Louisa Read online

  MEANWHILE, I WAS still living at Aunt Monika’s. Though my income could have paid for a room at a boardinghouse, the idea struck both Aunt Moni and Adele as absurd, even insulting. They fluttered around me, pretty, charming, gracious ladies who had lost the boy they’d spoiled and probably found me a poor substitute. Adele had given up David and was keeping company with a dashing surgeon named Andras. She tried to introduce me to Andras’s younger brother, a regular bohemian, she said, but all through the intimate dinner at the expensive restaurant, I felt myself rise slowly to the ceiling and watch us from that height as though it were a play called Young People Having a Delightful Time. Andras knew all about the Riesling we were drinking and made a series of German puns. The bohemian brother recited Brecht from memory, still a daring thing to do back then as real Communists had fled to Austria or rotted in jail all over Hungary. Adele flashed me look after look below her glowing curls, and I could tell that she assumed the smile pinned on my face was genuine, so I allowed my spirit to leave the room entirely.

  After the boys had put us in a taxi, Adele said to me, “I think Andras’s brother likes you. You can be charming when you want to be, you know. But did you really have to smoke so much? While we were eating?”

  “Some men don’t mind a girl who smokes,” I said.

  “No, I suppose not.” She leaned back into the depths of the taxi cab’s upholstery and looked suddenly wistful. “Do you ever wonder where we’ll be in twenty-five years? I mean,” she said, “Bela always knew he’d go to Palestine. But honestly, I don’t know what’ll happen to me, if I’ll be a nurse or not be a nurse, or marry Andras or someone I don’t even know yet, or no one at all.”

  I leaned in close and said, “Give me your palm.”

  She gazed up through her eyelashes. “Where did you pick that up?”

  “Gypsies,” I said. I held the slim right hand Adele presented and turned it towards the passing streetlights. The lines were faint, the soft skin just above the wrist almost transparent. It felt unfinished. Still, I could not tell her that, so I said, “Very subtle lines here. There’s more to you than there seems.”

  “What does that mean?” Adele asked, rather sharply.

  “It means,” I said, “that you’ve got a good mind, though you work hard to hide it. Also, you’ll be an excellent nurse.”

  But those were commonplaces. As the taxi turned up Dohany Street and passed the synagogue, I knew I had to say more, so I asked for her left hand, squinted, and saw the smooth palm divide itself into braided lines that flowed up from the base.

  “So, Nora,” Adele said, “tell me. Where will I be in twenty-five years?”

  That would be 1946. I touched my forefinger to my cousin’s wrist as we cut past a streetlight and abruptly, each fine line burst into flame. I said, “I can’t read palms, not really.”

  Adele retrieved her hand. “I don’t believe you. You can. You just don’t want to read mine.”

  Fortunately, we’d reached our house by then, and Aunt Monika spread out some coffee and cakes and turned on the gramophone, and Adele either forgot to press me or she had tact enough to let the matter go.

  What would Adele and Aunt Moni make of my young man, that is if he was my young man at all? I wrote to Bela, who was still in Haifa then: What would you think of a child named Gabor? I suppose you and your Dori would go for something Hebrew.

  I imagined that when Janos and I actually married, I would write Bela with the news. It never occurred to me that anyone else would have to know.

  I OWED the job at the Katona Jozsef School to Bela; he’d written to the headmistress about me soon after I arrived in Budapest. She had been in charge before the Commune, when the school was simply called the Rakoczi Gimnazium and had no pretensions. Back then, Bela had taught a little German and Italian to replace men drafted during the Great War. It was right around the corner from his home on Dob Street. Bela had been absurdly young, but he must have made a strong impression because the headmistress hired me on his recommendation, sight unseen. When I arrived the first day and asked where she kept the typewriter, she admitted it had been tucked away somewhere but she hadn’t thought it necessary. She was a mild lady with short hair and a loose gown, a little too old to try to look so modern.

