by Ed Ifkovic
“Miss Kós,” I began, but she wasn’t talking to us. I realized then that I was watching the aging entertainer slipping away from reason, the frantic, faraway eyes of a prisoner isolated too long in a cell. “Miss Kós,” I began again, “perhaps some coffee?”
She snapped out of her trance. “I know things.”
That jolted me. “What things?”
She laughed rashly as she glanced at Tihanyi’s drawing. Her hand reached out as if to tear it to shreds. But Tihanyi pushed by her, blocking the drawing, and Zsuzsa stumbled, nearly toppling into some bushes. She righted herself with the help of Bertalan Pór, and shrieked a torrent of Hungarian.
The effect on the volatile Tihanyi was immediate. Wild-eyed, arms flailing, he barked at her, his body swaying. Bertalan Pór tried to grasp his shoulders, but the painter was incensed now—he breathed fire, his cheeks dotted with red, his hands banging against his chest. Alarmed, I stood up, ready to flee these two impassioned Hungarians, but Zsuzsa suddenly stopped her own fury, backed away from the agitated artist, and stumbled out of the garden. Lajos Tihanyi, exhausted, sank to the ground, his body quaking, his shoulders slumped. He was sobbing.
“Well,” Bertalan Pór nodded at me, “we witness the artistic temperament. The sad old singer acting out her loneliness and…and my good friend…the painter who will someday cut off his ear in the grand tradition of…“ But he stopped. Abruptly Lajos Tihanyi stood up, hastily gathered his easel and canvas, crammed his brushes and paints into his field box, and stormed away.
At the edge of the quay he turned, calm now, his face serene, and he smiled at me, bowing low. He uttered incomprehensible syllables at me, impossible to grasp, though Bertalan Pór understood. “He apologizes for his behavior, but his art is all he has.”
I doubted whether Tihanyi’s utterances conveyed that noble sentiment, but I nodded back, content.
“And,” Bertalan Pór went on, “You and your friend Winifred Moss are invited to his studio this afternoon at four to see his work.”
Again, I nodded.
Then he quietly went after Lajos Tihanyi.
Minutes later, sitting in the lobby waiting for Winifred to join me, the desk clerk left his station and handed me a letter. “For the Miss Ferber.” He bowed as I smiled at his English. “It arrives moments ago on the morning post.”
Winifred joined me as I was opening the letter. “My mother,” I told her, “writing me from Berlin.”
“Good news?” she asked.
I frowned. “I rather doubt it. It is from my mother.”
Winifred blinked. “Edna, really.”
I read the letter quickly and looked up. “She’s not joining me in Budapest.”
“Well, you didn’t expect her to, right?”
“True, but she’s not happy in Berlin, it seems.” I ran my eyes down the page. “A disagreement with a cousin, though she doesn’t go into details. Some nasty words exchanged.” I looked up at Winifred. “I’ll hear about it for years to come.” But the last paragraph caught my attention. “A visit to her oldest brother Isadore ended with someone hurling an anti-Semitic slur her way. She says she called his name out in a restaurant, and I guess his name is commonly used by some provincial Jew haters in beer hall comedy skits. Can you imagine that? It really unnerved her. So she was told to whisper his name.” I ran my tongue into the corner of my mouth. “My mother doesn’t believe in whispering.”
“That’s preposterous,” Winifred said. “I never heard of such a thing.”
“So she wants to leave Germany as soon as possible.”
“Why not come here then?” A chuckle. “The Hotel Árpád will gladly dim the lights for her.”
“No, she’s headed to Paris, our final stop, and she wants me to join her there within the week. Three days from now, in fact.”
“But your plans…”
“Are never a concern to her.”
“What will you do?”
I sighed and folded the letter back into the envelope. “I believe we have an engagement this afternoon at the studio of a rather bizarre Hungarian painter whom I’ve come to like.” I tucked the letter into my purse. “I’m rather looking forward to the visit. Perhaps later on you and I can take in some theater and a late-night supper.”
