Louisa

by Simone Zelitch

  “Nora,” one of the ornamental women said to me, “keep an eye on that son of yours. He’s a heartbreaker.”

  Gabor was rushing past just then with a sandwich in either hand, and I said, “More like a plate-breaker.”

  “No, heartbreaker,” the woman repeated, tapping her slim, white finger on my chest for emphasis, so close I could smell her cologne. “Plate-breakers always turn out to be heartbreakers. Trust me. I know. Your cousin broke plates too.”

  GABOR, IN FACT, was in his element. To him, Istvan Lengyel’s house was a personal amusement park. He climbed up arbors, turned the pages of music scores, and zoomed through the parlor with his arms outstretched doing his airplane imitation in a way that made everyone feel original. He also proved to have an ear for music. When one patroness played piano, Gabor overshadowed her, and she taught him basic theory. She would strike a chord, and Gabor would call out “Major” or “Minor” or “Augmented” or “Diminished.” He was always right.

  At this point, Istvan Lengyel had just recently abandoned his career in opera, but he hadn’t lost his sense of musical engagement. He loved nothing better than to listen to a piece he couldn’t understand over and over again until he formed a justified opinion. He wrote for several papers in Budapest, Vienna, and Berlin, and occasionally, he also reviewed art exhibitions. Many of the men present on those Thursdays had received favorable reviews from Lengyel. Back then, he still had a taste for what was new.

  So it was no surprise that he would take his place at the edge of the circle around this little wonder. He asked the lady at the piano, “Who works with the boy?”

  “Don’t assume all of us can afford private lessons,” she replied. That was her way of saying Gabor was a pauper.

  Lengyel must have seen an opening. He found Gabor in the kitchen garden one afternoon and knelt to meet him face-to-face. Gabor had picked the vines clean of green-beans and filled the cook’s straw hat. He looked up at Lengyel with an accomplished grin.

  Lengyel wasted no time in plucking Gabor from the mud and taking him upstairs to the library for a talk. He asked him how he could tell “Augmented” from “Diminished.”

  Gabor laughed and said, “I just can.”

  “That’s not good enough,” said Lengyel. “Such an answer can only take you so far. If you give me an answer I like, I’ll let you look inside the hood of my car.”

  Gabor was open to bribery, so he made an attempt. “Augmented’s mixed up,” he said, “and Diminished is mixed up and sad at the same time.”

  Lengyel made himself smile, though his true feelings were more complex, or rather, Diminished. He asked, “Do you like music?”

  Gabor didn’t think the question worth answering, and he dropped his hat full of green-beans and buzzed across the library to stare out the window into the sunshine. He wouldn’t be kept in that room for long, not even if he got to look inside the hood of someone’s car.

  Lengyel followed with his hands in the pockets of his white suit-jacket; the sun turned Gabor’s black hair reddish and his slender, restless shoulders pressed against the windowpane. Lengyel said, “Did you know songs could be taken apart to figure out what makes them run, like cars?”

  Gabor turned then, and asked, “Like airplanes?”

  “If you prefer,” said Lengyel. “You like airplanes, don’t you?”

  Gabor walked away, straight through the hall to the verandah, where, by the time Lengyel found him, he was humming a tune that went nowhere and humming it with such natural confidence that Lengyel paused to listen. When I took Gabor home that night, he rested his head on my shoulder, and said, “Momma, you know that song you used to sing when I was little?”

  “Which one?” I asked him.

  “The one about the magic bear,” he said.

  “The bear wasn’t magic,” I replied. “He was just big.”

  “Oh,” Gabor said. “I made up a song today about a magic wolf.” And he sang it to me on the tram, about a wolf who flew an airplane, and all the while I was so full of my own troubles that I barely listened.

  THAT NIGHT, JANOS did not come home. He’d been late often enough, but even after I’d fallen out of the habit of waiting up for him, I’d always woken up to the familiar pressure of his back against my own. That Friday morning, I didn’t. I didn’t see him in school the next day, and in fact, he was reported absent. When I returned, he was in his study with the door open and the scrubby hair on his crown damp with exertion. I knew how unusual it was for him to be at home so early in the afternoon, and I didn’t want to break in and ask where he’d been; in that way, I lost my only reasonable chance to ask a few questions.

