A moment later, Paul thought he could hear them again, his sister and Zoli, the velvet banging, the gasps and sighs, down the hall in her room, the spectre of law removed for them, the restraints of civility, of the right and wrong time for things. What right time could there be when one hears of one’s father’s execution or comes upon one’s murdered parents? Anything was possible now.
Rozsi had moved from Szeged to Budapest ostensibly to look after her big brother, but the truth was she wanted to live in the exciting capital and felt safer in Paul’s company than in anyone else’s. He had always been her guide. He taught her the difference between what was right and what was legal, a difference that was especially important now. Once, when Rozsi was young, a housefly flew in through an open window, and she called for her brother Paul to please come in to kill it.
He found it resting on her blue curtain. “Why should I kill it?” he’d asked.
“Because I hate it.”
“Is that a good enough reason to end its life?”
She thought about it and said, “Because it might harm me.”
“Might?” he’d said.
“Because it’s trespassing in our house.”
“Oh, trespassing,” was Paul’s reply. “But the fly does not know property law. It might not even know national law or civil law. It could have flown in from Paraguay, for all we know. Laws are lines we draw for ourselves. They can’t involve the rest of nature.”
Rozsi groaned in frustration. “Well, we’re bigger than it is.” She ran at the insect like a mad warrior, and it flew out of her room into the corridor.
“Yes, but it’s faster than you.”
Later, when she started dating a young lawyer in Paul’s office, Aron Borbely, she confessed to her brother that she found the man boring and wanted to see someone else, Elek Beker, a piano teacher like her. Paul’s response was that she had to tell Aron first.
“But what if it doesn’t work out with Elek, either?”
“You shouldn’t deceive Aron. That’s all I’m saying. And don’t deceive Elek, should you ever feel the need.”
She didn’t question her feelings for Zoli, that was for sure. What little time and commitment Paul had given to love. As a boy, he had known Ruth a little, briefly, passionately but prematurely. His fancy and fantasy had fed on her into his adulthood.
But the memory he revisited even more often was the one of Zsuzsi. He had met her ten years before, in Komarom, a town near the Czech border. He was visiting his aunt Hermina and uncle Ede’s summer home, their sunny white palace, alight with glass on every side. He’d been reading there, relaxing, sleeping too much after his biggest case of 1934, when Paul was just thirty-one. It was a national case, involving Manfred Weiss, the country’s first and best-known billionaire, and a Jew. His empire was encroaching on Eszterhazy land, royal land, with Hungarian blood flowing through its brown roots, and the nation wanted him stopped, but Paul saw no good reason. Was it for the greater good that Manfred Weiss be stopped, merely because he was bumping up against Hungarian royals?
What disease had Paul, the advocate, come upon? Was the disease differentness, or was it blindness to sameness? That was the argument Paul wished to make in court in defence of Manfred Weiss, even though the argument could have been made against either side, since his Mr. Weiss thought no more highly of his adversaries than they did of him.
So Paul had to find a neutral beneficiary both could tolerate. Both sides believed they were specially selected by history and the forces of evolution and by the creator himself to inherit the world.
Leave the disputed land to nature, then. Let the disputing families see that true nobility is expressed in largesse. Let Hungarians see the generosity of both noble families. Manfred Weiss could live with that. His client could be made to live with that as could the Esterhazys. Let the Hungarian people enjoy the land. The judge agreed, and Manfred Weiss left the court beaming and shaking hands.
Now, victorious, Paul was unwinding in the summer home of his uncle and aunt. And today he was visiting Komarom’s famous stonework museum in the Igmandi Fortress.
He was studying an ancient Roman carving of the young Mercury, probably, standing on tiptoe on the back of his dog—Mercury looked ready to take flight—when Paul first heard her voice. “Why do you suppose he’s standing on his dog?” And he guffawed like a schoolboy before he could even take her in.
She was tall and elegant, her collar like a calla lily, the white flower offering itself up. She wore a brilliant cream silk dress that was almost too elegant for an afternoon at a museum. He said, “I guess standing on your dog places you closer to the sky.”
