Louisa

by Simone Zelitch

  I also kept the shoe-boxes full of letters I never sent Bela. Later, of course, I lost everything. Some of the lines from the letters come back to me, the sort of things you write when you know no one will be reading, senseless, sentimental, in a private language: the breath we took together, before you dropped me in that cemetery full of stones, all of those birds in flight, that’s you, flying off, and I’m the stone. Or What is lost, you can not have back again, not a breath we took together or bread we ate together. I can not join you any more than I can make bread out of a stone.

  There was a sock of Bela’s in my hand, just then, darned with yellow thread. He’d left it in the flat years before. It had probably been mended by Dori Csengery. I pulled it over my hand, and, onto it, sunk my chin.

  CONSIDER THE photograph I’d mentioned previously: Dori, Nathan, and Bela. Louisa knew it well; she’d found it one day when she riffled through my private papers on Prater Street and held it towards me like an accusation, sobbing out her heart.

  “You’ll leave me. All I do is make you unhappy, and look at the three of them,” she said. “Look at all the sunshine.”

  Indeed, the Pioneers swam in light, but the effect was probably the consequence of poor photography. Really, it was a mundane place. The settlement was set in real earth and its membership was flesh and bone, as unhappy as the rest of us. All this, I knew from Bela’s letters, sent along with the photograph of Bela, Dori, and Nathan posing in front of the chicken coop.

  Each of those letters began and ended with a plea to join him in Palestine; most of the invitations were light-hearted, some direct, and a few in 1939 a little pointed. You say the Jews of Europe are flocking to Hungary? They’re running in the wrong direction. I’ve written the same to Adele and to my mother, but you must make them go. You have the stronger will. You could convince them. At least think of your son.

  It was that letter that Louisa held out that afternoon, along with many others, and that photograph, as she said, “You’re going to leave me and go to the Holy Land.”

  “Dear,” I said, by way of consolation, “he wrote that five years ago. There’s no way to get there now.”

  By 1944, Hungary had long since sent those Jewish refugees back to Poland and Austria, and my flat rumbled beneath American bombs, and on my couch lay Louisa, sobbing her heart out for fear I’d go to Palestine.

  “But you’re an Israelite,” she cried.

  I stroked her hair and whispered, “Shh, shh. There’s no such place.”

  2

  AS I’VE SAID, JANOS put no faith in photographs. When Gabor was two years old, I asked Janos to come with us to a studio on Andrassy Street to take a family portrait. He refused. “Photographs reproduce perceived perspective. They have nothing to do with objective truth. For example, look at our son.” Aside from three hours of work in the afternoons, I had done nothing but look at Gabor since he was born. Janos said to me, “How big do you think his head is, Nora?”

  “Counting hair?” I asked.

  “You could factor in the hair.”

  “He has a lot of it.”

  “Theoretically, hair doesn’t matter.”

  “You would say that,” I said to Janos. “You’re losing yours.”

  “I’m serious,” he said, in case I doubted it. Frankly, I’d hoped to drive him out of the house, because I’d almost, and I mean almost, gotten Gabor to take a regular nap, and I knew that Janos would be pulling out his tape-measure in a minute and wrapping it around Gabor’s head.

  “Look,” I said to Janos, “all I want is to take a little picture of the three of us to send to my cousin in Palestine.”

  “That’s the whole point,” Janos said. “Photographs only reproduce individual perception. There’s no objective reality to a photograph. A photograph would tell your cousin more about the photographer than it would about our son.”

  He shook his finger at me while he said this, and he stumbled back a little in his agitation, looking no different than he had four years before, like a pipe-cleaner with a frayed end, like a lost soul, like someone schoolgirls would snicker over in the hall. As time went on, the oddness felt increasingly like affectation. He couldn’t possibly think that shaking his finger would make me pay more attention. Eventually, I got the photograph taken without him, by a man who had a little shop on the Great Boulevard, and I mailed it off to Bela with a short note in German: Measure Gabor’s head. According to every study I’ve read, it’s the right shape for a Cossack.

