Divorcing

by Susan Taubes

  It’s a magical and exalted world. The days become different under the tutelage of those big round clocks; the bells, the hours, every segment has its characteristic activity: color, bodily sensations, excitement and boredom. It’s like the seasons only cut up smaller, the same sense of return, knowing that you will come back to Monday afternoon reading class next week.

  Sitting in class was like being on a trolley whose route you knew, anticipating the familiar stations; a certain turn particularly thrilling, dull stretches when you can daydream. School was like that. There was the pleasure of being told what to do and then of doing it with only now and then an instant of fright which always had to do with the hand of the clock and with time moving while she stopped to think about what color to draw the roof, and the sudden realization that time moved while she stopped was like falling off a moving thing.

  Silent reading always produced an acute distress. The clock ticking in a silent room, one felt the earth hurtling through space, the Chinese standing on the other side hanging upside down, one heard the blood pounding in one’s ear and at different points of the body a voice that said: “Time is passing time is passing time is passing.” Against such discomforts there are remedies like drawing secretly under the desk or turning pages when teacher isn’t looking, or methodically studying the children’s legs crossed, uncrossed, socks, shoes.

  Every morning before class they stood very straight and solemn beside their desks singing the national anthem:

  I believe in one God.

  I believe in one country.

  I believe in a divine, eternal justice.

  I believe in the resurrection of Hungary.

  The big flag standing in the corner was unrolled while they sang, one student kept the pole upright and another held the cloth straight. There was a gold crown embroidered on the white ground in heavy gilt thread. It roused mysterious, joyous feelings, uniting pleasures of winter and summer: snow, chocolate Santa Claus wrapped in gold paper and the fireworks on St. Stephen’s Day. The map on the wall showed the greater, or resurrected Hungary, a thin black line indicating the present boundaries established after the First World War.

  It was exciting drilling for air attacks, trying on gas masks. Her father said it was nonsense, propaganda. Lies. War was ugly. He had lived through a war, fighting on the side of the Dynasty. He saw the revolution and counterrevolution. It was a lot of nonsense. Stalin was important.

  Everyone was sure there would be a gas war. Which country was preparing the attack wasn’t clear. One of Hungary’s neighbors, maybe, or was Hungary preparing a war? On the way home from school they sang, “Burn every Rumanian, hang the Czechoslovakian, drown the Yugoslavian, kick the Austrian in the pants.” The kick was especially vivid because they couldn’t resist trying it out on each other more or less playfully and usually landing in the mud. Who were the Rumanians? A fiction of the treaty of Versailles. Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia—they were not real countries. Hungarians had occupied this land for over a thousand years, every Hungarian schoolchild knew.

  It’s not good for the Jews, she heard people saying at her grandmother’s house. These Hungarian patriots would kill the Jews. Sophie said she wanted to fight for her country. They were all laughing. “They won’t let you, you’re a Jew.” Every morning she prayed for the resurrection of Hungary.

  Hungary was where you were born and really belonged; Hungary was your home, not the little red villa but a great expanse of land under the sky that went on beyond the hills of Buda. It was great mountains, lakes, forests, rivers. The Danube flowed from the Black Forest to the Black Sea. Hungary was the lowlands: the shepherd with his flock and dog. It was peasant girls wearing lace-hemmed skirts and boots, and fishermen mending nets on the shores of Lake Batalon. Shepherds, the lowlands, huts, wolves, storks, peasant girls and boys were more truly Hungarian than Budapest. All these things she saw in pictures, and drew in her class notebook with great care and love, the storks especially. Storks standing on one leg in a swamp. Stork nests on chimneys. The stork feeding its little ones. Storks in flight, that was the hardest to draw.

