A Universe of Sufficient Size

by Miriam Sved

  Flipping back to the writing, she finds her mother narrating a whole scene about her school days, the first time she and Ildiko met. This is such a complicated joy to Illy, to read about her mother as a schoolgirl; her mother and Ildiko standing up to their prick of a teacher, who sounds like a nascent child molester. Illy actually laughs out loud when the girls have a giggling fit in front of the teacher. Eszter as a spirited and insecure teenager. She feels a new kind of closeness to her, a new angle of connection, and a swelling pride as if Eszter were one of her children.

  The school scene ends too quickly and they are back at the statue, Ildiko talking about the planned trip to Vienna, which makes Illy’s pulse rise a notch: it is terrifying, troubling, to read about her mother preparing for Vienna. When the account skips forward to the day of the trip she feels a kind of drag on her reading; more and more of the Hungarian nouns are eluding her and she wonders where in the house her old Hungarian–English dictionary might be.

  Of course, with the trip there is a lot of dwelling on the strange boy her mother was in love with: Pali Kalmar. Illy finds herself turning the name over in her mind. Has she heard it somewhere before? Perhaps this is someone her mother has mentioned to her, a thread of identification that Illy might be able to pull towards her older, recognisable version of Eszter. But she can’t think when the name might have come up. Eszter has never talked about any of these connections from her early life, never talked about anything much of what she left behind in Hungary, and Illy, with the tense reticence she recognised when she started reading stories and theory about ‘trauma descendants’, never pushed her to share anything. She knew only that Eszter’s parents and most of her old life were killed in the war. It was Illy’s role to embody a future for her mother to move into, never to pull her back into the past.

  Pali Kalmar.

  Aware that she is probably just procrastinating out of the vague fear of continuing into the Vienna part of the narrative, Illy leaves the notebook on her bed and goes into the living room where her laptop is, attuned as she passes Eszter’s door to the silence behind it. She sits on the sofa with the laptop and goes to Google: Pali Kalmar. It is only a hunch; she is not really expecting to find much on what must be a pretty common Hungarian name, but to her surprise the first page, the first many pages, are about one person who can only be the Pali from her mother’s early life. Pali Kalmar (mathematics, 20th century), the Wikipedia entry says, and there is a series of photos across the top of the search engine page that are like time-lapse illustrations of the character she has just been reading about: a sinewy boy with intense eyes and a big nose turning into a bespectacled old man, all crags and furrows but still dwarfed by the wild mess of his hair; hair that makes Illy think of Josh. She stares at one of the young photos, trying to reconcile it: this was a boy her mother loved. Eszter considered throwing everything in for him, to devote herself to him. Words from the notebook hover in Illy’s mind: I felt connected to Pali, and through him connected to some larger truth.

  She did not throw everything in for him, clearly. Illy supposes she should be grateful, since that would have ruled out the conditions for her own existence, and her children’s. But looking at the pictures of Pali Kalmar, with her mother’s avid younger voice in her head, she feels a plunge of something like disappointment, or anticlimax. Why? She would like to confront her mother with this question: why give up on something she felt so strongly?

  There might be answers in the notebook, for which she will need to brace herself and read on into the Vienna trip. Not feeling ready, she distracts herself by clicking on one of the links about Pali, a page about his life and work: prominent mathematical polymath of the twentieth century, ground-breaking work in fields including number theory, mathematical analysis and graph theory, lots of things about early computers and some big breakthrough to do with prime numbers. She keeps scanning, looking for details about his personal life, but all that page, all any of the pages give her is bloody maths. Graphs and squiggles and meaningless solutions to this or that meaningless problem. She may as well be reading another language.

  Illy is about to give up and is steeling herself to go back to the notebook – or perhaps she can justify not ploughing ahead with the trip to Vienna now, perhaps she can take what she has read and let it settle for today – when something on the page she has been scrolling down catches her eye. One of the maths bits. She stops and stares at it, a small conglomeration of dots and shapes. A couple of squares with points floating outside their borders; a triangle with two points in the middle. She reads: Extremal problems in elementary geometry. Ramsey theory. Any set of five points in a plane in general position. A little tremor runs up Illy’s back and becomes a tingle in her scalp.

