The Choice

by Edith Eger

  “Here,” my sister says. “I have something for you.” She hands me an envelope, my name written on it in the cursive script we were taught to write in school. “Your old friend came by.”

  For a moment, I think she means Eric. He is alive. Inside the envelope is my future. He has waited for me. Or he has already moved on.

  But the envelope isn’t from Eric. And it doesn’t contain my future. It holds my past. It holds a picture of me, perhaps the last picture taken of me before Auschwitz, the picture of me doing the splits by the river, the picture Eric took, the picture I gave to my friend Rebeka. She has kept it safe for me. In my fingers I hold the me who has yet to lose her parents, who doesn’t know how soon she will lose her love.

  Magda takes me to the entertainment club that night. Klara and Csicsi are there, and Rebeka, and Csicsi’s brother Imre. Gaby, my doctor, is there too, and perhaps that is why, weak as I am, I agree to dance. I want to show him I am getting well. I want to show him that the time he has devoted to my care has made a difference, that he hasn’t wasted his effort. I ask Klara and the other musicians to play “The Blue Danube,” and I begin my routine, the same dance that a little more than a year ago I performed my first night at Auschwitz, the dance that Josef Mengele rewarded with a loaf of bread. The steps have not changed, but my body has. I have none of the lean, limber muscle, none of the strength in my limbs or my core. I am a wheezing husk, a broken-backed girl with no hair. I close my eyes as I did in the barracks. That long-ago night I held my lids shut so that I wouldn’t have to look at Mengele’s terrifying and murderous eyes, so that I could keep from crumbling to the ground under the force of his stare. Now I close my eyes so that I can feel my body, not escape the room, so that I can feel the heat of appreciation from my audience. As I find my way back to the movements, to the familiar steps, the high kick, the splits, I grow more confident and comfortable in the moment. And I find my way back in time, to the days when we could imagine no worse encroachment on our freedom than curfews or yellow stars. I dance toward my innocence. Toward the girl who bounded up the stairs to the ballet studio. Toward the wise and loving mother who first brought her there. Help me, I call to her. Help me. Help me to live again.

  A few days later, a thick letter arrives, addressed to me. It’s from Béla. It is the first of many long letters he will write, first from the TB hospital, and then from his home in Prešov, where he was born and raised—the third-largest city in Slovakia, just twenty miles north of Košice. As I learn more about Béla, begin to assemble the facts he gives me in these letters into a life, the gray-haired man with a stutter and sarcastic sense of humor becomes a person with contours.

  Béla’s earliest memory, he writes, is of going for a walk with his grandfather, one of the wealthiest men in the country, and being denied a cookie from the patisserie. When he leaves the hospital, he will take over this same grandfather’s business, wholesaling produce from the region’s farmers, grinding coffee and grinding wheat for all of Slovakia. Béla is a full pantry, a country of plenty, he is a feast.

  Like my mother, Béla lost one of his parents when he was very young. His father, who had been the mayor of Prešov, and before that, a renowned lawyer for the poor, went to a conference in Prague the winter Béla was four. He stepped off the train and fell into an avalanche of snow. Or that is what the police told Béla’s mother. Béla suspects that his father, a controversial figure because he rebelled against the Prešov elite by serving as an advocate for the poor and disenfranchised, was murdered, but the official word was that he’d suffocated under all that snow. Ever since his father’s death, Béla has spoken with a stutter.

  His mother never recovered from his father’s death. Her father-in-law, Béla’s grandfather, kept her locked up in the house to keep her from meeting other men. During the war, Béla’s aunt and uncle invited her to join them in Hungary, where they were living in hiding using false identification papers. One day Béla’s mother was at the market when she saw a group of SS soldiers. She panicked. She ran up to them and shouted a confession. “I am Jewish!” she said. They shipped her off to Auschwitz, where she died in the gas chamber. The rest of the family, exposed by Béla’s mother’s confession, managed to flee to the mountains.

