WE SPENT A LOT of time with my father’s brother, Oszkar, a watchmaker who also tinkered with spectacles and music boxes. When Uncle Oszkar worked at his bench, his eyes would turn inward in a bewildered, Bela-like way, and he’d rub his mustache in the wrong direction. Uncle Oszkar was an old bachelor. He never left that shop. He even lived there. The workbench stretched along one wall, the bed along the other, and a tub-sized kitchen was crammed into a corner blackened with twenty years of his cooking. The WC was outside, and so was a little kitchen garden and an arbor strung with grapevines, where he’d serve us supper.
Those were easy hours. Bela and I would sit up on high stools and watch my uncle as he unpacked tiny cogs or lenses from their nests of cotton-wool. Uncle Oszkar took to Bela in a way that made me jealous. One afternoon, Bela went out back to the kitchen garden where Uncle Oszkar was weeding, and the door closed before I could follow. I sulked, fiddling with the tension on a music box until the melody curdled. Before long, they both appeared with their arms full of under-ripe tomatoes. Uncle Oszkar said, “Your cousin wants to be a farmer.”
Bela shook his head. “I didn’t say a farmer. I said Pioneer.”
“Pioneer. Farmer. No matter what, talk sense into him, Norika. He’s got a good head on his shoulders. Why would he want to be a peasant?”
“Because peasants know how to pick apricots,” I said.
“Because,” Bela said, “Dori and I are going to Palestine.”
“Who’s Dori?” I asked.
“Dori Csengery. She’s going to be a doctor. I call her Mouse.”
“Why?” I asked Bela. “Is she scared of cats?”
Bela laughed and said, “She isn’t scared of much.”
By then, we were all peeling tomatoes and chopping peppers for lekvar, and I had a thousand questions about Dori but just kept chopping harder and looking grim until Uncle Oszkar told me to go out and lay the table.
We ate our lekvar under the grape arbor as Bela talked about his father’s friends who’d moved to Palestine three years before and were working alongside Arabs on plantations until they could afford to buy land of their own.
“There’s a song,” Bela said.
“Well, sing it,” said Uncle Oszkar.
“I’ve got an awful voice,” said Bela, and he was right, but he sang anyway. It was the first time I’d ever heard Hebrew. He translated: We’ve come to build the land and be built by it. “It goes with a dance,” he said.
I imagined Bela picking apricots in the middle of the desert with some lady-doctor giving him instructions. He’d never manage to pick them on his own.
WHEN BELA WASN’T in Kisbarnahely, I had no friends. The girls in school played games they seemed to have learned on days I wasn’t there, and I suppose that if I’d asked, they would have taught them to me. But patience has never been my strong point, and it was easier to make up my own games and play them by myself. Sometimes, I gathered pebbles and turned a paving stone into a topographical map. I would compose national anthems for these imaginary countries and send them through the air to Bela in Budapest.
The only one who would give me the time of day was my uncle’s assistant, Laszlo, a boy ten years older than myself with broad shoulders and thick golden hair and a sly way of looking up from the workbench that made me want to bite him. One afternoon, my mother had sent me to town to pick up some lemons. As sullen as ever, I set off with the coins in my pocket and the little net bag hanging from my arm. It was April. Where was I supposed to find a lemon? She always wanted things she remembered buying as a girl in Pest.
Given my state of mind, I was grateful when I heard a bell, turned around, and saw Laszlo on his bicycle. He was a man by then, but he still looked like an overgrown boy, waving and grinning and swinging himself over the bicycle frame. “Nora, don’t you even say hello? I passed you by five times.”
He made me wonder how I could have looked so sour. I said, “Maybe you should make me a pair of glasses.”
“Try this,” Laszlo said, and he reached into the pouch slung over his shoulder and drew out something wrapped in cotton-wool. It was an octagon of cut glass set in wood, and as I leaned in to see, he pressed it to my eye, and my mouth turned into a round, round O. He said, “It’s called a prism.”
I asked, “What makes it do that?”
“Light is actually a lot of different colors,” Laszlo said. “We got a model in from Switzerland, but this one your uncle cut himself. And look.”
