Klari blushed. “He does sometimes.”
“Yes, but only to her,” Simon put in. “He seems to hold the rest of the family responsible for what happened.”
“What happened?” Lili asked.
“He practically came to blows with our father—that’s what happened,” Klari said, “and then Father disowned him. They disowned each other, I guess.” The room lit up with the sun again, brightening Klari’s auburn hair.
“Maximillian’s sister, Ernesztina, married beneath her station. She settled down with a handsome but wayward sort by the name of Kellner. They had three sons, and when the eldest was thirteen, their father died. As time went on, Ernesztina, Alexander’s mother, asked her brother Maximillian in Budapest to please set her son up in some kind of profession.
“Alexander Korda, or Sandor Kellner, as he was then known, came to Budapest at his Uncle Maximillian’s behest. My father established an office for Sandor right next to Odon Grunwald so that his nephew could study law with the best of them. It was not easy for my father to extend such a hand. When others in his family faltered, he let them fall—that’s how he was. When his brother Gyorgy gambled away his inheritance, night after night, over a backgammon board, he came to his elder brother for help. Maximillian would not meet with him at first. He’d barely come down to say hello to Gyorgy. He would not visit Gyorgy when his brother took a fall and broke his ankle. He would not respond to any of the notes Gyorgy sent him. He wouldn’t even open them. Finally, an appeal on behalf of their brother by Ernesztina, the only sibling for whom Maximillian had a soft spot, weakened Maximillian’s resistance. He arranged to meet Gyorgy at the Japan Café, an establishment Gyorgy also cherished for its bohemian character.
“When Gyorgy got there first, the proprietor hugged him and offered him his favourite table. ‘No, Max’s table tonight, please, Attila,’ Uncle Gyorgy told him. ‘The dark Munch.’
“They both laughed just as Maximillian walked in. Attila snapped to attention. ‘May I get you something, a drink, some fresh cherry strudel?’ Attila asked him even before he sat down with Gyorgy.
“My father wanted only palinka. Then he told Gyorgy it was time for him to leave Budapest because nobody would trust him here even if he did succeed in slaying his demons.
“Gyorgy asked my father, ‘Why do you hate me?’
“My father told Gyorgy he didn’t hate him, but they’d both started out of the same gate. Uncle Gyorgy was wounded. ‘So is that what this is?’ he asked. ‘Some kind of race? Some kind of competition? I didn’t even notice the starting gate until you came charging out of it.’
“My father was exasperated. He implored Gyorgy to take whatever he had left and start a new life in France or England or Austria. But Gyorgy had nothing left, so my father offered him enough money to make a start elsewhere but not enough to return. He wanted Gyorgy to earn his way back.
“My uncle asked my father, ‘Take me in with you, Max. Take me into your business.’
“‘You’re joking, surely,’ Father said. ‘I don’t want you near my business, let alone in it. If you don’t want this money, I’ll take it back with me. I don’t part with it willingly, because I don’t trust you, Gyorgy. I don’t know what you’ll do with it.’
“I can imagine how Gyorgy felt. He must have looked my father up and down for a good while before he took the money and stormed off.
“And now, years later, came his other sibling’s request, Ernesztina’s appeal, this time on behalf of her eldest son, Sanyi. It was easy to see why the young man who came to Budapest was thought to be wayward. His mentor at the law firm, Odon Grunwald, made some effort to get Sandor to appreciate the law. Instead of hearing him out, though, the young man made Grunwald listen to him as he prattled on about The Birth of a Nation or about the pratfalls of Fatty Arbuckle. Grunwald certainly would not have played along if he hadn’t been asked by Maximillian Korda himself and, oddly, if he hadn’t found the young man so captivating.
“Sandor stayed for a short time at our house on Kaldy Street, off Andrassy. When he first approached the house, he asked if he was being taken to temple, so grand was the walkway leading to the entrance. ‘Goodness!’ he said, looking at the frieze above the door and colonnades holding up the roof. ‘Is there an Ark of the Covenant inside?’