  “I’ve always done up the correspondence by hand,” she said. “It is more personal. Still, I suppose you could give the old girl a try. If you think it would be faster. We are a little pokey around here, what with the changes.”

  In that office were at least a dozen boxes of loose correspondence and contracts and ten-month-old tuition checks, a few unsigned. These I sorted as best I could. Then there were reams of old materials from the Commune about the plight of Pesti seamstresses which sat under a leak and were infested by mites. I found two strong men on the street and offered them both beers if they would clear the mess away.

  The school had no filing system to speak of; the headmistress had stuffed everything she could into the drawers of a beautiful rosewood desk, and when I told her we needed metal cabinets, she said nothing. At first I thought she disapproved, but when the cabinets appeared the next day, I realized the poor woman was terrified. Of me.

  Given those circumstances, it was no surprise that I outlasted the headmistress and four others. In fact, I would be a fixture at the Katona Jozsef School right through the early forties. Students would pass through the office, cadging change for the cukrászda or complaining about this teacher or that, but on the whole I wasn’t a favorite with the girls. I was too efficient about passing on records to their parents and I did not take bribes. Once, someone let slip that they called me Old Shylock. Interesting, given that most of the students had been drawn from the surrounding neighborhood, and were Jews themselves.

  Janos was not popular either. As one of the few male instructors, he should have held some fascination for the girls, but he spent most of his class facing the chalkboard where he scraped out problems and solutions, and when he would turn he would be coated, head-to-toe, with chalk as though he’d fallen into a lime pit. If they made a mistake, he would wag his finger at them and back up, knocking his head against the board. Sometimes, I would overhear girls in the hallway doing Janos Gratz imitations, muttering and clearing their throats.

  One said, “Did you hear about him in the cafeteria?”

  “Cafeteria? I thought he ate chalk.”

  “He was in the cafeteria last week, Reka says, and he bends down while we eat lunch and right in the open he looks up the girls’ skirts at their panties.”

  I suddenly threw open the door, and said, “The floor.”

  The girls froze. They had been all bunched up in a cluster like a body with three heads, and they turned their round, stupid faces in my direction.

  I clarified. “He’s measuring the floor. That’s why he kneels down.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” one of them said, and from the way her lower lip trembled, I could tell she was about to burst.

  I turned and closed the door.

  THAT AFTERNOON, when I met Janos at the Hovirag, I asked him, “What do you think of the girls?”

  He took a long draw on his pipe. “I don’t think of them at all.”

  “They think of you,” I said. Then, I braced myself and added, “They think of me and you. There may be problems.”

  “Problems?”

  “I don’t—” I hesitated, and leaned back in the chair, glancing through the window at the school across the road where girls emerged in their blue pinafores. Finally, I said, “I don’t understand girls.”

  “The whole class is embalmed,” Janos said, and I didn’t know if he meant his math class or the middle class. I also knew that I had been wrong. I had nothing to do with the future Janos had planned for himself. I didn’t have good sense, not an ounce of it. Who couldn’t see right through me, if he took the trouble? I had the strangest sensation then that Bela was observing all of this, standing, bemused, in the doorway of the cukrászda, shaking his head. Janos was mutt
ering something now, into that hateful pipe-stem, and I told myself that there was no one in the world to whom I was not a stranger.

  “Janos,” I said, as though saying the name out loud would prove me wrong. But he was rising to go.

  Then, he was out of the chair and through the door of the Hovirag, walking briskly up Andrassy Street, with his shoulders bunched up and his hands in the pockets of his overcoat and the back of his brown hair sticking up like a coxcomb. But this time, I ran behind him, taking two steps for his every one, and then I did a very foolish thing. I grabbed hold of his sleeve and pulled until it tore. He turned around.

  My face was red and my eyes smarted. I said, “You’re ashamed of me.”

  Janos said nothing. He dislodged his sleeve from my hand and held the torn gabardine, staring at it with wonder.

  I said, “I’ll mend it for you.”

  “Now? You carry around a needle and thread?”

  “No,” I said, and I started to cry.