  Because I didn’t demand an explanation for the first night, it was an unspoken agreement that I couldn’t demand one for a second or a third, and so passed two years speckled with those absences. Then, one autumn, when Gabor was fourteen, Janos disappeared for two full weeks. He returned with his mustache shaved and, I swear, smelling differently, like disinfectant.

  I handed Janos his mail, which had piled up, and he frowned and leafed through it. I remembered a time when he’d read to me over supper, news of old classmates from the Polytechnic, paragraphs from the engineering journals. I’d never liked that habit; I couldn’t keep my mind on what he read and usually had to pretend I’d understood him. Now, I found myself clearing my throat to get the attention of my clean-shaven husband, and I said, “I just got some news from Bela. Want to hear?”

  “No time now,” Janos said, carrying his work to his study.

  Then, he closed the door, so I couldn’t tell Janos that Bela was coming to Hungary for a visit, and he would stay with us overnight before traveling south to see his mother and sister in Szeged. I’d been curious to know how Janos would respond.

  BELA WAS DUE IN ON a Thursday. I was supposed to meet his train, so I would miss one of the afternoon salons. Gabor looked cross, but then he brightened. “Istvan could pick me up.”

  “Istvan who?” I asked. It never occurred to me to call Lengyel by his first name.

  Gabor laughed. “I won’t tell him you said that. He won’t mind swinging by. He has a new Mercedes.”

  Of course, I should have asked him how he knew that sort of thing, but I’ll admit to having plenty on my mind at the time, so I said, “Just don’t tell anyone your cousin’s here. They’ll steal him away.”

  “Oh, him,” Gabor said. By then, his natural sweetness had gained an edge of sarcasm which sometimes made him seem a little older than he was. He was already close to the height of Janos. He liked to stretch out on the floor when he did his homework. Chairs couldn’t contain him. Of Bela, he said, “He’s the farmer, isn’t he? The bear who ate the bread?”

  I knew I shouldn’t play that game now, but I said, “That’s right. Borzas Medve. You can’t tell me you’re not a little curious.”

  “Isn’t he the one who’s such a Jew?”

  “Yes, he is,” I said. “I’m making a roast.”

  “Well, I’ll be back. No question,” Gabor said, kissing me on the head. “A roast. You never make me a roast.”

  So he accepted my terms, and that Thursday, at five, when a midnight-blue automobile pulled up by the flat, he leapt up, threw on his coat, and swung through the door, calling back, “He lets me drive!”

  Now I opened my mouth to say a thing or two, but Gabor was already out the door, and I stuck my head out the window and watched him climb into the driver’s seat. I could barely make out Lengyel, who moved over to make room for him. How could anyone in his right mind put my son behind the wheel? I couldn’t let myself dwell on it for long. There was a roast to cook, a train to meet, and there was Janos.

  FOR THE FIRST WEEK after Janos’s return, he had come home every afternoon straight from school and at once locked himself in his study, emerging only to make himself a sandwich or open his mail. I noticed he’d switched from a pipe to cigarettes, a strong Bulgarian brand, and those cigarettes, along with his naked upper lip, gave me the sen
se that the man was an impostor. Finally, one afternoon when Gabor was out, I waylaid Janos, standing bodily in front of his study door, and I said, “What’s going on?”

  Janos frowned, and without his mustache, he looked all the more severe. “Nothing that concerns you.”

  “Janos, I’m your wife.”

  “I don’t have time for this nonsense,” said Janos.

  A lump rose to my throat, and as I spoke through it, my voice came out all crooked. “I want the truth,” I said. “I want to know the truth.”

  Janos sighed. He said, “All right. I wanted to wait until it was confirmed, but you were going to find out anyhow. One way or another.” He motioned me towards the couch and sat me down, and he lit one of those brutal new cigarettes, a gesture that made my stomach turn. I knew that for me they had always been a way to stop time, to keep one moment from following the next, to postpone. Janos took a puff, blew it nowhere in particular, and said, “I’ve been offered a position. Abroad.”

