by Miriam Sved
Something touches Josh’s arm and he gives a violent twitch. Nagymama is looking up at him, her face pinched with concern; he must look stricken. He tries to smile at her and refocuses on the front of the room so she will stop looking at him.
Sol Milos, that treacherous bastard, is wrapping things up. He asks, somewhat reluctantly it seems, if there are any audience questions. Hands prickle up around the room and Josh sinks down in his seat as one then another boring question is asked. The phone screen is still on his lap, open to the terrible page. Someone asks how close Kalmar thinks a proof of his Ramsey theory conjecture is. Kalmar says off-handedly that it will be a race against the clock of his death; the audience laughs uncomfortably. Josh hates them all, he doesn’t want to be here in this room full of old sycophants anymore. He will just leave; he will walk the empty halls of the maths department until it is time to take Nagymama home. He is leaning towards her to whisper some excuse and make his escape when Sol Milos calls on an audience question from the other side of the room and there is a familiar voice.
‘I hope you don’t mind a personal question.’ It is Max. ‘I’ve heard that a lot of your friends from uni were mathematicians too. I was wondering if you’ve kept in touch with them or if you still work with any of them.’
What is he doing?
Pali Kalmar’s gaze wanders around the room seeking the questioner. ‘Sometimes, yes,’ he says. ‘When I was young I have the best friends I think of anyone. I still do the work with any of them when I can. But a lot of these ones have died in the war.’
He does not sound particularly sad but Sol Milos sends a hostile look towards Max. ‘I’m afraid we’ll have to wrap this up,’ he says. ‘We’ll stay for a few minutes if anyone wants to have a short word with our guest or say thank you in person.’
He asks for a round of applause and the room gives a long, rousing one. Josh notices that his left leg is asleep. Now that it is over he has lost the will to leave the room, or to do anything much. He feels enervated by his disappointment and melded to his uncomfortable chair. Perhaps this is depression. Around them people are standing up, bracing backs against hands and stretching limbs. He supposes that Nagymama will want to go and speak to Pali Kalmar, and that this is the part of the event that he has been brought for. He doesn’t know if he can face it: no longer the potential inheritor of Pali Kalmar’s mathematical legacy, only a pretender and a supplicant. He has nothing to offer the great man.
But Nagymama doesn’t move. The people around them begin a purposeful shuffling towards the seminar table and Nagymama sits still, her usually bent body very straight, eyes focused on the front of the room as though Pali is still speaking. Josh looks at her with a distant kind of curiosity. ‘Do you want to go and see him?’ he asks, and when she doesn’t respond or move her eyes, ‘Nagymama?’
‘Just a minute, darling.’ Her focus doesn’t change; her voice sounds reedy. Josh notices that her breathing is shallow, coming in little sips of air.
‘Okay, Nagymama.’ He feels a warm rush of sympathy that takes him momentarily, gratefully, out of his own misery. ‘No hurry.’
The two of them sit quietly watching the front of the room. They can no longer see Pali Kalmar through the bustle of bodies crowding around him. It is peaceful and Josh feels no wish to break the surface of this stillness, which is inside as well as outside, a silence that has fallen over the usually beating rhythm of his psyche: his drive to move, strive, prove himself. He wonders abstractly if this stillness is how other people live. A presence looms on his right and someone sits in the vacated chair there. Max.
‘Hi,’ Max says, addressing them both but pointing his winning, many-toothed smile at Nagymama. Josh has seen him deploy this smile to disarm surly university administrators, groups of angry protestors, Jasmine. Now Max leans over him and proffers a hand towards Nagymama. ‘Max Drishane,’ he says. ‘I’m a friend of Josh’s, from uni.’
The hand hovers for a few moments while Nagymama turns her slow attention onto Max, blinking at the hand as though she has arrived at it from a long journey. Eventually, fleetingly, she places her own hand into it. ‘Hello,’ she says.
