by Miriam Sved
Dr Antal broke off his oration when he saw her hand. ‘Excuse me, sir,’ she said in a clear voice, ‘I thought I should point out that your example is not a discontinuous function.’ And she smiled slightly and raised her eyebrows as if expecting some pleasant, collegial reply. Oh Elohim, I thought. She has no idea what she is dealing with.
Dr Antal said nothing so Ildiko continued, ‘According to what you said earlier, in order for a function to be continuous it must be so at every point of its domain. You gave as an example y = 1/x, but the point x = 0 is not in the domain of that function. So I assume that it is in fact a continuous function?’
The teacher was rocking slightly back on his heels and peering at the new student over those little spectacles of his, as though he couldn’t quite grasp what was happening. I suppose that was my moment of reckoning – there was a small fraction of time before I spoke when I noticed a twitch occurring in Dr Antal’s cheek, and I could have reconsidered what I was about to do – but the look that had passed between me and the new girl required this act of solidarity: I could not leave her out there alone in the hostile territory of Dr Antal’s stare. My voice came out a little reedy when I said, ‘Of course 1/x is discontinuous at x = 0,’ realising too late that I hadn’t raised my hand to speak, that alone a punishable offence in Dr Antal’s class, but by then I’d gone too far to stop. ‘But I think, according to what you said earlier, that that is not the same thing as an actual discontinuous function? As I understand it.’ I ended, I’m afraid, with a little quaver as Dr Antal turned his scorching look upon me, and I had time in the next few seconds to feel myself wilting in the heat of that terrible gaze and to regret my uncharacteristically rebellious interjection (in general I was such a little sap at school), before I became aware that the new girl was trembling silently in her seat, head down in her arms. I realised it at the same time as the teacher and, I suspect, every other girl in the class, and we all turned as one to look at her, my first thought being that she was crying. Then some noise broke out from the huddle of her arms and I realised she was not crying. With a fascinated kind of horror, I turned back to the teacher to see how he was receiving this new insult, and something about his face – the incredulous bulge of his eyes and a blotchy redness creeping up from his neck – combined with the little squeaks of badly suppressed mirth coming from the new girl’s table to overtake me like a wave. It was one of those wholly involuntary laughing fits, I was defenceless against it and even less successful than the new girl at keeping it quiet.
Finally Dr Antal’s voice broke through the terrible, unstoppable hilarity. He said, ‘Oh, all right. Terribly clever, girls.’ It wasn’t the diatribe I would have expected from him – I could tell from his tone that he was striving to sound bored and dismissive rather than angry – but it gave me the shot of fear I needed to calm down instantly. I straightened up and wiped my eyes. The teacher turned his back on us, giving the board a rather aggressive scouring to prepare for a new subject. I couldn’t quite believe we were getting away so lightly (oh foolish naivety). And I could not, for the rest of the class, bring myself to look at the new girl. I sensed that she too was keeping her eyes meticulously averted from me. This not looking at each other felt very warm and friendly.
When at last the class ended and we were a safe distance away from Dr Antal’s room I found her walking in step beside me. She leaned close to my ear and made her voice into a sibilant hiss, a wickedly good caricature of our teacher. ‘Terribly clever, girls,’ she said. And we both dissolved again into laughter.
We were silly to think the incident would end there and to treat it so lightly, but everything Snakeman did after that – the many small cruelties and humiliations he inflicted over the years, and the large cruelty that might have kept one of us from the university if not for Ildiko’s resourcefulness – only strengthened our friendship. We were sisters in battle, and that first day we were both giddy with it, eating lunch together and laughing and learning everything about each other so quickly. We were inseparable after that.
All this was between us that afternoon at the statue, along with the beautiful promise of Ildiko’s new problem that I would go on to ruin for her. Feeling suddenly light and reckless with happiness, I said, ‘Do you know, I thought you kept me here today to lecture me about my Pali problem.’
Ildiko gave an exaggerated snort. ‘Who is this Pali? Has he invented a new branch of mathematics while simultaneously helping an unfortunate boy with bad breath to pass his exams?’
I laughed, shaking my head.
‘Then what do we want with him?’
We were quiet for a moment, then she said, ‘I’m quite serious, Eszti. What do we want with him? And the others. They are just children playing games, they will never leave. If things get any worse we should find a way, you and I. Perhaps your relatives in America could help us. As long as we stay together we will be all right, we’ll get by.’
This was such an abrupt transition that I barely knew how to understand it, whether she was speaking seriously. I searched her face, but she wore her most earnest, set-jawed expression. Of course now, when the anti-Jewish laws have become so much worse, her words seem reasonable – prescient even – but at the time I was still living in a dream world. I thought she was being melodramatic, as well as disloyal, and I was almost embarrassed, resenting the end of that happy spell I’d been under moments before. I started to say something superfluous about the work, trying to turn her attention back to the upper limit problem, but Ildiko cut me off.
‘Don’t go to Vienna,’ she said.
I was shuffling through the papers on the bench. I didn’t look up to meet her eye.
