Leah's Children

by Gloria Goldreich

  “Why is your participation so important?” he asked gently. Rebecca had asked him a similar question so many years ago when he had enlisted in the RAF: Why must you go? Why must it be you?

  “I just might make a difference,” Lydia replied. “I might be in the right place at the right time.” It was the same answer he had given Rebecca then. He could not argue with a logic that so closely matched his own.

  “Paul is also involved. He is a leader of a small group of dissident students in his secondary school. He wants to see the struggle through to the end. And I am in a privileged position. I am an important scientist, and my own loyalty has never been questioned. After Ferenc’s death, AVO ran a thorough security check on me, and no irregularity was found. I was cleared to work with classified information, although it has not been necessary and I was allowed to attend a scientific conference in London. Because of my status I can move freely throughout the city without arousing suspicion. I travel from the university center, where most of our group’s decisions are made, into areas like Ulloi Avenue and Lenin Boulevard where our grass roots-leadership is centered. The envelope that I dropped contained a plan for a demonstration connected with the reinterment of Laszlo Rajk and the other victims of the purge trials of 1949. I was able to carry it from the university to the drop point. I carry propaganda leaflets and other documents in the same way.”

  “But how long can you continue to do this without attracting attention?” he asked. “I saw you today. How long will it be before an AVO agent spots you?”

  “The revolution is imminent. It is only a question of a few weeks, a month. We have the momentum now and we can win. By the end of October, Hungary should be free. Paul and I can emigrate with the knowledge that I have been true to myself and true to Ferenc’s memory. I will, of course, understand if you cannot wait that long for the hearing. Perhaps you feel now that your trip has been for nothing and your time has been wasted. If so, I am sorry.” Her apology was tinged with gentle mockery. How could the schedule of any individual be as urgent as her revolution, as her involvement in Hungary’s future?

  “I was not told about Paul,” Aaron observed mildly. “You realize, of course, that this complicates matters. We are now asking for two waivers, not one. And Paul, of course, would not receive the kind of preferential treatment that my government would award a scientist of your rank.”

  “But Paul is my son,” she said fiercely. “According to Hungarian law I am his mother, just as if he had been born to me. Surely, if a mother is granted a visa she is not expected to leave a minor child behind.”

  “There may be complications,” Aaron continued. “Perhaps you could leave without him. He could be enrolled in a boarding school, and we could arrange for his emigration when your own situation is more secure.”

  His calm voice masked the fury he felt. The damn incompetents. If he had known about Paul while he was in the States, he could have researched precedents, obtained opinions. He would have to rely on Tom Hemmings now and on Joshua Ellenberg’s powerful congressional connections. Damn! Lydia stared at him, her blue eyes as hard as agates.

  “You have no children, Mr. Goldfeder?” she asked.

  “No,” he replied shortly.

  “Then I do not know if you can understand. When Ferenc and I were married, I told Paul, ‘Your father is my husband and you are my son.’ But for a long time he did not believe me. He worked very hard at being very good, very tidy, very quiet, because the woman on the farm where he had hidden during the war had told him that she would not hide a noisy, untidy child. Then, one night, I went into his room. He was crying hard but without a sound. He had had a fearful nightmare and had stuffed a rag into his mouth to quiet his sobs. He did not want to be sent away. I was angry. I pulled it out and told him that this was his home ant that children had a right to cry and to laugh and to scream in their houses. The day he left his crayons in the middle of the floor and ran out to play, slamming the door behind him, I knew he really belonged to us. That was almost ten years ago. Ten years is forever in a child’s life. I nursed him through measles and chicken pox, and he helped me to nurse his father. He held my hand at the funeral. ‘We won’t be lonely,’ he told me when we came home from the cemetery. ‘We have each other.’

  “Sometimes I go with him to the singing teacher, and I sit outside during his lesson and listen to him. I think then that perhaps God had a special reason for saving Paul. He would not take a child with the voice of an angel.

  “How could I go to America and leave my Paul?”