“My father didn’t answer but spoke only to Lajos, his aide. ‘Take his things upstairs to the green room, the guest room.’ Then he turned to his nephew. ‘You have time to dress for dinner if you like,’ he told Sanyi.
“At dinner, Sandor cast a spell over us Korda girls, Hermina, Anna, Etel, Mathilde and me, and even over our mother.
“Oh, where are they now?” Klari said, interrupting herself. “Where is Hermina? Where is Anna, and Etel—and their boys, Bela, Janos—poor frail Janos—”
“Mother, please,” Simon said, and Klari looked up at the young couple.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “but these times—you know…”
Lili nodded sympathetically. Klari went on. “Sanyi was tall and awkward, but his dark brown eyes gleamed with cheer. The boys and Father seemed less moved. Sandor asked us over dinner, ‘Have you read Karl May?’ When no one answered, he said, ‘What about Jules Verne? Are you familiar with Around the World in Eighty Days?’ I said I had read it. ‘How about Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea?’ He said if he were being tested he thought he could describe every single detail of Captain Nemo’s quarters on the Nautilus.
“‘Unfortunately, there is no test for such a thing,’ my father said. We all glared at him, even my mother. ‘Is that what you want to do, Sanyi?’ Father asked. ‘You want to travel in a balloon or crawl along the floor of the sea?’
“‘Not at all. I’m afraid I’m not quite heroic enough for that. But I love the stories about people who do want to do those things. I’d love to capture such adventures myself, if I could.’
“‘Capture them?’ my mother asked good-naturedly.
“‘Yes.’ He leaned forward. ‘Imagine capturing such a thing, such an adventure, on film, so the whole world can join in.’
“Sanyi did not last long at our house. He preferred living with a poor cousin called Miksa, from his father’s side of the family. Miksa was a poet who supported himself as a hordar, a porter.”
As Lili tried to imagine what it must have been like to have such a man, this young man from another planet, traipsing around Klari’s living room, the room they sat in brightened, as if the light of heaven were shining through the window.
Simon looked restless. He said, “Is that when Sandor started courting you, Mother?”
“You really are a troublemaker, my dear son, my only son.”
“You should have had another one,” said Simon, “to balance me off.”
Klari said, “Sanyi didn’t court me. I wouldn’t describe it as courting.”
“How would you describe it, then, Mother?”
Lili thought Simon looked especially tough with his black eyes and broken nose. He looked like a warrior.
“Wouldn’t he skip out in the middle of the afternoon at the law office and come get you to take you to the movies?” Simon went on.
Klari giggled as she remembered. “Yes, we went to the very first moving picture house in Hungary, and guess where it was? In the New York Café, that’s where. They started it at the New York because the coffee grinder was a big brute of a man who could crank the projector the whole way through a film. It took some strength. It was before I met Robert, needless to say. I spent a great deal of time with my cousin Sanyi.”
Lili shifted uncomfortably in her seat as she watched Simon, felt his restlessness, his discomfort, perhaps, at hearing about his mother’s earliest infatuation.
“I must confess,” Klari went on, as she checked a wave of red hair at her temple, “Sanyi was a silly boy, really, but a strikingly handsome and smart one. And a dreamer—my Lord, what a dreamer he was! Aunt Ernesztina had three sons—Sanyi was the eldest.”
“And the
handsomest,” Simon put in.
This time it was Lili who said, “Troublemaker.”
“Yes,” said Klari, awkwardly. “He was the handsomest. Anyway, you should have seen the nice office Father had renovated for Sanyi, against his own better judgment, in his building on Vaci Street. He would do things for his sister that he would never have done for his brother.”
“Why don’t you talk about when he came calling on you?” said Simon, and he walked to the gramophone. He winced as he bent down and put his hand on his ribs.
He selected Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony and pulled it from its sleeve. A moment later, the composer’s insistent music filled the room. Klari turned an invisible knob in the air, and Simon obeyed, turning the spirited symphony down somewhat.
“The trouble was that Sanyi was not interested in the law,” Klari said, “and hardly ever visited Mr. Odon Grunwald. He would slip away to watch movies.
