by Miriam Sved
And then, when I was still getting used to Ildiko looking at me like that and still struggling with all the things I wished to say to her, I suddenly had a revelation that seemed to undermine all my convictions of purity and covered me in a shivery kind of delight. It was dense of me not to have thought of it before: I would be on a train with him, with Pali. Obviously I would be on a train with him; this was the whole essence of the plan to get him to the professor, one step closer to the institute in America. But the physical reality of the thing: the two of us, without the others, for all those hours together in a carriage. I had not thought about it like this before. It seemed heavy with significance and possibility. My face got even hotter, and Ildiko was still looking at me intently.
I thought of what Nagymama used to say when somebody (usually me) displeased her. Shaking her head slowly and fixing me with those wrinkled-over eyes, she would say, Elohim knows your thoughts better than you do.
Pali was still talking about Farey arcs, and beside me on the bench Tibor sat straight and focused and unaware. When we were at the university, after Tibor started courting me, I’d overheard an acquaintance of ours, Zsuzsi – Ildiko and I had been at school with her but we were never close – I’d heard Zsuzsi say that I must have trapped Tibor somehow. Of course she was implying pregnancy. At the time I had wanted to laugh (if sarcastic Zsuzsi knew how little Tibor had touched me she would have made other, equally cutting assessments). But this idea of entrapment, of a sticky web of complications we had all caught each other in, flashed up in me beneath the statue, linked to Nagymama’s all-knowing God. I tried to dismiss it (how could I, ordinary and blockheaded, have entrapped someone like Tibor?). I tried to forget about Ildiko’s gaze and stop blushing, to start listening to Pali rather than watching him.
‘And so,’ Pali was saying, ‘if your primary integer is larger than five there will always be an integer c such that c squared is not congruent to 1 or –1, and then the incongruent numbers would be quadratic non-residues to modulus p. Which obviously is impossible.’
It was something like that. Hard for me to reproduce it now as by that point I had very little idea what he was talking about, but I nodded and tried to look thoughtful. Tibor turned to me on the bench and gave me one of his rare, sweet smiles. And another unusual thing: he reached out to take my hand.
Sydney, 2007
Josh does not feel great about the fact – though he seems powerless to change it – that throughout the brief ordeal of his grandfather’s funeral his attention is continually drawn back to the new phone in his pocket.
The large pastel-trimmed room where the reception is being held is full to bursting with old people, and perhaps this is one reason why Josh can’t keep his hands off the phone. It is so reassuringly fresh and young. So new that almost no-one else in Australia has even seen one. He keeps running his fingers over the screen surreptitiously (he hopes surreptitiously), mentally cataloguing all the phone’s sweet contours. The on-off switch, the volume control, headphone and charger jacks. This inventory always leads to the smooth divot of the ‘home’ button, which he clicks to feel its satisfying clickiness, and the phone lights up in his pocket, inviting the swoosh of his index finger, a powerful left-to-right sweep to bring it alive. Looking down at the screen he can see the top row of ‘apps’, an alluring promise of digital escape, but out of the corner of his eye he can also see his mother, and he has a feeling she is monitoring his performance today and factoring it into her decision. And anyway, here comes one of the old people, shuffling androgynously towards him, ready to tell him what a good man his grandfather was.
He looks around for escape but all the people he knows are unapproachably grieving – grieving in a way that Josh can’t help feeling as a bit of a reproach, a bit of an accusation. Eszter, his Nagymama – of course she is grieving – sitting in state in a high-backed chair against the opposite wall of the large room, near a fire escape, her face all shut down as people edge past with their condolences. Josh’s sister Zoe hovers near their grandmother. Her heavy eye make-up has been cried all over her face and she holds a balled-up tissue. Overdoing it – it’s not like she had some great relationship with the old man. And Josh’s mother, grieving in her large, outward way, accosting people with teary hugs. She and Zoe are a team at this sort of thing, extroverted and emotional. Josh’s father is back at the house, setting up for the small gathering that will be held after the reception. And of course there is no Bethany, who would have been good in this situation, would have been a rope between Josh and all the normal, appropriately grieving people. Josh tries to shake off the genuine desolation of this thought as the old person, who turns out to be a very old man, reaches for his hand.
