All Around Atlantis

by Deborah Eisenberg

  Sándor, at least, didn’t think you were so very wonderful. Sándor didn’t just jump up from his desk and throw open his door every time you came over. Sándor wasn’t looking to you for some muzzy little miracle. Sándor hadn’t lost his sense of humor.

  Oh, yes, I know he sat with you in his room…“working” (as I thought of it) hour after hour. But it was clear to me, at least, that he was indulging you. That he lent himself to your purposes out of sheer respect for the surrealism of…reality. It’s true, Peter—He shook his head: No good will come of this, he said—as though he had no power over the matter at all, as though it were all a fait accompli. He seemed to be standing on a bridge, watching himself be carried along on the currents below.

  I shook my own head in sympathy; things had been thus far ideal for him, I felt—sitting outside on the benches with the other declassé Europeans, gossipping, reminiscing, playing chess…coming back in to write, for a few hours, in a language that few around him could even read, or to read in a language that he would never speak with complete ease…What more could anyone ask, Sándor and I agreed on one of our walks—he had a very good life.

  I happen to remember, Peter—do you?—the occasion on which it seemed to occur to Lili that you, like her suitors, could be put to practical purpose. It was an afternoon when you were still draped over the sofa, following several hours of “work.” Yes, Lili proposed, she and Sándor, if you would consent to stay and look after me, could go out simultaneously.

  I can still see your momentary look of astonishment! And recall my own little frenzy. But of course they could both go out, I objected; I was virtually fourteen! I was actually starting high school and I certainly didn’t need looking after!

  Imagine how I felt when Lili’s gaze rested absently on me for only an instant, and she said, “No, you don’t mind, Peter? A few hours only?”

  You closed your eyes, haughtily. I longed to clamp my teeth around your ankle. Lili riffled your hair; you opened your eyes, sniffed, and closed them again.

  I remember you and Tócska on that evening, and subsequent ones, padding around after Lili and Sándor had left, humiliated and sorrowful. I generously offered to entertain you by turning on the TV, and was rewarded by a blank look that sent me flouncing off. You, I’m sure, remember none of it (your nubby little sweater, the way you lay on the sofa, reading, with your feet up rudely on the arm, some coffee with hot milk you made once and shared with me—its profound, mysterious taste)…but I, Peter, remember it all, with a special, ringing clarity. I was—I admit it—that happy.

  Perhaps your own demotion—from severe scholar, or from spoiled princeling—to domesticated animal, gave you some feeling of solidarity with me. I couldn’t say, of course, but I certainly remember the moment you abruptly put down some journal you’d been reading and looked at me narrowly, as though I were a specimen that had just been brought to your attention.

  “Why are you such a barbarian?” you said. “Why are you having trouble with your math? It’s impossible that you’re an actual imbecile, but look at you—you’re always staring as though you’ve been lobotomized!”

  “‘Lobotomized’?” I scoffed.

  “And your vocabulary.” You invited me to marvel with you. “Your vocabulary is a disaster.”

  You demanded to see my math text. I can see you this instant, plucking it disdainfully from the pile of schoolbooks on my bedroom floor and thumbing through it, frowning. What page was I on, you wanted to know.

  Why? Were you so great at math?

  You were great at everything, you said, squinting at the book as you settled yourself on my bed. Or hadn’t I noticed? No! Off! Who was I to sit next to the great You? I was to grovel respectfully in the little chair over there.

  So how was I supposed to see the book, please?

  Hmm, you conceded. A plausible argument; evidently the situation wasn’t hopeless.

  “Anna’s doing so well at school,” Lili boasted to Mrs. Spiegel. “Thanks to Peter.”

  You and I looked up at one another from whatever we were reading, and glowered. Mrs. Spiegel drew back. “So sweet,” I can remember Lili saying, imperturbably. “Aren’t these two? So dear.”