  Béla’s brother George has lived in America since before the war. Before he emigrated, he was walking down the street in Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia, when he was attacked by gentiles, his glasses broken. He left the brewing anti-Semitism in Europe to live with their great-uncle in Chicago. Their cousin Marianna escaped to England. Béla, though he had studied in England as a boy and spoke English fluently, refused to leave Slovakia. He wanted to protect everyone in his family. That was not to be. His grandfather died of stomach cancer. And his aunt and uncle, coaxed out of the mountains by Germans who promised that all Jews who returned would be treated kindly, were lined up in the street and shot.

  Béla escaped the Nazis by hiding in the mountains. He could barely hold a screwdriver, he writes, he was afraid of weapons, he didn’t want to fight, he was clumsy, but he became a partisan. He took up a gun and joined ranks with the Russians who were fighting the Nazis. While with the partisans, he contracted TB. He hadn’t had to survive the camps. Instead he had survived the mountain forests. For this I am grateful. I will never see the imprint of the smokestacks mirrored in his eyes.

  Prešov is only an hour’s drive from Košice. One weekend Béla visits me, pulling Swiss cheese and salami from a bag. Food. This is what I fall in love with first. If I can keep him interested in me, he will feed me and my sisters—this is what I think. I don’t pine for him the way I did for Eric. I don’t fantasize about kissing him or long to have him near. I don’t even flirt—not in a romantic way. We are like two shipwrecked people staring at the sea for signs of life. And in each other we see a glimmer. I find that I am stepping into life again. I feel that I am going to belong to someone. I know Béla is not the love of my life, not the way Eric was. I’m not trying to replace Eric. But Béla tells me jokes and writes me twenty-page letters, and I have a choice to make.

  When I tell Klara that I am going to marry Béla, she doesn’t congratulate me. She turns to Magda. “Ah, two cripples getting hitched,” she says. “How’s that going to work?” Later, at the table, she speaks to me directly. “You’re a baby, Dicuka,” she says. “You can’t make decisions like this. You’re not whole. And he isn’t either. He has TB. He stutters. You can’t marry him.” Now I have a new motivation for this marriage to work. I have to prove my sister wrong.

  Klara’s objection isn’t the only impediment. There is the fact that Béla is still legally married to the gentile woman who protected his family fortune from the Nazis, and she refuses to divorce him. They have never lived together, never had a relationship of any kind other than that of convenience—for her, his money; for him, her gentile status—but she won’t grant him the divorce, not at first, not until he agrees to pay her a large sum of money.

  And then there is his fiancée in the Tatra Mountains, dying of TB. He begs her friend Marianna, his cousin who had escaped to England but returned after the war, to deliver the news that he isn’t going to marry her. Marianna is justifiably furious. “You’re horrible!” she yells. “You can’t do this to her. I won’t in a million years tell her you’re breaking your promise.” Béla asks me to come with him back to the hospital so he can tell her himself. She is gracious and kind to me, and very, very ill. It rattles me to see someone so physically devastated. It is too much like the recent past. I am afraid to stand so close to death’s door. She tells me she is happy that Béla will marry someone like me, someone with so much energy and life. I am glad to have her blessing. And yet how easily I could have been the one in bed, propped up on scratchy pillows, coughing between words, filling a handkerchief with blood.

  That night Béla and I stay in a hotel together, the hotel where we met. In all of his visits to Košice we have slept in separate rooms. We have never shared a bed. We have never
seen each other without clothes. But tonight is different. I try to remember the forbidden words in Zola’s Nana. What else can prepare me to give him pleasure, to pursue pleasure myself? No one has instructed me on the choreography of intimacy. Nakedness has been degrading, humiliating, terrifying. I have to learn again how to inhabit my skin.

  “You’re shivering,” Béla says. “Are you cold?” He goes to his suitcase and takes out a package wrapped with a shining bow. Inside the box, nestled in tissue paper, is a beautiful silk negligee. It is an extravagant gift. But that isn’t what moves me. He somehow knew that I would need a second skin. It isn’t that I want to shield myself from him, my husband-to-be. It’s not cover I’m after. It’s a way to heighten myself, extend, a way to step into the chapter that hasn’t been written yet. I tremble as he slips it over my head, as the fabric falls against my legs. The right costume can augment the dance. I twirl for him.

  “Izléses,” he says. Classy.