He took it from me and drew it some distance from ourselves. Against the dry yellow wall, it threw a spray of rainbows.
We sorted through the lenses, and he showed me how one flattened images, another worked with a twin to turn them upside down, and on a third they seemed to float to the surface like oil on water. He used a fourth lens to light a cigarette. I asked for a puff, and he frowned and said, “You must be nuts.”
“I smoke all the time,” I said.
He said, “Don’t show off.”
“It’s true. I do.”
“You’re just a kid. Who’d sell them to you?”
Boldly, I said, “The gypsies.”
“You are nuts,” he said again, and of course he didn’t believe me. “Anyway, girls shouldn’t smoke.”
After he rode away, I saved his cigarette butt and carried it in my pocket, wondering if I ought to smoke it all at once, save it for later, or not smoke it at all. By the time I’d made up my mind, it had fallen apart, and I had nothing to show for the encounter but a little loose tobacco.
BELA WASN’T AFRAID of gypsies. One summer, I took him to their encampment just past the brickyard, and he walked right up to a woman hanging wash, picked up her basket, and followed her down the clothesline. She gave him a cup of something, and he drank it without hesitation. Me, she ignored. Bela also wasn’t afraid of the dark. We would spend the hottest part of the day in the cellar of our house, where we would dig and find strange coins or pins or bits of teacups. Bela would wrap what we found in a handkerchief and clean it in the kitchen sink, and months later he wrote and told me that the coin was two hundred years old.
I showed him the Jewish cemetery. He asked, “Is your family buried here?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve never been inside. There’s a dog and I don’t think it’s chained.”
Without hesitation, Bela rang for the porter and the old man actually appeared, a squat, wry, clearly Christian gentleman who asked us what our business was and said to Bela, “If you know where her grandfather’s stone is, get her to clear off that ivy. What was that name? Csongradi? Oszkar’s niece? Fourth row, to the far right. Grandmother’s there too. Nice stone.”
So we passed his shack where the dog was held by the collar so hard that the bones in his neck strained through the skin. Beyond it, maybe three or four dozen graves were lined along a knoll. Bela stopped before each one, cleared off a little underbrush, and read the Hebrew.
“What a funny alphabet,” I said to him. “It looks like something you’d make out of sticks. You can’t really read it, can you?”
But he could. He found the two stones, just where the man said they would be, and in fact my grandmother’s was a handsome stone, red marble and an arc of Hebrew broken by a bird with outstretched wings.
“Csongradi Naomi,” Bela translated. “Died at peace, surrounded by her sons.”
“I didn’t even know I had a grandmother,” I said.
“But aren’t you named after her?”
“Maybe,” I said.
“What’s your Hebrew name?”
“Why would I even want a Hebrew name?” I offered Bela a cigarette, pretty sure he’d still refuse, which was a good thing because I only had one left. It was damp among all those stones, and it took a while to light my match. Bela watched me with the edge of wonder which always drove me to greater acts of boldness. Was this a sacred place? I blew the smoke out of my nose and said, “So you’ve got a Hebrew name, I take it.”
“Boaz,” Bela sai
d. “But I don’t like it. Sounds like a giant in a children’s book.”
“Borzas Medve,” I said. Shaggy bear.
He blushed, and I felt light-headed, thinking of all the languages in the world, the bird in flight, wild possibilities. Back then, it would have thrilled me to think that I would travel through a dozen different countries and sleep on train platforms and in ditches and share barracks with people who spoke languages that even Bela never knew.
“Borzas,” I said to my cousin, in the presence of my grandmother Naomi’s stone, “what was the dance that went with that Pioneer song?”
The afternoon was waning and in the dark green light of the Jewish cemetery, on a knoll overlooking the town hall, Bela leaned forward and grabbed hold of my forearms, saying: “Just put a foot behind, a foot forward.”
“Foot behind what?” I asked, but then he started pulling me along, at first just enough to make me stumble. Then he whipped on one heel like a top and my arms stretched tight, all my breath rushing out until there was nothing to me but a little thing going around and around, feet leaving the grass altogether. Bela sang something badly, but I couldn’t hear. It all sounded like wind as I shouted, “Let me go! Let me go!” and he abruptly fell and took me with him.
