by Edith Eger
But when Bob, who now lived with his wife and two children in El Paso, told Béla, “Come west!” I was worried that we might be walking into another dead end disguised as opportunity. Bob reassured us. He said the economy was booming in El Paso, that in a border town immigrants were less segregated and marginalized, that the frontier was a perfect place to start from scratch, to reinvent one’s life. He even helped Béla find a job as a CPA’s assistant at twice his Baltimore salary. “The desert air will be good for my lungs,” Béla said. “We’ll be able to afford to rent a house, not another tiny apartment.” And so I agreed.
We tried to make the upheaval into a fun adventure, a vacation. We drove scenic highways, we stopped at motels with swimming pools, and got off the road early enough in the day to have a refreshing swim before dinner. Despite my anxieties over the move, the cost of gas and motels and restaurant meals, the miles stretching once again between Magda and me, I found myself smiling more often. Not the mask of a smile worn to reassure my family. The real kind, deep in my cheeks and my eyes. I felt a new camaraderie with Béla, who taught Marianne corny jokes and bounced Audrey in the water when we swam.
In El Paso, the first thing I noticed was the sky. Open, uncluttered, vast. The mountains that girded the city to the north drew my gaze too. I was always looking up. At certain times of day, the angle of the sun would flatten the range into a faint cardboard cutout, a movie set, the peaks a uniform dull brown. And then the light would shift, the mountains rainbow into pink, orange, purple, red, gold, deep blue, the range popping into relief like an accordion stretched to expose all its folds.
The culture, too, had dimension. I had expected the dusty, out-of-touch frontier village of a Western movie, a place with stoic, lonely men and lonelier women. But El Paso felt more European, more cosmopolitan, than Baltimore. It was bilingual. Multicultural without the stark segregation. And there was the border itself, the union of worlds. El Paso, Texas, and Juárez, Chihuahua, weren’t separate cities so much as two halves of the same whole. The Rio Grande cut through the middle, dividing the city between two countries, but the border was as arbitrary as it was distinct. I thought of my hometown: from Košice, to Kassa, to Košice again, the border changing everything, the border changing nothing. My English was still basic and I didn’t speak Spanish at all, but I felt less marginalized and ostracized here than I had in Baltimore, where we lived in a Jewish immigrant neighborhood, where we had expected to find shelter but instead felt exposed. In El Paso we were just part of the mix.
One afternoon soon after our move, I am at the neighborhood park with Audrey when I hear a mother call to her kids in Hungarian. I watch her, this other Hungarian mother, for a few minutes, expecting to recognize her, but then I chide myself. What a naïve assumption, that just because her voice is familiar, a mirror of my own, we might have anything in common. Yet I can’t stop tracking her as she and her children play, can’t let go of the feeling that I know her.
Suddenly, I remember something I haven’t thought of since the night of Klara’s wedding: the postcard tucked into Magda’s mirror in Košice. The cursive script across the picture of the bridge: El Paso. How had I forgotten that ten years ago, Laci Gladstein moved here, to this city? Laci, the young man who was liberated with us at Gunskirchen, who was on the top of the train with Magda and me from Vienna to Prague, who held our hands in comfort, who I thought might marry Magda one day, who had come to El Paso to work in his aunt and uncle’s furniture store to save for medical school. El Paso, the place I thought looked in the postcard like the end of the world, the place where I now live.
Audrey pulls me out of my reverie, demanding to get on the swings. As I lift her up, the Hungarian woman approaches the swing set with her son. I speak quickly to her, in Hungarian, before I can stop myself.
“You’re Hungarian,” I say. “Maybe you know an old friend of mine who came to El Paso after the war.”
She looks at me in that amused way that adults look at children, as though I am delightfully, impossibly naïve. “Who is your friend?” she asks. She is playing along.
“Laci Gladstein.”
Tears spring into her eyes. “I’m his sister!” she cries. She has read my code. Old friend. After the war. “He’s a doctor,” she says. “He goes by Larry Gladstone now.”
How can I explain the way I felt in this moment? Ten years had passed since I rode with Laci on top of a train with other displaced survivors. In that decade, he had fulfilled his dream of becoming a doctor. Hearing this made no hope or ambition seem out of reach. He had reinvented himself in America. So could I.
