‘I don’t, that’s all.’
‘With the long decades of freedom ahead of you, why can’t you spend a few minutes just to please me.’
‘I’m sick and tired of trying to please you, and I don’t have long decades of freedom ahead of me. As you well know, both my parents died before they reached sixty.’
‘But that’s no reason to expect that…’
‘And I’ve got nothing to say to you. The marriage wasn’t working, that’s all.’
‘That’s not good enough.’
Worn down by my persistence, sitting down at the picnic table amidst the sunshine and birdsong, he eventually did as asked. Once started, Douglas had no trouble speaking – almost eloquently – about my faults, which, according to him, had been numerous.
‘All the complications that living with you entailed. Nothing was straightforward. Turning myself inside out to try to guess what was behind your sigh, your look of displeasure. I am a simple person; I like things, people to be simple, uncomplicated. And your anxieties! “Have you enough life jackets with you, Douglas?” “Have you checked the tides, Douglas?” “Have you looked up the timetable, Douglas?” “Have you packed enough warm clothes, Douglas?” “Have you mended the hole in the tent, Douglas?” Although you were quite a young child when you came to New Zealand, it’s sad that you’ve never really got over being a refugee. I’m an active person who likes to do, to act. I can’t live like that. All too often you’re paralysed by fears, by insecurity. Security was what you wanted through the marriage. Security, not me.’
With those words he stood up, ready to go. Just before we parted, he asked if I remembered saying to him, not long after we were married, that with him I felt half dead?’
I nodded.
‘If you hadn’t made it so clear how you really felt about me, I might’ve tried harder, might have stuck it out longer, at least until Janet was a bit older. That day confirmed what I had suspected all along.’
‘What? What was that?’
‘That you had really only married me to get away from your smothering family. That’s not good enough. I need to be…feel entitled to be loved for myself. Not that I deserve it, of course. I know I’m not entirely blameless in the way things have turned out.’
He finished speaking and was starting to walk away, when he turned back to say, ‘You’ll be better off without me, you’ll see. I’m doing this for the three of us. We’ll all be happier, you’ll see.’
On Christmas morning, loaded up with the new big bike, the new Barbie and a pile of books, I dropped Janet off at Douglas’s flat. Driving away to my parents’ house, I couldn’t help thinking about the Christmases of my childhood, also spent bored and alone with my parents and grandmother. I had wondered then, as I wondered now, what I was supposed to do on this day when everyone else was celebrating. But my parents seemed to have plenty to do. As soon as I sat down in the lounge, they started to draw up a comprehensive list of Douglas’s deficiencies.
‘So, he was a good provider. Full stop. What else was good about him? Tell me that, Eva,’ said my mother.
‘So, the marriage is finished. Is it the end of the world? Think of what my poor mother had to put up with! What I have had to put up with from your grandmother! Life is not meant to be a bed of roses, Eva,’ said my father.
The list of Douglas’s faults contained the following: he wasn’t Jewish; he wasn’t central European; he didn’t show affection; he couldn’t show his feelings (if he had any, which my mother doubted); and he wasn’t a normal human being – no English person was.
‘Darling, Eva. Their peculiar qualities – stiff upper lip, always businesslike, never saying what they think – may be lovable for other English people, but you are still our daughter and Jewish and Hungarian through and through.’
‘I’m a New Zealander, I think,’ I said, but they weren’t listening.
Their conclusion was that Vicky could have Douglas. There were better fish in the sea for me. My father was prepared to go fishing on my behalf. I wasn’t to worry. A decent new husband would soon be found.
Just before my marriage ended, my parents had been experiencing a period of ill-health, taking it in turns to ply Dr Steiner with many and diverse symptoms. The visits to the doctor had become increasingly unsatisfactory because my mother no longer trusted his diagnoses. As poor Dr Steiner’s eyesight was now so bad, how could she believe him when he reassured her that the pain on the right hand side below her ribcage was really nothing to worry about? Could Dr Steiner be sure, without actually being able to see it, that the sore that refused to heal on Gyuri’s leg was not malignant?
