Triptych

by Margit Liesche

  ***

  There are three antique stores in Willow Grove. Irina’s Antique Shoppe is located in the commercial strip by May Lee’s Restaurant; the other two are on the outskirts, at opposite ends of town. I pause before the display window at Irina’s. Ten months ago, after Vaclav had rejected my idea for his class, he’d proposed an alternative to placate me. “I tell you what. We meet tomorrow, go on field trip. Find way to make your invention work.” We’d stopped here at Irina’s.

  Irina Marinovna from my first English conversation group—the same class as Vaclav—had recently purchased the shop. Irina’s English was actually quite good. She’d come to class only to support Natascha, a recent arrival and distant relative from Russia.

  In a bin of needlepoint samplers, Vaclav found what he was after. It was a beach scene, three fourths of the canvas sky—a glorious shade of Adriatic blue (the precise color of Vaclav’s eyes). Along the narrow bottom strip, beach flora—sprinklings of lavenders, greens and deep purples—dappled a white and taupe strip of sand. A smidge of green-blue ocean separated sky from sand along one corner of the canvas.

  “Forgive, please. I have not yet had the time to weed—” Irina had said coming up behind us. “That thing, it must be something made by a child or an untrained crafts woman. Sorry—” She reached to rescue the piece from Vaclav.

  “No.” He smiled and turned to me. “Exactly what we look for, yes?”

  I nodded. I was smiling too. “I already know what I will call it. Dream.”

  Vaclav insisted on paying for the sampler. It was only a dollar and I did not object. Gentle, sure of himself, he draped his arm casually around me as we walked to the counter. “In dreams you can have all you want,” he had whispered.

  ***

  I give in to the urge to take a quick pass through the store. Irina’s shop reminds me of Auntie Mariska’s bookstore. I never met either of my grandmothers in Hungary, but drawing a deep breath of the musty air I am transported to their homes. In the crowded aisles, I see the furnishings they might have had.

  At the bin of vintage samplers, I flip through, stopping almost immediately. A house set among pine trees, its chimney spouting a squiggly plume of smoke. Along the top and sides, a decorative pattern of hearts and soaring birds.

  Where we love is home,

  Home that our feet may leave, but not

  our hearts.

  The verse, stitched in black, is at the sampler’s center, above the rising smoke.

  I lift the framed piece out of the bin, knowing I will buy it to add to my collection of sentimental embroideries, purchased so that I can remake them.

  I reread the verse and experience the familiar ache. In China, my mother had moved eight times. Then, forced by war conditions, she emigrated to yet a third continent where she would never seem at ease. Home, the place to which she could never return.

  Recently, I have been experiencing a sense of not belonging myself. Of feeling apart. Apart from what? I don’t know. The logical side of my brain would like me to acknowledge that my thirty-eighth birthday is creeping up. This would account for a ton of churning feelings. What else could it be? I am not my mother. I am firmly placed in Willow Grove, my library job, my condo, Vaclav…

  A traditional decorative motif surrounds the verse. I find the discordant colors selected by the needleworker wildly inspiring. In my mind, I begin transforming the array into colored squares, composing a grid over the faded blue pattern lines in the old motif. I play with what to leave showing.

  Where we love is home. I trace the verse. I might have been born in Ohio, but my blood is one hundred percent Hungarian. I am intimately linked to a country trapped beneath the oppressive knuckle of Communism—a tenuous connection. But from it, Vaclav had lionized me into his ideal American. “My America.” Mostly Old World with a brushstroke of New. As part of the old order, my loyalty to country—and family—ought to be in the same league as his. “In my country, in my family, we would never allow murderer of loved one to go unpunished.”

  I am so absorbed in my thoughts that the sound of Irina’s voice startles me.

  “So you have fell in love?”

  I smile. “Have fallen in love, and, yes, I simply must have this.” I hand her the piece and lift my tote bag from the floor. Irina eyes the protruding bouquet of flowers. Her mouth forms a tight line.

  “Vaclav?” she asks.

  My chin shoots up. “Yes. From one of his gardening projects. He’s artist of the month at the library, did you know?”