‘He was a good man, such a good man.’ A papery limp handshake.
‘Thank you.’
The man lets go of Josh’s hand but doesn’t move away. Josh has no idea who he is or what to say. He has gleaned from his mother that he has met some of the old people before, but so far he hasn’t been able to figure out which ones, so whenever someone comes up to tell him what a good man his grandfather was he tries to arrange his face in a way that could show familiarity or just friendly grief.
‘Thank you,’ he says again, slightly desperately, as the old man continues to stand there looking up at him, waiting for … what? There is a buzz of traffic from outside (the funeral home is right on the Pacific Highway, not very peaceful). Josh’s foot starts tapping and he finds himself humming moronically under his breath.
Now there is an old lady shuffling up to join them. She takes the hand that the man has just released and peers up into Josh’s face. He is ninety per cent sure he has never met this one.
‘I knew your grandfather when we are young,’ she says, tenses off-kilter, in the ubiquitous creaky European accent. ‘Always he is such a good man. The best of men.’
‘Thank you,’ says Josh, the hand that is being clutched twitching to get away. Old people are so bodily, their skin calling attention to its unbeautiful self with intricate whorls and creases, and the smell – funny how the smell seems to increase proportionately as the body decreases (Josh wonders if you could graph these inverse smell-to-body coordinates) – and then all the smells to cover the smell. ‘That’s kind of you,’ he says, with a slight turn of his body that he hopes might indicate urgent business elsewhere in the room.
The old lady seems to take the hint, or perhaps she has just achieved all she came for in reminding Josh what a good man his grandfather was – either way he feels a rush of gratitude towards her when she loops her arm through that of the still-hovering old man and leads him away, the gnome-y duo hobbling across the room towards Nagymama, leaving Josh to recover the proper use of his hand in his pocket.
A good man. Josh supposes that Nagypapa was good, in the usual sort of ways. He wasn’t a criminal, he didn’t go around kicking puppies. Josh once saw a letter on his grandparents’ hall table thanking them for their contribution to some Zionist fund, which probably constitutes charity. But to Josh himself – and also, in his observation, to Zoe and their mother and grandmother – the old man had always seemed basically like a sullen bastard. Quiet, uptight, accepting Nagymama’s ministrations without much thanks, maybe nodding his head in her direction if she filled his coffee cup, more likely waving her away like she was something buzzing annoyingly around his head. And the same with Josh’s mother, who did sort of swirl around him like an insect, small and frantic and unappreciated.
But apparently Nagypapa did things or thought things or said things that outranked his domestic surliness. Maybe it was his work – maybe he engineered enough office buildings and bridges that he could be excused for waving his hand dismissively at his wife and daughter. During the service the fat funeral director had gone on quite a lot about Nagypapa’s work, and about how he’d been a Holocaust survivor (which, let’s be real, he hadn’t – Nagymama and Nagypapa had left Europe in 1938 and spent the w
ar cooling their heels in a prestigious maths institute in the States), and how he’d built his life from nothing in Australia. Maybe it was those big, worldly hardships – perhaps each historically shitty event that you live through (war: check; migration: check; attempted genocide: check) entitles you to a certain number of justifiable domestic cruelties. (In which case Josh doesn’t like his chances of getting away with anything – being dumped and having to beg money from your mother probably don’t classify as historically noteworthy disasters.) Or maybe – and here’s the big maybe in the room that Josh would like to find a way of suggesting to snivelly Zoe if he wasn’t on best behaviour – maybe everyone is protesting a bit too much about what a good man Nagypapa was. Maybe he was just a regular grumpy prick, but a grumpy prick with the misfortune of being born into a century full of the most murderously grumpy pricks in human history.
