by Susan Taubes
Zoltan Vithezy wanted to marry her mother. He was different from mother’s other boyfriends because he wasn’t so pronouncedly athletic, and handsome, and always tanned. He was tall, fair and kind; not dashing or mannered in the expected way. His smile was always surprising. Maybe he wasn’t really handsome. What struck Sophie most was that he was big. People said her father was tall but Vithezy stood at such a height that to enter through a normal doorway he had to draw in his head like a turtle for which reason he was nicknamed Teenie. Otherwise, he had no distinguishing features, unless his baldness which, however, due to his extraordinary height, went unnoticed. Sophie, who rode piggy-back on him, was in a position to note both his bald pate and the long blond hairs which still adorned it. Papi treated Zoltan in a friendly but somewhat patronizing way and he didn’t make fun of him. They had long discussions and seemed to respect each other.
Zoltan behaved toward Sophie differently from the others. Even if her mother was divinely oblivious to Sophie, sometimes Zoltan liked to pretend that they were a family. He went about it in a funny way, perhaps because Sophie was a funny little girl or because he was so tall and in a funny position. Also he was a quiet, thoughtful man, brooding, not talkative. It was her mother who would start him, joking about his being taciturn. But even though he was preoccupied with himself and then with her mother, suddenly he would want them to be three people and he went about it in a big way, lifting Sophie up and dancing—holding her by the waist while her feet dangled in the air, he waltzed or put her on his back, riding piggy-back, even when she was too big for that. They were putting on a show for her mother. Or he put on a show with her mother for Sophie. Sophie and her mother didn’t have to put on a show for him, that would have been impossible. Ordinarily, she would have been embarrassed especially to watch him putting on a show with her mother, but she was too impressed by his strength and suddenness. He lifted her mother like a feather. “Shall I throw her out the window?” he asked. She saw even her mother was stunned and confused, protesting, giggling hysterically.
She knew that she mustn’t like her mother’s lover too much even if she wasn’t clear about why. Even with Zoltan who was like a second daddy it was safer to be on joking and playing terms. Long before the divorce, her mother asked her how she’d like him for a daddy. While she was ready to oppose, displease, deny her father for a cause, she couldn’t hurt him. And to prefer another man to your father was a hurt. No one asked Sophie if she preferred Zoltan Vithezy to her father, but even to ask her if she liked him was like asking her how she felt about something she was not ready to feel, like asking you do you like oysters—someone who hasn’t tasted oysters and isn’t ready to.
THE DAY everything changed it seemed like it happened to someone else, another child, an undefined stranger, was trying to grasp the deception, the endless loss; the loss of both the world and the person to whom it naturally belonged who was beginning to feel at home in the world which was strange enough, with its meadows, trees, and sky and the only world there was. Then suddenly it was brought home it didn’t belong to Jews: it was other people’s world—Hungarians, Germans, French, Russians—and they might let Jews live on their earth and even own a house or a shop for a while but then they’d want them to move on and nobody really wanted them. It had to be so, the Jews weren’t meant to feel at home anywhere; the fields, orchards, horses, cattle, rivers and sky were not for Jews and not what Jews wanted or should want because they were singled out by God to be different, singled out for a different destiny.
The double loss of a world and of the person who belonged to that world was experienced by an anonymous schoolgirl in a sailor-blouse uniform and high brown laced shoes. Sophie Landsmann, the name on the trolley pass, who was she?
In the gymnasium a child’s eyes were studying the legs extending from the black shorts of the class lined up against the wall: their form and proportion, the different skins—pale and ruddy, hairy, smooth—asking what were the distinguishing signs, because one pair of legs didn’t belong in the room, in this building in Budapest or anywhere on earth.
From the fall of 1938 till the spring of 1939 no one knew whether Rudolf Landsmann and his daughter would really be going to America. School occupied most of her days, and the long trolley ride from Pest to her school in Buda and back. Everything hinged on a piece of paper.
• •
One Sunday morning in the spring of 1938 her mother invited Sophie to her bed.
“Would you be very unhappy,” her mother asked, “if I left the house and married Zoltan?” They had been discussing the question of the divorce, her mother continued; her father and she had decided it would be for the best, but they wouldn’t do anything against Sophie’s will. Her father was worried that Sophie would be unhappy if they separated. “But I know you wouldn’t be unhappy—” her mother was smiling, she spoke with great verve. “We were always good friends,” she told Sophie and she hoped they would be even better friends in the future, however she was quite sure Sophie wouldn’t miss her. She would want to stay with her father, naturally; she had always preferred her father. Her mother understood how Sophie felt. The conversation they were having was just a formality; it was to reassure her father. In a sense she was asking for Sophie’s permission but really telling Sophie that it was to her advantage.
“You will have your father all to yourself like you always wanted,” her mother said gaily; “you will have two fathers.”
The divorce wouldn’t change anything, her mother went on; Papi and she would always be the best friends, and whenever Sophie needed her mother or felt like seeing her...
