Divorcing

by Susan Taubes

  • •

  For Uncle Benji, a physician, times have improved: the sick receive care and medication regardless of income. Of course, if the Russians withhold penicillin...“When you left, Budapest was Eastern Europe. Now it’s Western Russia. Nothing has changed.”

  Uncle Benji jokes and talks about his niece from America as if she were part of a dream and in the tone appropriate for a little niece he joked with years ago in Budapest. “Did the American young lady think about her Uncle Benji in Budapest?” What should one say to Uncle Benji, who has come back from Buchenwald an old man? Should one mention dead members of the family? Those who died on their way to Auschwitz? They question her greedily about America, about her father’s house in Garfield, like little children who don’t know what to do with answers. They just want to go on saying, “Incredible, incredible—can you imagine?”

  “When will we see you again!” Aunt Lea exclaims with emotion. “I’ll visit you in America, what will you say to that?” Uncle Benji laughs and pursues his fantasy. “We don’t know what will happen to us,” Aunt Lea sighs.

  Cousin Mitzi greets her in a fancy pink negligee. She doesn’t fit into any of her dresses since the baby and everything is brought into the perspective of Mitzi’s good-humored, sexy vulgarity. She is blond, glamorous and gay; her tiny apartment has the look of an expensive boudoir: everything carpeted, curtained, spread in velvety pale pastel colors. No rude or naked object in sight, even the baby’s bottle has its pretty ruffled mit. She is married to a factory manager. Her small baby boy is named after her dead father—“missing,” she says, “but you know...” and, sending her brother down to the patisserie with a tray, assures Sophie that the pastry is still first class. Mitzi hasn’t changed—talking about her figure. Wasn’t it disgusting how she has spread since the baby? But her platinum blond hair, of which her mother disapproved, it was to please her husband. “But tell us about America, your father.”

  As for what they lived through—always the same words: “You can’t imagine; you were lucky.” “And we were lucky,” Mitzi says with a significant look at her mother.

  “Lucky to be alive,” Aunt Lea agrees without expression.

  Should one ask or wait for them to tell their story? Isn’t it unnatural not to ask? “Were you in Budapest all the time?” Sophie asks Mitzi. No, they had fled; they went to the country; peasants hid them. She and her brother and grandmother together, she says looking in her lap—it was a long story.

  “It’s better forgotten,” Aunt Lea says quickly, and they each say something in turn about how terrible it was for Grandmother. “Imagine, she had to eat non-kosher food. We hid as servants in different houses; we had to assume false names; we had to pretend we didn’t know each other,” Aunt Lea says with sudden emotion. Mitzi tells the story of how she and her mother had secretly arranged to meet at the market once a day and as they passed each other one whispered, “Mitzi” and the other, “Mother.”

  Then as Mitzi, in her fancy pink negligee, walked her to the door: “There were things I didn’t want to talk about in front of my husband and my mother especially,” she tells Sophie in the hall. “He knows, of course, and she was present when he raped me but she can’t bear the thought, she still hasn’t gotten over it. I have,” Mitzi says gaily. “I adore my husband and my baby, why should I be unhappy?” and kisses Sophie good-bye.

  Grandmother Landsmann is past eighty and blind; she isn’t wearing her ritual wig. A strong, impatient, angry woman, she pushes the hand that would guide her to the granddaughter from America. “Rudi’s daughter,” she says, feeling her hands and hair. She heard young girls painted themselves in America. “But you don’t,” she confirms with satisfaction. “So you have come, they said you were coming, you know what happened here, you know what they’ve done to...” It’s told by a raging old woman; no one can stop her. She swats at them if they try to fix her kerchief. It’s told in the pure bitterness of a personal loss: a wrong done to her, her children, grandchildren murdered, Nazi brutes did it, the enormity of evil measured in her personal loss, not in millions. Her lament as bitter for what they made her do as for what they did to her. What they’ve done to an old woman who was pious all her life. They made her remove her ritual wig and now she doesn’t care if the kerchief slides off. “Look what you have made me!” her scorn lashes indiscriminately at the whole world, her own life, those around her, the Nazi brutes, God.

  “Will I see you again?” she asked anxiously after each visit.

  On Sophie’s last visit, she cried bitterly in a terrible shameless way. “I’ll never see you again; I’ll be dead. And your father, why didn’t he come? Why didn’t he come to see me? Why didn’t you bring your father?” she continued wailing.

  “You must feel very strange being back,” Peter says. “Do you remember that statue?” he asks her. And, after a pause, just as she is about to guess: “Please don’t say yes,” he says, “it’s the monument of Liberation built by the Russians. A bronze lady with drapery—maybe they had the Statue of Liberty in mind. She is offering a laurel. And note the pack of Russian soldiers with machine guns huddled around her to emphasize the peace motif.”