  “You can’t,” Aaron said with a firmness that surprised himself. “We will find a way.”

  He stared out the window at the dying of the autumn day. The lingering light drifted into evening shadow, and he felt himself drift, just as unresistantly, into her perception, her consciousness. Briefly, he had hovered, like a spectator, at the periphery of her passion. Now, as though pulled by magnetic force, he felt himself drawn to its center. He would not try to dissuade her either from her work or from her determination to bring Paul Groszman out of the country with her. He would join her. His heart beat faster and he felt a rush of warmth, a surge of energy.

  “I want you to let me help you,” he said. “To let me help you and Paul.”

  “How?” she asked warily. “You will help us, of course, with the papers, the hearing. That is why you are here.”

  “Of course. That much is understood. But I want to help you with your work. I, too, can move with impunity through the streets of Budapest. I can visit certain places perhaps more easily than you can. I want to help you. If you will trust me, allow me.”

  “I trust you,” she said softly. “I allow you. But we will have to devise a scenario for you.”

  “I will be your American uncle.”

  “No. You are too young.”

  “Then I will be your lover.”

  “I have never had a lover.”

  “It’s time, then.”

  “All right.” She smiled, and suddenly her face was alive with mischief and pleasure. Her eyes glittered with gemlike brilliance and a blush colored her skin. He thought he knew now what she must have looked like as a young girl; he imagined her laughing at a party, flirting with tentative timidity in a student café, before the war came to rob her of innocence and gaiety.

  He leaned forward and with his fingertip traced the turquoise birthmark that flowered at her neck. It was velvet-soft, and he stroked it gently, rhythmically. The cashier dimmed the café lights, and the waitress removed their cups and piled them onto an enamel tray. He left too many florin notes on the table and slipped the scarlet cape over her shoulders. Outside they looked up and saw the first star of the evening clinging tenaciously to the violet-veined twilight sky.

  *

  DURING the days that followed their first meeting they worked diligently at the scenario they had so casually devised. Lydia came to the Grand Hotel each afternoon, and she and Aaron sat in the tea salon and ate elaborately sculpted pastries filled with tart berries from the woods of Buda. They toasted each other with glasses of tea laced with plum brandy. The other guests, mostly visiting businessmen and those who came to take the waters of Margaret Island’s famous Palatinus Baths, looked at them with the wistfulness with which the ill consider the healthy and the unloved view the loved. All of them were bored in this dull and shabby East European capital. They had visited the Gypsy nightclubs too many times and eaten more than once at the barge restaurants along the Danube. Lydia and Aaron were an interesting diversion—such an attractive couple, the dignified redheaded American and the beautiful Hungarian woman. The Soviet diplomat who had come to the thermal waters to relieve his bursitic shoulder noted Aaron’s name in his little black book, but his wife was intrigued by Lydia’s clothing, by her swirling velvet skirts and the brilliantly hued blouses against which her skin shimmered like polished porcelain.

  There were knowing, conspiratorial glances when Aaron and Lydia left the room and ascended, in the wrought-i
ron cage of the lift, to his third-floor suite. It did not escape the notice of these casual observers that the lovers (for surely only lovers shared wordless smiles and averted glances and sought aloneness at evening’s edge) offered each other gifts—small boxes and elegantly wrapped parcels from the shops on the Grand Boulevard.

  An elderly gentleman who always sat at a green velvet banquette in a shadowed corner, where he drank a single cup of black coffee followed by a small glass of golden brandy, walked past them one afternoon and dropped his gloves near their table. He bent to retrieve them and studied the box that rested beside Lydia on the floor, jostling it slightly. It was from an excellent haberdashery, and he smiled thinly, approvingly.

  “He’s an AVO agent,” Lydia said. Her eyes followed him as he bowed charmingly to the wife of a British banker and nodded to the Soviet diplomat.

  “How do you know?”

  “I saw him once, outside Ferenc’s office. And while they were verifying my clearance, I saw him follow me. He’s gone now. Let’s go upstairs.”