Josh feels a stirring of his watchful anxiety. Nagymama, he knows, would usually be extremely interested in meeting any of his friends, too interested: it is a collision of worlds that Josh has never had any intention of allowing. But Nagymama seems to have vacated the premises; she shows none of her customary pushy curiosity and drops Max’s hand after a brief moment.
Max seems undeterred. ‘I hope you don’t mind me joining you.’ A collusive tone and another flash of the winning smile. ‘Josh has told me a little about his family. I’m really interested in the Jewish diaspora.’ Josh blinks stupidly: he is? Max, keeping Nagymama at the centre of his sharp focus, gives a nano-quick wink at Josh, his face smoothing out again so seamlessly that Josh wonders if he imagined it. ‘My grandmother’s family came here from Japan,’ he goes on, ‘so I have some idea what you guys must have faced as immigrants. It was before the Second World War, wasn’t it?’
Nagymama has not diverted her attention from the front of the room, eyes still fixed on the table where Pali is surrounded by a loose conglomeration of people, mathematical pilgrims jostling politely for his attention. For a few moments Josh thinks Nagymama hasn’t heard Max’s question, or that she will ignore it, but then she gives a little shake of her head. ‘We are here in 1952, from America.’
‘Oh, so you guys went to America from Europe,’ Max says, as though he has never heard anything so interesting. ‘It must have been an amazing time to be there. New Jersey, wasn’t it? Princeton.’
Josh registers that Max has given the lie to his pretence of not knowing the family’s migration route, but Nagymama doesn’t seem to mind.
‘Yes,’ she says, looking at Max properly for the first time, her attention diverted from Pali Kalmar. ‘We are in Princeton first, for my husband’s fellowship at the institute there. After this we move to a neighbourhood in Brooklyn where he finds work.’
‘Ah.’ Max is nodding slowly, ponderously. ‘Your husband.’
A prickle of apprehension makes its way up Josh’s neck.
‘And you and your husband were both friends with Pali Kalmar’ – he nods towards the front of the room – ‘before you left Hungary?’
Nagymama wobbles her head back and forth in a way that could be construed as a nod or a shake. ‘I am friends with Pali before the war. Not my husband.’
Josh is definitely interested now, able to push away from his own misery to take stock of what Max is doing.
‘Ah,’ Max says again, knowingly. ‘It must have been difficult for your husband. With Kalmar being so brilliant.’ The implications of this statement hang in the air between them. Josh looks curiously at Nagymama, to see if she will understand and how she will take it.
Eszter shakes her head. ‘No,’ she says decisively. ‘Not that they are not friends because of this. My husband did not know Pali Kalmar, they met only once.’
‘Really?’ says Josh, surprised. He had thought – although he wouldn’t have been able to say where the idea came from – that his grandparents and Pali Kalmar were all in the same group together. Some kind of study group.
‘No, darling,’ Nagymama says, looking from Josh to Max, addressing them both. ‘Pali and me and all the others, we are just students. Your Nagypapa was older and he has a job. He was professor of mathematics at the university in Vienna.’
Josh, disarmed, sits in silence, letting this sink in, and Max also seems to be thrown off his interrogation: they are both quiet long enough for Nagymama to lever herself up and begin to move past them. ‘Excuse me,’ she says. ‘I think I will speak to Pali now.’
Josh, lost in thought about his grandfather – his official grandfather, the one that he had hoped to replace with Pali Kalmar – lets her shuffle past his legs and absently watches her slow progres
s down the aisle. A professor of mathematics in Vienna. So much more impressive than anything that seemed viable from the surly, snarling old man Nagypapa became. Josh wonders if that man, the young and impressive one, would have been worth knowing. Still watching Nagymama with that sense of detachment, knowing that he should follow her and play his part in the reunion, knowing also that he should speak to Max and re-establish his foothold in the world of the young, he feels a plunge of despairing fellow feeling with that man: the wrong grandfather, the one who didn’t become famous. He worked as a foreman in car plants and then as an engineer on construction projects and aged into a bitter contrarian bastard. And with this new sense of identification pressing down, threatening to crush him, Josh casts around and can only think of one person he would like to speak to, who might make him feel better.
