by Miriam Sved
The potatoes are finally done. She puts Illy down – the child still safely enthralled by the whisk – and quickly scallops and layers the potatoes with the cabbage and sour cream. ‘Dinner will be ready in ten minutes,’ she says to András, who doesn’t look up or seem to register that she has spoken. These silences he sometimes lapses into are unnerving but peaceful.
Once the meal is ready she straps Illy back into her high chair and gives her a little bowl of the creamy potatoes, which the baby immediately goes about removing from the bowl and smearing carefully into a lumpy paste on the tray. Then she sits at her own dinner, which, as she often finds after the hot work of cooking, is slightly nauseating, but she starts to eat systematically, mechanically, to take advantage of the small window while the baby is occupied. András picks up his fork. She sees him raise his head and look directly at her.
‘He is coming,’ he says. ‘He is coming here, to America.’
‘Who?’ She is reaching towards the baby, who is holding a lump of potato threateningly in her chubby fist. ‘Give that to me. No throwing, no.’
‘Pali Kalmar,’ says András.
Distracted by the baby’s mischief, it takes her full seconds to feel the impact of the name. Such a fundamentally familiar name: it could float her back through time into a different life, one in which she had heard it said aloud; she herself had said it aloud every day, maybe with irritation or hurt or even anger, but never as something other than an immovable signpost in a world that belonged to her.
Illy throws the fistful of potato over the side of the chair and laughs delightedly as it splatters on the linoleum floor.
She looks from the baby to her husband and registers now, too late, the fixedness of his gaze, his silence since he arrived home no longer a simple domestic void but the dangerous emptiness of static air, and she knows the storm is coming.
‘I will put the child in bed,’ she says firmly, pleased that her voice doesn’t waver. She needs to try to protect Illy from whatever scene is about to happen, although she knows also that it is futile: there is not enough buffer between the bedroom and the kitchen in the small apartment. She extracts a soggy lump of potato from the baby’s fist and lifts her up out of the high chair, which Illy, not finished with her potato project, resists with a little howl and a stiffening of her body. ‘Time for bed,’ she says.
András stands and shadows her as she carries the resistant child to the bedroom.
‘Don’t you want to know?’ he says, face already reddening. ‘Or is it that you already know? Have you already contacted him?’
‘Of course not,’ she says, trying to control a rising panic at the need to get this right: to be dismissive but not too dismissive, to head off András’s anger without stepping on any landmines. ‘I haven’t seen him since before,’ she says. ‘I thought he was still at Cambridge.’ To the extent that she lets herself think about Pali at all, the last remnant of her old life.
András grunts. ‘He is. But he has received another fellowship from the damned institute; he will be there working with all their beloved Jews soon. Or maybe he is already there – what do I know about it? Only a few hours away, maybe you two have already got together to talk about old times and laugh at stupid foolish old András.’
She feels, dangerously, almost as though she could start laughing, it is all so absurd; there is a ballooning hysteria in her chest and if she lets it burst it could smear her insides all over the small apartment and the baby and András. That he could think she might want anything to do with Pali Kalmar. Just the name is like a scalpel to the delicate crust of forgetting that covers her central, vulnerable self. She would be happy never to see him again, never think of him again.
András has positioned himself behind the baby’s cot, holding on to its side with a white-knuckled grip as though the cot is keeping him anchored. Or as if he might pick up the rickety thing and hurl it.
‘Be reasonable, András,’ she says, trying to keep her voice low and calm. ‘Why would I want to see Pali Kalmar – or anyone who knows what we did?’ This is a dangerous path, landmines thicker all around it than in any other space of their marriage. But she feels worn down, unable to see a way through this fight that doesn’t touch on the truth. And anyway, her vigilance is useless; she cannot shield herself or her daughter from this man she has shackled them both to.
‘What we did?’ he says, shouting now, rattling the edge of the cot much like Illy when she is having a tantrum, and as if on cue the baby on her hip starts to shriek. ‘What you did. Oh, I was a fool, a stupid idiot. I was lost the moment I met you and your Jew friends. I should expose you, tell everyone how you tricked me into it. And how lovely it all turns out, Pali Kalmar with his Wolf Prize and the Americans begging him to come back.’ Putting on a high, mincing voice, ‘Oh please, Jewboy genius, please come. Even though you are a twitching freak, all the money and prizes are yours. And for me it is good enough to go on working in a car factory. This idiot country.’
The baby is pink-faced and has stiffened against her with apoplectic unhappiness. She thinks suddenly, absurdly, of the pages of geometric patterns folded at the back of her underwear drawer: she thinks of them with longing, and a constriction in her chest as though she is marooned in the wrong habitat, as though the air is unbreathable here in the small bedroom with her vengeful husband and her daughter. She thinks of a quiet room, a table, pencil and paper.
‘Okay, András,’ she says. ‘All right.’
Illy lets out a volley of hiccuping sobs, and she puts her down on the ground, where the baby lies face down in abject misery.
She says, ‘We should go to Australia.’
