Louisa Read online

  The next morning, she knocked again. Gabor kept still. She called in, “Hello?” Her voice poked through the door like a finger, probing the room. Gabor would have slid under the couch, if he hadn’t been afraid to make a sound.

  It took effort to meet her at school. Around the entrance of the yard, young girls milled in their green jumpers, with their smooth hair and their empty pretty faces. The cold drew puffs of steam from their lips, and inside of them each was a fire, but rather than feeling aroused, Gabor took all of this in with deep nausea. When Louisa appeared, the nausea deepened by an octave. Weakly, he waved to her.

  This time, she had no speech prepared. Her jumper hung awry, her eyes were pink, and her voice was very raw. “Where were you?”

  “I don’t know.” Gabor spoke as though the question didn’t mean much. “I have quite a few pupils, you know.”

  “I thought you’d given all of them up.”

  “Oh. Did you think that?” Gabor smiled and all the time wondered why his lies were taking that direction; there were no other girls at the moment, though there would be by and by. For what was he preparing Louisa? The answer took this shape: “I need money. I’ll be leaving soon.”

  Louisa blinked like a rabbit. She said nothing.

  “After all,” he said, “I need to get a broader view on life. Maybe I’ll move to Istanbul.”

  Louisa asked, “But in Istanbul how will you write music?”

  “What does music have to do with it?” Gabor asked her. He thought: What the hell is in Istanbul? He suppressed the urge to laugh, at life, at Louisa, or at the surprise of what might come out of his mouth next. “Why should I stay when you’ll be singing in all the capitals of Europe?”

  “I won’t go!” Louisa threw her arms around his neck and kissed him with such depth and urgency he couldn’t pull himself free without actually throwing her against the schoolyard wall, which he did. She fell with a mild thump. The gray in her eyes shimmered dangerously. Maybe her schoolmates were watching. She didn’t cry.

  “Look,” Gabor said, “there’s nothing for me here. Budapest is a dead city. But if you don’t go, you’ll miss a real chance. Lengyel has influence.”

  “I thought,” said Louisa, “that you hated him.”

  “Use the man. I would if I could.” Gabor couldn’t stand the way Louisa just sat there staring, so he gave her a hand up and brushed off her bottom as though she were his little sister. “Come on, Lu. Chin up. I won’t be leaving for a while.”

  “I don’t understand,” Louisa began, but then her voice broke, and it took a moment for her to regain control. Then she said, “It isn’t your mother, is it?”

  “Momma?” The comment came from nowhere.

  “She’s jealous of me.”

  “What does that have to do with it?” Gabor made Louisa sit on a bench beside the schoolyard, and he made a pretty speech about me. “My mother probably is jealous of you, but that doesn’t matter. She can’t do a thing to hurt you. I don’t think she even knows how to hurt someone.”

  Louisa took all this in. She said, “I think I understand her. She’s like me.”

  The comment threw Gabor off-balance, but he let it pass. “I’ll tell you something else. She’s been through some pretty raw stuff in her time, but none of it’s made her hard. You know, she told me never to hurt you?”

  “But you will anyway,” Louisa said.

  “Probably,” Gabor said, grateful she’d paved the way for him to say it. “I think her secret is, she speaks her mind. It makes her seem rough, but she’s all there.”

  “We should go back to see her,” Louisa said.

  Gabor shuddered a little but dropped the issue. “Now I have to get to work.”

  “And what have you written?” It was almost an accusation. Gabor rose from the bench and walked off, fruitlessly pretending he hadn’t heard her, wondering if he should have mentioned me at all.

  A MONTH PASSED. Gabor never again told Louisa that he was leaving, but he cut back his appearances at the girls’ school. Once, when his roommate was on tour with a woodwind quintet, he came down with a cold and didn’t open the door for two days running. When he emerged, he found two baskets of bread, apples, and cheese perfuming the hallway. They had been gnawed by mice.

  One afternoon, I was making myself a coffee when the door opened, and there was Gabor. He’d looked better. His hair was matted and his nose was running. He brought with him a little of the dry December air; it hovered around his coat. I stood with the coffeepot in my hand and said, in a friendly way, “It’s good to see you.”

