Louisa

by Simone Zelitch

  That isolation took its toll on Sharon. She was still young, but her face had been merrier once. Now she looked, in turns, stunned and exhausted. Funny to think that she was not much older than Louisa. An idea occurred to Shmuel. He asked Sharon, “Would you like to meet her?”

  “You want me to tell her how to be a good Jewish wife?”

  “I didn’t say that,” said Shmuel.

  Sharon took a sip of fruit-juice and lowered her eyelids, in case he hadn’t noticed how tired she was. “I suppose she plans to marry one of us.”

  “All right, all right. I’ll drop the subject,” Shmuel said, with more good humor than he felt. “But that’s not what I meant.”

  “You’d better figure out what you do mean,” said Sharon.

  “I only wonder,” Shmuel began, but then he thought better of it. He’d meant to say he wondered if Louisa knew her own mind. Why did she leave her home and her life and take on the life of someone else? Is there a reason for an act so rash and selfless? Perhaps it was in the category of those lines in the poems he admired which, if examined too closely, would break down into nonsense.

  HE’D MAPPED OUT A program of study. It wasn’t hard to find good texts in German, but he also wrote out transliterations of the Hebrew and was stunned to find she didn’t need them. She had already mastered Hebrew characters. Her memory was outstanding. From her seat in the office, she would recite the texts down to the subtle vowels.

  “Very good, Frau Gratz,” he would say. “And now, please, tell me the purpose of these laws.”

  “These are the beasts which you may not eat,” Louisa began again, this time in German, and she counted them off on her fingers. “The ox, the sheep, the goat, the hart and the gazelle and roebuck. You must not eat abominable things—”

  “And to what purpose?” Shmuel asked again.

  “Purpose?” Louisa turned pale. “To keep clean,” she said. “Not to eat anything abominable.”

  “What is meant by abominable?”

  “Camels and hares,” she said. “Rock badgers.”

  “What makes a rock badger abominable?”

  “It doesn’t have cloven hooves or chew cud.”

  Shmuel said, “You don’t chew cud, Frau Gratz. Are you abominable?”

  Louisa’s face contorted. “I don’t understand.”

  “Prayer and observance of the law,” Shmuel said, “are duties, and we do them at first without knowing why. But if you want to understand these laws, you have to know their purpose. Why all these details? Why the separation between Israel and the other nations?”

  With some hesitation, Louisa said, “To keep clean.”

  “Are you saying, then, that Israel is clean and all other nations are dirty?”

  Then came the silence. Shmuel had learned to think of that silence as Louisa’s natural element, strange given that he heard she was once a singer of Lieder. Sometimes the silence felt fertile, a place where new things could grow, and sometimes it felt like a void. That silence paralleled the gradual darkness of the room. He did not turn on the light.

  “Rabbi,” Louisa asked him, “what if I do and I do and I still don’t understand? Will they send me back?”

  “I’ve told you before, I can make no guarantees.”

  “But I can’t help not understanding. It’s not my fault.”

  The panic radiating from the girl unnerved him. He fought against the urge to reassure her and make promises he couldn’t keep. Again, he wondered why he felt so pessimistic about her case. “No one is blaming you,” he said. “No one is asking for the impossible.” Yet somehow neither of those statements felt quite true.

  Then he tried to imagine me, the Mutter, whom he had not met. The biblical Naomi was not a sweet old lady. After the death of her sons, she had asked her fellow Israelites to change her name to Bitterness. There was, Shmuel knew, plenty of guilt to go around.

  I MET LOUISA FOR the first time in August of 1943 when I sat on my bed surrounded by a pile of my husband’s trousers, jackets, wool socks, ties, and dress shirts; they had not been moved in years, and they smelled of dust and silverfish droppings. I did my best to sort through them. I knew the brown sweater with the moth holes would have to be discarded, but what could I sew up again? It was then that Gabor came in unexpectedly with Louisa.

  I must have lacked some dignity. As I rose from the bed, three pairs of trousers fell to the floor. I extended my hand. Louisa took it. Her handshake was weak, and her eyelids fluttered slightly, as though against rising dust. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “We’re interrupting.”