Dizzy still, heart beating fast, I stared up through the trees for a while. The sky was Prussian blue, the way it is just as the sun sets. I knew I was lying on top of a lot of dead people, and I didn’t care. Bela lay maybe arm’s length away, and when I turned my head a little, there was his hand almost touching my face. I reached out, turned up the palm, and said to him, “You know, I can tell fortunes.”
“What do you see?” Bela asked, still out of breath.
That palm was indistinct. Where was the life-line, and where was the heart-line? A grass stain ran along the base, and I touched it and said, “You will have a great fall.”
HIS FEARS WERE less predictable. There were trains. At midnight, I knew the Szeged express would be passing by, so I woke Bela up and made him join me outside. We both wore our nightshirts and stood with our backs to the wall, and as the foundation began to vibrate, I felt the thrill rise from the bones of my hips. I turned to Bela and saw he’d gone all pale.
I said to him. “It doesn’t go off the tracks.”
Yet once, the headlamp of the train seemed to swing so close that I was abruptly blinded, and my hand reached sideways for Bela’s and hit nothing at all. I found him sitting on the stoop of our front door, breathing hard. His head was turned and I couldn’t see his eyes.
Bela was also afraid of bridges. I didn’t find out until his last summer in Kisbarnahely, the day before he was due to leave for Budapest, when, after three years, he finally gave in to my pleading and joined me to see the sunflowers.
“They’re the only beautiful thing in this town,” I said to him.
Bela smiled, but he didn’t tell me I was beautiful. Even at twelve, I had the face I wear today, flattened and squinting. My black hair was so thin, it puffed in the slightest breeze. Bela followed me over hard, yellow mud, beyond the boundaries of Kisbarnahely. Then he stopped walking.
The plank bridge across the ravine was perhaps ten paces long. He looked at me and said, “Is there any other way around?”
“No,” I said. “What’s wrong with you?” I wasn’t about to turn back. We’d already walked three kilometers and the flowers were at their peak.
He told me that he had always been that way about bridges, big and small. Even the mighty constructions across the Duna in Budapest, he had to cross with his head down. He couldn’t explain it. Perhaps it was because people jumped off bridges. He asked, “Do you believe in ghosts?”
He asked it the way he’d asked if someone had taught me to pick an apricot, with the same earnestness. I said, “I’m not a baby.”
“My father fell out of a sailboat. That’s how he drowned. And sometimes, when I’m on a bridge, even if it’s not over water, I see his ghost. And others.”
I didn’t say anything for a moment. Then I caught his arm, and before he could stop me, I’d pulled him onto the bridge which lurched with our weight, and as we scrambled to the far end I could feel his fear pass through his arm and into me. When we reached the other side, I realized what I had done, and I was ashamed. When I let go of his arm and dared to turn to him, Bela looked at me as though I were a stranger.
I wanted to apologize, but instead, I spoke German: “Gehen wir.”
He didn’t answer. We walked on, and eventually, of course, he forgave me for pulling him across that bridge. We reached the sunflowers. They were high, yellow and lovely, and I took us back by a route that circled the ravine, though it meant adding two more kilometers to the walk. Our talk was easy as ever; Bela taught me the German word for sunflower (Sonnenblume) and how to say “My legs are sore” (Meine Beine tun weh). Still, once in a while, I caught him giving me that look: disbelief, betrayal.
I didn’t like knowing Bela Hesshel saw ghosts. A girl from the provinces collects her share of superstitions, but Bela was a Budapesti. It had the feel of a confession. Later, I found out he hadn’t told Dori Csengery, and that gave me satisfaction. He never did reveal to me what he meant by “others.”
4
AFTER BELA BEGAN to study through the summers, his family stopped coming to Kisbarnahely. I wrote him once a week. It helped me practice German and improved my penmanship until it was as exact and blotless as his own. He lived on Dob Street. One day I’d know that big apartment well. I would spend a winter in its parlor, reading all of Bela’s books on a green sofa, with a lumpy throw across my shoulders and a cheek pressed against a pillow embroidered with strawberries.
