Louisa

by Simone Zelitch

  WITHIN TWO months, Janos gave me the information. According to witnesses, my mother had not survived the trip to Auschwitz. Aunt Monika arrived, but had at once been gassed, as had Adele, who had been pregnant at the time.

  “Her husband I could find no record of. You also might be interested,” said Janos. “Someone else has also been asking about them. The Zionist cousin.”

  I tried unsuccessfully to hide the sudden rush of blood to my heart. “He’s still in Palestine?”

  “Apparently,” said Janos.

  “That’s interesting,” I said.

  “The records aren’t very detailed. You want his address?”

  “I know it. Don’t bother,” I said. I already felt absurd enough, summoning up this information which was of no use to anyone.

  In fact, one of the women in the neighborhood called out across her fence to me one day. “I hear you’re bringing in relations.”

  I turned and tried to smile. She smiled back, or anyway showed some teeth. She was a handsome woman who must have been my own age. She was clipping roses, which grew all over her fence, pink and red. By now, some time had passed since I’d arrived in Kisbarnahely, time enough for my neighbors to more or less get used to me and make their judgments.

  “I hear your mother’s bringing her sister,” the woman said. “From Budapest. And they’re buying houses.”

  “You heard wrong,” I said, with my smile frozen in place. It would have helped, had I known her name. All I knew was that her yard was more well-tended than my own and that her dogs strained at their ropes and barked all day. It was her husband who said my mother should have paid him to chop down the apricot tree.

  She reminded me of this now and again; I always promised to get around to it and never did. He had been right of course; the tree was blighted. It stood in the dust of the yard like a useless sculpture.

  “I heard,” the woman said, still leaning on the fence, “that a trainload of Jews is arriving next week to force families out of their houses.”

  I should have said: Lady, they’re all dead. Clip your roses. Rest easy. Instead I only shook my head.

  She said, “Ask your husband.”

  In fact, Janos confirmed that there was a train arriving from Poland, one of many carrying survivors back to Hungary. He didn’t know how many had expressed interest in returning to Kisbarnahely, but he had heard that some men freed from the Labor Battalions had inquired about lost property. “Rumors have some basis,” he said. He looked worried.

  “So what if they come?” I asked him.

  “I think,” he said, “it’s time to cut down that tree.”

  TO PAY IN CURRENCY was, of course, impossible in those days. Janos came back from negotiations with the gentleman across the road in a mood even more taciturn than usual. “He’ll be here tomorrow,” Janos said to me. “He has a chainsaw.”

  “What are you giving him?”

  “A position,” Janos said. “He’s deputy in charge of the reclamation of confiscated property.”

  “I’m not sure he knows how to read,” I said.

  “That doesn’t matter. By the end of this decade, Hungary will be completely literate.”

  “And that’s how it’s done?” I asked him.

  “That’s one way it’s done,” he said. “There’s another way.”

  We had this conversation in our living room. It was late June of that second year in Barnahely: 1948. By now, we’d been together long enough to talk in short-hand, like any married couple. I wondered if we had always spoken to each other this way, or if it was like what happened in bed, a language rooted in this place, where what we said mattered.

  He said, “You know, we could have shot your friend Laszlo. He fixed their watches, and he took the house of a victim of Fascism. For such things we lined men up against the wall and shot them. You think I could find nothing on this other man? We’d get witnesses, we’re very good at that, and probably most of what they’d say would be the truth. There’s a place near the tracks where we did plenty of executions back in ’forty-five.”

  “So you silence him one way or the other? Those are the two choices?” I asked him.

  “Those are the two choices.”

  “And you choose the merciful one.” My voice sounded hollow, even to myself, because I wasn’t praising him. He knew it. It wasn’t dark and wouldn’t be dark for some time; days stretched as we approached midsummer. Then those days would shorten and fog would lay over the houses and the shops and the steeple of the Reformed church. I would live out year after year in the town I was born, with a man who had crossed a continent to find me but could not tell me why, with a man who did not believe a thing could be false or true. There would never be a time when we could make a choice because we thought it was right.

