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Back The Double Save as PDF
Chapters (63)
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  63. Acknowledgements

Their usual game of don’t ask, don’t tell.

‘You mean that ring on her finger?’ Her look was sympathetic. ‘I wouldn’t worry. She’ll tell you when she’s ready.’

He considered asking her to join him for coffee, but she had her own work to do and he couldn’t keep putting off the business of the day. Seated by the fire, he poured out the coffee and sifted through his stack of mail, pausing at a letter postmarked Toronto. In the search for Vidor’s family, he’d written to a number of women in Canada and the US, after Vidor let drop that one of his sisters had emigrated to North America. Though his letter campaign felt like trying to hit a target with a fistful of pebbles, perhaps he’d struck the bullseye on the first attempt. He slit open the envelope and smoothed the letter on his knee.

Toronto, Canada
20 November 2008

Dear Dr Gessen,

My apologies for the delay in replying to your letter of 12 November. I was out of the country for several weeks, and only returned the day before yesterday to a chilly house and a stack of mail teetering on the table in the front hall.

At first, I couldn’t make any sense of your letter and assumed there must be some mistake. Crossed wires, you might call it, or perhaps simply a question of one of those computer searches gone wrong. It happens quite often these days, I understand, what with old classmates and former lovers anxious to rekindle memories best left in the past where they belong. When I read your letter, my first thought was that I didn’t know anyone named Vidor Kiraly.

As to the matter of that gentleman being a relation of mine, I could by some stretch of the imagination accept that your Mr Kiraly was a distant cousin from the old country looking to reconnect. Vidor is certainly a common name in Hungary, as is the family name Kiraly (and my middle name, if that’s of interest), but my family name is Molnar (Miller in English, so you can imagine how many of us there are). I didn’t change it when I married my late husband. Quite a modern thing to do in those days, but I was a bit of a rebel in my youth and with my husband having a plain old Anglo-Saxon name, I didn’t care to lose the part of my heritage I held so dear. I have fond memories of my early life in Budapest – I was fourteen when we emigrated to France – and it was part of family lore that, no matter where fate took us, we would always be proud Magyars.