But that is only half the story. Standing in a park in the hot desert sun, I was indeed at the end of the world, farther in time and space than I’d ever been from the girl left for dead in a pile of bodies in a muggy forest in Austria. And yet I had never, since the war, been closer to her, either, because here I was almost acknowledging her to a stranger, here I was meeting a ghost from the past in broad daylight, while my daughter demanded to go higher and higher in the swing. Maybe moving forward also meant circling back.
I find Larry Gladstone in the phone book and wait a week or more before I make the call. His wife, an American, answers the phone. She takes a message, she asks several times how to spell my name. I tell myself he won’t remember me. That evening, Bob and his family come over to our house for dinner. Marianne has asked me to make hamburgers, and I make them the way my mother would have, the ground beef mixed with egg and garlic and breadcrumbs, rolled up like meatballs, served with Brussels sprouts and potatoes cooked with caraway seeds. When I bring the meal to the table, Marianne rolls her eyes. “Mom,” she says, “I meant American hamburgers.” She wants flattened patties served between tasteless white buns, with greasy french fries and a puddle of bland ketchup. She is embarrassed in front of Dickie and Barbara, her American cousins. Her disapproval stings. I have done what I have promised myself never to do. I have made her feel ashamed. The phone rings and I escape the table to answer it.
“Edith,” the man says. “Mrs. Eger. This is Dr. Larry Gladstone.”
He speaks in English, but his voice is the same. It brings the past into my kitchen, the sting of the wind from the top of the train. I am dizzy. I am hungry, as I was then, half starved. My broken back aches. “Laci,” I say, my own voice far away, as though it is coming through a radio in another room. Our shared past is pervasive yet unmentionable.
“We meet again,” he says. We switch to Hungarian. He tells me about his wife and her philanthropic work, their three daughters, I tell him about my children and Béla’s aspirations to become a CPA. He invites me to visit his office, he welcomes my family to join his family for dinner. So begins—again—a friendship that will last the rest of our lives. When I hang up the phone, the sky is turning rose and gold. I can hear my family’s voices in the dining room. Bob’s son Dickie is asking his mother about me, am I really an American, why is my English so bad? My body tenses, the way it does when the past is too near. It’s like a hand thrown out in front of my children when the car brakes too fast. A reflex to protect. Since my pregnancy with Marianne, when I defied the doctor’s warning, when I chose that my life would always stand for more life, I resolved not to let the death camps cast a shadow over my children. That conviction has hardened into a single purpose: My children can’t ever know. They will never picture me skeletal with hunger, dreaming of my mother’s strudel under a smoke-thickened sky. It will never be an image they have to hold in their minds. I will protect them. I will spare them. But Dickie’s questions remind me that while I can choose my own silence, and I can choose the kinship or camouflage of others’ silence, I can’t choose what other people say or do when I’m not there. What might my daughters overhear? What might others tell them despite my efforts to keep the truth locked away?
To my relief, Dickie’s mother moves the conversation in a new direction. She prompts Dickie and his older sister Barbara to tell Marianne about the best teachers at the school
she will start in the fall. Has Béla instructed her to maintain the conspiracy of silence? Or is it something she has intuited? Is it something she does for my sake, my children’s sake, her own? Later, as their family gathers at the door to leave, I hear Dickie’s mother whisper to him in English, “Don’t ever ask Auntie Dicu about the past. It’s not something we talk about.” My life is a family taboo. My secret is safe.
There are always two worlds. The one that I choose and the one I deny, which inserts itself without my permission.
In 1956, Béla passes the CPA test, earns his license, and a few months before our third child—Johnny, a son—is born, we buy a modest three-bedroom rambler on Fiesta Drive. There is nothing but desert behind the house—pink and purple ceniza blooms, red yucca flowers, the throb of rattlesnakes. Inside, we choose light-colored furnishings for the living room and the den. Over fresh papaya that Béla crosses the border to buy in the Juárez produce markets on Sunday mornings, we read the headlines. In Hungary, an uprising, Soviet tanks rolling in to quash the anti-Communist rebellion. Béla is terse with the girls, his stutter edging back. It is hot, I am very pregnant. We turn on the swamp cooler and gather around the TV in the den to watch the summer Olympics broadcast from Melbourne.
