The Choice

by Edith Eger

  Alienation is my chronic condition, even among our Jewish immigrant friends. The winter Marianne is five, we are invited to a Hanukkah party, where all of the children take turns singing Hanukkah songs. The hostess invites Marianne to sing. I am so proud to see my intelligent and precocious daughter, who already speaks English as if it is her first language, happy and bright-eyed and eager, confidently accepting the invitation, taking her place in the center of the room. She is in kindergarten now and goes to an after-school program run by a Jewish man, who unbeknownst to me has become a Jew for Jesus. Marianne beams at the guests, then closes her eyes, begins to sing: “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so …” The guests stare at her and at me. My daughter has learned the skill I most want her to have, the ability to be at home anywhere. And now it is exactly her lack of understanding of the codes that separate people that makes me want to slip under the floorboards and disappear. This embarrassment, this feeling of exile, even in my own community, didn’t come from without. It came from within. It was the self-imprisoning part of me that believed I didn’t deserve to have survived, that I would never be worthy enough to belong.

  Marianne thrived in America, but Béla and I struggled. I still suffered with my own fear—the nightmarish memories, the panic that brewed just below the surface. And I feared Béla’s resentment. He didn’t struggle to learn English as I did. He had attended a boarding school in London for a time when he was a boy, and he spoke English as fluently as he spoke Czech, Slovak, Polish, German, and numerous other languages—but his stutter grew more pronounced in America, a signal to me that he was pained by the choice I had forced upon him. His first job was in a warehouse, where he lifted heavy boxes, an exertion we knew was dangerous for someone with TB. But George and his wife, Duci, who was a social worker and had helped us find our jobs, convinced us we were lucky to have work. The pay was terrible, the labor demanding and demeaning, but it was the immigrant reality. Immigrants weren’t doctors or lawyers or mayors, no matter their training and expertise (except for my remarkable sister Klara, who secured a position as a violinist in the Sydney Symphony Orchestra soon after she and Csicsi immigrated). Immigrants drove taxis. Immigrants did piecework in factories. Immigrants stocked grocery store shelves. I internalized the feeling of unworthiness. Béla fought against it. He became short-tempered and volatile.

  During our first winter in Baltimore, Duci comes home with a snowsuit she has bought for Marianne. It has a long zipper. Marianne wants to try it on right away. It takes ages to get the snug snowsuit on over the top of Marianne’s clothes, but finally we are ready for the park. We trundle down the five flights of stairs to the street. When we reach the sidewalk, Marianne says she needs to pee.

  “Why didn’t you tell us before!” Béla explodes. He has never yelled at Marianne before.

  “Let’s get out of this house,” I whisper that night.

  “You got it, princess,” he snarls. I don’t recognize him. His anger frightens me.

  No, the anger I am most afraid of is my own.

  We manage to save enough money to move into a little maid’s room at the back of a house in Park Heights, Baltimore’s largest Jewish neighborhood. Our landlady was once an immigrant herself, from Poland, but she’s been in America for decades already, since long before the war. She calls us greeners and laughs at our accents. She shows us the bathroom, expecting us to be amazed by indoor plumbing. I think of Mariska and the little bell in the Eger mansion that I used to ring when I wanted more bread. It is easier to feign astonishment, to fulfill our landlady’s expectation of who we are, than to explain, even to myself, the gulf between then and now.

  Béla and Marianne and I live together in the one room. We turn off the lights when Marianne goes to bed and we sit in the dark. The silence between us isn’t the intimate kind, it’s taut and burdened, a rope beginning to fray under the weight of its load.

  We do our best to be a normal family. In 1950, we splurge and go to see a movie in the theater next door to the Laundromat on Park Heights Avenue. While our clothes spin in the machine, we take Marianne to see The Red Shoes, a movie written, we are proud to learn, by Emeric Pressburger, a Jewish Hungarian immigrant. I remember the film so well because it moved through me in two directions. Sitting in the dark, eating popcorn with my family, I felt a contentment that had grown elusive for me—a faith that all was well, that we could have a happy postwar life. But the film itself—the characters, the story—upended me with the force of recognition. Something broke through my careful mask, and I gazed into the full face of my hunger.