  What I did not send Bela was a longer letter in Hungarian that I wrote around that time, in 1926: It was his sadness that made me marry him. What is it like to be married, you asked me. It is like knowing you’re being watched, then wondering how he can’t be on to you. I think I am a mystery to him, Bela. It’s like I speak another language. I wish I was a linguist, like you, and understood everything.

  I had reverted to them again, those letters, the way another wife might revert to drink. Although I hadn’t time enough to fill the pages at the rate I had as a girl in Barnahely, there were six boxes now. I kept them in a deep drawer in the living room, under a lot of bedding, and took them out sometimes to read through while Gabor napped. I would put my legs up on the couch and pile them on my lap, smoking and reading, and it was as though the flat were crowded with myself at fourteen, eighteen, twenty-five. I didn’t keep them hidden, really. I told myself I wasn’t the one with something to hide. I wasn’t Janos.

  I THINK GABOR’S birth made me less tolerant. Once, Janos decided to use our flat for storage. Of course, there was no warning. At eight, when he’d already left for the library and I was making Gabor a pancake, a boy showed up at the front door with a handcart piled with parcels.

  He squinted up at me. “I’m supposed to leave these.”

  He pushed right past, dragging that wretched, squeaking cart to the center of the flat and dumping the parcels. There were maybe thirty of them wrapped in thick brown paper and crisscrossed with lengths of twine, each around the right size to hold thirty or forty contraband magazines or a hundred leaflets or half a kilo of explosives.

  “All right, then,” said the boy. Then he left. So there I was, and there was Gabor, and there were the parcels. Was I supposed to line them up neatly against the wall? Was I supposed to hide them under the bed? The only thing I knew I wasn’t supposed to do was open them. I went to the window and looked after that boy, a spindly, dead-pale creature who dragged that empty cart behind him so carelessly that one of its wheels dislocated and scraped along the road. Then I looked at Gabor.

  That afternoon, Janos got home before I did, and I noticed that he’d put the parcels somewhere out of sight. He was leaning over his bowl of soup and the spoon was just in front of his mouth when I said, “I want those things out of the flat.”

  He put the spoon down. “What? You mean my papers?”

  “They’re not your papers. They might as well be rat poison. They’re out of here tonight.”

  Janos did not say anything for a while. He looked into the bean soup and moved the stem of his spoon first one way and then the other. Gabor sat in his high-chair, observing the movement of the spoon with more interest than the expression on his father’s face. Then, Janos said, “All right. But it’s not possible until morning.”

  “You could throw them in the Duna,” I said.

  “Nora, be reasonable.”

  “Not here,” I said to Janos. “Reason stops here.”

  I didn’t even let him finish his soup. He had to knock on a neighbor’s door to borrow a handcart, claiming he had to move some books to his cubby-hole in the library, and I think that was where he stored the packages that night, though that meant getting them past the guard who was a reactionary and suspicious. I do know he came home without them, just before midnight. He dragged in the empty handcart and stood, sweating, in his coat. He said, “Can I at least leave the cart?”

  I came up behind Janos and removed his coat, setting it on our coatrack next to my lamb’s-w
ool jacket and Gabor’s little winter parka. He didn’t shake his bad humor that night or the next, but I did notice that he was home for supper for the rest of the week, and when he returned the handcart next door, he made a great show of complaining to the neighbor about how a woman never understands the importance of a man’s work, and he actually let himself get invited in for a glass of pálinka like any other husband drinking with a husband to make common cause against their wives.

  IN 1927, WHEN Gabor was three years old, Janos graduated from the Polytechnic, and it was then the future he had laid out for me in the Horivag cukrászda was supposed to begin. It was June, the end of the semester at the Katona Jozsef School, and I had never seen him so close to profound happiness as after that final math class. Not once had he complained about the girls, mind you, not once had he said a word to make me think he knew what they thought of him, but that afternoon, he burst into my office with a demonic grin. His style was telegraphic.