  “All right, then,” said Janos. He picked up his briefcase. “I’ve got to get back to the office. My train leaves at ten tonight.” He was going on another trip, north this time, to a village where a generator had just arrived. As ever, I watched him climb onto his bicycle. I wondered how he laid the phylacteries when he was on the road. I never asked him. There were too many things I still could not ask Janos.

  I couldn’t stay indoors; the house stifled me. I could hear a train approach. They were even more frequent now than in my childhood. Kisbarnahely was becoming a town, attracting new industries, and cement blocks of flats had been planned for the open space past the brickworks where the gypsy encampment used to be. No one could tell me what had happened to those gypsies. My first week back, I looked for the Jewish cemetery and found an empty yard overgrown with wildflowers and ivy, and now there was talk of turning it into a public park with a playground for children.

  I lit a cigarette, the last in the pack. Then I took a walk to the Kismacska. As a respectable married lady, I wasn’t quite a regular there, but I’d been known to stop in for a coffee. It hadn’t changed; its pure dinginess, as ever, overcame me like sloth. The tables with half the plastic tops peeled off were oddly comforting. Of course, the place was crowded with Soviet soldiers now.

  I slipped behind an empty table and ordered myself a coffee and a pack of cigarettes. The waitress, an unsmiling Hungarian, slapped both of them in front of me, shooting half the coffee onto the tabletop. I sipped what was left, though it was cold even before it touched my lips.

  Csaba was there as well, one table over, pretending he was grown up and playing cards with two of the soldiers. He joked with them in his broken Russian. Then he glanced over and gave me a sloppy grin. “Hey, Mrs. Gratz, come join us. Don’t you play?”

  “Badly,” I said.

  “What do you have to bet?”

  “An apricot tree,” I said, “and a handful of pipe-cleaners. Maybe also a dish of vanilla ice cream bought by a Komsomol.” I was in a strange mood. Csaba was too pleased with himself to notice.

  Then a voice came from across the room. “She can’t bet the property.”

  I turned, and there was a man I didn’t even know, with a hat pulled over an unpleasant, fisty face.

  “Come on, Comrade,” Csaba called back to him. “We’ll deal you in. It’s no fun with just three of us.”

  “I’ll be fucked if I drink with those Red Army shits. But I want the lady to know she can’t bet the property. I don’t care what the judge told her mother. It isn’t hers.”

  Csaba gave an apologetic shrug in my direction.

  The man called out: “It wasn’t her father’s. I tell you, in the village records, take a look sometime and she’ll see our name on the deed from the time of the Turks!”

  It was easy for me not to look at the man who addressed me as if I weren’t there, and as I felt some distance from the situation, it struck me that he had an excellent point. The house was as much his as it was mine. What did I really have, if I didn’t have that house? I made a little bet with myself, and I reached my hand towards Csaba and said: “Let me cut the deck.”

  Even as I set the edges of the cards neatly against
the broken tabletop, I knew what I’d find. I raised half the cards with two fingers, and turned them over. The topmost card was Winter.

  That old woman had the same solemn face I had seen when Uncle Oszkar read my cards when I was a girl. Her eyes were on the road before her, and the hand that did not hold the walking stick bunched the strings of her blue cloak between her breasts. The top of that walking stick was so jagged it was no wonder that she held it low, as she stooped to keep her bundle of twigs balanced between her shoulders. In contrast to that waste of snow and blasted trees, in the corners floated acorns so colorful, so fertile, that you could only hope they gave some sign of where she might be going.

  But it wasn’t winter in Kisbarnahely; it was midsummer. At nine at night the sky was still suffused with gray light which implied, to me, a kind of exhaustion. I asked Csaba, “Do you know the train schedule?”

  “Mr. Gratz is leaving in an hour,” he said.

  “I know, but southwest. Which train goes south or west?”