Yet all of that was still to be imagined. Abandoned, I wrote in broken German: Wie geht’s? I don’t know how many pages I filled and rejected before I would consider the letter ready, and I saved the versions I’d discarded in one of my mother’s sturdy Budapest shoe-boxes and kept it under my bed. By the time I turned fourteen, the letters Bela saw were written in a dry, economical style that left little room for error.
Bela’s German was a different story, headlong and overflowing. Later, I’d know the desk where he had written his letters, a scarred warhorse, blackened with varnish. I could well imagine him hunched in the chair with one hand deep in his hair and a little ink on the joint of his right thumb. When he got one of my letters, he always wrote back the same day.
Bela was a heroic writer of letters. At the same time that he wrote me, he corresponded with Zionists in Palestine, Berlin, and Minsk. When he wasn’t writing letters, he was attending secondary school at the Budapest seminary, frequenting lectures or concerts where he could do a little fund-raising for his youth group, and trying to teach himself Arabic.
He took on the last task with nothing but a dictionary, a grammar, and a newspaper one of his father’s friends sent him from Jaffa. It was lonesome work. Once, walking along the promenade by the Duna River, he saw two Arab gentlemen well-settled on a bench, smoking cigars, and a few sentences drifted by that made him jump out of his skin. He threw himself upon them and blurted out a salutation: “Taeshaerrafna!”
They stared.
He tried: “Sabah ael-kher.”
This made more of an impression. The stouter of the two produced a line of German. “Sir, you are addressing us in Arabic?”
Bela turned purple and tried to speak again, but the man raised his hand for silence.
“It is a beautiful language, young man, and it is very admirable that you approach it with such zeal, but I am afraid I do not understand a word you say. Do you plan to go into the foreign service?”
Startled, Bela said, “No, sir.”
“Well, in any event, learn English. It’s a tougher bird than Arabic and will stand more abuse. Good day.”
After that encounter, Bela redoubled his efforts and haunted the docks in search of conversation partners. When I read his letters, I could see him, wandering around Budapest with all those dictionaries, listening
hard for languages he didn’t know. His clothes, though clean, were never pressed, and when the weather turned warm he would take off his coat and leave it on the chair of a café or on the hook by someone’s door, or folded behind a throw-pillow. Hats were worse. He had too much hair to keep a hat. Once he left something behind, he never bothered to find it again, and you were forced to run after him or to simply accept it as a gift.
His work at the seminary involved the commonalities between the verbs of Middle Eastern languages and Hungarian. In his letters, he would keep me abreast of the latest trends in scholarship. I skipped those parts. What I read instead, over and over, were simply the accounts of his days. First, a breakfast, over which he would make corrections on a translation while sister Adele cleared his plate out from under him and Aunt Moni boiled fresh coffee. Then, a last-minute dash for the trolley where, still refining, he would turn the translation into something like prose just in time to hand to a professor, who by the way invited him to dinner as there would be a guest from Palestine, and so Bela must arrange for that guest to speak at his Zionist club before he left town: a flurry of visits to households, more coffee and cakes—I imagine all the cigarettes and light one of my own—more arrangements and a room confirmed and then the man himself: the phlegmatic owner of an orange plantation, a Hungarian-Ukrainian named Mr. Manuel Lorenz who was, in fact, anti-Zionist.
So much the better, Bela wrote, though by now his squarish handwriting had little points, like waves. They never got to meet anti-Zionists who actually lived in Palestine. Lorenz was told they were a walking club with an interest in botany. Bela asked him about fertilizers and backed off when it was clear he knew nothing about them. Then Bela turned the conversation towards climate and steered a friend away from the obviously sensitive point of labor relations. Muttering answers under a dirty-white mustache, Lorenz made it clear that Palestine was a dead-poor country for hiking, and they would all catch malaria. Later, he took Bela aside and said, “My boy, I hear you know some Arabic. Come by tonight at ten. I have something to show you.”
Louisa Page 3