“Not much,” she said and giggled herself. He could feel himself suddenly, urgently, wanting to taste her lipstick. Then she ran her fingers, light as feathers, over the soft marble back of the carved Mercury, barely touching the mythic figure, possibly not at all. Paul felt his ears burning, big as conches.
Paul and Zsuzsi Rosenthal exchanged names only as they were departing. He said he knew some Rosenthals in Budapest: Leopold, the lawyer. “No connection,” she said, and she waved, looked down at her feet and slipped away. That was the whole of their encounter.
And when Paul told his devilish Aunt Hermina about it, she said no more than “Oh,” but then he heard her speaking on the telephone to her sister Klari in Budapest, and the following morning Klari arrived to take in the country air and to ask about flightless Mercury.
“I don’t know how long he’s been like that,” Paul mused. “Two thousand years, possibly, and he will never fly. He’s like the lovers on Keats’s Grecian urn. ‘Never, never canst thou kiss, though winning near the goal,’” he said in English. How pretentious I am, he thought, but the feeling was nevertheless real and pure. “For millennia they have been about to kiss,” he said, “waiting for it, hoping for it, their warm marble hearts alight, but they never quite make it.”
“Hmm,” Hermina said, and Klari smiled. Ede headed back to Budapest to perform an operation, and the ladies and Paul saw him off, Paul helping his uncle with his bag.
And just then Zsuzsi walked up the path. “Oh,” Paul said. “How…” and he turned to look at his aunts, hovering by the door.
“Oh,” Zsuzsi said too. “Nice to see you again.” Neither was expecting the other—Hermina had called Zsuzsi simply to invite her for a meal—and now Zsuzsi, too, looked at Hermina and Klari.
In Hermina’s billowy parlour, after a lunch of pheasant with summer squash and bell peppers, followed by cool cherry soup, Zsuzsi was to play piano and he was to accompany her on cello. Schubert. Well of course Schubert. Paul could still picture Zsuzsi, still taste her image, as she sat poised, her pink fingers resting on the ivory keys of that silly creamy grand piano, exactly the same as her sister’s in Budapest, both of them bought on the same day, from the same instrument maker, in Vienna. And so they played Schubert. The composer was to be the translator of their feelings—and just in the nick of time—for in the past hour Paul had found himself stumbling over every subject that arose. He found himself trying to impress Zsuzsi but frightening her instead. Anyone would have run from him. He would have run from himself.
Klari had said over lunch that Komarom was paradise on Earth. Through the wide-open windows, you could hear birds chirping outside and smell the lush greenery, so he could certainly see why she would say it.
But Paul couldn’t hold his tongue. He found himself saying, “Paradise for everyone, or paradise for the four of us and Uncle Edward and whoever else we condescend to invite?”
“Why are you being rude, Palikam?” Hermina said. “All my sister meant was it felt good to be alive today, nothing more.”
The comment prompted Zsuzsi to ask, “Are you a socialist, Mr. Beck?” She was holding a spoon of creamy pink cherry soup to her lips.
“No,” Hermina said on behalf of her nephew. “He’s showing off. He wants to let you know how clever he is.”
Paul blushed. “I’m not a socialist
, not an -ist of any kind. I just want to do some good things, as I’m sure you do.”
She was still holding up the spoon in front of her. “Does this soup not have cream in it?” she asked. “We’ve just had pheasant—meat, I mean, followed by milk.”
“Oh,” Paul said, looking at his own spoon. He filled it, drained it again, licked it clean.
Zsuzsi gently put down her spoon. Zsuzsi’s pale slim face gleamed in the light reflected off the silver. Her eyes were brown, almost black, yet they shone as if they gave off light rather than took it in.
“You’re still a Jew, aren’t you, Mr. Beck?”
Klari said, “Yes, a Jewish child, sometimes.”
Paul uncrossed his arms. “Thank you, Aunt Klari. I am a Jew, Miss Rosenthal, but not just a Jew.”