  I stared. The blood ran out of me, and it was as though the old couch on which we sat was slipping down a precipice. I wanted to hold onto something, and without even thinking, the thing I grabbed hold of was my husband. “What?”

  Janos broke free and said, “You heard me. It’s been arranged.”

  “Where?” I asked him.

  Janos stubbed out his cigarette, hesitating, and then he gave me a long look. “Has someone been asking you about me?”

  My voice caught, and when I didn’t answer right away, he pressed me.

  “Has anyone been by? Tell me the truth.” Now I know he was waiting for me to say: The truth is that we want you with us, that we need you here. But then, all I saw in that look was an accusation. I shrank back and made myself speak.

  “You’re having an affair, aren’t you.”

  “I won’t even give that the benefit of an answer,” Janos said.

  That’s when I should have said it: Stay. But instead, I said, “I suppose you think I’ve driven you away.”

  “It’s not about you. Why can’t you see past yourself? You’re like a child,” Janos said. He got up and rubbed the place where his mustache used to be. “You think I’m a defeated man because we don’t live a bourgeois life. If that’s what you want, you’re better off without me.”

  Then he walked off to the study and closed the door.

  After that day, he was gone again for a week, and then he returned. He said a few words to me in passing. Once, he engaged Gabor in a conversation about jet propellers that seemed to go on for so long that I wanted to drop a tray of sandwiches or crack a window, do something to signal disaster. Afterwards, Gabor said to me, “He’s in a good mood today. You know, he said he’d take me to watch the trains again? I don’t think we’ve done that since I was a kid.”

  “You still are a kid,” I said, heart beating hard. But all I could imagine was Janos and Gabor boarding a train and riding far away, leaving me alone.

  ALL OF THIS preoccupied me during the weeks before Bela’s arrival. It was strange, the way something you long for happens and then seems almost beside the point. I bought the makings of a wonderful dinner and left the roast in the oven while I went to meet Bela’s train. That train was late. That gave me too much time to think, and I deliberately kept my mind on that late train and on what might have happened to Bela. Did he catch malaria in steerage? Did they take away his visa? Did they stop him at the border? Worrying about Bela was like settling into a warm bath. I relaxed on the station bench, marked time by the announcement of new trains, and came to myself only when Bela shook my shoulder.

  He took me up and hugged me, and when he let me go, I braced myself for my first look at him in fifteen years. I said, “You’re still big.”

  But he wasn’t. He’d dropped weight, too much weight, and rather than standing straight, he veered a little to the right. There was a lot of gray in his hair. I felt moved, somehow, by the sight of Bela approaching middle age, and I waited for him to tell me that I was still as small as a girl. He didn’t. Instead, he hoisted a duffel-bag over his shoulder, an outdoor gesture that somehow looked out of place in a train station. “Uff,” he said. “Should have gotten a porter.”

  “I made you a roast,” I said, “but it’s probably shoe leather by now.”

  “Nora, I’d love shoe leather,” he said, “believe me. I can’t remember the last time I had a decent piece of beefsteak. I’m sick of cucumber salad and eggplant pie and—”

  “Milk and honey?”

  “Honey,” Bela admitted. “The hives are fine. I’ll tell you more but I’m out of breath. Let’s just go home.”

  That might have started it, the way he had said home, much as he had once said that when he was with me it was like having time to himself. I watched the way he doubled under the bag and thought, I should take up a strap, yet logically that only would have made the weight more awkward. The long train ride must have made him stiff. As we pushed our way into the open, he stumbled a little, but recovered himself.

  At the threshold of the underground, he hesitated. It was then I remembered. I said, “Drop the bag.”

  “It’s fine,” Bela said. “I’m fine.”

  “We’re taking a taxi,” I said to Bela.

  “I can roll it down the stairs,” Bela said. He blushed hard, which made him look younger. “This is really embarrassing, but with my knee the way it is—”

  “Don’t you want to see the wonderful new taxis in Budapest?”

  Bela shook his head. “I’ve been looking forward to taking the underground since I got off the boat.”

