Louisa

by Simone Zelitch

  “It’s very hard,” Janos said to me that first night, meaning it was hard for him to talk then as he’d been awake for the past thirty hours, and more particularly that it was hard for him to talk to me. He’d cleaned himself up a little with water from the boiler room, but grime still lurked in the deep crevices on either side of his mouth and in the wrinkles in his forehead.

  I said, “You shaved your mustache.” His mouth looked vulnerable without it.

  “I shaved it before I left, I think,” said Janos. “I don’t remember.”

  “Maybe you did. But I always think of you having a mustache.”

  “Would you like me to grow one?”

  In spite of myself, I laughed. “Yes,” I said.

  We were sitting in his office. He was chief civil engineer for the southeast region, a job less glamorous than it sounded. He was on the road most of the time, overseeing projects, requisitioning materials, and visiting new sites. He was good at his work and grateful for it. For most of the war, he had been stuck behind a desk doing nothing in a town in one of the Republics whose name I could never pronounce no matter how patiently Janos repeated it.

  “Surely you weren’t doing nothing at all,” I said.

  “As little as possible,” Janos said. Then it was his turn to laugh, though that laugh sounded a little forced. He had been relocated from Moscow in 1940, not long after most of the men and women he knew from the days of the Commune had been arrested and executed, Bela Kun among them. He didn’t say much about that.

  We asked little of each other at first. That night, after he’d made us tea and arranged for my lodgings, he said, “I have something for you.”

  It was the deed to the house. I looked it over, line for line, not believing it existed. “It’s not occupied?”

  “It’s only been six months since they started deportations.”

  “And my mother?” It might have been then I realized that if I took the house, it meant she wasn’t there to take it and that I was holding my mother’s death certificate in my hand.

  “You think she might claim it? It’s very unlikely she even survived the journey.”

  I knew about the deportations. The Soviets had liberated Auschwitz long ago. I changed the subject. “Can I see the house tonight?”

  “Of course,” Janos said, in an off-hand way that made me think of his old days at the Katona Jozsef School, but when I saw how he had to brace his arm on the desk in order to rise from the chair, I thought better of the idea.

  I said, “It will still be there tomorrow.”

  “I don’t see,” said Janos, “why you should believe a word I say.”

  “Neither do I,” I said. “But somehow, I do.”

  “You used to be such a sensible girl,” said Janos, and he didn’t kiss me then, but he looked as though he wanted to, almost as much as he wanted a night’s sleep. There was a heavy sweetness to that look. My bed was at the Hotel Oasis. I slept on clean sheets for a change. There was electric light too, though I didn’t use it, preferring the dark, the better to smell the faint breath of the brickworks and the railway station, the smell of home.

  The house was vacant, as promised, though its furniture had all been stolen and couldn’t be retrieved. Cleared of my mother’s heavy credenzas and sofas, the rooms looked smaller, full of clean, spring light. Beginning at the wall of what had once been my room, I paced. Fifteen. Turning, I crossed my arms and paced again. I’d returned with the intention of selling the house and my share in the shop, and it hadn’t occurred to me that I could actually move in, but of course now that I had the key in my hand, I considered the possibility. At least, I thought, until I could find a good price. Then I’d have a nest-egg to begin life somewhere else.

  “If I were you I’d go to America,” said the boy who’d given me the key. His name was Csaba, and he was Laszlo’s grandson. I would have guessed that just by looking at him. He had his grandfather’s golden hair and puppy-friendly face. He felt, to me, like a talisman, and under his protection I could bear the observation of the neighbors who watched me over their gates. Those neighbors knew who’d lived in that house, and they knew what had become of her; her hideous furniture was probably in their own parlors.

  One man did say to me as I passed, “You know, that tree’s diseased.”

  I answered casually, “Is it? I’ll cut it down.”

  “Your mother should have hired one of us to do it.”

