Louisa

by Simone Zelitch

  Louisa didn’t answer, but she stared into that teacup which seemed to have swelled between her hands into enormity. That pale, still tea must have been cold by then. Shmuel resisted the impulse to warm it with a little from the pot.

  LOUISA AND I HAVE certain things in common. We were both only children who led isolated lives. Her father, like mine, pored over columns of numbers, but, unlike mine, he had means, and cause to travel. He worked for German Railways and had been sent to Hungary to make a study of our transportation system and to coordinate trade routes for shipments of bauxite between eastern Hungary and the Reich.

  When Louisa’s family moved to Budapest, she was just thirteen, a sensitive girl. Her father wondered if she ought to be pulled from secondary school in the middle of the winter term, and it took her mother to point out that it was not wise to refuse government posts these days. Furthermore, she’d looked into the matter and found that Budapest had a decent conservatory. In fact, the city seemed like the ideal place for their girl to, as she put it, “bloom and grow.”

  “Bloom? Budapest’s no place for a girl like our Lu,” her father said. “Gypsy music. That’s all they’ve got there.”

  “You’re wrong. She’ll meet some very cosmopolitan people,” Frau Bauer said, “and she won’t be taken for granted.”

  She didn’t say this in front of Louisa, who would have taken it the wrong way. It wasn’t that she doubted her daughter had talent. It was only realistic; Berlin was full of talented girls, and Budapest, when all was said and done, remained comparatively provincial.

  Louisa’s voice first called attention when she joined a children’s choir, and by her tenth birthday, she was performing solos in a fluted bandstand in the public park surrounded by fourteen gifted but inferior girls. Her governess, though hardly tone-deaf, proved inadequate. So did the director of the choir.

  They tried several teachers before settling on the most reluctant, a Madame Twersky, Russian and barrel-bellied and aristocratic. After the lessons, Madame Twersky would take coffee and brandy with Louisa’s mother. She confided that Louisa would never sing opera. “Her voice,” she said, “is too intimate. She’s meant for Lieder. It is the sort of voice that makes you hear your own heart beating.” Yet in that flattery was a note of condescension; Madame Twersky herself once sang opera and at points released a mezzo-soprano like a hurricane.

  After Madame Twersky there was a dull mother hen who insisted on teaching Louisa with four other girls, and after the dull mother hen was a dreadful patriot who told the twelve-year-old Louisa that singing in public would make her infertile. Really, they couldn’t find a proper teacher for Louisa anywhere, until they came to Budapest and happened upon Istvan Lengyel.

  Lengyel taught at the Music Academy, but he was at liberty to take as few pupils as he chose. His heroic chin and brow made him look like an actor, and in fact, like Madame Twersky, he had once appeared in operas in Budapest and Vienna, though generally in minor roles. “Who has time,” he said to Louisa’s mother, “to be second rate?” Later, he moved on to composition, and finally to music criticism, and by the late thirties he had found his niche at the Academy, where he taught a little bit of everything, primarily voice.

  After listening to Louisa sing, he addressed her in flawless German. “Do you have a hobby?”

  Louisa thought she ought to say something, so she replied, “I press flowers.”

  “Let them wilt and die,” said Lengyel. “From now on, you have one hobby, and that is your body. Your voice lives there. It doesn’t come down from heaven. It rises from your lungs. I’m glad you are still slim.”

  “Slim?”

  “Ah, I like the way you echo back the intonation. Your ear is not half-bad. And if we build your muscle-tone below the breast, we’ll force out something worth hearing. Just now, you might as well be made of matchsticks.”

  Lengyel’s hands came up behind Louisa and abruptly cupped her rib cage. She took her breath in sharply, staring forward at her mother, who sat watching this performance without a word. Lengyel addressed Louisa’s mother. “You have no idea how many hysterical Belladonnas tell perfectly sound young girls to get fat because they themselves got fat, and you have no idea how many perfectly sound young girls believe them.”

  All the while, his hands sexlessly kneaded Louisa’s ribs and then moved back to her spine. He pushed both thumbs up at the base.

  “Uff,” said Louisa.