  “Oh, hell, Momma,” he said, tossing the coat over the couch, “I did look in a few times. You must have been out.”

  “Must have been,” I said. “Want a coffee?”

  “I could have left a note,” Gabor said. It was as close as he would get to an apology.

  Afterwards, we were both quiet for a while. I’d found a box of lemon biscuits that were so stale they broke in pieces. I knew I should offer him something more substantial, but I sensed that if I mentioned supper or even so much as pushed back my chair to warm up his coffee, he’d take it as a sign to go, so I stayed put. The crumbs clogged my throat, and the cigarettes roughed them up until I had to swallow hard.

  As for Gabor, he seemed a little stunned. He’d slung himself into a familiar chair and observed a familiar kitchen with its mismatched tiles and its curtains faded down to ocean green. He must have wondered how he’d spent nineteen years in the place. Then, he turned those same measuring eyes on me and said, “How long would it take to get a pilot’s license?”

  At last, I broke down and said, “Gabor, don’t talk nonsense. You know they wouldn’t take you.”

  Gabor smiled a little; his teeth weren’t clean.

  “Do you love her?” I asked. The question startled even me, who’d asked it, and as soon as it was out of my mouth, it seemed absurd. Gabor rocked backwards on his chair and at the same time drew a cigarette from my pack and lit up before he answered.

  “Let me tell you about this German girl. She’s got a voice that will take her places. She’s got a future.”

  “And she’d give up that future for you?”

  That brought on silence, and even our coffee seemed to grow a shade paler until it was pointless to go on. Released from the prison of his lodgings, Gabor had returned, and I’d said everything I shouldn’t have said. Even as he sat across from me, he was already receding.

  But actually, he leaned across the table to kiss me goodbye. He said he’d be back soon. “Don’t worry about Louisa.”

  “You said her name.” I voiced the observation without thinking. It stopped Gabor in his tracks. “You never use their names,” I said. “It’s always, The Fat Lady or The Virtuoso or The Angel. Never names.”

  “You’ve lost me, Momma. I’m too slow to follow your logic.” Gabor pulled on his coat and opened the door. “You know her name, after all.”

  THAT AFTERNOON, he met Louisa at school. Perhaps he planned to tell her he was going to become a pilot. Due to his cold, he took a trolley. He hadn’t seen her for a few days, and as the trolley rattled across Margit Bridge, he wondered what sort of greeting she would give him, but she only smiled, surprised to find him waiting. She didn’t kiss him, but she didn’t seem to hold back out of resentment. Rather, she simply fell in beside him as they walked together.

  “You look like a rose in bloom,” Gabor said. “You must have a new boyfriend.”

  Louisa only laughed; she did look fine that afternoon, particularly in contrast to Gabor, who should have been in bed. Her face glowed, and her laughter was so free and candid that Gabor wondered if he’d hit on the truth. Then, Louisa asked, “Why don’t you meet my family?”

  Gabor said, “I’ve never been invited.”

  “Well, I’m inviting you. Christmas Eve.”

  It had the edge of an announcement. As though someone had set upon his eye a sharper lens, Gabor saw everything again, and in as steady a voice
as he could muster, he asked, “Lu, are you pregnant?”

  Louisa blushed, but her lips turned pale. “How could you even think that?”

  “Well, it’s not impossible,” Gabor said, reasonably enough.

  “How can I be pregnant,” Louisa said, “when I’m going on that tour?”

  Nonplused at this series of revelations, Gabor took the young girl in his arms and held her close. He tried not to notice the rapid beating of her heart. She had invited him to her own farewell party, and the relief he felt was mixed with something sharper. He wasn’t completely lucid when he said, “Of course I’ll be there. With bells on!”

  He thought: That angel, that kid. He ought to get her something nice for Christmas.

