All Around Atlantis

by Deborah Eisenberg

  I don’t think you ever met her mother; you weren’t around yet the time Mrs. Chandler came for tea. A ritual inspection, I have to presume, which, I have to presume, we failed. Mrs. Chandler was wearing a suit of a kind I’d never seen outside Lili’s magazines; the driver was parked downstairs, waiting between a row of garbage cans and a game of stickball. That incredibly courtly old man had just dropped by—Mr. Keeskeméti—and Mrs. Chandler couldn’t understand one word out of his mouth. At first she kept saying, Pardon me? Pardon me? And then she gave up and simply carried on her side of the conversation as an improvisational solo. Mr. Keeskeméti was totally bewildered, Lili proceeded to forget her English, Sándor basically left the planet, and Paige and I were clutching each other with merriment.

  In Paige’s family, there wasn’t a loose end in sight. Everything was hermetically sealed; her parents had encased themselves in a veneer of propriety so effective you could have lain right down on their floor, screaming in agony, and never have been heard by a living soul.

  I, of course, was a walking loose end. And Paige spotted me immediately: something at last to unravel! And not to be vain, but I must have looked worth unraveling—I suppose it was the very weaseliness of my demeanor that was so promising. And once Paige had set her sights on me, she went about me the way she went about everything—calmly, inexorably, sure of success: Why can’t you come over and practice with me? Won’t your mother and father let you? Well, next week, then. Or the week after that. So, if it’s too far, I’ll come to your house. My mother won’t mind—she’ll have the driver bring me.

  So, there was Paige—sitting right in our living room. And needless to say, I was numb with embarrassment. But on whose behalf? On behalf of everyone who’d ever been born, I suppose. Though to my astonishment, all parties other than myself appeared to find everything perfectly natural.

  Lili was delighted, of course, that I’d found a friend—so well-mannered and self-possessed a friend at that. Sándor was fascinated by the black velvet headband in Paige’s glossy, American hair, her perfect impenetrability, her sudden (calculated, I was quick to inform him) dimplings. Mrs. Spiegel adjudged her gifted—not unbecomingly gifted, but gifted. And Tócska! Poor Walden Tócska, who flattened himself against the wall whenever I appeared, heaped his great bulk across Paige the moment she sat down on the sofa, and wheezed with love as she crooned to him and ran her fingers through his nasty fur.

  Paige herself was aglow. I guess she’d had something rather concrete in mind for us (“exotic” or even “colorful,” I’m afraid, is how she might have characterized us in later years) and we must have accorded satisfactorily to her specifications—the accents, Sándor’s marvelous white hair and elegant posture, my blond, stunning, soigné mother, the mere functionality of the furniture, the noisiness of the street outside, the casually shifting landscape of visitors, the—the-what-was-that-thing-called, Paige asked Lili, the delicious thing with the apples? And how ever could Lili have made it!

  Oh, one learned, Lili said absently; she’d often watched the cook…

  Paige and I practiced our duets, and then Lili would give us a snack. Paige would be all smiles and dimples, while I watched Lili tremulously, hoarding the sight of her as she took the glasses for our milk down from the cupboard…the plates…It was as if Lili were about to undergo, unknowingly and at my hands, an operation which would either save her life or kill her.

  Because as soon as Paige and I were alone in my room, Paige would get right down to business: What cook? Well, then, what was my mother talking about? Where were she and Sándor from? Who had taught her to play the piano? So why didn’t I ask? Why had she stopped playing? Well, so why did her whole education stop? Then why did she have to go away? But didn’t she have to go to school there? So why did her mother and father let her go? But anyone could get off a train—they must have come with a car! What had she done wrong? But that was impossible—she couldn’t be! Didn’t I know what they looked like? Like Kathy Frankel, or like that girl with the bassoon, Risa Loeb. Well, we didn’t eat funny food, did we? Anyhow, what did that have to do with it? So what did their friends do then? Their neighbors? The cook?