  “You felt that?” Lengyel asked her. “Good. Your body is more than the seat of your soul, my young friend. Madame,” he said to the mother, “does your daughter attend church?”

  “We have not yet found a suitable church in Budapest,” she said.

  “Then she will walk with me on Sunday mornings,” said Lengyel, and in that manner, he admitted her not only as a pupil but as a part of his inner circle, a group of no more than five intimates who joined him for long hikes around the Buda hills. Summer and winter, they would meet early at Lengyel’s house near the castle and spend a full day either on the tramp or sitting in the frosty shade with volumes of Goethe.

  The language spoken on those walks was German. Lengyel was ruthless about pronunciation, correcting even Louisa, and in the middle of a chapter of The Sorrows of Young Werther, he would make her stop short and repeat over and over the most trivial line about the color of the hero’s hose.

  He would clasp the sides of the book still in her hands as though it were a rib cage, and say, “Those hose are presented in the purest German. If you don’t keep them clean, I’ll ram them down your throat.”

  How could his pupils help but love him? They were a mixed multitude, Louisa, another German girl, Hungarians, Austrians, and even a Spaniard. Each he worked with alone, only occasionally scheduling all of them at once and springing on them an ensemble piece in a language none of them knew, like Russian. In spite of his preference for German Romantics, he threw his net wide. Only Louisa was given a strict diet of Schubert.

  At first, she took it as a rebuke. Madame Twersky was right. She was a parlor singer. But then Lengyel said to Louisa, “Do you know what your voice is?”

  Louisa admitted that she did not know.

  “It isn’t sound,” he said. “It’s light. You are a clear vessel, and Lied is a light in you. It generates through your lungs as though they are a set of fuses, and it sparkles through your throat. Your voice,” he said, “is infinite and formless. It will take the shape of any music, take it so completely that no one will know where your voice ends and the music begins. Keep two fingers on your mouth, Louisa. Like this.”

  Then he took Louisa’s middle and index finger and placed them on her mouth.

  “Sing lu lu lu,” said Lengyel.

  Louisa sang, and she felt, on the tips of her fingers, the spire of the L and the curve of the U, and it was as though she were made of thin, blown glass, and lu after lu generated in its heart. Arrogance kindled then, awareness of what lay within her.

  If she could just sing lu lu lu all day, she would have been happy. Such was not the case. She hated the German girls’ school that sat between the Lutheran Church and Castle Hill. She arrived there mid-year and none of her classmates included her in their intrigues. Sometimes their green jumpers seemed like a wall and sometimes like a literal forest where she would lose herself. She hated Budapest where everything was covered with a film of soot. Sometimes, as her father’s driver took her from Rose Hill to the Music Academy, she would press her finger to the window and wonder that even ten minutes on the road could make the glass so filthy.

  Three years after she arrived in Budapest, she had settled into a persistent homesickness that had nothing to do with Germany. Even in Lengyel’s circle, she felt distinct, holding herself apart even during those walks in the hills, wandering ahead with those two fingers on her lips and her eyes full and distant.

  SUCH WAS LOUISA’S condition the day she met my son and found herself before her teacher without her Schubert. When the lesson ended, she rushed straig
ht home and wandered around the house, trying this or that measure of The Eorl-King to see if she could recover it from memory.

  Over dinner, she asked her mother, “Are there Hungarian composers?”

  “I believe so,” her mother replied. “Some people consider Liszt a Hungarian, after all.”

  “I mean living composers,” Louisa said. “Young men.”

  “I’m sure I don’t know,” her mother said. Louisa barely ate, and afterwards found her way to the practice room, where she played a few chords on the piano and sang out fifths in a voice that throbbed and carried. After a while, the servant, Eva, brought her a cup of tea.

  Eva was five years older than Louisa, and she worshipped her. She approached the piano as though it were the altar of a church, and she hovered there, whispering in her excellent German, “Do drink this, Fräulein, please. You look so pale.”

  Louisa glanced up. “Eva, are there a lot of Jews in Hungary?”

  The question was so unexpected that Eva had to get her bearings before she answered, “Unfortunately, yes, Fräulein.”