  She goes to the bedroom and gets the notebook, brings it back to the living room and flips through to find Ildiko’s ‘exciting new problem’. Looks from the drawings in the notebook to the page online about Pali Kalmar, from the book to the screen and back again.

  This is not right. The upper limit problem was Ildiko’s work, and also Eszter’s. Her mother’s work. Maybe Illy has found it: the big mystery that Eszter is leading her towards. Did Pali Kalmar steal the girls’ idea? It might explain why she left him behind. There is a flash of pride in the thought of taking this to Eszter – I found it, Mama, I worked it out – along with a deeper current of anger and defensiveness on behalf of her mother. How dare he? Perhaps Eszter and Ildiko should have been famous.

  But there are still all the unanswered questions remaining about her father, still a sense of mystery shrouding everything. She will have to keep reading in the hope of answers, and with this thought she feels a fresh jolt of simple irritation with Eszter – her silence and her manipulativeness – just as she hears the door of the guest room open and the real, present day Eszter shuffling out towards the kitchen. Illy checks the time on the laptop: later than she thought, almost five-thirty. Eszter will be getting jittery about dinner and will ferret around in the kitchen, conveying the threat that she will cook something herself, which will silently compel Illy to start cooking. The whole passive-aggressive production of her mother, of life with her mother, suddenly weighs down on her. Still sitting on the couch with the laptop open in front of her, Illy thinks, Fuck it. And then, Let’s make something happen here. She tucks the notebook under her arm and carries the laptop towards the kitchen, open on the page with the constellation of dots.

  As expected, Eszter has begun a survey of supplies. She has both the fridge and the pantry open and has removed various staples from each: milk, rice, kidney beans, many bottles of spices, and she is delving in the cupboard for more. It is Illy’s role to jump in and corral this operation before it passes a point of no return. Instead she sits down at the kitchen table without saying anything to her mother, angling the laptop so Eszter will see it when she turns around, and she enlarges the page: Extremal problems in elementary geometry, the patterns of dots and shapes at the centre of the screen, and the loose sheets of dots beside it.

  ‘Mama?’ she says, shaky but determined.

  She watches her mother’s face when she turns from the pantry: Eszter registers the screen, the page about Pali Kalmar, Illy is sure of it. Now, she wills. Let’s have an honest conversation now. There is a moment – more than a moment – with Eszter looking from the screen to the notebook and her whole body seeming to droop even closer to the ground than her normal exaggerated stoop, and Illy thinks her mother is ready: she will tell her about Pali, about what happened, about the maths. Something real.

  But all Eszter says is, ‘I thought you might like to know about her.’

  Illy looks at her blankly.

  ‘My best friend,’ she says. And when Illy goes to speak, to ask for something more, Eszter holds out her palm, an unanswerable barrier. ‘Finish reading, darling,’ she says. ‘I cannot tell it all until you finish the book.’

  She gives a nod of cryptic finality and shu
ffles out of the kitchen towards her bedroom. Illy is left at the table with her mother’s dinner plans arrayed on the counter and the notebook open in front of her, outflanked again.

  ∴

  Budapest, 1938

  It was three days between the trip to Vienna and our Thursday meeting at the statue. In that time I let myself drift, taking no action. On the night of Vienna I had gone to bed with a bursting sense of possibility filling my mind, everything in the world coloured by the new intimacy I felt with Pali, acutely alive with the shocks of the day.

  By the time I woke up the next morning the excitement was replaced by shame: a knotty ravel of it filling my chest. Was I really thinking to break off my engagement with Tibor? I felt that I had betrayed him, but in the light of day I also felt silly for the tectonic shifting of the world I had read into a look, just one look and a few minutes of quiet work in an empty train carriage. What if I had imagined the intensity in Pali’s gaze? What could I say to Tibor? What could I tell my mother?

