The Painting on Auerperg's Wall

by Erika Rummel

  She smoothed out her angry face and put on a syrupy smile for Leo, who was waiting for them in the Géllert Cafe. After the introductions, they sat stiffly around the table. They were unused to napkins and white tablecloths and gold-rimmed coffee cups, and intimidated by the waiters who bowed and scraped and treated them with the deference reserved for foreigners.

  Livia kept her X-rays-eyes trained on Leo, and he regarded her with the same fixed look. They were inspecting each other. The conversation was halting. Livia took advantage of Leo’s ignorance of the language and said in Hungarian: I don’t like him. Mrs. Orban covered her mouth to stifle a gasp, alerting Leo that something was up.

  “Do you speak German?” he asked Livia. “I understand you have been taking lessons.”

  “Ja, ich spreche Deutsch. Wie geht es Ihnen?” she said in a smirking parody of Lesson One in the manual the Orbans had pressed on her for the occasion.

  Leo faced her solemnly and continued the textbook conversation, politely asking after her health in turn: “Es geht mir gut. Und Dir?”

  No doubt, he expected her to go on in the approved fashion and tell him that she was well, but Livia bucked the standard dialogue and denied her well-being:

  “Nicht gut,” she said.

  He asked why she was not well.

  She deliberated, then shrugged. “Ich kann es nicht sagen auf Deutsch,” she said. She didn’t have the words to say it in German, but she smiled and continued in Hungarian. “Because I don’t like living with the Orbans.”

  Mrs. Orban bit her lip and looked down on her lap. Leo looked at Zoltan, waiting for a translation.

  He stumbled over the words and caught himself. “She would prefer to have real parents to live with,” he said.

  Leo nodded. He stretched out his hand as if to pat Livia, but she flinched, and he retracted his hand. Mrs. Orban saw that the crisis had somehow passed and took a sip of her coffee.

  “Sehr gut,” she said with a gurgling rush and a burst of social laughter, exhausting her German. It wasn’t clear who or what was “very good” — the quality of the coffee or the way Zoltan had defused the situation.

  When they came out of the hotel, Mrs. Orban wanted to know what he had said to Leo, and he told her. Livia was furious. You call that translating? she said.

  The elegant hotel and the moneyed visitor awed Zoltan. His admiration, kept in check by Livia’s sarcastic smile while they were at the hotel, broke out and bubbled over when he came home. He looks like a tycoon! he said to Eva. She gave him a weary look. Tycoon? she said. He’s a wheeler-dealer with aristocratic manners. Her voice was disparaging, full of submerged meaning. You don’t like Leo Auerperg? he said, surprised. What do you know about likes or dislikes? she said. She did not often speak sharply, and he wondered what he had said that made her angry, but later he thought the rebuke was deserved. Really, what did he know about likes and dislikes? He thought he was in love with Livia, but she only shook her head and laughed. No, you want me, she said. That’s different. He knew that already. His body told him so. He could read his body even if he could not read his soul.

  So what did you and Leo Auerperg talk about? Eva asked him. He didn’t tell her about Livia’s pert remark and Mrs. Orban’s embarrassment. He made it a good-news report. But lies have no staying power. That’s why he had to remind Eva now, at the hospital:

  “I met Leo Auerperg at the Géllert. You stayed home because you had a headache, remember?”

  “A headache,” she murmured, lost in thought, slipping away into the past.

  They sat in silence. She hadn’t noticed the commotion in the ward, was deaf to the intrusion of nearby voices. She didn’t ask Zoltan about the moans of the wounded, the crying women and children, the clattering bedpans and IV lines, the confused rush, the exhaustion of the nurses and doctors and interns. She didn’t notice, as he did, their heavy tread, the way they dragged their heels and allowed their shoulders to slump or alternatively hugged themselves for warmth, all those gestures of hopelessness. She didn’t ask what was going on, and he didn’t tell her about the events outside, the revolution, because he thought the time she had left was too short for politics. The future could be of no interest to Eva now, he thought. The cancer was spreading through her veins, a rich oxygenated red, as he pictured it, discolouring her internal organs, and morphine lay on her brain like a grey apron of lead.

