Louisa

by Simone Zelitch

  “I know all about you, Professor.”

  Istvan Lengyel remained standing. From his pocket, he removed his cigarette case, and with a trembling hand, he dislodged a cigarette. The flame of the lighter erupted, and Louisa stared across at him.

  She whispered now: “I know everything.”

  “No,” said Lengyel. “You don’t know everything. You know what others tell you. Would you like me to tell you everything? I think I could.”

  Louisa knocked the lighter out of Lengyel’s hand. It fell flaming to the carpet, and while he scrambled for it, he reached, with his other hand, towards Louisa. But she had disappeared.

  JANOS AND I HAD argued about circumcision. He insisted it was more hygienic, but while I was recovering in the hospital, I had the misfortune to pass by a room where a doctor was performing the procedure. Afterwards, I stood firm. Hygiene or no hygiene, no one would put a knife to my son. Janos’s vehemence surprised me and, to my mind, bordered on barbarism. It was only when I accused him of reverting to a tribal mentality that he backed down. Personally, he said, his son’s foreskin made no difference to him one way or the other.

  Well, as it turned out, the foreskin did make a difference. When Gabor was five, he confronted Janos and said, “You’re not my father.”

  Janos, reasonably enough, replied, “Of course I am.”

  Gabor smiled his broad, angelic smile and dropped his shorts.

  Odd, that I should have been flooded that night with memories of my husband. Christmas was hardly a family holiday. Still, sometimes there would be chocolates or bottles of homemade wine from the parents of his students at the Katona Jozsef School. Perhaps because he had been raised near mountains, he had a weakness for the smell of evergreen. He didn’t seem displeased when neighbors dumped a lot of branches down the fire-escape.

  Where was Janos? Was frozen rain cracking against his window? For some reason, I imagined snow. During the years when he sent a little something through the mail, there was never a note, just the money folded inside a white sheet of paper. Perhaps it was the whiteness of the paper that made me think of snow, or maybe even the silence of that flat, the way the night stretched before me like an open field so deep and cold that nothing could cross over. Time would pass more quickly if I’d slept, but I only threw a blanket around my shoulders and turned on the stove to heat the coffeepot. From my purse I drew the last of the cigarettes I’d smoked with Gabor. I smoked them one after the other, and by the time I’d finished the pot of coffee, they were all gone.

  By then, it was midnight. I was determined to go to bed and had just tucked myself between the covers when I heard strange footsteps on the stairs. Not Gabor. I didn’t move. The neighbors to the right were in the Nyirseg for the holiday, and the old man to the left seldom had visitors. The steps stopped by my own door.

  I rose and put on my robe, closing the belt with one hand, waiting, knowing he had a key, that I hadn’t changed the lock. But there were three quick knocks. Standing in the hall with her hair loose and her face very pale, wearing only a soaking velvet dress, was Louisa.

  She stood in the doorway for some time, saying nothing. As for me, I wasn’t immediately certain I was going to let her in. Rather, I crossed my arms over the front of my robe, and looked up—I’m shorter than she is—and said, “He’s not here.”

  “Nein?” Louisa looked over my shoulder.

  “Try his flat.”

  “I’m not looking for him.” Louisa shivered; her dress was half-frozen and her hair hung in dripping locks. “I came to see you, Frau Gratz. I didn’t know where else to go.”

  Her answer took me aback to the point where I at last allowed her inside. She entered with hesitation, as though the whole flat could dissolve before her feet. “Excuse me, dear,” I said, “but it is very late and I wasn’t expecting company.”

  “Ich verstehe. I’m so sorry. I just—” Louisa stopped herself midway and took a breath. “I’m sorry if I—it’s only—”

  Another pause. She set a hand on her head and kept it there.

  “Would you mind a lot if I sat down just for a minute? Then I’ll go.”

  Well, of course, I had to let her rest on the couch. She slung a long, wet arm along the back. The dress was dark with damp and bled a little yellow dye onto her skin.

  She closed her eyes and opened her mouth just enough to whisper, “I’ll get out of your way soon.”

