Divorcing

by Susan Taubes

  There comes the slow-paced chant, lovely like a long journey but again the voice breaks off—Uncle Jonas must tell an anecdote—it infuriates the child, even Grandmother is smiling. The men rise again to wash their hands. The roomful of people is transformed into those irreverent, scoffing, unruly Israelites, who grumbled against Moses for taking them out of Egypt, the land of plenty, who danced around the golden calf. Now it is Sophie’s father who tells them to stop fooling around and get on with the service. They want to hear the ten o’clock news broadcast. They are rattling off the prayers fast to be finished before ten. You can get any city in the world on Uncle Benji’s radio: you can hear Hitler and Mussolini, London and Tokyo: the children are very excited; they shriek out the ten plagues on Egypt.

  In the spring of 1938 Passover at Grandmother’s had the quality of a gathering for a massacre. And perhaps this is what being a Jew always meant. It began with slavery in Egypt and a God who led them out to be his chosen people, and then they were always strangers, wandering, remembering in the land of the stranger how God led them out; and waiting for the prophet Elijah to come through the door left open to him and drink the goblet of wine, and then he would immediately (or would they have to wait another year?) take them to Jerusalem, which was not a clear place—maybe in heaven where God was king, but also a country far away, the opposite direction from England and America, called Palestine where nobody really wanted to go; a place they joked about. It was always the strange stories and waiting for a prophet, but actually for something terrible to happen, a great punishment. The noise and confusion and joking at the table made her feel that: unruly children chasing around the apartment of the dead rabbi, both the grown-ups and the children screaming plagues of blood frogs, darkness on Egypt like in some grotesque comic opera.

  THE RIPPERS were a funny, scattered family. To begin with, they didn’t all have the same mother. Grandfather Ripper was married twice, they never came together as a family and Sophie wasn’t quite sure how many they were; she heard stories about aunts in Serbia, Bosnia, Istanbul, and had a dim memory of seeing one or more as a small child, but it was not clear if they were her mother’s half sisters or sisters of her grandfather’s first or second wife. The one she heard most about was Buena Tante and probably she was her mother’s and not Sophie’s aunt.

  The story they told about Buena Tante was that one day she got on a river ferryboat with a man without telling anyone, leaving her family just like that. Nobody knew what became of her till she wrote them a letter from Astrakhan some years later telling them she had a wonderful time going all the way to Kiev. And now she was very happy living in a fine house with someone else, a very rich man. And that’s how she lived. She came to visit her family one day to show them her baby; she wasn’t living with the rich man any more, she married someone else and she was very happy. Nobody ever met her husband. Nobody really knew anything about her life and perhaps when they didn’t hear from her for a long time they started making up stories like she did, which may or may not have been true. But she came and visited every so often, always looking splendid and expensively dressed, even if in a somewhat funny Eastern style, and she had fine and healthy children and was always very happy. Even Papi couldn’t explain Buena Tante. She was crazy, of course; the Rippers were all a bit crazy, he said, except for Rosa, and he’d talk about how old Ripper went cuckoo and how he’d driven his wife crazy and about Uncle Fritz who was a schizophrenic, and her mother—and then he’d tell the stories about Buena Tante; but when Sophie asked what was wrong with her, he shrugged, saying she had wanderlust, which didn’t sound like a sickness.

  Grandfather Ripper was a mean man; he loved his first wife very much and when she died he was heartbroken and married just to have someone to take care of the house and his three or four children. He didn’t love his second wife; he kept her like a housekeeper and treated her worse than a servant. Grandmother Ripper suffered terribly from her husband but she was a fanatical woman and no matter how tyrannical her husband was, she outdid him in her obedience. She worked harder than even he could make her. The children wore only white and were always spotless, even if she had to wash and iron and sew night and day; and the girls were never permitted to do any manual work, to sweep the floor, or even enter the kitchen. Grandfather Ripper went cuckoo when he lost his fortune after the war. He spent all his time making complicated calculations to prove how rich he would be now if he had invested his money differently.