  IN THE EVENING he went home, storing away what he had seen at the hospital without saying anything to Livia. There was no room in Eva’s mind for the future, and there was no room in Livia’s mind for anything but the future. She had no place for words like “cancer” in her narrative. She had room only for revolutionary words. That’s all she talked about as they lay in bed side-by-side. Szabadsag, freedom, was the last thing he heard as he dropped off and fell asleep with her mouth against his cheek, still forming revolutionary words. Sometime during the night, but it must have been early in the morning, Livia turned up the volume of the radio, which had accompanied their sleep like a lullaby, a low murmur, and Imre Nagy’s voice came on and announced a second Russian invasion, the end game to topple the new government. Our troops are engaged in battle, Imre Nagy said.

  They got dressed. I have to go to the hospital, he said. Yes, go, go, Livia said impatiently, refusing to waste words on Eva’s unrevolutionary condition. What if they attack the hospital, he said, but Livia waved him off. They won’t. There are international conventions, she said briskly. I know, he said, but what if they ignore those conventions? They won’t, she said again, her voice brassy now and impatient with the fate of individuals.

  “Can I borrow Eva’s boots?” she said. “I need shoes with decent soles. Mine have had it. They are shredded. I stepped on glass yesterday, and the shards came right through. Can I borrow her coat, too?”

  “Stay in, Livia,” he begged her. “You’ll get hurt.” But she only bared her teeth at him.

  “I’ll go out as soon as it’s daylight,” she said.

  It was still winter-dark when he stumbled downstairs to the sound of peepholes opening and closing, wary neighbours keeping an eye on him. Everyone else here is staying indoors, he thought, sitting out the revolution. At the corner, someone hawked black market goods, or so he thought, but he was mistaken. The man wasn’t hawking tins of corned beef, as he had expected. Boys, who wants a machine gun? he said, touting his wares to passersby. Zoltan shook his head and rushed on. Livia would have taken the man up on his offer, he thought, but she had already told him: You are no fighter, you are a coward, Zoltan. So he knew how he felt about guns, and he averted his eyes from the young men passing him on the street, ammunition belts slung around their necks and carrying Kalashnikovs. The sun came up, as he passed the Horizon Bookstore on Lenin Boulevard. The large plate glass window was shattered. Torn books lay in a heap out front. People were going through the blackened pile. He was tempted to join them, but he thought of Eva and pushed on, climbing over the rubble on the sidewalk, skirting people who lined up for food. They were going through their everyday routine in a calm way that struck him as bizarre. They stopped to gossip, queued for pretzels at a cart, inspected the handbags a woman had laid out on a piece of cardboard.

  When he got to the ward, he saw that someone else was occupying Eva’s bed. She has died during the night, he thought, but a nurse pointed him to the hall. They had pushed Eva’s bed out into the corridor, as if she was beyond human help and taking up space needed for more hopeful cases.

  “Auntie,” he said, leaning over her.

  Her eyes fluttered open. “Did you bring Livia?” she said.

  He was confused. He hadn’t told her that Livia was staying with him at the flat. How did she know?

  “You wanted me to bring Livia?” he said, irrationally afraid of pronouncing her name and giving away the fact that they were lovers. Was it right to make love at a time of death?

  Eva rallied. �
��I no longer make sense, do I?” she said with surprising energy. “My mind is wandering.” She held his hand and apologized for her wandering, misaligned words. “I can’t think straight with all the medication they pump into me, you know. I meant to ask you to look up the Orbans. Tell them I won’t be seeing them at Christmas, I don’t think so. Ask them how Livia is doing in school.” She closed her mouth and looked thoughtful, paying the Orbans a visit in her mind. “I worry about Livia,” she said. “She’s such a precocious girl. She sees and understands more than is good for her, more than she can handle at her age.”

  Zoltan pressed Eva’s hand. In his head, he tried out comforting words: I’ll bring Livia with me tomorrow. She is at our flat. She has run away from home. But those weren’t comforting words.

