Louisa Read online

  “So what are you doing now?” the Komsomol asked Janos.

  “Teaching mathematics to seamstresses,” he said.

  “Ah, very nice, useful to know that sort of thing,” the Komsomol said. He ordered more ice cream, and then he turned to Janos again. “Don’t tell me you’ve given up on engineering.”

  “Shouldn’t I?” Janos felt himself go red up to the ears. “My bridges fall down.” Then he surprised himself by going on. “You joke, all of you, but there were men on those bridges who didn’t become Communists. They drowned or they were shot or they were maimed.”

  “History,” said the Komsomol, “is a process. Bridges fall down. So build better bridges, Comrade Gratz. Be on the side of the builders. Are you a Nihilist?”

  Janos stared down at his plate of melted ice cream and said, “No, I’m not.”

  “You look like a Nihilist. You look like a donkey, frankly. No wonder I found you up there drinking. Get something in your stomach. Don’t you like ice cream?”

  “It’s too sweet for me,” Janos said. “So is all this talk about being on the side of the builders. So is your manner. Men died because of me, and they’re going to die because of you, because of this thing you call a process. Look at these,” Janos said, and he pulled out his photographs of the residents of the block of flats—the veterans, the disappointed old women, the gaunt girls, and the blind man and his daughter—and he fanned them across that sticky table, all the while wondering why he was bothering. The Komsomol put down his spoon and picked up first one, then another. He threw both back on the table.

  “Well, then, you’re just a Romantic,” he said to Janos. “A donkey and a Romantic.”

  “You’re the Romantic,” Janos countered, and the men argued like two boys, closing the restaurant and walking off together. Eventually Janos took another photograph of the Komsomol. His uniform was half-unbuttoned, revealing the medal of his patron saint. A smile was smeared crookedly from chin to cheek. As for the cap, it was frankly off-balance, and a lot of clean hair sprang from it and caught the gaslight by the entrance of the subway station.

  I ASKED JANOS, “DO you still have the photograph?”

  He leaned back on the public bench where we’d settled together, and shook his head. If he had been running from me to an appointment, he had missed it long ago.

  But I asked, “What about the other photographs?”

  “Gone,” Janos said.

  “Where did they go?” I asked, without quite knowing why.

  Janos stuffed his pipe and lit it, buying time. As he sat with his neck bent and a cable in that neck throbbing, I tried to detect in him something of the spirit he must have shared with the young man when they had argued through the night.

  I asked, “Do you still take pictures?”

  In a flash, Janos turned his head. “What do you mean by that?”

  “Nothing,” I said, and my voice shook a little. “It was just a question.”

  Janos was looking at me now, unmistakably looking at me with eyes like lenses, and I don’t know what he found in my face, but when he spoke again, it was with hesitation, but more gently. “Nora, I don’t mean to seem, well, how I seem. It’s only, those photographs, they’re out of my hands now. They were taken from me.”

  “By the Komsomol?” I asked.

  “By the new government,” said Janos. “By the Whites, the reactionaries. And, well, how smart are you, Nora?” He paused to catch his breath, and he was still looking at me, as though if he broke his gaze, he’d know what he risked in speaking. “How much do I have to spell out for you? What do you think happened to the people in those photographs?”

  That brought a lump to my throat. “Look,” I said, “I’m sorry. You don’t need to tell me anything.”

  “They were good people,” he said.

  Then I had to ask, “You say were good. Are they dead?”

  “Some of them,” said Janos, “and some in prison, and some in exile, and some, well, what do you want me to say? You’re a young girl, Nora. These aren’t trivial concerns.”

  I broke the gaze, at last, myself, because otherwise, I would have asked him about the blind girl and her father, whether they were implicated too, and the longer I delayed, the more my thoughts kept racing, until I was wondering why the people met those ends, but he was free. Had he turned in those photographs to spare his own life? Had he been considered too unimportant to pursue?

  Janos said, “Look, do you want me to lie to you?”

  He allowed me silence. I used it to keep on staring at my hands, which looked small and white.

