“Didn’t you mind having to do everything?”
“No. It was more than a fair exchange. I was capable of doing all that I did plus a lot more, but Mrs. Pomfret was doing for me everything and the only thing she could do. She offered me her name. It was a fair exchange.
“I made up my mind that Mrs. Pomfret’s children would never be as helpless as their mother was, and I took it upon myself to teach them how to do useful things like cleaning and cooking and so on and so forth. To learn to clean a house you need only to have a nose for dirt and be willing. Calloused knees also help. In order to teach the children how to cook, I had to learn to do it myself. And I did. I became quite a good cook, and considering all the wartime shortages, I also became a very inventive one, and that, too, helped save my life.”
At this point in her story, I had been coming to the home for over two weeks, and I had become very good at feeding Miss Ilona one-handed. She told me that I had become adroit. Even though I had become adroit, it sometimes took us a very long time to get finished with her meal because she would ask me about my day and what I had learned at school, and some other days we had agreed to watch the same television programs, and we would have to discuss them when I came. We had mostly the same favorites. We both loved documentaries, and neither one of us could stand cartoons. So we decided that we both had excellent taste. One day she convinced me to read The Little Prince, and she was happy that I liked it. She told me that it was better in French, and then she laughed and said that she hoped I would always remember that she was the first snob ever to tell me that something was better in French.
Between various other discussions, I did learn that when World War II was over, Mr. Pomfret returned to Paris and once again took over management of his family. They no longer had need for her, so she planned to make her way back to Hungary.
“I left the Pomfrets in better shape than I had found them. The change in Mrs. Pomfret was for the better, but I knew it would not be permanent. With the children it was different. They were and would continue to be far more self-sufficient than when I first met them. And so was I. And, please remember, I was now competent in French cooking as well as French literature and French art and so on and so forth.”
By this time I, Phillip, had become something of a celebrity at the home. Everyone knew my name and said hello to me when they saw me, and Mr. Malin, the singing Ukrainian, often rode with me in the elevator up to the second floor. When he did, Miss Ilona would act huffy and say things like, “How is Mr. Musak these days?”
“Mr. Music,” I corrected.
“I said Mr. Musak, and I mean Mr. Musak. Music is lively and interesting, and Musak is just there, but not there. It’s what you get in supermarkets. Mr. Malin is jealous. They’re all jealous. They think they have stories to tell.”
“Maybe they do.”
“Then let them tell them.”
“Who to?”
“To Merv Griffin, to Mike Douglas, to Donahue. How should I know? Do you want me to continue with mine?”
“If you’ll calm down,” I said.
“I’m calm,” she answered. “I just want you to remember that I am not a Beige and Gray.”
“I’ll remember,” I said. “You’re more of an Orange-Red.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Fiery temper.”
She seemed pleased with that, and she calmed down. “Where was I?”
“You were leaving France after World War Two.”
“Yes. It was 1949 before I got my papers back in order and made it home to Budapest. Once I got there, I hardly recognized anything. My handsome brother had been taken by the Nazis to a concentration camp, never to be heard from again—even to this day. We can only assume that he was murdered, but without eyewitnesses, my parents continued to hope. They were old and broken, and I found them more helpless than the early Mrs. Pomfret had been. The older of my two sisters was now a widow with an eight-year-old daughter, and my younger sister had married a Communist.”
“A practicing Communist?” I asked.
“The Communists had taken over the whole country,” she said.
“Oh,” I replied. My question had been the opposite of adroit, whatever that is.
“One thing I want to make clear to you before I have finished my story,” she said.
“What’s that?”
“It’s not easy being a Hungarian. We’ve been conquered too many times. We’ve become quite good at it, unfortunately. We have a bad habit of taking on the characteristics of our conquerors until we remember that there is no satisfactory substitute for being a real Magyar.”
“May I ask what all this has to do with how being ugly saved your life?”