“I still clearly remember that man in there, cranking that projector. How ridiculous. How ridiculous and wonderful at the same time.” Klari chuckled. “What an experience! What magic, really!
“Sandor loved that place, loved the moving pictures he saw, loved the very aroma of the place. And he used to tell me that he wanted to make pictures like that. They were pictures, he was sure, that could move people the way he had been moved.
“When more theatres were built, like the beautiful Tivoli in the seventh district—”
“I’ve been there!” Lili shouted and clapped her hands together. “We saw the Marx brothers there. It was wonderful.”
Simon put his arm around Lili. Klari said, “Sanyi loved it, too. He would steal away from his dreary office, come take me out of school and spirit us over to the Tivoli, or later the Octagon, where we would sit in a paholy so as not to be spotted.”
“I’ve seen those,” Lili said, “the private boxes around the sides of the theatre and in the mezzanine. They were intended for lovers.”
Robert put his head in to say, “When you put on Beethoven, you have to listen only to him. Beethoven is not background music.” But then he saw the bundle in his wife’s lap. “Oh, the letters and pictures,” he said, and went away.
The parlour fell silent, except for Beethoven. Klari closed her eyes to listen. After a time, she said to Simon and Lili, “Do you ever wonder, as you listen to a beautiful piece of music, the kind that goes straight to your heart—do you wonder, is it all right for me to love this melody in this way, or did the composer not intend it for my ears? In other words, am I welcome here? Or conversely, if Wagner, say, disapproved of us Jews, is it all right for my heart to go on this voyage at all, or must I hold it back?”
Klari looked down at her feet. It was another minute before she resumed her story. “Of course, we were not lovers, Sandor and I. Cousins sometimes were, but we were not. At the theatre, Sanyi would clasp my hand in his as if we were getting set for a ride on a Ferris wheel. The lights would dim, the piano player would start to play, the great curtains would be drawn open as if upon the panoramic windows of a palace, but instead of looking outside, we’d gaze upon another world altogether, the world of an Alaskan in The Spoilers, the world of a penniless little hobo in The Tramp with Charlie Chaplin. Sanyi loved them all, and so did I—Mack Sennett with his Keystone Cops, the chilling Birth of a Nation, made by a man named D.W. Griffith, then Cecil B. DeMille and Erich von Stroheim, that lovely Mary Pickford…”
Her voice trailed off here as Beethoven’s lilting allegretto began, rhythmic and imploring. Klari said, “Oh, now listen to this impossibly beautiful music.” Klari closed her eyes and placed her right hand over her heart.
They all listened, but then Lili asked, “How old were you and Sandor then, Miss Klari?”
“I was eighteen or nineteen, and Sanyi was a year younger—too young, really, to apprentice to a lawyer.”
“But not too young to fall in love,” Simon said.
“No, not too young, but he was more interested in the love on the screen, the adventure, the safe adventure, I suppose, the safe love—the unreal love, that’s what it was—than he was in me or anyone else. Little did I know at the time that he was apprenticing to the film directors, not to Odon Grunwald with his hefty law books, poor man. He tried so hard.”
Klari sighed, but then she smiled. “Things went quite badly between Father and our cousin after a time. Young love was too frivolous for our father.”
To Lili, it felt as though they were talking about the love stories in films, not in real life. They paused to listen to the Beethoven. Simon wished they could go out to the movies themselves, sit in a paholy and drink coffee. How did that world slip away? He listened to the Beethoven again. He said, “My cousin Paul loves to quote that American poet, Emily Dickinson. She wrote, ‘Some cannot sing, but the orchard is full of birds, and we can all listen.’”
“That’s lovely,” Lili said.
“He’s referring to himself, dear,” Klari said to Lili. “Just don’t ask him to sing.”
Lili giggled, and he laughed, too.
Klari got to her feet. “I think we’ve had enough of these ancient recollections. We’ll continue another time.”
“I haven’t had enough,” Lili said. “I want to know what happened.”
“Show her one of the photographs,” Simon said.
