With effort, he stood from the sofa and went to the one suitcase he’d managed to pack, unzipped it, and placed the sketchbook inside a hidden compartment. He would leave in the morning. There was no reason to remain in Budapest a day longer. No reason at all, because now he had confirmation that everything between them was finished long ago. A daughter with Eduard. Eduard, whom she wouldn’t discuss with him; Eduard, who was part of her real world, not the fantasy he’d built inside his head. Perhaps now, at least, he would be set free. Perhaps all this self-inflicted misery had not been for nothing.
He zipped the suitcase, then went to the desk and picked up the telephone. It had been days since he’d spoken to Rudolf, and he burned with the desire now to hear his voice, but as he began dialing, he realized that it was just past three in the afternoon in New York. Rudolf would likely not be home, so he disconnected the call. He switched to the reception desk, wanting to at least arrange for a car to the airport, but there was no answer; he would have to call back in a few hours. Then, because there was nothing more for him to do, and because he felt slightly drunk and more than a little depressed, he began making his way to the bedroom, kicking off his shoes on the way, fumbling with the knot in his tie. And that’s precisely when the knock came.
A bellboy, he thought at first, getting the wrong room number. He ignored it and continued on, yanking off his tie and tossing it on the floor as he went farther into the bedroom. Another knock followed, and then another, and, with a flare of annoyance, he made his way to the door. Then, as he opened it, disbelief. A wash of happiness, then again, disbelief.
He thought at first his eyes were failing him, that he had fallen back into one of his reveries, that he was once more seeing her face as he had a habit of doing in a perfect stranger. But it was her. It was Eva exactly as he’d last seen her, two hours earlier.
“I’m sorry,” he heard her say. “I’m sorry to come up unannounced. There was no one at the reception desk, no one at all for more than twenty minutes, and the guest ledger was open on the counter, so I couldn’t help looking up your name. I hope I’m not intruding, but you said that you were leaving tomorrow, and I couldn’t take the chance that I would miss you.” There was a pause. “I had to come speak to you.”
Wordlessly, he opened the door wider, and Eva stepped into the vastness of the suite with its tall ceilings and lights too bright, its rosewood furniture from a distant era. “You are not intruding at all,” he said, rushing to remove his discarded shoes from the center of the rug, even though it seemed like the most senseless thing in the moment. It was hard to think. All he wanted was to drop down to her feet and weep.
She pivoted toward him, tried smiling as she drew off her head scarf and bunched it into her fist. “I only came because there is something that I needed to tell you. Something that I didn’t know myself until after I left the restaurant. May I sit?”
Not waiting for his answer, she pulled out the chair at the writing desk and sat. Her hand came up over the glossy wooden surface, traveled to the vase of lilies, touched the white petals, and rested there, as if enraptured by the delicate white trumpets. But even in profile, he could see her face was etched in anguish. The scarf had slipped to the ground, yet she seemed entirely unaware of it.
“I didn’t know, Aleandro,” she began at last. “I had no idea that you wrote to me after the war. I never got your letter. Whatever reply you received, whatever it said, it was not sent with my knowledge.”
The words didn’t crystallize right away. They hung in the air, hovering above Eva and Aleandro, refusing to sink. He’d heard her well enough, but it was as though the words had been meant for someone else. As if they’d landed in the wrong room, between the wrong people.
“But how could that be? That letter. You mean… I thought it was you who asked your friend—Dora, is it?—to write it on your behalf. She sounded very close to you; she sounded… she sounded as if she was speaking on your behalf. As if she was conveying your wish.”
From across the room, their eyes met fleetingly, and her beautiful mouth twisted. “My wish? My wish, Aleandro? Don’t you think I would have at least wanted to know what you’d been through, what you’d survived?” She shook her head, drawing her bottom lip between her teeth. “No, that was not my wish. And I couldn’t let you leave Budapest without knowing. I don’t know why, but it was important to me that you know this. That’s why I came back.”