  Irina cocks an eyebrow. Of course she didn’t know. The exhibit was barely up. Taking her lead, I clamp my lips shut.

  Irina knew that Vaclav and I would be lovers before I did, from our first visit to her shop. “In public, in my presence, he place arm around you,” she had said the next time I stopped in. “As if in buying you the needlework, he at once own you. Vaclav, he knows what he is made of,” she seemed unable to resist adding. “The old country, his wife, his art. You never will be part of that. Is not possible. He will break your heart.”

  No, Vaclav would not break my heart. Unattainable Vaclav. Irina could not know it was precisely why Vaclav was so right for me.

  Irina turns, and we walk toward the cash register. A spry slight woman in her mid-fifties, Irina is wearing a flowy pleated skirt that sways, and the toes of her flats point outward as she walks duck-footed, her back perfectly straight, slightly ahead of me.

  Irina steps behind the counter and sets the sampler on its surface. The light picks up the smudge my finger made on the glass. She finds a cloth and begins polishing. She chuckles. “What you do here? Try to erase the little stitched home?”

  I smile lamely at Irina. “The opposite. I am trying to connect.”

  Irina’s age and difficult past are evident in lines crisscrossing her face. In her teens, she trained with the Kirov ballet in Leningrad. During the horrific siege of the city by the Germans, she fled with her parents, wending through Sweden to eventually arrive in London. She was a principal ballerina with a famed company until, in the mid-fifties, her parents sought better opportunities in Toronto.

  Irina dips down, rummaging beneath the counter, and extracts a length of brown wrapping paper. “Home. This is very important, connection,” she says. “If you are proud of where you came from, you will always know where you are going, and you will take pride in everything you do.”

  Irina had brought a jacket to my conversation group class, handmade like the one she is wearing today, but more primitive. She had crafted it along her journey out of Leningrad from old clothing donations sent by the Red Cross.

  I pay for the sampler. Perhaps it’s because we share a flair for transforming second-hand goods, Irina’s face lights up at the sight of Mariska’s shawl.

  “You have completed more destruction,” she says.

  I laugh. “Deconstruction.”

  Before leaving the library, I’d wrapped the shawl around my hips, over my black leggings. The two small independent circle clusters that earlier today floated on my shoulders now rest on either side of the large knot at my hip. Irina reaches for the pointed end of the shawl. The fringe dances as she pulls the fabric away from my thigh, holding it aloft, eyeing the boldly colored circles-within-circles abstract design I’d created—my “Kandinsky rings,” as Ioana had dubbed them.

  “New within the old,” Irina says. “Conciliation. Coming together. The future from the past.” She nods approvingly. “Very nice.”

  I smile.

  Her gaze drifting to the flowers in my bag, she shakes her head and pricks my bubble. “But elsewhere you must do some personal unstitching.”

  ***

  Budapest, 25 October 1956

  Évike and her mother met Dóra downstairs in the courtyard. The weather was sunny but cool. The baby fussed as Dóra, having bundled Dórika in a tattered woolen blanket, positioned
her in the dilapidated stroller and tugged a rough woolen cap over the baby’s downy blonde hair. Dórika had a cherubic face, big blue eyes, and full lips like her father Tarján, the best friend of Évike’s father. Bright, but less scholarly, Tarján had been conscripted into the Hungarian Army. His unit was somewhere in the city and Dóra had not heard from him since before the demonstration at Kossuth tér. The women had agreed to team up in the search for their husbands.

  On the street, a sense of calm. People strolling freely. The farther they walked, the more it was apparent that the armed struggle was not over. The radio pronouncements…Pure propaganda.

  In the next block, young men and women, even teenagers, wearing tricolor armbands, their expressions full of grim purpose, carried what seemed like oversized weapons. Évike recognized one the young soldiers, a boy from her school. She started to wave, but struck by the lingering taint over being singled out, removed by the director from her classroom, her hand returned to her pocket.

  Suddenly the pavement shook. Dórika’s wailed but her cries were drowned out by the approaching rumble of a Soviet tank.

