Louisa

by Simone Zelitch

  “How much time do you think I have? Her comings and goings are well-known.”

  Now I could see the ash-can and its lip of flame. Perhaps ten of the Transylvanian girls surrounded it, chattering in Hungarian and poking through crates and greasy paper sacks.

  “Look,” Berkowitz said, “take it or leave it.”

  “Leave what?” I asked. The fumes from the fire were thick and sour. One girl pulled out a pair of cotton bloomers.

  “You know what. What they found,” Berkowitz said.

  What were those girls sorting through? Pages from magazines fluttered past, and on each was a picture of a blond woman with a serene smile. Then there were stockings dumped from a cardboard box, white cotton stockings from the charity bin, the ones that had been on Louisa’s legs the day she’d found me there at Zalaegerszeg. I drifted past Berkowitz, drawn towards the items floating from that box: ticket-stubs, locks of fair hair, more bloomers, white, off-white, a clear horn comb, and there it was, unfolded, light and almost in pieces like the petals of a daisy, and by then I was close enough to catch it. So faint the type, if I hadn’t known, I wouldn’t have been able to read: Das gibts doch nicht! Wann? Wo?

  One of the girls tried to grab it from my hand, but I stepped away in time and read those two lines of German. Below it was an address in an exact handwriting I recognized.

  Close to my ear, the voice of Berkowitz. “You must have known.”

  My hands were shaking so hard that I couldn’t at first read that writing. What was the address? It had been half-torn and I knew I would not be able to see it by this light.

  “Where do you think she’s been going? To pick oranges? No, you’ve known. And you’ve let it go on. Even this, she’s taken from you.”

  The girls seemed to have forgotten about the telegram. To them, it was worth no more than everything else they’d stolen from Louisa, the undergarments, stockings, ticket-stubs, and bits of hair pulled from her brush, the images of her they’d found in magazines, all of which they burned with the other remnants of their childhood: sheepskins, tubes of cheap lip-stick, the limbs and heads of all those dolls.

  I said, “I owe her my life.”

  “No, you don’t,” said Berkowitz. “There’s something you’re not telling.”

  “I owe her my life,” I said again, and the soft, dark heads of all those girls bobbed close, and looked, to my mind, like the heaps of coal in the cellar where I hid through the siege of Buda, and the fire, too, put me in mind of that cellar, where by February I was in danger of freezing to death, but couldn’t light a fire.

  “Wash your hands of her,” said Berkowitz. “She’ll come back tonight, so innocent. What ties you to her? Wash your hands of her.”

  Never had his Hungarian sounded so rhythmic. Lulled to the point where I could hold the telegram open, I read the return address at last: M. Lorenz LTD, 310 Hillel Street, Haifa.

  Then, almost as an afterthought, his new name: Jonah Histaresh

  I heard myself say, “I wash my hands of her.”

  That was all I said. I made no promises. I signed no papers. And I didn’t get a thing from him then, not so much as another cigarette. A wind blew through me, cold, from nowhere. Somehow I took a few steps forward and there I was in front of the administrative office, dark now, and padlocked, and it was a cool, ordinary night in June. I turned around, and there was the ash-can, smoking. One of the girls still stood there, looking at me through the hair in her face. She held a burnt stick. The rest seemed to have disappeared.

  And Berkowitz was gone. With the sense of grasping at air, I closed my hand around that telegram, and when the paper crackled, I smoothed its folds and read again: Nora: I don’t believe it. When? Where?

  Then that name I must have thought belonged to a postmaster: Jonah Histaresh. Yet in those words I heard the voice of my Borzas Medve, the shaggy bear who’d hold me upside down as I plucked, from the tree, the sweetest apricot. There was the address in my hand.

  “My cousin,” I said, to no one in particular, “likes little girls.”

  The words deepened that chill that hadn’t left me, and I longed for that coat I’d lost, the one Adele had given me on my wedding day. It had been such a good, soft lamb’s-wool coat, and now it was gone.

  “Go to him,” I said, as though Louisa could hear me. Or was I talking to myself? I was face-to-face with that welcome I’d convinced myself my cousin wouldn’t give me. I could go that night. I’d find him and he would crush me to him, clumsy and overwhelmed. He’d welcome me; I had the telegram in my hand.