He stumbled to the sofa and sank into it, not bothering to remove the newspaper or magazine underneath him. Head in his hands, he forced himself to think, to reach for anything logical. “But it made sense! Everything that was in that reply made sense! After my time in the camp, I had even less to offer you than I did before that fire. I had nothing. For your own happiness, I had to release any hope of you.”
“She had no right,” he heard Eva say distantly. “She had no right to keep your letter from me. All this time, I assumed that after the fire, everything changed, and my God, I spent so many weeks, months, praying that you were still alive. I didn’t know that you were alive until I read about the gallery opening in the paper.” She paused, drew in a sharp breath. “She had no right to keep that simple knowledge from me.”
“Oh, Eva.” He felt like crying as he said her name. His love, his Eva, his muse—he couldn’t stand to see her like this, and it no longer mattered what he felt. It no longer mattered that his own heart was breaking anew. His heart would always break for her, and he had to ask the one question that could still pull them back, that would reconstruct the reality they’d both known.
“And would you have made a different decision, Eva? If you had read that letter, would it have changed anything at all?”
For a few moments she didn’t say anything, then she lifted her chin and looked straight into his eyes. “It would have changed everything.”
Her words undid him, and he came to her and took her hand and placed her palm flat against his chest, at his thrashing heart. She pulled back from him, as if her hand had been burned, and stood from the chair, clutching the backrest before she turned and began for the door. And he couldn’t let her go, couldn’t let her go now any more than he could stop what had been set in motion. At the door, he reached for her, crushed her to him.
Then there were no more words, no space for them. There was only their arms, legs, and lips, his palms curving around her shoulders and her waist and the sharp bones at her neck, and her voice breaking in his ear, Aleandro, oh God. At some point they’d moved farther into the room, but he registered none of it now. Nothing existed but her in his arms, and him kissing her, kissing her cheeks and eyes and the hollow at her throat.
If this was right or wrong, he didn’t give a damn. For the first time in his life he didn’t care what he was taking from another, didn’t care what damage he was causing. A recklessness poured through his veins, and with it the sharp stab of jealousy, something that felt oddly like poison, like hatred. Hatred, yes, if that’s what it was, for the man who’d put that golden ring on her finger, for the life she had lived without him. When he undressed her, it was a bit roughly, but she didn’t resist, and for a moment, it filled him with a dizzying sense of power. But then something happened, something broke apart inside him, and he slid down to his knees. He was weeping, his cheek pressed against the silkiness of her stomach, weeping for all the years stolen from them, which he could never take back.
It was she who broke away from his grasp and reached for his hand. And led him into the other room, where she peeled away the bedspread. When they fell back against the sheets, there was no moon and no sun anymore. There was no world beyond this. There was only here and now, and the two of them crashing like waves, all of eternity distilled yet made whole in this one single moment.
* * *
Aleandro did not expect that she would still be there in the morning. Yet she was, her golden hair fanned out on the burgundy silk of the pillow, her eyes pinned to the ceiling, her thin arm still bearing the gold watch f
olded across her breast, hand at her throat. God, she would never stop taking his breath away. He watched her a bit longer, not shifting a muscle, not daring to breathe, drinking in the near transparency of her skin, the large areolas surprisingly dark, and the beauty mark in the crevice between her breasts. If he blinked, he feared that she would disappear. He willed himself not to blink.
“You are exquisite,” he said after a few minutes, and she startled and turned her face to him, blushing a little. “I could live ten lives and never get enough of looking at you.”
Drawing the sheets around her, she sat up, bashful, turning herself from him. “What time is it?”
