There was a hesitation: “He was… older. Had kind of grayish hair and he was wearing a leather vest.”
Then Lukas spoke: “I seen him before, Andro, driving up the road in a black shiny car to the big house on the hill. The one over there. Where Eva took me to ride the pony.”
A scream. Aleandro couldn’t push it back, couldn’t stop himself even though he knew he was frightening his brothers when they’d been frightened enough. Another came, and another. He was screaming, for he knew now, with the clarity of a dying man, what had eluded him all along.
The fire had been set for him. It was the price to pay for his love.
* * *
Eva was not there when he returned with his brothers. The cellar was empty. Only the sketchbook was there, near the kerosene lamp in a corner, the blanket folded neatly beside it. All around the vineyard he searched for her, calling out her name, plunging through the rows of vines, cutting himself on the barbed wire, shouting out, imploring: Eva, answer me! Eva, where are you, where are you, where are you?
The sun had dipped below the hillside. It would be dark again soon, and there was no more he could do. He was spent, so he stretched out in the grass with his arms splayed wide, his gaze pinned on the sky, though he knew no stars would shine tonight.
Eventually, he returned to the cellar where his brothers waited, picked up Lukas, and began walking. No wagon now, nothing to carry them but their feet and his will to lead them. The two other boys followed silently, and they made their way toward the winding dirt road that cut through the province. Not looking back, he led them along at a brisk clip, not too fast, for they needed to save their energy. Not too slow, either, but steadily, toward the two-lane road, four, five kilometers away. If they could get there, there was hope. If they could get there, they would continue on toward the Austrian border, follow the very same route he’d envisioned they’d be taking with Eva.
Two days later, they were walking still, the little one on his back, his other brothers slightly ahead now, passing a flask of water between them, kicking stones. They were walking toward the horizon; they were walking to Burgenland, his sketchbook with the portraits of her tucked against his heart. All that kept him going was a single thought, a single conviction. Once he knew his brothers were safe, he would turn around and come right back for her. For Eva, for his love, he would return if it cost him his last breath.
Part II ROADS
13
Budapest
Autumn 1943
WHENEVER EVA LOOKED BACK ON those early days upon her return from Sopron, she would recall a general vacantness, a long stretch of indistinguishable hours punctuated only by the hum of the traffic below. The pale wallpaper with its silver and gold stripes, the rumple of sheets on the bed that Eva hadn’t bothered to straighten in days, the perfume bottles sheened in dust on the dressing table next to the thank-you notes she’d once intended to write—all blending into the darkness and coming into focus again. From her bedroom window she noticed the tinge of gold in the treetops lining the wide thoroughfare below her window, pupils in school uniforms carrying their lunch pails and clarinets, a thickening of pedestrians returned from the summer holiday. The first rain came down in a torrent, and she watched it in the same impassive way, tracing the rivulets on the glass with her fingers.
She saw practically no one, hardly left the room to grab some food from the kitchen when she was sure that the house was empty. Only Dora called her once in a while, and she would run to the phone hoping for news, but there was nothing new to convey, nothing but the grimness Dora had delivered the first time: the gypsy camp had been burned to the ground. There were casualties, but some had been able to escape unscathed. The portion of land had been bought by a wine merchant (a friend of her father’s, rumor was), and it was being razed. No one had seen a sole fiddler in town since.
“Please, Eva,” Dora would conclude, “please try to put the matter out of your mind. It does no good to dwell on it, my child. Try to forget.”
Yet how could she forget? How? To know that she had been the cause of the fire seemed a burden impossible to carry. It seemed impossible to bear it here, alone, in this apartment with its massive Florentine furniture and slabs of marble, which had always seemed small to her on return from Sopron, yet which now had the effect of a tomb.
She could have left anytime. The door was no longer locked; she could have walked out into the street and away from this life, which in some way still contained her father. But she couldn’t. If Aleandro was somewhere out there, still alive, perhaps he would come to look for her here. She recalled telling him in their time together that on a clear night she could see the lights inside the opera house from her terrace. The building two blocks away, guarded by two marble statues. My father, it seems, must dominate even the ostentatiousness of Andrássy út.
And so she would wait.
Her father had tried several times to make amends. He’d brought her a ruby pin one day, set the velvet box containing it outside her door. Another day, there was a leather journal and a beautiful Montblanc pen.
She put them out on the hallway table with only a few words written inside the first page:
I will never forgive you.
The letters from Eduard, which had come at first in a steady stream, had dwindled as well and eventually stopped. The only trace of his prior ardor to speak with her rested in a pearly white box on the windowsill, withered—a coffin for those roses, for what their lives might have been.
Then she realized one day that she was waiting to no avail. She was waiting for a ghost.
Even if Aleandro managed to escape from Sopron, the fire had changed everything between them. She saw that now, clearly. What had they ever been anyway but a temporary madness? What else did the silence prove? Soon however, thoughts about that night abated. All that consumed her now was the nausea in the pit of her belly that came like the tide one morning, stirring her from a deep sleep.