  At a sidewalk patisserie a waitress laughs a deep vibrant laugh, rich and scornful, as she serves them. “A former countess,” Peter explained. He seemed on most intimate or just informal terms with the woman, perhaps slept with her. It was exciting for some of these noblewomen to leave their shuttered rooms and become waitresses, hairdressers in the capital, he told her. “No, you would not have wanted to be here,” he kept saying. “All the girls became prostitutes—and it wasn’t the nice ones who survived. But how old were you then? No, you wouldn’t have had a chance. I worked with the resistance—spy work—since my family is Catholic, so I saw what was going on. No, I’m glad you weren’t here. I suppose you could call it a time of terrible ironies,” he said facetiously with a tired smile. It was difficult to believe he was only nineteen. He told her some of the stories. Jewish boys went around at night in arrow-cross uniforms to make a bid for the poor dogs the Nazis were picking up—just to play with them. The victim might still get his arm broken—but still. A friend of his, a Jew and Latin scholar, hid camouflaged as a priest for a poor working-class community whose priest joined the Jews in their death march. He learned the whole Mass overnight. Her companion laughed, so she smiled her weary smile. She didn’t know what to say.

  “You’re so serious,” he observes. Her mother had told him she was studying philosophy and writing and theater. “I wonder, I wonder,” he keeps saying. “What you will become in the end—” And taking her arm, “How come you’re so shy?” he asks. “Tell me, are you a virgin?” Amazing. He didn’t think there were virgins over fifteen in America. There certainly weren’t any in Budapest. “But what would you like to do?”

  He is waiting for his exit permit—it would come through eventually. He has a job in London beginning January and wants to practice his English with Sophie. “I don’t quite believe it myself as I look at you that you’re here, that I am looking at Sophie Landsmann. And you still speak Hungarian. We were playmates when you were six and I was five—do you remember that?” He speaks now in English, now in Hungarian, and keeps offering her American cigarets. “We have Scotch too in Budapest if you like. I know where to get the best black-market Scotch—or don’t you drink?” He laughs when she confesses her preference for vodka. “Here we have only red vodka,” he jokes and asks about life in America, what she did, is she liked to dance, liked jazz. There were two or three first-class night clubs, maybe not as good as in America, or would she rather see the old sights, the baths—an excursion to Castle Hill. She said she liked gypsy music. If it was true gypsy music. Then she was ashamed. Most of the gypsies they knew were exterminated or sterilized. She was ashamed to have asked if some were left to entertain her. But Peter finds it amusing. “So you like gypsy music. I have a weakness for it myself.” He knows the one place that i
s open till dawn; you just bribed the gendarme. But they still had all afternoon—didn’t she want to walk across the bridge to Buda to see her old house?

  They stood before the tall padlocked iron gate; she took a brief look at the red stucco house set in the hillside at the end of an alley of walnut trees, then stared at his hands that gripped the iron bars; she didn’t touch it. He was giving her a history of the different occupants since she left. Government people owned it now. She expected to be disappointed, or a little moved, but felt nothing. The house she noticed was squeezed behind a great old mansion surrounded by bushes on the left and flanked by a smaller house with a tall apartment building behind it on the other side; they obtruded on her view of the house now so oppressively, it was surprising that she had entirely forgotten them.

  On their way back to Pest, walking past the Field of Blood toward the new bridge, Peter kept saying how odd it was the way they played as children; they spent so much time together without knowing each other at all.

  “Children can play together for months and have absolutely no relationship to each other,” he said, “don’t you think that’s true?”

  She wasn’t sure what he meant; she remembered that the little boy Petie was very important to the little girl she was. His face hadn’t changed much; the same skinny boy grown very tall; she is still surprised by the wide shoulders and his big feet; he is another person now and just like any other young man with whom she does not know what she feels or should feel. The same strangeness with Peter as with every other man, waiting for something to happen, to change in her, or change between them; never having known any other feeling; asking herself, “Can I love this man?” waiting for some impossible revelation or simply for a man to take hold of her and make her will-less.

  They danced around the deserted square in the early dawn after the tavern closed, a little drunk; he told her, “I hope we’ll meet in London.” He was just breaking off a very complicated affair with an older woman and he was very impressed by someone like Sophie, so serious and a virgin—she must forgive him, this was a crazy place—he was hoping they’d meet when he wasn’t in this crazy place. “I can’t believe anything will ever make sense; but I’m going to London and who knows...”

  •

  The ten days over, on the night train to Geneva, the numbness that had settled on her in Budapest begins to lift. She recalls the flight from Prague: ten days ago, early in the morning, as the plane crossed over the foothills of the Carpathians where the Danube bends south, seeing the Danube loop, the sense of homecoming swept over her; she stared through the thick slab of glass, resisting the onslaught of sensations, of summer days of long ago, unprepared for tears. It was not the moment in her life to remember the smell of the Danube across Visograd; and she walked through ten days guardedly, as in a dream where it is useless to pick up gold coins scattered over the street because you wake up in a room in another country without those lovely coins, feeling terribly deceived.

  “I DON’T know why I’m sitting here,” Kamilla says. “We have nothing to do with each other, do we?”