  “Oh, Momma, hell!” Gabor pushed us apart and held up, for inspection, my ancient lamb’s-wool coat, the wedding present from Adele. “What do you expect to do with this? Pawn it?”

  I said, “I’m too stout to get it buttoned these days, but it’s in good condition. I thought we’d reverse the buttons and make it a man’s coat. You could wear it this winter.”

  “Winter? Winter’s not going to come. Trust my mamma,” Gabor said to Louisa, “to spend a day like this sorting through garbage.” He threw the coat over Louisa’s head and held her at arm’s length. “Angel, you’d make a splendid nun.”

  Louisa kept the thing on for just a beat too long before letting it drop to her shoulders. Something about me made her lose her composure. In any case, Gabor and I soon stuffed everything back into the wardrobe. I offered them a cup of something, but Louisa insisted on taking us to a local cukrászda for a plate of overpriced sandwiches and some lemonade.

  Here was my first impression of Louisa: transparent. Her color came and went through skin like fine stationery, and her hair was so light that it looked like an optical illusion. Also, she was obviously younger than Gabor had led me to believe. Honestly, I didn’t know what to say. I’d never before met one of Gabor’s girls. I knew it would be all too easy for my son and me to settle into our natural camaraderie, so I forced myself to address Louisa directly in German. “So, dear, do you like it here in Hungary?”

  “Perfekt,” Louisa said. “It really is the best place for an artist at this stage of my development. My father travels for the Deutsche Reichsbahn, and he tells me trains pass through villages that have not changed in a hundred years. You have no High Culture. You have only Folk Culture. It exposes me to new influences. Like, for example, your son.”

  Gabor’s mouth was full of meat-paste, but he pressed a few teeth sideways in a lazy smile.

  Louisa clarified. She reached across the table and laid a cool, weirdly throbbing hand on my arm. “Your son is a genius,” she said.

  “Is he?” I took up my glass of lemonade, and over the rim, I locked eyes with Gabor.

  “He is a genius of the Hungarian kind. He comes from no tradition. He is his own tradition.” She gave my arm a condescending pat. “Of course, we have a great master in common. Professor Istvan Lengyel.”

  I took care to swallow what was in my throat. Gabor said, “Small world, hey?”

  If Louisa knew a thing, it didn’t show in her face, though it did turn just a little pink as she swallowed the iced lemonade.

  LATER, I WAS DIRECT. I said to Gabor, “I don’t want you to get yourself or that girl into trouble.”

  Gabor seemed startled. He had returned from walking Louisa home, and he’d expected a few laughs at her expense. “You should know me better than that. I don’t get girls in trouble.”

  “I’ll make myself clear,” I said. “That she’s too young, you know. And that’s your business. But Lengyel’s another matter. You’re the one who said you wanted to keep out of his circle.”

  “The Queen of Sheba? He’s old news. Frankly, I’m flattered he recognized that manuscript,” said Gabor.

  “How could he have recognized it, if you haven’t seen him in all those years?” I asked him.

  “Well,” Gabor said, “I must have made a lasting impression. I do, you know.” He straightened and wiped the last traces of meat-paste from his mouth with the side of his hand. I’d meant
to launder napkins that lost afternoon and now had nothing to show for it but worry. That worry made me furious, and I dumped the dirty dishes in the sink, all the while wishing I could give him a smack now that there was no one here to tell me to be reasonable. But Gabor was nineteen. I couldn’t tell him what to do.

  THAT SAME morning, in a fashionable district in the Buda hills, Istvan Lengyel’s maid laid out his long underwear and hiking gear for the weekly excursion with his students. He shaved, cleaned his spectacles, and combed his hair back from his brow. Lengyel loved to walk. He’d spent the best days of his early manhood in the Austrian Alps, where, with his boon companions, he’d conquered mountain after mountain, and in the frost they would wrap blankets of hide across their shoulders and read Schiller to each other by the light of a kerosene lamp. At dawn, he would practice his voice, which was nearing its prime, and it would echo back against the margins of those mountains.