  It was a long walk from the Bauer house to Prater Street. I confess, I put on water for more coffee. As I ran the tap, I glanced over my shoulder more than once at the girl my son had called the Angel. She looked younger than ever, with her hair loose and her eyes closed and the small, thin nose tilted towards the ceiling. Her mouth was open like a baby bird’s.

  I brought over a cup and said, “Drink this. It’s hot.”

  Louisa straightened so quickly that her hair fell in her eyes. “Danke. I wish you hadn’t,” she said, taking the cup. “I don’t need anything. Do you have cream?”

  “Milk,” I said.

  “Oh,” she said. She let the cup thaw her hands for a while before lowering it. “You’re sure you don’t have cream?”

  “Are you going to tell me why you’re here, dear?”

  She set the cup on the arm of the couch. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean,” I said, “why you’re here. Why you aren’t home.”

  “I have no home,” Louisa said. “Not anymore. I couldn’t think of where to go, so I just ran and ran.”

  “Ran here?” I shook my head. “Louisa, if you’re here, you’re here. But you’ll have to speak plainly. I don’t have much patience. It’s too late—” I added, and by then it was one in the morning at least, “—to listen to lies.”

  Louisa looked stunned. To fill a space of hesitation, she reached for the coffee cup, which had sat on the arm of the couch long enough to leave a brownish indentation. Finally she asked me, “Is lying against your religion?”

  Now I was stunned. “What religion?”

  “Israelite,” said Louisa.

  I smiled, but not quite enough for her to see. “Yes, it is.”

  “Well,” Louisa said, “then I’ll tell you.” So she told me what had taken place that evening. When she mentioned Lengyel, I held back my panic with some success, and she said, “I want them all to love each other. I wanted to help him. Would you mind if I cried now, Frau Gratz?” Though I didn’t give her permission, she began.

  I’m no good when people cry. I would have to learn the trick, it seemed. Louisa had sunk her head into her hands and she was sobbing, less with abandon than with endurance, and I had plenty of time to squeeze in next to her on the couch and put my arms around her and rest my chin against her hair.

  “Honestly, dear,” I said. “Don’t try to protect Gabor. He doesn’t need protection.”

  Louisa buried herself a little deeper into my shoulder, and she muttered something I couldn’t understand.

  “What was that?” I asked her. She raised her head and spoke again.

  “He does,” she said. She pushed herself upright, cheeks still damp, eyes still fuzzy.

  From close range, I observed this strange young girl. Her slim feet in black low-heeled shoes, her gold dress dried into a mass of wrinkles but pulled tight against the breasts. “Louisa,” I said, “you’re pregnant.”

  Louisa said, “No, I’m not.”

  “I told you, no lies.”

  She didn’t hold out for long, crossing her arms against her chest as though against a chill. Through narrowed lips, she said, “I won’t tell him.”

  “Dear, don’t you think he ought to know?” My hand, all by itself, rose to her hair and stroked it a little. “I’ll tell him, if you won’t.”

  “But he’s going to Turkey.”

  “Dear, Gabor’s not going anywhere.”

  “How do you know? Where is he, then?”

  I pretended I hadn’t heard her. “How far along are you?”

  “I don’t know,”
Louisa said. “Am I big?”

  “Have you seen a doctor?”

  “Do you have a blanket?”

  Relieved to break off this fruitless sequence of questions, I crossed into Gabor’s room and stripped a red wool cover from his bed. Louisa held out her arms to take it and she tucked it around her shoulders in a way that made me conscious she wasn’t so far from being tucked in by her mother at night.

  Sitting beside her, I asked one final question. “What are you going to do?”

  Louisa didn’t answer, but she stared ahead with tight lips and a fixed expression. I think I was the only one she’d told, and telling didn’t seem to bring relief, in part because it led to that same question, which she couldn’t answer.

  I went on. “You’re not the first girl to be in your position. There are ways—”

  “Abortionists,” Louisa said, not looking at me. I didn’t contradict her. “I read a book that gave the number of Christian babies who’d died because of Jew abortionists. Do you know, Frau Gratz,” she said, turning at last to meet my eyes, “you’re wrong. No one has ever been in my position, no one ever.”