  Why did I sit on the stoop of that administrative building without so much as a cigarette to keep me company? All of this time, she’d known, maybe she’d seen him, and now I could see him too, yet I did not move.

  I could not throw myself at Bela’s feet. Once I had thrown a box of letters there, and come to grief. Now he had met this little girl, Louisa, the one who had saved my life. Why did I send her in my place? What was I afraid of?

  4

  FIVE YEARS AGO, in March of 1944, Gabor died. He died along with many young men pulled from trams or found in train stations or airports in the days after the Germans invaded Budapest. Now that the war was clearly lost, Hitler was afraid that Hungary would make a separate peace with Britain and America; thus, by March, he took a firmer hand. That spring, the Germans would begin the process of gathering the Jews of Hungary’s provinces for deportation east. The Germans worked against time, emptying villages before they could be liberated by the Soviets.

  Five years ago, in June, months after Gabor’s death, I put on the old lamb’s-wool coat, stuffed cigarettes, a comb, and my papers in its pocket, and moved to a Yellow Star House. The house was in the Kiraly district, and other Yellow Star Houses were by policy scattered throughout the city so that Jews would be spared no part of the Allied bombings. By then, a lot of Pest was rubble. The flat I occupied was not so far from Aunt Monika’s old place. The owner remembered me and said, “Poor Moni. She was a lady. She’d die if she saw the class of people they’ve got here now.”

  Perhaps I did look a cut above the rest, as I wasn’t hunchbacked under a life’s belongings, but almost at once I sunk to their level. There were twelve of us in three rooms, with our elbows in each other’s faces, bickering over where to hang the wash or who got first crack at the bath-water. We slept in our clothes because we never knew what would happen in the middle of the night. There was no privacy for changing anyhow, though in the end, modesty gave way along with everything else.

  Nine of the twelve of us were women. Most had sons or husbands in Labor Battalions, some in Romania and some in Serbia. A few of the husbands had been in the Ukraine when it was liberated, and their wives kept a little apart from the rest of us, as though they had something we didn’t. Though they’d heard no word from them, they never stopped speculating on when they would appear at the head of an invading Soviet army.

  What I wouldn’t have given to get out of that place, even for an hour, but it was safest to remain indoors. Curfew was arbitrary. Sometimes they would give us two hours to see a doctor or buy groceries, and without warning we would have to drop our bags and run for shelter for fear of arrest. Still, for all the chaos of those months, there were a lot of rules. A list was posted in the house lobby with restrictions on entertaining guests, shouting from balconies, and disposing of rubbish.

  Those rules were a great comfort. We reasoned: Someone must have taken the trouble to formulate those impossible sentences and post the list in every Yellow Star House. We had heard rumors about the provinces, talk of Jews from Debrecen and Szeged being deported to some desolate part of the Great Plains or to a labor camp called Waldsee. A few of us began to receive messages from family who’d been sent to Waldsee: I have arrived. Am well. These handwritten postcards were at first reassuring, but when they began to arrive in great numbers, all bearing the same message—I have arrived. Am well—we did not know what to think. I received one from Adele, whom I hadn’t hea
rd from since winter.

  One thing seemed certain: They would not deport Budapestis. If someone cared about how we disposed of our rubbish, why would they bother to displace us altogether? Maybe we could just sit out the rest of the war.

  By summer, Romania had been liberated and American bombs blasted the roof off a church not far from the house. Plaster rained into our soup. That soup was muddy and foul, full of pumpkin-fragments and tallow dumplings. Plaster might have improved the taste. We used teacups for bowls.

  A woman who’d just arrived looked at me over her cup. “So where’s your husband?”

  I said, “East.”

  “Perhaps he’s escaped and joined the partisans,” she said. She wanted to cheer me up.

  It took a long time to chew through one of those dumplings. I swallowed hard and said, “Perhaps he has.”