He reaches into his pocket for the phone and goes to the little green icon. Bethany. She is still in his favourites list. Holding the phone, he gets up and edges past Max’s legs and walks quickly towards the door of the seminar room, suddenly desperate to hear her voice and tell her what happened – tell her about Harry Kesten, the death of all his hopes, the realisation that he is aligned with the wrong grandfather, the loser one – knowing that as soon as he hears Bethany’s voice something that is precariously held together in his chest will break apart and he will cry. This humiliation actually feels good in anticipation, strafing and cleansing. Let him be debased in front of Bethany, which he realises now is the worst possible fate, worse than the death of his work and his hopes, worse than Max knowing the truth about his weirdness and Jasmine denying him her beauty and flicking him away like a bug. Let him be exposed as a failure and a fraud before Bethany. He will travel through that ordeal and see what manner of Josh emerges.
He leaves the seminar room and stands in the corridor, leaning against the wall. His finger is on the phone icon and his eyes are already prickling at the corners when a name and an image, not Bethany, flash up on the screen and the thing buzzes at him. It is disorientating and confusing and yet strangely perfect. This image that is the best F.U. the universe could offer, a humiliation even worse than Bethany. It’s his mother calling.
It doesn’t even occur to him that he could dink her. He answers the phone and puts it to his ear. ‘Hi, Mum,’ he says flatly.
‘Josh?’ she says. ‘Josh is that you?’ She sounds high-pitched and querulous, speaking slightly too loudly. Who else would it be?
‘Josh, I need you to come down to the police station in the city,’ she says. ‘Zoe and I have been arrested.’ And the words, like everything else today, make no sense at all.
∴
Budapest, 1938
I received my first letter from the professor on the following Wednesday, about ten days after Pali and I had travelled to Vienna. I know that it was a Wednesday because our regular meeting at the statue was scheduled for the following day, and I was nervous about it. Ildiko and I had not spoken all week.
‘My dear Eszter,’ the professor’s letter started. ‘Please allow me to say first how charmed I was to meet you, and to preface what follows with a hope that you can forgive my forwardness on the basis that I have thought of little else in the proceeding interval.’
I had to read this first sentence many times before I could take it in, and then I checked and rechecked the sender information on the envelope. Professor Voigt (András, as he asked me to think of him later in the letter), with his uninterested gaze and casual anti-Semitism, was addressing me romantically.
After this florid beginning the letter did not dwell on the professor’s debilitating preoccupation with my charms, but moved quickly into a detailed description of his collegiate relationships with a number of influential overseas scholars. One in particular, a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, had apparently all but offered a visiting fellowship. ‘I need only supply him with research interests that will convince his colleagues. And there is also the question of finding the necessary sponsors to attain an American visa. I am told that family members are preferable.’
I laughed aloud after I read that, the professor’s purpose falling into place. Such flowery beginnings, when what he really wanted was a bureaucratic arrangement. The American relations of whom I had spoken so unthinkingly during the meeting in his office. You, in short.
He continued at some length about the opportunities that would open to him in America, a dazzling reception awaiting him (and, I suppose I was to imagine, his bride) among the nation’s elite. He did not make any explicit propositions, but his purpose was quite clear. He wrote, ‘I understand that your position in Hungary grows increasingly tenuous, as in Vienna, and that many of your people are seeking sanctuary in new lives elsewhere.’ He was proposing a marriage of convenience.
After I had indulged some laughter about it, and put the letter away in my desk drawer and resolved not to think of it again, and then retrieved and reread it without any laughter, and paced the length of my room holding on to it – after I had done all this and somewhat recovered from the initial shock, the first person I wanted to show it to was Ildiko. I wanted her to laugh about it with me, and for us to exclaim together about the nerve of this lofty man, and for the threatening stink of the situation to be removed through Ildiko’s mockery, the way that she could always dismantle Snakeman’s terrors. At that point I hadn’t for one moment considered his proposition with any seriousness.