  And I had betrayed Ildiko. I tried at first to convince myself that it was not a large betrayal: she would have showed her work to the others eventually; she respected Pali’s opinion, his mind, as much as the rest of us. She would be glad if he made any headway on the work. But then I thought of her beneath the statue when she’d offered me the upper limit problem, looking up at me over the constellations, her face open with excitement. ‘Let’s work on this together, just you and me.’ She had made me that offering, and I had used it as some kind of inducement for Pali. My skin crawled with shame.

  And the trip itself. What could I possibly tell the others about the professor, in whom we had put all our hope? When I thought about the day I could only see his blank, uninterested face and feel again my own cowardice and ineptitude in the situation. Nothing terrible had happened to us, but I had been overcome in the occupied city by what I now saw was a weak and feminine hysteria. I resolved to be rational and composed when I had to face the others. But I watched our meeting approach with growing dread, and when Thursday afternoon came I prevaricated over getting ready, paying unusual attention to my clothes and hair so that I was running late and was the last to arrive at the statue.

  I could see them all there as I walked across the park: Pali reclined on the ground looking up at the others, one of his long legs raised in a peak. They all looked so casual, so at ease. I felt a strong urge to turn and hurry home, but Levi had noticed my approach.

  ‘Eszti!’ he called, and the others looked up and shifted to make room for me on the bench. Whatever they had been speaking of ceased. There was an expectant hush as I sat down and busied myself with my satchel, removing workbook and pencil, wishing this was a normal meeting and we were only going to discuss the latest Pólya problem. I found it difficult even to look in Pali’s direction.

  Levi broke the silence. ‘Well, Eszti,’ he said. ‘Tell us everything about Vienna.’

  I looked around at them, and forced myself to look directly at Pali. There was no apparent self-consciousness in his gaze; he was staring at me as avidly as the other three, as though he had not been in Vienna himself and was only waiting for me to describe the day and give it form. Had I imagined the whole thing, the look that passed between us in the train carriage and our new intimacy over the work? A pulsing warmth spread from my face down my neck.

  I tried to compose myself. It was why I had been sent to Vienna, after all: to document and report back to the others. And to keep Pali out of trouble. That, at least, had been partly managed – he had not tried to lecture the German troops on prime intervals.

  ‘Well, Pali at least did not try to lecture the Wehrmacht on prime intervals,’ I said aloud, and Pali responded with his barking laugh: ‘Ha.’

  ‘But what happened in the meeting with Professor Voigt?’ Tibor asked.

  So I could not escape it. The difficulty, to begin with, was in conveying the failure of our meeting with Pali right there in front of me. How could I tell them, tell him, about the professor’s politely glazed face when Pali was expounding on his number theory, the ceaseless drumming of his fingers on the desk? About the distinct sense I’d had that the professor was humouring a precocious but ultimately tedious child?

  I tried at first to speak in generalities, telling them that the professor had listened to and seemed quite interested in one or two of Pali’s projects. This might have sufficed were it not for Pali himself, who said, ‘I am sorry, now, that I did not speak more about the probabilistic approach. I think that it will be an important element of the PNT proof.’

  The others turned to look at him, and Ildiko said, ‘You told Professor Voigt about your sieve theory for the prime numbers?’

  Pali nodded, and levered himself dextrously to his feet, his legs thin and rubbery. ‘Did you know,’ he said, ‘that Dirichlet told Gauss of the logarithmic integral approximation? He scribbled it on a copy of the proof and mailed it to him.’

  Ildiko turned back to me. ‘But what did the professor say? How did he respond?’

  I did not look directly at her when I answered. ‘He said it sounded like a promising approach.’

  ‘Eszti, you are coy,’ Pali said, and addressed himself to the empty courtyard with mock grandiosity. ‘He said, Young man, you will turn us all out of our jobs at this rate. Or something of that sort. It was hyperbole, of course. I wonder, could he come to Budapest and attend the Ortvay lectures? I would like to hear about the developments in theoretical physics. I do think we might be overdoing it with this embargo on the university.’