  “I could ask Livia to visit you,” he said, but he had missed the moment of lucidity. Eva was rambling again.

  “Have I told you about Leo Auerperg?” she said, asking him the same question she had asked him the day before.

  “Yes, you have told me about him.”

  She shifted uncomfortably, dribbled haphazard words, sentence fragments.

  “You have told me many times,” he said, stroking her hand, massaging her fingers. He didn’t know how to comfort her.

  “I haven’t told you everything,” she said, her eyes suddenly focused and clear. She paused for breath. “I’ve pushed it down for too long,” she said.

  “Pushed down what?” He tried to make it easier for her, to prompt her, to coax out of her whatever it was she wanted to tell him.

  “Am I making sense?” she said. “I can no longer tell. The words come and go.” There was another long pause, in which her breathing changed, became noisier. “Have I told you about Leo Auerperg?” she began again, as if there was no other way to get to the core, as if the question was a gateway to everything else.

  “You did,” he said patiently. “He is Livia’s sponsor, I know.”

  “Her sponsor?” she said. “Yes. The other thing I wanted to tell you, no, I mean Livia. Is she here? I need to tell her.” She closed her eyes, exhausted by the effort to concentrate. “It was wrong. I did it because I was desperate. I needed someone. And then I found I was…” Her hand reached out, and he took it, but he wasn’t sure the pressure of her fingertips was for him. It could have been for someone else whose name was on her lips, Leo or Livia, a name starting with an “L.” The word was too soft to be audible. It came out as an elongated sigh, Leo or Livia. What will I do when I come here tomorrow, and Eva’s bed is no longer in the corridor, he thought, but he didn’t have to wait for tomorrow. She tried to sit up, desperately gripping his arm, then released him and sank back. There was a shift in dimensions, he realized, the distance between them had become wider. He flagged down a nurse. Strange, he thought, how easy it is to recognize the arrival of death, even if you’ve never seen a dying person before, like a shadow shutting out the light of life.

  The nurse may have said something consoling to him when she pulled the sheet over Eva’s face, but he didn’t hear her. Coldness crept into his head, barred his hearing and his vision, putting him into a frozen daze. He could barely follow the directions the nurse was giving him. Go to Office 201, she said, they will look after you. There, in a room with green walls and a counter that ran the length of the room, a woman looked up from her desk and without rising from her chair asked what he wanted. She reminded him of the secretary at school, same dirty blonde hair, same dark blue smock, same disinterested expression, neither helpful nor peevish, closed in on herself, an expression saying that he was unimportant, there was nothing important going on in this room, just the boring routine that had to be gotten through every day. She got up with a sigh when he told her why he was there. She stepped to the counter, reached down and brought out a folder and several forms for him to fill out. She wrote “Eva Nagy” on the outside of the file with an old-fashioned flourish and handed him the forms. Sit down over there, she said, pointing to the wooden chairs along the wall, and fill out the papers. He sat down obediently, but all he could see were the scuff marks on the linoleum floor by his feet, and the places on the chair legs where the varnish had come off. He tried to read the papers in his hand. He went as far as looking at the first few lines, the name and address lines, but he didn’t think he could hold on to a pen or shape letters, and so he stood up again. He expected to be held back, told that he couldn’t leave without filling out the forms, but the woman was on the phone now, had turned away from him, was paying no more attention to him. He walked out of the room, unhindered. Once outside, he stood on the steps of the hospital, the forms still in his hand, without a clue to his feelings. I am sad, surely, he thought, looking down at the documents which he would have to fill out eventually and sign and return. And then? He thought of other government offices he would be obliged to visit, the lineups, the sullen faces of clerks. Would they come after him, or did he have to apply for a public guardian? He was a few months short of turning eighteen. But perhaps no one would worry about that now, he thought, suddenly aware of a beehive murmur around him, the crowd in the street, dense like after a soccer match.