‘Please, Eszti.’ A note of pleading had entered her voice that was strange and unsettling to hear, so unlike Ildiko’s usual steel. ‘Don’t make me worry about you like that.’
I was flushing red to think about the Vienna trip, I’m sure of it, and quite desperate now to divert her attention, but I couldn’t think how.
‘It won’t be so dangerous,’ I said weakly. ‘We’ll be there for barely an hour, just in and out of the university.’
‘Come on, Eszti, don’t play the hero with me. Leave that sort of thing for Tibor.’
That shocked me a little. Our stance, all of us, had always been one of steadfast admiration, combined with concern, for the danger of Tibor’s political work. His playing the hero.
‘And anyway,’ she went on, ‘Pali doesn’t really need an escort to Vienna, and it’s not even so important for him to meet with this professor. Have you ever noticed that someone always comes to Pali’s rescue before anything bad can happen? Even at the university, though he wasn’t a proper student, he was the one the faculty protected.’
This was true, but I was taken aback to hear her say it. The five of us had never really spoken about what happened at the university, and it had not occurred to me that Ildiko might harbour any bitterness towards Pali for being kept out of it. His absence on that day, his relative safety, was the only blessing I could ever see in it. But I couldn’t say that to Ildiko, not now that she knew of my Pali problem.
I tried to get us away from the subject again, asking about her tutoring schedule for the week, when we might be able to work on the problem, how far away a generalisation and a proof might be. She seemed despondent after that and told me she would have no time over the next fortnight. I didn’t say it aloud, but I remember thinking that in that case we would not be working together again until after the trip to Vienna.
It was too late by then for Ildiko to talk me out of it: the tickets were booked and the meeting arranged. Pali and I would travel the next week.
Sydney, 2007
On the morning after the funeral, Illy opens her eyes to see the notebook. It has been moved to her bedside table. It’s so plain and innocuous-looking that she almost fails to register its presence, and the fact that it doesn’t belong there. Her mother must
have deposited it in the night, with some stealth.
Illy had rolled over in a blanket reclamation manoeuvre (Russell is a tempestuously selfish dreamer, amassing more of the covers with each dream sprint) and accidentally opened her eyes to the dawn spring brightness. She’d had no intention of being properly awake, was drifting luxuriously in that sweet spot of semi-consciousness where the aspects of self are so loosely draped that she could inhabit her own life – Russell and the kids intact and unassailable – and other lives too. She could, for instance, have run off with Carrum – beautiful bare-chested hippie Carrum, who would chant her through a peacefully leathery middle age in the woody hinterlands of Byron Bay. She could have taken the Manhattan curatorial job someone once dangled before her at a smoke-heavy party in 1976, and by now she’d be all strategically lopsided: stylishly slanting hair and linen, a niftily arranged city apartment and a Mini convertible. Maybe a young lover; the gallery’s delivery boy, perhaps.
Russell had momentarily knocked her back into herself with a bony ankle, and that’s when she opened her eyes and saw the notebook beside her.
The combination of brazenness and secrecy is so typical of Eszter, Illy doesn’t know whether to be amused or annoyed. Her mother has always been an insomniac and a night prowler; one of the images that had haunted Illy into her suggestion that Eszter should stay with them was of her in a diaphanous nightgown drifting through the empty rooms of the big house at some disastrously small hour – the broken hip at 3 am, too far from the phone and from dawn. She must have crept in and left the book on Illy’s bedside table like some geriatric tooth fairy.
Illy turns away from the thing, pulls the covers back up to her shoulder and clamps herself onto Russell’s back, trying to reclaim sleep by piggybacking onto his determined morning oblivion. But he is too hot and he has his legs thrust out at awkward angles. It’s no use, the Tribeca loft has receded into dream absurdity. Whereas when she rolls back over and opens her eyes the notebook, which as a concept has a Grimm fairy tale quality, is stolidly real and radiates its demands. Reluctantly she sits up, swings her legs around and picks up the book, ignoring the loose pages of dots at the back and opening it at a random page. The Hungarian looks alien and opaque, all uncannily long words and acute accents. She used to read it fluently, the literal mother tongue, but it is a unique and unforgiving language, no reminders in any nook or cranny of English, and she fell out of the habit of using it with her mother once the kids were old enough to pester for translations. It will be hard going to read this book, whatever it is and why ever her mother is so determined to get it to her. She rubs her eyes vigorously with her fingertips, a small act of filial rebellion, Eszter’s voice in her head telling her it will make her wrinkles worse.
Her irritation with her mother is complicated and historical. Today, now, Eszter has hijacked the agenda. Illy’s attempt to sidestep and ignore has failed: everything now will be about this notebook, with which Eszter is clearly broadcasting some message. But it will be up to Illy to excavate the subject: to hint, then ask, then coax, while her mother maintains a determined, loaded silence.
