Free Buying the Night Flight by Georgie Anne Geyer Page A

if she did not enforce hours. We became the four most popular girls at Mexico City College, if only because at any party we could outlast all the others.
    When it came time to leave after three months, I died deaths. Life had finally been precisely as I had dreamed it: adventure in a strange culture, joy, mystery, intensity of act and emotion. Miki and I soberly agreed we would never again in life be so happy.
    In the fall of 1956 I went to Vienna on a Fulbright scholarship. Vienna was then still a haunted city, her body whole but her soul ravaged by all-too-recent holocausts. It had only been the year before that the four-power occupation government--one of the most unusual arrangements of all times--had ended. Now, with the Russians blessedly and miraculously gone, there was an arrested sigh of relief, but it remained arrested. They were so close, and Vienna was such a desirable, somber jewel. Yet it was also a world that was once again pulling itself together. The assurances that all of us felt in our world, in our Western world, remained unbroken.
    Then one morning that October I woke up in Vienna to the German-language radio broadcasting the last cries from Radio Hungary: the Hungarian revolution had begun.
    With other students from the university I traveled in a bus to the border. It was already wintry cold in the rolling hills that flowed between Austria and Hungary, and the sky was gray and forbidding. The people fleeing across those snowy hills had the empty, searching faces of refugees everywhere (I was to see many too many more of them in my life) and their dark, dreary clothes expressed their suffering. The Austrians behaved like heroes in those first months, when every school and hotel and municipal building in the charming old villages of the border provinces were opened to the waves and waves of refugees. They slept on floors, on makeshift beds, on the ground. They stood in silent lines waiting for the food we students were dishing out in the cold old Hapsburg courtyards. I was filled with the excitement of it all--but for the first time I was to realize that "living intensely" also meant suffering and observing suffering and absorbing suffering. I was heartbroken. Heroism had failed. Goodness had lost. What was the matter with the world?
    Naturally I had to fall in love with a Hungarian, and naturally I chose a handsome, blond, charming one. We worked together on the border, we suffered together over the Hungarian tragedy, we stayed up listening to Radio Hungary. On New Year's Eve -- a bitter cold, white afternoon and evening in which the whole world was lost in the undifferentiated whiteness, the kind of day when it seems that there will never be another -- we drove out to the border and watched a refugee "show" that moved us to tears. In the crowd of hundreds in this hall one after the other would get up, dance, sing folk ballads from his village or recite poems, while tears flowed freely down every face.
    But there was something else that year in Vienna that left me with a new kind of joy: I learned, rather quickly, actually, to speak good German. I am always so saddened for people who, seeking the fickle outer joys, which never seem to make them happy, do not or cannot understand these inner joys. Learning a language -- and then finally experiencing this magnificent world it opens you to -- is like having a creature growing inside you. Suddenly you have something new inside you; suddenly you can recognize an entirely new world. The day I finally could speak German was a day of sheer joy for me; after that, I studied languages whenever I could. It was almost an addiction.
    When I left Europe in the fall of 1957, as heartbroken and emotional as I had been when I left Mexico City after my magic time there, our relationship gradually died out. But I also came home with a dire case of hepatitis. It was serious indeed, because I was in bed with it for a full year, and I was in a coma for two full months. But it,