by Susan Taubes
“I am writing a novel.”
“My daughter is writing a novel!” she repeats grandiosely. “How wonderful! But tell me is it mainly romantic, or something philosophical or psychology? Father told me that you have asked him for material about the family for your new book. Is it that? I could tell you so many stories...But tell me,” she ventures shyly with childish eagerness in her eyes, “do you have someone, a lover? You have a lover!” she exclaims.
“It’s a secret.”
“Oh, that’s wonderful. It’s the most important thing, my dear. I won’t tell anyone, you can be sure. Can I meet him someday? You wouldn’t have to introduce me as your mother,” Kamilla pursues, “in fact, it would be much more interesting for me if I would meet him as...No?” she laughs. “Oh, I understand perfectly, my dear. But if you told me when you are having dinner with him in a certain restaurant, I could see him without his knowing, I’m so curious. But, you’re right my dear. I am so glad you have a true romantic relationship at last. I hope you don’t intend to get married. Believe me, marriage ruins every happy relationship. It’s the little irritations of daily life—he sees your hairbrush on the table or you see him cutting his nails and the beauty goes. You are very wise to live apart. To share only the beautiful things. I know. Zoltan and I were the happiest lovers for five years and then as soon as we married...I don’t even want to talk about it. He wanted a mother substitute, a nurse, one of those classical neurotic types...but it really isn’t interesting. What you have with this young man is the ideal relationship. You should keep it that way. Even if he should want to get married, you know, men sometimes...You mustn’t do it. I am so happy for you, and perhaps now we shall see each other more often. And maybe you will come and visit me in New Jersey. It’s only an hour by bus. I have a cottage by the lake. It’s so peaceful. You should really come in the summer.”
• • •
Getting off the Greyhound bus at Meadow Lake station, Sophie doesn’t recognize her mother right away. She looks for her in one of the parked cars dimly aware of a hippy woman in a dirndl-style summer dress standing at the other end of the platform. Is this her mother? Her mother, with her face oddly as if someone had screwed chin and head between two boards and pressed slightly. She wears a dog collar of studded bamboo stalks. Suddenly she beams, grinning from ear to ear. It is her mother.
“Sophie,” she gushes. “Has my little girl come? I was watching the people get off the bus, asking myself where is my daughter? Where is my daughter? And here you are!” She is without her car. She was too nervous to drive today, she explains, and they take a taxi.
They enter the cottage, the gilded mirror and the old antique divan stare her in the face like from an old photograph. The familiar furniture is depressingly out of place in the little low-ceilinged bungalow with its unelegant square windows looking out on the asphalt road of a New Jersey pike and some more tasteless one-story cottages like the one they’re in mounted on scrappy lawns. They settle in the air-conditioned kitchen where the only trace of another era is a framed poem in Hungarian hanging on the wall: a child’s fancy calligraphy in red, black and silver ink, with illustrated capitals. Glimpsing it as they entered, Sophie read, “For my dear mother’s birthday,” and passed on, not daring to read further.
They sit drinking tea. “Sophie dear,” Kamilla begins in her little-girl voice. “May I ask you something? You won’t get angry? Because there is something I would like to understand—and perhaps now that we’re on better terms you can explain to me something that has always puzzled me about you. How can you live with yourself? Have you no pangs of conscience?...” It’s from an old soundtrack. Sophie hears out the record to its end and says, “All right, I was a terrible child, but you know I had difficult parents.”
“You—” Kamilla gasps, “you had the most wonderful parents in the world!” and launches into a new torrent of speech.