This sense of mystery and evasiveness is typical of Illy’s parents, the way they always seemed to operate, never straightforward about anything. Illy has long accepted the deep silence around her mother’s early life in Hungary – that hallowed ground is too scarred to be walked on. But why the sense of mystery about everything else? Like how they’d ended up in Australia when they had initially emigrated to America, where Illy was born. Why the denial of their remaining family members in America, a branch of aunts and uncles and cousins that Illy only knows about through a genealogy company she paid a few years ago? When she tried to raise the subject with her mother, Eszter said something tantalising about her American relations being unaccepting and ungrateful, and then resolutely deflected all Illy’s follow-up questions.
Illy turns the notebook over in her hands. So typically, infuriatingly Eszterian.
Deeper still, beneath this level of irritation, there is another, guiltier layer that has to do with a similar game Illy was limbering up to play, one in which she has already made her first move. A very similar game, down to the modus operandi of sneakily depositing weighty reading material in bedrooms. Illy has been checkmated with her hand hovering to strike. Or maybe just checked. She was never able to properly grasp chess; Russell would know which it was, and – another irritating thought – so would Josh.
She resists a strong urge to slide back under the covers and try to reclaim her dream selves. She gets up and takes her dressing-gown from the back of the door, slips it on and belts it tightly to feel girded before tramping out into whatever her family have waiting for her.
The house is quiet. Eszter is not a deep sleeper, but if she has had a long stretch of insomnia she may be able to catch up a couple of hours in the morning. Illy treads carefully past the guest room, regretting again the tactical error of putting guests so close to the kitchen – it was not done with her mother in mind. It’s unlikely that either of the kids will be up for hours yet: Josh was home last night but would have spent half the night on his computer, and Zoe … best not to think about where Zoe was. Her daughter is twenty-three, and although Illy and Russell try to maintain a low hum of under-my-roof authority, they do not police her movements. There is a reflex emotional kickback to any thoughts of her daughter at the moment – especially thoughts of where her daughter goes at night – that Illy tries to smooth away quickly, buffering it with a covering of more reasonable blame: blame the insane Sydney property market, forcing kids to live with their parents well past their sell-by date (God knows Illy couldn’t have done it; she would have gone crazy and killed one of them, or been killed by them). Blame the awful stress of the last few months, the old man’s interminable combative dying: Illy had tried to keep the kids out of it but Zoe had wanted to help. She’d sat at his bedside in the big house and then at the hospice, taking her share of misrecognition and verbal abuse. Illy mustn’t look too closely at the feeling that has tacked itself onto thoughts of her daughter, for fear of what she might find at the crux of it, the feeling’s muddy centre. Zoe has always been a rebel and an envelope-pusher. Until now Illy has been able to take it all in her stride; she wasn’t surprised or alarmed by the veganism, or the women’s circus, or the loudly proclaimed socialism. All week she has been staging defensive apologias in her head: about how she was perfectly prepared for Zoe – for either of her kids – to be gay. Or bi, or whatever. She would have been the model of proud inclusion. But this? How do you begin to include this? Her daughter has wandered out of frame, too far from any identifiable landmarks. What will her family Christmases look like? Who will she put down on government forms? Who will she rely on to come home to her?
It has been a week of difficult conversations: wrangling the bureaucracy of death, all the hospice forms and then the servile upselling of the funeral home people; negotiating her mother’s fragile angry grief (did she love the old man after all?); then Josh and his wacky scheme to throw away his degree and his future for some maths-related idea about the internet. Beneath all these difficult conversations the surprise one she had with Zoe – four days ago now? five? – churns with a different kind of unpleasantness. Zoe had helped out a lot with the funeral yesterday, they cooperated civilly in the shopping and the driving and all the logistics, and afterwards Illy was just beginning to feel that the conversation might be sinking into the mulch of their relationship – pat it down, move on and hope the whole thing passes – when Zoe brought it up again. At least, Illy thinks she did: in the kitchen after everyone went home, the two of them loading the dishwasher and discussing the awkward evasions that the funeral director used in Nagypapa’s eulogy (a strong personality was how he translated their stories about the old man). Zoe said, ‘I hate it that everyone has started glossing over what he was really like. I don’t think even he would have wanted it like that.’ And then, straightening up and fac
ing her mother over the row of plates, ‘I think it’s much better to be open and honest, don’t you?’ She was looking at Illy with her eyebrows slightly raised, and the previous conversation rose up between them, Illy getting a vivid mental flash of the woman with all the tattoos – Sal. Her daughter’s ‘primary’. The bureaucratic entrenchment of this word, the ease with which her daughter deployed it (how many ‘secondaries’ were there? Thirdlies?) shocked her as much as anything. Sure that she was blushing, she turned away from the naked appeal on Zoe’s face and kept loading dishes in silence. Nothing else was said.
The kitchen now is quiet and clean – no detritus left from all the people who were milling in here yesterday, just a fridge full of leftovers. The time after a funeral is supposed to be a danger period, grief rushing in to fill the void, but Illy has been waiting for this day, this calm, for months. Maybe even years, depending from when you date the old man’s decline. Now if she can just get Eszter into safe harbour. The brochure, glowing like a small beacon of sanity where she left it on her mother’s bed. But then the Hungarian notebook looms up, and she is not ready to think about her mother’s checkmate and its implications. She puts coffee on the stove and goes to the front door for the papers.