Divorcing

by Susan Taubes

  In school there were the noisy classrooms, angry teachers trying to maintain order by yelling and hitting; the scuffles in the corridor between classes. Often she didn’t know whether the kids who heckled her or wouldn’t associate with her were from the Jewish ghetto or the “others.”

  There was the corner drugstore where the big kids hung out and where every lollypop- and ice cream–licking child aspired one day to spoon the sundae or banana split whose giant images were plastered on its windows. There was East Liberty with its three five-and-ten-cent stores, twelve movie houses, its soda fountains and slot machine joints, its stench of exhaust gas mingled with the smell of popcorn and sweet carbonated drinks, where everyone from the surrounding slums flocked evenings and weekends. And towering over the store windows and movie marquees, the giant cereal boxes, tires, tubes of toothpaste and the silly smiling faces of beer-drinking, soup-gobbling, car-satisfied men, women and children, the gods of America.

  There was downtown Pittsburgh, a bigger East Liberty, more ponderous and somber, where the movies, department stores and soda fountains were more expensive.

  There was nothing you couldn’t get in America, her uncle said. He was a well-to-do businessman who came to America before the First World War, and boasted about his Buick and his fine brick house in the best residential part of Pittsburgh. His street was cleaner, the houses bigger than where she lived and there was a bit of lawn between the porch and the sidewalk, but it wasn’t really different. It was near her uncle’s house, the day after they arrived in America, that she heard for the first time a boy yell “shaddup!” with that ugly snarl that she would hear everywhere around her, in her uncle’s voice telling how he rose from being a salesman to a floor manager. “...in this country if you’ve got what it takes, you can get anything you want,” he said, his mouth twisted in a snarl as he talked of America’s wealth and opportunities. “But you gotta work for it,” he said, “you gotta forget the old life, you can’t sit around in a café here, you gotta work or you’re nobody...” Her uncle talked just like the shopkeepers in the ghetto, only meaner.

  When people asked her how she liked America it was simply to hear her say how much better it was here than in the old country; whether it was a kid on her block or her uncle’s boss who drove a Cadillac, they wanted the same answer. Nobody wanted to hear about “over there”; they told you that “over there” you didn’t have things like you did in America, and telling them about the baths in Budapest or maintaining that one did have telephones there, only invited the phrase, “Then why don’t you go back where you came from.”

  “You’re lucky to be here,” people told her. To be in Europe now would be terrible, her family, as well as everyone else, kept saying. Every hour from seven in the morning her aunt listened to the news broadcast—the occupation of the Lowlands, Norway, the fall of France, Dunkirk, the Blitz. She tried to make herself indifferent to historic events from which she had been excluded, which it was impossible to grasp, living in Pittsburgh. She went to the movies every day in the summer, movie people filled her mind, she lived in the many movie worlds of prison breaks, spy rings, navy battles, historical romances, love, horror and cowboy movies. The reality of the war in Europe came across most in the daily greeting of the shopkeepers, “Aren’t you glad you’re not over there now!”

  Being in America at this time didn’t make the terrible things happening in Europe less terrible. One heard about deportations already in Budapest; in Pittsburgh one continued hearing about death trains, mass exterminations, conditions in the camps. What was happening far away was closer than the streets in Pittsburgh; the death camps were closer and more real than the drugstores she passed which mocked her with the colored pictures of giant candy bars and ice cream sodas; perhaps she herself was on a death train; perhaps a machine-gun bullet just pierced her throat; the streets she roamed between her block and East Liberty became an unmapped limbo while she rejoined her real or phantom self that remained on the other side. Week after week on her way to East Liberty she made her journey to the camps, unable to obtain her death from the thin-lipped, white-smocked Nazi doctors of her fantasies and unable to think herself anywhere else. Herself, walking along the street in Pittsburgh, had no reality at all.

  Then there were the hours she spent writing; after everyone went to sleep, the words came to life, absorbed with their shapes and hues she was in an enchanted forest, hunting treasures far from the world where words were ugly sounds coming out of people’s mouths. It was only words from a dictionary; this happiness had nothing to do with her, she realized; moreover she stood in its way. Sophie Landsman was an obstruction that wanted to be expunged.