“But the divorce—” Sophie interrupts her mother’s paean to the ideal parents, but Kamilla is going full steam. “The divorce! It was the most beautiful divorce!” she exclaims with deep pathos. “There couldn’t be two people more loving and considerate to each other than your father and I—we laughed about the whole thing, we couldn’t decide about the dishes and the furniture. He wanted me to have everything, I wanted him to have it; no, my dear, you have a completely wrong idea, this wasn’t like the usual divorce, we cried and embraced and comforted each other; there couldn’t have been a more beautiful divorce and it didn’t mean that we stopped caring for each other; on the contrary. It was just a divorce of convenience. Everything would stay the same—who could imagine that you would go to America, or the war! Surely I am not responsible for that! Had I known that you would go to America, I would never have agreed to the divorce. Never! I thought the divorce would ease the tension and everything would continue as before. But to be separated from those I loved by an ocean, I have no other family than you and your father,” she weeps. “Sometimes I think that the whole thing was a plot against me. I don’t think Rudi would deceive me; we were both kept in the dark. The family waited till after the divorce before persuading your father. He had always been against the divorce and I would never have consented had I known. And now we are here, each of us living alone with our problems, your father alone in Garfield, you alone in New York and I alone here in New Jersey.”
“Can we go to the living room?” Sophie suggests after a pause. “It’s freezing here.” She stops on her way out to read the poem she wrote for her mother’s birthday in March, 1939, in which she wishes health and happiness to her beloved mother and regrets that she will not be with her on future birthdays. “Forgive me, dear Mother, that I won’t be at your side but I must follow the irresistible call to adventure to far and foreign places, to cross the wide ocean, etc.” The child managed to make all this rhyme, if somewhat clumsily. The calligraphy is still impressive...
They sit in the living room which has too many doors and windows, which for this and many other reasons, the mirror with the gilded baroque frame and the divan do not dominate on this sticky summer day in New Jersey’s nowhere.
“Mother,” she ventures gaily. “You never told me about your first marriage to Count Csaba-Csaba.”
“My marriage to Count Csaba-Csaba?” she echoes, wide-eyed. “Oh, that was nothing, my dear. He came from one of those very old noble Hungarian families in Transylvania. They were completely ruined under the Hapsburgs, mostly drunkards; he came to Budapest to study law. But I tell you, it was nothing. We weren’t married even a year. I was only fifteen...”
Once more the story of the broken engagement is told. Kamilla tells it as the little sister; an old lady now looks at her daughter with the eternal girlish eyes that captured Csaba-Csaba and Landsmann. Her sister’s decision still rocks her. “...I couldn’t understand how Rosa could do it. They were the ideal couple. There was simply no comparison between your father and Gerechter. But I never held it against her. My sister and your father are the two people who have meant the most to me in my life...those were different times...actually Csaba-Csaba behaved very decently in the end. He attended to the legalities of the annulment himself so it didn’t cost us anything.”
“...And then you married Father?”
“Yes,” she says slowly, her face assumes a mask of childish perplexity. She doesn’t know what her story is in all this. She can’t recall what year she married Landsmann, and when her daughter asks how they lived just after they married, Kamilla dwells nostalgically on their blissful honeymoon on Lake Balaton. All she remembers is the ceiling. “For a month I didn’t leave the room. I can’t tell you how beautiful it was those first years. We were so in love; we couldn’t be separated for a minute. People called us love birds.”
“And then?”
She sighs, her face saddens. “And then,” she says very softly and timidly, “you were born and it was over.” The memory of the old hurt brings tears to her eyes. “
He fell in love with you, you know the story. He gave you all his love, he took from me the little words of endearment and gave them to you, my little fish, my canary—” She pauses, for a moment the room resolves into that imaginary interior where a woman stands stripped of her satin ribbons that a man with talcum-powdered face and slicked-down hair hangs over an infant’s crib; then changes back into the cottage where an old lady weeps over her ribbons. “And the rest you know,” Kamilla resumes with a philosophic gesture. “Then you went to America with your father. No one is responsible for his nature. I don’t blame you...I am happy since I learned to live with myself. My one dream is to have one or two women friends like myself to talk to; analyze our nature. Understand what makes us do what we do.”
“Why do you live out in New Jersey?”