Strange how this moment, now it is here, was always here: she can see that they have been travelling towards it since András first mentioned an academic job some old colleague from Europe could secure for him in Sydney. She has only been distracting herself from its approach.
‘If your friend can get us permits, we could try to leave before the American semester starts, before he gets here.’ Feeling a nauseous plunging sensation even as she says it, related to those first months in America, when the horrors of the voyage were still fresh inside her and she knew not one single person, not one name in the whole country, and the alien breadth of the sky was like an assault.
Perhaps this time will be different. She is a different person now: more pragmatic, more accepting; at least she thinks so. And Illy will be too young to remember the upheaval.
András has calmed down instantly. He is still standing awkwardly beside the cot, but the vice-grip of his fingers on its side has loosened and he suddenly looks foolish rather than threatening: ruffled and red-faced, breathing in little puffs.
‘My friend will arrange everything,’ he says in a voice that is almost gentle. ‘I may be able to get an advance on the salary there to help with our tickets.’
She swallows all the sharp replies she would like to make. More big promises. Big promises from the big important man. No point keeping the fight going. She wonders if this friend in Sydney really does have a job at the university, if András’s old standing as a mathematician might be enough in that obscure place, Australia – which in her mind is a kind of pretend country, a fiction cooked up by powerful people in the real world of Europe – enough to make András respectable there, and respected. With a small, ridiculous lurch she thinks of the Hasidic woman, Ruth, of the fantasy tea and babysitting with which she had so recently been diverting herself. And not only Ruth. She has not got to know many people in Brooklyn: she has hidden her inner self for so long that some skill she used to have for human connections, some requisite faith, has atrophied and fallen away. But now that she is confronted with leaving this place she realises that, almost despite herself, she has made connections – there is Mrs Nowak; there are vendors at the market who know her orders: the old Russian man who gets special Hungarian salami just for her. She doesn
’t know his name but feels suddenly, uncharacteristically tender at the thought of the extra time he must have taken to source that salami when he found out where she was from. She wonders if she will ever be able to get it in Australia.
And the place itself: the soft dapple of plane trees blanketing the streets around Boro Park, where she has walked so often while the baby slept in her stroller; the row houses looking down on either side, dignified in their specific histories, even the ones that are dilapidated. This neighbourhood that she has finally, grudgingly, come to think of as her home.
She lays down the first coating of chilly ash over these images of Brooklyn in her mind, adept at moving on. She has left much more than these thin shreds of a life before.
‘I’m going to take Illy outside,’ she says to András, picking up the baby who is on the inverse side of her tantrum, damp and floppy. ‘She needs some air before she sleeps.’
Actually, it is probably a mistake taking Illy outside, reviving her from this exhausted lassitude in which she could slip easily into her cot and to sleep, but suddenly she is desperate to leave the apartment and be away from András, to exercise some small gesture of agency. The feeling of inevitability about her life claws at her: there is nothing she could have done to avert this course once it was set in motion however many months or years ago. Nothing she can do now. She remembers, in a hypothetical sort of way, the self she used to be who did not feel like this; who had confidence in her own power to exert change. But wasn’t it that very hubris – the idea that she could engineer something meaningful from the chaos of the world, that she could control its spinning orbits – that led to this place, to her exile from everything she knew?
Pali Kalmar. She has tried to avoid encountering any mention of him in his increasing stature: already when András was at the institute, when Pali was at his fellowship at a lesser institution on the west coast where he was nevertheless establishing his fame, there were people of her age and nationality who would home in on her connection with him, asking if she had ever known Pali Kalmar in Budapest. They were hoping to work with him, to publish with him. She would lie and say she had never met him. And once they left Princeton it was not an issue.
She allows herself to think about what it would be like to see him, to talk to him. Once he was an inconvenience to her. Worse than an inconvenience – she had almost hated him for his blithe intrusion into her ordered world: his primacy with Eszter; the way her friends would ignore their own self-interest to protect and help him. Now she can’t believe she could have been so petty and grasping when she had so much. She wonders if he is the same, if he still has the old eccentricities that used to charm Eszter and infuriate her, or whether the years and horrors have whittled him into something else, something unrecognisable. And what might he know of them: of the others, and what happened to them during the war? Has he been able to piece together a more detailed narrative than she? If only she could somehow hold this conversation without being in it as herself; without having to face him.
Holding the limp baby awkwardly in her arms, she skirts past András, who voices no opposition to her leaving but looks for a moment as though he will reach out and try to touch her as she passes. She braces herself, but he only stands there beside the cot and rocks slightly, and then she is out of the room, out of the apartment, negotiating the steep staircase with the heavy baby and trembling watery legs.
There is instant relief in pushing through the building’s front door out into the mellow dusk of the street. These evenings, with their perfect layering of warmth and breeze, are like a blessing for surviving the godless heat of the days. But the simple relief doesn’t last long. The Hasidic woman is still out here, sitting on the third step of the stoop, alone now other than two little girls who play on the sidewalk: long braids and unseasonably long-sleeved blouses, they are playing some jumping game with a pebble they throw onto the cracked flagstones of the pavement. She hovers with the baby on the top step, taking in the scene and unsure what to do. Then the woman, Ruth, turns and sees them, reaches out her arms to the baby and says, ‘Come here, tsigele.’ A Yiddish endearment she recognises. So she walks down and sits beside the woman, and lets the baby brace herself between them. Ruth leans forward to speak to Illy, low and conspiratorial. ‘Hello there, little bubbala.’