We tune in just as Ágnes Keleti, a Jew from Budapest on the women’s gymnastics team, warms up for her floor routine. She is thirty-five, six years older than I am. If she had grown up in Kassa, or I in Budapest, we would have trained together. “Pay attention!” Béla tells the girls. “She’s Hungarian, like us.” To watch Ágnes Keleti take the floor is to watch my other half, my other self. The one who wasn’t sent to Auschwitz. (Keleti, I later find out, bought identification papers from a Christian girl in Budapest and fled to a remote village where she waited out the war, working as a maid.) The one whose mother lived. The one who picked up the seam of her old life after the war, who hasn’t let her hardships or her age destroy her dream. She lifts her arms, extends her body long, she is poised to begin. Béla cheers wildly. Audrey imitates him. Marianne studies me, how I lean, lean toward the TV. She doesn’t know I was a competitive gymnast once, much less that the same war that interrupted Ágnes Keleti’s life also interrupted—still intrudes on—mine. But I sense my daughter’s awareness of my held breath, of the way I follow Keleti’s body with my body, not just with my eyes. Béla and Marianne and Audrey applaud each flip. I am breathless when Keleti is slow and controlled, when she leans all the way down over her legs to touch the floor, and then revolves from a seated forward bend to a backward arch, and up into a handstand, all grace and fluid motion. Her routine is over.
Her Soviet competitor takes the floor. Because of the uprising in Hungary, the tensions between Hungarian and Soviet athletes are especially fraught. Béla boos loudly. Little Audrey, two years old, does the same. I tell them both to hush. I watch Larisa Latynina the way the judges do, the way Keleti must be watching her. I see that her high kick is maybe a little higher than Keleti’s, I see the buoyancy of her flips, the way she lands in a full split. Marianne sighs with appreciation. Béla boos again. “She’s really good, Daddy,” Marianne says. “She’s from a country of oppressors and bullies,” Béla says. “She didn’t choose where she was born,” I say. Béla shrugs. “Try twirling like that when your country’s under siege,” he says. “In this house we cheer for Hungarians.” In the end, Keleti and Latynina share the gold. Latynina’s shoulder brushes Keleti’s as they stand side by side at the awards ceremony. Keleti grimaces from the pedestal. “Mom, why are you crying?” Marianne asks me. “I’m not,” I say.
Deny. Deny. Deny. Who am I protecting? My daughter? Or myself?
Marianne grows ever more curious, and is a voracious reader. When she has read every book in the children’s section of the El Paso Public Library, she begins scrambling around the bookcases in our house, reading my philosophy and literature, Béla’s history. In 1957, when she is ten, she sits Béla and me down on the beige couch in the den. She stands before us like a little teacher. She opens a book that she tells us she found hidden behind the other books on one of our shelves. She points to a picture of naked, skeletal corpses piled up in a heap. “What is this?” she asks. I am sweating, the room spins. I could have predicted this moment would come, but it is as surprising to me, as arresting and terrifying, as if I had walked into the house to discover that the live alligator pit from San Jacinto Plaza had been installed in our living room. To face the truth, to face my daughter facing the truth, is to face a beast. I run from the room. I vomit in the bathroom sink. I hear Béla telling our daughter about Hitler, about Auschwitz. I hear him say the dreaded words: Your mother was there. I could crack the mirror. No! No! No! I want to scream. I wasn’t there! What I mean is, This isn’t yours to carry! “Your mother is very strong,” I hear Béla tell Marianne. “But you must understand that you are a survivor’s daughter, you must always, always protect her.” This could have been an opportunity. To soothe Marianne. To unburden her from the need to worry about or pity me. To tell her how much her grandparents would have loved her. To tell her, It’s all okay, we are safe now. But I can’t leave the bathroom. I don’t trust myself. If I say a word about the past, I will stoke the rage and the loss, I will fall into the dark, I will take her there with me.
I focus on the children, on the things I can do to make all of us feel secure and accepted and happy in our new home.