  In the summer of 1942 getting out of a car in New York before the Hotel Park Plaza where her father lived, the nightmare ended. The three years in Pittsburgh were just a bad dream that had nothing to do with her as they walked down toward Central Park West in the evening breeze and the city felt alive and festive. Elegantly dressed people getting in and out of cabs, and poor people on Columbus Avenue had a liveliness she had forgotten.

  “Is it true that you flunked all your classes?” her father asked, laughing; “Olga wrote that you did it just to spite her.”

  They had dinner with friends, a seven-course feast in a little Hungarian restaurant, all for seventy-five cents; afterward her father read to her from her last letter, “...I’ll live on bread and water, just let me come.”

  Life was beautiful in New York. While her father worked she went to the Museum of Natural History across the street or walked up and down Amsterdam Avenue looking into antique shops and hardware stores. At night they opened the folding cot where she slept and put a screen before it. Free all day, she could write anytime she wished in the hotel lounge, which even provided paper. It was as nice as living on a ship. When people asked how she liked America, she told them that she loved New York.

  From the Pittsburgh slums to New York—a brief six weeks’ holiday till her father passed his medical examinations and once more they got on a train. Garfield, New York, where her father set up his office and she went to high school; small towns in New England where she played in summer theater, Bryn Mawr College; in that eerie, shallow present, her personal past discarded, she began her journey to past and imaginary worlds. While she tried to escape from America in books, the stage, dreams or sheer blankness, not really living in Garfield or the many New England towns she passed through playing in summer stock, whose names she forgot or never knew, while she fled or simply ignored America, America changed her.

  SOPHIE Landsmann, arriving in Budapest in August, 1947, saw no corpses floating in the Danube nor any traces of blood on the cobbles. Two years had elapsed since the last Nazis had fled Budapest, blowing up the bridges and leaving some three thousand corpses strewn in the streets. No one was safe; but, their time being short, the Nazis concentrated on Jews already assembled in large numbers at orphanages and in nursing homes, as well as in the central ghetto. Those who actually lived and survived these times of terror walked along the corso with a nonchalance that awed the American visitor. Business was lively in the shopping section even though the upper stories of the houses had been bombed away. A covered scaffold had been raised over the sidewalks to protect the populace from falling rubble. A thin drizzle of plaster rained on pedestrians, nevertheless. A nuisance...

  Fashionably dressed women sporting fancy hairdos, emerging out of scarred passageways, picked their way through rubble and broken pavement on elegant thin heels. Their laughter and fragrance mixed with reflections in the river on this bright summer day. To one who was not present at the scene of the disaster, who left too soon, arrived too late, these incongruities had a special harmoniousness.

  Sophie had not planned this visit to Budapest. In the summer of 1947 Hungary was closed to American tourists. Having left Europe on one of the last westbound crossings of the S.S. Aquitania in 1939, it seemed appropriate that she return on one of the
first boats making the eastbound trip—a still unconverted military troop ship with hammocks—from New York to Liverpool.

  But the object of a trip to Europe had not been entirely clear to Sophie. What could she go back for? Or back to? Growing up in America during the war years, she wished at times that she had never left Europe, or dreamed of returning to live in Europe as though she had never left it. But she didn’t seriously believe in this. Europe was only a lost dream. In any event, her father wouldn’t hear of a trip. More of his daughter’s craziness, like becoming an actress and studying philosophy. Go to Europe in 1946? Go to Europe after Auschwitz? Europe was rotten, centuries of rottenness behind a facade of impressive architecture, outward graces. Nothing but lies and rottenness. “Culture!” her father said scornfully. He didn’t want to hear of Europe or of his daughter’s visiting Europe. It was pointless for her to mention Hiroshima or argue that America had some responsibility in Hitler’s rise to power when her father spoke from the bitterness of what he experienced, bitterness and disgust with Europe that reconciled him to life in America. She had no political point to make nor any dream to oppose to his acceptance of life in America. She had on her side only the fact that she was not reconciled, for which maladjustment was the word, which spoke against her. Therefore she never pressed the issue.