  Aunt Rosa, her mother’s older sister, was considered a great beauty; she was the woman her father ought to have married. Everyone told the story of how she escaped from Budapest at the time when they were shooting down all the communists, leaping on a moving train in her nightgown. She had lived in different countries, married to different husbands. Aunt Rosa lived in London now, she had a baby but wasn’t married to anyone; she was a psychoanalyst like her father.

  When Aunt Rosa came to visit them one summer with her little boy, who looked like a fat angel with blond curls and round blue eyes, and Grandmother Ripper, Sophie couldn’t quite believe it. Aunt Rosa was a smiling, dark-haired woman, slightly older and shorter than her mother; she wore a suit—it was hard to imagine her as a young girl, barefoot in a nightgown and leaping on a moving train—she had become a different person and wasn’t unhappy about it. It was upsetting the way Aunt Rosa and her mother hugged and kissed, her mother weeping how much it meant to her to see Rosa, how terribly she missed her, and Aunt Rosa’s good-natured acceptance of her mother’s adoration. She didn’t understand what it meant to be sisters. And she wasn’t prepared to see Grandmother Ripper, a strange, terribly bent old woman, in their house. She thought of Grandmother Ripper as always living in that shabby, yellowish apartment in Pest where Grandfather Ripper died.

  They were a strange family, and real to Sophie like people in stories; these people she knew mostly from stories told about them; people who were either dead like Grandfather Ripper and his first wife; or Grandmother Ripper and Aunt Rosa who didn’t live in Budapest, whom she saw only once; or the famous Buena Tante who didn’t live in Hungary either, who may have been her mother’s dead stepsister or her aunt, who lived in a foreign country. She remembered dimly a woman visiting from far away, dressed very fancy and colorful, laughing, with jewelry and fat arms, like she remembered things that happened before they moved to Buda.

  Of her mother’s two stepbrothers who lived in Budapest, Sophie mostly heard that they were small, unsuccessful, unlucky people.

  Sophie saw her uncles once or twice a year. There was something special about the visits to her mother’s relatives—it belonged to another life, like when she spent the day with the maid and her boyfriend. She went with her mother on the trolley; her mother was dressed more simply than usual. She had explained to Sophie before that they were going to see Uncle Jani or Uncle Emil to make them happy. They were always asking about Sophie and wanting to see her. Her mother knew it wasn’t very interesting for Sophie to visit grown-ups and had made excuses for her, but she couldn’t always refuse. Her mother explained it to her so nicely: The visit was a favor she was doing for her mother as well as the uncles so the uncles wouldn’t be cross at her mother.

  It was one of those rare occasions when she felt well with her mother. It was the way a picture in a schoolbook of a mother and her daughter in the trolley made her feel simply right and, at the same time, festive because it happened only on rare occasions. She watched her mother; and the way she chose a seat, paid for their tickets, and all her small gestures were new and different from the way she appeared to Sophie in the house. She talked nicely as if everything were always fine between them. It made Sophie feel guilty: maybe her mother was really this nice person all the time but everybody, including Sophie, was mean to her and didn’t see her as she really was.

  Her mother’s brothers didn’t act like relatives—as if she belonged to them and they were terribly important to each other. They seemed just lik
e any other people, whom one was free to like or dislike and with whom one was naturally polite.

  Uncle Jani was a small man with bushy gray hair and an old-fashioned moustache; everything about him, his shoulders and forehead, was always furrowed with worry. His wife was a very big, kindly and helpless-looking woman and it seemed especially horrible and unnatural to Sophie that a fat woman like that couldn’t have children. They were really poor; they lived in one small room with a table, sofa couch, a buffet and some chairs, everything cramped and painfully neat. You had to go through the court to the toilet and Sophie didn’t know if they had a kitchen. There was a bowl of fruit behind the glass of the buffet that Uncle Jani’s wife put on the table, urging Sophie to take something. It was all the food they seemed to have, and they were saving it for guests. She didn’t want to take it. Aunt Marta took an apple and, shining it with her sleeve, offered it to Sophie in an apologetic way—afraid Sophie really wanted something she didn’t have in the house—so she took it quickly. She gave all her attention to eating the apple and showing how much she enjoyed it and not showing how awkward she felt because of the way Aunt Marta looked at her. Her mother was talking to Uncle Jani about money matters. Sophie knew she mustn’t appear to be listening to them because it was embarrassing that her father was helping him out financially and Sophie shouldn’t know about that. In a sense she was alone with Uncle Jani’s wife looking at her with a strange helpless intensity, sad and yearning. Sophie knew she was terribly unhappy that she couldn’t have a child, everybody had said it and here Sophie was, a child, not her child, eating an apple she gave her and this made Sophie feel very awkward.