“Has a lot to do with it. But,” she added,” I don’t like to make my point too sharply. I like to blunt it a little so that you really feel it when it penetrates.”
Right there, on the cassette, you’ll hear a pause, which is me thinking about what Miss Ilona has just said.
“Besides,” she said, interrupting my thinking, “everything I tell you about the Hungarians will have meaning in some part of my story. You’ll have to remember what I have already told you about how the Hungarians love their own cooking and their own language.”
There’s a gap in the tape again, me thinking again. Finally, I said, “So where do you come in?”
“Tomorrow,” she answered. “Miss Ilona likes to make a grand entrance, even if it is in a wheelchair.”
I shut off the cassette recorder. I was basically annoyed, and I didn’t want my thoughts on tape.
As I left the building, Mr. Malin called to me, “Phillip, Phillip! Wait up.”
I did.
He grabbed my good arm. “Now, listen to me, Phillip,” he said, “I’m next. As soon as you’re finished with Miss Ilona, it’s my turn.”
“I may be living here myself before Miss Ilona gets finished,” I said. I was still annoyed with her.
He cupped his hand over his ear and said, “What’s that?”
“You’re next,” I answered.
“Me, next.”
“You got it.”
“Got what?”
“Ohmigod,” I said, under my breath, and I ducked out the fire exit.
The next day I thought that if I went in by way of a side entrance I could avoid Mr. Malin and keep Miss Ilona happy. I found a door that looked like an employees’ entrance. I was practically an employee, so I went in and climbed the stairs. I climbed to the second floor, Miss Ilona’s floor, but I found that the door there had no knob; it must have had a push bar on the other side and could work only one way, so I walked back downstairs and found myself going through a laundry room. I nodded casually to the woman who was folding laundry and walked toward a sign that said ELEVATOR, and I took the elevator. It was not the elevator I usually took, and it had only one button, so I pushed that. I got out of the elevator and found myself in a hallway that I had never been in before. I went to find the nurse’s station. Unlike Miss Ilona’s floor or the first floor, the hallway here was quiet and empty.
When I found the nurse, I saw that she was sitting in front of a whole panel of TV screens, all of them black and white and all of them showing one variety or another of an old folk in bed. The nurse was keeping guard by way of closed-circuit TV.
I studied the panel of screens and said in my best game show host voice, “Do these contestants understand that there can be only one winner in our Mahatma Guru look-alike contest and that . . .”
The nurse’s eyes traveled from my broken arm to my cassette recorder and said, “You must be Phillip. What are you doing on this floor?”
“I’m lost,” I answered. “How do I get to Miss Ilona’s from here?”
Both the nurse and I were instantly distracted because about a million red lights began blinking on a panel in front of her, and the nurse had to flip about a hundred million switches and ask, “What is it?” about a thousand million times. She obviously had left her micropho
ne on and every one of those stars of the mini-screen had heard that I was Miss Ilona’s friend, and they all wanted to see me. They all had a story to tell, and they all wanted to tell it to me, Prince Phillip and his Magic Cassette. The nurse held a microphone out to me and said, “Would you care to say a few words to these people?”
I took the microphone from her and debated for a minute about doing my Fonzie imitation, but I decided that they wouldn’t understand, so I played it straight. I told them, “I have a date with a singing Ukrainian after I finish with Miss Ilona.” I glanced over at the panel and saw those million million lights blinking. “But,” I added, “I want you to know that I am working on a plan that will enable all of you to tell your stories.” Then I gave the microphone back to the nurse and asked her to please pull the plug. She did. I asked her how I could get out of there, and finally she told me without interruptions.
“You’re late,” Miss Ilona said.
“You’re lucky I’m here at all. If the people on the fourth floor had not been bedridden, I would have been kidnapped and held for a ransom of twenty-six bedpans. Now, I want you to know, I not only have the Beige and Grays, I also have the Whites after me. Everyone has some story to tell.”