  “Do you know any?”

  Eva said, “One can’t help but see Israelites on the streets.”

  “What did you call them?” Louisa asked.

  “Israelites,” said Eva. “That is the polite term.”

  Louisa took up the word. “I’ve never met an Israelite. So I would know one if I saw one? On the street?”

  Eva said, “Surely.”

  Louisa took a sip of tea, and, gathering courage, she told Eva everything, how she found the young composer in her practice room, and how he put her in such a state that she abandoned her Schubert. Then, with a shiver, she told Eva what she had heard from Professor Lengyel. Eva was so overcome that she began to take anxious sips from Louisa’s own cup of tea. She broke in.

  “The professor’s a liar, Fräulein.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “It’s nothing but jealousy. He must have taken one look at the music and knew he was a genius.” Then Eva said, “You never told me his name.”

  “Oh—Lord—I don’t know his name.” Louisa despaired now. “I don’t have my Schubert or the manuscript or even the name of the Israelite—”

  “He’s not an Israelite,” Eva insisted.

  “How can you know?”

  “They don’t let them into the Academy anymore. We haven’t let them in the universities for years. We’re not barbarians,” Eva said.

  Louisa conceded the point, but she couldn’t believe that her teacher would tell such malicious stories. She drew her hand across the piano.

  “What a shame that old man has the Lied,” Eva said. “He’ll probably burn it.”

  A new weight fell on Louisa. Was it possible she had the only copy of that song? She wanted to weep. Eva put her arms around her, and her face was soulful like the face of my son, and her hair was dark and curly like the hair of my son, and Louisa said to her maid and bosom-friend, “I have to find him.”

  “You must,” Eva agreed. There were tears in her eyes. She couldn’t believe that Louisa was in such a fascinating situation.

  THAT’S HOW MY SON came to show up an hour before supper one evening with a note in his hand: To Gabor Gratz, return my Schubert to me.

  “Return, my Schubert, to me,” Gabor sang out as he swung himself into the kitchen chair. “She already has a pet name for me. I’ve never been called Schubert before. Should I be flattered?”

  I was peeling potatoes, and over the bowl, I gave him a hooded look. “Do you still have her score?”

  “Somewhere,” Gabor said. “It doesn’t matter. If she bothered to find out my name, not much can matter. It’s a good thing you made me work on my German.” He grabbed a potato from the bin and peeled it idly. “Maybe I should marry the girl,” Gabor said. “Then I’ll have German citizenship.”

  Take that as proof of Gabor’s innocence. He never opened a newspaper. With the competence that came on him when he chose, Gabor peeled three potatoes for my every one and all the while he imagined his future. The most likely future, that he would be drafted and die in a Labor Battalion in the Ukraine or Serbia, did not seem to cross his mind, and I wasn’t about to press the point.

  He said, “I’ll bet her father is an ambassador. When they draft me, I’ll take refuge in the embassy. I’ve always wanted to live in an embassy.”

  Gabor did not stay for supper. As usual, he had a full evening ahead of him. These days, he rarely came back before midnight. I couldn’t help but wait up for him, but I’d stop letting on, waiting until he went to bed before I would get up to gather the trail of discarded coat, shoes, socks, and trousers between the front door and his bedroom. The shoes were sometimes caked with gravel from the railway yard or even slippery, as though he’d waded across the Duna. I did not like the thought of Gabor wandering in those places after dark, but I had the sense to keep my worries to myself. Besides, he told me more than most mothers have a right to hear from their sons.

  I knew, for example, that on the night in question he had scheduled two piano lessons, a date with a lady painter who wanted to use him as a model, and a possible tryst with Louisa. He had arranged for the last by pinning a note of his own on what he already thought of as their practice room: Engel, ich verstehe nicht. Could I have something you’d want? Then he had written a time: ten o’clock, too late to have anything but romantic implications.