  And where was Sándor when she was away? Did he go with her? But no one could really live in someone’s closet—how would you go to the bathroom? And where were all the others? The others—like Lili’s mother and father; I had grandparents, didn’t I? Or aunts and uncles—didn’t Lili at least have a brother or a sister?

  Paige and I stared at each other, and then I exclaimed: No, breathless, as though running at top speed I’d smacked right into an invisible wall.

  Of course not, I said. Obviously Lili had no brother or sister.

  Paige frowned. But anyhow, she said, what happened to the piano?

  It was very much a common enterprise that Paige and I pursued on those afternoons. It was Paige who could lower me down into the world I couldn’t reach by myself, and Paige who could haul me back up, to tell what I had seen. But she couldn’t go down there herself. And she couldn’t see it—not even at second hand, as a nightmare, the way I could, or even as a migraine. It was up to me to tell her what was there; Paige couldn’t see that world at all.

  We’d stare at one another, concentrating, going over and over it, straining to fit fragments together—straining to look all around, to see its landscapes, its weathers, its populations…Sometimes both of us fell asleep, quite suddenly, like travelers. Often we found ourselves at a cul de sac and had to discard a question or an answer in order to proceed.

  But slowly, slowly, from the shadows of overheard conversations, as I felt my way around the shapes of skirted subjects, pictures began to distinguish themselves from the welter of my dreams, refining and embellishing themselves; Paige and I watched, as though we were watching a photograph immersed in a solution developing details from a blur.

  What did it look like, Paige asked, staring at me.

  I lay across the bed and closed my eyes.

  Suppose I’d been able, Peter—by bending my entire self to it—to imagine adequately some tiny element. Just, let’s say…oh, one barb of the wire fence. Its taper, its point, its torque, its dull gleam altering with the play of the searchlights, the small rag of flesh, the faint, high, venomous raging of the current…

  Fix it in your mind, I’d instruct myself; focus in on it…Can you see it—really see it? Yes? And now—Step back!

  I don’t know, I said, though by then I could hear the boots in the courtyard, smell the dank, urgent anxiety of the dogs, see the beautiful boy…Did he sense me through the layers of time, struggling back for him? No, it was something quite different he was waiting for, his eyes huge and blank, growing dull, but still stormy blue, like the ocean. Like Lili’s.

  Oh, I just fry with shame, Peter, when I think of it. Of course, I felt plenty of shame at the time—Lili’s shame, probably, the shame of the body; the shame of the disgusting things that can be done to your body—the disgusting ways your body can be made to fail—by someone whose body is itself intact.

  But eventually (unclearly, of course, at first—as an uneasiness or unhappiness) a different shame began to emerge from behind that one: the shame of what Paige and I had been doing. Was I exposing Lili needlessly? Was Paige’s interest trivial or merely morbid? Was mine? Had I been using Paige, and to do something that I was too weak or too cowardly to do myself or that I had no business doing in the first place?

  I discussed it with you, actually. Constantly, in fact, for some years—in imaginary conversation. And what it seemed to me you had to say on the subject, was, basically, that we all live in one world; that everyone is exactly the same distance from the core of the earth. That it was, therefore, if for no other reason, very much my business. And that Paige—even after her nerve gave out and she buckled down to being a socialite—was no less involved than I was in everything that had ever happened.

  Well, I still fry with shame, Peter, as I say. But this notion of yours (that I feel almost
certain would be yours) does provide some consolation; and actually I think you’ve got a point.

  One time, just one time, I went to dinner at Paige’s house. House, yes! Right in the middle of the city! With great, tomb-like beige-and-gold rooms, old, gold-framed—ancestors, Paige said, spying down from every wall, massive, closed, oak doors…

  There was the desolate sound of the dinner bell, and then the maid brought the serving platters around to the five of us—Paige, her older sister Pamela, their parents, and me—docking, departing, docking…we might have been towns on the shore of a huge lake. And just as the platter of steak completed its stately voyage, Mr. Chandler’s head lifted slightly, as though he had caught a scent. Very unusual, my name—what sort of name was it?