Miss Ilona said, “Those old folks want to tell you about how they excelled at being a mother or a father, and how, now that their children are grown, they never come to visit them, and so on and so forth.”
“What about Mr. Malin? I see him quite often, and he never complains about his children.”
“Mr. Malin, the Ukrainian, who walks up here with you?”
“Yes, that Mr. Malin.”
“No wonder he never complains about his children. He has none. He never got married. He was a singing troubadour. Toured all over Europe. The only people who don’t complain about their children are the ones who don’t have them.”
“Well, I sort of promised him that I would get started with his story after you get finished with yours. If you ever finish.”
“Don’t rush me. I’m here all the time. It was you who was late today. Now, where was I?”
“You were up to 1949. You had just returned to Budapest and found your family very changed or missing.”
“Yes,” she said, “there were terrible food shortages in Budapest at that time. Everyone was hungry. Except, of course, the occupying Russians. They managed to get the best and the first for themselves. The Russians have never been short on nerve, I can tell you. They had the nerve to complain about the Hungarian cooking. ‘Onions and paprika!’ they yelled, as they sat down to eat. They began calling my people Paprikniks. The Russians put a nik or a ski on the end of most of their words.
“My sister who had married the Communist heard of these complaints, so she told her husband, ‘It’s no wonder that Comrade Zloty is in a bad humor all the time. He has indigestion from eating our awful Magyar cooking.’ ‘Yes,’ her husband agreed.”
I began to say something about remembering that the Hungarians were most proud of their cooking, but Miss Ilona stopped me. “My sister pretended to sympathize. She was only pretending because she had a plan. She said to her husband, ‘I know a young man who was chef to a wealthy French family and who could move into Party headquarters and cook for Comrade Zloty. He could also train the present staff to cook in the French manner, for he speaks Magyar almost as well as he speaks French.’
“My sister meant me, of course. She cut my hair like a boy’s and dressed me in a chef’s uniform and presented me to her husband.”
“You mean that you fooled your own sister’s husband?”
“It was easy. Her husband had never met me, and besides, in a Communist country there are some things that wives never tell even their husbands, and there are other things that wives especially never tell their husbands.”
“So did you take the job?” I asked.
“Indeed I did. And I did my job very well. I mentioned that there were all kinds of food shortages, but the Russian always got first choice of everything, and I had learned to cook under even worse conditions. I got so good at substituting that sometimes I could save enough ingredients to smuggle some out and give them to my family, including my sister who had married the Communist.”
“And is that how being ugly saved your life?”
“That is the first part of the second part.”
“What is the second part of the second part?” I asked.
“I had a little ceremony that I taught my Hungarian helpers.”
“What was that?”
“We spit in the soup.”
“You what?”
“We spit in the soup. We passed the pot around and each of us spit in the soup.”
“How did that save your life?”
“It saved my soul,” she said. “And that is the second part of the second part of how being ugly saved my life.”
As I was leaving the building, Mr. Malin approached me. He was holding a Beige lady by the hand and pulling her along. “Phillip!” he called. “I want you to meet Mrs. Silverman. I promised her the turn after me.”
Mrs. Silverman held out her hand to shake mine and I noticed a number tattooed in blue on her forearm. “Pleased to meet you,” she said.
“Do you have children you want to complain about?” I asked.
Mr. Malin grabbed my good arm—he had developed a bad habit of doing that—and pulled me over to the front door. “She lost her children at Auschwitz.” He pointed to his arm, the spot where her tattoo was. “In the concentration camp.”
If ever, if ever, if ever I felt the opposite of adroit; if ever, if ever, if ever I needed to be able to erase what I had said out loud the way I could erase what I said on tape, I would have done it then. I walked back from the door and said, “Mrs. Silverman, please excuse what I just said.”
“It’s all right, Phillip,” she said.
As I walked home that afternoon, I got madder and madder at Miss Ilona. If she had not put into my head the thought about Beige and Grays and people wanting to complain about their children, I would never have made that remark to Mrs. Silverman. Miss Ilona was certainly an interesting woman, but she was difficult.
