Paris: A Love Story Read Online Free PDF

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 preciousmementos 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 otherAmerican 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,