  “I can’t tell you everything. I could lie to you, but I don’t want to lie to you.”

  What could I say to that? By now, it was twilight, and Janos’s torn coat was damp with perspiration. Sitting so close to me, he looked younger, lean, anxious, giving off a scent of panic. What I knew now was like the tear in that overcoat, something that couldn’t be undone. My head rang with too many thoughts at once. Finally, I asked him, “Janos, if you don’t trust me, why did you tell me this much?”

  “It’s not a matter of not trusting you,” he said. Then, with something approaching tenderness, he added, “I want to protect you.”

  And I thought: I want to protect you too. From what? From sorrow, maybe, or a deep loneliness, from having to lie to me. “Janos,” I said, “I’m not so fragile.”

  After some hesitation, he said, “I know.” But that was all he would tell me.

  10

  I MIGHT BE accused of losing my husband the day I got him, that afternoon on Andrassy Street. I compensated by treating the matter of Janos with a Janos-like reticence. Adele and Aunt Moni didn’t know I was engaged until the day I got married when I took them to the courthouse to serve as witnesses.

  Aunt Moni wore one of her pre-war hats for the occasion, a white-plumed boat that made her look tiny and old. She laid a hand on my arm, maybe to steady herself against the sight of Janos knocking his pipe against the mahogany bench in the judge’s chambers. She leaned in close enough for me to smell mothballs and whispered, “He seems like a very steady boy.”

  Adele held Aunt Moni’s arm and kept a bright smile pinned to her face. Afterwards, Janos had to study for the entrance exam to the Polytechnic, so I went back to the apartment to get my things. Adele followed me into Bela’s old room and asked, “Why didn’t you ever bring him home?”

  “To Barnahely? To get my mother’s blessing?”

  “I meant to our apartment. To us.”

  “To get your blessing?” I think my tone was a little wry. “I don’t suppose he’s what you might have for a husband, Adele. He isn’t a doctor, for one thing. I don’t think he’s tasted Riesling in his life.”

  By now, of course, Andras was history. Adele let my insults pass over her, and she sat me down on Bela’s bed and tried to talk to me seriously. “It’s done,” she said. “That’s that. You’re married. He ought to make a decent living if he’s an engineer. And if he looks like a scarecrow with a mustache, maybe that’s what you like in a man. But do you really love each other?”

  “What do you think? He married me.”

  “Has he said it?”

  Now I felt as though Adele had stepped into territory where she wasn’t welcome. I let a telling silence build as I tucked all those dresses Adele had given me into a carpetbag. The late-afternoon sunshine slanted across all those rows of dusty books Bela had left behind.

  Adele watched me pack for a while, and then she got up to help. She was far more efficient than I was, folding the better underwear and stockings in tissue, and even throwing in a handful of lavender, “like the fancy ladies do,” she said. “What do you want for a wedding present?”

  I said, “You don’t have to give me anything, Adele.”

  “Not even my blessing?” She rubbed a little lavender between her fingers. “Hmmm. You’ll need this. That boy doesn’t bathe. You think I’m jealous?”

  “No,” I said.

 
“You want me not to tease you about him?”

  “I don’t know.” I closed the carpetbag before she could put anything else in it, and I turned towards the window. “I never told him I love him either,” I said. “We don’t talk like that.”

  “Maybe I talk like that too much,” said Adele. “To me, it doesn’t feel like such a hard thing to say.”

  “Lucky you,” I said. How could I help, just then, but think of Bela, who probably was just like his sister, spreading his love around like apricot jam. I had spent most of the night before trying to write him a letter about the marriage, and typically, settled for writing one I couldn’t send. Well, then, Borzas Medve, shaggy bear, you weren’t here to give me away. Maybe you wouldn’t have given me away. Maybe you would have kept me. Like all the letters in the shoe-box it felt as though it were in code. Either he’d understand or he wouldn’t, and either possibility would be unbearable.