  I didn’t ask why he hadn’t simply lopped it off at the roots once she was in Auschwitz. With a backwards glance, rather suspicious, I noted that the tree looked the same way it always looked in early April, bulbous, dun-colored, and probably in better condition than myself.

  Csaba took me to his house for breakfast. His mother had prepared a feast: a bowl of goose-fat, white bread, early vegetables, and something that almost tasted like real coffee. There were flowers in a vase and an embroidered cloth on the table. That house seemed as charmed as the rest of the town; every rug on the wall and clay pot on the mantel was the same as it had been when my mother and I spent the night there in 1919. All that woman wanted to talk about was my mother.

  “She had an iron backbone,” she said to me. “You can imagine what it took to get her out of that house.”

  “So why did she go?” Csaba asked.

  “Kedvesem, they pulled her out. You know that.”

  “Why didn’t she hide?”

  “As far as she was concerned,” Csaba’s mother said, more to me than to her son, “that house was hers. And she didn’t have to be ashamed to be sitting in the middle of it. More coffee, Nora?”

  “Yes,” I said, “I’ll take more coffee.”

  There was more to tell, about her husband, who would be on leave soon and would be happy to pass on the deed to what was left of the business, and also about Laszlo himself, who’d died within three hours of his wife the same day that the Soviets had entered Barnahely. Nothing dramatic, Csaba’s mother said. They just ran out, like clocks.

  Laszlo had worked at the optics shop even during the German occupation. The Germans took one look at his equipment and requisitioned it and him. There was no real way that he could resist them. At least they let his family alone. They even made a mascot of him. They gave him cigarettes and hung around the entrance to his shop.

  One of the Germans was fascinated by Laszlo’s collection of lenses and prisms. He wanted Laszlo to cut him a set of his own, and he asked what Laszlo would like in exchange. “Maybe a motorbike? You’d have an easier time getting to your mistress.”

  Laszlo said, “I’m too old and tired for a mistress. If you want to know the truth, I’d like the Csongradi house.”

  “Old? Nonsense. You’re younger than any of us,” the German said. “If a man loves his work, he never grows old.”

  This was in June of ’44, at the height of the deportations. Laszlo and his wife moved into the empty house. His wife was a light sleeper. She was often kept awake because the transit center at the brickyard was so close and she could hear the trains full of Jews from neighboring towns pass through. They didn’t pass like proper trains. They rattled to a halt and crawled a few meters before stopping again. They would wait for hours until new cars could be connected, and sometimes Laszlo’s wife would make him get up and close the shutters.

  By then, Kisbarnahely and Szarvas were both empty of Jews. Germans brought all sorts of things to Laszlo’s shop now: little gilt clocks, watches from Switzerland, and once a chandelier with half the crystal missing. Laszlo often worked through nights, but he always returned to that yellow house so close to the trains, and thus the house was held through the remainder of the war until their deaths and found its way back to me.

  Young Csaba seemed to be the only resident of Kisbarnahely who genuinely liked the Soviets. He picked up a lot of Russian, and as we walked from his house to the old optical shop he greeted many of the soldiers by name. The shop itself was dark and empty; the Germans had stripped it before their retreat. Laszl
o’s son hadn’t yet decided what to do with the property, and I peered through the badly boarded window and tried to make out what was left of the interior.

  “I think I was your age when your grandfather started working for my uncle,” I said. “You know, I had a terrible crush on him.”

  “It’s a good thing you didn’t marry him,” Csaba said. “Then you would have stayed here, and you would have been dead for sure.”

  That night, I was supposed to meet Janos’s train, and I came early to the brickyard. I walked for a while among the broken bricks, looking for traces. Who knows what I wanted to find: a shoe, a broken comb, a pince-nez, maybe the handle of a suitcase. I’d been told that over two thousand Jews had been collected there from the whole region over the course of two months, but there weren’t even footprints. The dirt had been raked over. So complete was my concentration that I didn’t even hear his train approach.