  THEN THERE WAS Louisa. I hadn’t seen her since the day of Gabor’s death, and as far as I knew, she had moved back with her parents on Rose Hill. We were not in touch. Then, in October, I returned from shopping and found her at the entrance of the house. Non-Jews were not forbidden to enter a Yellow Star House. A few even had rooms there because they refused to be forced to make way for us. Still, Louisa couldn’t have looked more conspicuous. She wore a warm blue coat I’d never seen before, and with her pink cheeks and her glossy hair, she might have lived on pastries and cream.

  Without preamble, she came to me and said, “I’ll take your bag.”

  I didn’t reply.

  “I’ll take it up for you,” she said. “Let me.”

  “Go home,” I said to Louisa. “This isn’t the place for you.”

  Something in my voice must have alarmed her. She turned pale. Then, with no warning, she tore the bag out of my arms and stumbled back with a strange smile on her face.

  I asked her, “How did you find me?”

  “I had to talk to you,” she said. “I couldn’t—”

  I broke in. “You want the groceries? Take the groceries. There’s nothing I can do.”

  “Mutti,” Louisa began. “I had to see you, that you’re alive.” She was so much stronger than me that she could cradle that heavy bag of canned milk and potatoes in a single arm, and she approached me with the free hand outstretched; I cannot fully describe the heat and nausea that radiated from her to myself.

  With all my strength, I pushed Louisa back. She stumbled, whimpering, and spilled those pathetic groceries onto the muddy sidewalk, and before she could recover, I fled upstairs where I wrenched open the door and closed it behind me, holding myself against it, shaking so hard that I could feel it rattle in its hinges.

  NOT LONG AFTER that, news came to us by way of a radio three floors down. Hungary had begun negotiations with the Soviets. We actually believed it was the end, that the bombs would stop falling and the Germans would leave and the Red Army would roll into Pest. It was so sudden and so dazzling that we didn’t know what to do with ourselves. Some of the girls tore off their yellow stars. Later, I heard that in the labor camps the men threw down their picks and danced.

  In fact, the news was false. That was the day of the German coup. Hitler ordered the current government of Hungary to be replaced by the Arrow Cross, Hungarian Nazis. There would be no more quotas or curfews and no more laws about collecting rubbish. In a month, maybe two, we’d all be dead.

  By evening, I was huddled in a doorway somewhere near the Duna with my heart in my throat. Gunfire at close range is unmistakable, even if you’ve never heard it before. I pulled tight that lamb’s-wool coat and was thankful that I was well-hidden because somehow, even if I didn’t care whether I lived or died, my body disagreed.

  I shivered; the lining of that coat had disintegrated into a few rags crosshatched by soft threads. I dug my hands into what was left of the pockets, and by then I’d grown so thin I couldn’t even find my own legs. Then, something bit my thigh. It was a key.

  It was the key to the padlock of Louisa Bauer’s cellar door. I knew that because once I had a son who told me those things. On my face was an expression of mingled grief and hostility, and then that face broke like an egg, or like Gabor’s head broke the day he died. I will not describe that death in detail now. Save it for later.

  This much I will tell you. I considered the possibility that I could manage to make my way across the bridge to Rose Hill, to the house with the green shutters. I had never seen the house before, but it had been described to me. I knew the way. And what would the Arrow Cross make of this thin, pale woman moving steadily down the lip of the Duna River with one hand across her heart, the other plunged into the pocket of her coat? Let them make a corpse of her. She is already a corpse. She finds that cellar door, and she opens the padlock and crawls into the dark. The door closes behind her.

  5

  HOW WELL HAVE I described the Bauer cellar? It was damp and lined with coal-colored moss. It hadn’t been used for some time, though an ancient heating vent led up to the grid which, as I’d mentioned, opened below the pedals of the piano in the practice room. When the grid was removed I could fit head and shoulders through it, though that head was bound to hit the piano.

  In happier times, the cellar had held wine; I could make out mossy, bottle-shaped impressions on the floor. No wine now; for comfort, I made do with horse-hair blankets, and, of course, cigarettes.

  All in all, not so bad. When Louisa discovered me that night, she leaned over that grid with a struck match; her face was lit ghoulishly from below. I noted changes the few months had wrought. Her soft, pink mouth had a line down each side now, and her downcast eyes looked dry.