But Ildiko and I were not then on laughing terms, after the way we had left each other on the day when she learned of my betrayal and I learned of all her planning. I no longer felt that I quite knew her, not with the kind of intimacy I had always assumed before. It was an awful, bereaved feeling. So I did not take the letter to Ildiko. Instead I went to Tibor.
It was not unusual for me to call at Tibor’s house in the Castle District, although I had fallen out of the habit in recent months, I suppose in tandem with the growth of my Pali problem. There had been a time when I was almost part of the household, visiting with Tibor’s mother and sister as much as with him. The way the Weisz family welcomed me into their circle was a source of great joy, and then of some shame.
I took the funicular up the hill. That ascent always felt slightly ritualistic to me, leaving the human bustle and noise of the city behind and being cleansed by the elevation. It has occurred to me that the opposite was probably true for Tibor: I know he felt bad about living in such lofty comfort, removed from and overlooking the mass of the people. Like the rest of us he was in no position to leave his parents’ home, and they would have objected strenuously had he tried, but I wonder how much of his self-renunciation and political commitment was a product of this guilt.
The Weisz family villa was at the eastern side of the Castle District. The neighbourhood around the villa felt, as always, somewhat forbidding or even unfriendly: silent and stately houses set back from the road, plunging walled streets where even the birdsong seemed hushed. But the house owned by Tibor’s family – just as dignified as the rest, its front facade covered by creepers – broke open to reveal an internal life that was warm and slightly raucous. Tibor’s younger sister Erzsébet opened the front door to me, holding on to the collar of George, the family’s slobbery Alsatian.
‘Eszti!’ she said, and George was released to give me some hearty sniffs while Erzsébet hugged me. She stepped back and looked at me reproachfully. ‘It has been forever since you visited us. I have so many things to tell you about what Snakeman has done to me and my friend Vera during his horrible calculus classes.’
I laughed, only slightly ashamed to have passed the derision for Dr Antal on to a new generation of girls. Erzsébet started at the gymnasium the same year that Ildiko and I left, and she liked to tell me all the gossip.
‘Mama is out at the market,’ she went on as I followed her and George into the house. ‘She will be sorry to have missed you. But I suppose you are here to talk about marriage and mathematics w
ith my boring brother.’
‘I do have something particular to speak to Tibor about, but I promise that afterwards I will find you and be completely horrified about all the dreadful things Dr Antal has done.’
‘Good.’ She led me into the sitting room – not, I noted, the big stone-walled kitchen at the back of the house which was where the family congregated. I had made myself scarce for too long and been demoted from the status of honorary family member to that of visitor. Of course this was as it should be, given my situation, my determination to break off the engagement with Tibor. But still I felt a moment of wistfulness.
‘Wait here,’ Erzsébet said, gesturing towards the handsome velvet sofa, ‘and I will fetch the prince.’
Only a sister could have treated Tibor’s dignity so lightly. I had often marvelled at their differences of temperament.
I waited in the sitting room for a few minutes, reaching into my satchel for the letter and fiddling with a corner of the envelope. I looked at the professor’s handwriting on the front: it was very upright but not entirely neat, there were blotches of ink here and there as if he had been writing with a leaky pen. My dear Eszter. My face flushed with embarrassment and something like anger to think about the man’s presumption. It no longer seemed at all funny.
Tibor was suddenly in the room with me, looking somewhat flushed himself, uncharacteristically crumpled in shirtsleeves. I wondered with surprise if I had caught him napping.
‘I’m sorry to barge in like this.’ I felt awkward standing there with him, aware as always of the amount of space between our bodies, unsure whether it was too little or too much.
He said, ‘I am glad you came.’