My broken marriage appeared to have had the benefit of entirely distracting my parents both from their own symptoms and their anxieties about Dr Steiner’s competence. Even my father’s obsession with wanting to go back to Budapest to dig the waste ground took second place for the moment.
‘Your mental health, Eva, is the most important thing. Dr Steiner has plenty of degrees, even extra ones from Edinburgh. Go and see him,’ said my father. ‘He will give you something to return you to your senses.’
‘You need to calm down, and he will give you something to help you sleep,’ said my mother.
‘At least go and talk to him. Listen to us,’ shouted my father.
Late on Boxing Day night, I set out to go for a walk and, somehow, ended up at Douglas’s flat.
‘You’re making so much noise you’ll wake Janet,’ Douglas said when, in response to my repeated banging, he at last appeared in the doorway. He was wearing a maroon dressing gown I hadn’t seen before.
‘Come home. It’s no good without you.’
‘No.’
I can’t manage without you.’
‘Of course you can.’
‘I can’t.’
‘I don’t care whether you can or can’t. What I want is to finish this conversation right now.’
‘What will I do?’
‘I don’t care what you do,’ Douglas said, shutting the door.
The next day, after waving goodbye to Janet – who was going off on the Picton Ferry with Douglas and Vicky – and after receiving a phone call from my father asking if I had been to Dr Steiner yet, I phoned Qantas and booked a flight to Sydney.
Dressed in a smart little black suit, Zsuzsi was at the airport to meet me.
‘I’ve just come from the auction,’ she said. ‘Bought Ted another home unit, with great harbour views. It’s not a bad little investment. I was only a bit nervous. Spending a million or so is no different from spending a thousand or so.’
Not that Zsuzsi was often spending extravagant amounts, as I found out in the next few days. She was careful with her husband’s money. She bought all her clothes second hand at shops called ‘Nu to U’. Her clothes fitted her better than in the past, for Zsuzsi could no longer be described as plump; she was as thin as I used to be before Janet’s birth.
‘Now, tell me all,’ she said when I was comfortably seated in a deckchair by the large swimming pool of her Vaucluse executive family home with six bedrooms, five bathrooms and garaging for four cars and three boats.
I didn’t know what to say. The days when we had easily confided our emotional secrets to each other were gone now.
‘Why did you wait so long to leave Douglas?’ she prompted when after a few seconds I still hadn’t said anything. ‘He was so obviously wrong for you.’
‘It wasn’t me, but him. He didn’t want to try any more. I still don’t know why…what I did wrong. He ended it. I wanted the marriage to continue, or perhaps I was simply afraid to leave. I don’t even know which is true. What I do realise is that in spite of my efforts I’ve become just like my parents, full of fears and anxieties. Listen to the things I’m afraid of: falling over, getting hurt, riding a bike, skiing, dense bush, leaving…losing the people I love.’
‘Stop, stop,’ said Zsuzsi, covering her ears. ‘The most important message I got from my parents,’ she paused as she piled up my plate with ric
h cakes – marzipan cake, krémes, rétes and sour cherry Strudel – ‘was that they were fragile. You had to be very gentle with them because they would shatter easily. And I had no right to be angry ever, in spite of the burden they had put on me.’
‘What burden?’ I asked, knowing the answer.
‘That I had to be happy, to make up for everything that had happened.’
‘How adept you always were at discarding burdens,’ I said. I noticed that not one of those fattening cakes had found its way onto Zsuzsi’s plate.
Neither of us knew what to say after that, and the conversation floundered. Eventually, Zsuzsi said, ‘I don’t understand why you’d want Douglas back; but if you do, you must strategise. Remember, the main thing is to be hard to get.’ But before she had a chance to tell me specifically how to do this, we were interrupted by the maid:
‘How am I supposed to serve a meal for sixteen, single handed, with two hours’ notice and the scallops not delivered yet.’
Zsuzsi rolled her eyes and disappeared.
My parents picked me up from the airport. My mother clutched my hands and peered intently into my face.
‘Together we will build a new life for you.’