“Is that what you think I am?”
“It’s the last thing I think you are.”
“Meaning what?” she asked.
He blushed again.
She said, “When your Jewish resolve weakens, aren’t you falling prey to the people who dislike us?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say my Jewish resolve has weakened. My resolve is not determined by the degree of my observance but by the degree of my sympathy.”
“But if I feel very much sympathy, it is nourished by our particular history.”
“My Judaism has informed my sympathy, but my Jewishness is not diminished by my sympathy for other people and causes, the repressed and exploited Hungarians, for instance.”
“We are not guilty of creating the hardships endured by Hungarian peasants.”
“But we’re also guilty. We don’t help, most of us.”
“Oh, here we go,” Klari said. She brushed a crumb from her forest green dress.
Zsuzsi said, “My parents invite a beggar to our dinner table every single night, and he sleeps under our roof and under a warm blanket, and in the morning eats a hot breakfast.”
“Of course he does,” Paul said, “and of course your family does these things. I didn’t mean to make you defensive.”
“What I’m saying is that being religious doesn’t make us less sympathetic to the misfortunes of others, I assure you.”
“Maybe not, but it draws a circle around you and makes you less tolerant of others, of differentness.”
“You’re doing the very thing you’re criticizing, assuming things about people you don’t know personally. I’m not less tolerant of anybody.”
“Then why would you define yourself so rigidly?”
Hermina glanced at her sister and rolled her eyes. What had they done?
Zsuzsi was now as red in the face as the blushing Paul. “We are not responsible for what ails the world and shouldn’t be held responsible.”
“You couldn’t be more right, Zsuzsi—Miss Rosenthal. But the sick thinking of the rest of the world doesn’t indemnify us, any more than it indemnifies anyone else who contributes to the misery of humanity.”
“You are blaming victims.”
He had taken his silver napkin ring in his hand and was gripping it so hard it was bending. His aunts looked on, helpless.
“I am not blaming victims, per se. I would never. I am a Jew, too. My ancestors have been victims, too, but being victims does not necessarily make us right, either. Victimization and rightness aren’t always connected, nor are history and the present.”
“They’re not mutually exclusive either.”
“No, they’re not.”
“What a speech,” Hermina said, “and over summer soup no one is having.”
Zsuzsi looked as if she was getting ready to stand. “Be a Neolog, by all means, Mr. Beck, be a reformer, but don’t be an anti-Semite.”
“Why do you insist on defining me?” Paul asked. “I’m—I’m—”
“I guess we’ve done that to each other, shown our prejudice.”
Zsuzsi laid her thin white hands on the table on either side of her bowl of cherry soup, getting set to push herself to her feet.
“Please,” Klari said, “don’t leave. Stay a bit. You and Paul can play a duet. That way you won’t talk.”
Paul said, “You can experience my cello. I sound like a cat with a bad stomach.”
“You’re not that bad,” Klari said. “You’re tolerable.” Paul took this as a reference to his character as well as his cello playing.
Zsuzsi didn’t get up. Paul looked at his mischievous aunts, whose experiment had gone so badly. How could he be angry, really, when they had taken aim at his own heart—and with such dazzling accuracy? Paul wanted somehow to hold on to Zsuzsi’s image. He knew as he studied it that it would hang in his mind for months to come like a portrait in a gallery, the lights going down on it, the lights coming up, the eyes waiting serenely to see who was visiting today.
Neither young person wanted to leave things as they were. Their ears buzzed. The air coming in through the window smelled green.
The housekeeper came in to clear away the dishes, and Paul’s aunts helped out. Paul and Zsuzsi, still stinging from their chat, watched as the others fussed. Paul believed he was the most obnoxious suitor who ever lived and hoped this young woman had a great capacity for forgiveness and tolerance.