  ‘It is not our embargo,’ Ildiko said, sounding impatient, ‘it is their embargo on us. But what happened after you told Professor Voigt about your primes theory? Did he seem interested? Will he help you to publish what you have?’ She was looking at me, not Pali, who had started to walk in circles around the statue.

  ‘He was quite busy,’ I said helplessly. ‘He had a graduate student coming to see him so he couldn’t spend much time with us.’

  ‘But he must have given some indication,’ she persisted. ‘It is such a different approach to anything tried before. I assume he was familiar with the sieve, but had he considered combining it with Riemann?’

  It is not often that I wish Ildiko less sharp and determined. ‘I can’t remember any more details of what he said.’ And in a sudden flash of irritation: ‘I think everything else was jolted from my mind by what we saw of the city after the meeting, on our way back to the station.’

  So much for my resolution to present the events of the day with more calmness and less hysteria than I had confronted them. The others positively fell on me in a clamour to know what had happened, what had we seen, and I found myself elaborating on the sense of threat, the ominous weight of those occupied streets: terrifyingly large images of the little psychopath towering over us, and the horrible scene we witnessed, the crowd of onlookers jeering at those poor people scrubbing the ground – all of it as though it were something from a horror movie and Pali and I the hapless protagonists. I was somewhat ashamed of myself as I spoke, but not enough to counter the enthusiastic responses of Levi and Tibor, both of whom seemed eager to hear about catastrophe, although in different ways. ‘How dreadful,’ Levi kept saying with hand-wringing theatricality, his face bright with interest. He needled me for details about the soldiers. Were they all as tall and fair as in the propaganda reels? Did I see any of them use the infamous Polizei pistols?

  Tibor was more considered, but I could see that in his own way he was just as wrapped up in my narrative. He wanted to know more about the people who had been made to scrub the streets. Were they old or young? Was it some particular punishment meted out by the Germans or just routine humiliation? How did the people on the ground tolerate it – did I see any sign of resistance? And the crowd watching on: were they all enthusiastic witnesses to the display of power or did any of them break rank to defend their countrymen?

  I a
nswered his questions as well as I could. Thinking again about that scene, I was overcome by the sense of a fracturing of reality, and I tried to convey it to Tibor: how the whole thing had seemed both unreal and like a manifestation of some deeper truth about the world that I had suspected before without properly looking at it. He nodded earnestly and said, ‘Our Hashomer Hatzair group needs to hear about just these kinds of details, the truth of what life is like under Nazi occupation. You are what we need right now, Eszter, for I think that the Anschluss is becoming an accepted thing and resistance to Hitler is waning. Complacency is our worst enemy. There is a meeting tomorrow night – do you think you could come and describe what you have seen? It will just be a small group at my house and there is not much risk of a raid.’

  I would have agreed – reluctantly, in my cowardice, but I was eager to placate Tibor, towards whom I felt such guilty confusion. But just then Ildiko jumped in. ‘She can’t,’ she said to Tibor. And to me, ‘Remember, Eszti, tomorrow night we’re finally working on that dress pattern I showed you last week.’ Her eyes steady on my face, making sure I understood. We had agreed to work on the new problem the following evening.

  Again, I didn’t have time to respond: Tibor started to say something about the importance of the Hatzair meeting and I think it would have become an argument, but Pali, who had been drifting quietly around the statue, came to a stop in front of Ildiko and gave a little bow from the waist. ‘Oh, Ildi,’ he said. ‘I have been meaning to offer you my compliments on your marvellous upper limit problem. Eszti and I did some work on it in the train, and once I was home I turned to the generalisation. I don’t think the proof can be far away. It may divert me from the primes for a week.’

  Ildiko stared at him, expressionless.

  ‘Ildi,’ I said.

  She didn’t look at me. ‘You have a generalisation?’ Her voice sounded calm, almost distant.