  Janos just stood there with the patch in his hand and he said, “Look, don’t. I’m no good at this. I wouldn’t care, only the coat’s a loan from a friend and he doesn’t have another one.”

  “Who is the friend? Why can’t I meet him? Why don’t you ever take me anywhere?” Even as I spoke, the questions struck me as completely reasonable. I felt startled that I’d never asked them before.

  “Nora,” Janos said. His voice had dropped back to that hateful whisper. Now he moved in close of his own accord, though my head was buried in my hands and I couldn’t see him anymore. “I’m a Communist. My friends are Communists.”

  Now my head was pressed against his chest, and his hands were buried in my hair. What he had just said wouldn’t sink in for hours, both the substance of it and what it meant that he had told me. Yet all I could say was, “That doesn’t matter. You’re ashamed of me,” just so he would stroke my hair again.

  DURING THE commune, on the first of May 1919, in Budapest there was a grand parade. The streets were strung all over with red bunting imported from the Soviet Union, and proletarians gathered under banners and marched on the Great Boulevard. Railway workers led a plaster locomotive expelling real steam; the film industry was represented by a twenty-meter film canister pulled by six white horses; girls in red neck-kerchiefs sang folk-melodies and a pensioners’ band played a rather ragged version of the Internationale; children tossed red confetti hither-thither into people’s hair.

  Janos didn’t like parades. By then he was twenty-nine, too old to be an enthusiast. He had returned from the Great War to find the Polytechnic in a shambles, and he had found a position at the Institute for Proletarian Education only because he claimed his mother was a seamstress. He was put-off by the impossible prospect of crossing the Great Boulevard, and the confetti made him sneeze, so almost by chance he stepped into what turned out to be a local chapter of the Party.

  The office was lively, full of brisk young men in leather jackets writing up dispatches for this and that newsletter. Janos sat sullenly in a hard chair until a pretty girl asked him if he knew how to type, and when he shook his head, she asked him if he knew how to run a printing press, and when he didn’t respond at all, she said, “You must be good for something, you’re so serious,” and she kissed him on the nose and walked away.

  Then Janos got up and took a step towards her, but, as was his way, he stumbled, this time straight into one of the boys in the leather jackets, and Janos said to him, “This parade is obscene! How can you justify spending that kind of money on red bunting when your revolution is bankrupt?”

  The boy laughed, and he said, “Comrade, why do you say to me, your revolution? It’s yours too. You make me think of the rebellious son they talk about at the Passover Seder who said to his father: ‘Why did the Lord lead you from bondage?’”

  “I don’t care for religious references,” said Janos.

  “I’m born Catholic myself. Just keep good company,” the young man said. Then he shouted out, “Hey! Balazs! Sign this donkey up to do something or other. He’s an accountant.”

  “Teacher,” Janos said. Then with the sense of making a confession, “And student of engineering.”

  “Very good, very good,” said Balazs, a boy with twinkling eyes who couldn’t have been older than seventeen. And that was how Janos became a member of the Communist Party.

  IT WAS THAT SIMPLE. You filled out a form and they kept a copy for their files, and you were a Party member. They gave Janos an assignment, to teach elementary economics to a group of workers in a dismal suburb an hour east of Pest. After the first class or two, the only regular attendees were a blind old man and his illiterate daughter. Half the time, Janos ended up in the old man’s flat pretending to drink homemade pálinka and nursing a guilty conscience.

  The daughter’s devotion to Bela Kun and the revolution was fierce and genuine. She made Janos read out transcripts of the debates in Parliament, and she learned parts of them by heart. Her pox-scarred face always looked a little unclean. When she talked about the Commune, she’d sweat as though she had a fever, and she’d grip Janos’s hand across the rickety table and say, “We’re so lucky to have lived to see this.”

  What could Janos say to that? It couldn’t be answered. That daughter had lost her husband in the war. Janos was afraid to ask where he had fallen. Janos himself had overseen the construction of temporary bridges on the Russian Front. As they had worked under pressure, he had doubled as surveyor and taken photographs of the area with a portable box-camera. There was something clean and scientific about setting up the tripod, snapping and developing those photographs, and overlaying the prints with faint cross-hatches in pencil.