  Dóra had often spoken of Tarján’s knowledge of Soviet tanks. He was assigned to a T-34, the WWII model the Soviets brought in to keep control over “meek” Hungary. Tarján liked to pooh-pooh the tank, calling it old-fashioned, but Évike could not distinguish old from new. And with its noisy treads, thick plating and raised turret, a giant machine gun angled from its hatch, the T-34 looked to her now like an angry rhinoceros barreling down on them, the long main gun its super-sized deadly horn. The radio had said the tanks were here to crush the uprising and as the speeding metal monster cut a corner, taking a chunk of a brick building with it, Évike felt the thump-thump of her heart, racing with both excitement and terror.

  They reached Kossuth tér where a crowd of thousands had gathered, and a fleet of Soviet tanks in a semi-circle stood guard before the parliament building.

  “Do you see Tarján?” Dóra asked in a shaky voice, eyeing the tanks.

  “No, but there are so many units attached to Budapest,” the mother said. “Do you really think his could be here?”

  Dóra looked around once more. Her shoulders sagged. “We’re likely to have better luck finding members of our Petőfi group. They will know what is going on.”

  They began elbowing their way through the masses, Dóra maneuvering the stroller in fits and starts.

  Franciska grabbed her friend’s arm. The foursome halted. “Look.”

  More Soviet tanks and armored cars were positioned throughout the square among the mass of assembled protestors. Many of the tanks were draped with Hungarian flags, even flowers. One tank sported a tricolor tied to its radio antenna. Évike shook her head in disbelief. Demonstrators had clambered up some of the tanks and were waving Hungarian flags.

  “Mother, is it over? Does this mean father will come home?”

  Just then a handsome youth about eighteen, with sandy-blond hair, gray-eyes, and skin spotted with acne, pushed in next to Dóra.

  “What is going on?” Dóra asked him. “Everyone seems so…well, friendly.”

  The young man nodded. He raised his voice to be heard above a new round of chanting. “Yes, when we first arrived, we kept back from the tanks, but then, a strange thing happened. A few of us and the crew of one of the tanks start to talk. It is crazy, really. The Russians have been sent to intimidate us—kill us, maybe—but we are all chatting like old friends. Suddenly eight or ten demonstrators run to a tank, climb up on it. Students…Soviet soldiers, standing together. As if to signal an accord between the sides, then everyone takes up the mood…”

  While the young man spoke, Évike was glancing at the blue October sky.

  “But look, up on the Ministry of Agriculture building,” she said.

  The young man tracked her gaze to the barrels of submachine guns mounted on the roof of the building directly across from Parliament. “Ah, yes, and over there.” He pointed to the rooftop of a six-story building at the square’s southern end. “AVO snipers.”

  Évike huddled closer to the women.

  “It is okay. We are unarmed,” the sandy-haired youth continued, smiling to put them at ease again. “We have made repeated announcements. The demonstration is to be peaceful.”

  They left him and continued through the crowd. “Look at this—” Évike’s mother swept her hand through the air. “Victory is close. Can you feel it? We are going to drive the AVO out.”

  Pressing on through the crowd, they at last encountered a friend from their Petőfi circle, Josef Csoki. Évike had seen Josef many times at meetings and knew him to be a flirt. He was one student who sometimes would find time for her—and for her mother.

  Josef had an olive complexion, heavy dark eyebrows, and wavy black hair. He smiled easily, and Évike thought his full lips and white teeth made him look all the more dreamy. “Sexy,” Évike’s mother had observed privately to Dóra, giggling, and adding, “He’s married. Just likes a good time.”

  He dazzled Évike with a broad grin then turned to the women. “The tank guys are good guys, but I was just talking with a Russian soldier who—can you believe?—did not even know he was in Budapest. Thought he had been sent to Berlin.”

  The women looked stunned, then laughed. Évike held back. Was he making a joke?

  “No, this is real,” Josef said. “Jenõ…you know Jenõ, right?” The women nodded. “He told me he talked to a Soviet soldier who also thought they were in Berlin, fighting German fascists. These guys have lived so long under Communism…Maybe uneducated, raised on secluded farms—Who knows?”

  “What about Nagy?”

  “No sighting. Here, take some leaflets.”

  Évike recognized the Cyrillic alphabet.