  I allowed myself to accept a token gift from Adele, a lamb’s-wool coat that she’d bought for herself, but which, she claimed, was much too short, so she really must have been thinking of me all along. And, she added, it could be a man’s jacket if I reversed the buttons; it would do for Janos as well. It was a very good coat, dark and soft, with a square collar, horn buttons, and black silk lining. As I fastened the buttons, I felt protected and glamorous. It would suit some men, I suppose, but I could no more imagine Janos wearing it than I could imagine him wearing a monocle.

  Aunt Monika meanwhile had filled a crate with preserves, biscuits, sausage, and most of her good hand-painted Herendi china tea-set wrapped in the same tissue Adele had used for my underwear.

  “I can’t take the pot,” I said.

  “We have another pot,” said Aunt Moni, and then she started to cry. “It’s not Herendi, but we have another pot. Norika, I wish your mother were here. I know I can’t take her place, but she would want you to have nice things.”

  Faced with the sight of Aunt Moni dabbing her eyes with a bit of tissue paper, I found her a handkerchief. She blew her nose. “Thank you for the tea-set,” I said, trying to mean it. “We’ll have you over for tea as soon as we’ve settled.”

  I cabled my mother. We’d written each other regularly since I’d moved to Budapest, though the letters were rather telegraphic. To me she did not seem badly off. Uncle Oszkar’s shop was under Laszlo’s care and earned a decent income. She had become friendly with the porteress at the Száras Gimnazium dormitory, and they took a trip to Szeged to hear the orchestra.

  She replied: Now that you are married and will want to settle down, I will make arrangements for the deed to the house to be placed in your name, as I trust you will not turn me out onto the street.

  I said to Aunt Monika, “She can’t seriously expect us to move to Kisbarnahely.”

  “Maybe not,” said Aunt Monika. Then she paused and set the lid on the crate. “She’ll want to meet him.”

  “He’ll be what she expected,” I said to her. “No social graces.” At once I regretted the flippancy because her eyes teared up again, and I wasn’t sure if it was from happiness this time. Adele threw her a look I didn’t want to understand. I took the opportunity to give the two of them a quick kiss goodbye, call the porter to carry the suitcase and crate, and be on my way.

  I GOT ANOTHER crate from Laszlo. It arrived the day Janos took his entrance exam for the Polytechnic, and it was Janos who opened it, prying the slats apart with the back of a hammer. Encased in straw was a music box made of cut glass so one could see the works.

  Janos turned the handle, and out came, of all things, Little Dog, Little Dog. I’d never heard that tune come from a music box before, and it made me think of the drunk old Transylvanian, but also of Laszlo himself whistling on his bicycle or Uncle Oszkar laying the table in his backyard. The melody was infectious, slight, the dog, the sheep, the black-eyed love a bold love, the blue-eyed love a true love. I wanted to say all of this to Janos, to tell him about Kisbarnahely and the sunflowers, about the way I would pass by dances in the town hall, hear the fiddle play Little Dog, Little Dog and feel a pinch in the heart. But Janos was completely engrossed in the workings of the box.

  “This is remarkable,” he said. “He must have done it by hand. There’s no other explanation. I’m going to open it up.”

  I caught my breath. “Janos, it’s glass. Be careful.”

  “Careful?” He smiled. “Nora, I used to be a tinker, remember? Trust me.” He was in high spirits. The exam had gone very well. I think he enjoyed my obvious anxiety as he produced a tiny screwdriver and removed the bottom of the box as precisely as a surgeon.

  We both lay on our bellies on that dormitory floor, and he took me, step by step, through the workings of that small, clean device Laszlo had made. We spent the afternoon there, breathing in dust and the smell of the straw from the crate, my husband lying next to me and tapping, with a pencil point, gear after gear of the music box. He didn’t whisper, didn’t need to, we were so close. The light waned, and after a while I could not imagine that my husband actually could see a thing he was describing. Nor could I listen. It was enough to hear the tapping of the pencil and the sound of his voice.