  “Done,” he said. “Over. Gone. Never again. Say,” he added, looking down at my paperwork, “can’t you get out of here? I want to show you something.”

  I followed him outside into the milky sunshine, and when we were in the open, he took my arm and guided me to a side-street where workers were drilling through the cobblestones. I said, “I can’t stay away long. I’ve got a full afternoon’s work ahead.”

  “An afternoon? An afternoon?” Janos turned full around to face me, and then he laughed, surprising me to the point of panic. I had never heard him laugh before. Then he pointed to the drillers and said, “Molten iron switch-boxes. All over Budapest. Mains-fed. Activated by an astronomical clock.” Then he drew me to a lamp-post and said, “See that? It’ll be timed to come on at sunset, whether that’s four in the afternoon or ten at night. And that’s my job,” he said. “Ganz Electrical Works. Complete overhaul of the circuit system. Tear out the old equipment, bring it up to date, and when Ganz asked around at the Polytechnic, they got my name.”

  I never did get back to work that day. Janos measured the distances between the future switch-boxes and made me hold one end of the tape as he walked backwards with the other. The brilliant metal strip extended like a band of light, and when he shouted out a measurement, I’d let myself be pulled forward to meet him, giddy and bewildered. I don’t know what pedestrians made of the two of us, all doubled over and sweaty in our good clothes with that tape-measure, making our way up Andrassy Street. Janos wrote numbers on a little pad and pointed out the lamp-posts that would be timed to dim at midnight and the lamp-posts that would burn until dawn. By the time our knees gave out, it was twilight, and we were perhaps a mile from where we had begun.

  Janos lit his pipe. “You know, they’ll probably climb on the boxes, those schoolgirls.” As ever, when he spoke around the pipe-stem, I could barely make out what he said, and I moved in a little closer.

  I asked him, “Do you want to sabotage the boxes and electrocute them?”

  “As a class?” Janos asked, and then he took his pipe out of his mouth and kissed me.

  By then we had been married for four years, and I didn’t know at first why that kiss seemed to run so deep and turn the world fuzzy and green. I fell back hard against something but didn’t care. Janos dug his hand under my little suit jacket and pulled it halfway off, and it was so dark, no one could see or mind, and little Gabor was at Aunt Monika’s and wouldn’t be the wiser, so what made me abruptly pull away? We were on a bench in Vidam Park.

  “You knocked your head,” Janos said, not looking at me.

  “A little,” I replied, gently. “Not much. You know, I’d better put our things in to soak. They’re filthy.”

  “Yes, soak the jacket. I won’t need it. It’s a warm night.” He handed it over, and I bunched it up in my arms and held it so tightly as we walked home that it had to be pressed later. I laid it out under our mattress. That did the trick.

  JANOS DID NOT GET the job at Ganz. They never contacted him again, and when he gathered enough nerve to go to their office, he was told that they had given the position to another recent graduate who had more “hands-on” experience. “What was the Great War if not experience?” Janos said, but then he pretended not to be surprised. “Something will turn up,” he said. By then, it was early July.

  I worked through summers; Janos did not. Thus, in theory, he would have all day free to look for a job. Every afternoon, I would pick up Gabor at Aunt Monika’s, have a cup of tea with Adele, and return to find Janos sitting hangdog at the kitchen table cleaning out his pipe, with his good suit-jacket slung over the back of the chair. I didn’t even ask if he’d had luck.

  “I need to throw a wider net,” he said at first. He had stopped calling himself an electrical engineer and tried to spread word that he could take on any project. No one was interested. Then he thought it was because he was too old, but the other war veterans his age were hired by firms that valued their maturity. One morning in early August, Janos said to me, “How do I look?”

  “The same,” I said to him. He was wearing the coat I’d pressed and a pair of very baggy trousers, and he had made an unsuccessful attempt to slick back his hair.

  “The same? What I mean,” Janos said, “is do I look, well, like . . .” His hesitation seemed to pain him. He wanted to get it out. “Do I look suspicious?”

