirmed. Wow, also in a sushi restaurant! Why sushi? Perhaps because it is easy to hide hemlock among multiple fillings and toppings mixed with loosely packed rice? And, of course, spices hide the altered flavor.

He vividly remembered how Clifford’s eyes came together in a sharp focus when he asserted with the gravitas of a cheesy salesman that he did not engage in such activities –“No, no, no, not his firm!” Then how does a private security outfit become prosperous? By sending minimum wage night watchmen to slumbering offices and frigid warehouses? And who was that boneless, faceless man who slid out from the banquet room?  “He had to be the one who actually poisoned me!”

The next day, Joe sat on his bench again, watching a sparrow’s futile picking at the dust.  Students rushed by with the naive determination of somnambulists, pursuing their private little dreams. Once upon a time, he was one of them.

We go through life, he brooded, without noticing how romantic and elastic it is until that certain exuberance we did not even know we had crashes on a rigid obstacle, natural or manmade.

His youth had been full of false starts and unfulfilled cravings.

He studied violin until he was 15 and wanted to become a celebrated concert artist, like Niccolo Paganini. Then he wished to become another Picasso. He was barely 16 when his painting that showed a woman with two heads and 11 fingers on each hand, won a prize at a junior art competition.

Later he conjured up careers in politics, the military, or perhaps in the sciences, settling finally on the ambition to become a writer, perhaps a playwright, given all those beautiful actresses he could meet.

There was Linda, the pretty drama major! Between kisses, they talked about their complementary plans of success in the theater. She married an elderly state senator from Georgia.

Oh, those ancient lustful times, when he sailed through the perilous summer seas of his golden season with hunger for glory!

When, at the age of 30, Joe realized that he would never make it as a writer, he had gone through law school with the support of Irene, whom he married out of gratitude.

He was a so-so professional, never fully giving himself to his work. After more than a decade with the D.C. law firm he had remained a “long-term associate” without any prospect of becoming a partner.

The big change came with “the case.” The minute he understood that the complaints against the drug-maker were real, his veins thickened on his forehead. Suddenly his life had a meaning: “Go after the rotten sociopaths.”

He worked night and day, over weekends. Before, he and Irene had spent their summer vacations in North Carolina, in her mother’s house on Hatteras Island. Not this year. Irene went alone and stayed for months. She took a lover there, a retired professor of philosophy from Ohio. Her guilt-ridden chitchat amounted to a confession, but he let it pass. As during most of his life, he was somewhere else.

Irene could not have children and that was just fine with him. Until this moment, that is.

Now, on the threshold of nonexistence, his old desires and ambitions to rise from the colorless mud of mediocrity came alive and collided with his sense of nullity. He regretted everything he did in his life, except for making a stand against murderous greed.

The raging tempest of disjointed recriminations lasted for only a couple of days. As he fell into the remainder of his time, the past turned into an enchainment of rigidly foreordained events and lost its significance: Neither future nor past! His promenade through ineffable wretchedness had come to an end. Eyes closed, he turned inward, perceiving the reality of his life in its unsurpassable fullness like a glass filled to the brim — not a drop more.

On Monday, he drove to his other favorite place of solitary reflection, Roosevelt Island.

The second he pulled out from the curbside another car half a block behind him did the same. Its driver was a middle-aged man with a clean shaven head and gold-rimmed designer sunglasses.

Joe sat on a bench facing the Kennedy Center across the Potomac.

“What is life?”

The motionless noon gave no answer, only the pebbles glistened mysteriously after the rain, and a sudden gust of wind whipped up a dazzling arabesque on the river’s surface. Being in the world is absurd but this does not render death less incomprehensible. Anyway, what’s the use of harping on abstractions? Thoughts about infinity and the absolute always deceive us. They have no center; they cannot elucidate the present. A sudden stabbing pain in his chest that left him out of breath filled his heart with pride. By being in contact with almighty death, he became the representative of inescapable human reality.

A middle-aged man wearing sunglasses walked by, looking at him studiously.

“Who the hell is this? What on Earth do they want from me, kill me for the second time? Or perhaps they want to know if I’m talking to someone. My God, but of course, that’s what I should have been doing all along.”

He decided to walk into FBI Headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue the next day to make a private statement about the infamy and his suspicion of having been poisoned.

That did not happen. Lacking stamina, he no longer left the house. He just sat by the window and, surrounded by the somber aura of the morgue, buried his wrinkled face in his palms. He reluctantly lay down on his bed. Facing the wall, as if turning his back on this vile world, he succumbed in heroic solitude.

Legal action against the drug maker was settled out of court. The patients and survivors received token damages while the law firm raked in a munificent sum. Its senior partners were sweating bullets to hide this, making high-visibility charity donations left and right. They portrayed Staufenval as a failed lawyer who fell into the error of sensation mongering. The case should not have taken such a long time, they maintained, although whenever he came up in a conversation, which they invariably kept curt, they always said “he was a decent man.”

Helplessness is the mother of myths. The short-changed victims came to regard Joe their saint. Irene, most people at the law firm, and practically everybody familiar with the case suspected the coincidence between his sudden death and the consent decree that followed with lightning speed. They all kept their mouths shut. It is better not to get on the wrong side of the Invisible Hand.

The funeral fell on a bright Wednesday morning. The sun sparkled in all windows, on glass and metal surfaces. This is how heaven always celebrates the passing of a generous soul

Although I met his parents and his sister Cecile, Milan was not exactly a friend. Not a close one anyway. So, when I state categorically that what follows exhausts my knowledge of his deeds and fate, please take it for fact. I am not in the possession of any document, address, lead (domestic or foreign), or any other information whatsoever concerning music historian Milan D. Kunst or any other person who may resemble him.

After this well-advised motion of legal self-defense, let’s lighten up. The story, after all, has a happy beginning. It is 1989, a time when those of us who could never imagine the Cold War going away began to smile. It was also not a bad year for the Philadelphia Symphony and all the organizations, foundations, and the artistic community associated with this world-renowned orchestra. Music Director Ricardo Muti has just returned from a triumphant tour of the crumbling Soviet Union where he conducted La Scala’s musicians to the applause of Mikhail Gorbachev and representatives of Russia’s intellectual elite (including Andrei Sacharov), galvanized by the loosening ballast of communist dominion. The Symphony’s finances brightened up. All of a sudden there was money for everything, from urban beautification projects around The Philadelphia Academy of Music on Broad Street to research grants given for the asking. Milan received one too.