“That’s such a strange story you won’t believe it. But I’ll tell you if you really want to hear. It’s a true story. You know how troubled and full of disasters my life has been with you and your father, then Zoltan and the war, the affair with the painter and a lot of things you don’t know about—and then at last I met a man with whom I had a beautiful and harmonious relationship. You remember Eva? She called one day—a week or so after I told her about the way it ended with that impossible accountant your Ezra found for me. She has a proposition to make to me; she has an acquaintance, a fine man, in his early fifties, attractive, very wealthy, who travels a great deal and is looking for a woman about my age, cultivated, intelligent, for companionship when he was in New York; someone who would share his interest in concerts, opera, good dinners; would I be interested in meeting him. I said yes, I didn’t really believe the whole thing, it is rare that a man seeks friendship. ‘There is one condition,’ Eva said, ‘he insists on this. You must not ask him any personal questions as regards his family, his work, where he is coming and going. You will know him by the name of Alex Bondy, the name he gave me—it’s not his real name; you’re not to inquire about the life he lives when he is not with you. Before he meets you he wants to be sure you agree to this.’ Well we met, and discovered that we were truly kindred spirits.”
“Didn’t the conditions bother you?”
“Look, it is what a man is in relation to me that matters to me, not what he is with his wife or mother or any other woman. Every man I have ever been with has told me the same thing: that I’m the first woman with whom they can be completely themselves. Alex, like the others. In a way our relationship was the purer in that he never compared it to others he had. I was happy to be with him. I did not care what place I had in his life and when he confessed to me that, in fact, I had moved to a central place I was rather surprised and somewhat apprehensive. I was afraid he would propose marriage. But Alex was really marvelous. We were closer than I had even imagined. He said that while he could not marry me, he wanted me to have a house built on some beautiful spot—the love of beauty united us—designed and furnished to my taste, which he would consider as his ‘home’ whenever he was free to come to me. Money was no consideration—an hour’s drive from New York. I found the perfect spot. It was a dream; completely isolated, overlooking a lake. I inquired and it was for sale. When Alex came again we drove out. He was enchanted; it was exactly what he wanted and he made a deposit toward the purchase of the grounds. I spent the next weeks in feverish planning, contracting architects, making estimates. I realized I would have to supervise the building so Alex bought a two-room bungalow across the lake where I would live temporarily. Yes, this, where I live now. We were going over the blueprints and I confessed to him that I was worried—the house seemed a great responsibility—couldn’t he make an exception and give me an address where I could contact him in case of need. In answer he pulled out wads of money from his briefcase—the full amount for the purchase of the land, which he wanted in my name. I should make a contract with the architect and in a week he would be back with ten thousand dollars cash to start construction. Then he didn’t come. No letter, no telephone call, nothing. I waited another week then I called Eva, to ask whether she had heard from Alex. ‘Forgive me for not calling you,’ she said, ‘I couldn’t bring myself to it. He had a heart attack ten days ago and died. I was hoping he had left instructions that you be notified. I just didn’t dare to call you.’ So here I was with the plot, and this bungalow. I didn’t have the strength to move. And that’s how I got involved in the real estate business.”
“Did you ever find out who he really was?”
“Some details, but it’s of no importance as I told you...My life is a novel,” she concludes, “somebody should write it. Why don’t you? I am sure you could make a lot of money with it. If the Russians hadn’t stolen my journals...thirty volumes from 1920 to 1945. In 1937 —— wanted to publish it. I had to refuse of course. I was still married to your father at the time and it contained things...I would never do anything that might harm his reputation. To begin all over again now? I tried a few times, with a tape recorder in Hungarian, but to find somebody to translate it. It’s impossible for me in English. But you,” she smiles, looking coyly at her daughter, “you write in English, it’s easy, all you have to do is write it in good English, the story is all there and you could make money with it.”
IT IS STRANGE even in a dream to find yourself in the country of your childhood; she had been traveling up the Costa Brava bound for Italy when suddenly the railway tracks stopped in the middle of a marshy meadow. The fields were flooded throughout the north of Spain, the Barcelona radio had announced—or was that in another dream? For here she is greeted by a group of Hungarian peasants who insist that this muddy swamp is the Danube. They invite her to a meal in the kitchen of a farmhouse whose low curved ceiling is as sooty as the inside of an oven; she speaks guardedly: Will they recognize by her accent that she is a foreigner? Why are they so friendly? One of the kerchiefed women looks like Aunt Lea from Budapest. Do they know that she left for America before the war? Is this a trap to punish for deserting? For she did not plan this visit. She came to Europe to make a tour of Spain and Italy: there was a fresco of the Last Judgment in Pisa she was supposed to see before continuing to Naples, and the geographic as well as political boundaries of Europe had been drastically rearranged so she’d be caught in the Hungarian plains.
