‘You don’t have to be especially brave, or strong, or clever to survive,’ he had said. ‘You just have to be able to keep going.’
I understood now how this might even apply to me. I saw myself keeping on going alone, bringing up Janet, pruning the roses, mowing the lawn, helping my parents and the circle recover a little from the losses of the past. I would be a daughter to poor Sándor and Klára, who were growing old without Tomi. I felt the tears pricking at the back of my eyes. Perhaps, to please my parents, I would agree to go out with Gabi, even if he turned out to be a fussy little bald man with glasses. Or I would marry Joe, or even Stephen Lucas; both men appeared to be still available. I could almost imagine myself walking along Oriental Parade arm-in-arm with one or other of them, my parents arm-in-arm in front of us…
A voice interrupted my noble thoughts. It was one of the border guards, clambering on board. Glancing with utmost casualness at our papers, he seemed almost friendly, utterly non-threatening.
WELLINGTON 1983
On Friday afternoon, I let myself into the house. My mother had already lit candles – one for the Sabbath, the others for the beloved dead. Candlelight illuminated the photos sitting on the mantelpiece. I searched the faces of my grandmother Judit, my grandfather Imre and the cousins and aunts for some clue, for some sign – of what I didn’t know. How sad it was that my father’s mother, his cousin Tibi, and his sister and her child could not be there too and that there wasn’t even a photo left of my dead brother.
‘Hello Eva,’ my mother called from the kitchen.
‘How was your day?’ my father called from the sitting room.
‘Fine,’ I called back. My life, squeezed between job, writing, parents, Janet, amounted mostly to getting through the lists of tasks, big and small, I allocated to each day. Janet and I were still in the old Karori house, more or less unchanged from when Douglas used to live there too. The pale Woollaston watercolour was still on the maroon-papered wall, and I still slept every night on our old double bed with the no-roll together mattress – no longer as firm as it once was. The garden too was more or less unchanged, though looking more and more unkempt as time passed, despite my occasional trimming, weeding and lawnmowing. Underneath my busy-ness, in the bottom layer of my thoughts, was a grey and confused sadness, which there was no point in thinking about.
Familiar food smells filled the house.
‘How was your day?’ I asked my father when he came into the room, his precious copy of New Life neatly folded in his hand.
‘It was a bit windy for your mother round the coast but not too bad,’ my father said.
My parents have joined a walking group.
‘The people are so stimulating,’ my mother said. She sat down next to me on the sofa. ‘The Mackies are back from their trip, and Doreen is not getting married after all.’
‘You really enjoy walking now?’
‘You know, with my cousins, we used to climb in the mountains, and at night we would have a party and dance. And there were ice-skating parties, and cycling excursions in the forest. Did you not realise what a sporting mother you had?’
No I did not. Nor that she had been jealous of one cousin and adored another. The thought that my mother had once had a life like that – that there had once existed a large, close family of aunts, uncles, grandparents, nieces and nephews, who bickered and were reconciled, who gathered for outings, for Chanukah, Pesach, bar mitzvahs and weddings – was consoling.
The candles flickered as the late afternoon light faded. We didn’t want to turn on the lights. It was peaceful in the room as my parents and I sat in the dimming light. How impossible to describe why the candles seemed reassuring and safe. But they did.
Douglas had less hair than I remembered and looked exhausted. We walked together through almost deserted streets. Sunday. Past the largest wooden building, past the Beehive, on to Glenmore Street. We were on our way to the Botanical Gardens. Through trees laden with bright orange and brown leaves, past velvet lawns, by the shady duckpond, into the sunshine. There weren’t too many people about this early. The city was so tranquil. But my state of mind was not.
‘Janet looked well,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘She does.’ I was thinking of the occasions in the last few years when Janet hadn’t been well and would have benefited from her father’s presence. Where was Douglas when she ended up in hospital with asthma? Where was he when she broke her leg in three places and was in plaster up to her hip for three months? And where was Janet’s father when his little girl was the hit of Mrs Connor’s end of year production of Snow White? But what was the point in thinking of those things now? It was too late. Janet, at almost eleven, was no longer a dependent young child.
‘How’s business?’ I asked.
‘Sales aren’t going particularly well, which means cash flow problems.’
‘They won’t affect your payments for Janet, I hope! She doesn’t get any cheaper, you know, as she gets older.’
Since leaving the security of the university for a business in Hong Kong, Douglas spoke of cash flow problems whenever I needed something for Janet.