  “It’s not necessary,” I said.

  “Since when did you turn into my mother.”

  I couldn’t decide whether I felt insulted, and to be honest, I don’t think I got over the remark until we’d managed to roll the bag downstairs and were seated in one of the cars. I lit a cigarette and said, “So here you are, on the underground. Is it everything you thought it would be?”

  “I’m not a cripple,” Bela said.

  “Well, I’m not your mother,” I said. “Don’t call me that or I’ll have to do something drastic.”

  Bela smiled. He’d set the duffel between his knees, and when he leaned over to put his arm around me, the weight was substantial. “Drastic? Like what?”

  I said, “Like take my son and move to Palestine.”

  The underground gave a groan then, reaching its terminus. Bela laughed. “Well, that would be drastic, all right. And to think I wondered all these years what it would take to convince you.”

  “I’m serious,” I said, and then the doors opened and we had to struggle with that duffel-bag again. It was harder to roll up than to roll down, and Bela pushed. All the while, he kept looking at me, earnest as ever, the lines around his eyes and mouth somehow making him look even more probing and gentle, and it touched something in me that for weeks now had been opening. Over each step the duffel rolled, and I thought about the way things climb, year after year, and go nowhere, and rising over the bag, that face of Bela’s, really there, looking up at me, and when the bag came over the final step and Bela followed, I said, “We’re going with you—Gabor and me. To Palestine.”

  “Hey, Nora, hey,” he said, catching his breath. “Now what’s up? What’s the trouble?”

  “You don’t believe me,” I said. “But we’re going back with you.”

  He managed to calm me down, and that’s when I told him Janos was going to leave me. He asked me if I was sure and how long there had been problems. He asked me if we had tried to talk it out or had spoken to a rabbi. This last question made me choke. By then, we’d reached the flat, which was a little smoky from a roast that had cooked for far too long, and Bela threw down the duffel, sat on it in a temporary sort of way, and looked at me.

  “Nora,” he said, “you know, it’s not an answer.”

  I was opening a window when he said it, so I didn’t think I’d heard him right. “What isn’t an answer?”

 
“Leaving. Running away. That’s not a reason to make aliyah.”

  A little air blew the curtain over me, and I pushed it back. “I’m not running away.”

  “Just talk to him. You’ve always been so good at speaking your mind.”

  “That’s not true.”

  I had spoken without thinking. I had no idea what I’d meant by what I’d said. Bela leaned his elbow on his knee, and put his chin in his hand, looking up from that pose of thoughtfulness in a way so heart-wrenchingly familiar that I lost my reason. He asked, “What’s not true?”

  “I don’t speak my mind,” I said. I was falling all to pieces, and I had to keep myself occupied, do something with the roast, offer him coffee and a biscuit, at the very least get him sitting on the sofa properly instead of on that duffel, where he looked as though he were ready to bolt. I knelt to open the deep drawer where I kept the quilts and pillows and said, “I’ll make up your bed.”

  From behind, I heard Bela shift his weight. He spoke with some hesitation. “Maybe I shouldn’t stay here.”

  What could I do then but rise with all of that bedding pressed against my chest and my flesh compressed to a fist in my throat. He was going to go to a hotel. After all, I had no claim on him, nor had he reason to think himself anything but a friend who’d walked into something that was none of his business.

  Bela let the silence grow. Maybe he looked bewildered. I can’t know, because I couldn’t bring myself to look at him. Instead, I trained my eyes along the floor.

  I said, “I have something to show you.”

  Then I knew what I’d intended from the moment I’d pulled the bedding from that drawer. There they were, twelve boxes lined up, striped, gray, or white, all stuffed with closely written pages. I dropped the bedding and bent to pull those boxes free. As I threw down an early box, the sides broke in a kind of explosion. The contents spilled across the floor. At last, I turned to look at Bela. He rose from the duffel now, and his knee gave just enough to make him wince. “What’s this about?”

  “You’ll need some light,” I said. I switched on the lamp, and there they were, spread at his feet, maybe two hundred pages scrawled on both sides.