She did not check her watch, forgetting perhaps that she was wearing it, remaining still, as though she was the subject of a painting. Then when she shifted, it was to move away from him. He felt the void of her as she went to the window and pulled the drapes open a little, letting in a strip of sunlight. “I should go,” she said, not turning from the window, running her fingers over the silk panels. Her head dipped forward, and her hand moved away from the curtains and to her forehead. He thought she might be crying, and he felt the burn in his own throat, because he knew that she would leave. That in a moment she would dress and exit this room and his life once more, return to her family, and there wasn’t a thing he could do to stop her.
“Come back to me,” he said nonetheless and she turned. To his utter, utter surprise, she walked back to the bed and lay across it, resting her head on his chest. They stayed like that, each with their thoughts, each with their fears, each with the recollection of the night before. With so many recollections of a simpler time.
He didn’t know how much time passed. Only that the strip of light in the window had rounded at some point, that his plane had left long ago, that his stomach churned with hunger, that she was still here in his bed. They made love again, slower this time, in a way they had not before, as if there was no reason to hurry, then dozed off in each other’s arms. When he woke, she was no longer beside him. She was on the phone in the other room, her voice steady, calm, escalating only a little at the end. He couldn’t hear what she was saying, didn’t want to know what she was saying, but afterward, when she emerged again in the doorway, naked under his suit blazer, his heart ached and he couldn’t help asking:
“You must go, yes? Back to him?”
She nodded solemnly.
“Does he know where you are?” He couldn’t help sounding a bit hopeful.
“No. It wasn’t him that I spoke with. It was Dora. She still lives with us—she takes care of my daughter—and I had to let her know that I’m all right.”
“And what will you tell him when you do speak to him?” Still hopefulness in his voice, but now, sharpness.
For a long moment, she looked at him, then she walked across the room and sat at the foot of the bed where his discarded clothing lay in a pile, and scrunched the edge of the bedspread in her hands. “This, us, it has nothing to do with Eduard. This is just ours.”
“Nothing to do with him? Don’t you think, Eva, that perhaps he might be wondering at this very moment where you are? Where you’ve been all night?” His tone was no longer mild; it was curt, rough, last night’s jealousy stripping away all of his remaining possession. And so his worst fear was not unfounded. Everything was just as in Sopron, only now, more serious. She was married to Eduard now, and he was perhaps no more than a diversion, a slip of consciousness she would blame on nostalgia. A trip down memory lane.
“Well, I’m sure you’ve already come up with how to explain me away.”
Now she was the one to appear wounded. “Is that what you think of me? That I could so easily betray him with you, then make up a lie? How little do you know me?”
He threw off the covers and got out of bed but couldn’t go to her, as much as he wanted to. He couldn’t look at her now and kept his back turned, hands on his hips. “You’re talking in riddles. Perhaps you don’t think I understand all of this, but I can see clearly enough, Eva. You mean to keep this a secret.”
“That’s not true.”
“Do not toy with me, Eva. I don’t deserve that. The least I deserve is the truth.”
She came up behind him then, and put her arms around him. Her floral scent was there again, that scent that he would never be able to expunge from his jacket or his pores, and he wanted to die.
“I never meant for this to happen. I never did. And the reason why I couldn’t speak about Eduard in the restaurant last night, the reason why I can’t tell him about us now, is not at all what you think. It’s complicated, and it will complicate everything between us if I tell you.”
“So let it.”
He heard her intake of breath and felt her cheek pressing into his back, not with desire now, but seeking solace. “Aleandro… the truth is: I haven’t seen my husband since just after the revolution. For nearly a year now, I haven’t seen him.”
33
AFTER RECOUNTING HER TRIALS, STARTING with her and Bianca getting caught in the demonstrations and ending with Tamara’s unexpected appearance at their door, Eva could go no further. The entire time, she’d spoken facing the window, unable to look at Aleandro and his intense gaze, and now she dipped her aching head against the cool glass.
“We had no idea,” she resumed after a few minutes, sliding into the chair beneath the window and pulling her knees to her chest. “We had no idea, you see, that we were being surveilled, that they’d tapped our phones, that they’d been watching Eduard for a while. That they were watching and waiting for an opportunity to ruin him, to ruin us, yet it all came to us clearly in that moment. To be tagged as a revolutionary… I don’t have to tell you what that means in this country.