  It must have been Csaba who warned my husband, because I hadn’t packed my suitcase yet when I heard him at the door, and before I even saw him, I called, “You’ll miss your train.”

  “What are you doing? What have I done?”

  “Nothing,” I called, and I was telling the truth. “I just can’t stay here anymore.”

  Then he appeared in the doorway, sweating so hard that beads of it gathered in his mustache. “What can I do?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “I just know I can’t live where no one wants me.”

  “I want you,” Janos said, with undeniable tenderness.

  But I was ruthless. “Why?”

  “To be a husband to you.”

  “That’s not enough,” I said.

  “Where do you think you’ll go? You’re not a young woman.”

  “I don’t want to have nothing,” I said. “I can’t live with nothing.” I wasn’t even sure what I was saying anymore. “I can’t live in prison. I want to go somewhere where I don’t have to be afraid.”

  “Oh, God, Nora,” Janos said. “Listen to me.” He sat on the edge of our bed, beside my half-filled suitcase. “It’s a circumstance of life. You’re going to take it with you everywhere. Can you name one place, one place?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  Then Janos said nothing. He took his pipe out of his pocket and turned it around in his hand, though he didn’t light it. I finished filling that suitcase under his observation and was just about to close the clasp when at last he asked me, “Is Gabor my son?”

  My hand trembled, but without looking up, I said, “Gabor is dead.”

  Janos said, “I thought you’d leave, that time he came. I’ll never understand—”

  “There was nothing between us, Janos. I swear. That’s not the reason.”

  “This Bela,” Janos said, “is sure to disappoint you.”

  I couldn’t deny it. Yet this time I vowed that I wouldn’t disappoint myself. I pulled the suitcase from the bed. It was remarkably heavy. My train was due in half an hour, and I was hardly assured of a place, but it was heading in the right direction.

  “You want something impossible,” Janos said. “You’re going to a place that doesn’t exist. You’re leaving me and you can’t even tell me why.”

  HE WALKED ME TO the station, taking his bicycle along the tracks, and he helped me up and passed me my suitcase. It was frankly dark by then. I could just make out his face, and it looked so mournful and confused that I wondered what had happened to that dry young man who had tapped his pipe on the table of the Hovirag cukrászda and called me sensible. I considered what I said next to be a rehearsal for the rest of my life, and I said it with the recklessness of someone stepping off the edge of a cliff.

  “Janos, I love you. I’m leaving because it’s so hard for me to say.”

  By then, the train had pulled out. I’d timed it that way. Janos jumped on his bicycle and followed, pumping and pumping in line with the tracks, and he called, “Jump off! Jump off!”

  “I can’t,” I called back.

  “Jump off! For God’s sake! Jump!”

  But by then there was no point in calling to each other, because that train had picked up speed and I could only wave with the hand that wasn’t holding my suitcase as Janos was left far behind in the dark among the closed, shoulder-high sunflowers.

  9

  AFTER HER examination by the Bet Din, Louisa immersed herself naked in the ritual bath. They laid a sheet on the surface for modesty’s sake. It was a very old bath, constructed of gold Jerusalem stone. Louisa rose with the sheet around her shoulders. She shivered a little and was handed a towel.

  They couldn’t believe she wouldn’t take on the name Ruth. She wanted to be called Leah. This was news to Jonah, who was there, but he kept quiet. It was only later that he asked, “Can’t it be some other name?”

  Louisa said, “I like Leah. It’s plain, and she had a lot of children.”

  She never asked him to explain his heartsick reaction. That was a comfort. Still, he never managed to use the name. It became a kind of joke between them, how everyone called her Leah—the grocer, the neighbors who came by for tea and pastry, the pupils she coached—everyone but her husband, who persisted with his “Lu” even when he introduced her to his friends.

  He did have friends now, new ones, at their block of flats in Tel Aviv. Jonah had used his connection to Lorenz to find them a spacious apartment, and in return, he’d agreed to take a real management position at one of the textile mills. But, Lorenz said, his real future obviously lay in politics. Jonah decided it wasn’t really an awful thing to wear a suit to work, as long as he was allowed to pull off the jacket and roll up his sleeves. He put on weight and took to smoking the occasional cigar.