Later, in the parlour, as he rode his cello, he gazed at his musical partner sitting before the keys of the cream piano. They played sad little Schubert together, whose beauty that afternoon was as sad as could be. Paul couldn’t help but smile. The smile caught on with his aunts as they digested their lunch in their soft chairs. But no such sentiment travelled to Zsuzsi. After a time, she began to play hard, as if she were playing Beethoven, as if she wanted to push her way through the piano to get to the other side. Even though she imposed her own mood on the piece, Paul could tell she was a much better player than he was.
Later, at the door, Zsuzsi said, “Is this what you do, Mr. Beck—attack your guests and then play bad music together?”
Hermina said, “He also stands on his head,” but Klari dragged her sister off again to the parlour.
“I’m sorry,” Paul said. “I couldn’t be sorrier.” And then he asked, “May I walk you home?”
“It’s all right,” she said. “It’s not far, and I like walking alone sometimes. I have a big family.”
“Oh,” he said.
They stepped outside. She turned toward him as if she were about to change her mind.
“We’re going to Philadelphia,” she said.
“Philadelphia?”
The word hung in the air between them like exotic fruit.
“What’s in Philadelphia?” He felt like a perfect ass, as if he’d been responsible for her wanting to leave the country. Their faces shone red again in the sunshine.
“My father has a brother there, but it’s not what’s in Philadelphia so much as what’s here, what’s been happening. Hungary’s changing. Europe’s changing.”
It was 1934. Her family had more foresight than most.
And then she said, “Your aunt tells me you speak English.”
It sounded unmistakably like an invitation. He saw the whole of his future determined by what he said in reply, as surely as the Rosenthals’ future might be determined by their decision to leave Hungary behind.
She was looking away from him, over her shoulder at the walk ahead. He said, “My work is here. I have a lot I want to do.”
“If you can visit sometime, we would be happy to have you.”
Did she mean here, in Komarom? Could she have meant Philadelphia? She couldn’t have been more candid and yet more ambiguous. He would revisit this conversation a thousand times to guess at her intention.
And on this sleepless night, ten years later, in his bed in Budapest, he was convinced she had just been asking him over for tea, perhaps to prove to him how wrong he’d been about the good people who lived in her house. What hurt was that he’d appeared to lose an argument rather than a chance at love, and he’d been conducting the argument only to give him the chance at love. He wished he had not spoken at all
. He would have fared better as a deaf-mute. Zsuzsi became the measure for him of all things comely and sympathetic in a woman, this elegant white calla lily, now turned away from him to the light. He’d often thought of writing to her in Philadelphia, possibly even a letter in English. He did write a card a few years later to say he’d looked in again on Mercury and found the fleet-footed messenger of the gods still earthbound and standing on his poor dog. But he didn’t mail the card. How corny and how transparent, he thought at the time, as he stared at the sealed envelope, wanting to ask his aunt for the Rosenthals’ address in America, fearing she would write to Zsuzsi herself instead if he waited too long.
Yet he could not dam up the river of hormones raging within him.
“Come away with me,” he now said to the darkness.
“Where?”
“Come away with me nowhere—anywhere.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean nowhere. Zerowhere. I’m not going anywhere and I want you to come with me.”
“I can’t.”
How easy Zoli and Rozsi made it seem, down the hall, and even young Lili and Simon, across town. What an utter ass he was, what an ass.
PAUL GAVE UP, finally, by dawn and got himself ready to go out. He set off to his office to send out some letters to clients whose cases were now being managed by other lawyers. He was still providing advice on the side, and the new lawyers were glad to have it and pay for it. Lately, though, he felt his movements were being watched. He had twice, in the past few days, seen the same cream-coloured Alfa Romeo outside his townhouse, and now here it was again, across the street from his office building. They could have tried to be more subtle, or maybe that was the point. He had, after all, been the son of a prominent Jewish mayor, and was a prominent lawyer himself. Was it his inquiries about Istvan that interested the men in the Alfa Romeo? Had they followed Zoli? He knew, now, that Istvan had not been taken away and was not listed among the dead of Szeged. Paul just didn’t know where his brother was, and maybe that was best. If he didn’t know, probably no one did.
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