Josh strokes the phone screen. If he could just get the phone out of his pocket and download some more apps – there’s supposedly one for Myspace and another for Facebook – he might even be able to update his page here and now without leaving the reception. (The stoically grief-struck yet quirky status potential of a grandfather’s funeral: You guys, life is short, do what the Nike people say. He has a feeling it would be a hit with his three hundred and twenty-four friends – many of whom, incidentally, overlap with Bethany’s two hundred and eighty-three friends.) If only this option were open to Josh without drawing the wrong kind of attention to himself, he might be able to switch off the Tourette’s-like voice in his head that seems bent on saying all the worst things. Maybe it’s a symptom of grief – deeply subconscious grief. Post Funereal Cuntiness Disorder.
And then it occurs to Josh that there is another, non-digital option for dealing with this voice. An option on the other side of the room, near where Nagymama is sitting, arranged on a rickety card table that’s trying to spruce itself up with a doily-style tablecloth and the flutiness of the champagne glasses. Dozens of them, some full of champagne and orange juice and others with the straight poison, although there are not so many of those left undrunk. The table is very close to where Eszter sits in dignified grieving state, but so what? It occurs to Josh that he is an adult, of drinking age – and if he has never got shitfaced in front of his mother or grandmother before it is because he has not, heretofore, been of drinking age. Not that he’s going to get shitfaced. Just a glass or two, to take the edge off everything: off Bethany’s weary face when she explained her inability to continue to live in what she called Josh reality, and his mother’s watchful power over him, and the galling indignity of being twenty with a better idea than anyone to take to the world but no way to fund its delivery.
Josh pushes off his wall and begins the long migration across the room, trying to look purposeful but not in a shifty way, carefully avoiding eye contact with a hovering clump of octogenarians. He reaches the opposite wall, between Nagymama and the drinks, and he stands next to Nagymama and instructs his hand to pat her on the shoulder, which will look good. A friendly moment of sympathy and solidarity – no need to complicate it with words – and then the afterthought of a champagne flute in the other hand.
But Nagymama, to his surprise, jumps slightly when he touches her, ruining Josh’s composure and his momentum. He is standing beside her and finds himself looking down at the top of her head: a swirl of blue-tinged white, crisscrossed with the even whiter roadmap of her scalp, a patch of still-taut skin that seems somehow painfully vulnerable; it gives Josh an uncomfortable flash of his grandmother (who has always been so old as to barely count as a person) as someone who has lived other lives, other selves in this skin, perhaps even selves that were young and potential-filled. He shudders the thought away and says, ‘Sorry, Nagymama, I didn’t mean to scare you. I just meant to say … you know.’ (What? What did he mean to say?) ‘You know, hi. Oh, I’m sorry. I mean of course I’m sorry that Nagypapa … but sorry for you. I guess we all knew it was coming, but you never really expect it, do you? And this must be a very hard time for you. So I just wanted to say, you know, I’m very sorry. For your loss.’ Fighting the urge to say, He was a good man.
There is a longish pause, during which Josh registers the hovering presence of Zoe in his peripheral vision, no doubt rubber-necking at this train wreck and poised to insert herself, and then Nagymama seems to lift herself with some effort out of whatever void she was in; she reaches up and gives Josh an abstracted little pat on the bit of him closest to her, which is close to his groin.
‘Thank you, darling,’ she says (doing something specific and Hungarian to the word: dahlink; Josh has always found it endearing). ‘You are a good boy.’
He exhales, job done. But as he inches away towards the drinks table, Nagymama makes a rattling sound in her throat. Geriatric gargle or preparation for speech? Josh waits, his eyes on Nagymama and hand fluttering towards the alcohol, and eventually the old woman says, ‘My loss. The world’s loss.’ She is nodding slightly, rhythmically, and Josh is struck by the terrible thought that she might cry, in which case it’s a good thing that Zoe is hovering nearby, ready to jump in and emote. But Nagymama doesn’t cry; instead she makes a not very sad but quite phlegmy noise, almost like a snort, and says, ‘Always the good men are dying young. The great ones are dying, eh.’ And snorts again.
