Now you see it, now you don't [antikvár]

Introduction Hungary, somé 2,000 kilometres from England, may not seem üke a very adventurous place to think of spending a year. But the year was 1982, and the country still belonged to the Eastem Bloc. There were, in fact, no more than a dozen British people resident in Budapest, none of whom we knew. If true life is always stranger than fiction then the string of coincidences which led us to this journey readily supports the theory. In 1977, we were newly-married and struggling to survive on my undergraduate grant in Sheffield. Paul had begun his Ph.D. on the composer Liszt but had no funding, and his attention had been drawn to a British Council Scholarship to study for two months abroad. Paul carefully considered the merits of both Weimar in East Germany, and Budapest, but finally decided on the latter. He duly filled in the forms, exaggerating his prowess in various languages, especially Hungárián - he had just learnt to count to ten. In the intervening weeks before we heard that Paul was being summoried for interview, he lost somé of his originál enthusiasm for the trip. However, the letter of invitation to the interview stated that travelling expenses to London would be covered, and this decided us. At Christmas we travelied to Germany with my mother to see her sister and arrived back early in January. There, among the late Christmas cards and bilis, lay an envelope írom the British Council: Paul's date of departure was to be January 31st. The short letter ended with the words, "We hope someone will meet you at the station in Budapest. As yet we have no further details." Paul arrived at Budapest's Keleti (eastem) Station on February lst, 1978, in snow and temperatures well below zero, armed with his booklet from the British Council entitled "Advice for Visitors to Communist Countries". This included warnings on everything from getting into com-promising situations with people likely to lure or blackmail you into