by Erika Rummel
“I know,” she said to Zoltan. “I’ve seen that hostility many times. If she hates someone or something, it is irreversible. She has — how do you say it? — a one-track mind.”
“You are right. You can’t change her mind. She declined Leo’s offer to stay at his apartment until she found work. No, thanks, she said in that brittle voice she brings out when she hates something. So where will you stay, Leo said. With Zoltan, she said. I was sharing an apartment with three other students at the time. Leo knew I couldn’t put her up. There was no space. But you will have no privacy, he said to Livia. I don’t mind sleeping on the floor, she said. I’ll make my own privacy.”
“That is one thing anya is very good at: making her own privacy, shutting everyone out. Except when it suits her to call them in, when she wants them to do her a service.”
“Leo ended up paying for a furnished room, just for Livia,until she got a job. But she never did, had no intentions of getting a job, never applied for one. You know how she felt about German. She refused to speak German.”
Yes, Cereta remembered. Anya left their apartment only when necessary, went shopping in one of the few supermarkets that had opened up in the city, so that she could pick what she wanted without talking to anyone. She didn’t want visitors, went out reluctantly, sat mutely in the company of Zoltan’s friends, preferred to stay home in her room and write poetry in her native language.
“So Leo kept on paying for her room until I graduated and got a job, and Livia agreed to marry me. To end her financial dependence on Leo, I suspect.”
“I thought people married for love in those days,” Cereta said.
“And divorced because they fell out of love?”
“Something like that.”
The pause that opened up between them came with a freight train of thought moving from the question at hand to other questions better left unasked, questions about her own failed marriage, her breakup with Laszlo. She was grateful for Zoltan’s silence. She wasn’t ready to do a post-mortem on her relationship with Laszlo. One failed marriage at a time, she thought.
“It didn’t take long for us to realize that we’d made a mistake,” he said. “We should never have married. Livia knew it all along. I came to the same conclusion eventually.”
“And having children was a mistake, too?” Cereta said.
“Why are you asking that question, Cereta? Because I haven’t told you often enough that I love you? I know it’s a problem I have. I’m working on it. I wanted children. I can’t speak for Livia, but I don’t think she regretted having children. In fact, she said you turned out to be more interesting than she thought. I had hopes that she might say the same thing about me one day, that I was more interesting than she thought at first, but she didn’t change her mind about me.”
“Or about Opa Auerperg?”
“Or about Leo. It was a fixed idea. She couldn’t get it out of her system. I tried to reason with her. I told her: Write it out of your head, Livia. Paint it out, if that’s your mode of operation. But you need to understand that it’s a figment of your imagination. Leo is no criminal. He certainly is no rapist. She flicked me off. She insisted it wasn’t her imagination….” Zoltan waved away the rest of the sentence. “Eventually, I gave up. She had no rational explanation.”
That’s what anya said to her as well, giving her a dark concentrated look, like an animal at feeding time: “It’s not my imagination.”
“She said she read it in Eva’s eyes. Leo’s crime, whatever it was.”
“In Eva’s eyes?” Zoltan said and gave her a searching look. “I think there was something like that in the second poem, ‘Rape II.’ She wrote it after Leo died and left us money. She wasn’t going to touch Leo’s money, she said. It was blood money. You can do what you want with your half, she said to me, but I don’t want any part of it. He is a rapist. I saw it in his eyes.” He looked at Cereta, with a helpless shrug of his shoulder. “She put that line into her poem: ‘I saw it in his eyes.’”
“In Opa Auerperg’s eyes?”
He nodded glumly. “She squandered her half of the legacy, went out and handed wads of Leo’s money to beggars, left large bills at playgrounds and in the lobby of hospitals, dropped them into the Danube from the Donaubrücke, threw them over the wall into the exercise yard of Steinhof, an institution for the mentally ill — that one made the papers. They all reported on the ‘prank.’ The inmates had a ball, according to the papers. IT’S RAINING MONEY IN STEINHOF, one headline said. I showed the headline to Livia. She laughed. A terrible laugh, like an attack of whooping cough.”