Josh feels slightly panicky. The great ones are dying? Has she lost someone else recently? (But it must be a predictable occupational hazard at eighty-nine?) Or just a tense problem – some long ago grief thrown into the present by the Hungarian murder of grammar. (None of the Hungarians seem to have a grasp on past and present – or male and female for that matter: Nagymama, referring to Josh’s twenty-three-year-old sister, will say, ‘Zoe, he was so beautiful when she is a baby.’)
‘I’m sorry, Nagymama,’ Josh says. ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’
‘What?’ she says sharply.
What what?
‘I’m sorry to hear that you’ve … lost other men?’
She is looking up at him strangely. He has started sweating. Fuck it. He leans over and scoops one of the smooth cool glasses and takes a generous mouthful of sweet bubbles, Nagymama still watching him.
‘He dies,’ she says. ‘She dies, they die, eh.’ She waves her hand.
Now that he’s holding the champagne glass Josh feels braver and more competent. He leans down to her. ‘Are you all right, Nagymama?’
She says something in Hungarian that sounds explosive and rude (much of the language sounds explosive and rude) and Josh catches an updraft of her breath – mildewy with age, but also sweet – and at the same time he sees a reflective glint on the floor beneath her chair. He bends down. A row of them: four champagne flutes in slightly higgledy formation against the wall. When did she put all that away? He hasn’t seen her drinking – in fact he’s never known her to drink at all. Josh grins, impressed and somehow relieved (this is a response to cosmic shittiness that he can understand, maybe even help with). He takes another glass from the table and hands it to Nagymama, who holds it before her like something she doesn’t know what to do with.
‘Cheers, Nagymama.’ Josh clinks their glasses together and throws his own back in a long mouthful.
Something subtle changes on Nagymama’s face – a slight upswing of her pinched old features – and she says, ‘You are the bad influence on me, darling,’ and drinks her own glass with such swift gusto that Josh laughs out loud, honking and inappropriate. The judgemental spectres of Zoe and his mother are both in his peripheral vision now, haunting opposite sides of the room, but the oppressive worry he’s been feeling about his mother and competitive resentment towards his sister have merged into a more comfortable swell of rebellion. He takes two more glasses, hands one to Eszter and says, ‘Bottoms up, Nagymama,’ and this time when they swill it is Nagymama who lets out a grief-jarring cackle, and then burps.
Josh laughs again. ‘Easy, Nagymama.’
She w
aves him away. ‘Don’t you easy to me. You know what it is we drink in Hungary before the war? No orange juice for our pálinka. Now pass to me the glass.’
Josh picks up two more glasses, but in turning he catches his mother’s eye. She is still some way across the room, talking to another elderly lump, but she seems to be migrating him or her slowly in Josh’s direction, both of them inching along the floor without breaking the flow of conversation. And there is a look in her eye, directed straight at Josh. He has a hot flush of memory, recalling the last thing his mother said in the horrible conversation: ‘Maybe if you can prove to me that you’re a responsible adult, I might feel that I can help you out with this.’ He’d wanted to shout at her that she was the irresponsible one for jeopardising the chance he has. But of course he didn’t shout at her; he nodded respectfully and tried not to bite off his own tongue as he muttered something about proving himself.
And now here he is, proving himself by getting drunk with his grandmother at his grandfather’s funeral. His mother’s father. Josh sometimes has the feeling that he doesn’t quite have the full measure of other people’s emotions, that everyone else is living life, feeling life, on a slightly different emotional dimension to him. Like now, at this funeral – shouldn’t he be feeling more than he is?
(Though the scene with Bethany had made him want to do something nuts – wrap his hand around the blade of a kitchen knife, or even smash up his laptop – so that, surely, was legitimate grief.)