It had passed as easily as it came, then returned again in the afternoon. The morning after, she vomited until the tears streamed from her eyes, even though her stomach contained only the glass of water from the night before. Again, it happened before dinner. Again, the next day. She considered it to be a virus, nothing more, but her medical knowledge far surpassed her wishful thinking, and soon she could no longer deny what she already knew in her heart.
* * *
That night, she’d called an old friend, a brash girl with bright red lips and a mass of glossy curls whom in another life had dragged her into a bar for the first time, and confessed to her that just three weeks earlier she’d managed to solve what she referred to as a “female problem.”
“All French women are doing it,” Eva recalled her saying, adjusting the top of her blouse in a way that evoked cheers from a group of soldiers at the other end of the bar. “And why should we deny ourselves the same pleasures as men? Why should we endure the greater consequences when they come and go as they please?”
At the time, she found her casual demeanor about the matter distasteful enough that in the months after her engagement, she’d managed to avoid her entirely. Now, as she dialed the number, her fingers trembled so violently she could barely complete the numbers on the rotary dial.
“Hello, Julia? Yes, yes, it’s me, darling.” She struggled for an even tone, her hand fisting the cord so tightly it might have drawn blood. “Yes, yes, I know it’s been a long time. A very long time. But I’m calling now because I’m in a bit of a bind. And, well, you are the only person on earth I could turn to. It concerns something of a personal nature. And I’m counting on your discretion. Much, of course, as you’ve been able to count on mine.”
After she’d written down the address, she stuffed it in the dressing table drawer and slammed it shut. Then she sat down on the brocade green stool and sobbed into her hands.
* * *
The building was, as Eva might have imagined, not located on a wide thoroughfare but on a narrow backstreet in
the seventh district, lined with dilapidated windows overfilled with chipped flowerpots and undergarments hung to dry. She stopped in front of the address she’d written down, confirming that this redbrick building with its glass-fissured door was indeed the right place.
Her heart surged with paralyzing fear, but—she reminded herself—what choice did she have? What choices at all were available for girls like her, without a husband or a profession, without the support of a family, without any means of income? For, surely, once her father found out, he would disown her. Not that she minded so much for herself, but how would she support a child? No, there was no other way, and after silencing the meek inner voice that had been telling her to turn around since leaving home, she pushed through the door.
The stairwell reeked of an overpowering combination—cat urine, fried meatballs, cleaning fluid—so she held her breath as she took the stairs to the first landing and knocked on a maroon-colored door. There was no answer, and then she noticed the sign on the door, which read Reception Inside, and she let herself in. It was no more than a vestibule arranged to give the impression of a waiting area. The only furniture comprised two stiff wooden chairs and a dusty glass table with coffee mug stains and fashion magazines with curled edges. The carpet, dark green and discolored in places, she realized, accounted for the cat urine stench—and she breathed into the crook of her elbow, willing her stomach not to revolt.
“Name?”
She turned and found herself looking up at a mountain of a woman sporting a turban and green housecoat that was oddly almost the same shade as the carpet. In her hand there was a hunk of bread lined with slices of pork fat. Her lips glistened under the fluorescent lights.
“Eva,” she said, averting her eyes from the flat, disinterested stare. “Eva César.”
“Did you bring the money?”
“Yes, as you asked.”
“All six hundred pengös, then?”
“Yes.”
“Well, now, that’s a first. This way, please.”
She was led through a dank corridor and down another flight of service stairs at the end. A door opened to reveal a basement room with a sidewalk window. A chair similar to the one in the waiting room was accompanied by a metal cot stripped of all linens, a rough woolen blanket rolled up at the foot. Next to it, there was a standing tray on which some objects lay hidden from view underneath a white towel.
“I…” Eva began. She turned to the woman, scrunching her purse to her chest. From somewhere in the building she could hear loud voices, a couple arguing, a baby crying. “I don’t know if…”
“Don’t worry, dear,” the woman reassured her, her gaze roaming lazily over the tailor-cut coat as if considering if she should have charged more. “The doctor is quite good. Now, what you need to do is to set your things down”—at this, she pointed to the chair, as if instructing a two-year-old—“all of your clothes is what I mean, every last stitch, then lie down on the bed and pull the blanket up to your shoulders. After he is done with the examination, he will proceed right away. Afterward, you can stay for two hours. Then you are on your own. Questions?”
Eva began again, feeling hazy. “You see… I fear that I haven’t really thought this through. I haven’t. I didn’t quite have the time.” She laughed loudly, shrilly. “Can I just take some time and maybe come back later?”
Then she was running. She was through the door, flying up the steps, scaling them two at a time, and through the hallway, where the terrible smell assaulted her again. A small cry escaped her throat as she emerged into the daylight.
Outside, she found that her knees couldn’t carry her farther. She sat on the edge of the sidewalk, thinking miserably that she had just wasted the last of her personal savings. Bending over her knees, she vomited into the street.
* * *
On the streetcar, later that afternoon, Eva sat in the back, away from the other commuters, tucked her valise under her chair, and leaned her head against the window. Beyond the glass, Budapest stretched like a lazy old cat—cobblestoned streets and old Gothic churches, parks with grass coming back to life after the hot summer, Edwardian flats much like hers, windows. Endless windows, beyond which life would unfold tomorrow precisely as today and the day after that, when she would no longer be here to see it. How easy it was to slip out of one’s life, Eva thought. How little she would be missed.