  Fireworks on St. Stephen’s Day, the celebration of the fifteenth of March when everyone wore a ruffled pin with the colors of the flag, some quite fancy with a crown in the center or the picture of the poet Petofi—all this belonged to the present together with NO, NO, NEVER stickers on every wall. Trianon was neither a place nor a treaty but an act of butchery: posters showed it clearly: a knife held in a hairy fist slicing the land. “Trianon” named the crime depicted on the poster. The answer to Trianon was: “No, no, never.” Hungary was the four seasons, but mostly spring when the storks returned from Africa to build their nests; when the grass was new and very green. The red, white and green pins worn on the fifteenth of March belonged to that sense of freshness and expectation in the same way as the first snowflower. It was very hard for Sophie to imagine that it could be as truly spring anywhere else as in Hungary—because in Hungary it was already in the colors of the flag—the red, white and green in the blue sky: the red blood of soldiers who died for their country, the white for the snow and clouds, and the green for grass.

  Why did she have to go to Hebrew lesson when her father didn’t believe in God? One day she told her father she had had enough. “Humanity isn’t ready,” he pleaded. Sophie was ready. “Shh,” he said, “there is a patient in the waiting room.” She took the Hebrew Old Testament from her schoolbag and flung it to the ground. It landed open, the pages all messed up near his foot just at the threshold of his office. Her father picked it up without a word. She took her schoolbag and went to her room.

  PASSOVER was at Grandmother’s, on the second floor of an apartment house in Pest, across the river. All the Landsmann family came to celebrate Passover at Grandmother’s. Nobody in the family, with the exception of the aunts who married rabbis in far places, was religious. Not even Uncle Benji who lived with Omama because he was a bachelor, and worked in a hospital. He joked about religion and didn’t observe the rituals outside of the house.

  Religion was something old and shabby; it was a dusty ugly piece of furniture you were ashamed to have in your own house, even in the back room, but you couldn’t get rid of it any more than you could get rid of Grandmother.

  But there was another side to this. Religion was embarrassing; but you were proud to be a Jew. Why? Superiority of being a Jew was so obvious to everyone, her family looked dumbfounded and disapproving when Sophie asked. Jews were different from all other people, couldn’t she see that? Of superior intelligence, they were too intelligent to be religious. Her father attributed his scientific mind, his atheism, to Jewishness. And conceded most reluctantly and with reservations that a non-Jew could be a truly great thinker. Specialists, technicians, artists, but when it came to facing the truth...Nietzsche was the one exception. Her father quoted Nietzsche: “I’m not genius, I am dynamite.”

  It was very confusing. When she woke up in the morning or ran along the street jumping over puddles she wasn’t Jewish. But at Grandmother’s house you were Jewish: you did things religious Jews did. Being Landsmann and being Jewish were the same thing—that’s what was confusing. It was the way everybody talked, even Granny who was angry at them all, and wanted them to be different. If one of her children or grandchildren was praised voices rose, “Naturally, he is a Landsmann,” or, “A Jew is always smart.” A Landsmann child. A Jewish child. They meant the same. The only exception was Omama. She had her own excellence, neither Jew nor Landsmann. If anybody else in the family did something clever it was being Landsmann and Jewish. Omama made the greatest Passover feast because she was Omama.

  Omama was a very angry, offended, suspicious old woman, sniffling at you from the moment you walked in, rubbing the material of your coat in her hand to assess the quality of the fabric, asking, How much did it cost? She looked you over, feeling your cheeks, arms, sides and hips like women at the butcher store buying a
goose. “What’s this?” she complained, shaking cousin Gabor’s skinny arm. “You let him run around too much!” When Omama asked you what you did or what you ate, holding your arm, bending close over you, it wasn’t in a friendly way but knowing everything without accepting it, and wanting to be able both to hate and to hope and be a little deceived, and having to pretend and preserve some humor and common sense; they should have a well-fed and well-to-do look at least, and this night they would eat her soup and matzah balls and fish and roast lamb and duck and this belonged to the excitement of Passover.