  The winter sun had come out, and people were carrying their coats folded over their arms. No, they were carrying more than their coats, they looked like travellers. Was everyone on the move, on some sort of pilgrimage? From the steps of the hospital, he looked down on the crowd clogging the pavement, a steady stream, street-wide. He saw a familiar face bobbing up, Andras, and was reminded that there were schools and classes somewhere with teachers and classmates like Andras, who hopped off his bike, stood at the bottom of the stairs and shouted:

  “Hey! Zoltan! Are you going?”

  “Going where?”

  “To Austria, idiot.” He saw Zoltan’s blank face. “What’s the matter?” he said. “Are you brain-dead?”

  “My aunt just died,” he said.

  “Oh,” Andras said. “Well, sorry. But even so. The borders are open, nobody knows for how long. We are going. My uncle thinks he can organize a van.”

  Zoltan woke up to the possibilities of life after Eva’s death. “I’ll come along,” he said, starting to breathe freely again.

  “I don’t know if there’s room for one more,” Andras said. “I don’t know if my uncle can take you. You can’t bring any luggage, that’s for sure.”

  “I won’t bring any luggage,” Zoltan said. Why would he? He wanted to leave this life behind. No, wanted to leave death behind.

  “Come by before noon, then,” Andras said.

  “What about Livia? I can’t go without her.” He couldn’t possibly.

  “Livia? That morose little shit? You screwing her or what?”

  “She’s at my place,” he said.

  Andras shrugged. “It’s up to you. But my uncle won’t take two people, I can tell you that much.”

  Andras ducked back into the stream, and Zoltan, too, forded the human river flavoured with smoke and sweat and dirty underwear, shook off hands trying to push him, hands with black-rimmed fingernails and orange nicotine stains. He held his own in the jostling crowd and was cast up finally at his apartment building.

  He ran upstairs two steps at a time, jangled the keys impatiently, pushed open the door, suddenly afraid that Livia would no longer be there, had left without him, but she was there, sitting at the table, writing, giving him a triumphant look, as if she had just found the perfect word to describe the day.

  “The borders are open,” he said to her. “Let’s go to Austria.”

  “I’m not leaving,” she said.

  “Why not?” he said lamely. I should be kissing her, he thought. I should take her into my arms and overwhelm her, but he looked into her pale face and knew he could not change her mind with words or embraces.

  “Because I don’t speak German,” she said.

  “So what? You’ll learn.”

  �
�No, you don’t understand, Zoltan,” she said. “It would interfere with my poetry. I couldn’t write in German.”

  “You don’t have to. You can keep writing poetry in Hungarian.”

  “I couldn’t with everyone around me speaking German. You can’t have two kinds of rhythms in your head. Besides, why would I want to leave? This is where it’s happening. Right here. Right now. The revolution.”

  They looked at each other.

  “Do I need to explain everything to you, Zoltan?” she said. She used body language on him now, gestures and stares, flapping hands, a skittering sideways step. “Don’t you understand anything?”

  No, he was helpless. He couldn’t make head nor tail of his emotions. He moved closer, looking hard into Livia’s face, looking for clues in the landscape of her flesh, trying to get at the quintessence of her thoughts, seeing at last how it was. Livia had taken him on as a project, but now she had better things to do than telling him what he felt. She had a new project: the revolution.

  “You are in love with the revolution,” he said.

  “So you got that straight at last. I just hope Eva will let me stay with her.”

  “Eva died this morning.”

  “I see,” she said. “So that’s why you are leaving.”

  “Come with me,” he said, hopeless, because he knew he had no words to persuade Livia, and nothing to offer her in compensation for her services as a translator of his emotions. She didn’t even answer his plea.

  “Start packing,” she said. “You can take the food that’s here and leave me your money. You don’t need forints where you’re going.”

  “And what will you do? Someone will requisition the apartment now that Eva is dead. They’ll throw you out,” he said as he put on a triple layer of clothes because Andras had told him to bring no luggage, and he wasn’t even sure that his uncle would take him along with or without luggage. He might have to make it on his own. And Livia would have to make it on her own, too. “They’ll throw you out,” he said again in the vain hope that she might change her mind and go with him if she had no place to stay in Budapest.