  I am so happy that someone is looking at me. His gaze is more than a compliment. Just as my mother’s words once taught me to value my intelligence, through Béla’s eyes I find a new appreciation of my body—of my life.

  CHAPTER 9

  Next Year in Jerusalem

  I MARRY BÈLA Eger on November 12, 1946, at the city hall in Košice. We could have celebrated with a lavish affair at the Eger mansion, we could have chosen a Jewish ceremony. But I am a girl, I am only nineteen, I have never had the chance to finish high school, I am falling from one thing to another. And my parents are dead. One of my father’s old friends, a gentile, has been checking in on my sisters and me. He is a judge, and it turns out that he knew Béla’s brother when George was in law school. He is a link between Béla’s family and my own, he is a link to my father, and so he is the one we choose to marry us.

  In the fifteen months since Béla and I met, my hair has grown from meager fuzz to full waves all the way to my shoulders. I wear it down, a white barrette clipped at my temple. I am married in a borrowed dress—knee-length black rayon, with puffed shoulders and a white collar and tapered sleeves. I hold a small bouquet of lilies and roses tied with a wide satin ribbon. I smile for photographs on the balcony of my father’s shop. There are only eight people at the wedding—me, Béla, Magda, Klara, Csicsi, Imre, and two of my father’s old friends, one of them a bank president, the other the judge who marries us. Béla stutters when he says his vows, and Klara gives me a look, an admonition. The reception is in our apartment. Klara has cooked all of the food. Roasted chicken. Hungarian couscous. Potatoes with butter and parsley. And dobos torte—seven-layer chocolate cake. We try to put a happy spin on the day, but all of the absences tug at us. Orphans marry orphans. Later I will hear that we marry our parents. But I say we marry our unfinished business. For Béla and me, our unfinished business is grief.

  We honeymoon in Bratislava, on the Danube. I dance with my husband to waltzes we knew before the war. We visit Maximilian’s fountain and Coronation Hill. Béla pretends to be the new monarch, pointing his sword north, south, east, west, promising to defend me. We see the old city wall, double fortified against the Turks. We think the storm has passed.

  That night at the hotel we wake to pounding on our door. Police officers push their way into our room. The police are constantly checking up on civilians, our lives a labyrinth of bureaucratic necessities, official permission needed for even the minutiae of daily life. They can whisk you off to jail with barely a pretext. And because my husband is wealthy, he is an important person, so it shouldn’t surprise me that we’ve been followed. But I am surprised. And afraid (I am always afraid). And also embarrassed. And angry. This is my honeymoon. Why are they bothering us?

  “We were just married,” Béla reassures them in Slovak. (I grew up speaking only Hungarian, but Béla is also fluent in Czech and Slovak and other languages necessary for his wholesaling business.) He shows them our passports, our marriage license, our rings, everything that can confirm our identities and our reason for being in the hotel. “Please don’t bother us.”

  The police give no explanation for their invasion of our privacy, for their suspicion of us. Are they following Béla for some reason? Had they mistaken him for someone else? I try not to register the intrusion as an omen. I focus on the smoothness of my husband’s voice beneath his stutter. We have nothing to hide. But high alert is my constant state. And I can’t lose the feeling that I am guilty of something. That I will be found out.

  My transgression is life. And the beginnings of a cautious joy.

  On the train home we have a private room. I prefer its spare elegance to the hotel. I can imagine myself into a story. We are explorers, settlers. The motion of the train unspools the apprehension and turmoil of my brain and helps me focus on Béla’s body. Or maybe it’s just the smallness of the bed. My body surprises me. Pleasure is an elixir. A salve. We reach for each other again and again as the train moves through the night.

  I have to run for the bathroom when we return to Košice to visit my sisters. I vomit over and over. It is good news, but I don’t know it yet. All I know is that after more than a year of slow recovery, I am sick again.

  “What have you done to my baby?” Klara screams.

  Béla runs his handkerchief in cool water and wipes my face.