  In Aaron’s room she opened the package and removed an elegant paisley dressing gown in rich tones of forest green and burgundy. Its sleeves had been padded with tissue paper, and within the folds of the tissue paper, documents had been concealed. She removed them carefully and explained them to him. An agenda for a secret meeting to be held by the electricians’ union, a list of addresses of dissidents, a summation of student demands to be delivered to a printer.

  Aaron hung the robe in his closet, where the chambermaid would see it in the morning. He looped the belt about the hanger.

  “You have excellent taste,” he said.

  She shrugged.

  “A colleague in Paris sent the robe to Ferenc. A student whose mother works in the shop obtained the box and wrappings for me.”

  He felt the sullen disappointment of a child who has been told that a supposedly new toy had once been owned by another youngster. He imagined the elderly Ferenc Groszman sitting opposite her at the breakfast table in the robe that had so briefly pleased him. Lydia would have adjusted the collar for him, her pale hands tender at his exposed neck.

  “Ferenc never wore it,” she said suddenly. She did not look at him but continued to slip the documents between the pages of the financial section of the Herald Tribune.

  That night he carried the newspaper to a café in Old Buda, near the Vienna high road, where Gypsies played mournful melodies. A well-dressed businessman at a neighboring table politely asked if he had finished the paper.

  “I am particularly interested in the new copper discoveries in South America.”

  “You will find that story on page nineteen,” Aaron said politely, and it occurred to him that his prowess would have impressed those who had marched with him in demonstrations during his student days—the would-be revolutionaries of yesteryear, all comfortably settled now in Long Island or Westchester, doctors and dentists, lawyers and businessmen. Then they had all been members of the Young People’s Socialist League, and at their meetings they had spoken feverishly of a new world in which social justice and equality prevailed. He and his closest friend, Gregory Liebowitz, had often talked through the night of projects they would undertake, arguing about food cooperatives and socialized medicine beneath the poster of Mother Bloor that hung in Aaron’s cold-water flat. Gregory had enlisted with Aaron in the RAF and had died of dysentery in Ethiopia. Poor Gregory. Sorrow for his lost friend gripped Aaron, and he fought against it. Gregory was dead and he was in Budapest.

  The businessman left the café, and two men followed him out. A coincidence, Aaron thought, but he felt a shaft of apprehension. He ordered a cognac, and the waiter who brought it gave him a folded slip of white paper.

  “From that gentleman who is just leaving,” he said.

  Aaron looked up, startled at the sight of Yehuda Arnon tipping the girl at the checkroom. Yehuda’s eyes met his without a flicker of recognition, and Aaron downed his cognac as his brother-in-law left the café. A phone number was scrawled on the half sheet. Use only if necessary, Yehuda had written in his unique cursive script. Aaron realized that Yehuda’s presence had briefly unnerved him but had not really surprised him. He felt grimly reassured, and he tucked the slip of paper beneath the snapshot of Katie in his wallet and caught the last tram back to Margaret Island. As he hung his suit up, he noticed that the belt which he had draped on a hanger was now neatly looped about the paisley robe.

  *

  LYDIA invited him to dinner, and he met Paul Groszman. The tall blond boy was slender and moved with an easy grace. His narrow face glowed with the last of the summer tan gained at his music camp in the hill country. He had been the lead boy tenor in the choir—his last year in such a role, he said laughingly. His voice was changing.

  “Perhaps you will sing for Mr. Goldfeder,” Lydia suggested. Paul blushed and threw her an embarrassed look. “Perhaps later,” he said, and Aaron liked him for his restraint, for the concealment of his annoyance.

  Later, he saw Lydia talking softly to Paul in the kitchen. The boy bent and kissed her cheek. He supposed that he had apologized and they had made up. He liked Paul even more for being an adolescent who was not embarrassed to kiss his mother.