At the train station, she bought her ticket and sat on her small valise amid all the activity. A little girl caught her eye—she was crying for something, an old toy she might have forgotten at home, and her mother was trying to soothe her with a square of chocolate, which the girl didn’t want. The mother picked her up, and Eva felt oddly lifted from her loneliness for a brief second. But she couldn’t entertain any thoughts of motherhood or what it would be like to hold a child of her own, so she lifted her valise and walked to the other end of the platform.
On the train, more dwellings, more windows passed in her vision, thinning out, fading. Soon only a dismal collection of cottages with collapsed picket fences and crumbling porches lined the tracks. Then there were no more buildings of any kind, just infinite strips of land and overgrown weeds. On a narrow dirt road, a handful of women in peasant dresses came into view, balancing huge wicker baskets filled with apples on their heads. Beyond them, a red sea undulated in the late evening breeze. Poppies, she realized. Poppies. She was nearly there.
She descended at the station, got in a cab, delivered an address. In the back seat, she kept her eyes closed, not wanting to see this land yet inundated nonetheless with the recollection that had become her punishment: A hand grasping her arm as she stumbled through the haze of the field. The car door slamming behind her, the back seat of her father’s Buick. The sheen of fire over the horizon, which had made her scream and pound her fists on the glass. Then, hours later, as they sped through the streets of Budapest, an irrational calmness overtook her. The conviction that he would come for her followed. Then silence.
* * *
In front of the shabby door of the cottage, after the cab sped away as if the tip wasn’t worth waiting for in this part of town, Eva stood resolutely. The light-headedness from the train had returned, so she sat on the rocking swing on the porch. She traced the faded red roses on the cushion she and Dora had stenciled in the time she’d lived here. Once, this run-down little cottage with peeling windowsills and oak sap peppering the wooden porch had been her safe haven, and perhaps now, for just a little while, it could be again. Emboldened by this thought, she picked up her valise and walked to the door and knocked. It opened finally on the third one, just a crack at first, then widely, and in her relief, she let the suitcase drop to the ground.
“Eva? Child! What are you doing here?” The stupor in Dora’s voice gave way to a tone of admonishment as she reached for the porch light and flicked it on. “Eva, I told you not to come here! There is nothing here for you, Eva! Why don’t you ever listen?”
“I had nowhere else to go, Dora. Please forgive me, but something has happened. I need your help.” Her hands came up to her face. “I’m so ashamed, Dora. So ashamed.”
Then she was in the only arms she had ever been able to count on and was drawn inside, into the warmth of the tiny room, with its plaid sofa and threadbare rug, which, she vaguely recalled, had once lined a hallway inside the villa.
14
SHE PLANNED TO STAY JUST long enough until they could figure out a solution. An answer, if one existed, although as the days passed, it was clear that one wouldn’t come. Three weeks had gone by, then three months, and as the first snow came in a downpour, burying for the first time in eighty years the dome of the Fire Tower, Eva knew it was too late to leave. She had written a letter to her father saying that she would be traveling for a while. She was meeting some friends at the Black Sea in Romania, that he needn’t worry about her; she was fine. It was enough to keep him from coming to look for her here, and for the time being, this distance was all she needed.
As
the last feeble leaves fell from trees in the neighbor’s apple orchard, Eva stopped venturing outside altogether, for whenever she did, she couldn’t help but be drawn in one of two directions: one was the peak of the hillside on the other side of the train tracks, from which the old gypsy land surfaced down in the valley as a great lake of upturned earth, strewn with garbage and motionless tractors. The other was the town square, where Aleandro’s face would crop up unbidden wherever she turned. On cobblestoned lanes that twined through clusters of pink and ochre jewel-box buildings, in doorways and corner parks, through tired taverns’ windows, she couldn’t help seeking his face. At times it would be no more than a shock of black hair under a hat, the clip of a stranger’s walk, or a set of stern shoulders that drew her eye, and then she would follow these figures for blocks, pretend she was studying a store display or a map, pretend she was checking her watch, waiting for someone. Often she would catch inquisitive glances from passersby, be asked at times if she needed help, if she was lost.
She was indeed lost, she’d admitted once. It was the truest thing she had said that day.
* * *
It came almost as a relief when her condition became apparent enough that she could no longer go into town, where someone might recognize her. Now she lounged around the cottage in Dora’s oversize robe—the only thing that fit comfortably—reading the books she’d brought in her luggage along with a few pieces of clothing too thin for the season. The rest of the time she just daydreamed, chewing her fingernails, while overgrown, barren branches tapped at the windows.
In her fourth month, her state of inertia was interrupted quite suddenly by a kind of euphoria, one that pulled her from a deep sleep. It seemed inappropriate that this seed of happiness should bloom in her heart when nothing about her life was cheerful, but then she’d placed her hand on her belly and felt it again. That flutter. She hadn’t dreamed it.
When the Summer Was Ours Page 8