The Fig Eater

by Jody Sheilds

  She hears the Gypsy orchestra as they walk in. Following the music, she races ahead of him, laughing. When he enters the ballroom, the place is dense with smoke and people. It takes him a moment to find her, standing at one side of the orchestra, raptly watching the musicians. The primás, a dark young man in a jacket, solemnly motions for the orchestra’s attention. The room falls silent. The primás drops his arm, and the crashing strains of a csárdás begin.

  In one motion, the audience stands and pushes its way into a clear space between the tables. The Inspector watches as his wife is swept along by the crowd. Strangers, both men and women, grab partners. Erszébet rests her hands on a man’s shoulders. He nods, and without speaking, puts his thumbs alongside her neck. They begin to dance, stamping their feet, working their way into the music, their bodies pivoting.

  The orchestra is inexhaustible, pitiless. A violinist with a scarlet diklo around his neck fiddles as if possessed, his eyes never leaving the face of a woman at a table. Other musicians sway, ecstatic, gripping their instruments as if barely able to restrain them. The arms of the cimbalom player blur into furious white motion, his expression vacant. Their music is devilish, rapid, it impetuously swoops and changes following the direction of the inscrutable primás.

  Men raise their arms and shout Éljen! The women wail, a wild noise that speeds the dancing. The music is as calculated as a perfume, invisibly spiraling back on itself, its previous state, then carrying everything forward, past and present. Erszébet has no sense of time passing.

  The music abruptly halts.

  For a moment, the dancers keep moving. Then the men bend over and weep. The women stay numbly in place, as if turned to statues.

  The Inspector finds his wife standing dazed and alone. He’s almost afraid to approach her, but he takes her arm and gently ushers her to a chair. She gulps the water from the glass he hands her. Some of it falls onto her dress.

  She doesn’t remember the dancing. Later she says, I was in the realm of mulatni, when the world vanishes.

  She secretly wonders if her husband watched her with the stranger.

  Wally has seen Erszébet only once in the last two weeks. They’d attended an afternoon concert at the Kursalon in Stadtpark. At that time, Wally had found Erszébet changed, but it was too nebulous to pinpoint. She had an aura of slowness, as if looking up moments too late to witness a plate’s fall or a bird’s flight. On the way home from the concert, Erszébet wasn’t quick enough to avoid a beggar pushing a cart. He brushed against her coat and then walked over her shadow. She swore something under her breath and then refused to translate her angry words for Wally. It’s just bad luck, she finally explained. Step on a shadow.

  The weather has turned very bitter — five degrees Reaumur — and Erszébet stands by a shivering chestnut seller in the Hoher Markt. She’s swathed in fur, a density of black fringe, finer than needles. She deliberately chose this location to meet Wally. The crowd suits her purpose.

  Wally arrives in her red cloak, glad of Erszébet’s company. Without waiting, Erszébet abruptly turns and walks through the market, talking to her over her shoulder.

  “You know, there’s a legend about Emperor Franz Josef visiting here? He toured the markt and deliberately turned over a basket of eggs, just so the egg seller would scream at him. She was so furious, she forgot he was his Apostolic Majesty. He paid for the eggs and believed it was worth the experience of being treated like a commoner.”

  Even in the cold, the market is very busy, and Wally dodges around shoppers to keep up with Erszébet. She loses sight of her when a man with a bushel of firewood blocks her way, and a second time when the canvas awnings over a stall flap down in her way. She finds Erszébet at a vegetable stand, calmly balancing a cauliflower in each hand. Serenely ignoring Wally, she makes her way to another stall, where a woman is curtained by strings of dried peppers. They have an animated conversation about different paprikás. After Erszébet makes her purchase of félédes, semisweet paprika, she seems surprised to find Wally still waiting for her.

  Wally grabs her arm. “What is the matter?” she says wildly. “Listen to me.”

  Erszébet shifts her basket to her other hand, forcing Wally to drop her arm.

  “I’m listening.”

  “Why are you ignoring me?”