He had a master’s degree in music history from the famous state university located in Philadelphia and was on the verge of formally joining the doctoral program. He set out to study U.S.-Hungarian cultural relations as part of East-West tensions during the Cold War. His mother was Hungarian. He had spent months with relatives in Budapest and spoke the language fluently. As a credit to his finesse, he obtained funding for a project that would provide (based on preliminary agreements with his department chair and graduate advisor) building blocks for his dissertation.

I had three substantive conversations with him during the roughly two-month period before his departure for Budapest in the early spring of 1990. Lodging with relatives, he would spend a year there to conduct research in association with the Hungarian State Opera, the Franz Liszt Academy of Music, and the National Archives of Hungary. Some of his work would involve tracking down and interviewing individuals who were in contact with or were knowledgeable about the two central figures of his planned project, African-American singer, actor Paul Robeson and Hungarian born baritone Alexander Sved. He talked about these persons with great enthusiasm. As he put it “taking them together you get more than the sum of the parts.” By the end of our last conversation I got the idea.

You may recall the tormented life of Renaissance man extraordinaire and civil rights activist Paul Robeson (1898-1976). His performances in the title roles of Shakespeare’s Othello and O’Neil’s Emperor Jones were probably the highpoints of his professional history. As a singer he appeared in musicals and on concert stages; he sang Negro spirituals and folksongs in different languages. Less known is that, after he was allowed to leave the United States in 1958, he stayed for a while in Hungary where people were still stunned by “1956,” the twentieth century’s bloodiest armed opposition to communist rule. Paul Robeson went on record condemning the revolution. In public statements and interviews he reprised the main theme of communist propaganda: People egged on by subversive lies, broadcast through the antennas of Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, carried out a “counter-revolution.” Ultimately, American imperialism was responsible for the whole bloody affair.

“That must have been his low point . . . ,” I ventured.

“You mean besides moving back to Philadelphia?”

“Imagine, a victim of oppression condoning the oppression of others.”

After a thoughtful silence, perfectly justified by the three-Martini haze, we changed the subject and began to analyze the women in the lounge. Milan was a Lothario-class gallant. He came across to the opposite sex as a benefactor. Until I hung out with him, I never knew that someone could tell a beautiful young woman standing next to him in a singles bar “I’m not sure I want to get involved with you.” Now what? I feared an unpleasant remark or a burst of sarcastic laughter. Instead, she turned into a reprimanded school girl, lost in visible thoughts of self-doubt: “Why? Is it my dress, my makeup?”

Our penultimate conversation took place during a leisurely stroll through town. Milan talked about the other central character of his study trip; the legendary baritone Alexander (or Sandor) Sved (1906-1979). Following his debut in the Hungarian Royal Opera in 1927, Sved had a spectacular international career. (He performed in Vienna, Berlin, Munich, Paris, London, Rome, Salzburg, Bayreuth, Buenos Aires, and Rio de Janeiro.) After a short stay with the Chicago Civic Opera, he moved to New York in 1940 and joined the Metropolitan Opera. He spent the war years in the Americas and continued to perform with the Met until1950 when he made one big mistake: He went to Hungary for a nostalgic sojourn and concert tour.

By that time communist governments were firmly ensconced throughout Eastern Europe. In Hungary, Matyas Rakosi became the figurehead and the State Security Organization (AVO) acted as the main executor of a reign of terror and state hooliganism the likes of which may be observed today only in Kim Jong-il‘s North Korea. Most Hungarians knew that lips had to be tightly zipped. People perceived as enemies even in the slightest possible way (telling a joke about Stalin or Rakosi) disappeared in large enough numbers to make rumors of torture and labor camps, whispered among trusted neighbors and colleagues, credible.

Sved was advised by the U.S. embassy in Budapest to leave the country while the going was good. He was told that the communists considered anyone with Hungarian citizenship free game and, technically, Sved was a Hungarian. He ignored warnings until it was too late. They took away his passport and invited him to a meeting at the Hungarian State Opera (the former Royal Opera). There he was, in essence, coerced to feign defection to the “Camp of Peace.” In practical terms this meant breaking his contract with the Met and joining the Hungarian Opera’s cast.

“Sved burst into sweat and wanted to protest.”

“What made him acquiesce, after all?”

“The fear he detected in the eyes of his future colleagues.”

While some of those present, according to Milan, timidly repeated the communist party line, others threw in a modicum of patriotism (something like “Your country needs you in these trying historic times”).

“Looking at the downcast eyes, feeling the chill of mortification and mutual suspicion in the air, he knew that if he did not cooperate he would not be the only one paying a huge price. In the end, he was not really confronted with a rational choice.”

In a few weeks Sved became the “singing prisoner.” Gossip had it that he wanted to finish his scheduled concerts and appearances (instead of leaving with the first train for Vienna) because he was money hungry. Milan disagreed:

“Sved was too much of the trooper to break engagements, let down organizers, colleagues, and audiences. As a world celebrity with a stable position at the Met, he was financially well off. What would he do with a pile of inconvertible forints that he could not spend anywhere except in war-ravaged Hungary? Things were not that simple.”

Milan’s level of information astonished me. This was early 1990. Democratic rights had just begun to emerge in the former communist block. What I heard from him was clearly not available from print or broadcast media. (As a journalist intern in Philadelphia at the time, I was in the position to observe the rise of investigative journalism in post-Cold War Eastern Europe.) He guessed my curiosity and came forth with a surprising explanation.

For many years and until the end of his stay in Hungary in late 1956, when the Hungarian-Austrian border was briefly opened, Sved had a live-in-maid called Matild. Milan’s mother was related to her. I never understood the exact relationship but, as I learned later, they were both born in the same village somewhere along the River Tisza, and, despite the difference in their ages (Milan’s mother was younger), they were very close during the decade that followed the war. In fact, Milan’s mother, who joined the mass exodus after the Soviet invasion in November 1956, had begged Matild to go with her. Sved bolted out of the country at the first possible opportunity, leaving Matild alone in the elegant home. Unfortunately, she stayed.