  The movie is about a dancer, Vicky Page, who catches the attention of Boris Lermontov, the artistic director of a celebrated ballet company. She practices the high kick at the barre, she dances passionately in Swan Lake, she longs for Lermontov’s attention and regard. I can’t look away from the screen. I feel like I am watching my own life, the one I would have gone on to live if there hadn’t been a Hitler, if there hadn’t been a war. For a moment I think it is Eric in the seat next to mine, I forget I have a daughter. I am only twenty-three, but it feels as though the best parts of my life are over. At one point in the movie Lermontov asks Vicky, “Why do you want to dance?” She replies, “Why do you want to live?” Lermontov says, “I don’t know exactly why, but I must.” Vicky says, “That’s my answer too.” Before Auschwitz, even at Auschwitz, I would have said the same. There was a constant inner light, a part of me that always feasted and danced, that never relinquished the longing for life. Now my guiding purpose is simply to act in such a way that my daughter never knows my pain.

  It’s a sad movie. Vicky’s dream doesn’t turn out the way she thought it would. When she dances the lead role in Lermontov’s new ballet, she is haunted by demons. This part of the movie is so terrifying I can barely watch. Vicky’s red ballet shoes seem to take control of her, they dance her almost to death, she is dancing through her own nightmares—ghouls and barren landscapes, a dance partner made of disintegrating newspaper—but she can’t stop dancing, she can’t wake up. Vicky tries to give up dancing. She hides the red shoes in a drawer. She falls in love with a composer, she marries him. At the end of the film, she is invited to dance one more time in Lermontov’s ballet. Her husband begs her not to go. Lermontov warns her, “Nobody can have two lives.” She must choose. What makes a person do one thing and not another? I wonder. Vicky puts the red shoes on again. This time they dance her off the edge of a building to her death. The other dancers perform the ballet without her, a spotlight trained on the empty place on the stage where Vicky should be dancing.

  It’s not a film about trauma. In fact, I don’t yet understand that I am living with trauma. But The Red Shoes gives me a vocabulary of images, it teaches me something about myself, the tension between my inner and outer experiences. And something about the way Vicky put on the red shoes for the last time and took flight—it didn’t look like choice. It looked compulsive. Automatic. What was she so afraid of? What made her run? Was it something she couldn’t live with, or something she couldn’t live without?

  “Would you have chosen dance over me?” Béla asks on the bus ride home. I wonder if he is thinking of the night in Vienna when I told him I was taking Marianne to America, with or without him. He already knows I am capable of choosing someone or something else.

  I defuse his question with flirtation. “If you had seen me dance then, you wouldn’t have asked me to choose,” I say. “You’ve never seen a high kick like mine.” I pretend, I pretend. Somewhere deep in my chest I suppress a scream. I didn’t get to choose! the silence in me rages. Hitler and Mengele chose for me. I didn’t get to choose!

  Béla is the first to collapse under the pressure. It happens at work. He is lifting a box and he falls to the ground. He can’t breathe. At the hospital, an X-ray reveals that his TB has returned. He looks more unraveled and pale than he did the day I got him out of jail, the day we fled to Vienna. The doctors transfer him to a TB hospital, and when I take Ma
rianne to visit him every day after work, I am rigid with the fear that she will see him coughing up blood, that she will feel the possibility of death despite our efforts to hide from her how sick he is. She is four years old, she can already read, she brings picture books from Mrs. Bower’s to entertain her father, she tells the nurses when he has finished his food, when he needs more water. “You know what would cheer Daddy up?” she says to me. “A baby sister!” We haven’t allowed ourselves to try for another child, we are too poor, and now I am relieved that we don’t have the pressure of another person’s hunger weighing on Béla’s recovery, on my pitiful paychecks. But it breaks my heart to see my daughter yearning for a companion. To see her loneliness. It makes me long for my own sisters. Magda has a better job now, in New York, using the tailoring skills she learned from our father to make coats at London Fog. She doesn’t want to start over again in a new city, but I beg her to come to Baltimore. In Vienna, in 1949, that is how I briefly imagined my life might turn out—bringing Marianne up with my sister instead of my husband. Then, it was a choice, a sacrifice, to spare my daughter life in a war zone. Now, if Béla dies, or if he becomes an invalid, it will be a necessity. We live in a slightly bigger apartment now, and even with two of us working we struggle to eat. I can’t imagine how I will afford to pay for it alone. Magda agrees to think about coming.