There are the daily rituals, the hallmarks of the week and seasons, the things we do for joy, the things we count on: Béla’s unusual practice of shaving his bald head in the morning while he drives Audrey to school. Béla on a shopping run to the Safeway that was built in the vast desert behind our house. Inevitably, I’ve forgotten to add something to the list, and I call him at the store. The grocery clerks know my voice. “Mr. Eger, your wife’s on the phone,” they call over the PA. I tend our garden, I mow the lawn, I work part time in Béla’s office. He becomes the loved and trusted accountant for all the successful immigrants in El Paso—Syrians, Mexicans, Italians, European Jews. On Saturdays he brings the kids along to meet with clients, and if I didn’t already know how much Béla was adored, I would see their love for him in the affection they shower on our children. Sundays, Béla drives to Juárez to buy fresh fruit from Chuy the grocer, and then we have a big family brunch at our house, we listen to Broadway musicals albums, we sing along to the show tunes (Béla can sing without stuttering), and then we go to the YMCA for a family swim. We go to San Jacinto Plaza in downtown El Paso on Christmas Day. We don’t celebrate Christmas with gifts, but the kids still write letters to Santa. We exchange practical gifts—socks and clothes—for Hanukkah, and we bring in the New Year with lots of food and the Sun Carnival parade—the Sun Queen, the high school bands, the Rotary Club men riding by on motorcycles. In spring, there are picnic outings to White Sands and Santa Fe. In the fall, back-to-school clothes shopping at Amen Wardy. Running my hands over the racks, I can feel the best fabrics by touch, I have a knack for finding the finest garments for the lowest price. (Béla and I both have these tactile rituals—for him, choosing produce; for me, choosing clothes.) We go to farms in Mexico for fall harvest, we fill ourselves with homemade tamales. Food is love. When our kids bring home good report cards, we take them for a banana split at the soda fountain behind our house.
When Audrey is nine, she tries out for a year-round swimming team and becomes a competitive swimmer. By the time she is in high school, she will be training six hours a day, as I used to do in gymnastics and ballet. When Marianne is thirteen, we build an addition to our house, adding a master suite so that Marianne and Audrey and Johnny have their own rooms. We buy a piano. Marianne and Audrey both take lessons, we host chamber music concerts like my parents did when I was a girl, we have bridge parties. Béla and I join a book club hosted by Molly Shapiro, well known in El Paso for her salons, where she brings artists and intellectuals together. I take an ESL class at the University of Texas. My English finally improves enough that in 1959 I feel I can
enroll as an undergraduate student. It’s long been my dream to continue my education—another dream deferred, but this one now seems possible. I take my first psychology class, sit in a row of basketball players, take notes in Hungarian, ask for Béla’s help writing every paper. I am thirty-two years old. We are happy on the outside, on the inside often too.
But there is the way Béla looks at our son. He wanted a son, but he didn’t expect this son. Johnny had athetoid cerebral palsy, probably caused by encephalitis before birth, and this affected his motor control. He struggled to do things Marianne and Audrey had learned to do with little fuss—dress himself, talk, use a fork or a spoon to feed himself. He looked different from them too. His eyes drooped. He drooled. Béla was critical of Johnny, impatient with his struggles. I remembered the ridicule I had faced for being cross-eyed, and I ached for my son. Béla would yell in frustration over Johnny’s challenges. (He yelled in Czech, so the children, who had picked up a little Hungarian in our home, despite my wish for them to speak only flawless American English, wouldn’t understand the words—though of course they understood his tone.) I would retreat into our bedroom. I was a master hider. In 1960, when Johnny was four, I took him to see Dr. Clark, a specialist at Johns Hopkins, who told me, “Your son will be whatever you make of him. John’s going to do everything everyone else does, but it’s going to take him longer to get there. You can push him too hard, and that will backfire, but it will also be a mistake not to push him hard enough. You need to push him to the level of his potential.” I dropped out of school so that I could get Johnny to his speech therapy appointments, his occupational therapy appointments, to every kind of clinic I could think of, to every kind of specialist who might help. (Audrey says now that her most vivid childhood memories aren’t in the swimming pool—they’re in waiting rooms.) I chose not to accept that our son was forever compromised. I felt sure that he could thrive if we believed he could. But when he was young, eating with his hands, chewing with his mouth open because that was the best he could manage, Béla gazed at him with such disappointment, such sadness, I felt I had to protect my son from his father.