He looked up. His eyes were wet, as if he had been whipped by a gust of wind.
“That’s when I knew I had to get out,” he said. There was no comedic breath left in him. He had taken off the clown mask and showed her the pasty face of a man exhausted from years of cheering up his audience.
“That’s why I want to get out too,” Cereta said. “Because anya is crazy.”
Everything Livia said was subject to multiple interpretations. Nothing was literal anymore. Anya’s voice was stuck in the poetical register. She found her words by reading people’s eyes.
“I agree. You should get away from her, move out, leave Hollókõ. Why don’t you go to Vienna?” he said, attempting a comeback smile, a happy ending to the story. “You could apply for an EU passport. You were born in Vienna. Your grandparents were Austrian citizens. That should be sufficient.”
“Or I could just wait until Hungary becomes a member of the EU.”
“But that won’t happen for another year — a whole year out of your life.” He gave her another smile, rawer this time, as if he was letting her in on a secret. “But I guess that’s an old man’s take. At my age you can’t afford to waste a year. You know you are running out of time.”
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll find out what is involved in applying for Austrian citizenship or a work permit at any rate. I’ll check the job postings on the web.” She noticed he hadn’t offered to sponsor her for American citizenship. Perhaps he had enough of the father-daughter confidential. Perhaps the process was too complicated and involved lawyers and money he did not have. In Hungary, she had always thought of Zoltan as a rich man, but that was an East European cliché: “All Americans are rich.” She had to let go of that kind of thinking, get over her breathless admiration for the West. There were poor people here, too, like the drifters she had seen on the boardwalk, the people living in vans parked on side streets, people at the warped core of American life. Zoltan wasn’t exactly poor, but he was too careless with money ever to be rich. Easy come, easy go. He really should stop sending money to anya, she thought, or send it to me instead. But she didn’t have the nerve to bring up the subject at their farewell dinner.
“I’m glad Laura didn’t go to Hungary,” he said, “and the two of you had a chance to touch base.”
“So I could give a more convincing performance as Laura?”
“No, I didn’t think you needed cueing. I assumed playing Laura would come naturally.”
“It wasn’t easy. We’ve grown apart, you know.”
“Interesting,” he said. “Studies of identical twins have shown that, on the whole, genetics trump environment, but perhaps anya is a force of her own. She has a warping effect. That’s why it’s important for you to get out. I thought role-playing might help. Stepping away from your Self for a time and looking at your surroundings from the perspective of another person — I thought that would have a therapeutic effect. I wish I could do more for you, Cereta, but the next step in creating your own space is something you have to do on your own.”
The exhaustion she had seen in his face earlier was gone now, replaced by the professional mask of Zoltan Nagy, therapist.
The next day, when they said goodbye at the airport, they were careful not to break the surface calm. She kept her voice level. No more chil
dish cries of “I don’t want to go back!” He gave a creditable performance as father, squeezing her shoulder in a tactile show of regret at seeing her go. It was as if they had scripted the farewell scene together and kept to their lines. No impromptu sighs or tears. No spontaneous breakouts, no mad anguish. She allowed herself only a twinge of regret at what might have been had she stayed on in America. A walk on the beach with David, perhaps. A moment when she would take his arm and tell him her name, and he would call her Cereta.
SITTING IN THE room that had been Opa Auerperg’s study, in his chair, at his old desk, looking at the fake Liebermann, Cereta no longer worried about her solitary laugh. It wasn’t mad. It was merely circumstantial. She had no one with whom to share her relief at being done with chasing after the painting. She wished David was with her. He was such a sensible man, the antidote to anya, unless she had overlooked something — his penchant for poetry perhaps? Could that cause trouble? His reluctance to answer the phone — there was something odd in that, but it was a minor foible. His failure to raise her pulse rate? That could prove lethal to a relationship in the long-run. Perhaps David was too pleasant, too sensible for her. Still, she shouldn’t have run away when she saw him at the Dorotheum a week ago — unless the sighting was a mirage, a manifestation of her congenital or acquired madness, because David’s appearance at the Dorotheum was inexplicable. A case of qubits being teleported? She shook that thought out of her head. I refuse to go crazy like my mother or turn into a joker like my father, she thought. But someone looking like David stopped in his tracks the moment he caught sight of her at the auction house. She saw a current of recognition move across his face, and when she turned around at the exit and looked back, she saw him coming after her. She should have stopped and talked to him. But she panicked because she couldn’t think what to do next: Keep on playing Laura or confess to David? If it had been David.
