Divorcing

by Susan Taubes

  •

  At St. Gellert’s bath you saw the water fall through the air and run down the steep hillside, splitting into many streams; some got caught in moss and ran into holes; most of it came down along the middle rushing in and out of rock pools at different levels, changing shapes as it dropped from bowl to bowl down to the great basin at the bottom where people could wade. It was lovely to catch the stream that spouted from mouths of marble fish or stand under the shower coming directly from the rock, feel a thick sheet of water break on your back; when it was too much, numbing, you could stand behind it, not too long, you didn’t know if you had enough air. By the rocks the stream was coming down its own many ways both hard and soft; big cold drops on the same spot; if you held out your palm, it hit with its own beat, unpredictable, alive, like someone talking to you. Four drops coming one after another and then you waited; it was busy in the moss further up, delayed in crevices, but it arrived eventually, a stately drop in her palm, very leisurely and taking its time.

  She played in the outdoor pool where every half-hour for five minutes they put on artificial waves. But the fountain was more marvelous; even though she enjoyed the waves as they got bigger and bigger, other people’s screaming spoiled it, even grown-up people screaming when the big waves came, she knew they weren’t really scared; but that you screamed because you were having fun; she didn’t understand this, it always scared her, even her own Papi, he tried to explain, but it didn’t help. She was really afraid of herself, he said, she was afraid of herself screaming, he insisted; that made her even more afraid.

  His skin smelled funny in the water. He smelled different wet than dry, that’s what always struck her first when Papi appeared in the bath; she found him or he found her, they were always losing each other. Most of the time she was alone. But sometimes he suddenly surprised her in the water; or she found him sitting somewhere smoking a cigaret and reading the newspaper. He had a special waterproof case for money, matches, cigarets.

  He talked a lot about what a great athlete he used to be, how he practiced diving when he was a young man. She wanted to see him do it. Muscles and good looks, that was all nonsense, he said, what you had in your head was the important thing.

  But to please her, he would show her what he could do. She could be proud of her father. See what a father she had. Play-acting with mock seriousness, maybe imitating himself as a young man to whom a flawless dive was important, imitating himself and other people, he took up various positions on the diving board—the matinee idol, the fat middle-aged Jew deciding in turn for and against attempting the dive; he made Sophie laugh. He had a real actor’s sense, her father. He could get her to laugh so hard his actual diving lost importance and when she didn’t care any more whether he dived or not, then he dived very competently and did a crawl across the pool and back. He came up the ladder dripping. Sophie wanted to see him do it again. No, it was enough, he said wiping himself, careful not to get water on the newspaper and cigarets. It was enough. Ah there was a time...Then sat smoking, once more the scientist, explaining to Sophie why she enjoyed seeing him dive.

  Fat women sat or squatted in the water, engaged in lively conversation, sometimes they dipped under or splashed themselves; when they stood up in their funny bathing suits that looked like underwear they were so amazingly hideous she couldn’t help gaping at them. It was to hide their ugliness they stayed submerged, she thought. They looked at her so sternly when she gaped that Sophie learned to look from the side of her eye. She could look at people carefully while flopping her head as she frolicked in the water.

  Her mother always stayed in the part with grass near the restaurant when she was at the baths. Most of the time she lay oiled on a beach chair with separate part for the feet that always collapsed when Sophie tried to sit on it. Her mother swam with great care for style and always asked her boyfriend afterward whether she was doing it well. She had different boyfriends. They all were very tanned and reminded her of Papi’s imitations of matinee idols.

  She was playing in the water most all of the time; they had to drag her out of the water when they wanted to go home. Look, everyone is going, look they’re closing the pool. See the guard over there, Papi would say. She got mad when people lied to her. She didn’t want to go home. Then she was very ashamed: people were staring at her because she was screaming. When she screamed she forgot that there were people around her, she wasn’t screaming at her mother or Papi, people stopped existing and she was screaming all alone in the world, then suddenly she saw them and their looks, or just remembered the shocked and disapproving faces because she was running ahead to the trolley stop; she didn’t want anyone to see her face. When she was running very fast it was like being partly out of the world and outside herself. Sometimes it was possible to change yourself just by pressing your cheek against the window of the trolley.

