by Mark Sarvas
And—for some reason, this is the thing I remember most, though I can’t say why—it was there that I first saw an uncircumcised penis. Get your mind out of the gutter, Virgil. It isn’t like that.
I remember the dead, still air of my dormitory room, much like the dead air here in the auction house. The room was long and narrow, marked by two rows of single beds, each equipped with a small particleboard closet and chest of drawers. A row of clerestory windows admitted light but no views. My closet was cleaned out early on by light-fingered Hungarians enamored of my American T-shirts and candies. This remains my only experience bunking down with large numbers of males—there were probably thirty of us in the room—and I imagine it’s similar to being in the army or in prison. The almost continuous feeling of vulnerability, of exposure. Friendships born of necessity, protectors and patrons. We foreigners hung together, whispering our impenetrable English codes late at night, enjoying our apartness and privilege over our backward, Eastern European brethren.
After our daily swim in the lake, we would all return to the dormitory to change out of our wet trunks. Ridiculously modest, I would position myself beneath a towel held into place by my chin pressed to my chest, and try to change with a minimum of exposure. My maneuver was a source of much mirth in the room, especially among the more exuberantly naked of my peers, who discarded their trunks and ran around flicking wet towels at each other. I remember being startled and repulsed by their hooded members. I had, after all, limited experience with the male organ, exclusively my own, which hadn’t yet begun to interest me, and so I assumed there was something defective about them, some peculiar foreign variant. But there was something more about these boys. I couldn’t help but contrast their tall, supple power with my own scrawny limbs, and although there was obviously something wrong with them, I envied the effortless grace of their movements while I hid beneath my terry-cloth tent. Later, I approached Geza, one of my counselors, a mere teenager himself with whom I’d formed a vague, brotherly bond as the weeks had dragged by. I drew a picture of what I had seen and tried, in broken Hungarian, to elicit an explanation. He looked curiously at me, gestured toward my own package, and asked, “Zsidó?” I did not understand, and after a few minutes of fruitless gesturing, he drew a Star of David on a sheet of paper and pointed inquiringly at me. I hesitated, and executed a movement that rested uneasily between a nod and a shrug, and that was how I came to realize that zsidó meant Jew.
Did Geza’s attitude toward me change at that moment? Yes, I believe it did. Weeks later, I was being punished with one of my friends for talking after lights-out. There was something sinister about the way Geza extracted us both from the dorm and took us out into the warm, honeyed night, where he had us squat barefoot in the gravel. I didn’t understand, at first, but as the minutes passed, I came to see that the discomfort of the position was the point, and I was forced to maintain it even after the pain had become excruciating. To be fair, the same penance was required of my bunkmate, about whose religion I have no specific recollection. But it seemed to me that Geza—lithe and lean and blond like my bedfellows, or so I remember him now—was deriving considerable pleasure from my suffering.
Or is that merely the way I remember it, the inevitable Woody Allen trajectory of all this? Once you embrace your inner Abraham, all you can see are anti-Semites lying in wait? Yet I felt myself an outsider among those boys even then. A strange fear gripped me as I lay in my row beneath my thin blanket, long before I had learned enough history to compare it to images of other rows of people sleeping in camps. Yet when my father announced, the following year, his decision to return me to camp—my opinion was not solicited—I did not protest. Why was I so compliant? The obvious answer is that fear of my father’s displeasure was greater than my fear of whatever I imagined awaited me at camp. But was that reasonable? Would he have thrown me back if I had told him what I was facing? Is it possible that I have read him wrong my whole life, failed to give him the credit he deserved?
Hah, look at you, Virgil, all knowing smiles. You’ve caught me out. Of course not. Performance still, to the end. The old man wouldn’t have given me a second’s thought once the flight attendant took me, the unaccompanied minor, to the plane bound for Budapest. O Father why hast thou forsaken me? Oy. Great-grandpa Szabo is no doubt rolling in his … in his what? There was nothing left of him but ash and smoke.