She was staring at her mother’s rings which had always fascinated her. She heard the sound of the gardener raking the gravel under the window. Looking up she noticed her mother’s breakfast tray with the broken eggshells on the chair. She had eaten and her face was painted; she was wearing a peach-colored satin bed jacket, the same color as the pillow case. Her mother’s eyes were very bright, her mouth quavered.
“Aren’t you a little sad I’m leaving?” she asked.
Her father asked her afterward if her mother had spoken to her and told her.
“Well, that’s how it is,” he said. “A divorce is not a good thing...But under the circumstances...” He spoke in the tone he used for unpleasant matters, as if he were talking about other people’s troubles. “I couldn’t live with your mother any more,” he said, “we are too different. I want my peace.”
She sensed uneasily her father’s new position and that he was not the sweet, good man her mother and his family made him out to be. He was getting rid of her mother because she annoyed him; fortunately there was someone who wanted to marry her. But he didn’t like the whole thing. From the way he pronounced the word “divorce,” Sophie sensed it was something ugly, sad and terrible; but she didn’t know how to apply it to him or her mother or herself who were never really a family.
It was both sad and exciting to think of her mother marrying Zoltan. Sophie was impatient to see her mother’s new house; she looked forward to living in two houses. She wondered if when her mother left she would have her room or whether her father would sleep there. But her mother didn’t leave right away; even after she was married all the furniture and some of her things remained in her room. She didn’t visit her mother and Zoltan—their place wasn’t ready or they were away on a trip. Her father told her that he might go to America. Uncle Isidor and his family were definitely planning to leave Budapest. He hadn’t decided yet. Perhaps he and his brother would join them in America a year later. They would decide about all this in the fall.
She spent the summer with her father and his sister in Dubrovnik. When they returned to Budapest she learned that the villa was going to be sold. They stayed there briefly. There was a lot of packing to be done. Sophie went to live with her grandmother. Her father came to see her there. After the house was sold he stayed in a hotel and she saw him only at Grandmoth
er’s with the family. Uncle Isidor, Aunt Olga, and their two sons whom she didn’t know very well before came to visit at the same time. They talked about Hitler, money matters and whether her father would get his visa. Sometimes Uncle Isidor addressed her in his loud, unnatural voice that made the most ordinary remark sound preposterous. “You will go to America on a big boat, can you believe that,” he boomed, his round, childish face frozen in a military mask. “You, Landsmann Sophie, will go to America. And do you know what you’ll be called in America? A ‘kid’! A ‘kid’!” he bellowed woefully, then burst into laughter. Sophie would deny this, insisting that a kid was a small goat. Then Uncle Isidor and her father would give imitations of a typical American, slouching, hat pushed back, thumbs behind suspenders, chewing gum and picking their teeth; soon cousin Gabor joined in. The men enjoyed this game. But Aunt Olga got mad when Gabor put his feet on the table. He was only showing how men sat in America, but his mother was really offended. “In my house you will not put your feet on the table,” she said.
•
She was leaving; it was almost certain, probably in March, maybe as soon as February. They would go by ship. For a whole week they would live on a ship as big as the Duna Hotel, with shops, movies, a swimming pool. Her father brought her pictures of trans-Atlantic steamers. When they talked about going to America she didn’t think about leaving Budapest or what it would be like in America, but only about living on a ship and actually crossing the Atlantic Ocean. By the middle of March it was certain that they were going, there were the tickets for the S.S. Aquitania leaving Le Havre on April fifth and the train ticket booked from Budapest through Paris.
Sophie’s meetings with her mother during these months were infrequent and irregular. Her mother’s involvement in her new life apart from her father and herself, lent her a new allure and even created a new closeness between them. On the few afternoons they spent together Sophie observed that her mother dressed more simply, living in fact under more modest circumstances than in her father’s house. She seemed more affectionate than before, and at the same time gentle and subdued. Now her mother was like a friendly stranger with whom she in turn could be friendly, and for the first time she felt they were intimate, discussing things she did not talk about with her father and his family because she did not feel this respect between them and herself. The possibility of Sophie’s going to America may also have created a new sense of closeness. But when her mother suddenly exclaimed, “You will go to America and leave me!” she didn’t know what to say. She endured in silence her mother’s tears at their separation, her ambiguous reproaches against fate and herself—against her daughter who was tearless; she couldn’t entirely believe her mother’s sincerity, that she was inflicting such a blow by going to America. She had not chosen to go to America with her father, but her mother demanded that she assume the role of a child she invented. Her mother had her own story of the wonderful, adorable, handsome Rudi going off to America with his lucky little girl; and even if she couldn’t entirely believe in her father as a demigod, she wanted Sophie to believe it. But her mother understood that her tears only hardened Sophie’s heart and surprised her by taking her side: her mother loved and respected the person she was who had no patience for a mother’s tears, who had her own will and destiny, who would let no one, neither father nor mother, stand in her way and in whom her mother took pride. At exalted moments Sophie would be torn between two temptations: to incarnate her mother’s vision of her strong-willed ambitious daughter, whose lack of attachment to family was not only forgiven, but encouraged, and to entrust herself to her mother who truly understood and would help her attain whatever ambitions she had envisaged for her. But if secretly she considered that she might be happier staying with her mother, she also understood that this was not a real possibility. On occasions her mother would daydream with her about their life together—but only supposing her father was not granted the visa. Her mother’s wistful make-believe, Sophie understood, was not only conditional, but predicated on its denial: on the child who could not be swayed, who would not be groomed or guided by her mother. However touched and tempted by these seductions, she understood that her mother wasn’t serious—she made it clear enough by breaking off each time she reached the climax of her invitation—the issue had been sealed by her daughter. Sophie listened to her mother, now charmed, now angry, but all the time looking behind her mother’s words for the real reason why she couldn’t make a genuine offer: whether she was lying to her or helpless or both. And finally, looking into her own heart, where she couldn’t find any truth either, left her baffled and resigned. Everything had become so strange. From the time of her mother’s marriage to Zoltan she had seen nothing of him; he vanished like the house. Whenever her mother burst into tears, Sophie lapsed into angry silence, thinking: In America I won’t see you cry. I won’t miss you. I’ll never feel sad. She was going to America where everything was white and very modern; in America she would speak and write and think in English and forget Hungarian.