  Janos was in his army uniform that night. It wasn’t until he’d come very close that I saw he was growing back his mustache. I felt appalled but also giddy, and without thinking about it much, I kissed him, just a friendly kiss.

  He seemed taken aback, but only said, “You look rested.”

  “You can’t say more than that?”

  “What else should I say?”

  This exchange took place in front of several other officers, the only consolation being that they probably didn’t understand Hungarian. In Russian, Janos explained that I was an old friend and that our meeting was one of the miracles of the war. He translated for me afterwards as we walked back to the house.

  The air felt soft that night, though it had been a spring slow to begin, full of false thaws and sudden frosts. I said to him, “You don’t call me your wife?”

  He didn’t look at me as he said, “Ten years’ abandonment.”

  “But I’d prefer it.”

  Then he stopped short and turned to me. He asked, “Why?” He looked almost angry. “I can’t see how you can. We’re strangers to each other now, aren’t we?”

  I felt suddenly tired. I realized I’d spent all day tramping around Kisbarnahely and that the last hour in the brickyard had worn me down. I said, “We don’t have to be strangers.”

  IT COULD BE ARGUED that we had never been other than strangers. Sometimes, when I’d find his pipe-cleaners on the table, I’d pick them up and wonder when he’d started using them instead of knocking the bowl against the furniture. His mustache was also a surprise, gray and vigorous. Then there was the camera, a German model the size of his hand that he drew out of a leather pouch one afternoon. He raised it to take a picture of the steeple, and I caught his hand and said, “What happened to the measuring tape?”

  He glanced down, distracted. “What measuring tape?”

  “I thought you didn’t trust photographs,” I said.

  “I don’t,” said Janos, and then he took the photograph, stepped back, and took another. Then he put it down at last and said, “I don’t trust measurements either.”

  “What do you trust?” I asked him, as we walked back home together. Rather than answering, he paused in the middle of the road to stare at an ink-black rabbit as it flashed across the grass. Then he turned with the camera and took a photograph of me.

  AFTER SOME TIME, we began to share a bed again. Once, he had pulled up my little nightgown; now I was the one to reach for him and work the drawstring on his pajamas, feeling, below my fingers, something unfamiliar. He’d draw back, but I would not let him go, knowing that in this room, my parents made me, in this house, I dreamed of flight, and now I’d flown back to find this man who entered me at first as though it hadn’t been what he’d intended, as though taken by surprise. I rocked with him.

  Those good hands found me. I remembered nights long ago when those hands took me apart like a music box. Now they were less precise. They drew me in, but I had to draw myself deeper, carry him with me. I cannot describe what happened. It troubled and frightened me like an important conversation.

  Then there was the morning I decided to find out why Janos sometimes left our bed just before I got up. I thought he might have gone out to take photographs, and after a few educated guesses, I tried the field where he had seen the rabbit. I spotted him in the middle of overgrown weeds, facing east.

  He was alone. The weeds around him rustled; it was otherwise quite still. His back was turned to me, and his shoulders were hunched; it almost looked as though he were reading. He looked so meditative that I almost turned back. Then, he himself turned, and I saw that he was wearing phylacteries.

  I was struck dumb. I’d never seen them anywhere but in the window of a religious store on Dob Street. The effect of the crossed leather on his arms and the thong around his forehead made me shiver, as though he were being drawn and quartered.

  Janos spoke first. “Don’t tell anyone.”

  I could only ask, “How long?”

  “I began a year ago,” he said. “They were passed on to me. They belonged to a man who’s dead now.”

  His voice was a hoarse whisper. He didn’t expect me to understand, and in point of fact, I didn’t. What can you say when you find your husband bound in the tfillin of a dead Jew? He removed them, and he showed me their case, a bag made of dull, black velvet. It must have been richly embroidered once, though now most of the stitching was undone.

  The man had been Hungarian, on trial in Moscow because he had known Bela Kun. When the trial began, there had at first been little evidence of association. Of course, Janos said, evidence could be manufactured, and it made little difference in the end whether the conversations actually took place, whether the café where they met existed, whether the room was crowded or they dined alone, whether the table measured one meter or five meters from the doorway where the informer stood recording what he heard.