A celebratory laugh was justified at any rate, even if she had no one with whom to share the good news: The hunt was over! No, a whole phase of her life was over, the phase when she felt caught in some preordained misery, thought she couldn’t help it, like the coin-toss that decided who was going to go to America with Zoltan, or like the watermark on the wall of anya’s house, a permanent blot on her life. Now she knew: It was possible to escape and start over.
Sitting at the desk, looking up at the pseudo-Liebermann, she started the remedial process, allowed Opa Auerperg to slip back into the place he used to occupy in her heart. He was no longer the man who had tricked Eva into handing over a valuable painting, whose eyes spoke of rape. He was once again the splendid old man, her stand-in grandfather of whom she was impossibly proud, who looked down on her from his great height, shining on her the light of his benevolent eyes. She could allow herself once more to love Opa Auerperg.
The Liebermann folly, she promised herself, was the tail end of a series of bad decisions that began with her loyalty to anya, continued with the move to Hungary and her marriage to Laszlo, and culminated in the quixotic pursuit of a fake painting.
How did everything go so wrong? She thought Laszlo would provide the orderly life, the normalcy she craved, but instead of order, he gave her boredom and routine. She thought love would redeem her because she was in love with his lazy smile and his soulful eyes, with his fleshy lips and fluttering kisses.Who knows what he saw in her, but he didn’t love her enough, and she moved back into her mother’s madhouse. After that, the chemical spill was just another accident bound to happen in the natural progression of things, an event linked to her wrong choices like cause and effect, like sin and punishment, like destiny. She had to escape the noxious air of anya’s house, and to her surprise Zoltan understood. He gathered what was wrong from the few words she said to him on the phone, from a sigh perhaps, or from a certain inflection. His understanding wasn’t paternal. It was the diagnosis of an experienced therapist. He knew: In America, away from Laszlo, away from anya, she could break through the clouds and see the lie of the land, make out the pattern of her life, and plan her escape route. A bridge was needed to get from one side to the other, an in-between space where she could try out versions of a new life, staging it, blocking out the steps. It was unfortunate that David showed up at the hospital and spoiled the scene, made her want to be herself prematurely.
It’s me, she thought, not Laura, who should have gone to the cabin in the desert. Trying out a new life is the stuff of a monologue.
And now the time of acting was over. End of play. Beginning of new life. Thank God the Liebermann had turned out to be a fake. Cereta had a sense of redemption, of second chances. Zoltan was right: playing Laura had had a therapeutic effect, almost like a holiday, the strenuous kind that involved survival training or an expedition into the Amazon Basin. Now it was back to work. In fact, she had an actual job offer, to work as an event planner in Vienna. Would living in the West close the gap that had opened between her and Laura and make her more like her sister? Could she appropriate Laura’s dry voice and make her spare, stripped-down, intellectual look her own? Perhaps it wasn’t even a matter of “could she.” That is how she would have turned out if she hadn’t lived with anya, if she hadn’t taken all those wrong turns, making decisions for all the wrong reasons. I opted to stay with anya, she thought. Why? To enjoy a moment of moral superiority over Zoltan and Laura. I moved to Hungary with anya. Why? Because I felt sorry for her and didn’t want her to feel lonely. I found out too late: Anya is never lonely. She doesn’t need people. She uses them. She gave me a pitying look when I said I would stay with her, but she accepted my sacrifice. And I married Laszlo, God knows why, in spite of the warning signs, because no better man had come along, or just to get away from anya. And the Liebermann painting, why was I chasing after it? It was anya’s pet project. She wanted the painting. Not because she liked it — the Liebermann was bourgeois shit in her opinion — but because she wanted to right a wrong. Anya was always on a crusade, always mobilizing. She needed a crew to man her galley.