New clothes awaited me on the bed. Old ones vanished from my wardrobe. I had appointments to keep: with the hairdresser, the beautician, the masseur.
‘You have to get rid of those wrinkles and those grey hairs. You must not let yourself go. You have to make the best of yourself. You must start going out. You will not find a new man sitting at home reading a book.’
‘Yes, yes, but…’
‘A young woman like you should not stay on her own,’ said my father.
‘There’s Janet…’
‘Janet will be OK; it’s you I’m worried about. It is not good enough to put up with loneliness,’ from my mother again. ‘The world has not ended because your marriage is over.’
‘Every tragedy has its good side.’ My father was looking at me intently. ‘How I suffered in the slave labour camp, but I never turned my back on life.’
‘Please, please…’
‘Don’t shut us out. You will always be our beloved child no matter what you do, no matter how you treat me, or your mother.’
My mother had a visitor.
‘Meet Lászlo,’ she said, ‘a ghost from the past, a friend of my cousin.’
Lászlo, who wasn’t even forty, owned a mansion in Canada, a flat in Sydney and a pied à terre in the South of France. Now he was looking for an orchard to buy in New Zealand.
‘Eva will look after you and show you everything there is to see.’
Lászlo, a small, clean-looking man, was exhaustingly enthusiastic.
‘What a magnificent harbour!’ ‘What marvellous hills! Any good for skiing? Every day is a gift, you know. That’s what I learned from my parents. They were in the camps, you know.’
Lászlo and I went on a harbour cruise; we canoed at Otaki Forks; we were whisked away to the Marlborough Sounds in a tiny plane. He had tickets for a weekend excursion to the Wairarapa – white-water rafting, wine tasting and two nights at the lodge all included.
‘Go, go, go with him,’ my mother said. ‘Your father and I will look after Janet.’
Was this the same woman who used to say ‘Be careful’ whenever I put my foot outside the door?
Lászlo lost his first wife in a car accident and his second to cancer.
‘Eva, listen, he is your chance – he is free, no children,’ my mother said.
‘I’m thinking of settling in San Francisco,’ Lászlo said after a few weeks of rushing about the country in my company. ‘What do you say, Eva? Would you and Janet start again with me in America?’
‘Ah, Lászlo,’ I said to him, poring over the book of Wellington walks. ‘One decision at a time. Which mountain shall we climb today?’
He chose the Catchpole in the Orongorongos. As we trudged along the leafy highway, so much improved from the muddy, boggy track I had first encountered with Douglas, I did a stocktake of Lászlo from the rear, from the bottom up. His legs – muscular – were entirely devoid of hair. Bad. No hair on his little arms either. Bad. Next to come under my critical scrutiny were the neat buttocks and the small straight back. Bad. There didn’t seem to be even a speck of dandruff on the sturdy shoulders. Good. Nor did they curve inwards, like Douglas’s, although Lászlo had more reason than Douglas to keep what he had for himself. Then came the neck. There was something stiff and off-putting about the neck. Last, tidy haircut, topped by souvenir cap from the Picton Ferry. Bad. I couldn’t help noticing how carefully Lászlo walked, seeming to watch each step, ensuring his suede boots would remain in the pristine state they were in when we started out. I thought that if only Lászlo would get some mud on his well-cut jacket and trousers, then something might still possibly develop between us.
‘How is your suitor?’ my mother asked.
‘Has he asked the question yet?’ my father asked.
‘So, finally, I have my chance to go to America. What do you think?’
‘Go,’ my mother said. ‘Your father and I will come too.’
‘And Janet?’
‘She’ll be OK. Children adjust.’
‘But she wouldn’t be able to be with her father.’
‘She can come back sometimes in the holidays to see him. Or he can visit her.’
‘I don’t think I can do it.’
My mother sighed. ‘See, Eva, you see. What an example Lászlo is to you. Two wives gone and he is able to start again.’
‘I might be able to start again too if I was sure that Lászlo was the right man.’
‘Lászlo is a good man,’ my mother said.
‘Will you for once listen to your mother?’ my father said.