Dreams have their own topography and it is to the country of childhood she returned, sometimes as a traveling scholar; or slyly substituting the child, dressed in regulation sailor blouse, navy pleated skirt and high-laced shoes, she descended the wide stairs of a vaulted building with a group of schoolchildren. It is the entrance to the baths of St. Gellert with its bubbling pool ringed by marble columns. The cavelike walls are hewn out of the mountain. At its peak, far above the Danube, is the statue of a martyr saint holding up the apostolic cross. The entrance forms part of an old basilica: its walls are hung with notices, like in French village churches, announcing weddings, births, baptisms, funerals, current cinema showings, books, either approved or banned by ecclesiastical authorities. As the line moves ahead the child edges toward the wall and tries to make out the writing which becomes more blurred as she comes close while, three thousand miles and three decades away from the scene, the dreamer, impatient for the information, whispers with awe, “These are the most ancient archives of memory...” The child can just barely distinguish the white square of the bulletin from the darker wall. The child, unable to make out a message, disappears. The dreamer awakes.
Some minutes are necessary to overcome the frustration of not having glimpsed a single word of the message, while in the window frame the laddered water tanks at various rooftop levels come into focus in the early morning Hudson River light. Breakfast must be prolonged to recover from the deception, the shame of having once more been so seduced. Finally, the bed made, the boots on, the coat belted and the day begun, dropping three nickels in the coin box of the Eighty-sixth Street crosstown bus, it is disconcerting to have to acknowledge that Hungary is a real place on the map of Europe and not the priv
ate property of the dreamer. That its capital, though heavily bombed in the last years of the Second World War, has not been utterly destroyed like Lidice, but restored to its former architectural splendor, and competes for tourist trade, besides carrying on its daily business. That in fact, as a stroll along Second Avenue in the November drizzle confirms, travel agencies advertise package jet flights for the Christmas holidays. Two weeks round trip for only $288. Spend Christmas with your family, the hand-lettered posters urge in Hungarian. Causing her to draw in her breath. Christmas in Budapest conjured candy stores. First the flash of tinsel wrappers, the red, the green, the silver and the gold. Next the taste of that wonderful inferior chocolate which went into little animals, sheep, donkeys, dogs, birds, and into larger hollow Santa Clauses that were hung on trees—a taste which good Swiss and Dutch chocolates couldn’t compare with, and not even the worst American chocolate. It was very special. The shape entered into the taste, as the child’s tongue traced the legs, ears and tail of a lamb or cracked the hollow skull of old Santa before chocolate melted, while it was hard and dry; and the taste did not interfere, a muted hard stale, faintly sweet, faintly bitter taste.
Inside dingy darkish office which one suspects doubles for money exchange, credit and clerical services of another financial era, unimaginable to a present-day New Yorker, a sad and ferreted face greets her in the most courteous Hungarian. Her request, in the friendliest English, for Hungarian travel folders, brings color to the yellow cheekbones. Lady wishes to travel! “The owner will be back shortly,” he promises excitedly. “The manager will be delighted to...” The lady, fearful that “shortly” may mean any length of time which she would rather not spend in company of seedy clerk whose eyebrows are too mobile, even more fearful of meeting the manager; she imagines a two-hundred-pound Hungarian who might actually persuade her to book for a real trip—the lady regrets but she is in a hurry. Once more she inquires if by chance he has a folder —The manager knows where everything is, the clerk cries in despair. Just a folder with a map of Budapest, she pleads. He withdraws to back room where other people are working. Communists? Anarchists? she wonders. Fund-raisers for regaining the Crown of St. Stephen? The clerk returns with two travel folders, one pink, the other, an old photograph green. The colors remotely relating to dominant colors of Hungarian flag. Apologetic and downcast, beseeching to be reassured that she will return when manager is in the office, he hands them to her. She will drop by later, she promises noncommittally, as clerk holds the door and she walks out on Second Avenue.