  Erszébet shakes her head. “I can’t talk to you just now. I’m waiting.”

  Wally loses her language. Her words come out in English. “Waiting for what?”

  Erszébet moves over to the next stall to carefully examine a stack of bread and rolls. When she turns around, Wally has knocked over a sack of potatoes and vanished into the crowd.

  If Erszébet could study her own face at this moment, she’d recognize her expression as identical to that of the látó, the wise women who could make contact with the dead. An internal gaze.

  Erszébet stays home, telling herself the snow keeps her inside. She cooks feverishly, stewing dried figs and prunes, marinating game birds, filling dumplings by hand. During this period, the house is fragrant with the smell of roast pork and paprikás. She spends afternoons preparing her husband’s favorite desserts, an elaborate Mehlspeise, rice pudding soaked in red wine, and csöröge fánk, sweet fritters, which he’d enjoyed on their honeymoon in Buda Pest.

  Wally follows Egon into the Zentralfriedhof, its vastness transformed into a pale desert of snow. It’s early morning, but the sky is stubbornly gray. There is no noise but their footsteps on the brittle surface of the snow. Egon is a dark shape in front of her. As they make their way up a hill, he sends a great cloudy breath over his shoulder.

  They find Dora’s monument and quickly set up their candles on a nearby grave. It is the three-month anniversary of Dora’s burial. Wally has persuaded Egon to visit the Zentralfriedhof on this particular day, hoping the dead girl’s family will pay their respects. Perhaps Egon will be able to identify Philipp as the man who came to his studio. They wait, pacing around the plot, trying to keep warm.

  Wind steals the veil of her hat and it streams around her head. She tucks a corner of it under her hat, leaving just enough of the fine black silk to hide her face. She is startled by Egon’s hand on her arm.

  “Are you frightened?”

  “No. Not a bit.” She refuses to share her fear with him.

  “That’s good. I’m going to tell you about a corpse I once photographed.”

  He stands so he can watch her face while he talks. She doesn’t blink, doesn’t look away.

  “The police found the corpse of a man in the woods outside the city, in Heiligenstadt. He was hunched over, frozen stiff. It was the middle of winter. We dragged the body into a house and left it in a chair in the kitchen. Then we went out to search the area. Guess what happened?”

  Wally raises her eyebrows.

  “It was extraordinary. The heat from the stove thawed out the corpse so it changed position. When we came back, the body was sprawled in the chair, its arms thrown back. When I looked through my camera, I could see his foot actually move, like this.”

  He slides his foot toward her. She slowly gets up and backs away from him.

  A group of dark figures, darker than the trees behind them, laboriously make their way up the hill to Dora’s grave. When their candles are lit and set around the grave, the flames make a strange, artificial light against the snow, as if they were only imitating fire. A woman and a smaller figure, a boy, set wreaths against the monument.

  Wally bends toward Egon and whispers, “Can you see her father?”

  Egon stiffly turns to face Dora’s family, his face concealed by his bowler and the high collar of his coat.

  Suddenly, the woman wails loudly and drops to her knees, her coat pillowing around her. Then she falls forward into the snow. Otto begins to cry. Philipp stoops over his wife and takes her arm. As if he can feel the intensity of their watching eyes, Philipp suddenly raises his head and stares straight at Wally.

  Startled, she jerks back, and her veil float
s across the flame of a candle. She hears screams, the thin, hungry whoosh of fire eating silk a second before the color around her head is transformed from black into yellow and light envelops her.

  The Inspector is surprised when Franz pushes the door open and breathlessly announces that Fräulein Fürj is waiting for him in the outer office.

  “Temper yourself,” he says, for Franz is clearly overexcited.

  Blushing, Franz nods and straightens his shoulders.

  After he leaves, the Inspector tries to quiet his own nerves. The girl would only come here if she had something of significance to tell him. He’d slipped her his card at Philipp’s office for just this reason. Thoughtful as a suitor, he covers the top of his desk with clean white paper and moves two chairs into a corner of the room for their interview.