  “Don’t worry,” Béla says, coughing into a handkerchief. “I won’t let our girl grow up without a father. I will not.” He coughs and stutters so badly he can barely get out the words.

  Béla does recover, but he is still weak. He won’t be able to resume his job at the warehouse—but he will live. The medical staff at the TB hospital, taken by Béla’s charm and humor, promise that before he is discharged they will help him figure out a career path that can lift us out of poverty and give him plenty of healthy years. They administer an aptitude test that Béla thinks is silly until the results come back. He is best suited to a career as an orchestra conductor or an accountant, the test reveals.

  “We could make a new life in the ballet,” he jokes. “You could dance, I’d conduct the orchestra.”

  “Do you ever wish you’d studied music when you were young?” It’s a dangerous game to play what-if with the past.

  “I did study music when I was young.”

  How have I forgotten this? He studied violin, like my sister. He wrote about it in those letters when he courted me. Hearing him talk about it now is like being told he used to go by a different name.

  “I was pretty good. My teachers told me I could have gone to conservatory, and I might have, if there wasn’t the family business to run.”

  My face gets hot. I am suddenly angry. I don’t know why. I want to say something that will sting, but I don’t know if it is myself I want to punish, or him. “Just think,” I say, “if you’d kept it up, you might have met Klara first instead of me.”

  Béla tries to read my face. I can see him trying to decide whether to tease me or reassure me. “Do you really want to try to convince me that I’m not happy beyond happy to be married to you? It was a violin. It doesn’t matter now.”

  Then I understand what it is that has upset me. It is the seeming effortlessness with which my husband has put to rest an old dream. If he ever suffered anguish over giving up music, he kept it hidden from me. What was wrong with me that I was still so hungry for what wasn’t?

  Béla shows his old boss at the warehouse the results of the aptitude test, and the boss introduces Béla to his accountant, a generous man who agrees to employ Béla as his assistant while Béla takes CPA classes and works toward his license.

  I am restless. I have been so consumed with money worries and Béla’s illness, so wrapped up in the cramped routine of hours at the factory and counting coins to buy groceries, that the good news unmoors me. The release of worry leaves me with a gaping cavity that I don’t know how to fill. Béla has new prospects, a new path, but I don’t. I change jobs several times in an effort to earn more, to feel better about myself. The extra money helps and the advancements do lift me for a while. But the feeling never lasts. At an insurance company, I am promoted from my station at the ditto machine to bookkeeper. My supervisor has noticed how hard I work, she will train me. I feel happy in the company of the other secretaries, happy to be one of them, until my new friend advises me, “Don’t ever sit next to the Jews at lunch. They smell.” I don’t belong after all. I must hide who I am. At the luggage company where I work next, I have a Jewish boss, and I think I will finally fit in. I feel confident, accepted. Although I am a clerk, not a receptionist, one day the phone is ringing and ringing, and seeing how taxed the secretaries are, I jump in to answer the phone. My boss storms out of his office. “Who gave you permission?” he yells. “Are you trying to ruin my reputation? No greener will represent this company. Am I making myself clear?” The problem isn’t that he chews me out. The problem is that I believe his assessment of my worthlessness.

  In the summer of 1952, shortly after Béla’s recovery and a few months before Marianne turns five, Magda does move to Baltimore. She stays with us for a few months until she can find a job. We set up a bed for her in the dining area, near the front door. Our apartment is always stuffy in the summer, even at night, and Magda cracks the door a little before she goes to bed. “Careful,” Béla warns. “I don’t know what kind of palace you were living in in the Bronx, but this isn’t a safe neighborhood. If you leave that door open, someone might walk right in.”

  “Don’t I wish,” Magda purrs, batting her eyelashes. My sister. Her pain visible only in the humor she uses to transcend it.