He looked at me with irritation in his eyes. ‘Still the same tower of strength.’
‘Yes, I am.’
‘How’s your work going? Are you still do-gooding with refugees, for a pittance?’
‘I’m writing a book about them now.’
‘Isn’t one book enough?’
‘You haven’t changed either Douglas, as supportive as ever.’
We walked in silence up the hill towards the playground.
After a while he said, ‘Don’t let’s spend time snapping at each other.’
‘Who’s snapping?’
‘It’s a waste. I leave in a few hours’ time.’
‘OK.’
‘Guess who I ran into in the airport lounge? He was holding hands with a young Asian woman.’
‘Who?’
‘I didn’t recognise him at first but saw someone hovering by my table. Then a penetrating voice I would know anywhere booms out, “Why it’s you, Douglas. May I join you?”’
‘Stephen Lucas?’
‘I hadn’t even agreed to him joining me,’ continued Douglas, ‘but backwardness in coming forward not being one of his faults, he is already settled in a chair, asking, “How is the nurse?”
‘“Nurse?”’ I repeated. Trust Stephen to know all the gossip and poke his nose into my business.
‘“Your wife, partner, girlfriend, whatever?” Stephen says.’
Douglas had once told me that the happiest memory of his childhood was having his appendix out and being cared for by the lovely nurses in Wellington Hospital. A nurse to replace Vicky who left him a couple of years ago seemed entirely suitable.
‘So how is she?’ I asked.
‘It’s all over,’ he replied. ‘We found we weren’t compatible… about small things… For example, she liked a careful routine, always leaving the bathroom as she would wish to find it, folding her own towels and everyone else’s in a special way that pleased her. She fretted that when I went into the bathroom I might spoil the symmetrical arrangement of the towels and might even splash water on the floor. She had some of my mother’s worst traits.’
By the time we reached the rose garden, we had slipped into a mood of being gentler with one another. After a turn around the begonia house, I asked Douglas:
‘How is life then, since the nurse?’
‘You know me, Eva, busy as ever. So much to do.’
He didn’t say, So little time left to do it in. Was he still expecting to die young as both his parents did?
‘Have you got a new woman then,’ I asked, rather brightly.
‘Not really. Just a… flatmate. And you? Is there… someone?’ he asked after a pause.
‘Only my parents and Janet.’
Janet – our darling, capable daughter. Capable of anything. Capable of leaving. Walking jauntily with her big bag to the depart
ure gate, on her way to visit her father in Hong Kong for the school holidays. My parents and I had seen her off on that morning. In the afternoon, I had gone shopping. I bought lemons, tonic, gin, a big bottle. Instead of going to work, I had retired to bed for the rest of the day, congratulating myself for the way my aching throat and threatening tears had been entirely hidden from Janet.
‘How are your parents?’ Douglas was asking.
‘The same. They still phone all the time, begging me to give them just a scrap of my precious time – they get hysterical if I only phone once a day. Joe, the good son, calls his mother twice a day of course. But their most persistent worry is that I haven’t found a decent new man, preferably of the right ethnicity. They’re not as anxious about their own health as about what they regard as my unfulfilled life.’
Douglas laughed.
‘Dr Steiner looks after them well. He’s retired now and supposedly fully occupied writing his memoirs; but he’s always at their place, checking their blood pressure or their bowel movements. Then he stays on to eat my mother’s paprikás, but can’t stay for too long. He’s always in demand and always busy, running round helping the battered refugees to cope with their lives.’
While we were standing outside the begonia house, one of us, or perhaps both, began a sentence with ‘Do you remember…’ Those poignant words.
So here we were in the gardens, remembering. Remembering our first walk together to the Orongorongo River, the cross waiter in the Budapest restaurant, Janet’s second birthday party in our garden and, and…
‘How you used to argue and yell, and then not speak to me for days and, yes, hide my pipe or my tobacco. Why did you hate my pipe so much?’ asked Douglas.
A sedate person, with her feelings well in control, has replaced that angry young woman. Is the change for the better? I wondered.
‘Janet told me about your trip to Hungary last year. How was it?’ he asked, as we climbed towards the herb garden.
Seated on the bench beside the rosemary and thyme, I told him about it:
‘I went with my father to Budapest. He was at that time still preoccupied with the waste ground and with how he might find his photos and other belongings. I went to keep him company. My mother was worried about him over there without her but she could no longer bear to have anything to do with what she called his foolish obsession.’