  While my sisters continue life in Košice, I begin an unexpected life of luxury. I move into the Eger mansion in Prešov, a five-hundred-year-old monastery, wide and long, a block of a house, horses and carriages lined up along the drive. Béla’s business is downstairs and we live upstairs. Renters occupy other parts of the enormous house. A woman does our laundry, boiling the sheets, ironing, everything white. We eat off of china made for the family, their name—my new name—in gold. In the dining room there is a button I can push that Mariska, the housekeeper, hears in the kitchen. I can’t eat enough of her rye bread. I push the button and request more bread.

  “You’re eating like pigs,” she mutters to me.

  She doesn’t disguise her unhappiness that I have joined the family. I am a threat to her way of life, to the way she manages the house. It pains me to see Béla hand her the money for groceries. I am his wife. I feel useless.

  “Please teach me to cook,” I ask Mariska one day.

  “I don’t ever want you in this kitchen,” she says.

  To launch me on my new life, Béla introduces me to the Prešov elite, the lawyers and doctors and businessmen and their wives, beside whom I feel gangly and young and inexperienced. I meet two women about my age. Ava Hartmann is a fashionable woman married to a wealthy, older man. She wears her dark hair in a side part. Marta Vadasz is married to Béla’s best friend, Bandi. She has reddish hair and a kind, patient face. I watch Ava and Marta intently, trying to see how I should behave and what I should say. Ava and Marta and the other women drink cognac. I drink cognac. Ava and Marta and the other women all smoke. One night after a dinner party at Ava’s house—she made the best chopped liver I have ever tasted, with green pepper in addition to onions—I remark to Béla that I’m the only one who doesn’t smoke, and the next day he brings me a silver cigarette case and silver cigarette holder. I don’t know how to use it—how to insert the cigarette into one end, how to inhale, how to blow the smoke out through my lips. I try to mirror the other women. I feel like an elegant parrot, nothing but an echo dolled up in nice clothes that my father did not make for me.

  Do they know where I’ve been? Sitting in parlors and around ornate dining tables, I gaze at our friends and acquaintances and wonder. Have they lost the same things Béla and I have lost? We don’t talk about it. Denial is our shield. We don’t yet know the damage we perpetuate by cutting ourselves off from the past, by maintaining our conspiracy of silence. We are convinced that the more securely we lock the past away, the safer and happier we will be.

  I try to relax into my new privilege and wealth. There will be no more loud knocks on the door disrupting sleep, I tell myself. Only the comfort of eiderdowns and clean white sheets
. No more starvation. I eat and eat—Mariska’s rye bread, spaetzle dumplings, one batch made with sauerkraut, another with bryndza, a Slovakian sheep’s milk cheese. I am gaining weight. The memories and loss occupy only a little sliver of me. I will push and push against them so they know their place. I watch my hand lift the silver cigarette holder up to my face and away. I pretend it’s a new dance. I can learn every gesture.

  The weight I’m putting on is not just due to rich food. In early spring I discover that I’m pregnant. At Auschwitz we didn’t get our periods. Perhaps the constant distress and starvation were enough to stop our cycles, or maybe the extreme weight loss. But now my body, the body that was starved and emaciated and left for dead, houses a new life. I count the weeks since I last bled and calculate that Béla and I must have conceived on our honeymoon, maybe on the train. Ava and Marta tell me that they are pregnant too.

  I expect my doctor, the Eger family doctor, the same man who attended at Béla’s birth, to congratulate me. But he lectures me instead. “You’re not strong enough,” he tells me. He urges me to schedule an abortion, and soon. I refuse. I run home in tears. He follows me. Mariska lets him into the parlor. “Mrs. Eger, you will die if you have this child,” he says. “You are too skinny, too weak.”

  I look him in the eye. “Doctor, I am going to give life,” I say. “Good night.”

  Béla follows him to the door. I can hear my husband apologizing to the doctor for my lack of respect. “She’s a tailor’s daughter, she doesn’t know better,” he explains. The words he speaks to protect me create another small hole in my still fragile ego.

  But as my womb expands, so do my self-confidence and determination. I don’t hide in the corners. I gain fifty pounds, and when I walk in the streets I push out my stomach and watch reflections of this new version of me glide by in shop windows. I don’t immediately recognize this feeling. Then I remember. This is what it feels like to be happy.