  Yet it seemed that measuring a photograph was no substitute for measuring a site, and they distorted the height and width to the point where the materials ordered might as well have been paste and pick-up sticks. The moment men started across, bridge after bridge collapsed. As a consequence, Janos ended up in the infantry, where he tried not to think too hard about what he had done.

  Janos told that story to the woman, whose only response was: “Could you take a picture of me?”

  Reluctantly, he dug up the old box-camera and took it to the block of flats the next afternoon. He photographed the father and daughter together. The father’s cataracts had turned his eyes completely white, and his skull had visible brown spots. Even as Janos took the photograph, he wondered if the woman knew what she would be forced to see. Her hand was folded over her father’s, and she stared into the camera without smiling.

  After that day, Janos stopped teaching economics altogether. Instead, he became something of an official photographer for that block of flats. Into that grim kitchen came old women in embroidered blouses and kerchiefs wanting a picture to send to family in the provinces, young girls with waved hair and lip-rouge hoping to send a photo to a film director, and veteran after veteran in their uniforms. One of the veterans seemed too old to have served; his hair was already white and the teeth he had left were brown with tobacco. He looked as though he hadn’t taken off his uniform since the war, and it was only when he put his crumpled soldier’s cap on his head that Janos saw he was missing an arm.

  “You take my picture,” said the man. “People should know.” He took a long suck on a cigarette then, and Janos gave in to weariness. What should people know? Economics? The sight of their own faces? How to build a bridge? How to forget?

  One afternoon, as Janos was pretending to drink another glass of pálinka and smoking his pipe, someone knocked on the door. This, itself, was unusual because nobody usually bothered knocking. The woman answered and before Janos could even see who had arrived, he could tell by her expression that it was someone she recognized and also feared.

  In fact, it was a Komsomol, a man around Janos’s own age, though he looked younger. He wore a leather jacket, but his rank was clear in his carriage and in his voice as he said, “You’re Janos Gratz? The engineer?”

  Janos lowered his pipe an
d looked the fellow over. He didn’t look unfriendly. Still, Janos hesitated as he said, “I’m not an engineer.”

  “That must have been why your bridges always collapsed,” said the Komsomol. Then he took Janos’s hand and gave it a shake. “I’m here to take you to the district headquarters. We need a group portrait to send abroad, and obviously, you’re our man. After all, you’re the reason I became a Communist.”

  Speechless, Janos blinked, and the Komsomol’s face went a little out of focus as he went on pumping Janos’s hand, and he told Janos how he had been on one of those bridges when it fell apart, and how he had been taken prisoner by the Russians, and there joined a Marxist study group, along with Bela Kun, and so on, and as he cheerfully went on, he led Janos down the hall to a waiting automobile where he was driven to a well-appointed office in the Buda hills and asked to take group and individual portraits of most of the members of the Kun’s inner circle.

  It turned out that three of the Komsomols Janos photographed were what they called his “front line recruits,” captured by the Russians because of a flaw in Janos’s designs, and converted to Marxism as prisoners of war. “They ought to erect a statue to you in front of Parliament,” one said to Janos, and another suggested that he move to Romania and build bridges for the Whites.

  Yet none of this banter was ill intentioned. In fact, they had a confidence that they gladly extended to Janos. It was assumed he was as happy with himself as they were with themselves, and they expected him to make as many jokes at their expense and seemed baffled at his silence. After he’d finished taking the photographs, the Komsomol who had fetched him led him to a restaurant and ordered pork, and when there was no pork to be had, he ordered cakes, and when there were no cakes to be had, he ordered vanilla ice cream. Indeed, with no food coming from the provinces, they all seemed to live on vanilla ice cream that spring. It made Janos light-headed and slightly sick, but seemed to have the opposite effect on the Komsomol, who scraped his plate.