  When I cried with frustration, alone with you in my room, and hurled my book onto the floor, you waited, you retrieved the book, and you explained again. Don’t be so frightened, you told me. Don’t be so impatient. Don’t fight so hard against it; if you want to know something you don’t already know, you have to let yourself change.

  It was quite natural, don’t you think? That we began to speak of Lili and Sándor. How, in fact, could we have avoided it?

  Were you surprised to find how little I knew? That I knew virtually nothing at all about either Lili or Sándor? I wonder at what point it dawned on you that I was only then learning—and from you—how Sándor had been smuggled out of Berlin after his brief stint in hiding, with the best fake papers money could buy; how, at the end of the war, Sándor haunted the agencies, going daily to study documents, sign papers, scour the records for anyone who might be left. How, when Sándor went to meet the stranger who was to arrive on the boat, it was Lili who appeared, wearing a little navy-blue coat presented to her by some organization or another, carrying a small suitcase and a one-and-a-half-year-old child.

  Her cousin’s uncle? I said.

  Anna, you said. I could see my own shock in your face as I stared at you, measuring the great, blank space that lay between Sándor and Lili.

  And what could have gone through your mind when I asked if you knew whether I might have cousins somewhere, myself: when you realized that the only person there to answer was you; to inform me that (as you’d gathered from Sándor) my father’s large family had been eradicated, and that in Lili’s there had been only the one other child.

  Another child? “Oh—” I remember saying. “Her brother…”

  It collected in the room as we lay there, stretched out—the pink and silver city; the river, reflecting the pink and silver sky, the sleepy stone lions guarding the tunnel through the mountain, the lights twinkling on in the dusk below the castle, the twinkling bridges, the stone, the tile, the arches, the marble, Europe and Asia washing over each other, converging and diverging, the park, glorious with its drapery of snow or blossoms, the cafés, the Gypsies, despised and magical, playing music in the streets, the crowds strolling, laughing, drinking, dancing…or at least that’s how it must have been, you said, while Lili was growing up.

  It was over, of course—all changed by the time you yourself were growing up—gutted, buried. A gray city now, the ghost of itself.

  Lying there, side by side, you and I explored the rainy park, the broad, silent avenues, searching for the big house with the piano and the cook, searching through the ghost city for the missing—you searching for the living city, I for traces of Lili. We were ghosts in the ghost of Lili’s city, just as she and Sándor were ghosts in mine.

  And you were the stranger, then, everywhere…Where was your home, Peter? Were you frightened? I envisioned my own fear rising from my body, encased in a luminous globe—you accepting it into yourself as though it were precious; it left a rift in me like a wound. I remember the springy feel of your hair against my cheek; once in a while I dared to reach out one hand and touch my fingertips to yours. Were you aware of my hand? Whose did you think it was—a girlfriend’s? My ghostly mother’s? The missing boy’s? Mine?

  How often did we talk like that? Every afternoon for a while? Every few weeks? Maybe, in fact, it was only once.

  Because at a certain point you were just there; at a certain point, as long as I could imagine you alive in the world, going about your business, I no longer required for our conversation—which was so necessary to me—your physical presence.

  You know, Peter, Paige was much more grown up around that time than I was. I’d go so far as to say she was actually infatuated. She was getting rather dignified, in her way, and she’d all but stopped talking to me about you.


  I could at least point out to her, I felt, that you were vain, not pleasant, and that you had a different girl tagging along behind you all the time.

  Yes? she said, in an idle manner. And what kind of girls did you especially like?

  Oh, who could tell, I said. You probably didn’t notice what any of them were like. And you dropped them all, anyhow. Or maybe they just got sick of you bragging.

  In fact, though, you liked a very distinct type of girl at the time, didn’t you. I wonder if you still do. Of course, we don’t really produce that type any longer; probably even Europe doesn’t—at least, not in quantity. Fragile, restless, sloe-eyed, ill-tempered, very squeamish, in their little striped T-shirts, as if someone had just handed them a sickeningly poor translation of Sartre…

  Those girls! Did you get around to marrying one of them? Maybe you married a whole bunch of them. Or maybe you never bothered yourself about getting married at all. Maybe you married that girl you brought to the party someone gave when your book about Sándor finally came out. Did you, I wonder. That girl had her hand on your sleeve every second.