  A trip to Europe nevertheless materialized upon the persuasion of friends. Sophie’s roommate in college, Jessica Lipsky, complained of suffocating in American materialism and soullessness. Her mother, in whose Manhattan townhouse Sophie spent many weekends, similarly deplored the philistinism of the land. Of Europe as the fountain of art and culture, Mrs. Lipsky spoke rhapsodically to both “daughters” (having some time ago adopted Sophie as her spiritual child). “There are no good men in America,” lamented her friend Jessica. “America is hopeless.” Sophie agreed, even if she couldn’t share her friend’s idealism about Europe. Her sense of the matter was that things were generally hopeless and that there was no place for her anywhere: the world in which she would have wanted to live had ended—before Hiroshima, before Auschwitz. Just when the first trumpet blew that sent the four horsemen of the Apocalypse galloping across the sky, she did not know. But a trip to Europe, any long trip, appealed to Sophie. Time was oppressive, superfluous. And time passed more easily when one traveled.

  “America is no place for two such young women as Jessica and Sophie,” Mrs. Lipsky pleaded tearfully with Sophie’s father and added, “Rudolf, you’re a boor. I cannot change that but you cannot be so selfish. We cannot deny our children the profound spiritual nourishment of...”

  Rudolf Landsmann agreed to finance his daughter’s trip to study at the University of Geneva for a year. At this time Kamilla de Vithezy, his former wife, had been making plans to leave Hungary and emigrate to London where her sister lived. It was finally arranged that Sophie, instead of leaving with her friend in the fall, would go to London in the summer to see her mother. When she arrived in Liverpool at the end of June, Sophie found only her Aunt Rosa at the pier and learned that her mother was not allowed to leave the country. Kamilla, though in possession of a dearly purchased exit permit as well as an English visa, had been detained at the airport. A recent shake-up in government made her exit permit, issued by the ousted party, invalid. New rulings were not yet in effect.

  There followed a month of frantic correspondence, tearful long-distance calls, ending in resignation. Sophie would spend the summer in London with her aunt and proceed to Geneva in the fall as planned.

  In the third week of August, however, a friend brought to the aunt’s attention an ad in a small Hungarian paper for the Industrial Fair. Representatives of American business firms would be granted a week’s visiting visa to Hungary. Within forty-eight hours Sophie’s passport was stamped with a special visa for the Industrial Fair and her flight was booked to Budapest via Prague. Arriving at the airport in Prague at noon, she found out that her connecting flight to Budapest would be delayed. There was no cause to worry, two cheery, blue-eyed Czechs assured her, driving her into Prague in a dusty light-blue car; the plane was scheduled to depart at six a.m. the following morning. They dropped her at a hotel facing a river. She would have her meals there, they explained, all at the airline’s expense; and promising to return to drive her to the airport at four a.m. the following morning, they drove off. And what if they didn’t, Sophie thought, strolling dreamily through Prague’s old streets and over its delicate bridges. Perhaps she never expected to leave Kafka’s city. She couldn’t believe she would actually arrive in Budapest. And when the two men arrived at four in the morning, all during the ride they joked that they were kidnapping her, of course; she noticed it was a different car—she was wishing it might be true.

  •

  “They wouldn’t let me out with an English visa and an exit permit, but they let you in. I really have a clever daughter,” her mother exclaimed jokingly.

  “Perhaps fraudulent papers worked better. It was a matter of luck,” her daughter shrugged modestly.

  A group was taken to the Industrial Fair where her passport was stamped.

  Walking through the streets of the city she left in April, 1939, she was most struck by the ruins, a long-familiar sight for her mother who had been in Budapest all the time, all during the German occupation, the siege, the Russian liberation. She laughed about that, the so-called liberation. “You can’t imagine—nobody can imagine,” she was telling her daughter as they hastened toward the shopping district—they had so little time. “We didn’t believe it while it was happening—naked corpses piled along the corso, neatly like sacks of potatoes except they stank. In the winter the bodies froze to the pavement, we had to scrape them off. Corpses everywhere, in doorways and the gutters, corpses floated in the Danube. Nobody believed it of course. Then the American planes—” she shook her head incredulously and shrugged. “I never went to a shelter. Most of the people hid in cellars and we had the hotel all to ourselves. No electricity or water, of course—the top three stories were bombed away—still, we somehow managed. But when the Russians came—” she would tell her about that later, not on the street. “You never know.” And they walked into a shop where Sophie would have some pretty dresses made before she continued to Geneva.