‘Did he find anything?’
‘No, of course not.’
‘At least you were with him.’
I looked at him with surprise. It was not an observation Douglas would have come out with in the past.
‘Did you remember any more about your childhood?’ he asked.
‘Not really.’
No, I can’t remember the streets, only the feel of them. Snowflakes from a leaden sky. Zsuzsi and I playing in the park. I thinking: these are the best games, we will play them together always…
Douglas was already on his feet. He must be at the airport in an hour. We had to start walking back to town. I suddenly wanted to tell him that I had loved him even though I had also been desperate to escape my family.
I remember the feel of him. Walking home together at dusk, holding hands; I thinking: this is the best time ever, the best time. Waking together in the morning, drinking tea; I thinking: we will be together always…
But would he believe me? Would he even care how I felt? I tried to read the expression on his face. As usual, I couldn’t tell what he was thinking about. But I thought it was bound to be about chemistry or his cash flow problems.
Next time, I thought. Perhaps next time I’ll tell him. At the Cenotaph, a light kiss from Douglas on my cheek. With friendly calmness, perhaps not quite achieved, I reciprocated. He walked away.
The smell of cold and pine needles. The edge of the toboggan track – wasn’t that where the hiding place had been?
GLOSSARY
Anyuka
mother
Arrow Cross extremist Fascist party that was in power in Hungary from October 1944
aliyah (to go on) settle in the land of Israel
bar mitzvah coming of age ceremony for Jewish boys
blintzes (Ukrainian) pancakes, usually with cottage cheese filling
bocsánat pardon
challah braided loaf of white bread eaten on Sabbath and the holidays (Hebrew)
Chanukah one of the Jewish holidays, feast of lights
chaver / chaverim comrade/s
Chevra Kadesh burial society
dobos torta cake with toffee topping (Hungarian)
erev shel shoshanim evening of roses (Hebrew)
gefilte fish chopped fish made into fish cakes or fish loaf
Gehenna Hell (Yiddish)
Habonim Zionist youth group, the builders
jó napot good day (Hungarian)
Kaddish mourner’s prayer
kibbutz /kibbutzim collective settlement/s in Israel
Kol nidre the evening before Yom Kippur; the prayer that ushers in Yom Kippur
kis anyám little mother (Hungarian)
kolbász sausage
körözöt spread made with cottage cheese, paprika, caraway seeds and onions (Hungarian)
kosher prepared according to Jewish dietary laws
krémes cream cake (Hungarian)
krumpli potato (Hungarian)
kuglof cake (Hungarian)
lánc chain (as in Chain Bridge in Budapest)
lecso vegetable stew with green peppers and tomatoes (Hungarian)
mazel tov congratulations, thank God
meshugah crazy
mezuzah a little oblong container placed to the right of the front door of the home of a Jew who believes in putting up a mezuzah. Inside the mezuzah are the words: ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one.’ A mezuzah is intended to consecrate the home.
minyan ten male Jews required for religious services
matzo unleavened bread eaten during Passover
nokedli noodle (Hungarian)
Pesach Passover
paprikás stew made with paprika (Hungarian)
picike little one (Hungarian)
rétes cake made with thin layers of pastry (Hungarian)
Rosh Hashonah Jewish New Year
Shema Yisroel Hear, Oh Israel (a common Hebrew prayer and the last prayer uttered on an Orthodox Jews’ deathbed)
shikse or shiksa non-Jewish woman (Yiddish)
shul synagogue (Yiddish)
solet bean casserole (Hungarian)
tarhonya a kind of cereal eaten with stews (Hungarian)
tsena come out (Hebrew)
vadas hus beef stew made with carrots and mustard (Hungarian)
yarmulka skull cap worn by observing Jewish males
Yom Kippur Day of Atonement
yontev or yontif holiday
Copyright
First published in New Zealand in 2002 by
Tandem Press
PO Box 34 272
Birkenhead, Auckland
New Zealand
www.tandempress.co.nz
Copyright © 2002 Ann Beaglehole
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publishers.
National Library of New Zealand Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Beaglehole, Ann.
Replacement girl / Ann Beaglehole.
ISBN 9781869798710
1. Romans à clef. 2. New Zealand fiction—21st century. I. Title.
NZ823.3—dc 21
Published with the assistance of
Cover and text design by Verso Visual Communication
Text editing by Jeanette Cook
Production by Book NZ
Printed in New Zealand by Dunmore Print
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