  Then it got so dark that he couldn’t even pretend to give a lesson. He turned the handle: Lit-tle-dog-lit-tle-dog-you-will-bring-my-sheep-to-me—so slowly that the notes divided and lost meaning, and I thought back to those afternoons in Uncle Oszkar’s workshop where I turned those handles backwards and made random music spark and sing. I looked at Janos, a man Laszlo’s age, and like Laszlo, he had blue eyes, and like Laszlo, hair the color of straw, and just as Laszlo brought my past to me, this man would carry me forward just as clearly as those careful hands moved from the works of the machine and found me. I felt his mustache brush against my ear, and I thought: Time moves on, thank God.

  JANOS DID SCORE high enough on that exam to enter the Polytechnic, and not long afterwards, he found us the flat on Prater Street. It was grim, but I’d figured that it would do for a while. I couldn’t have known then that I would live there for the next twenty years. It had some good features: ample space, French windows looking onto the street, and a courtyard with a live tree in the middle. It was also a short tram-ride from Aunt Monika’s. I would stop there, sometimes, after work, when Janos was studying, and when he had business that kept him out late, I would often stay through supper.

  I never did manage to follow through on my own invitation to tea. Frankly, it was easier to go to Dob Street and pour from the non-Herendi teapot into the mismatched cups. Janos might have joined me once or twice. I don’t remember. His schedule was erratic, and it was sometimes difficult for him to know where he would be from one hour to the next. There was his teaching at the Katona Jozsef School, his course-work at the Polytechnic, and also two or three nights a week when he wouldn’t come home until well after dark and would crawl beside me in bed, smelling of mimeograph fluid and cigarettes.

  If you do not ask once, you cannot ask again. I don’t know why that is the case, but it is so. I did wonder about the work he did, why it was dangerous, why it was worth the trouble. I speculated: Surely there was a girl Comrade who worked beside Janos, a bouncing, healthy working girl for whom none of this was a mystery. There were nights, even early in our marriage, when I wondered if my husband would come home. Yet he came home.

  Once, there was paste in his hair, and I combed it through with vinegar without asking how the paste had gotten there or if the anti-Horthy posters he had plastered everywhere would be scraped off by the police by morning.

  I did let slip, “You’re a little old for this.”

  “Will it all come out?” he asked me, as though I combed paste from men’s hair every day.

  I answered, “With your hair, I don’t think anyone will notice.”

  He let himself smile then. “Nora, why’d I drag you into this?”

  I would reply, “You didn’t. Go to sleep.”

  Sometimes, he’d sleep. More often, he would lie with me for
a while, and then get up and study those engineering books that he had promised would take us right off the map of Hungary to Vienna, to London, to America. When I woke up, he might have his head on his desk, and I would wake him up by turning the music box backwards the way I had when I was a child in Uncle Oszkar’s workshop. I’d pour him coffee from the pot hand-painted with blond shepherdesses and white doves.

  JANOS WASN’T HOME the Sunday Adele finally decided to visit our flat. She appeared without warning, carrying three hairy-looking red flowers, and as she took the place in, I could see her heart drop to her feet. Compared to the elegant clutter of Dob Street, it must have looked like a warehouse, bare and cavernous. To make matters worse, I was drying laundry, and linens and towels were draped across every piece of furniture we had. There was even a bedspread hanging from the kitchen cabinet. As for me, I had been leaning over a laundry basin, wringing out Janos’s underwear.

  “Where should I put these?” Adele asked, meaning the flowers.

  “Just empty the cold water from the pot by the window. Thanks. They’re nice,” I added. I couldn’t think of why she’d turned up at all.

  She did find the pot, which of course was the Herendi china. It was too short, and she hunted for scissors to cut the flower stems, all the while trying to hide the fact that she was appalled at what she saw. She asked me, “Don’t you have a maid?”

  “A maid owns the building,” I said. It was true. Prater Street No. 30 was owned by a retired housekeeper who had managed to buy the property for almost nothing when the owner left for Vienna during the short-lived days of the Commune. The woman must have been close to ninety, and occasionally I came across the terrible sight of her on her knees, scrubbing the hallway.