  *

  She would be kidnapped by gypsies or simply wake up in another house with other parents who were her real parents and forget what had been just a dream. She thought this always when she was riding on the trolley. A dirty old man got on the trolley. He had trouble picking out the fare from his torn pockets. He looked bad-smelling and his eyes rolled. Please don’t let him sit down beside me, she prayed. I’ll say the national anthem ten times, dear God, if you grant me this wish. The dirty old man lurched on down the aisle and slumped in a seat in the back of the trolley. Suddenly Sophie felt very bad for that poor dirty old man who was her father in another life. She regretted her wish but she kept her end of the bargain. Then while she was murmuring, “I believe in one God, I believe in one Country, I believe in one Eternal Justice, I believe in the Resurrection of Hungary,” it struck her that one day she will forget Papi; she will be living another life and he will be a poor old nasty-smelling man she won’t recognize and won’t want to sit next to her. It made her feel very sad. She would try to be extra nice to Papi.

  All the years in Budapest she thought about waking up and forgetting. It was a strange, powerful, frightening thought. However, she reflected, it was frightening only now. Once she woke up in another life she wouldn’t be afraid because she wouldn’t remember having been someone else before.

  • • •

  It was all very strange and difficult and wonderful to begin and have her own room in a nice villa with colored pencils and lots of paper. If only she could make up her mind about being in so many worlds. But she was of many minds. One mind said: I like to stay where I am. Where I am is the right place. Another mind liked to travel. It loved to be surprised; to lie down in one bed and wake up in another, in another country, another person. Or discover you’re a whiskered fish swimming in the water; or look out the window and see water all around instead of trees and mountains. Or ring your grandmother’s doorbell and have the trolley conductor open the door. If you put a chestnut in a box and closed it, there was no reason why it should be there half an hour later or why there couldn’t be two chestnuts or a live kitten in it instead; that’s how her second mind liked things to appear and vanish and change. Her third mind said you have to be careful.

  At Grandmother’s it was sometimes wrong to ask for paper and pencil. It was a day on which it was forbidden to draw and she saw in her grandmother’s face that she had done something terribly wrong in asking, even if she couldn’t understand what it was.

  Sabbath wasn’t like Sunday. You woke up and it was Sunday. But you had to wait all Friday for the Sabbath; nobody was sure when it began. Uncle Benji was showing her how to draw a horse. Omama said it was time to put the drawing away because of Sabbath. “Look how dark it is.” It wasn’t Sabbath yet, Uncle Benji said. It was a cloudy day. He looked at his watch—it’s only four-thirty. “Look in the newspaper,” she said.

  “We still have over an hour,” he said. Just a little over an hour! It was late. The table had to be set. They put away the paper and pencils hurriedly.

  “Is it now?” she asked Uncle Benji. No, it
was not. It was coming.

  At Grandmother’s house dark, glossy furniture filled the room. From morning till late afternoon there were visitors coming and going: bearded men in black with pale shiny faces, wide-rimmed hats and thick lips, their voices high-pitched and full of sudden shrieks and gurgles, to whom she served red wine and offered sweets which they always declined. They spoke excitedly in a foreign language as if they had just arrived from another country with bad news or a secret message.

  She didn’t like to sleep over at her grandmother’s because the Sabbath was in her house. It wasn’t anywhere else. She looked out the window from the dark room and saw the street lights and stores lit, cars moving, people moving about. At Grandmother’s she felt like she was outside the city.

  She was drawing a battle scene: a whole row of men blown into a black cloud, the last one, running, a huge bloodflower in place of his head.