But the crusade was over. The next step was to draw a solid line under that episode. Make sure it’s over.
Cereta picked up the phone and called Mrs. Kertesz, their neighbour in Hollókõ, a call that needed to be timed exactly, after Mrs. Kertesz had gotten out of bed and before she went off to work. Anya always made things more complicated than they had to be. This refusal of hers to have a phone in the house, or a television, or a washing machine wasn’t a matter of money. It was because those things were “perversions of nature.” Anya wanted a simple life, she said, but her life wasn’t simple. It made her dependent on the goodwill of Mrs. Kertesz, who had to drop whatever she was doing, eating breakfast most likely, and go next door to fetch anya while Cereta was waiting on the phone.
“It’s me, Cereta,” she said when Mrs. Kertesz picked up. “Sorry to bother you again. Could you get my mother on the phone? I really appreciate it.”
“No problem, girl. I’ll get her for you. So how’s it going?”
“So-so. Thanks.”
She imagined Mrs. Kertesz putting the receiver down on the counter and walking to the door, groaning softly — she had a bad back and a habit of sighing whenever she straightened up or bent down. For a while, there was silence, then Cereta heard the muffled opening and closing of a door, some steps, a rustle, a perfunctory exchange of pleases and thankyou, her mother taking up the receiver.
“Cereta?” she said in her hollow what’s–the-use-of-talking voice, as if she didn’t trust the phone to convey her meaning, as if nothing of substance could ever be discussed using that unnatural medium.
“I got the appraisal,” Cereta said. “It turns out the painting isn’t an original. It’s a copy.”
“A copy? Are you saying that Leo Auerperg…”
“I’m saying it isn’t worth fighting over, so listen: I’m letting this whole thing go, anya. Don’t ask me to do anything else about the painting. That’s the end of the Liebermann
business as far as I’m concerned, you hear?” She braced herself for a defiant reply, but it didn’t come.
“I see.” Anya’s voice was porous, momentarily weakened by defeat, but she recovered quickly. “Alright,” she said, her voice filling with new purpose. “I’ll go back to my poetry then.”
Her rape poems. “If that’s what you want to do. Just don’t ask me to read them.” No more poetic innuendos, Cereta thought and took a deep breath. “And another thing, anya. I have a job offer. I’ll stay in Vienna.”
Her mother didn’t ask what kind of job, was it well-paid, was it permanent? She said: “Running away from me, are you?” And after a pause. “But you can’t run away from yourself.”
“I’m not,” Cereta said. “That’s the whole point of my staying in Vienna. I want to be myself.”
She listened to her mother’s breathing, a wordless incantation, or perhaps it was only static. No, she was still there, exhaling silent accusations.
“Goodbye, anya,” she said and hung up.
It was goodbye to Hollókõ as well. She felt a generous sense of experimentation. Free to be herself — the words seemed too tawdry to describe the rush of desire she felt to start over and pass into the realm of the untried, to call on friends and amaze them with her transformation from a woman made in Hollókõ to a new and improved Cereta put together from original ingredients. Except that there was no one to call on in Vienna, no friend, no acquaintance on whom to practice her incarnation, no one who had known the old Cereta. She thought of the chance meeting with David at the Dorotheum. She’d like to start with him, let the truth come out, confess everything and meet him over again as herself. She had seen the flickering interest in David’s eyes. She listened for an inner echo, an increased heartbeat responding to his name, a warming trend at the thought of her new self together with him, but it was hard to read the internal gauge with nothing to go on except the memory of a casual touch of hands, an American-style kiss on the cheek. She had no tactile memory of David’s body. She had no idea how he felt up close, flesh against flesh. Would there be sparks when she met him again as Cereta? Would they reach the melting point and come to an elemental fusion? She had only words and looks to go on, and they were mixed up with Laura’s name. Her name had intruded on every conversation with David. “Why don’t we read Brecht, Laura?” “Would you like to come over for dinner, Laura?” It was hard to think of herself as Cereta meeting David when she had been on stage playing Laura, when Laura’s name hung at the end of every sentence.