  In this case, however, there was a firm piece of evidence, a photograph taken during the Commune in 1919. Kun and five comrades, including the man in question, posed before a velvet curtain. Other photographs were passed around that day, more enemies of the state irrefutably associated with Kun and Kun’s co-conspirators. Those photographs were so widely circulated that they reached even the obscure town where Janos sat behind his desk doing as little as possible.

  “Useful photographs,” said Janos. “Might still come in handy to somebody else one day.”

  I asked, “So you wear his tfillin because you have him on your conscience?”

  Janos shook his head. “It’s not his name that’s inside of them,” he said. “That’s not what’s written on the parchment.”

  I will confess that I did not know what was written on the parchment, and it came on me like a dizzy spell that Janos was telling me that he believed in God. Such a confession, made even obliquely, made me tumble backwards to the day he told me in a whisper that he was a Communist, and I wanted to make him swallow his words because I didn’t know what I was supposed to do with them.

  “From the day I turned thirteen,” Janos said, “until I left my father’s house, I wore these every time I prayed. Back then, I prayed the way you smoke, Nora.”

  I said, “I don’t understand.”

  “I prayed,” he said, “out of habit. And because it was the only way I knew one hour was different from another one, because I lived in a prison. You once told me you thought my politics was a trap. I thought it was a key, that I could become a free man.”

  By now, we’d reached the house again, and I was fixing coffee. He took out his pipe and looked inside the bowl.

  “I couldn’t believe my luck when I met you. I looked at you and thought: That girl could have anyone.”

  I didn’t let myself laugh. I sat myself across from him as he felt in his pocket for a pipe-cleaner and looked at me under his ragged eyebrows. I only said, “Maybe you’re right.”

  “You were smart, young. The world was open to you.”

  “And it wasn’t to you?”

  “I never told you,” Janos said. He took a sip of coffee
then, wetting the end of his mustache. Then he said, “I had a wife.”

  I let that sink in. It struck me that once you’ve decided to forgive someone, the choice stands; you must forgive them everything. Admittedly, I didn’t find that one so hard to forgive. Really, I was more curious. “How old were you when you got married?”

  “Sixteen,” said Janos. “She’s dead now.”

  “And your father?”

  “Dead.”

  “Uncles? Cousins?”

  “Of course they’re all dead.”

  “How can you know?”

  Janos had no more coffee in his cup, so now his hesitation took the form of cleaning out his pipe, and he did that for a long time before telling me that he had no reason to think they were alive.

  “So you haven’t tried to find out?”

  “I’ve made no inquiries.” Janos pushed his chair back. “I have to get to work. I’m already late.”

  “And me? Did you ask anyone about me?” I also rose from the table and was surprised to feel tears come to my eyes. “Don’t leave yet. Let me know.”

  With the back of the chair still in his hands, Janos swallowed. “What would I have to say to those people?”

  “What do you have to say to me?” I asked, helpless and barely believing I could ask such a question.

  “What do you want me to say to you?”

  “I want you,” I said, “to tell me you’re glad we’re both alive.”

  Between us was the table and his chair, both Soviet issue. We felt the distance between us, physical and not easy to move. Janos’s voice broke. “How can you ask me to be glad?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  Janos said, “I have to go,” and in fact he would already be almost half an hour late for work. He’d gained control of his emotions, or at least his voice was steadier now. “I want to be a husband to you.”

  I almost asked: Why? For the same reason you wear your phylacteries? Instead, I said, “I want you to find out what happened to my mother and my aunt and my cousin. I want to know.”

  Janos nodded, and looked oddly relieved. His bicycle was in the garden, and as he rode to work, it drew a long rut through the mud, spattering the cuffs of his trousers. Alone, I wondered why I’d asked. He might think I’d done it to shame him. And in fact, did I really want to know at all?