  6

  IT’S AMAZING WHAT a steady supply of Lucky Strikes will do. After the first pack, I discovered that my everyday dresses had absorbed so much perspiration they might as well have been made of wet paint. Louisa got me a new one. She’d bought a length of rose-colored cotton with her wages, and one of the Egyptians did it up on a sewing machine in an afternoon. Really, she did take good care of me. Cigarettes allowed me to put her in perspective.

  If orange harvest had ended, that meant that Louisa had been lying to me, and if she’d been lying to me, that meant I didn’t have to tell her about Dori or Gan Leah. After all, what did I really know about that girl? Consider: How had a child of seventeen arranged to stay behind in Budapest when her family fled to safety? How had she hid me in that cellar? How had she managed to live out the years between the war’s end and the day she found me at the border, wearing the fur coat and fancy earrings? These were all mysteries, and I could let them go. Having something to hide is simply part of the human condition. Those were the sorts of things I thought when I was smoking: Platitudes that could make anything sound reasonable.

  I couldn’t have said why I withheld information from Louisa. Perhaps I didn’t want to get her hopes up. After all, life at the transient camp seemed to get harder rather than easier for her as winter turned to summer. Even after the Poles were gone, she was hated by the residents who flicked her breakfast tray into her face or threw her washing from the line. Israeli boys in shorts would intervene, less angry than embarrassed. They apologized to Louisa, and out came the word again: Sabonim, Sabonim, accompanied by a gesture of despair.

  Louisa took all of this without complaint. What she couldn’t bear were the Transylvanian girls. They left her gifts: a canvas sack of brown sugar that leaked all over the blanket, a transparent plastic pocket comb, photographs torn from magazines of blonde girls with dazed, serene expressions. Louisa obviously still found them unnerving, and once confided that she’d found a few pairs of her bloomers missing.

  “What would they do with my bloomers?” she asked me. “They’d be much too big.”

  “Perhaps they don’t have any clean ones of their own, dear,” I replied.

  “But then they give me all these dirty things.” Louisa shook her head. “I don’t want dirty things. It’s hard enough to keep clean in this place.”

  One memorable gift came from the youngest of the girls, who caught us once at dawn, appearing by the cot and staring down right at Louisa. She wore what looked like a soldier’s duffel coat which ended somewhere at her ankles, and her hair flew from her wide forehead like black feathers. Her eyes twinkled with malice. “Mit csinaltsz, német lány?”

  Louisa lurched away and pressed herself to my side. She whispered, “Mutti, what is she asking?”

  “Nothing of consequence,” I said. “She simply asked what you are doing.”

  The Transylvanian girl leaned down a little farther, smelling of vinegar, cabbage, and blankets. “Tetszik a csúnya kis baba, német lány?”

  To illustrate, she pulled from her coat a bald doll the size of the palm of her hand. It was missing a leg, and blue inkblots obscured an eye and most of a nose. She held it towards Louisa, whose face did some interesting things.

  I explained. “She’s offering you the doll. She says it is an ugly doll.”

  Louisa got out of bed so quickly that she got half-tangled in the bed sheet and stumbled up against the windowsill. The truck from the orange grove pulled in then, and she took a shallow breath and pulled up her shorts under her nightshirt with one hand as she felt for her hat with the other.

  The girl leaned over my side of the bed and grinned. “Itt van a völegény!”

  If there were no oranges to harvest, where did that truck go? I knew I ought to be a little afraid for Louisa, riding off in that unmarked truck with the compactly built Arabic Jew. Yet she seemed at home beside him, as though she had ridden off with strangers in the past, therefore procuring herself, say, a rabbit-fur coat, or expensive earrings. Speculation came easily to me, and cost nothing.

  I sat up, lit a cigarette, and turned to the Transylvanian girl, whose heart-shaped, swarthy face was smeared with dust, and who still held that doll in her hand.

  She said to me, “A völegény, Nagymama. Öreg, csúnya.” A bridegroom, old, ugly. Like you.

  LOUISA DID ONCE bring me back an orange. “Himmlisches Apfelsine. Have a taste.”

  I was bewildered, and not pleased. “Where on earth did you get that?”