* * *
IN THE SIX WEEKS that followed my first interview with Rachel, events proceeded with a frustrating dullness. Given the remarkable intensity of that first meeting, I imagined that our follow-up would attain similar heights. But the second visit consisted of signing an impossible number of legal documents, insistent red adhesive arrows directing me again and again to scrawl Mathias Santos across a variety of dotted lines. I think I bought a baseball team. To this day, I can’t really say what I signed. I’d like to say I trusted Rachel so implicitly that I gave myself over to her, but the truth is I have always been careless about such things, to my agent’s irritation.
Once the paperwork was signed, there was dismayingly little needed from me. The documentation required by the government, arcane and overcomplicated though it was, could be generated with minimal involvement at my end. The question of authenticating my father’s photograph was raised again, and then deemed unnecessary in light of Halasz’s meticulous journals. There were a few one-question phone calls, and a single interrogatory as well as a few documents requiring notarization. All of this was followed by weeks of silence.
I was suffused with a feeling of anticlimax. The echoes of that first meeting continued to reverberate, and I was desperate to feel that again, that purpose, that, dare I say it knowing how it will sound, love? And so it came to pass that after several weeks of quiet, I made my way to a small shop that carried Jewish specialty items. I had decided to buy a mezuzah of my own, as though this might restore in me the quiet ecstasy I’d beheld. I am aware of how foolish, how pathetic that sounds now, but if it is any consolation, it felt foolish and pathetic even then. I headed down to one of the Jewish neighborhoods that dot Pico Boulevard, and I stumbled more or less at random into a store called Solomon’s. Yes, I know … Would I make that up?
The shop was sunlit, although a faint odor of dust permeated the space. Moving through the store, one traveled from the general-interest books in the front, through the religious accessories in the middle of the store, to the storehouse of religious texts in the rear. The character of the handful of customers seemed to progress along similar lines: two women in jeans and T-shirts perused the menorah selection, while an elderly bearded Hasid fingered a Babylonian Talmud. I asked the Orthodox twenty-something behind the counter where the mezuzahs were, and he directed me to the middle of the store, barely looking up from his text. Did he know a poseur when he saw one?
I wandered past the kippot, the tefillin, the yahrzeit candles—how easily these trip off my tongue now, and yet how alien they were to me just months ago, neglected for a lifetime—and stood, bewildered, before a display of mezuzahs. There were mezuzahs of pewter, of wood, of frosted glass, of bronze. There was one covered with handmade sequins, and another in the shape of Batman. There were sports icons, maps of Israel, olive branches, and a true monstrosity, Noah’s Ark in pewter and colored enamels. There was even one made of stone recovered from an archaeological site on the Temple Mount, holding out the possibility that it might contain a piece of the ancient temple. The prices ranged from the cost of a movie ticket to hundreds of dollars. Which would I buy? I certainly couldn’t be seen buying the cheapest—my browsing had caught the attention of the young ladies.
I focused on a simple bronze mezuzah, sleek and unobtrusive. I reached out my finger and stroked it. Nothing. That astonishing feeling that had gripped me in Rachel’s office was nowhere to be found. My gesture felt false, mannered. How could I imagine devotion would inhabit me so easily, unearned? I felt my cheeks redden with disappointment and self-reproach, and I looked up around the room, certai
n everyone had been watching. The two women were busy among the books and the cashier was still deep in his studies, but I became convinced that they knew exactly what was unfolding, and had averted their eyes to spare me disgrace. Only the old man with the Talmud held my eyes, briefly, inscrutably, and returned to his text.
The bell over the front door chimed, and I looked up as a father and his young son, maybe nine or ten, walked into the store together draped in prayer shawls. The boy took in the store’s wares with delight, and together they walked up to the counter, where they fell into easy conversation with the cashier, whose countenance thawed at the sight of them. As they spoke, the father laid his hand on his little boy’s head, and the boy raised his head to meet his touch. I felt something pierce me and I hurried from the store, buying nothing.