  I looked frantically at Paige. “He wants to know where you’re from,” she said, coolly. “Anna’s parents come from Hungary, Daddy.”

  Mr. Chandler’s fork hesitated in the air; his head rotated toward me like a planet. Were my people in Budapest? There was a family friend in Budapest—a prominent person, an elderly, highly respected woman—If my people were there, perhaps they knew her…

  His stare was cold and flat, a dull blade…What had happened to my mother’s piano? Because Lili had nothing, not even a locket…

  “Mummy,” Pamela said, “I don’t think Anna eats meat. Do you eat meat, Anna?”

  A ring was collecting around the bloody lump on my plate, soaking the potatoes red. “Oh, dear,” Mrs. Chandler said.

  “No, I do,” I said. Paige was watching carefully, consideringly, as I sank my ornate silver fork into the steak. “Really…”

  You might not have taken much notice of Paige, Peter, but Paige took plenty of notice of you. It was as if she’d been waiting to see what we really added up to—and voilà, yes? It was you.

  She insisted to me you were beautiful. No, I said, you were—and this was the very word—creepy. The most beautiful person in the world, Paige said. Next to Sándor, of course, but Sándor was too old for her.

  I didn’t see why, I said. In only one more year we’d be in high school and her parents would let her go on a date, and Sándor would only be sixty-two. Though naturally by then Mrs. Spiegel might have nabbed him.

  Paige’s sigh fluttered like a long silk scarf. She said: I have nothing but pity for mean-spirited people.

  Well, how would you have felt if I showed up from nowhere at your home the way you did at mine? The fact is, you just slid right in there, and then I was the stranger.

  I was asleep; I woke up suddenly, the way children do when something is wrong. My room was unfamiliar in the dark. I listened, but there was only the usual slightly eerie lullaby of voices and laughter from the living room.

  I reached for my clothes, which I’d slung over the chair, and I crept down the hall, blinking in the light.

  Oh, my, Peter—how unfed and pretty you were! So different from the sleek, the…oh, let’s say “personage” I got a glimpse of yesterday. You were like a weedy little flower poking its way through a crack in the pavement. Even your clothing, your dark little jacket, your trousers, your shirt, were as thin as ragged petals.

  But what on earth was happening in that room? It was as if my ears were scrambling what they picked up—just ever so slightly—before passing it on to me! Was I, in fact, still asleep? Ah—no, you and Sándor and Lili were speaking Hungarian…

  I remember your small, pointed chin and huge, sleepy, skeptical eyes. You looked as though you might bite if someone tried to pet you. I remember your hair falling around your face in black squiggles, and your white, white skin. As white as mine, but bad—a catalogue of privations. The faintest ray of daylight would have scorched you lifeless.

  You lifted your eyes to me; you seemed entirely unsurprised to see me there, peeking out from the entranceway. Sándor was speaking—I heard a cataract of water as you and I gazed at one another.

  I wonder what it was you were seeing. In my jeans and plaid shirt perhaps I looked like a boy, myself—a delicate little boy; perhaps you were gazing at yourself, younger, in some vision of alternate possibilities. It certainly seemed to me, as I stood there—the happiness of your conversation deafeningly amplified by the unrecalled language—that the three of you were together in a vivid, hardy, enclosed past, and that I was looking on longingly, dissolving into the shadow of an unsatisfactory and insubstantial future.

  What did you want from us? You’d arrived in the country, I gathered, some two years earlier, equipped with that most powerful item—a slip of paper, on which were a few names and addresses. Your formidable gift for languages provided you with sparkling English in no time. You’d distinguished yourself at college and had already catapulted, at your tender age, well into graduate school. In short, you had plenty. So couldn’t you leave us alone?

  No, Lili said. What was the matter with me? It was a marvel, a blessing that you’d come to find Sándor, that you’d tracked him down. That you intended to bring his work into English; it was the most precious gift possible that Sándor (according to you) once again represented something to young people back home.