  What did he have now? Students in their little shorts humoring an old man. At nine o’clock, he expected Louisa and a tenor named Laci. Laci arrived half an hour early and was so enthusiastic about the walk that he had brought along a pad and pencil for sketching flowers. Recently, he’d taken to carrying a staff like his master’s, though he was such a big boy that it had weapon-like proportions. Laci unpacked a roll from his bag and chewed most of it in his left cheek. He looked like a squirrel. He would leave crumbs on the furniture.

  “We will have to go without Louisa,” Lengyel said. “If we wait for her, she will never learn discipline.”

  The day was cheerless. Without Louisa there, Lengyel’s insistence on German felt all the more artificial. They didn’t reach the countryside until noon, and the morning chill soon gave way to far too much sunshine, so the two of them had to stop and rest. Never before had Lengyel noticed how boring the tenor could be. He would sit there and sneeze, and then he would lapse into Hungarian to apologize.

  Well, he hadn’t taken Laci on for his charm but for his remarkable voice, and as he suspected, he had caught a cold. By the time they returned to the house, Laci’s nose was beginning to drip, and when he said, “Goodbye, Professor,” his voice broke.

  “Goodbye yourself!” Lengyel shouted, losing his temper. “You sound like a bullfrog. If you don’t take care of your throat, you’ll end up working as a cobbler.”

  It was not in Laci’s nature to answer back. Lengyel knew he would do anything to please him, wrap himself in hot scarves, make his mother steam the bedroom, even bribe him with some homemade brandy. But Laci said something surprising. “Louisa sure kept warm.” Lengyel was struck by the note of insinuation. He hadn’t planned to press, but Laci added: “She’s got a boyfriend. Everyone knows.”

  “I must congratulate her when I see her,” said Istvan Lengyel, “and I’ll be sure to let her know you were the one to break the news.”

  Then he turned his back on the young man, stripped off his damp coat, and deliberately ignored him so as not to lose his temper and dismiss him altogether. He settled onto the one comfortable chair in his study for a brandy. After a moment, he asked his maid to dial the Bauers’ number. She handed him the receiver and at once he asked for Louisa, only to be told she’d been gone since morning.

  “But I’d assumed she was with you,” said Frau Bauer.

  “Indeed she was,” said Lengyel. “But she forgot a certain manuscript, I think. A short piece, not finished. By a friend, a composer.”

  “Composer? I don’t believe she’s mentioned a composer. Eva!” Frau Bauer called, and after a moment she returned. “Yes, Eva says she knows a composer from the Academy. Funny, the way she’ll tell a servant what she won’t tell her own mother.”

  He said, “Do let the matter drop. Girls need their secrets.” Then he took his leave, and sat for a long time, turning the glass of brandy around and around in his hand.

  AS FOR GABOR, he'd brought Louisa home because he had run out of things to do with her. They met once or twice a week, at the Academy or at an ice-cream shop on either end of Margit Bridge. Once, they spent the afternoon on Margit Island, and they walked among the gardens and rented a tandem, rounding the parameters until Louisa was breathless and Gabor light-headed with boredom.

  There were a thousand other things he could have been doing. The artist still had the portrait to complete; a friend had told him about a stunt pilot performing in a field in Ujpest; a girl whose brother wrote plays wanted him to read for the part of the Young Man. Yet this Louisa’s light breath blew on his back as she sang out: Would that I were a fish so nimble and swift—

  Then, touching her vibrating throat to his shoulder, her mouth brushing his ear, she’d whisper:

  “Is it for my voice?”

  “Ja,” Gabor said. She was referring to his song.

  “But, you know, it’s not a big voice. Perhaps you want a Dramatic Soprano.”

  “Nein,” Gabor said. “I want you.” He didn’t turn around, but the faint flutter in her throat and the warm hum along her lips reminded him. He could pedal and pedal and he wouldn’t lose her. Then she’d sing again:

  If you came angling, I’d not keep you waiting!

  That voice was smooth, bright, fully formed. She’d release it without warning, as if she couldn’t help it, and he knew that the Schubert was for his benefit. With every day, her expectations and impatience grew. It had been a month now, and no song.

  “Gabor,” Louisa said once, as they were walking with their ice-cream cones, “why don’t you work in my practice room at home? That way, you won’t have to worry about getting past the lady at the desk.”