  “What do you think of going to America with your mother, Paul?” he asked as they sat in the small, book-lined living room drinking cups of hot chocolate. He had been in Budapest long enough to know that Lydia must have stood on a food queue for hours to obtain the cream that floated like a snowy flower on the rich, dark drink.

  “I’m not sure,” Paul said. “Hungary is my country. My friends are here. But, of course, I will go with my mother if that is what she wants.” He looked unhappily at Lydia.

  “I would not do anything that made you unhappy,” Lydia said quickly.

  “No. Of course not. I am much interested in democracy,” he added quickly, as though fearful that his answer might have offended Aaron. “And I know the American composers. Aaron Copland and Charles Ives. In the camp we sang songs by Leonard Bernstein. Do you know this?”

  He went to the small upright piano and played “New York, New York” from On the Town.

  Aaron joined him and together they sang the first verses of “I’ll Take Manhattan.” Paul’s voice was vibrant, and he sang with a rare sense of joy. He was right. Within a few months it would reach its full depth, its ringing, soaring range.

  They finished the song in a burst of their own laughter as their improvised lyrics tumbled into nonsense, and to Lydia’s pleased applause. Paul left soon afterward. He was meeting friends, he said.

  “Will Genia be there?” Lydia asked.

  “Yes. Of course.” He shook hands with Aaron. “I hope we will meet soon again.”

  “Who is Genia?” Aaron asked after Paul had gone.

  “A special friend,” Lydia said. “A nice little thing.”

  *

  PAUL AND GENA LUCAS walked hand in hand down Saint Stephen’s Square.

  What is he like, your mother’s American friend?” she asked.

  “I liked him,” Paul said.

  “Do you think they are lovers?” She grinned at him impishly, and he tousled her dark curls reprovingly.

  “Don’t be foolish,” he said. “They’ve only just met. He’s helping her in her work.”

  “Ah, is that what they call it?”

  “Genia!”

  He lifted his hand in mock threat, and she dashed away. He ran after her, and when he caught her, he held her tightly, his cheek touching hers. Sweet, foolish Genia. They had passed through childhood together into the sweetness of this new time. He dreamed of her at night and awakened to a mysterious moistness, a tender melancholy. They met in the afternoons at school and rehearsals; in the evenings they walked the streets of Budapest and sometimes pooled their money and had a coffee at a barge café. They studied the light-splattered waters of the Danube and smiled shyly at each other, mystified by their own happiness.

  “Paul—you won’t leave me.
”

  “Ah, Genia.” His reply was a soft moan, and later they each realized, separately, that he had said neither yes or no.

  *

  LYDIA AND AARON continued their pattern of daily meetings. They spoke very little during the time they spent in his room. She had warned him of the possibility of concealed listening devices. And, by unarticulated agreement, they did not touch at all; the concentrated lack of contact filled him with a nervous, almost pleasurable excitement. But always, as the afternoon light faded, they walked the patterned paths of Margaret Island. They followed the pebbled borders of the rock garden, winding their way through the Japanese dwarf trees and studying their twin reflections in the lily pond. They listened to the gentle chimes of the musical fountain and paused beneath the giant oaks that sheltered the bust of the Hungarian poet Janos Arany.

  “Ferenc loved these oaks,” Lydia said. “He felt a wonderful peace here. He used to quote Arany’s poem about these trees. I remember the first lines: ‘Under oak tree here, Would I find sweet quiet….’ Do you like poetry?”

  “I did. Once.” He sealed off the memory of himself and Katie, exhausted after lovemaking in his student flat in Cambridge, softly, lazily tossing favorite lines of poetry at each other until they drifted into sleep. But Katie would never have memorized a line like “sweet quiet.” Not Katie, who feared sweetness and dreaded quiet.

  He told her instead about his childhood in New York and about Leah, his mother, and her quiet courage and vibrant talent. He spoke of Michael, who had been so painfully bewildered since the death of David Goldfeder.

  “But death is disorienting,” she said. “When someone we love dies, we lose part of ourselves, and then we must go in search of it.”