  “Home,” Sándor said mildly. And just what was it he was said to represent, he mused, wandering back into his room.

  But why did I think, Paige asked me, when we first discussed you, that every single person who was in this country had “escaped” from some place? “Maybe he just left, you know, Anna.”

  In school I learned simple facts: such and such a country is rich in natural resources; a railroad was built between this place and that; the area was contested—“simple facts,” staggering volumes of blood.

  Paige was too polite to say it in so many words, but I’m sure it had occurred to her, nearly as often as it had occurred to me, that everything I said in my room was a lie. Actually, I don’t think it was until I was in high school that the particular tragedy which Paige and I had struggled to fathom on those afternoons cooled down into Facts, which people spoke of publicly, as if what my mother experienced in her room were a matter of dates and numbers, a distant aberration.

  Your own, much more modest, catastrophe was quite a different thing. Now, there was a disaster one could speak of; the sort of disaster that might be experienced by human beings like ourselves; victims we could all—including Mr. and Mrs. Chandler—endorse! I must have been right, Paige told me excitedly, only a few days after her Doubts, you probably escaped—there’d been Communists swarming all over Budapest!

  How gratified you would have been to hear Paige’s conjectural account of your escape, lined as it was with monuments to you—You Scrambling Over Tanks in the Streets, You Dodging Bullets, You in Hand-to-Hand Combat with Soldiers…

  “Peter?” was what I said. “I’ll bet Peter was hiding under the bed.”

  You, of course, having brought it with you, were unable to appreciate the new atmosphere of industry and purpose that permeated our apartment. Which seemed to be twice as full of people as it had been, though in fact the only newcomers were you and some intermittent girlfriends of yours.

  And, oh, what a dilemma you posed for Mrs. Spiegel—Too bad you never got to hear her fretting to Lili in the kitchen! On the one hand, she was elated: Finally they’d come to rescue Sándor from anonymity! On the other hand, they, she’d remember, was you. Disorder saddened her and made her fearful, and the truth is, Peter, even if you hadn’t been a mere student, you were a little raffish for her taste, really. A little oblique.

  But Lili! Seriously, Peter, no sooner had you arrived, it seemed to me, than there was a rapid diminution in her sensitivity to the idiotic. Time to stop practicing, girls—Do you remember the way she’d say that? Peter and Sándor have work to do. Do you remember the way she enumerated our accomplishments to her bored and irritated beaux—Sándor’s accomplishments, your accomplishments, even my accomplishments. And I can promise you, Peter, those guys were every bit as impressed that you’d read Herzen, Gombrowicz, and Freud in the original as they were that I could play To a
Wild Rose on the piano!

  Sándor himself never would have demanded silence. Sándor wasn’t a show-off. Don’t you agree? Peter? But Lili was suddenly never without an ornamental book. Oh, all right, without a book, I mean. And do you remember those funny, unconvincing horn-rims she brought home one day from the office?

  Once I came upon you reading to her. In Hungarian, naturally. That day it was she who was stretched out across the sofa, and you were sitting in an awkward, straight-backed chair next to her. Neither of you even noticed me come in! And I was simply stunned, I have to say, by Lili’s dreamy, unformed expression, as though she were still only a girl, to whom anything might yet happen.

  Oh, look. Do you think I grudged my poor mother pleasure? Well, I didn’t! And obviously it was a tremendous relief to me that there were so few of those episodes, during that time, in her room. But how deeply, deeply unfair it all was. There you were, conducting Sándor and Lili back and forth between me and the world that had more than wished them dead so long before. And how eager they were to see that world; how much you had to show them! What everyone had been doing, what everyone had been saying, in the years since they’d left. So many questions, so much talk! Europe. Who cared? I didn’t even exist there. We’d been going along so happily where we all actually did live—America: I had welcomed Lili into America—that was what I’d been born to do.

  I was the American on the premises! That was my position and it was an exalted one. But the moment you come sauntering along, my position and I get a demotion! What’s that all about, please?