  Fräulein Fürj enters his office, visibly ill at ease. She awkwardly shifts a large bag from hand to hand. The Inspector suggests Franz wait outside.

  “Please have a seat, Fräulein. I’m glad to see you.”

  She indicates no, she doesn’t want to remove her coat. She sits down and gingerly holds the bag on her lap.

  He leans forward, careful not to make any sudden motions that might startle her, remembering her skittishness.

  “You seem troubled about something. Is that why you’ve come to see me?”

  She silently begins to cry, the tears a shiny parade down her cheeks. She takes the handkerchief he offers, keeping her other hand on the bag.

  “Now then. Tell me what you’ve brought me.” He keeps his voice low.

  As if she hadn’t heard him, she begins to talk, her voice rushed, high-pitched.

  “I thought about what you said about Fräulein Dora when you came to the office. After you left I heard terrible stories about how her grave was disturbed. Everyone at the office was talking about it when her father wasn’t listening. Someone said wolves dug up her body?”

  The Inspector doesn’t dare nod or even make a move for his notebook. Everything in him is focused on the girl, trying to keep her calm.

  “I found this in the stove at work.”

  She reaches into the bag, and he suddenly jumps up.

  “Don’t touch it!”

  She freezes.

  He stands over her, peering down at something loosely wrapped in the bottom of her bag.

  “It’s burnt, isn’t it?”

  She blinks up at him, terrified.

  He puts his hand on top of her head. Under her thin blond hair, her scalp is hot.

  “You did well to bring it here. Tell me what happened.”

  “I looked for his engagement book as you asked. I never found it, which was strange, since it was always kept on my desk.” Her voice trails off as she follows her chain of calculation.

  He waits.

  She shifts the bag on her lap, won’t look at him.

  “One day when I worked late, I noticed something was still burning in the stove. There was smoke. So I opened it and found this.”

  He lifts the bag off her lap and carries it to his desk. He takes a knife from his pocket and swiftly slashes through one side of the bag, then folds it down around the object inside. A bitter smell fills the room.

  “It’s his diary.”

  “Fräulein, I’m not going to open the parcel here, since it’s very fragile. I’d like to know exactly why you stole this from your employer.”

  Her pink mouth drops open, and she stares at him, so astonished she has forgotten to avert her eyes.

  “He said I was going to lose my job,” she blurts.

  “Unless?”

  “He said other things to me. He tried to kiss me.”

  Now she stares at the floor, and he strains to hear her.

  “I need to work.”

  “Please look at me.”

  Their eyes meet. The girl has more backbone than he thought. A budding blackmailer and an accomplished thief.

  “So you were going to threaten him with the diary you saved from the fire?”

  She nods, pressing her lips together until her mouth disappears, a fine white line.

  “Fräulein, I won’t reveal what you’ve done. You should try to find another job. You may use me as a reference.”

  At first she politely refuses the money he hands her, but then thinks better of it after he hands it to her a second time. Then he asks her to bring him a sample of Philipp’s handwriting. She tearfully agrees.

  That night he goes over his interview with Fräulein Fürj. It’s a pity women aren’t allowed to work for the police, he thinks. Erszébet told him that fortune-tellers are often unable to distinguish between policemen and thieves. All the signs are the same.

  The Inspector is anxious to begin work on Philipp’s diary. If just one sentence or a phrase can be deciphered, he imagines he can pull the meaning out of the burned book, as if the script were a long black thread connected over all its pages. He’s certain the evidence they need to convict Dora’s father is in these black pages.

  Earlier, Móricz had numbered seventy sheets of tracing paper and pinned them to thin boards. Then he painted each paper with transparent gum arabic, a rectangle about the size of the diary pages.

  Franz and the Inspector join him in the laboratory. To eliminate dust, they wear gloves and jackets of white cotton, and as they move between the long worktables set with the treated papers, they appear to be waiters at some strange banquet.