But sometimes after seeing her mother it was she who cried, waiting at the trolley stop in the early evening, suddenly every portal, tree, shop window, chance passer-by seemed unspeakably beautiful and happy. And to think that all this was made meaningless for her because she was Jewish; her walks through the city, the long trolley ride twice a day, crossing the Chain Bridge, the school day, her pride in her homework made questionable when they began talking about leaving, then made totally meaningless when it was certain that she was going. She was waiting, counting off the days till she would get on the train. And at the same time she did her schoolwork with the same care, precisely because it was meaningless. At Grandmother’s she spent her time playing endless games of Monopoly with cousin Tibor, Aunt Lea’s thirteen-year-old son. After a while she moved into cousin Tibor’s room in Aunt Lea’s apartment. Aunt Lea brought them their meals in the room because they wouldn’t leave the game. Her husband was cross at how Sophie’s presence upset the household, but they let it go since it was only for a short time before Sophie was going to America.
• • •
The morning of departure you feel nothing. This is how it should be, must be: the curious absence of feeling on the morning for which there had been so much preparation; drinking your hot chocolate, only half aware of the voices and faces of aunts and cousins you are leaving behind. Should a spoon feel different in one’s hand this morning? Everything is unnatural. Immune to the excitement that possesses relatives accompanying you to the station. It’s their day. You are departing and invulnerable. Unresponsive to their asking eyes. Cousins’ babble, aunts’ sentimentalities and repeated commentary that today was the day, crying out, “You are leaving us!” Voices repeating the old instructions and what to tell her father in Paris and what things to remember—none of this annoyed. It was the same pleasant numbness like before you were operated on. This is how it must happen, at such moments you should be absent. It’s like when your tonsils are taken out.
On the train platform just before mounting the wagon, the numbness was shattered by the hissing steam and sudden excitement, the real hands, bodies of the last embraces clutching, admonishing, till once again safe inside the train compartment. These last awful moments that had to be endured, standing still like a statute before the window, family cluster on the platform waving hankies, making faces, mouths shaping words. The thought occurs that the train will not move, this moment will be prolonged into eternity, of the family cluster waving handkerchiefs and Sophie standing expressionless by the window like a statue forever. Slowly the train begins to move, a jolt and a few chugs; you stand solemnly for a long time, as the train picks up speed, wheels sing, buildings fly past, now her journey was beginning.
• • •
It was a strange venture for Sophie Blind to write about what it was like to be a child in Budapest. The person who would be writing it wasn’t there, not as she was now. She was writing in English in a New York City apartment. The child was
in another country, in another language. She who was writing had not been there, couldn’t be there, then. But she could go back. Sophie Blind now in New York could go back. The child cannot, never having left. There is always that part which remains, continues, captive in its moment, and another that escapes. Someone else has somehow entered into the coming moment, a shadowy figure hurrying along a train platform with a suitcase, clutching her handbag and coach tickets. A woman in a traveling cape or a child holding on to her, they blur in the steam rising from the wheels, hastening along the train platform to their coach, one among the crowd of figures, passing, unregistered, as a gentleman sitting by the window of one of the first-class coaches looks up from the page of a book to rest his eyes for a blank instant and returns to his reading.
FOUR
A BRIGHT flurry in the hall. —Mummy, look! Presents! They can’t wait, running from their suitcases, unwrap the packages themselves. Toby, all legs, laughter and flying hair, waving a woven mat before my face; Jonathan, like an apple-cheeked, curly cherub out of a painting, brings a bowl.
—I made it myself, do you like it Mummy?
—Lovely...I’m astonished at their splendid, solid limbs.
—Did you weave that, Toby?
—Sure, we have a loom, it’s easy. —Look Mom! Joshua spreading a pile of large glossy prints on the living room floor, beautiful faun-faced dancer. And the way his eyes light up suddenly, the bold ironic look like Ezra’s old magic in the room.