  “You called,” she reminds her mother breezily, starting to prepare tea.

  “I called you because father asked me on the phone if I know how you are. I didn’t even know you were back in New York. You don’t write me. We haven’t been on speaking terms for years. I have accepted that I don’t have a daughter. But your father is a funny man. It worries him that we are not in contact. I don’t understand and the truth is that we have no relationship. Why am I sitting here? You are a stranger to me. I am a stranger to you.”

  “Because father wants it. It’s very simple. You have just explained: you came to please father. He does the same to me. Every time he calls he asks me, ‘Have you spoken to your mother?’ ‘Do you know how she is?’ We’re sitting here together to please father. So let’s have a cup of tea and a nice conversation.”

  “What funny people you both are! You and your father!” she laughs, wagging her head. “I’m going to have tea with my daughter,” she intones theatrically. “We’ll pretend to enjoy each other’s company.” She goes on while Sophie serves her, asking how she liked her tea, if she cared for toast or cookies—some brandy perhaps?

  “No, no,” Kamilla protests. “I’m not used to being treated so well. I am very comfortable, thank you. But sit down, my dear. I am a lucky mother to have such a nice daughter. I’m serious, my dear. I really appreciate your kindness. But you should be more kind to your father, poor man,” she sighs, pulling out a jewel-studded antique cigaret case. “I don’t understand what has changed him so. I remember how different he was in Budapest. And now...what a sad, strange, lonely life he has been living in that big house by himself. I have become resigned to the injustice of fate that I have no place in the family, but your father really deserved better. Ever since you were born he has lived only for you. It’s his great tragedy that the only creature he loves gives him no affection. Poor lonely man.”

  “But mother, you left him.”

  “I left him?” Kamilla repeats incredulously. “What are you talking about? You mean the divorce?”

  “That’s right. You divorced him and married Zoltan.”

  “The divorce,” she laughs. “I wanted to make it easier for your father when you decided to go to America. It was to make everybody happy. How unjust everybody is! My dear, I never did anything to hurt your father. I had been going out with Zoltan for the past five years; it was how Father wanted it; he didn’t have time for me so he asked Zoltan to take me out for concerts and dancing and vacations. Your father wasn’t interested in these things, he only cared about his work and you, but he wanted me to enjoy myself. To say that I was unfaithful to him, when he asked Zoltan! He and Zoltan were best friends. Of course the whole town knew about it. Zoltan didn’t like the situation; he wanted to marry me. But your father just laughed and said he could have me any time. He didn’t want a divorce because of you. Then finally when he decided to go to America, I told him I wanted a divorce to make the decision easier for him. I knew that he and you would be happier without me. I married Zoltan so that you and your father could leave for America with a free conscience. The truth is,” she concluded tearfully, “that I really love your father. I am the only one who really loved and understood him.”

  “Then you should have stayed with him.”

  “No, he didn’t want my love. My love was only a burden for him. It was your love he wanted. That’s how people are, they want what they can’t have,” she sighs philosophically, her eyes fixed on her daughter with a strange, sorrowful look. Pity for her who was born to be the cruel daughter?

  “Didn’t you have affairs before Zoltan? Before I was born?”

  “Really, my dear, you make me laugh!”

  “You mean all the stories I heard about you aren’t true?”

  “I don’t know what stories you’ve heard. Naturally I had many affairs. But it was all right, your father wanted it.”

  “That’s very strange.”

  “I’m serious. He encouraged me. I hope you will forgive me for saying that your father was a little neurotic. The first-generation Freudians, you know, were not properly analyzed. It gave him pleasure that I had affairs. He wanted to be the husband of the woman who had the most admirers.”

  “And you?”

  “I couldn’t help it, my dear,” Kamilla tells her sadly. “I went to the best psychoanalysts in Budapest and they told me that I had to have affairs to prove to my mother that I could have all the men. When I was a child my mother told me that I was so ugly no man would want me; therefore, you see, I had to make every man desire me, even though I had the most wonderful husband. This was the tragedy of my life. You can’t imagine how much I suffered. I was in analysis for fourteen years. We can’t change our nature,” she sighs. “People are the way they are. You too, my dear. You can’t help that you are unkind to your parents. It’s useless to
fight our nature. So now I live alone in my little cottage in New Jersey. I see no one; I speak to no one and you know something? I am happy for the first time in my life! But tell me something about your life,” she asks wistfully. “I have no idea what you’re doing since you went to Europe five years ago. You have left that awful man—Father told me. And are you finally divorced? Well, thank God that’s over. How could you stand to live with...But let’s not talk about Ezra. Tell me about yourself. I think the last time we talked was when you were in Budapest in 1947, you were interested only in metaphysical ideas. I remember how sweet you were trying to explain to me...You know when I came to America in 1952, you were like another person. It was impossible to talk with Ezra around and then the children. I am so glad they’re in a good school. And now we can talk. Tell me about yourself. I want to know everything you are doing, thinking, feeling, everything about your life, your work, your ideas interests me.”