  Omama knew that they weren’t religious, she told them in so many words, a long speech or a scornful “Hmm!” They weren’t fooling her; she knew and told every one of them, even the son who lived with her, what she knew, and as her anger mounted said it in Hebrew, short phrases, perhaps curses, spitting out each phrase. Omama’s outburst was part of the Seder, with her looks of disgust and knowing and the muttering curses in Hebrew. Everyone looked down on the floor waiting for her to finish. Then the women murmured plaintively till a voice rose, her father’s, to say, “You are right, Mama, we are hypocrites.” Then he praised her, she was a great woman and exemplary in every way as a wife, as a mother; he recalled her acts of devotion and self-sacrifice, her service for public charity; he spoke with intensity, sometimes declaimingly but meaning it and wanting to declare and convince others. Speaking of how good she was as a mother, he was both moved and embarrassed. Then her uncle came in, bellowing, “We are not worthy,” and went into a long praise of virtues in a cantor’s chant. “It is true,” her father put in periodically, in a low-voiced refrain. “It is true,” he said with loud emphasis to terminate his brother’s chant and, looking around the room at every one significantly, “We are a bunch of hypocrites. We are not worthy of Mama,” he said with a sudden change of energy. The prerogative of the oldest male in the room and master of ceremonies clear in his voice: “Let’s begin.” There was a great commotion like backstage just before the curtain rises—Omama rushed into the kitchen; all the aunts and uncles were moving about the room to check if everything was in its place. Was the table setting exactly as it should be? Were there enough chairs? They were ordering each other around—fetch this, take away that. The children were told where to sit. Did everybody have a Haggadah? Did Gabor? Did Lizy? Did Mitzi? Did Sophie? Did Tibor? Talking too loud, all this to-do quite unnecessary, it annoyed Omama. Omama looked grieved. Papi held her hand. “Sit down,” he told Uncle Isi, who gave him a hurt look. Papi adjusted his gray fedora. The men exchanged glances and started praying. Uncle Benji’s hand reached across the table, trying to flap the page in Sophie’s Haggadah to the right place. “Show her,” Aunt Lea said to cousin Mitzi. Before she could read the translation, cousin Mitzi whispered it in her ear, in her sweet, smiley voice, her voice blond like her hair that tickled Sophie’s cheek. Feelingfully taking little breaths in the tone she had for everybody that was always saying, I am the girl who makes everybody happy.

  Everything about the Passover ceremony is strange: a book beside everyone’s plate called the Haggadah tells about it. A picture shows how the table must be set; the text gives instructions between snatches of prayer for dipping greens, drinking wine, for breaking and eating matzah, for getting up, sitting down, for washing hands. It says what is being done and why and what it means. The youngest child is supposed to ask, Why is this night different from other nights? The question and answer are read from the Haggadah. The men sitting around the table in fedoras make it seem as if they were not really in a room; usually you did not see a man wear his hat inside the house unless he had just arrived or was just leaving. One of the men ranting and nodding at the other end of the table turns his head: it’s Sophie’s father and he smiles at her broadly with a wink as if they were at home, but he looks like someone else. It is her father wearing his gray-green fedora rather than the embroidered skullcap his mother gave him; he chants swaying back and forth, the expression on his face not like when he is just Papi or imitating someone else and ridiculing at the same time. Drawling, ranting, with strange jerks, he pushes the hat back on his head, his expression bored and arrogant. Now he is really a Jew praying, now he is making fun of a Jew praying. It’s hard to tell, perhaps there isn’t that much of a difference; perhaps that’s how a Jew was meant to be praying.

  The picture in the Haggadah shows a family at a Passover table: the child in the picture looks at the picture in the Haggadah of a child looking in the Haggadah. It has never been different than it is now: the family sitting around the table, the men in skullcaps, reading from the Haggadah; sometimes the matzah is round, sometimes it is square. The family sitting around the Passover table, this is what Passover is about, and God leading the Jews out of Egypt is just a story, mixed up with rules for people to argue about. Another picture shows the four sons at Passover: the wise son, the wicked son, the dumb son and the one too young to ask. There are also pictures of men in loin cloths carrying stones, and of the ten plagues.

  A child easily loses its place...