  “Suspicious?” I’d picked up his own habit of echoing back questions.

  “I overheard them,” Janos said. “They said I was suspicious.” He dropped his voice. “I can’t risk it.”

  He muttered something else, but to be honest, I was getting tired of having to get close to hear him. Why be so conspiratorial? Who was going to listen in now? Gabor? The boy had already climbed out of the trousers I had put on him, and now he was opening the kitchen drawer and dropping cutlery on the floor a handful at a time. I had to stop him before he got to the big knives. I didn’t have time for this sort of conversation. What was I supposed to say to him? That he was right not to become an ordinary man without politics who could get an engineering job? The Katona Jozsef School would be opening in less than a month. Janos had still not officially given notice. I could see the beginning of the new term rushing towards him like the floodlight of a train, and he was miserable to the point of paralysis.

  “Maybe,” he said, “I could just become an electrician.”

  “A suspicious electrician? Wouldn’t they be afraid you’d blow things up?” I asked him. I think I was trying to make him laugh. Sometimes, I could get that little half-smile out of him, but not that day. He didn’t even answer. In the end, I dressed Gabor, and off I went to work. I took my time about getting home, and in fact stayed at Adele and Aunt Monika’s for supper. I sang to Gabor about exploding cows, about a giant bear who danced with boys and girls in cemeteries, about magic bread that wise people know better than to eat, and though I did my best to put off the inevitable, I was met by Janos, who told me, in case I didn’t know, that he would be teaching at the Katona Jozsef School again that fall.

  AFTER THE TERM began, Adele was not at home as often as she had been. She’d fallen in love. The man in question was not a surgeon, not even a pharmacist. He was an unassuming little fellow from Szeged named Matyas who owned a shoe factory. The first time I met Matyas, I could tell by Adele’s pleading look that she’d been afraid to have the two of us in the same room. Well, what could I do? Bite his head off? Gabor was on my lap most of the time, so I could barely make it off the sofa. They had met the day of the Martin Buber lecture. Apparently, that walk I’d taken with Bela had served some purpose.

  “So are you moving to Szeged?” I asked Adele.

  “Nora, it’s not as though we’re getting married,” she said, but of course, they did, after a leisurely courtship. The worst of it was that they were going to take Aunt Monika south to live with them, and I didn’t know who would watch Gabor, let alone where I would go when I wanted to avoid conversations with my husband.

  The wedding itself took place in Budape
st in December of 1929 in an Orthodox synagogue. It seemed that this Szeged fellow was a Jew in the old style. The ceremony was brief and incomprehensible, and the chanting sounded like gypsy music. From my perspective on the women’s balcony, I could make out no more than the top of the embroidered canopy. Around me sat guttural-accented Szeged provincials in their dresses from before the Great War. There were also a few girls from Adele’s old circle of nursing students, straining to see the ceremony like anthropologists. I knew Bela had not been able to come, but I still found myself searching for him among the men below.

  After the wedding ceremony, there was a reception at a supper club, and I shared a table with some of my companions from the old days. Most of them were married by now. Andras the surgeon was there with a sweet little girlfriend who might have been Adele’s younger sister. Kalman Nagy took a seat across from me; he was still single and so unchanged that he might have been preserved in formaldehyde. He gave a weak giggle at the sight of me and kept trying to light my cigarette with a faulty lighter.

  There was a surprise. Seated to my left was Laszlo. At first, I didn’t recognize him. Somehow, in the years since I’d left Kisbarnahely, he’d gotten fat and had grown a thick, blond mustache. “Well, Norika,” he said, “where’s the engineer?”

  “Prior engagement,” I said. Janos had said he’d try to go, but I knew better. I’d seen him literally shrivel at the sight of a synagogue.

  “You two should move back to Barnahely,” said Laszlo. “They’re wiring the whole town for electricity. The man we have working on it now is no good. He’s the mayor’s brother-in-law.”