  Under their curious eyes, the Inspector gently unwraps Fräulein Fürj’s bundle over a table. It’s a slim diary, badly burned. The front of the book, where it rested on the fire, is completely ruined. A thick section of the back is also blackened and buckled.

  The Inspector cuts open the binding of the diary and removes the cover.

  “I’m going to try and save the first pages, since the author’s name may appear there. Look carefully. Fire produces different effects on ink and paper. See, the writing is visible if the light falls in a certain way.”

  Under the lamplight, a few black words eerily stand out on the warped black paper, as if the letters were written fire on fire. Only the disciplined spikes and loops of the letters seem to be holding the fragile page together.

  He slides a clean paper under the burned page, jiggles it loose and deftly maneuvers it onto the sticky tracing paper. It is more fragile than a butterfly’s wing. Franz fights the urge to sneeze.

  “We’ll try to relax the warped paper. Franz, move very slowly. Any motion will make the paper fly.”

  Frowning in concentration, Franz sets small stones down on the tracing paper, all around the edges of the burned page. It looks like a child has built a fortress. When he’s finished, the Inspector lays a fine damp cloth over the stones, pulling it tight across so it won’t touch the black paper underneath.

  “If we’re lucky, the moistness of the fabric will gradually soften the page. Sometimes paper isn’t hygroscopic and it just crumbles.”

  They repeat the process with the next few pages from the diary, filling the entire table with stones and black squares. It’s a painstaking process and it takes the better part of a day.

  Once Franz slipped and they all watched helplessly as a page wafted out of his hand, moving in lazy motion to the floor, where it silently shattered into black shards. The Inspector held his tongue. It’s useless to reprimand someone for an accidental mishap.

  When Egon walks into the laboratory, none of the men bent over the table looks up. Móricz wiggles a warning finger, and he slows his steps. Franz and the Inspector hold the sides of a small black square with tweezers. Moving together, they lay the square gently on a paper. It instantly crumbles into ash. Franz squints in exasperation.

  The Inspector wordlessly motions Egon to follow him outside.

  “I see you’re working with black powder.”

  “It’s burned paper. A diary.”

  “I just had a strange experience with fire.”

  The Inspector looks at him quizzically.

  “I respect fir
e. When I work with explosive powder, I can never predict what it’ll do. Sometimes even a footstep can make it go off. Look at the powder the wrong way and it’ll spontaneously combust. I’m convinced a mental state can cause an explosion. Perhaps that’s what happened when I had the accident with my hand. Did I wish for it?”

  The Inspector shakes his head. “That’s like saying a knife jumped off the table and cut you.”

  But his answer to Egon was a reassuring lie. He knows objects have a life of their own. Erszébet has influenced him. Sharp steel — a needle — can turn away evil. A sprig of vervain will open a locked door. The corpse of a woman who died in childbirth is to be feared.

  He is astonished to find himself thinking, The victim loves the gun; the victim loves the knife.

  An army of fir trees suddenly occupies the Hoher Markt. At night, under the light from the streetlamps, the ornamental paper streamers and ribbons twisted through the branches are the only color in the black and silent mass of trees.

  A few streets away, Am Hof Square has been transformed into the Christkindlmarkt, a shantytown of wooden stalls filled with Christmas toys and sweets, a children’s paradise. It is the holiday season.

  The Inspector struggles behind his wife through the children clamoring around the displays of rocking horses, miniature trains, marionettes, dolls, Noah’s arks, wooden swords, gilded bugles and drums, and unhappy caged parrots. Other stalls beckon with dried fruits, oranges threaded on string, candies, fruitcakes, gingerbread, and Bischofsbrot. A Krampus, a miniature figure of the devil, is attached to every box of chocolate.

  Erszébet becomes lost in the chaos. When he catches sight of her again, she seems momentarily unfamiliar, a mysterious figure returned to him. He wonders if his perceptions are playing tricks on him again, like the shape-shifters, the csordásfarkas.

  He squeezes her arm, then secretly touches her body under her coat, his gesture unnoticed by the children intent on their toys. Over their heads, her smile dazzles him.