  It’s not nice that picture, Grandmother said. Papi asked her questions and then explained the drawing to her. He spoke a foreign language, pointing to parts of his body that other people thought shameful. But she liked the story he told about Matushka the peasant boy who blew up trains with dynamite in the time of Franz Josef. She drew him very handsome with black hair to his shoulders and a red vest. What did dynamite look like, she asked Uncle Benji; he was her father’s youngest brother and more like a cousin. He drew a giant candle, then a pack of candles. She copied, drawing the wicks carefully. Why was Matushka holding sticks of dynamite in a picture showing a train already blown up? Papi asked in a voice that was sure her answer would prove his point. “For the next train,” she said. “He has lots,” she said angrily.

  She lived in a red stucco house with a garden. Her father worked all week. Sundays they spent together, going on long walks, or to the zoo, or the children’s theater. Afterward, they visited at Grandmother’s. Her father and she were close; they looked alike, that’s what everybody said who met them on the street. She looked like him and was smart like him. Sometimes they asked about her mother. Was Kamilla still in Italy? Was she back from Austria?

  Sophie was surprised if she found her mother sitting in the dining room when she entered. She was used to finding the dining room empty in the afternoons so that she could steal cookies locked in the buffet that she took with her to the meadow. Her mother wore a knitted dress and she was writing in a book, her hands seemed carved out of ivory, very beautiful, not like other people’s hands. She hovered around her mother. She bounced on the upholstered chair, circled around the table, banged against her mother’s chair, but didn’t have the courage to push her mother’s elbow; nothing made Sophie so angry as when someone pushed her arm and it ruined the page. She resolved to be so obnoxious that her mother would take her notebook into another room. She jumped from the window sill so that the chandeliers trembled.

  “Can’t you see how bad I am!” she cried out finally, and left the room.

  The house was empty; it was all hers. Her mother was away. Sometimes she gave bridge parties in the house. That always upset Sophie, to see the quiet room filled with smoke and shrieking people; bridge tables set up and chairs from other parts of the house brought in. She came in; painted women cackled over her. Servants hurried, passing around things on trays too high for her to reach. She ran out again. While she was at kindergarten or out playing the house was transformed.

  She peeked into the room on the other side of the bathroom when she woke up. Sometimes the shades were drawn, instead of the great big room there was a smaller dark bedroom. Her mother lay in a big bed. She saw her blond curls, a stocking over her eye; heard her snore and closed the door. But other mornings the sun was pouring into the room. She ran to the window overlooking the garden; she felt the soft blue velvet of the divan. She touched a gilded leaf on the mirror frame. She went to the dresser, careful not to catch a shocking reflection of herself in the mirror. She stared at the variety of flasks and jars and bowls, all the same blue crystal. She sniffed all the flasks, ran her finger over the fluted silver handles of her mother’s brush, her hand mirror, the sheath of her comb. In the left-hand drawer was the little box of black beauty patches. She knew where her mother kept her jewelry, her scarves, her silk stockings, fancy evening shoes, her fine underwear and furs. When most of her things were not in the drawers, Sophie knew that her mother would be away for a long time. Some mornings she saw her mother asleep, but when she came home from school her mother’s bedroom vanished; instead there was the big room which went all the way from the dumbwaiter to the divan. Sometimes the sliding doors were closed. The dining room was small. She listened. If there were voices, she went away. If it was silent, she unlocked the buffet, filled her pockets with cookies. She looked at the porcelain parrot behind the glass—did he see her steal? She went out.

  If the door to her father’s office was open it meant he was out. She went in, sat in his chair, bounced on the couch which was covered with a scratchy carpet. She took sheets of paper from his desk with the stationery heading: Dr. Rudolf Landsmann, Neurologist. She tried out all the buttons on the typewriter. She opened the bookcase and looked at the pictures of two-headed babies. Was it like having two eyes or like being two perfectly different people where one could have secrets from the other? If one could still be one person it might be very interesting.

  Grown-ups were stupid; they hid keys where she could find them, on top.

  The first year they lived in Buda she played every day with a little boy who lived in a big white house across the fields. Petie was four and a half and very skinny, with short-cropped woolly hair. It was marvelous how he peed. Very casually he pulled a slender tube of flesh from the slit in his pants that tapered like a spout of a gardening hose, and tilted the nose upward making an arc of water. They both watched the arc diminish to a dribble, then resumed playing.

  They were going to run away to America. Petie’s mother had an evening gown covered with diamonds; if they’d cut off just ten or twenty they would get enough money. The stones were sewn on very tightly, and they were afraid of being found in the closet so they cut strips from the gown. His mother found out. She laughed, the stones were only glass, Sophie could keep them and her father had to pay for the ruined evening gown.

  They would fly to America, she told Petie. She went up on the roof with her father’s big umbrella and her rain cape for their first flying lesson. After a while, Petie started to scream and the maid came running and then her father.

  She was told she couldn’t play with Petie any more. She was a bad influence—always getting him into trouble, tempting him to eat worms, to leap off the roof, making him steal from his parents. “They are right,” her father said. She went to cry in the kitchen; she complained to the cook, a fat Slovak woman.

  The cook said, “If you were a good girl they wouldn’t make up stories like that about you.”

  All this time she was drawing pictures, always battle scenes with planes on fire and bloody heads and arms flying in the air, till school started her drawing flowers, snowmen and maps.

  HER FATHER wasn’t an ordinary kind of doctor. He didn’t have a bag and visit sick people. He cured her cousin of stammering. When he was still a medical student he could hypnotize a frog and a chicken, sometimes even people. “It is wrong to teach a child to say thank you!” Papi always said, raising his index finger if anybody in the family or the maid or the shopkeeper asked her to say thank you. Omama was no exception. He was no exception. Sometimes Papi stopped in the middle of a sentence to correct himself, just as he stopped to correct anybody else. Papi belonged to a movement dedicated to rooting out hypocrisy and roundaboutness whose leader was a man called Freud. When you asked for something you mustn’t say, “Do you have...” or “Could you give me...” or “I would like to ask you...” no, there was no getting around Papi; Sophie wouldn’t get that piece of chocolate till she said, “Give me...” She couldn’t; she cried. “Why is it so difficult?” Papi laugh
ed.

  “I want some chocolate,” she said sullenly.

  “Is that so?” Papi said and walked on, poker-faced.

  The shingle on the gate said, DR. RUDOLF LANDSMANN, NEUROLOGIST; he was a medical doctor and a neurologist, her father explained to her, but he was really a psychoanalyst. It was a new science that a very few people really understood; it was a difficult science and a lot of people were against it, not only people who had wrong ideas about it but even his own patients; it was part of it that you didn’t like it; this was called “resistance.” He explained to her the Electra complex: She was really in love with him and wanted to marry him and there was no point in denying it; that was part of her Electra complex to deny it. Mostly Papi was talking to himself: he asked her a question and answered it himself. Sometimes he quoted something she said or did when she was three or four so that it seemed as if she had answered. He said she would deny this so she didn’t have to bother to deny it. Her father believed that the discovery of this new science was the most important event in human history; he was doing something that would change all mankind. It was a great struggle because it involved ideas that were in conflict with people’s habits and feelings. In time, however, people would accept it. All that Sophie understood of psychoanalysis was that it was a tricky doctrine which said that it was part of human nature to dislike and reject its view about human nature. You thought you were saying something against the doctrine or about human nature but in fact everything was said in the doctrine about you. She wouldn’t have liked to be one of his patients but then she wasn’t, she was his little girl and she liked having a powerful father with bushy black eyebrows she could play with. He could look a certain way that scared everybody, even the servants who said he was the kindest and most generous man: it made you feel he knew something about you that you didn’t know, except that it was horrible; you’d die without ever finding out, or he might any moment reveal it to you and then you would die. He did it just with his look, his face perfectly still, not like when he had to muss up his hair, change his face and posture to appear like a peasant, an idiot or a beggar or a drunk. Sophie didn’t let it scare her, she giggled, she pulled his jacket and climbed up his back and covered his eyes; she knew it was only her daddy. When she got mad because he really scared her doing the dead-man’s face, she hit him: it was only her daddy being stupid and she refused to be scared; she was his little girl.