  Those eyes, gray and rimmed with stubby lashes, were dry and sharply focused. Above the red blanket, her face hardened. I didn’t say a word.

  She said more. “You think you know all about Gabor. Well, if he’s not in Istanbul, where is he? I said I hadn’t been to his flat, but I was lying. He’s not here and he’s not there and he’s not at my house so tell me where he is!”

  “He’s not at his flat?”

  “Then you don’t know?” Her surprise was genuine. “I thought you’d know. Why don’t you know?”

  I held back a deepening panic and said, “Look, Louisa, it’s going to be morning soon and life isn’t going to get any easier for a while.”

  “You really don’t know?” Louisa asked again.

  I shook my head. In the wake of that bad news, Louisa put up little resistance as I pulled her to her feet and led her to the bedroom once occupied by Gabor.

  I thought: Is that why she came here? To sleep in his bed? I returned for the blanket and took a moment to spill out the dregs left in her coffee cup. By the time I brought the blanket back, Louisa’s eyes were closed, and she had curled up with her open hand beside her cheek. I threw the blanket over her and didn’t fiddle with it, but took myself out of that room as quickly as I could before I gave in to the temptation to take off her shoes and stockings and lay them at the foot of the bed.

  9

  YOU MIGHT HAVE wondered how a son of mine became a Gabor. Janos and I are, after all, hardly what you might call artistic. Well, it could be pinned, once again, on Bela. He led me to the Katona Jozsef School, to headmistresses in loose gowns and their bohemian younger brothers who frequented cafés tucked into less reputable parts of Pest and smoked and talked all night. Imagine these men—almost all of them were men with a handful of ornamental women—ordering coffee and brandy after coffee and brandy or shouting across the upper balconies of concert halls or lounging in well-appointed homes in exchange for the mention of a wealthy lady in a magazine. I did those things too. Unlikely as it seems, I did those things too.

  And I was hardly ornamental. No, I came along because one of those younger brothers once appeared in the school office and said, “You’re Bela’s cousin? My God—no resemblance whatsoever!” He was a grubby boy in a loose tweedy sweater, and he could have used a bath. “Maybe around the eyes,” he said, almost as an afterthought. “You’ve got little sparks in them, like fireflies.”

  I did not take my hands from the typewriter. By then, I was thirty-five, and looked it, but there was no mistaking; this boy was flirting with me. I asked, “How did you know Bela?”

  “How did I know Bela? He practically lived in our kitchen before he went to Palestine. I was maybe ten when he left, and we went through a period of mourning. My sister was in love with him, my mother was in love with him, I was probably in love with him myself. I still have a hat he left at our flat,” the boy said. “It’s too big for me. Goes down to my nose.” He threw himself onto a chair across from my desk and rolled himself another cigarette. “You’ve got a big head too,” he said.

  “Want to measure it?” I asked him, still not looking up.

  “Draw it,” he replied. “I want to draw it. What are you doing Thursday?”

  I could have told him I was making dinner for my husband, but that wouldn’t have been the truth. Lately, Janos had not been home in time to eat with us, and Gabor and I had often made do with a couple of egg and dripping sandwiches. Since Adele had moved to Szeged, I didn’t have much in the way of company, and though I hadn’t realized it, the invitation wasn’t something I could honestly refuse. I did ask, “Can I bring my son?”

  “Son?” He laughed. “Ah, there’s a novel idea. Is he much trouble?”

  “Yes,” I replied. Gabor was eleven years old.

  “Sure. Bring him,” the boy said to me. “If we’re lucky, he’ll break something. That’ll annoy the master of the house and when he heats up, things get, well, they get interesting. And bring some letters,” he added. “You have letters, don’t you?”

  He’d meant letters from Bela. I hesitated for a moment, though there was nothing private about the letters, and though he would have no objection to my reading them to his old friends. I rolled back my office chair and took a moment to give the boy a second look. In spite of his deliberate air of originality, he seemed essentially harmless. I said, “You know, I’m nothing like Bela, even if I do have a big head.”

  “You do have letters,” he said again.