  She was bored. She looked at the pictures on the first pages as you opened the book, which was the end of the Haggadah. She stared at the picture of the Angel of Death:

  that slew the butcher, that slaughtered the ox

  that drank the water, that quenched the fire

  that burnt the stick, that beat the dog

  that bit the cat, that ate the kid

  that Father bought for just two bits:

  one kid, a lonely kid.

  The stream of blood gushing from the throat of the ox was drawn like the water that put out the fire. The butcher’s knife was bigger than the sword of the Angel of Death. The fire and water seemed wrong squeezed in the middle with cats and dogs and sticks and people. The Holy and Blessed One who smote the Angel of Death—how could that be believed, what did it mean? A hand reached over the table, the fingers turning the pages to the right page. It was her father or an uncle giving her a significant look. “Rasha ma hu omer: What says the wicked son?” Her uncle from Sarajevo, the rabbi with the great rectangular beard, translated in his funny Hungarian the words of the wicked son, “‘Of what use is this service to you?’” To YOU and not to himself. By excluding himself from the community he has denied God, the Almighty. “Do thou, then, set his teeth on edge! Say to him: ‘This is on account of what the Lord did for me when I went forth from Egypt.’ For ME and not for him; had he been there, he would not have been redeemed.”

  A child is bound to be impressed by the passage in the Haggadah in which this cunning people predicts the deviant at every table, as if from the beginning; this too was a part of the Passover ceremony: the child who didn’t see the point of it, a Jewish child, because, as the saying goes, being a bad Jew didn’t make you any less of a Jew. It might very well make a child wonder what it means to be a Jew and it made Sophie, in particular, wonder if she owed the happy circumstance of being in Budapest to a chain of pious Jews beginning with some ancestor who went with Moses out of Egypt. For merely on the basis of the pictures in the Haggadah she would rather be herself than the Pharaoh’s daughter. She pondered the lines said of the wicked son: Had he been in Egypt the Lord would not have delivered him. The argument which rested on the if broke and sent her flying in all directions. If she had been there...was she...could she have been there? Where was she at the time of the Pharaoh?

  She heard a boy giggle. Her eyes fastened on the page, she sensed looks crossing the table and wondered if she was their target. But perhaps it was only to the sons all this applied. It was different for the daughters. They had no choice. One way or another they had to be good Jewish daughters. They were dark, grave and pious like her two cousins whose father was a big rabbi in Transylvania. Or they were gay, blond, pretty liars like cousin Mitzi who could hug Omama on her way to see a movie or drive in the country with her boyfriend on the Sabbath. A Jewish woman had no choice unless she was very wicked and a whore, like the wom
en Omama warned her against, quoting from the Bible. Her mother was like that, Omama said, and there was the mother of her classmate who was married to an industrialist, the wealthiest Jew in Budapest, about whom she heard even more shocking stories. But the wicked woman, the whore, met only with disapproval, scorn and disgust. She was not utterly disowned like the wicked son.

  “Why is this night different from all other nights?” the Manishtana begins, and the rest describes what is different in the table setting from other nights and from the Sabbath; it answers the first question and yet continues asking, “Why is it so?”

  A legend is begun, trails off in digressions, quote within quote, commentary around commentary, with comments thrown in. Are they translating from the Hebrew? Is this irreverent remark or the joke about two Jews in a concentration camp also in the liturgy like the part about the wicked son? Off and on, a Hebrew phrase thrown in has the same ring as a cynical aside.

  The men keep leaving the table to wash their hands. The women follow Grandmother into the kitchen. The children may leave their seats till the soup is served. It’s all coming and going. Aunt Erzsi came by train from Transylvania with her husband and two daughters. And the man with the big gray beard came all the way from Sarajevo, which was in another country; and they would go back there and perhaps she would see them again next Passover at the same table or in Jerusalem; or perhaps they would all go to America or at least she and her father and Uncle Isidor and his family because Aunt Olga said Hitler would kill them and they had had enough. Grandmother wouldn’t go. Nor Aunt Lea—her husband had a fine hardware store and they wouldn’t leave that. Grandmother is hushing them, they should get on with the service, there has been enough interruption. The children will fall asleep before the meat is served if this goes on.