  Gabor had to admit that all through the lessons he could barely concentrate, and he actually left over half of the sour-cherry pastry one mother pressed on him. Even as he stripped and posed for the painter, he searched for a clock and discovered that she didn’t have one. He occupied his mind by wondering how the girl would slip away at that hour; he had no doubt she would manage it somehow. Would she have to bribe a servant to call her a taxi? Would she actually go so far as to take a tram? Would she arrive early and hide behind a letter-box, peering out every time someone approached?

  As it turned out, Louisa was waiting openly, right in front of the locked doors of the Academy. She was quite pale. Gabor’s first thought was: She isn’t all that pretty. Then, a second thought eclipsed the first: She doesn’t even have breasts yet. But then she started towards him with the electric lights of the street burning across her face.

  “Veloren,” she whispered. “Ich habe das Lied verloren.”

  Gabor almost asked what song she’d lost, but he caught himself and laid a warm hand on an arm that felt like ice. “Don’t worry. I’ll write another.”

  “But it couldn’t have been your only copy!” She sounded appalled, and in her voice, Gabor heard enough of her old arrogance to remember why she had interested him in the first place. Still, how could he reconcile that with her little ribbon, her white smock, her tie-up shoes?

  He asked her, “Would you like an ice cream?”

  By now, they were walking side by side under the streetlights, and Gabor was trying to remember what shops might still be open; his late-night meetings, as a rule, did not involve ice cream. The whole situation set him on edge, to be offering her candy and soda pop and so on. She could at least have kept up with him, but she meandered behind, staring up at the lights of Pest as though she’d never seen them before.

  When they at last found a little cukrászda and sat with dishes of vanilla ice cream in front of them, she said, “You must be so upset with me, Gabor.” She said his name so tentatively that he almost laughed, but instead asked her:

  “How did you find me?”

  “The lady at the desk,” she said. Gabor couldn’t help but smile. The pinch-faced porteress was no friend of his.

  “How did you describe me?”

  “I told her I was looking for a composer. And I said—”

  “Did you tell her I’d stolen your score? The police could use a full description.”

  Louisa frowned. “What do you think I am?”

  “Someone who signs with the lady at the desk. Someone who loses manuscripts.”

 
“But I didn’t lose it. It’s with Professor Lengyel,” Louisa said.

  There was a pause. Then Gabor said, “Istvan Lengyel? Well.” He lifted a spoonful of ice cream to his mouth. “It’s lost all right.”

  “So you know him?” Louisa asked.

  “Sure. I mean, years ago. I was a prodigy. Hung around his circle, got a little attention, learned a thing or two. See,” Gabor said to Louisa, “I was his pet, but I wasn’t domesticatible, if you know what I mean.”

  “No,” Louisa said. “I have no idea what you mean.” She looked so agitated then that Gabor gave her a warmer smile than he had before.

  “I mean that I don’t sign up with the lady at the desk.”

  Louisa sat straight up. “You think I’m a superficial girl?”

  Gabor took Louisa’s hands from where they gripped the edge of the table, and he held them for a moment. “Angel, calm down. You’ll break your knuckles, and then you’ll never use another practice room.”

  Louisa retrieved her hands and said, “Don’t make fun of me.” But Gabor could feel the way she had vibrated when he touched her. He thought: She’s not so young.

  No, she wasn’t so young, but he probably shouldn’t push it. It wasn’t worth the risk. Still, he felt as though he ought to walk her home; my son is not so badly trained. By then, it was close to midnight, and the walk from the Academy to Rose Hill was long indeed, west to the Duna River and over Margit Bridge, long enough for Gabor to wonder whether he wanted to see the girl again. Quite naturally, he put his arm around her as they walked; her spine was like a band of steel, but she didn’t pull away.

  As they crossed the bridge, Louisa spoke unexpectedly. “Gabor,” she said, “stop a minute.”

  Gabor felt an uneasy premonition, as though his nerves were piano strings Louisa had touched. He gave a shrug and said, “Do you want me to carry you the rest of the way?”

  Louisa disregarded his tone. She stepped into the center of the empty bridge. Never had silence felt so complete to Gabor than at that moment, and that silence seemed to wrap itself around the girl like a blue oval, curling up from her ankles in their small white socks, around her gray skirt and her hips, closing over the crown of her head. Then she began: