Louisa Page 17

  MAYBE I’D TAKEN Levin’s advice and had a rest, or maybe the heat made me dull-witted. All I know is later that afternoon, I sat up in my bed and there was Yossel Berkowitz. He sat just where he’d been that first night, on a bed recently claimed by an Egyptian grandmother, and there was a hard brown suitcase pressed between his knees. In spite of the heat and sunlight, he still kept his leather coat buttoned to the top, and sweat glistened on his eyebrows and his long, deep upper lip.

  I said, “That bed belongs to someone else.”

  “Your interest touches me,” he said. “I don’t need much sleep. I don’t need much of anything, except for what I need. We have that in common. Here.” He pulled from his leather jacket a pack of Lucky Strikes, half-open, and he shook a cigarette into his hand.

  “What will that cost me?” I asked.

  “Ingyen van. All for free. Nagymama, you don’t trust me? I’ve never lied to you. I don’t take you for a fool. But I will tell you that you are going about this business like the Queen of Fools.” He shook a second and a third Lucky from the pack. “How many?”

  “Go to hell.”

  “I could leave a trail, and you could pick them up and see where it led you. It’s easier to give you a few packs.” He hoisted up the case, unlocked the clasp, and let it open on his lap. There was a rustle of cellophane, and he rooted around and said, “You want sardines? Whiskey? Cash? You want a new passport? You want to go to America? You want someone dead?”

  “What I want is my business.”

  “But I’m a businessman. What? It’s a telegram you want?”

  All through this, he’d been riffling in that suitcase, but he looked up then with little black sparks in his eyes. One hand was pinned around a carton of Lucky Strikes. The other touched the suitcase clasp as though he weren’t sure if he should close it.

  “Maybe you want something I got,” said Berkowitz. “Maybe you got something I want.”

  I stubbed the cigarette out and said nothing.

  “What is she to you?” Berkowitz asked me. “You know why no one talks to you? You know why they look at you as if you’re made of shit? It’s because you carry a curse around with you.”

  Then, he closed the case with a crack and rested on top of it that carton of Luckies and on top of the carton his not-very-clean hands. He smiled a little.

  “Tell me, why do you keep this girl?”

  I didn’t answer. He flipped the carton open and pulled out two packs.

  “I mean, what does she give you?”

  It was late afternoon. The barrack was full of people wringing out their underwear, brewing coffee, playing cards, but no one took notice of Berkowitz, and no one seemed to find our exchange of the slightest interest. He pushed one of the packs in my direction, and I didn’t lay my hand on it but didn’t push it back either. He added one more.

  He said, “I could find this cousin for you. In an afternoon, in half an hour, I could find him.”

  I didn’t answer, and I didn’t lay my hand on those packs of cigarettes. No, he left them on his own, szabad, no strings attached. They lasted me four days, and then he left me more, tucked under my pillow, four packs this time.

  He also said this to me. “She must have a nice time in those orange groves. She must have the time of her life. You want to know why?”

  With that Lucky in my hand, I felt no need to answer. The information would present itself when its time came. All I had to do was wait.

  “Because,” said Yossel Berkowitz, “there’s not a damned orange left on the trees. Harvest ended a month ago.”

  4

  TWO MONTHS AFTER Gabor had introduced me to Louisa, he took to spending more time at home. By then, it was October. He sewed the buttons on the other side of the lamb’s-wool coat and modeled it for me, striding up and down the kitchen like a Russian prince. Then he puttered with the gas stove until I made him stop. One afternoon, I returned from work to find him with a notebook propped up on raised knees, and as I put some onions in the bin, he picked at the end of a pencil and watched me as though I were an animal in the zoo.

  I asked him, “Don’t you have somewhere else to go?”

  “Of course I do,” he said. “But I like being here. I think I’ll sew the buttons on the other side of the coat again. Where’s the thread?”

  “You’re exhausting me,” I said.

  “I wrote a sonnet about you.”

  “Did you finish it?”

  “What’s this obsession with finishing? I think it’s death-worship, if you want to know the truth.” Gabor sketched an open can of sardines and kept humming two dull notes over and over until at last he settled back against the windowpane and groaned. “Momma,” he said, “I think I should move to Turkey. How much money do we have?”

  “Why Turkey? Why not China?”

  “She’d guess China.”

  “Why not just break it off?”

  “She won’t let me,” Gabor replied, a statement I did not yet understand. Then he added, “I have to give her the song.”

  “You know,” I said, “there’s something appealing about that girl waiting for the song. She’s like a clean slate.”

  “More like a hole,” said Gabor. I made no reply. His mood changed, and he lit one of my cigarettes for himself, though he seldom smoked. He made a show of letting smoke drift out of one side of his mouth. We sat in superficial harmony, but tension sang. Clearly, he’d wished I hadn’t met her, but the damage had been done. She’d been in our flat, and now it wasn’t quite what it should have been, a refuge. I asked what I should have known better, in a thousand years, than to have asked.

  “Are you supposed to be seeing her now?”

  He seemed startled to hear my voice. “What does it matter?”

  “If you lie to her,” I said, “I’d sooner you didn’t make it my business.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Gabor stubbed out the cigarette. “She’s not your daughter and she isn’t your business, and I don’t have to stay here. It’s damned depressing. It’s too big. We just knock around here. Why don’t we move? Don’t you know he isn’t coming back?”

  It was uncalled for. Why did he need to bring it up now, out of the blue? I wasn’t waiting for Janos. I’d faced facts. What would he have me do? Put a notice in the paper acknowledging that I was a straw-widow? Pawn all the clothing? Burn the engineering books? Besides, moving to another flat would cost a fortune. I said none of these things, but I did say, “I don’t ask you to do anything against your will.”

  “Fine,” Gabor said. “I’m going out.”

  HE WASN’T GOING TO Louisa. That was clear. In fact, Gabor got a tram to Nyugati Station. He often ended evenings there, I knew, watching trains come and go. Many a morning, he came in to breakfast still stinking of coal-dust and axle-grease. Shivering and feeling more than a little ridiculous, he followed the tracks clear out of the station, through a wasteland of railroad ties and coal heaps, and tried to remember the first two measures of Rocket.

  But what good was it without an ending? Everything he wrote trailed off or just stopped. It was as though an airplane, rather than swooping onto the landing field, fell from the sky like a stone. Stone, stone, he thought. He should take a stone and kill the girl. Wouldn’t that be an ending?

  Gabor looked over his shoulder at a train pulling into the station. Its headlight dimmed, and the light on its tail winked on and off like code. How could something so heavy look so light and so warm-blooded? He paused, and sat on an empty oil-drum, wondering if he should write a song about a train. Trains reach a destination.

  Then something spun towards him and fell at his feet with a crash. It was an empty bottle of pálinka.

  Gabor turned and saw two workers pass at a distance. “Hey!” Gabor called. “What’s that about?”

  One of them paused and spun around in Gabor’s direction. “Didn’t see you.”

  “The hell you didn’t!” Gabor stepped forward into a beam of light, though his
legs were unsteady. “You aimed!”

  “The hell I did.” The man stepped towards Gabor, a hulk with a mustache and a flushed face, clearly able to snap Gabor in two across his knee. “Why the fuck would I bother?”

  His friend pulled at his arm. “Zoli, come on, don’t waste time on that little kike. We’re already late. You don’t want to miss Judit.”

  Zoli gave Gabor one more glare, but turned his back and walked on, not so steadily, beyond the tracks, and even from a distance, Gabor could hear their brutal laughter. He pushed over the oil-drum, and it rolled downhill into a gully, leaving a black trail. He raked his hands through his hair.

  Then, silence. He could make out the hum of the lights from the station, and very distant, another train approaching. From behind, feather-faint, a violin. Greasy, shaken, wrongheaded, he turned towards the sound of that violin and started towards some hint of glowing windows, a kocsma, a worker’s bar, and now, unmistakable, the violin was joined by another, and he could hear laughter, feet stomping, a glass breaking, more laughter, and by then he stood at the threshold.

  He had never been to that kocsma before. The brakemen and stokers kept their hats on, but they were down to shirtsleeves. The girls wore full black skirts, and their hair was loose and wild, and they were either stuffed onto the workers’ laps or they were dancing. Men spun the girls and one girl on a table, with her skirt stuffed in her fists, screamed out a song about roses. The floor was sticky with wine and beer, and flames from candles singed the walls.

  The fiddlers were both gypsies, skinny men in cheap felt vests, and they were playing something familiar. Gabor heard himself sing out: Little dog, little dog you will lead the sheep to me—

  He swallowed the rest. The fiddlers kept playing. The two workers he’d seen outside were right by the door with their boots up on a plank table, and the one who wasn’t Zoli gestured him over.

  “What the hell? Dickhead, you think you come right in and join the party?”

  Gabor said, “I never knew anyone in particular owned that song.”

  “So you’re a lawyer too?” He raised a hand like a paw, and Gabor steeled himself to be struck, but that hand clamped down on his shoulder and pulled him towards him on the bench. “Hell, anyone in particular. You have too many words in your head. You need a drink.”

  “I’ll take a drink,” said Gabor, and the man introduced himself as Zsolt and poured Gabor a glass from his own bottle. Gabor put his chin in his hand and stared across the black table, over Zsolt’s boots, to the floor where Zoli danced with the girl who’d sung about the roses; and in the blur of candlelight and liquor, he took in the sound of the fiddle, the tramping of the heavy shoes as couples danced. A song began and ended. Then another song began. It was all the same to the couples dancing. Their bodies pressed together like fat pressing against pork.

  “What the fuck do you sit out there for?” Zsolt asked Gabor. “You look like a jerk.”

  “Sit out where?” Gabor asked Zsolt.

  “By the tracks.”

  “I’m trying to commit suicide,” said Gabor.

  Zsolt laughed, or maybe retched. “What’s the problem? Some girl won’t let you fuck her?”

  It was Gabor’s turn to laugh then, though his head rang. He said, “No. Some girl won’t let go.”

  “So throw her in front of the train,” Zsolt said.

  “Can’t,” Gabor said.

  “Then, son,” said Zsolt, “you listen to me. You want to get rid of her?”

  Gabor nodded, taking it in and at the same time grabbing hold of the tune which had wandered through Uncle Janos and Sweet Home of Mine back to Little Dog again.

  Zsolt pressed his mouth against Gabor’s ear; he could feel the mustache. “If you want to get rid of her, give her everything she wants. That’s the way it is. You treat a girl like shit, they worship you. You treat her like a queen, she leaves. Steal her a diamond bracelet. Shoot a fox and make her a coat. Nothing drives a girl away like that, nothing.”

  “It wouldn’t work,” said Gabor. “She doesn’t want a coat.”

  Zsolt shook his head. “Look at that girl,” he said, and he took Gabor’s head in his hand and turned his face towards Judit, whose red cheeks and dazzling eyes made her look half-consumptive. “I treated her like a queen, and Zoli treats her like shit. Guess who has her now?”

  Gabor didn’t take his eyes off Judit as he asked, “Did you steal a diamond bracelet?”

  “Who says I stole?” He pulled Gabor’s face back towards his own. “You’re the thief. I can see it in your face. I’m on to you.”

  “Are you?” Gabor asked, lightly. He reached for the bottle and poured himself another drink. “Maybe you are,” he said. “So if I give her everything she wants, she’ll leave me. But what if I can’t give her what she wants?”

  Zsolt pulled the bottle out of Gabor’s hand and took a long drink. He said, “Then you’re fucked. You’ll never get rid of the bitch.”

  Smoke made a film on the windows and obscured the headlamp of another locomotive as it passed the kocsma and moved on through the dark.

  I WAS ASLEEP WHEN Gabor stumbled in that night, and as ever, he shed his coat first, and then his shoes, flung each sock free so that one landed on the hat-rack and the other on the kitchen table and just before the threshold of his bedroom he had peeled off his trousers. All of this I saw when morning came. He left more marks: Pulled out of the closet were the boxes of old sheet music he must have kept from his piano lessons years ago. They fell across the floor in a smudged white fan. I rubbed my eyes and listened for the sound of him sleeping, bedsprings shifting, something, but he had obviously gone out again. So early? Without his trousers? No, he had other trousers. It wasn’t the first time he had come and gone, but I had an uneasy premonition. The shoes were muddy, flecked with gravel. I picked up those trousers which were smudged with oil, held them for a moment, dropped them again, and looked down at the mess he’d left behind.

  Bending with difficulty, I began gathering it up. There were elementary finger exercises all marked up in grease-pencil by his old piano teacher; there were three pages of The Eorl-King, and on cheaper, badly decorated paper, bits of what looked like ragtime music. Then, I saw an overturned shoe-box and a page that made my heart stop. Another page. I backed away and almost stepped on the music box.

  That music box lay in the middle of the floor. Kneeling now, I picked it up. The handle rattled. I gave it a single turn, and it came off in my hand.

  AT DAWN, GABOR stood shivering at the door of the Bauer house. He didn’t knock. For a moment, he considered climbing in through the cellar door, but he felt foolish enough already, tired, anxious, soiled with the pencil and with perspiration that steamed off him even as he stood.

  It was the maid, Eva, who opened the downstairs shutters. She asked in German, “You must be—you have to be the composer?”

  Gabor said, “I have the song.”

  Eva closed the shutters. The silence felt eternal. Meanwhile, behind him, Buda came to slow, Sunday life. There was the faint sound of metal wheels on cobblestone, windows opening, and at last the first-floor window opened again, and there was Louisa.

  Her face was brilliant, half-sleepy, young, pure. “Gabor,” she said. “Das gibt’s doch nicht!”

  “Es ist fertig,” Gabor said, and into her hand he pressed five sheets of crumpled paper smeared with pencil.

  She didn’t take her eyes from his face; it bore a look she’d never seen on a human face before. It must have been, she thought, the look of Goethe after he’d composed Faust, that distant and luminous. Her breath faltered into something close to a sob. “Nein, nein, it isn’t mine to take,” she said.

  But now Gabor was turning, walking away, and with a cry she pulled herself half-out of the window in her blue quilted robe, and she called: “You can’t leave me like this!” Then she hoisted herself over the white geraniums, slippers and all, waving those sheets of paper as she followed him up Castle Hill.

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nbsp; Gabor still found her behind him when he reached the business district some blocks away, where the first of the shops was opening its shutters. He gave in and turned, his head hanging with exhaustion. She was breathing hard under her robe, and the pages rattled as she held them towards him. It seemed impossible to Gabor that someone would not arrest them both.

  She managed to put some words together: “This is the only copy?”

  “Sure,” Gabor replied. Somewhere, the grate of a shop door gave a hollow clang. He felt it in his stomach.

  “But I can’t let you make that mistake again. It isn’t right.”

  Gabor told Louisa that he had to get home. His mother would be worried.

  “Oh, deine Mutter,” Louisa said. “No one can feel the way about you I do.”

  “Look,” Gabor said, “find someone at the Academy to copy it out on good paper, if that would make you happy. Make five copies. Make twenty.”

  Detaching Louisa from himself was, indeed, a delicate and imperfect process. There was her hand from his arm and her gaze from his face and finally her person from the corner, but she hadn’t gone two steps before she rushed back and asked if he really meant he trusted her not to lose it.

  “Lose what?” Gabor asked.

  Louisa gave a disgusted little sniff. “You’re just horrible!”

  “Go home,” Gabor said. “And I’ll go home.”

  BUT GABOR DID NOT go home. He made a day of heavy drinking. Beginning at a cukrászda with a pálinka, he went from kocsma to kocsma, moving through a succession of greasy tables. The company of strange men, the smell of bad tobacco, the absence, most of all, of any female was precisely what he needed. If he could only find that kocsma by the station, move in there permanently, with a bottle by his elbow and the flow of life around him acting like a cloak of invisibility.

  Gabor took his time with each glass of pálinka. Even here, none of the men knew him and no one would expect him to be a genius. In fact, they had no expectations whatsoever. They finished what was in their glasses and paid for another. He’d done the same, yet again, and raised the glass paid for with the last of his pocket money when he heard a tapping at the window. He glanced; there was Louisa.