***
At three o’clock Bertalan Pór appeared in the lobby to escort Winifred and me to Tihanyi’s atelier. Dressed in a spiffy formal jacket with an elaborate necktie and carrying a pair of white linen kid gloves, he looked ready to attend a fancy cotillion and not a messy workaday artist’s studio. “Afterwards, we go to tea or coffee,” he told me as I greeted him. “And some cake.” He pointed to his clothing. “Afternoon tea in Budapest is a formal occasion. For Miss Moss we drink tea a l’anglaise at five o’clock.”
Winifred whispered at me. “And we’re dressed for a boat ride on the Danube.”
Bertalan Pór shook his head back and forth. “Of course not. The American women in Budapest dress for dinner when they rise in the morning. They always look like…Paris.”
“Flatterers everywhere,” I commented. “I like it.”
“It is necessary,” he added, a remark I had trouble interpreting. But I followed the young artist out onto the quay. We walked down from the landing and onto the Váci Utca, then turned onto Rákóczi, and finally into a small street that seemed more alley than passageway. Bertalan Pór pointed to the large windows on the second floor of a grim, soot-covered brick building. “Up there.”
“Up there” meant entering a dark stairwell with only a sputtering electric light bulb on the first floor, none too helpful as we climbed the narrow steps, creaky and sloping. I caught Winifred’s eye. She was blissfully happy. Of course, she was—she loved those grubby Parisian artists in their gas-lit garrets and their paint-splattered lives.
The door was open, and the stinging assault of turpentine and dried paint wafted into the hallway. But I also heard a man’s cheerful voice, laughing loudly at something, the rich rolling Hungarian cadences filling the room. Tihanyi Lajos, it seemed, had another surprise guest. Endre Molnár, also dressed in elegant attire, was leaning against a back wall, contemplating a painting hung there. When he heard us, he swiveled, delighted, and ushered us into the spacious room.
A cluttered shambles of a room, though Winifred scooted about admiring it all. Canvases and pads stacked up against the walls, four or five paint-blotchy palettes hanging off nails, easels holding incomplete canvases. A bank of windows on one side let sunshine flood the rooms, giving everything a lit-by-fire feeling. A comfortable space, I thought, and wholly Tihanyi’s. His Expressionistic art assailed you at every turn—staggering geometric angles fused with brilliant hues of primary color. Portraits and landscapes, but of men at their most vulnerable, rolling farm fields at their most fantastic. This was no country other than one that brewed in his fevered imagination.
He bowed at us, excited, and immediately led me to a table on which was a scattered collection of drawings of—me. Yes—me. Me, in various poses, caught unawares in the café or on the street. Laughing, somber, lazy, dull. Me, posed decorously in the morning garden. Me, looking fierce and driven and a little world weary. Me, looking sad and lonely. Or ready to wither an annoying soul. Sketches of me, drawn in red crayon. The red jacket, collar turned up or flattened. Bothered, I said nothing though I was certain my confused expression revealed my astonishment. Try drawing that, I thought. He waited and I begrudgingly offered him an anemic smile that satisfied him.
Endre Molnár was watching me closely. “We are seen only through Tihanyi’s special prism,” he told me. “He aims to catch the soul. Look what he did to me.”
An easel turned away from us held a completed oil painting, oversized, brilliant in royal blues and forest greens, melancholy, sad, yet a spurt of liveliness. So like the Hungarians—weeping made them feel alive. Endre Molnár, posed in a black Pr
ince Albert coat, a diamond stick pin in burnished gold, his untamed moustache a blue-black sweep of color. His rigid jaw line sharp—a geometric slash. Aggressive, Alpine shoulders, pointed. But Tihanyi had purposely exaggerated Endre’s one lazy eye, magnifying it so that it gave the portrait a vaguely oriental cast. Utterly and unabashedly charming, the painting. Riveting. I fairly lost my breath. So handsome, so magnetic, so—so enticing.
I struggled to speak. “You posed for…”
He broke in. “Sooner or later everyone poses for Tihanyi.” He locked eyes with mine. “You know that Armageddon our friend Mr. Gibbon announces with some regularity—well, that war is waged in rooms like this. A Hungarian critic has called this art ‘a declaration of war.’ The artists are the ones who shatter the comforts of the few.”
Bertalan Pór nodded toward the sketches of me on the table. “Next you sit in the studio here.”
I agreed.
But I found myself wandering back to another table strewn with the sketches the two artists had made in the Café Europa—and, I supposed, other cafés. The work-in-progress for their planned art book. Dozens of sheets, pencil sketches, half-finished, finished, abandoned, labored over. Works by both of them. There were many of Winifred, some so sad it hurt to look at them—the artist caught the pain she carried with her from England. But another showed her laughing in a way I’d not seen—utter joy, vibrant.
“Everyone in the Café Europa?” I asked them.
“The ones that intrigue,” Bertalan Pór noted.
I spread them out, this varied panorama of faces and tables and chairs. Bottles of wine. A lithe waiter with a tray held high in the air. The Gypsy orchestra and the intense violinist. Zsuzsa Kós slumped at a table. Folks I didn’t recognize. Many of them. And Cassandra and Mrs. Pelham. Over and over, a sweep of images both flattering and ugly, the sordid personality and the beautiful. I tapped one of them.
“Jonathan Wolf,” I announced.
Endre looked over my shoulder. “Harold insists he’s a spy.”
Frustrated, I looked into his face. “Yes, I know. István Nagy told me Mr. Wolf called him a spy. He also said Wolf’s an Italian anarchist.” Endre’s eyebrows rose at that statement. “But for whom? For what purpose?” The drawing showed a man with a Rasputin stare. “Madness, all of it.”
He shrugged. “Harold’s fancy perhaps. Maybe Wolf is only a rich American, a lone wanderer through Budapest streets.”
“No,” I said, “there is something about that man. He’s always near when something happens. Frankly, I don’t believe such moments are purely coincidental. He’s not what he demands we believe him to be.”
Lajos Tihanyi had been reading my lips, his face concentrating on mine. Finally he said something softly to Pór, but his friend looked perplexed at the stammered words. So Tihanyi jotted something on a slip of paper and handed it to him. He read it and smiled. “Lajos insists Wolf has the face of someone from Gypsy villages in Transylvania.”
Tihanyi was nodding, and Bertalan Pór added, “Lajos watches every face he meets. He sees everything. In one minute he reads your soul. In a second he knows whether he should like you.”
“I remember his words: ‘I see what you hear.’”
Tihanyi, comprehending, sputtered happily.
As I peered at the drawings before me, so many focused on the Café Europa, my heart began to pound. There had to be some clue buried in the blunt pencil lines and bold charcoal smudges—something that told me something I needed to know. Cassandra and Mrs. Pelham at that table, a series of drawings, different moods, postures. What? I believed the answer to the murder had been captured by Lajos Tihanyi and Bertalan Pór as they sketched away. I had no idea why I thought that, but it held me. Staring down at the drawings, I had no idea where to begin looking. My mind swam.
“And now,” Endre was saying, “we will go to New York.”
Winifred glanced at me. “New York?”
Endre laughed. “Budapest’s New York.”
I rolled my eyes. “We’ve already been to your version of Chicago, sir. I still have heart palpitations and recurring dizzy spells. Perhaps it is best if…”
He was shaking his head. “New York is the café of choice these days. Not the intimacy and old worn fabric feel of the Café Europa, to be sure. New York is where everyone goes at five for tea or coffee. Or a glass of Tokay. Our table awaits us.”
Bertalan Pór offered his arm to Winifred, who was touched by the gesture. Immediately she began asking about his days studying at the Acádemie Julian in Paris. He mentioned that a short time ago in Munich one of Tihanyi’s paintings was rejected from the show—labeled entartete kunst, degenerate art—and so immediately Pór withdrew his own paintings.
“The brotherhood of artists,” he told her. “Our Prime Minister István Tisza attacked my exhibit in Budapest.” He grinned. “Expected, yes, but it still is hard to get used to—such dislike.”
Thrilled, Winifred talked in a hushed but lively voice. She looked—softened. Yes, that was the word that came to mind. This hard-bitten soldier of the suffragette wars in England, so bruised and battered by the mocking, scurrilous men on the sidelines of her protest parade—this war-torn warrior of a noble cause had come to own a hard face, especially when men approached her. And rightly so. She understood her enemy.