She watches the woman speaking to the baby, the ends of her long wig swaying forward, and an impulse wells up and out her mouth. ‘Jó estét kívánok.’ Until now she has not had the nerve to do this – address the woman in Hungarian – but the adrenaline from her fight with András has shaken loose her caution. It is a giving way to her always-present longing for home.
The woman shakes her head slightly, still looking at the baby, and answers in her English–Yiddish hybrid. ‘Good evening, baruch Hashem.’ Perhaps rejecting Hungarian as the betrayers’ tongue – or maybe Ruth is too pious for the common language. There were Jews like this in the small neighbourhood school she attended as a young child. She had casually ignored them: they were not even the same species as her and her educated family.
She reverts back to English. ‘A lovely evening.’
‘Beautiful.’
The baby’s interest in the grown-up women is already exhausted, and she has started manoeuvring herself backwards down the steps towards the older children. Ruth speaks to them in Yiddish and both girls break off their game and kneel down by the baby, who stares up at them, entranced.
‘They will play with her,’ Ruth says, as the bigger girl – perhaps six or seven – picks the baby up awkwardly by her armpits and Illy laughs delightedly. ‘My little froy,’ Ruth says.
‘I have meant to say thank you, properly,’ she says, ‘for your kind offer to look after her sometimes,’ nodding at Illy. The woman makes a guttural noise and waves the thanks away. ‘I would like this very much,’ she pushes on, aware that she has lapsed into a kind of wooden formality that sometimes overtakes her when she is nervous, especially speaking in English. ‘But it is not possible. My husband has an opportunity in Australia and we are to migrate.’
She is testing the idea out, hearing its cadence in the world. Another migration. The word has such a hollow, bereft sound; birds in an empty sky.
‘Mazel tov,’ Ruth says, looking at her in a sharp-eyed way that doesn’t seem to convey much congratulations. Then, after a short pause, ‘I think your husband will not be sorry to leave this part of the world.’
She flushes hot with embarrassment: what this woman must know or suspect of her life and of her husband’s character; either from András himself (God knows if he has let the facade of politeness he presents to the rest of the world lapse, if he has shown their neighbours what he thinks of them), or from the fights trickling down through the brownstone’s vents, which convey sound unreliably: sometimes only in muffled burbles, at other times with the crisp accuracy of a telephone.
‘My husband,’ she says, sitting rigidly on the step and looking straight ahead. ‘I am sorry if he does not show you the best part of himself. He is from a different kind of background, in Austria.’ She makes these excuses almost automatically, resignedly, but she registers a swell of grief for the possibility of a different kind of conversation. They might have become friends, eventually. ‘It is hard for him,’ she goes on. ‘Before the war he was a professor at the university in Vienna. It was a different world.’
‘One with not so many Jews,’ Ruth says: that jarring directness and a small, wry smile. She notices again the sharp gap between the woman’s front teeth. How young it makes her look. It is hard to take offence when Ruth smiles at her. She thinks of Eszter, who could say anything and be forgiven.
‘There were many Jews,’ she says, making an effort to return the smile. ‘András himself is Jewish. At least officially, according to the authorities.’
Ruth nods. ‘I know many like this, back in alte haym. It was harder for them, when they do not know they are klal yis
rael, His chosen.’
There is a burst of laughter from the little girls: Illy is trying to imitate their jumping game but she can’t get her lumpen feet off the ground. She jumps without moving her feet, her whole body lurching upwards, straining for flight.
Ildiko laughs too, and gives the baby a clap, and for a moment the softening warmth of the evening feels like a blanket that will protect them from everything.
Sydney, 2007
Everyone is just sitting around in the chairs set out for Pali Kalmar’s seminar. The room has been silent since Nagymama made her strange disclosure: that she started life as a girl named Ildiko. Josh and his mother and sister are spread out along the front row, staring off into different regions of space, all completely still except for one of Josh’s feet, which taps compulsively against the floor. In the foot-tapping quiet there is also a scratching of pencils. Nagymama (Ildiko, they have to start thinking of her as Ildiko) and Pali Kalmar have, outrageously, gone back to work.
Pali started it. When Nagymama finished talking and the silence set in, weighted by all the questions that hadn’t been posed, Pali was still for a minute; then he picked up a pencil and made a mark on one of the pieces of paper he and Nagymama had been working on. With a pantomime stealth that only called attention to what he was doing, he slid the sheet across to Nagymama (Ildiko). She looked at it, made a clucking noise, picked up her own pencil and started to scribble something. She looked up briefly, perhaps guiltily, at her stupefied family, then went back to work. Since then there has been only the noise of their pencils, occasional murmurs in Hungarian and the tapping of Josh’s foot.