  “You would disturb me,” Gabor said. “You have a history of disturbing me, Angel.”

  “You’ll never let me live that down,” Louisa said.

  “I never said I minded being disturbed.”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll be out of the way before you know it. By November, I’ll be in over my head with rehearsals. We’ll never get to see each other. Then it’s off on tour and you’re rid of me altogether.”

  Gabor didn’t dignify that claim with reassurance, but he walked on, considering, as he often did in Louisa’s company, just what he wanted from her. The ice-cream cone made her face sticky and filthy. Even her ordinary skirt and blouse looked like a schoolgirl’s uniform. “Angel,” he said to her, “the pressure doesn’t help.”

  “What would help?” Louisa was pleading now. “Maybe if you didn’t live in that awful flat with your mother. Did you see how she looked at me?”

  “She looks at everyone that way,” said Gabor.

  “Even you?”

  “Especially me.”

  “I’d never look at you like that,” said Louisa.

  “Ah, but you already have,” said Gabor, pleased to catch her out. “Every time you ask me about that song, you look at me like that.”

  This was said at the very threshold of her neighborhood, where they parted ways. Was she honest with her parents? A stupid lie could cause a lot of trouble. Perhaps he ought to give in and use that piano in her house on Rose Hill, make the friendship public, at least walk her to the door to show he meant no harm. But every time the impulse overcame him, he thought better of it. The tidy street, the window-boxes filled with puffy white geraniums, the green shutters and the arched doorway swallowed up Louisa. It was no place for him. She was, frankly, no girl for him. And he would shake her off soon, as soon as he gave her that song.

  He would turn his back on Rose Hill and start for his next destination, the wine-cellar up the street, or a card game in the park, or the wharf or railroad yard, nowhere in particular. He thought: What song?

  He asked a friend, a porter in the Hotel Astoria, “Have I ever written a poem that I could set to music?”

  “I don’t know,” he’d reply, buttoning his uniform. “I thought you were an actor.”

  To a girl pianist, he said, “Play that piece I composed last year.”

  “Must I?” The girl snuffed out her cigarette. “Why must I remember everythi
ng you do?”

  Weirdly, the whole world seemed to be united against him, narrowing from indifference to hostility and leaving him walking across the Pest which not so long ago was very much his oyster, and trying to reconstruct a few measures of Rocket.

  Boom! Boom! The notes, like two tin pellets, hit his gut. Two schoolgirls dressed in green jumpers passed by, and to Gabor’s eye, they were pointing and laughing. He realized, with wild anxiety, that he had come close to Louisa’s school and the girls were pointing because she’d mentioned him, described him in detail, and very probably every German girl in Budapest knew who he was and also knew what he was, every girl but Louisa.

  AS A RULE, I didn't involve myself in Gabor’s affairs, but the mention of Lengyel had thrown me off. Also, there was something about this one, maybe her youth or her German-ness or even the way her hand vibrated when it touched my arm. I got the strangest sensation: as though the girl were made of nitroglycerin.

  After Gabor and Louisa had gone, I turned back to sorting through my husband’s clothes. I wish I could have said that his memory was a comfort to me, but it wasn’t. He was not the sort of man to whom I could have spoken what was in my heart. I shook out a pair of what I always thought of as his “professor pants,” loose, tweedy things with ample pockets. Janos always filled those pockets with scraps of paper covered with equations or notes from engineering journals, and long after he’d left the Polytechnic, in fact long after he had given up hope of finding a position anywhere but at the girls’ school, he would still carry those arcane notes everywhere. I was always washing them along with the trousers, and they’d form little pellets and bleed ink all over everything.

  I used to find folders of his notes, carefully dated, stuffed not only in his desk, but in the linen closet, underneath the breakfront, apparently anywhere he could find room for them. After Janos had gone, I went through a period of hunting for those folders on a regular basis and attempting to arrange them chronologically, trying to hear his voice in them somehow. Perhaps because that flat was so enormous, I kept too many things: Name Day cards, student newspapers from the Katona Jozsef School, twine from parcels, and everything Gabor ever scribbled on a piece of paper.