No contemporary writer of action melodrama could conceive a more erratic and trying lot for a hard-working, honest soul than what befell Matild. Born before the First World War, she became a chambermaid at the age of 14. The Second War found her in the household of a well-to-do Jewish industrialist, the general manager and major stockholder of a considerable manufacturing firm in Gyor, a town on the Danube between Vienna and Budapest. The man was divorced and Matild became his mistress. Before his deportation by the Nazis in 1944, he left his earthly possessions to Matild who used the large apartment to save Jews. Her employer/lover miraculously survived the concentration camp and, upon his return, he married Matild. The union was short-lived. Just a few months before the Iron Curtain descended and the nationalization of factories (which involved, on occasion, the defenestration of “capitalists and their lackeys”) began, he traveled to London where his grown daughter from his first marriage lived. He never returned.

Disconcerted and angry, Matild left Gyor to join Milan’s mother who worked in a factory in Budapest. She was soon employed by Sved as a combination house cleaner, cook, and gardener.

They lived alone in a large villa. Their relationship, which by now, so many decades later appears somewhat comical, is characterized by the following exchange (based on a report published in the 10/15/05 edition of the Hungarian daily “Nepszabadsag”). After the departure of a man who paid them a surprise visit, Sved summoned Matild:

“You know who this man was?”

“No, Sir.”

“Then why did you let him in?”

“Because you told me, Sir.”

“But why didn’t you demand an ID before letting him in?”

“Because I don’t work for the police, Sir!”

“Did you get his name?”

“Yeah, some Thomas Nagy.”

“And do you know who this certain Thomas Nagy is?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Well, this certain Thomas Nagy is an agent of the AVO. He is a big fan of mine, and based on this fact he took upon himself to warn me that I am under constant AVO surveillance. They listen to my telephone conversations, open my letters; his office receives a continuous stream of reports concerning my person.”

“Oh, my God…”

“Oh my God what?”

“Then he too had a finger in the pie . . . I’m sorry, Sir.”

“Sorry, hah? Do you know my dear who rats on me?”

“No, I don’t know, Sir.”

“You, Matild, you!”

“This is not true, Sir, it is not true.”

“Au contraire, it is true!”

“No, it is not! Just the other way around, it is you who know everything about me. I don’t go anywhere during the day. How could I possibly . . . with whom and where would I communicate about you? To impute such a ghastly thing to me . .  It’s a shame. Now, really, Sir . . .”

Sved fired Matild a couple of times but he always called her back. As she told Milan’s mother “The great artist is totally helpless. He could not scramble an egg. He is my dependent. He misses me when I am not around.”

Discretion surrounds their degree of intimacy. Nevertheless, it became known that the two had long conversations deep into the night after Sved’s return from the opera. And, as the following dramatization (based also on published Hungarian reconstructions) confirms, their relationship was argumentative while always retaining Matild’s servant status. Sometime in 1954, Sved said with a sigh:

“You know everything about me, Matild.”

“I must say ‘yes,’ to be truthful, but it is still not true that I report on you, Sir.”

“Sure, sure. Then how on Earth do they happen to know that I sold my honorary tickets to the Hungary-England soccer game? You can be the only source, my dear.”

“Oh, how would they know?” replied Matild with hands on hips: “You announced it in the buffet of the Opera House. I heard with my own ears when you offered tickets on the phone. You even called the British Ambassador. The whole town knows about this. If you would excuse me for saying so, Mr. Artist, everybody knows everything about you. You are so incredibly transparent. But please, please believe me I am not an informer.“

Shortly after Sved’s departure in November 1956, Matild was murdered in the abandoned villa, a crime that remains unsolved to this day.

By now it has been confirmed that Matild’s protestations were sincere. She was not an AVO plant although she must have observed many particulars of the surveillance. Sadly, Sved, who once in the West, was debriefed and interviewed about his nearly seven years of life in Hungary (the source of reconstructed dialogues with Matild) went to his grave with the wrong belief. My hunch is that Milan’s mother, unable to get over Matild’s death, inspired her son’s interest in the Hungarian-related research project. She hoped to find out something about the reasons and circumstances of the tragedy. If so, the inspiration was in memoriam.

Mrs. Kunst died of cancer in the early 80s. She was divorced from her husband who escaped from Albania via Berlin before the wall went up. He changed his name to Kunst in West Germany and immigrated to America in the mid-60s, where he made his living (and by all appearances quite a decent one) from running an Albanian émigré organization and a network of social clubs in major U.S. and Canadian cities. Father and son got along well. (Milan was also fluent in Albanian.) “Kunst” was the only bone of contention between the two. He once joked that he wished his father chose Kampf instead of Kunst. He considered changing his surname back to the family’s original Albanian version.

Our last meeting began with cocktails and ended with another walk. Sved’s defection was faked, Milan opined, but the applause was real. The fortune he was amassing in inconvertible forints made him locally rich.

“Just think. With public acclaim, relative wealth, celebrity status … how long would any of us wake up every single morning feeling miserable, questioning the reason to live?”

“Do you mean he began to cooperate?”

“Yes, I suspect, inadvertently.”

“Did he buy the communist propaganda?”

“I wouldn’t say that. Like many others, he kept his political views in abeyance. Most people were not locked up in labor camps, after all, and there was a flood of delusive information about great economic progress. Just another 5-year plan, with emphasis on heavy industry, and shelves would cave and tumble under the weight of luxury goods in department stores named after Lenin and Stalin.”

“Agitation and propaganda coupled with fear worked for a while.”

“Fear and hope. We tend to counteract moral degradation even if takes a good dose of irrationality and denial.”

Somehow I guessed where he was going:

“Are you suggesting that if Sved was not a pure victim then Paul Robeson was not as bad as it seems …?”

“That’s right,” Milan concurred. “Tyranny turns victim into volunteer and volunteer into victim.”

He argued that a man with Robeson’s intelligence and worldliness must have arrived at the realization (explaining probably his subsequent physical withering) that his bitterness over pre-Civil Rights race relations led him down the path of becoming a worse victim than Othello. The mind of the Moorish General in Shakespeare’s drama was simply poisoned by Iago, the lying manipulator. But the Iagos in service of “real socialism” turned Robeson into one of them.

“Beyond Good and Evil,” I ventured. “But how does this relate to music?”

Milan stopped in the middle of the sidewalk for emphasis.

“That’s exactly the point.”

His exposition bristled with erudite references. He talked about Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, and Freud; how the discovery of irrational drives, the inconsistencies of human motives, will-to-power, and the chronic imbalance of mental energy reflect the emotional puzzlement and world-feel of anti-dogmatic modern music, the atonality of Schoenberg,  Berg, Webern; Bartok’s atavistic pulsations and unpredictable bursts of violence; the serialism of Boulez and “our fellow-Philadelphian Babbitt;” the provocative electronic nihilism of Stockhausen; the micro-polyphony of Gyorgy Ligeti (one of his favorite composers who, by the way, also fled Hungary in 1956).

“Precise melody and formulaic harmony,” he explained, “reduces behavior to an idealized model. Those who can readily believe that an individual is basically either good or bad, like the readers of Dickens and Balzac back in the first half of the 19^th century, are incapable or ill-equipped to access and appreciate the audacity of multiple harmonic planes, poly-tonality, irregular meters and offbeat accents; the barbarous and illogical impulses that endure in the human spirit.”

“You are not going to put all this into your study?”

“No,” he said, “maybe in the dissertation. But who knows. Life is one uninterrupted mental confusion, isn’t it . . . deformed melody and altered harmony. On the psychic scale, reason is not the dominant. Expect no resolution to a gravitational center. If reason characterized history we would be living in permanence, orbiting each other on set, non-intersecting paths like Newton’s heavenly bodies. Believe me, modern music is the true language of the human condition because the irrational is the quintessence of our existence.”

“And, so?”

“And so as Ligeti – you know the fellow who composed the anti-opera Le Grand Macabre? – once said ‘I cannot decide whether death is a tragedy or a farce.’ ”

With this humorous ambiguity we shook hands and went our respective ways. I never saw him again. The reason I can render his thoughts with sufficient accuracy here is that, as soon as I got home, I jotted them down, even looking up names and music-theoretical expressions that sounded Greek to me. When I heard that people incapable of appreciating modern music tend to divide individuals and actions into good or bad, positive or negative, I felt as if I had been slapped. Ever since that conversation, whenever I catch myself pronouncing verdicts so simplistically, I try to reexamine circumstances,, discover their complexity and avoid judging without listening to the internal voice of appeal, hearing from the witness-box of personal experience. (But with regard to music, I would still prefer Mozart or a good rock band.)

Sorry about that Milan, and also for what I am about to say: “I knew it! I knew it! I could have, I should have bet on it.” My hope for indulgence is with those criminal anthropologists who insist that physiognomy is destiny.

You might expect a library-dwelling music historian, a relentless pursuer of indolent academic sophistication, and esquire of polished taste to look like the superintendent of botanical gardens at a women’s college. But with a prominent, forward projecting jaw, high cheekbones, and hawk-like nose, Milan reminded one of a mounted robber baron of noble Anatolian descent, a roguish libertine warrior leaping ditches under the blood-stained flags of marauding rebels. And what do we get from the entanglement of deep spiritual and aesthetic strivings and untamed materialistic ambitions? We get “Arsene Lupin,” the gentleman burglar, a criminal with panache and some basic sense of honor.

The common wisdom whereby people crave for wealth and distinction glosses over the importance of the mix. It may well be that the altruist wants more status than wealth and the criminal, who represents by and large the opposite to altruism, is more concerned with what gold can buy than the social status it may secure. In these individuals, and I rank Milan one of them, wealth is decoupled from vanity and luxury becomes a birth right. To obtain it, with whatever means available, is nothing more than assuming one’s projected natural state in life.

************

About one year after we parted company near Rittenhouse Square, the telephone rang in the cubicle that I shared with another intern. It was Cecile, Milan’s sister (and as far as I know, his only sibling). Between sobs she told me that Milan had disappeared from his hotel in Rio de Janeiro.

“Excuse me? Wasn’t he doing research in Hungary?”

After a long pause:

“Would you please come over?”

Cecile lived with her fiancée and later husband. When I arrived at the door, she told me in tears that Milan had checked into the Hotel Palace on Copacabana’s Avenida Atlantico about a month ago, and then vanished.

“Who contacted you?” I asked.

“His girlfriend. Why are you grinning?”

I had to smile because once when I told Milan that he would eventually become a Benedick (Shakespeare’s young Lord of Padua who, after swearing to remain a bachelor for life, falls headlong into love and marriage) he answered that the only woman capable of breaking him in would be a Brazilian blond. (I told Cecile about this on a later occasion when I also learned that the girlfriend was a police officer of rank.)

On the late morning of his presumed disappearance, two eyewitnesses saw Milan heading north toward downtown Rio, instead of to the beach where he usually went that time of the day. The Brazilian police-officer girlfriend sent Cecile Milan’s diary, which had been found in his hotel room. I was allowed to read it (but not to remove it from the premises). I perused the diary and made notes after leaving the apartment, which was also Milan’s address until his departure for Hungary in 1990. (Cecile’s boyfriend/fiancé moved in after Milan left.)

************

Years passed, but the disappearance continued to bother me. The last sentence in Milan’s diary seemed to be addressed to me: “I wish that one day someone would delve into the gross shenanigans that occurred after the collapse of communism. A young, idealistic journalist who speaks Hungarian and had never lived under Soviet occupation would be the ideal person for the job. I knew someone in Philadelphia who fits these requirements.”

In the mid-90s I visited Hungary, a country whose language I speak, and, through the serendipity of personal contacts, I conducted about a dozen interviews with people close to the “Kunst affair.” I gathered sufficient information to piece together the broad outlines of Milan’s post-Philadelphia story. To repeat, the information gathered is “sufficient” as opposed to being complete. The sheer fact that I detected, on occasion, subtle stonewalling or polite manipulation by the sources of this report confirms my belief that Milan got himself involved in a dangerous, high-stakes financial gambit and lost control. The moral is simple for us average persons with modest needs and expectations in this life: Don’t insist on playing with the big boys.

To understand Milan’s fate, let us turn back the pages of history to the heady days when the world watched the eclipse of the red monster with incredulous relief.

Soon after the Iron Curtain fell (if not while it was falling), a window of opportunity to get very rich very quickly opened up in East European countries, formerly under Soviet boots, now respected members of the European Union.

State- owned enterprises were allowed to become joint-stock companies. Since the enactment of laws to this effect preceded full operations on reopened stock exchanges, shares could be sold through other channels, essentially controlled by a few individuals representing various state organizations. (The stock exchange in Budapest, shut down in 1948, reopened in June 1990 with small-scale experimental operations.) There was neither a complete legislative framework nor an effective enforcement mechanism to regulate deals and the better angels of national governance throughout the region remained silent out of concern for raising the specter of corruption, spoiling ongoing negotiations with Western governments, multilateral agencies (like the International Monetary Fund and The World Bank), or frightening away foreign business firms ready to bring in much needed capital.

Persons involved in suspicious deals were among the higher-ups and it was not easy to prove that they were operating unethically. Often they were friends, party comrades or colleagues, and criminal investigations with indictments would have caused damaging scandals if not daunting political crises. Such anxieties combined with the impossibility of distinguishing clearly between lawful and lawless deals resulted in public inertia. Transactions involving large blocks of “commercialized state property” went through and details sunk without a trace.

Not only was the playing field of financial aggrandizement uncontrolled and grossly uneven but it was also extremely sparse. People in general did not aspire to become millionaires. After decades of socialism, the ideal personal situation was a relatively well-paid job with foreign travel; perks such as a new dwelling given free by the state, a telephone, and permit to buy some Soviet-Block-made automobile (such as the East German Trabant, nicknamed the “up-engineered soap box”). When the starting pistol of entrepreneurship sounded, only a handful could move without the mental shackles of engrained imagery about the good life.

Behind-the-scenes financial machinations remained veiled from the public. The newly liberated press, still cautious about its limits and possibilities, lacked the culture of investigative journalism — the bane of corrupt statesmen in open societies. By the time elaborate mansions under construction and other visible signs of extraordinary wealth appeared, the window had closed. As suddenly as it had betrayed itself, the opportunity to fill purses big time became invisible. All that was absent from societies living by the rule of law became increasingly present. (Public sector employees throughout the EU, just as in the U.S., must file mandatory asset statements). Temporarily practicable proceedings became strictly extrajudicial, and, irony of it all, the strict enforcement of sacrosanct property rights made the bounties of ex-comrade-plutocrats legitimate and safe.

During 1989/91, foreign and domestic pressure was on to denationalize industry throughout Eastern Europe. Many state-owned companies initiated and conducted their own “corporatization,” engaged in what became known as “spontaneous privatization.” They issued stocks and sold them to Western business firms, often passing complete control to the buyer. (One company that took this route to private ownership was the Hungarian light bulb manufacturer Tungsram. In late 1989, General Electric purchased 51 percent of its shares for $150 million.)

************

In Budapest, Milan joined the network of classical music aficionados who were regulars at the Opera. As a trustworthy U.S. citizen of good social standing, with excellent education and manners, and an obvious talent for handling matters efficiently and discreetly, his social advancement was rapid. He frequented the homes of high domestic office holders and diplomats from other East European countries. There were rumors about a romantic affair with the wife of a deputy minister of defense. He deflected the noise by telling people that “she is like a sister to me.” (The diary mentions the family but there is no hint of any love liaison.)

All these dignitaries of the Soviet satellite world huddled together in feverish anxiety amidst the cascading disintegration of the “Ancien Regime.” They were ready to dispense unlimited energy and boldness; deploy wile and make use of back-stairs influence to transplant their privileges into the emerging social and economic order.

A large state-owned company that transformed itself into a corporate entity with marketable shares was central to the events that engulfed Milan. I tried to find out the name of the company but met with no success. Mouths turned into narrow slits when I ventured to ask if, perchance, the firm happened to be located in Gyor.

Let us refer to the state-owned industrial enterprise in question as Company X.

The scheme had five components: Top executives of the firm X, key office-holders in one of the pre-reform, semi-private commercial banks; and senior officials at state agencies in charge of overseeing the devolution of public ownership in industry and commerce. The fourth group consisted of national-level party bigwigs whose occupation during the socialist regime was purely political. They were most likely members of the Central Committee of the communist party (or held positions close to that level), above the fray of administrating the economy. They secretly formed a domestic investment firm. As public personas they could override possible objections of state agencies (part of the economic administration and, therefore, below them) against particular actions undertaken by their outfit.

Group number five comprised some members of the UN delegation living in Geneva. According to the information I gathered in person, amply confirmed by Milan’s diary, he was assigned to this group. After only a few months in Budapest, he traveled to Switzerland where his American passport allowed him to stay for 90 days without a visa. He became the general manager and treasurer of a “Western” investment company that would buy Company X’s shares. (Milan’s often chatty journal entries full of anecdotal slices of life and impressions never refer to the research task that he was supposed to accomplish under the grant that took him to Hungary in the first place. His involvement in the business at hand must have occupied his entire attention very soon after his arrival.)

Shortly after the turnabout, a semi-private commercial bank, like the one cited, was sufficiently sovereign to extend convertible currency-denominated loans. The domestic investment company (run by the paragons of anti-capitalism) borrowed such funds, probably in U.S. dollars or West German Marks, which it would then re-loan to the “Western” investment company that opened an account in one of Switzerland’s 24 so-called cantonal banks. (The schemers knew very well that the largest Swiss banks, despite the country’s famed, legally-enforced banking secrecy, are closely scrutinized by national authorities.)

Thus, the basic idea was to make the investment company buy the majority of Company X’s shares at their original very low forint price and “sell” it to the “Western” investment company again at a very low price denominated in hard currency. After improving the firm’s organization and enhancing its attractiveness, resell ownership to a bona fide Western business or put the shares on the global capital market through an independent broker-dealer. The profit derived from the difference between the ridiculously low, original forint price of the shares and their normal sale’s price would be distributed among the participants. The initial bank loan could be paid back quickly because the investment firm that transferred the borrowed funds to its bogus component would receive it again as a result of “selling” the shares. The investment company, along with its Western foil, would dissolve and all records would vanish.

A contract in a language that only the initiated understood contained the formula of distribution. It was drawn up and kept in the safe of a lawyer and joint tenant. Members of the group attached their signatures and swore to secrecy.

This ingenious bunch of light-fingered socialist gentry forgot to take into account only one thing: a fault line amidst their own ranks. Not that repentance or rekindled fear of justice or twinges of remorse (inexplicable coughing spells and dreams of black falcons or demons with sharp hooks at the dawn of sleepless nights) would have made any of them run to the police. Oh, no. The UN component that included Milan, who was indispensable in accessing the “Western” investment company’s bank account, simply decided to abscond with the borrowed funds.

The entire delicate operation may have involved as many as two dozen protagonists (not an unusually large number if we add up major shareholders, directors, and officers of a substantial business entity). However, it is hard to imagine that the Geneva contingent within the broader cabal included more than three persons besides Milan. They must have struck up a friendship — or some semblance of it — and decided that defrauding a racket is not only a forgivable imperfection but it would also remain unpunished. (It is possible that these persons, including Milan, did not actually sign the contract.)

Where would the other conspirators go to complain, to the Red Cross? Now, of course, if all this happened in Moscow or Saint Petersburg, there would have been shots from slowly cruising limos with one-way glass windows; dead bodies in three-piece suits on sidewalks. There were occasional murders, vengeful and coercive actions in the course of East European transition too. But compared to the blood-soaked convulsion that accompanied the foundation of mafia-style financial dynasties in the Wild East, the moral blackout that shadowed denationalization in today’s European Union-East would be best characterized as a flood of white-collar crime.

The bits and pieces of information I could obtain led me to speculate of yet another betrayal, one within the “Geneva Quartet.” After getting Kunst’s signature in order to clear the Swiss bank account, the diplomats may have decided to get rid of him. How could they do it? One possibility is that they set the country’s intelligence service on him, proving that he had committed a major economic crime against the homeland. During the Cold War, East European spy organizations (“brotherly organs of the KGB”) did have the capability of dispatching individuals (Bulgarian agents fired poisoned darts into political dissidents walking around London under the false impression that they were safe). Why would East European countries rush to dismantle such capabilities as the Cold War was winding down?

This solution allowed the “Geneva Trio” to blame Milan for the disappearance of funds.

The semi-private commercial bank that extended the loan to the domestic investment firm was still not private enough to live with the consequences of its actions. Allocation from the state budget would cover the hole left in its assets as a result of the bad loan, meaning that the domestic components of the plan did not incur the loss of even one forint.

How relations between the “Geneva Trio” and the rest of group evolved is an open question.

***********

I felt sorry for Milan. He became the victim of his reckless vaulting for the mega-buck, a life of super-splendor — Icarus flying toward the sun with wings of wax and feathers. Although I have a perfect explanation (a sort of biological determinism), I still ask myself: Why couldn’t he become a respected college professor or a noted music critic? So what if you walk around with chalk stains on your coat sleeves and have to fly in coach? At least you are alive and can savor the sweet nectar of youthful pleasures for decades. You don’t need to check into Copacabana’s most expensive hotel in order to dance extreme samba with bikini-clad Brazilian beauties. There are travel packages . . . Besides, isn’t it repulsive to be stuck for life in a milieu of deceitful, semi-illiterate, dimwitted worshippers of Mammon?

Alright, alright, I got carried away. Sour grapes! Let me look calmly at the illusions and simplifications that hide in the sediments of my own consciousness. Yes, I would also like to enjoy the impeccable cleanliness and profuse catering of five-star hotels. Yes, I would like to be among those who are called to board the aircraft first; to dine in exquisite restaurants and meet important people. And, of course, we all know that famous actresses and glamorous women would never go on dates with a poor Joe like me who eats his corned beef sandwich in front of a screen saver showing the fancy woodwork of London pubs.

Upon completing my internship in Philadelphia, I moved to a small town in the South, where I became a full-time reporter covering the fire department, zoning board, real estate, local court, and high school sports. (I write things like “The woman who spat on the county sheriff’s wife on the parking lot of Wal-Mart was sentenced Monday to 10 days community service” and the “Loss to the Beulah Pistons in a heart-pounding finale during their last home game of the season dimmed conference chances for the Hillsboro Tigers.”)

I do not complain. My living conditions are good, I am surrounded by decent people, and the work is more challenging and satisfying than you, dear reader, might first think. But still, I readily admit that I long for something more (call it “wealth and fame” if you must) and I know very well, if I just stop and think for a second, that the blanket generalization about the wealthy being worthless in a non-materialistic sense is eminently flawed.

Let’s face it; most of us would like to escape mediocre conditions that seem pretty shabby when compared to life in the “palace-castle-chateaux” circuit. Wouldn’t you like to be at home in the Ritz of London and Paris and cruise for weeks in the first class of QE2?  I, for one, would love that life, but not if the price was to be lured into an ominous-looking black car by cauliflower-eared goons on my way from the beachfront to downtown Rio; taken to a secluded building; injected with a lethal mix, and after becoming bubble-eyed and displaying crimson blotches on my skin, chopped up by meat cleavers, put into plastic bags, and thrown into one of Rio’s overflowing landfills.

No sir, it’s not worth it!

************

Recently I returned to Hungary once again and had a long conversation with a history professor who lived through the ignominious dissolution of Marxist utopia. He listened attentively — a burned out cigar stub in the corner of his mouth — to my question, which proved to be ill-informed and naïve:

“Are people still mad at Paul Robeson for calling 1956 a counter-revolution?”

“Mad at Robeson? First of all, he was only one among many international personalities who were so enamored of communist idealism that they slavishly repeated official propaganda. Even then Hungarians understood this clearly. They were happy that famous artists visited the country at all. They felt depleted and abandoned because they lost so many talented people through emigration.

“And second . . .?”

He answered slowly and with great conviction:

“You guys living in far away America did not grasp the essence of transition from socialism to capitalism, did you?”

“? ? ?”

“People who called the revolution a counter-revolution before 1989 have since then been elected democratically to high offices.”

After digesting this, I timidly asked:

“And do folks still remember Sved and the terrible thing that happened to him?

“Sure. Some do. There has been some research about his life and times, but if you look at the CD jackets of his recordings or read descriptions about his appearances you will find only the list of honors the Rakosi regime bestowed on him.

“No commiseration or apology?”

“Nope. Sved lived and performed in Hungary from 1950 to the end of 1956. The rest of the story? Not many care anymore.”

What I learned next I found even more amazing. The professor assured me that most of those who became personally rich as a result of privatization through what I have labeled conspiracy, plot, or scheme did not believe for a moment that they were deceiving or harming the public. They thought they were simply entrepreneurial.

State property, which was augmented significantly by economic growth since nationalization in the late 1940s, had to go to some people other than the former owners under the rather sparse restitution programs voted in by national assemblies. Self-organized units of new owners, harnessing extant circumstances was the only way by which capitalism could be restarted. Attempts to create enterprise-based ownership (where every employee gets an equal share) and the egalitarian distribution of stock entitlements (vouchers) among citizens, tried in various forms throughout the region failed to revitalize sagging socialist industries. In the end, the most resourceful individuals with the best understanding of and easiest access to institutional controls over public property plucked the fruit that would not have fallen in their laps.

While East European societies apparently accept this rationalization, some residual suspicion and blame still lingers, awakening reactions that range from violent outbursts to polite resignation and everything in-between. Indeed, one may ask, how can individuals who preached the moral purity of socialism and considered private property theft one month stuff their pockets with millions from the communal cookie jar in the next, and keep a straight face? Are they not ashamed?

Bring the bloody deeds of Shakespeare’s Macbeth or Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov down to the level of incorporated governance (white-collar crime) and you will still find that an inner authority, which we can neither silence nor lose, shadows our every move more closely than the AVO ever watched and followed Sved. Perhaps self-condemnation and punishment is milder than Macbeth growing mad and Raskolnikov, who becomes choppy and lightheaded, flirts with the police until, to his great relief, he is arrested and charged with murder and robbery. But as so many great artists, scientists, and philosophers have shown and explained, and as all of us who had ever experienced involuntary self-punishment know very well, our conscience is our innate, custom-tailored, vigilant authority. As long as the perpetrators of fictitious deals and gross falsifications regard their conduct and handiwork as sinful, their crimes will remain punishable because they consider themselves accountable to justice.

Upon hearing my allegorical meditation about filthy business deals and unavoidable guilt that must – like unaccomplished fate – hover over those who engaged in them, the professor answered with a story.

Back in the 70s, one of his high school mates distinguished himself as being destined for a great political lifework. He was the school secretary of the League of Young Communists (the youth movement in Hungary, which was similar in concept and organization to the Komsomol in the USSR). He got the rhetoric down pat and talked about the superiority of socialism over capitalism. He walked around with volumes of Lenin under his arm in the hallway, saying things like “You either have a socialist or a capitalist heart.” Teachers, even the school principal, were afraid of him; they considered his opinion — which he expressed as if he alone represented the lofty goals of the international proletariat and world revolution — a factor whenever they made decisions affecting the student body.

“Here is a curious thing: We, his fellow students were not afraid of him. Being of the same age, we could sniff out the ruse. His opinions in matters of policy, which the school administration had to heed, were somehow in our interest as students, always on the prowl to ease the load and remove restrictions. He even confirmed our suspicion that he used ‘commi’ rhetoric and mannerisms to intimidate the grown-up powers-that-be by winking at us after delivering an opinion. Although he must have overheard remarks about the Soviet Union, 1956, and jokes galore about our rising living standards soon after the next five-year plan, he never informed on anyone.”

“What happened to him?”

“He studied political science at the University of Economics. He was very bright. Had the regime change not happened, I’m sure he would have ended up in the top echelons of the party. But ’89 came and guess what he does now? He owns a multimillion dollar export-import company, has a newly-built mansion on Rose Hill (an exclusive residential district on the Buda side of the Danube), and drives a Bugatti Veyron.

“Does he talk to you at all?”

“Oh yes, he comes to class reunions and picks up the check for the entire old-boy gang.”

“Does he talk about socialist and capitalist hearts anymore?”

“Politics? Never! He is proud of providing employment for a hundred people. He says he helps improve living standards by importing quality products at affordable prices; he bolsters the national economy by opening up new export markets.”

“You mean his conscience is clear.”

“It is.”

“Just for the sake of argument,” I suggested, ”what would he say if you confronted him with this? But comrade, you live off profit. Didn’t you call profit ‘expropriated surplus value’ just a few years ago? Is this where the victorious struggle of workers and peasants (in close alliance with the progressive intelligentsia) has led us, to the usurpation of the commons and damaged social protection; communist ideologues, organic products of the  class struggle becoming pillars of a bourgeois republic? Would Karl Marx be dismayed! I can see him looking at Das Kapital on his desk, hitting it with his fist, while yelling ‘Damn! That’s not how I imagined human nature!’ What would he say to that?”

“He would laugh.”

“Heh-heh?”

“Heh-heh.”

“And what would be your answer to that?”

“Heh-heh!”

“Would you elucidate the deeper meaning of this penetrating intellectual discourse?”

“Society-wide transvaluation in the interpretation of reality, my friend, if you want a fancy diagnosis of what happened in this part of the world during the past two decades. Look, this fellow had always been an entrepreneur, but his creative talents were stymied and distorted by socialist institutions. The regime change simply redirected his gifts and rich blood to the market place. The very same guy would have prevailed in America’s 19^th century’s Wild West or become a bishop, had he chosen the field of ecclesiastic endeavor.”