  We host a small party to welcome her—George and Duci come (George shakes his head at the small expense), and some of our neighbors in the apartment building, including our landlords, who bring their friend Nat Shillman, a retired Navy engineer. Magda tells a funny story about her first week in America, when Aunt Matilda bought her a hot dog on the street. “In Europe, when you buy a hot dog from a vendor like that, you always get two hot dogs, and they’re covered in kraut and onions. Matilda goes to pay for my hot dog, and she comes back and there’s just one puny hot dog on a flimsy little bun. I thought she was too cheap to pay full price for two, or that she was making a point about my weight. I held a grudge for months, till the day I bought my own hot dog and learned that’s how it is here.”

  All eyes are on Magda, on her expressive face, waiting for the next funny thing she’ll say. And she has more; she always does. Nat is clearly fascinated by her. When the guests leave and Marianne is asleep, I sit with Magda on her bed, gossiping the way we did when we were girls. She asks what I know of Nat Shillman. “I know, I know, he’s Daddy’s age,” she says, “but I have a good feeling about him.”

  We talk until I am half asleep on her bed. I don’t want to stop. There is something I need to ask Magda, something that has to do with the cavity in me, but if I ask her about the fear, the emptiness, then I must acknowledge it, and I am so used to pretending it isn’t there. “Are you happy?” I finally work up the courage to ask her. I want her to say that she is, so that I can be too. I want her to say that she’ll never be happy, not really, so that I’ll know the hole isn’t only in me.

  “Dicuka, here’s some advice from your big sister. Either you’re sensitive, or you’re not. When you’re sensitive, you hurt more.”

  “Are we going to be okay?” I ask. “Someday?”

  “Yes,” she says. “No. I don’t know. One thing’s true: Hitler fucked us up for sure.”

  Béla and I are now bringing in $60 a week, enough to try for a second child. I get pregnant. My daughter is born February 10, 1954. When I awaken from the anesthesia that American doctors routinely administered to all women in labor at that time, she is in the nursery. But I demand to hold my baby, I demand to nurse her. When the nurse brings her to me, I see that she is perfect and sleepy, not as big as her sister was when she was born, her nose so tiny, her cheeks so smooth.

  Béla brings M
arianne, now six years old, to see the baby. “I got my sister! I got my sister!” Marianne celebrates, as though I have put away money in an envelope and ordered her a sister from a catalog, as though I have the capacity to always grant her wishes. She will soon also have a cousin, because Magda, who married Nat Shillman in 1953, is pregnant and will give birth to a daughter in October. She names her Ilona, after our mother.

  We name our own new daughter Audrey, after Audrey Hepburn. I am still dazed from the drugs the doctors used to sedate me. Even the intensity of labor, of meeting and nursing my baby for the first time, have taken on the numb quality of my life in hiding.

  It is a reflex to expect the bad with the good. The first months of Audrey’s life, Béla studies for his CPA test as though preparing for the ultimate test, the one crucial trial that will determine forever whether or not he will find his place, his peace with himself and our choices.

  He doesn’t pass the test. Moreover, he is told that with his stutter, his accent, he will never get a job, no matter if he is able the earn his license.

  “There’s always going to be a block in the road,” he says, “no matter what I do.”

  I object. I reassure him. I say we’ll find a way, but I can’t stop my sister Klara’s voice from creeping into my head. Two cripples. How is that going to work out? I cry in the bathroom. I do it silently, come out cheerful. I don’t know that fears kept hidden only grow more fierce. I don’t know that my habits of providing and placating—of pretending—are only making us worse.

  CHAPTER 13

  You Were There?

  IN THE SUMMER of 1955, when Marianne was seven and Audrey was one, we loaded up our old gray Ford and left Baltimore for El Paso, Texas. Demoralized by the lack of job prospects, tired of his brother’s judgment and resentments, worried about his own health, Béla had contacted his cousin, Bob Eger, hoping for advice. Bob was the adopted son of Béla’s great-uncle Albert, who had immigrated to Chicago with two of his brothers in the early 1900s, leaving the fourth brother—Béla’s grandfather—in Prešov to run the wholesaling business that Béla had inherited after the war. It was the Chicago Egers who had supported George’s immigration to America in the 1930s, and it was also they who had secured our opportunity for visas by registering the Eger family before the war. I was grateful for the generosity and foresight of the Chicago Egers, without whom we never could have made a home in America.