And yet I’d seen her smile slightly as Harold Gibbon danced around her, teasing, impudent. And now, in the company of the courtly Hungarians, these talented and gentle forecasters of another future, she softened, responded to them. Winifred Moss was being brought back into a loving humanity. Wonderful to watch, I thought, and necessary.
Winifred walked at a brisk clip as we headed to the café.
New York was a modern coffee house connected to an American insurance company. “Not Marcus Blaine’s,” Endre quietly informed us.
An intimidating place, this New York, with its Gilded Age abundance. Slick marble floors and columns, huge gilt mirrors, blazing chandeliers, gold leaf trim everywhere and—horror of horrors, a pedestrian replica of the Statue of Liberty under a huge Stars and Stripes. New York, indeed. A palace built to overwhelm, which, of course, had the opposite effect—you cringed at the opulence, the sheer ugliness of unfettered riches. Crowded, a blue haze of cigarette smoke hurting your eyes, steamy, the smell of sweating bodies. The heady scent of thick red wine and too many cigars. Chess, checkers, newspapers, talk, arguments, politics, love, hate, a slap in the face, a hug in the corner, an illicit touching of the Gypsy waitress as she shuffled by with a tray of whiskey and soda. Yes, a celebration of life, I supposed, some usurping of the glitter world of, say, Paris or even New York itself without the carefree, devil-may-care abandon. Here the nagging melancholy inborn in the Hungarian lent the room a wistful, bittersweet beauty.
Delightful though our coffee was, especially in the company of these deferential gentlemen, my mind kept reverting back to Tihanyi’s studio, that helter-skelter mess of drawings spread across that table. Scenes from café society. But something else—scenes from the characters in a murder. The dead and the—the what? The killer? A strand nagged at me, rumbled in my head, and, distracted, I found myself staring across the crowded café, hardly paying attention to the casual talk about café life, the globules of caviar slathered on thick black bread, the sumptuous chocolate cream cake called Rigó Jancsi, and even the pleasant Gypsy music.
Endre Molnár hired an open car, rather extravagant, and the five of us went to City Park for an evening of Tchaikovsky, though sitting next to the deaf Tihanyi diminished some of the pleasure for me. When it ended, Endre escorted us to Magyaros, a greenery restaurant at Deák Square, where we had cold sour cherry soup, followed by chicken paprikás with dumplings, eating outside under leafy chestnut trees. A crowded restaurant, a haze of cigarette smoke drifting into a hard blue sky. At midnight the car delivered us home, the two artists choosing to walk the short dista
nce to their apartments. But as the automobile turned a corner, we noticed a sleek black town car parked in front of a villa set back from the street. As the car slowed, Endre nodded toward the occupants, then stepping out.
The countess and her son, Count Frederic von Erhlich—he sharply dressed in his decorated military uniform, she dressed in a black velvet gown with jeweled piping—both paused a moment on the sidewalk. A streetlight made them seem resplendent characters in a Viennese operetta. Attendants bowed and scraped, but the countess, covering her face with a veil, moved through them, never turning her head. In a hurry she called her son’s name without turning back to look at him, but the count lingered by the open door of the town car as a woman emerged. A tiny capon of a woman with a plump, round face, she said something to the count. Reluctantly he reached for her hand.
Endre cleared his throat. “The Duchess of Saxony.”
“I don’t understand.”
“A widow two decades the count’s senior,” he added. “An unhappy woman who has shopped for a husband in the marketplace.”
“You’re saying?“
Endre swallowed. “Rumor says that the count is already betrothed to the woman.”
“Money?’
He snickered, but then seemed sorry he spoke. “Lots of it. Tons. But a nasty woman with a profane tongue, unhappy, blistering. Servants run from her, weep, hide. Her cruelty is legendary. She’s never forgiven a slight—and everything is considered a slight. But very respectable German aristocracy. A mountain castle. Essen steel money.”
“So everyone wins.” Winifred’s words were dry.
“All except poor Cassandra.” I said.
I immediately regretted my words.