  “Will I need to dress up for this party?” I asked him.

  After a pause, he said, “Well, you’re not planning on wearing what you have on, I hope.”

  SO I BOUGHT A NEW dress, something I hadn’t done in at least five years. It was chintz, cheaply made, and printed all over with little bluebirds. Gabor had helped me choose it. I modeled it for Janos one night, and he frowned. “Frivolous,” he said. “And it won’t be the end of it. If you start spending time with those sorts of people, you’ll need new shoes and a new hairdo, and then a new address and a new set of ideas and—”

  “A new husband.” I completed the thought. It wasn’t wise. Janos looked off somewhere so I wouldn’t see his face. When had he stopped getting my jokes, and why did I always think he would? I added, “I could just give you a haircut and brush off one of your old suits. That would make you new enough for me.”

  “Don’t bother,” Janos said. I wondered if what I had said amounted to an invitation for him to come along, and if his reply was a refusal. He walked off to make himself a coffee. It pained me to see the back of Janos. He’d been a tall man, but he stooped now, and the chalk-dust had worked itself so deep into his skin that his neck looked bloodless.

  THAT THURSDAY afternoon, and every Thursday afternoon for the next three years, Gabor and I took a tram together to a house on a steep hill in the Castle district. Once there, Gabor would shoot off through the hallway like a firecracker. I let him go with an ease I cannot now quite understand. Maybe it was because these people knew Bela. In spite of everything, that made the place feel like a refuge.

  I would sit in an expensive chair, smoke cigarettes from somebody else’s silver case, and pass around Bela’s letters, old and new. Only once did I feel ill at ease, when a man stared at me for a good thirty seconds. I curled up like a hedgehog. In his handsome linen suit, he might have been a composer, an architect, or a politician. In fact, he was Istvan Lengyel.

  “Charming,” Lengyel said of me. “The Brooding Jewess. Someone ought to do a sketch.”

  “I did, of the head,” the boy said to him, “but it didn’t turn out. The proportions were all wrong.”

  “Perhaps it’s the fault of the head,” said Lengyel. I took an instant dislike to him. That should teach me to trust first impressions.

  Later, of course, I’d tell myself that I had judged him too harshly. After all, the house
itself belonged to Lengyel, and he let these bright young people drink his good liquor, play his three pianos, sleep with his maid, and generally make themselves at home. Afterwards, when they would drag me and my letters to a café, they would make fun of him, speaking through their noses and pouting and talking about mountain-climbing. I wanted to give them a smack. Once, I actually found him upstairs in the library, in his pajamas, smoking an Egyptian cigarette and reading poetry. How could I dislike someone who wasn’t ashamed to get caught in his pajamas? What was wrong with me?

  Most of what was wrong with me was this: I had come into this life too late. Here was the world I had imagined when I read Bela’s letters in Kisbarnahely—the free talk, the wit, the sense of a closed, charmed circle, and I was not nineteen, but a woman with a husband and a son. I tried to imagine how Bela had conducted himself. Had he asked probing questions? Had he invited everyone to come to Palestine?

  In 1936, I wrote to Bela in Palestine, Do you actually know these people? They make fun of you, you know. They say you have a hundred wives, like Solomon, and are building a temple. Honestly, Borzas, they’re unbearable, spoiled and headstrong, and they don’t know how to end a conversation.

  Bela replied, I’m glad you like them so much. Tell them I can’t even build a WC, let alone a temple. I have some fond memories of little Jeno and his sister in particular. He can keep the hat. I have a new one now.

  I read that passage out loud the next Thursday, and even as they laughed and started in on what fond memories anyone could possibly have about Jeno’s sister, I felt myself slowly recede, as I had many years before in that restaurant with Adele and our dinner dates. I floated to the ceiling of Istvan Lengyel’s sitting room, and the distance between myself and the situation passed through me like physical pain.

  What were my own fond memories? And where had they led me? What should I have been doing, when I was nineteen? I could have boarded a ship and sailed off somewhere new. Instead, I was stuck with leftovers, with people who tried too hard, and with a sense of loss I could not shake.