  Afterward when they were out in the street her mother always said they were good people, such poor people, kind people, unhappy people and thanked Sophie for behaving nicely. Then they took the trolley to one of the coffee houses by the Danube and had pastry and hot chocolate.

  Uncle Emil was a bachelor and very different from the sad and timid Uncle Jani—he had a brisk manner and showed his gold teeth a lot and enjoyed talking gossip and money matters with her mother. They met in a coffee house. He had always a comfortable air about him and looked at home in the world the way he leaned back, motioned to the waiter or laughed about some rotten deal. Even if business was bad and he wasn’t making out (and he didn’t pretend he was a happy man or particularly enthusiastic about anything) he was still altogether at home in this world. His pale gray eyes scanned lightly or looked sharp and quick. They didn’t have that trapped and baffled look of the Landsmanns. Both Uncle Jani and Uncle Emil were different from her father’s brothers: they didn’t try to make an important thing out of being uncles: they were probably just curious to see Sophie once or twice a year. They seemed so much like ordinary people that it was hard for Sophie to believe that they were Jewish.

  Uncle Fritz, her mother’s full brother, she didn’t have to visit; he wasn’t curious about her or interested in his family. But she knew him best of all her Ripper uncles through her father’s frequent mention of him and his vivid evocation of Uncle Fritz wearing an elegant imported tweed suit, with breeches and cap, fancying himself an English duke, feigning a foreign accent, walking a wire-haired fox terrier along the corso on a red leash. She thought of Uncle Fritz exactly as her father pictured him to her, although she never saw him with a wire-haired fox terrier. Uncle Fritz was the incarnation of the sort of person her father found ridiculous. He couldn’t even give a decent imitation of him. If Sophie wanted to have a wire-haired fox terrier, that was just like Uncle Fritz. If she said she wanted to marry Prince Peter of Yugoslavia or join the English Navy, that was like Uncle Fritz. Whenever she expressed dissatisfaction with what she found vulgar, drab, boring, ugly and meaningless, it was like Uncle Fritz and her father pulled out the picture of Uncle Fritz. Actually, he always concluded, Uncle Fritz was to be pitied. His mother dressed him like a girl with ringlets down to his waist till he was twelve—that’s what made him crazy. He was a skin doctor. Her mother took her to his office one day. She had some scaly skin on her elbow and they’d ask his opinion what could be done with it. They sat in a narrow waiting room with other people. How sad it must be, Sophie thought, for a man who fancied himself an aristocrat to have to look at people’s pimples and rashes. When he appeared in a white smock she saw him differently every ten seconds. A crazy man with a very triangular face and thick glasses. A youngish man with full lips. A skinny man, but with fleshy eyes and lips. The teeth, showing behind a slight sneer, reminded her of Charlie Chaplin. A man with blue eyes that didn’t see her. Quick, sure hands. He was looking at her elbow in the waiting room. It was simple, he said, he could do it right now. He talked very fast with his eyes somewhere else. Her mother said they’d discuss it at home first. It was nice walking out of a doctor’s office without being jabbed or burnt. And Uncle Fritz wasn’t sad. He had a little sneer.

  HER MOTHER never really lived in the house in Buda. It was not her real home even though she had the most beautiful room with the window overlooking the garden. The first time they knocked the walnuts off the trees, her mother wasn’t there. She came and went like a visitor. Everybody was upset when she was in the house. Sophie didn’t know where her mother lived when she was away but she had a glimpse of her mother’s real world away from the house. It was only a glimpse of her mother with her boyfriend at the baths, the ski slope, a drive in the country, even if for a whole day’s outing; still it could only be what can be glimpsed at random of a world Sophie knew didn’t belong to her, which had no part for her, which, in fact, was flawed by her presence. No matter how nicely she was treated, she felt acutely both the loveliness of her mother’s world and that her presence flawed it.