“I understand that he wants to laugh up his inconsistency. What I don’t get is why you all go along with it. I hope it’s not because he picks up the check.”

“His generosity is an expression of personal guilt — no doubt about that. It may even be a form of apology. But there is more. He is not the only one who changed. The whole society did. We had to adapt to the ‘people’s democracy’ if we wanted to get an education and a decent job, and adaptation rubs off on the individual.”

“There is something shared between the oppressed and the oppressor?”

“Something? Oppressed and oppressor under both fascism and communism became bundled into one fortuitous skein. Your political consciousness, my friend, is full of illusions . . . .”

“Maybe so, but I still don’t get why you allow him to laugh up his past. He did get ahead of you under false pretenses. He intimidated you and his entire environment for years.”

“Certainly. But keep in mind that he never injured anyone then and now he is beneficial to society. He takes risks and provides employment. He and his likes got the stuff that made it possible for Eastern Europe to join the EU and become part of free-market-based, liberal democratic modernity.”

“Well, if society has made your former classmate’s conscience burden-free then, in my estimation he has committed the perfect crime.”

“Some people think your way all the time and most people think that way some of the time. But when it comes to telescoping average attitudes through electoral politics, the fallen regime is redux; it keeps on breathing in the shadows of our minds.

“Explain! Please.”

“Before the turnabout it seemed that socialism would never go away, and, therefore the next best thing was to try, at least, to reform it. That meant acceptance in one way or another. There was mute assent, unvoiced, whispered, or maybe even denied among family members or close friends; and there was the in-your-face, boisterous, chest-banging embracement, complete with red-star-adorned Lenin chapeaus. There was a big difference between the two patterns of self-conduct, yet they were bound together by a shared understanding of the main underlying circumstance, the overpowering, radical presence of Soviet occupation. From forced symbiosis came some measure of common interest, from that a complicity and cooperation in maintaining clear rules for the game of personal interactions, competition, and advancement. And so, my friend, through the daily intercourse of civil society, the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ reinforced itself, appearing as eternal to the majority of our population as Euclidean geometry. Of course, all this became clear only after we began to look backwards, sometimes with incomprehension, sometimes with shame, and sometimes with nostalgia. Yes, nostalgia because we were young back then and even memories of light-heartedness are embedded in the behavior and common places created by social institutions. Consequence: Most social scientists, artists, writers, and people in the media — in other words, those who express public thinking and shape the opinion of the masses — could not condemn the ex-socialist “nouveau riches.” They could not brand them as a bunch of chameleon-like apostates without appearing to be strikingly at odds with what was known about their own pre-1989 words and activities. The hypocrisy of editorialized damnation would have been flatly obvious to everyone. Yes, my friend, reality hereabouts is that both the individual and society evolved in certain ways during the socialist decades . . . and evolution is path dependent . . . history matters . . . whatever we do now or will do in the future cannot be done independently from what we have become in two generations.“

“What’s the lesson for us in the rest of the world? What stones has the collapse of the Berlin Wall brought to the edifice of human spirit?

“The rolling disorder of democracy with its ugly conflicts and glaring injustices is still better than the fixed idea of a select group becoming institutions, as under any totalitarian regime, gradually degrading the community and infecting its mental health with unrealistic obsessions. And, if you don’t mind my saying: What you call ‘the edifice of human spirit’ is a dark, impenetrable enigma.”

“Is this a prophecy of doom?”

For the first time he looked me straight in the eye.

“No, it’s a celebration of bad conscience . . . our unspoken hope.”

I remembered my last conversation with poor Milan when he tried to impress on me that things are never purely black or white. While Othello-turned-Iago broke down, Sved, the innocent victim, became confused. His inner judge, unable to create harmony between deeply held beliefs and values and the ones that were needed for immediate survival, became a cagey fence-straddler and hung out the sign: “Court adjourned for deliberation. Do not disturb!” But who could, in good conscience, allocate praise and blame between the two individuals more than half a century later?

After observing the vagaries of personal lives and unexpected turns in the theatre of history over the years, I am beginning to see why modern music’s wickedly disturbing sounds of dissonant metallic screeches, weeps, moans, and heartbeats from deep space; the alternation of earsplitting crescendos and shades of silence reminded poor Milan of the inexplicable series of prodigious adventures the philosopher calls “being in the world.”

************

Dear reader, I think I know you well enough by now to tell you what compelled me to go public with this story.

A few days ago I traveled to Philadelphia and visited with Cecile. She lives with her husband and two children in a multimillion dollar home on tree-lined Delancey Place near Rittenhouse Square. (The sumptuous elegance of the interior made me absolutely confident that their house was not purchased with a teaser loan and is now not menaced with foreclosure.) We chatted up a storm about old times and new ones, and, of course about the ones yet to come; we laughed and turned serious, then laughed again, but we never mentioned the name of Milan. If she does not bring up the subject, I thought, why should I remind her of the painful wound in her heart? Our encounter was utterly conventional — until the last minute, that is. As we said our goodbyes at the door (when I feared the most that she might just break down or at least become teary), I detected a distinct smirk on her face. Was it contrived? I don’t know but it certainly achieved one thing. In a split second my mind shed the “poor” from Milan’s name. The conviction that he was an unwitting victim, a martyr of his rapacious appetites became suspended.

Later that day, out of sheer curiosity, I walked into the office of the foundation that gave him the grant in 1989. They call themselves an “endowment” now and are very polite with visitors. (They probably never know who is about to make a tax deductible contribution in support of the arts.) The PR officer invited me into her office and offered coffee. After glancing through a folder that she took from a safe drawer, she told me in a satisfied tone that, shortly after Milan’s disappearance, the grant was fully refunded and a sizeable contribution was made in his name.

Hey, I thought, this reminds me of someone I knew; a guy who left his credit card with the bartender long before I declared my intention to pick up the tap for the martinis … and that smug, condescending leer on Cecile’s face … Have I just caught sight of the white plume of a long lost horseman, heard one or two hollow hoof beats from the ghostly plains of sinking time?