Klari looked down at the bundle of letters and photographs in her lap. She gingerly untied the knot in the ribbon and pulled a photograph from the bundle. She passed the picture to Lili. It was of an elegantly dressed man and woman, the man in a light suit and a white Panama hat, the woman in a wide-brimmed sun hat, laughing up toward heaven. The man was throwing some bits of bread to pigeons by a fountain. The pigeons were everywhere.
“That’s Sandor and—guess who,” she said.
“You look so much younger, but lovely as ever,” Lili said.
“We were in Siena—Sandor, my mother, my sisters and I. By the fountain in the square—Il Campo, they call it—where the horses run. They have a race there, in this ancient piazza.”
“What a nice couple you were,” Lili added, “happy and carefree.”
“Thank you, but we were hardly a couple, as I’ve said.”
“Ha,” said Simon.
“Don’t you be smart,” his mother said.
“What went wrong?” Lili asked Klari. “You were saying things went very wrong between him and your father.”
“Sandor had violent arguments with our father,” Klari said. She huffed out a breath with some force, as if she were expelling smoke.
Klari said, “When word got back to Father that his nephew had been spotted at the New York Café or the Orpheum, he began to speak of him as an ungrateful lout. And whenever he found out I had been with Sanyi, he punished me terribly. I was to stay in my room, without music, without walks, without family meals, for a week or longer at a time. And he banned me from the picture palaces for a year.
“Sandor seemed unperturbed. He would show up at our house anyway. It was a big place, and he’d stayed with us, so he knew where to hide out. He’d sneak me out of my room and steal me away for the last show of the evening.”
“Didn’t anyone catch you?”
“No, because everyone was in on our little racket. My sisters enjoyed Sandor’s company, and he was generous with it. There was plenty of wit and charm to go around. Even the servants thought he was sweet and were eager for him to regale them with tales of Jules Verne or Victor Hugo. The trick was that our parents’ room was at the back of the house, half a city block away from ours, so it was easy enough. But our father’s wrath would become the least of our problems.”
“What happened?” Lili asked.
“We snuck out to the movies late one evening, Sandor and I. My sisters knew we were going, as always. In the end, everyone knew, even our mother. Juliana loved him as much as the rest of us.
“Sanyi and I sat in our usual spot at the Tivoli. Sanyi even had wine and flowers brought to our seats—he really was sil
ly. I don’t remember what film we saw that evening. If my life depended on it, I couldn’t tell you. All I remember was the news. That was in the day when serious people went to the movies to watch newsreels, to get a better sense of what was happening in the world. On this particular night, there was news of a crackdown on communists in Budapest…” she hesitated “…and even pictures of young men who had been hanged, friends of Sanyi’s, people he used to meet up with at the New York and the Japan—artists, bohemians, people just like Sanyi.
“We left the cinema numbed. Sanyi said his days in Hungary had come to an end. It was time to start life over in a more sensible place.”
“Was he a communist?” Lili asked.
“Hardly, but his artistic friends were, some of them. Miksa was, the cousin he was staying with, the poet. But Sanyi was anything but. He was more like our father than either of them liked to admit. He had a fire in his soul, but he seemed to have command of that fire, if that’s possible, and command of the people around him, much like Father. Much like my nephew Paul. He even looked like Paul. He was tall and dashing.
“That same night, the night of the newsreel, we were caught again by Father as Sanyi tried to sneak me back into my house. Hermina, bless her heart, tried to stop our father, but he cursed Sanyi from the door.”
Klari stood now to act out the role. “‘How dare you defy me in this way?’ he said.” Klari used a deep voice. “‘It’s not just your life you’re wasting, here, but my daughter’s, your mother’s. How dare you disobey me so flagrantly and senselessly? I want you away from here. I want you to pack your things in the law office and clear out. I want nothing to do with you. You are a disgrace to the family name.’”
Klari paused dramatically. Then she said, “Sandor looked at our father and said calmly, ‘A disgrace? A disgrace to the family name? In what way could I possibly be a disgrace? The only disgrace to be brought upon the family will be the disgrace of hypocrisy and blindness. Uncle Maximillian, I will not take your kindness for granted anymore.’ Our father turned his back on Sanyi, and he never saw him again, nor heard from him directly.
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