But I wasn’t just thinking about Janet’s needs and Lászlo’s deficiencies, but of my own compulsion to cling to the wreckage of the marriage. Why couldn’t I let it go?
He suggested lunch in one of the new fancy cafés where the food is either raw or cooked in leaping flames at the table as diners look on in drooling admiration. I had an anxious, sick-in-the-stomach feeling as I went to meet him, unable to stand being even a few prudent minutes late. Even so, he was there before I was. He kissed me on the lips before taking my jacket. I ordered bread, and kumara and herb soup; he chose flambéed octopus and ordered a bottle of wine.
‘Eva,’ Douglas said, tucking into the semi-raw, pink-grey flesh of the octopus, ‘I wanted to have lunch with you because I should like us to have fun together from time to time. I believe we could. Not enough fun was, in my view, one of the problems between us. We were just too serious all the time. As my mother always said, ‘Life is too short for that.’
‘Do you think so?’ I said.
Douglas gulped down his first glass of wine and poured himself another.
I broke off a small piece of the bread and stirred my soup. I thought that Douglas’s earnest voice, each syllable clearly enunciated, was quite unlike his former mumbled speech typically executed with a pipe hanging down one side of his mouth. He looked different too. I noted the tight jeans topped by red shirt and pink-purple jacket, colours he had avoided since his mother first told him that they clashed with his ginger hair and freckles.
As I sipped my wine, I saw us out on dates together, holding hands in the cinema, dancing cheek to cheek at the cabaret, having sex on the beach after Douglas had spread coconut oil down my back and on my buttocks and between my legs. When we have finished making love, we laugh and squeal as we dash together into the surf.
‘Why did you leave then, if all it took to save the marriage was a bit of fun?’
‘To find out what I valued, what I wanted. It was for me a very restrictive marriage.’
His octopus was almost gone. The bottle of wine was two-thirds empty. I pushed away my almost full bowl of soup and the uneaten bread. Just then I noticed the couple at the next table. The girl had a kind of glow about her; the boy was attractive too, tall
and thin with large dark eyes. They were holding hands and laughing, drinking some pink fizzy liquid from the one glass between them. Douglas had noticed them too and glanced their way from time to time.
After that we talked about his work and what his colleagues were doing at the university. He had decided to leave the ivory tower and branch out in a new direction. By now Douglas was distant and withdrawn, much as he used to be.
‘Thank you for the lunch,’ I said eventually. ‘I’d better go. Janet will be home soon from school.’
‘I’m glad you enjoyed it,’ he said without much interest. I felt I could not suggest another lunch or future meeting.
He gave a burp as he got up to pay the bill; two more burps followed as he pecked me on the cheek to say goodbye.
It must be the octopus, I thought, as I caught a last glimpse of him hunched up against the wind in the parking area. He appeared to be burping more and more vehemently as he got into his car and drove away.
Lászlo wrote that he had found the perfect orchard at Motueka in the South Island. He said to come and see him whenever I liked as he wasn’t leaving New Zealand until later in the year. I thought about doing so several times, but as my father’s determination to return to the waste ground grew, my life got even busier. Lászlo and I never saw each other again, the way that often happens.
BUDAPEST 1981
As soon as we crossed over the Danube, I smelled the lilacs. Following my gaze, my father said, ‘They bloom every summer. Sure, they’re beautiful, but are they good for the Jews?’
How can he joke, I thought, with my mother, back in Wellington, beside herself with worry. She had told me that he hadn’t even bothered contacting any of her relatives. What could he be doing by himself alone all day long? I had come to Budapest to keep an eye on him on her behalf. But I had my own reasons for making the trip too. The lunch with Douglas had left behind a confusion of pleasure, sadness, uneasiness and expectation. He had apparently enjoyed my company but I had seen nothing more of him since, except in his capacity as Janet’s occasional father. I had really no idea what Douglas’s life was like now. I knew he had parted from Vicky. Did he have another girlfriend? These questions and my mixed-up feelings were what I hoped to leave behind in New Zealand.
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