I had to make it up to Mrs. Silverman. I had to figure out some way to get her and Mr. Malin recorded. And all the Whites. Maybe I could get my Sunday School involved, but I thought of Myron Pincus and Lisa Halpern, and I knew that I didn’t want to get babies like him or jocks like her involved. It was better to do the Beige and Grays one at a time. Waiting their turn would give them something to do. It was better for each of them to be center stage solo than for all of them to be part of a Beige and Gray chorus. How could you ever see a little blue tattoo if everyone stood in line backstage?
When I returned to the home the following day, I told Miss Ilona about my encounter with Mrs. Silverman. She got very touchy and said, “I didn’t say that everyone who has children wants to complain about them.”
“That’s the impression you like to give. I’ll bet that if you took the trouble to find out, you’d find that there are a lot of interesting stories in this place.”
“But at what cost? At the cost of being bored out of my natural skin? I told you that Hungarians have a bad habit of becoming like their conquerors. I don’t want to become a Beige and Gray.”
“There are parts of every story that are boring,” I said.
“Well, then, I better hurry up, so that you won’t be bored too long,” she said.
“There’s no reason for you to get insulted,” 1 said.
“You said that there are parts of every story that are boring, so I must bore you at least part of the time.”
“Let me just say that some parts of your story are more interesting than other parts.”
“What is least interesting?” she asked.
“The parts about the Hungarian language and Hungarian cooking.”
“But they are necessary!”
“I know that!” I said. “That’s why it’s important to listen to the less intere
sting parts.”
“What parts are most interesting?”
“Where you spit in the soup. I’m in no hurry for you to hurry,” I said. “There’s nothing I would rather do during my broken-arm phase.” She smiled, and I could see that she had returned to what is called good humor. “What really puzzles me,” I said, “is why no one ever guessed that you were not a boy.” (By this time I had completely forgotten that when I first saw Miss Ilona I had not been certain whether she was a Ms. or a Mr.)
Miss Ilona laughed, “I never had much of a figure.”
I think that at that point on the cassette you can hear me blushing, that’s how red I felt.
“Actually,” Miss Ilona continued, “Hungarians are artists at deceit. Some of the greatest art forgers of all time have been Hungarians.”
“I’m just surprised that the Russians never caught you. In movies they are always so suspicious.”
“I was almost caught once. That was in 1953, the year that Stalin died. What saved me was that after Stalin died, the man who came to power in Hungary was a man named Nagy. Nagy in Hungarian means large, and he was that. He was over six feet tall, and for a Hungarian, that’s basketball player size. He loved good food, good drink, good clothes, and so on and so forth. In short, the only thing Communist about him was his politics. After he tasted my cooking, I could have been a trained chimpanzee, and he would not have let me go. In fact, Nagy was so much a Hungarian at heart that he began to loosen up a bit on the government. He began to allow the factories to manufacture things like toothbrushes and refrigerators and so on and so forth. The Hungarians loved it. Of course, the Russians did not. So after two years they removed Mr. Nagy and put one more like their own back in. And for the next year and a half while I continued to cook up my soups inside, trouble was brewing outside.
“I told you that the Hungarians have a bad habit of becoming like their conquerors ... but only up to a point. I will explain it to you. That is, if I won’t bore you.”
“How will I know if you’ll bore me until I hear you?”
“All right. Let me explain it like this. The Russians said to the Hungarians, ‘We want to dress you up like Russian bears. Look at all the fun you will have with these sharp and powerful claws!’ So the Hungarians put on the claws and scratched out a few eyes with them. Then the Russians said, ‘See what fun! Now, suppose you put on a bear skin. See how warm it is.’ So the Hungarians put on the bear skin and saw how warm it was and how tough the skin was. Then the Russians said, ‘Now, suppose you wear these bear teeth and learn to eat like a bear.’ That’s when the Hungarians became a little worried.”
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