  That afternoon with Voitek, which changed a lot of things for you—it changed some things for me, too, you know.

  Didn’t you always think, when you were young, that real time starts the year you’re born? You’re born, and then time begins to move—forward. Didn’t you think that there’s sort of an ocean of space that separates you—but completely—from the big lump of everything that went on before?

  Were you particularly aware of Voitek? I wasn’t, as far as I remember. I don’t think Lili had been seeing him long. And she didn’t seem all that interested in him, really—maybe she just felt a little sorry for him. Or, anyway, he was just…there. Thinking about it now, I can see that he was very good-looking, but at the time he just seemed to me like a large—like a large apparatus of some sort, humming with silence…Like, in retrospect, an atomic reactor.

  It started with Tarot cards, that day—isn’t that right? I think Paige had seen a deck of them somewhere, and was sort of going on…to impress you, it seems fair to say: Didn’t we believe there were cultures that were special? Didn’t we believe that there were people who had learned how to—oh, I don’t know—to harness invisible currents, to see something, the future, in cards, in your hand…?

  I don’t really remember what all she was saying, but I remember it seemed so persuasive to me, fascinating…

  And the first thing I do remember clearly is the way Lili simply cut Paige off—how shocking that was: This is not interesting, a movie would be interesting. Voitek? A movie?

  Paige was simply stunned, and I remember looking at Sándor, for help, because he really did like Paige, you know, and always listened so seriously to all those ideas and opinions of hers—but instead he just made that little bow and said something to the effect that he himself could see clearly into his future, by looking at his hand or by not looking at his hand, that it was the past that was opaque, it was the past that only special insight could reveal, and as for what was going to happen tomorrow, I think he said, that was something anyone at all could see if he would only consult his memory of what had happened yesterday, and now, if we would excuse him…

  Of course by then I could feel it on my skin, in my body. But Paige was simply lost. Everything was happening so fast, and she was talking and talking, something, something about the Gypsies, didn’t you adore them? didn’t you love to see them, at least, and talk to them?

  And obviously it was to pacify her that you grabbed her hand and looked at her palm and said—goodness knows what you said, yourself—that yes, you’d known some, you’d learned all sorts of this or that: I see a concert hall…I remember you saying, and then Voitek saying, This guy sees a concert hall; I see a two-car garage in Bronxville…

  Of course he’d intended no more than a flippant little end to the business, I’m sure, but instead of sealing something shut, it tore something open, and where was Voitek then?

  Where were we all? And how many people were in that room? Millions, yes? Literally millions of people had been there all that time, just waiting to be recognized.

  And who, in particular, was Voitek seeing, I wonder, in the white stillness of your face, when he started to scream, yes you adored them, “adored” them, shit, shit, opportunist, coward, or whatever it was, exactly, until it became really impossible to make it out because it was all in Polish, I guess, except for a word here and there of German.

  Thank heavens for Lili, yes, Peter? Because you didn’t even have the presence of mind to duck. And thank heavens, too, that evidently Voitek had some dim awareness it was Lili, out of all that vast crowd, who’d touched his arm. Otherwise, he would have killed her, I’m sure, within moments.

  Was it I who went to the door? Usually that’s how I remember it, but sometimes in my memory it was you. Actually, I suppose, it could have been any of us, but usually I remember myself, threading my way toward the pounding on the door through the whirlwind of debris that had just been our possessions, and the curiously weightless way it was flying around, as though our apartment had only been waiting for one touch to send it wheeling, in splinters, through the air.