“Luckily,” she went on after a pause, “Tamara and several of the other medics had already arranged passage into Austria at Pamhagen while the borders were still open, and he went with them that very same night. In all the chaos that ensued, there was a good chance that they could make it through. Tens of thousands had fled already in those early days after the revolution, but then the Soviets were sealing the borders quickly and there wasn’t much time. No time, I mean, for us to figure out a better way to go with him as a family. My daughter was still shaken from the days of battle, and Dora’s health had been fragile for quite some time. It was inconceivable that we could bring her, and I couldn’t leave Dora any more than I could put my daughter through the danger of a border crossing, through more trauma. So he went without us. It was nearly impossible to convince him to go, but in the end, he did it. Truly there was no other choice. If he’d stayed, I don’t think he would be alive today.”
It was a long while before Aleandro could speak. “Dear God, Eva, and have you had any word from him since? Anything at all? Do you know where he is now? And are you safe? Are you safe here, in Budapest?”
“All I know is that he’s in Austria, in Vienna. And yes, I believe that I am safe. It is not me that they want, not while I might still lead them to him.” Her fingers brushed over the dark green brocade, tracing the swirls of carved wood on the chair. “I get word from time to time through other people’s families, through Tamara’s sister. I hear that he is trying everything to get us out of Hungary, to arrange for us and Bianca to join him under safer circumstances, but I fear that might be impossible. It could take years, or possibly never. And then there is her, Tamara. All that I know is that she is there with him. She is there with him in Vienna, and I don’t know what to think from one day to the next.”
Now they were both silent, and Eva could only guess what he was thinking: Eduard now gone, and him here, here with her, the window that had opened for him as much as it had for Tamara. The uncanny reversal of circumstances. It was almost impossible to believe.
“Aleandro, I could never blame Eduard for anything, no matter how it turns out. He always fought for the right thing, even if it meant putting himself in harm’s way. In the end, all I want for him is happiness, with or without me. He has been a good
husband to me all these years; he’s given me more than you know.”
“And you love him. Do you love him just as you did before?” His voice, weak, desperate, reached for the last bit of truth.
All she had, all that she could give, was the truth.
“I always cared deeply for Eduard, even before I met you, but it was always different with him than it was with you. It’s hard to explain, and perhaps there isn’t really a way to phrase it. We built a home together, we raised a child, we shared our work, a whole life. But, for whatever it’s worth, I wanted you to know before you left for New York that I’ve been on my own for a year. Perhaps it’s no excuse for my being here, but at least now you know.”
A long silence followed.
“I can’t go back to New York,” he said.
“What? You can’t be serious. What do you mean?”
“I cannot go back to New York without you. How can I leave you here now?”
“Aleandro. You don’t know what you’re saying.”
“But I do. I know exactly what I’m saying. You were married to me, too—once, in heart.”
It was so poetic that it might have been a verse in a book. Him, her, Eduard. They were tied together in a vortex of fate that would never release them. Forever she would be caught between these two men, with the wheels of history, which took one away, then the other, tearing up the boundaries of her heart and her life. How messy love was, when it should have been simple, beautiful. How much damage it left in its wake.
“Go home, Aleandro. Go home and live your life. You will always have my love, but there are responsibilities here that I can’t walk away from.”
“I want my life to be with you.”
She had to close her eyes but couldn’t block out his words, nor the questions that surfaced without invitation. Could she go with him? Could she leave Dora? Yes, she was quite angry with Dora, but could she really leave her behind? Dora was her soul mother; she had been there for her through thick and thin, she’d given her a home, she’d helped raise her daughter. And Bianca. Could she tell her the truth about Aleandro? She would no doubt resent her, and Eva had only just begun to bridge the distance between them.
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