  For Sophie, the changed aspect of the city was perceived under the emotions of homecoming, however unappropriate. It was impossible not to be stricken before the sunken chain bridge that she had crossed so often as a child. It was also difficult to grasp that she was really walking in an occupied city. Russian soldiers loitering at street corners, conversing freely in their native tongue, continued to amaze her. “Behind-the-Iron-Curtain country” or “Soviet satellite” were the phrases commonly used in America; but to Sophie “occupation” was the term known from history books: there had been the Turkish occupation, the Hapsburg oppression, and more recently, the German occupation. And now, walking on Russian-occupied ground—even for ten days to the Industrial Fair with a special visa extended to representatives of American business firms, which Sophie Landsmann was not—all this heightened the sense of unreality to an outsider of a city not quite real to itself.

  It’s amazing to see her mother so youthful and unscarred; she had had her personal misfortunes—her third marriage over in less than a year, the affair with the painter that was a long tragic story. But when she is asked how she managed, her face turns blank, she shrugs: “I never went to register; I don’t know, I never read the notices. Most of my friends were not Jewish, it was no problem. When the bombardment began—I suppose it’s because I’m so neurotic,” she says cheerfully, “it didn’t bother me. I slept like a bear.”

  Her mother is surprised that Sophie arrives from America like a poor relative—one suitcase with some cotton dresses and underwear, an old raincoat and not a single item with chic. “A young girl of eighteen!” she repeats with incomprehension and then apologizes to her dressmaker for her daughter’s shapeless, tasteless cotton dress.
She left in such a hurry, she didn’t have time to shop in America. Yes, it’s her daughter from America, her beautiful daughter. She wants the nicest silk or chiffon. There is none in all of Budapest. Not even the black market. But this rayon is almost like silk.

  “Budapest has changed,” Kamilla sighs. It was another life now with the new wage and working laws that favored the working class. “The plebes, the proletariats fill the restaurants,” she complained. The Russian soldiers, it would appear from Kamilla’s account, hadn’t washed for some time; many of them were unfamiliar with modern plumbing, drank from the toilet bowl, unscrewed the faucets fancying it was silver, didn’t know the use of toilet paper—but the burden of her complaint was the theft of the best fur coats, some ten she was saving for her daughter; the Russians left her three. And her journals—some thirty-eight volumes she had kept for twenty years—stolen. Of what possible use could they be to the Russians!

  “You’re here for only ten days. I would like to keep you all to myself and hear about everything—everything, your life, your feelings, your dreams, your father, etc., etc. But I promised the family, Omama of course. I said you weren’t arriving till the day after tomorrow or we would have had to rush to her from the airport. You will have to visit Omama and Uncle Benji and Aunt Lea and Mitzi and her husband—they have a baby, you know. My family isn’t a problem. My brother Emil will drop in for a few minutes, just wants to see you. I haven’t seen Jani or Marta—you know about my poor brother Fritz—the Nazis shot him, he provoked them; it was completely unnecessary, he was such a crazy man. But I have a very nice surprise for you. Do you remember the little boy you used to play with when he lived on Pasaréti út, Peter?” Of course she remembers. “Well, he has grown into a fine young man. We met maybe twice in the past six years. And can you imagine, the day after I received the cable that you were coming, I met him by chance at the ballet. I told him you were coming in four days; he walked me home and I showed him your photograph. He was enchanted—neither of us could believe it of course, that it’s the little girl we knew, or that we’d see the young lady with the long hair and the Mona Lisa smile. (Really, my dear, nobody would guess that you’re American except for your figure—is it really fashionable to be so slender? I mean if you’re not a movie star or a model—do the men find it attractive?) Peter asked if he could take you out, so I said he must ask you. I invited him for tea Thursday after you visit the family and you decide.”