  She didn’t ask me how I got there. At first I wondered if she’d speak at all. But then she whispered, “You can’t stay. We’re leaving Budapest next week.”

  I said, “I’m not leaving.”

  The match spent itself. There was a little second-hand light coming to the practice room from the hallway, and I knew she was still there.

  I said, “I’m staying here, and I’m not planning to die.”

  Louisa’s voice caught. “What can I do?”

  “You want to turn me in?”

  Now my eyes adjusted to the dark and I could make out a faint shine in Louisa’s eyes, almost fear.

  “You’re not leaving,” I said.

  So gray and indistinct did Louisa look, so sick at heart, that you would think it was she, rather than I, who would soon be forced to live down in that cellar and wait for death. You would think she had something to complain about. I could hear her harsh, treble breathing. I thought: She’ll stay.

  And she did. I don’t know how. The Deutsche Reichsbahn had sent her father east to help transport war workers, and her mother was preoccupied with ordering the servants to roll up the rugs, pull trunks through hallways, and throw sheets over furniture to prepare to move to the relative safety of Austria. Did Louisa tell her mother she had unfinished business here? What sort of unfinished business would keep a young girl in this house alone through that explosive winter? Perhaps she lost her in a crowded station, slipping away as the train pulled from the gate. Perhaps she feigned sleep in the back of an automobile, and crept out just before the border. I did not ask her. She did not tell me. Nor was she sought, I think. Resourceful girl.

  The grate remained between us, and it divided her face into twenty-four squares, each of which held her fine-pored skin, the down below her ears, and her light hair. That face, seen from above, hung off her bones. Sometimes she would remove the grate to pass down food, water, or cigarettes, and once or twice I thrust my own head up, and that gave her a real scare because she didn’t know what I would do.

  Later, she’d sing. The piano was no longer in tune, and to play must have been torture for her, so I made her play. From below, I could gaze diagonally across her narrow, skirted legs up to a chin trembling and bobbing with the music. Sometimes she’d hit a note so false that she would pause and look down at me.

  “I’m still alive,” I’d say then. “Sing more, dea
r. Finish the song.”

  So she would.

  “Schubert!” I’d call up. She would sing Schubert’s “Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel.”

  My bosom yearns

  to go to him.

  Ah, if I might clasp

  and hold him!

  and kiss him

  as I would wish,

  at his kisses

  I should pass away.

  Then I would call for that song I knew well.

  What is lost, what is lost

  We can not have back again.

  Then it would be more Schubert.

  My peace has left me,

  my heart is heavy.

  I shall never find peace, never again.

  “I’m still alive,” I’d say if she paused to catch her breath or to steady her hands. “Finish those songs, dear. Give those songs an ending.”

  So she would. Afterwards, she would crouch to get a better look at me, to make sure I was a real person, not some voice emerging from a hole below the piano. It’s God’s truth: She wasn’t sure. Yet I ate everything she passed me: bread, tinned meat, apples, bags of dried apricots. I smoked so many cigarettes that I could light each with the last.

  “Sing more,” I’d say. “Sing everything my son wrote.”

  “There’s just one,” Louisa would say.

  “Why just one? Surely you know more.”

  “Mutti,” Louisa would say, her voice breaking, “can I get you something? Are you cold?”

  “I’m thriving,” I’d say. It was true.

  So passed some weeks, during which my body took the shape of that crawlspace, wide and low. I defecated into a bucket that I passed up through that grate. Around this time the cold gave way to an illogical heat that nearly peeled my skin from my bones, and my mouth turned brown from all the cigarettes. They were, in some ways, the most satisfactory weeks of my life.

  What had become of all the others in the Yellow Star House? It was in those weeks that they began the marches to the border. The eleven strangers with whom I’d shared the flat probably figured I was dead. At this stage, I never asked Louisa what she saw on the street, and she never volunteered information. It was during that time, as well, that the Soviets took Pest, yet I never thought about the war. Nor did I think of Janos, or even, I’ll admit, of Bela. My days and nights, even my dreams, were full of Louisa.