  “What does it say?” asked Dóra.

  “Please Do Not Fire On the Hungarians. We Are Not Fascist Counter-Revolutionaries.”

  Looks good, huh? Printed this morning. At Athenaeum Press, after we captured it. We want all Soviets soldiers to get one. We need to counteract.”

  The women peppered him with questions about their men, but Josef had not seen Tarján or Miklós. He headed off in another direction.

  A short distance later, Évike’s mother boldly tried to engage a Soviet machine-gunner, his fur cap jauntily tilted, a cigarette dangling from his lips, his finger resting casually on the trigger of his gun. He spoke only Russian.

  “Édesem,” the mother said, addressing her daughter. “At last the Russian lessons forced down you have a purpose. Kindly explain to this gentleman we are anti-Stalin, not anti-Communist. We want the exchange of free thoughts, ideas. Individual rights, not a life dictated to us by others.” She thrust a leaflet toward the soldier. “We will liberalize Hungary and make it a decent place to live again. That is what this is about.”

  The Soviet machine-gunner took the pamphlet and moved away from them.

  They pushed deeper into the crowd. Atop a tank, Jenõ Toth, waving a giant Hungarian flag, his long black hair fluttering with the breeze, shouted, “Long live Hungarian Freedom! Long live our Native Land!” Others took up the chant.

  “Jenõ!” Dóra exclaimed excitedly, steering the stroller in his direction.

  The revolutionary climbed down and greeted them. Jenõ was twenty-one, the same age as Dóra. His black eyes blazed as he spoke.

  “They can’t sweep us away like garbage,” he told them, “We’re not trash…. We offered a peaceful way out, but they have not taken us, our demands, seriously. Now, we fight. This show of Soviet force—” he gestured around the square, “will not deter us. Curfews…they expect to control us. They cannot. Freedom fighters have taken over public buildings.”

  “Yes, we heard” Évike’s mother said.

  “And we have a stronghold in the main industrial center, Csepel. We seized a huge cache of arms from Bem tér barracks.” His fi
ery eyes searched the crowd as if expecting a troop of rebels to appear brandishing them. “Resistance groups are forming at every key location.” He rattled off the sites. The Corvin Cinema in Pest; Szena tér on the north Buda side; and Móricz Zsigmond körtér, at the south end of Buda, near the university.

  “My husband, Tarján,” Dóra said. “Have you seen him? Is he here?” She cupped a hand over her eyes, blocking the sun, searching faces.

  “He is with the Hungarian Army?” It was more of a statement than a question. “They will not fight on the side of the AVO even under orders. They are looking the other way, even handing over their guns.” He hesitated as if recalling the question. “No, I have not seen Tarján.”

  Évike’s mother spoke. “Yesterday, my husband Miklós—” At the name, Jenõ turned. “Miklós Benedek?” he asked. She nodded and continued, “Miklós, he said there was a rumor that some generals of the Hungarian Army will join the rebels.”

  Jenõ’s smiled. “Not a rumor. Colonel Kopacsi, commander of the civilian police in Budapest, Military Commander Kirahly, both have come over. Marton, Kana, as well. And at mid-city this morning, Colonel Maléter was taking a detachment of Hungarian Army tanks to fight rebels at Kilian Barracks when…”

  A look of panic crossed Dóra’s face. “Maléter…Wh-what happened?”

  “The old T-34s are not well-suited to street by street combat.” Another smile. “Rebels on roofs along Üllõi ut peppered them with gunfire and Molotov cocktails. Two tanks retreated in flames. The other three tanks made it through the main gate…but not without difficulty.”

  “Please,” Dóra said, her voice desperate now, “Tarján is in Maléter’s unit. Do you know? Did his tank make it?”

  “Sorry.” Jenõ’s hand brushed Dóra’s shoulder. “Be brave. I am sure he is fine. He is on the right side now. Because as I was about to say, this morning a miracle.” Jenõ paused, barely able to contain his excitement. “Maléter, he raised a flag signaling cease-fire then spoke with rebels. After this, he sent word to the Minister of Defense. ‘Going over to the insurgents!’” Another grin. “The Soviets will not defeat us now.”