I returned home to find a short e-mail from Rachel. Our petition has cleared the first level of review, she informed me, with a startling matter-of-factness. Budapest Street Scene was one step closer to being back in the family where it belonged. Her words. Not mine.
IT WAS IN 1919 that Kálmán, in characteristically short order—the man was unreflective about anything not involving canvas and paints—met, fell in love with, and married Ágnes Orban, a nurse who had tended to him during one of his brief stays in a Hungarian sanatorium. It was obvious to Kálmán that he could only survive with a helpmeet, someone committed to regulating his daily life in such a manner that he could free himself to paint. It is agreed that the Budapest Street Scenes, the monumental works that follow their union, belong as much to Ágnes as to Kálmán. It was under her steadying influence that Kálmán was able, in 1920, to be considered for and awarded a professorship at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts, a position he would hold for four years until he relapsed, his veronal-soaked lectures a disgrace the university would no longer tolerate.
Thus began 1924, Kálmán’s lost year, the year in which he might just as easily have died, rendering him little more than a footnote to modernism. But this time he had Ágnes, who saw him through the crucible of withdrawal. She helped him tame the hard white flame of addiction, and the Kálmán who emerged was a different man, tempered in a way that allowed him, a year later, to begin painting his famous street scenes. That these paintings were done from memory strained through the haze of narcotic withdrawal made them no less vivid, as disturbing in their day as they continue to be in ours. He painted them in a frenzy, a compressed period of weeks that saw him create six distinct views of the street. The angles change, the palette adjusts, the compositions alter slightly. But a darkness, a sharp-edged foreboding, informs each variation. Two were lost in the war, presumed destroyed by the Germans. One is in a private collection of a Japanese banker. One is on permanent display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and another hangs in the Kunsthalle in Hamburg. The last of the six is before me now. Could I imagine similar greatness coming out of a marriage to Tracy? Would she inspire me, protect me, if only I let her? And if she did, would I be capable of anything beyond the usual half-measures?
I awoke to find Tracy sitting up in bed, sending texts, her morning ritual. It’s something that has always bothered me, this electronic attachment that leaves me feeling supplanted. But Tracy has always been much more in the world, and of it, than I, so I suppose it’s natural that my own neglected phone should continue to slumber while hers lights up like a slot machine delivering a jackpot. There are, for her, always friends to be greeted, arrangements to be made and, of course, a cause to fight, although the last few months had been bleak. The recanted testimony had not moved Texas authorities as she’d hoped, and the execution date remained fixed on the calendar, looming in mere months, which meant even more Brian time in our lives. Just the night before, she’d hosted a fund-raiser with him. I was asleep when she came home, so she didn’t know about Rachel’s latest. I watched her for several minutes in a pose of mute indignation, waiting for her to notice I was awake, but she was engrossed. I finally spoke up. A performance is only a performance if someone is watching.
“You two should just get a room already,” I said, with forceful levity. Tracy looked up from her phone.
“Good morning. Have you been up long?”
“Hours.”
“Dick. Hang on, I’m just finishing up some stuff from last night. We did well, I think. We might have cleared thirty thousand.” She finished up her typing and set the phone aside on the bed.
“That’s excellent. Congratulations. I’m sure Brian must be pleased.”
“Was that a dig?”
I shrugged. “Little. It was a little dig.” She looked at me with what I hoped was fondness but could just as easily have been mild disdain. I pivoted and told her about Rachel’s e-mail.
“That’s fantastic. Congratulations—that’s exciting.”
“It’s a good start. We’re not there yet but…”
“Should we celebrate?”
“What did you have in mind?”
She climbed atop me. “Do you want to fuck me now?”
I kissed her. “I like the way you think.”
I have always enjoyed morning sex the most. Perhaps it’s the promise inherent in the new day. Perhaps I just like to see what I’m doing. I admit a weakness for the sight of the golden cross Tracy wears around her neck, dangling over me, between her breasts—there’s something irresistibly transgressive about watching it swing as she sways atop me. We were well on our way when her phone began to buzz, and she glanced in its direction.
“Don’t. You. Dare,” I warned her.
She complied but I could see the distraction had begun to set in. Fucking Brian. I grabbed the buzzing phone and threw it across the room, into an armchair, out of reach, out of sight.
* * *
LATER OVER COFFEE at our breakfast bar, Tracy filled me in on the case. An appeal had been filed with the Texas Supreme Court, though they held out very little hope on that front. They already had their eyes on a U.S. Supreme Court appeal, and the fund-raiser had been held to help defray those costs. As Tracy spoke, I worried for her, wondered how she would withstand the blow if things did not go her way. But I also admired, even envied her commitment. Years earlier, I had tried to teach her chess. There was something I found erotic about sparring over a chessboard, and she gave herself to the study of the game. She mastered the basic moves quickly and even showed a knack for strategy. But I beat her each time because she was reluctant to attack, to capture. It felt aggressive and wounding to her, I think, and so she played defensively. At the time, I thought of my father—no killer instinct would have been his diagnosis, and it was mine. I thought she was too kind to fight. But I have come to see, as this case unfolded, that I was wrong. Chess was my thing, she did it to humor me. But to this cause she was committed, she had conviction, something that eludes me even now, as I continue this absurd pose in this darkened room alone with this painting. Aware of my own shortcomings, I would periodically test her convictions.
“Tracy, that all sounds great and you know I’m behind you in this, right? But … well, what if you’re wrong? Have you thought about that? What if he did do it?”
“He didn’t. There’s no way. He’s a mental child. It’s impossible.”
“You think children aren’t violent? Have you been to a playground lately?”
She shook her head with a kind of tender scorn, the memory of which now aches.
I remember late one evening coming upon Tracy as she watched a video on her laptop. Ricky McCabe spoke to an unseen interviewer from behind prison glass, his hands cuffed, his expression desperate. His skin was mottled with acne, pale against the orange of his jumpsuit, his dirty hair in a sort of pageboy cut that didn’t suit him. I didn’t really listen to what he was saying, I was paying more attention to Tracy and her reactions. As she watched, she would occasionally sigh, no, more a shudder, almost a sob. At other times she would cover her mouth or wipe a tear. At the end of the short video, McCabe seemed to be addressing her directly and implored,
almost in a whisper, “Please don’t let me die.” She seemed to nod almost imperceptibly as she closed her laptop, some ineffable contract executed. It was hard not to be moved.
I tried again, softly. “You weren’t there. You can’t be sure.”
She set her coffee mug down on the countertop and looked at me with what I was now certain was mild disdain. Was I exposing my essential faithlessness at last? I don’t know, Virgil. Either way, I extracted the concession I was looking for.
“No. You’re right. I can’t.”
“So what if you get the story wrong? Then what?” Why did I press? I thought at the time I was being competitive; being, as she had averred, a dick. But now I think I was, without realizing it, looking for guidance.
She thought for a long moment, then took my mug and hers to the coffeepot for a refill. “Then you hope for another chance to set it right.” As her words sank in, she piped up with forced casualness from the coffee machine. “Oh, hey, there’s something else I have to tell you.”
Nothing good has ever followed this preamble. I steeled myself and turned to face her, curious, and I could tell she was uncomfortable under the scrutiny.
“So. I didn’t want to ruin the mood. I spoke to your dad yesterday. He’s coming to visit.”
“He— You what?” Of all the possible things she might have told me, this never made my radar.
“Yeah. Some toy show in Glendale in a couple of weeks.”
She placed the refilled coffee mug in my hand. I set it aside.
“Why is he calling you?”
“Gee, I don’t know, Matt, maybe I’m nice to him?”