  Louisa directed children’s choirs in primary schools all over Tel Aviv. The boys and girls looked at her sweet face and pony-tail and figured she’d be a soft touch, but soon enough, she’d be making each of them sing alone to hear who had gone off-key, or tapping the music stand with her reading glasses and saying, “Hebrew is a sacred language. The prophets spoke it. I want to hear every word, or I’ll stuff your scores down your throats.” Sometimes, a teacher would look into the auditorium during rehearsal and find twenty-five children with their fingers on their lips, humming out lu lu lu. The fixed expressions on the children’s faces would be disconcerting, but they never looked that way when they performed.

  After the marriage, almost at once Louisa was pregnant. I was the first one she called. By then, I’d moved into a rooming house in Tel Aviv. It was full of nice Hungarian ladies, like a little Yellow Star House. I never needed to learn a word of Hebrew. On one side of my room was a widow who’d lived around the corner from Aunt Monika, and on the other were two spinster sisters from Keszthely, one of whom picked up the hallway phone when Louisa called and shouted, “Nora! Your daughter!”

  “Mutti,” Louisa said after she told me the news, “are you happy?”

  “Of course I am,” I said. “I couldn’t be happier.”

  That was God’s truth. I couldn’t be happier. By then, I knew my limitations.

  But Louisa wanted more. “You’re happy for us?”

  That was a more complex question. You see, what Louisa was demanding now was my blessing. She’d demanded it before, at the wedding. She wouldn’t have many more opportunities. They might not have more children, with Jonah being well over fifty now. I said, “It’s bad luck to talk about it now.”

  Louisa answered without hesitation. “No. This one will live.”

  It did too. Rather, she did, a girl they named Tamar. When Louisa came to visit me, which she does, regularly and without Jonah, she used to bring Tamar along, in part because she couldn’t find a sitter and in part because it seemed important to her that I know the child existed. Tamar has a lot of curly black hair. As soon as she started crawling, I gave her the run of my room, and somehow she always ended up burning herself on the radiator or cutting he
r lip on the side of my bed-frame, so after a while, Louisa left her at home, but she remained the center of our conversations.

  The other women in the house would gather around Louisa as she spoke in German about Tamar’s playmates and her little boyfriend Ari, about how much she loves chocolate ice cream and how impossible it is to wash the stains out of her little Shabbat dress, and about her first day at the beach.

  “She collected stones for her Nanni,” Louisa said.

  “Nonsense. She barely knows me,” I said.

  “She knows all about you,” said Louisa. From her canvas bag, she removed a brown sack of pebbles, still sandy. She dumped them on my dresser and waited for me to admire them. I thought about a custom I had learned about only recently, to place a stone on someone’s grave. Why was it done? To keep their spirit in the other world, I suppose, to give them some peace.

  After Louisa had gone, the other women in the rooming house would linger by my bed and tell me what a jewel I had in Leah and how their own daughters, the flesh of their flesh, never so much as called them. They’d all wept when they’d first heard her tell our story.

  “Tell me,” I said to them, “how often do you think about the past?”

  I asked the woman who’d once lived around the corner from my aunt. She was an ancient of days whose dyed red hair made her face as white as lime. She said, “If my story was as beautiful as yours, I’d think about it all the time.”

  IHAD A FEW MORE visitors. One was Dov Levin. He came no more than once a month; after all, he lived in Haifa. Sometimes, he brought his daughter Nami, who continued to express interest in Louisa’s case. They finally met at the wedding and set up a series of interviews which Nami was in the process of transcribing. I found Nami’s presence tiring and preferred it when Levin came alone. He always brought something I needed, like a new radio or a pot with a coil for making hot tea. Sometimes, he would just stay in the room for hours, standing on a chair and repairing the spring on my window shade.