  Glimpsed through the screen of her natural envy, loneliness, dismay, her sense of exclusion from a play for two with no part written for a daughter—none that Sophie could accept; still it was the beauty of her mother’s romances Sophie experienced. The nicer her mother’s suitors were, the more considerate, reserved, delicate, sensitive to the situation, the more hopelessly Sophie fell in love with them and the more she had to play at being a child.

  On drives through city and country, the sights kept her busy. At the baths or ski slopes, she couldn’t do the graceful things her mother could: dive, do the Australian crawl, elegant ski turns. This belonged to her mother with whom she would not compete; on the positive side, she could do more, do it longer, faster: jump from higher rocks, take icy, messy slopes that arty skiers would avoid. It was for the general good if Sophie preferred to stay in the water or on the snow while her mother and friend had refreshment or a rest. This was a kind of life she enjoyed to see her mother living, except they were too leisurely—too many breaks for tea and wine, too much lounging around. That was boring. But then she was different from her mother. But what really offended Sophie was when she saw her mother tease men who courted her, and treat them with condescension, cruelty, coyness. Men who were nice and good looking, why did she go out with them and keep on flirting if she disliked them. Was this what Grandmother meant about bad women? She would never be like that.

  When her mother was happy with somebody she was so different; the whole world changed, soft and quiet and gentle. It wasn’t that she was kinder or more affectionate to Sophie. No, she seemed just vaguely aware of Sophie, and sometimes she was quite oblivious of her presence, or when she noticed Sophie it was embarrassing; her voice took on a false ring. But mostly she was ignored by her mother’s boyfriends and by her mother most of all. It was strange and new, both wonderful and disturbing, her mother’s obliviousness and the fact that she wasn’t making any demands on Sophie or blaming her. A harmoniousness that they did not normally enjoy seemed assumed by both. If her mother stroked her face or drew her in her lap casually while conversing, Sophie accepted it naturally. It wasn’t like at home where her mother made it a problem. It was how Sophie liked it.

  It was troubling to see her mother so changed, so much softer, more r
emote and really beautiful because there was that other mother she knew in the villa with her bad daughter; her husband who treated her as a joke or a case. There were other faces and voices and a different smile in other rooms. At home she watched her mother wash. She stood in silk panties, bent over the sink, splashing water on her arms, face and breasts. She recalled her father saying it was a pleasure to look at her, she had a fine torso, and her breasts were perfect hemispheres. Then her father came in, between patients. His voice shocked Sophie; it was so raspy, unmusical; it was a jesting, mock-affectionate tone with a bit of imitation peasant, the tone he used with the dog. He said the same silly jingle he said to the dog, full of nonsense words. “On what does Pajtas fatten?” He named various foods. It ended: “Fattens most on his master’s love.” The dog loved it, he lay on his back, his paws in the air, drooling while Papi patted his white belly rhythmically. He did it to Sophie too, she never liked it and now he was patting her mother’s buttocks like the dog’s belly. She played along, then laughed at him for being such a bore. There was something very different in the ski lodge with her mother and her lover, Zoltan Vithezy; she wasn’t sure what it was because it couldn’t be hers, except she felt robbed of whatever it was. Her father couldn’t know because he didn’t have it. And her mother, who had it, always told her that her father was the sweetest and kindest man on earth. He was the person she loved most in this whole world. Whatever love Sophie had she owed to him, not to her, her mother said with so much feeling and tears in her eyes Sophie had to believe her. It was another tone she used with her father, simpering, affected, lapsing into baby talk—a tone her father detested. Her father disapproved of her mother, and Sophie was made to be her father’s ally. She was glad her mother had admirers and a nice friend like Zoltan. No matter what her mother said, and no matter what people were saying against her mother—that she was a bad wife and mother—Sophie felt her mother was a woman wronged, robbed of her child. She was relieved her mother had a lover. To think of her alone, banished from the house, was intolerable.