  But the thing I always remember in exactly the same way is how Mrs. Spiegel just stood there in the doorway as those guys tore in and tackled Voitek. I’m sure neither Lili nor Sándor ever forgot it, either—the uniforms, the truncheons, the sound of Voitek’s head as it hit the wall; the utter absence of expression on Mrs. Spiegel’s face…

  And what was I thinking as I watched Paige cry? I was thinking about the way she looked, crying. I wouldn’t have imagined that something so extreme, so complete, could happen to someone’s face from the inside. Paige’s pretty face—where was it?

  I wonder if she ever noted that she got her date with Sándor. Because I gathered, eventually, that after he called her mother, Sándor took Paige to the coffee shop to wait for the driver, and the two of them had a soda.

  He certainly did his best to get me out of the wreckage, too. And if you hadn’t offered to stay with me, I would have had to leave. But how could I have left? I knew Lili would go to her room. I knew she would, and she did, and then there I was, evaporating, and she was on the other side of the wall, unreachable, spiraling back down…

  I guess I never really had a chance to thank you. But obviously you understood how serious I was when I asked you to leave me alone and go check on Lili. I know it took courage, Peter, to open that door and go in.

  And once you had—do you know?—I calmed right down. I stopped shaking, and that blinding silence dimmed. I raised my head and opened my eyes. There was the world, all around me—the sky, the earth, a bird, a voice…

  Did it ever occur to you to wonder what happened when Sándor came back? Well, he looked around mildly for a moment, and he asked how I was. I realized I was holding a book you’d stuck in my hands when you’d gone in to see Lili. I was fine, I said. And Lili? What about Lili? And Lili was fine, too.

  Sándor glanced at Lili’s door. “She’s all right,” I said. “Really. She’s fine.”

  “Yes?” he said, and hesitated. “Well. So, what would you say to a movie?”

  Lili was perfectly serene when I came in for breakfast the next morning—as serene as you found her when you eventually joined us yourself, looking disheveled and mightily confused. I hope I didn’t snicker, Peter, when she said she was glad you’d stuck around, that there was a lot of cleaning up to do.

  You, though! You were really insufferable, there, for a while, were you aware of that? I don’t know who you thought you were—my brother? my father?

  I suppose you were just panicked, really. These days no one bothers even to remark on a very young man and an older woman, but it certainly was a novelty back then.

  With all due respect, Peter, I have to say that I don’t really attribute Lili’s happiness in those days to any individual qualities of yours; no doubt any pretentious twenty-one-year-old Hungarian
would have done as well.

  But I very much doubt that anyone else at all could have parlayed, as you eventually did, some translations and what amounted to a small essay into so much celebrity for Sándor (and celebrity, consequently, my point is, for…well, you get my point, I’m sure).

  Of course it was just one of those moments, wasn’t it, when attention was on such things, when even writing as rarified as Sándor’s was likely to be hijacked—and by just about anyone. Absolutely every poor shnook seemed to be out there scrounging up some piece of art with which to beat up some ideological adversary or intellectual competitor, something that could be said to validate some thesis, or buttress some argument, or represent some something or other—an indictment of totalitarianism, or an indictment of repressive capitalism, or these particular currents of psychoanalytic thought, or those particular currents of Marxist thought, or an esthetic of the elite, or an esthetic of the people, or currents of Jewish mysticism, or an expression of Christian acceptance, or an expression of Buddhist acceptance…

  Now, of course, no one wants art for any purpose whatsoever—let alone for its own. But that was the moment, wasn’t it? And you seemed to have a perfect understanding of just how to exploit it, how to take it all as far as possible. Something so very exactly what Sándor never wanted.

  Hypocrite, you say; ingrate—Goneril couldn’t have put it better. What do I think you should have done? Surely I can’t mean to vilify you for having had a few thoughts about work to which you were so devoted! And don’t I think a readership deserves something useful in return for its admiration? Besides, anyone whose stance (like Sándor’s) is fastidious high-mindedness is simply demanding that others be exploitative on his behalf. Also, who am I to say that you were in any way exploitative? Were you not, in fact, entirely sincere in your efforts to bring Sándor’s work to a wider and more receptive audience?