  She didn’t seem to think the question out of place. She arranged herself on the edge of the cot, and I realized, for the first time, that she’d gone quite brown. “The manager said: Here, take this to your Mutter, so she tastes a real orange from Zion.”

  There was a half-crazed animation to the way she pulled the dull skin off that orange, as though it were essential that I believe it really came from a manager who really said those things and that he would think less of her if she didn’t get to the flesh of the fruit as quickly as possible. She tore off a section.

  “I don’t like oranges,” I said.

  “How can you not like oranges?” Louisa sounded a little desperate. She held the wedge out towards me, and I let it dangle there to dribble juice all over her shorts.

  LEFT TO MYSELF, I took a lot of walks. If I showered, wore that dress, and had some Luckies in my purse, I felt almost human. The rainy season had ended and the air felt different than any air I’d ever breathed: thin, dry, almost like smoke. Perhaps I walked because I wanted to avoid Levin. He’d probably try to give me back that stupid hat. I felt conspicuous in the hat and what I wanted most now was to move unseen. I liked to blend into tent-canvas or shadows behind the oil-drums, and from that perspective to watch goings-on with a degree of distance.

  I found myself drawn to the Yemenites. Their tents were pitched in the north end of the camp, and they were small as children, black as dirt, and quiet as cats. If I lingered there for long enough, I could observe the women carry out pots of water and do wash together, and I was brought back to that gypsy camp in Barnahely. Did Yemenites read palms? When I looked at all those mingled robes and headdresses it put me in mind of the circus back in Vidam Park in Budapest. SEE THE EXOTIC ISRAELITES FROM AFRICA. HEAR THEIR BARBARIAN TONGUE. MYSTERY OF THE EAST.

  During the early ’20s, when I had first arrived in Budapest and Adele had hoped to make a normal girl of me, she’d arranged for a few excursions to the permanent exhibit, and six or seven of us tried to keep together as the crowd did its best to push us in six or seven directions. I remember Adele’s fleeting, helpless wave, as she and David, or was it Andras, were swept towards the dwarf-swordfight, and I remained with one hand clamped to the protective bar in front of Monkey Boy.

  In 1941, Adele wrote me from Szeged: The circus passed through last week, and Matyas and I took our nephew. Monkey Boy has gone gray. What will become of us? After twelve years of marriage, she still had no children, though she hadn’t yet given up hope.

  I never did visit Szeged, but from her letters, I can imagine their home near the town center, with Matyas and Adele’s households meshing into a glorious clutter, china on the shelves and rugs strung on the walls, trays of hard candies everywhere, and all of Bela’s books and maps stored in
the attic. It would have been a wonderful place for a child. Matyas made furniture and carved wooden toys for a hobby, and the front yard was filled with a collection of miniature rocking chairs and horses and sheep and three-legged stools he passed on to his nieces and nephews. There was a constant battle between Adele’s roses and Matyas’s carpentry, with Aunt Moni wielding a broom in the middle, making sure that at least a path stayed clear so neighbors didn’t think they were barbarians.

  Of course, the neighbors thought no such thing. They came and went through the front door and the back, exchanging plant cuttings, homemade wine, and pastries. Adele didn’t trust the cook to properly kosher the meat, so often those neighbors would find Adele standing over the sink, still in her nurse’s uniform, with house-slippers on her feet and both hands full of rock salt. The cook, a local girl, resented the intrusion, so Aunt Moni would have to distract her by asking her to buy some lemons. You could get lemons in Szeged, unlike in Kisbarnahely. Perhaps that made all the difference.

  Matyas was considered henpecked. He didn’t drink or play cards. Sometimes he had to work until nine or ten at night, but the moment the light went off in his window of the factory, you could set your clock by the ten minutes it would take him to walk home. Adele was far more likely to go out with the girls after her shift at the hospital, and she never seemed concerned that Matyas would be angry. He was such a shy, unassuming fellow, peering over his wood-carving with his moist brown mustache, that it seemed obvious Adele could walk all over him.

  Yet in the matter of religion, Matyas ruled. The house was strict kosher, with separate dishes for the milk and meat. On Fridays and Saturdays, he went to synagogue, and sometimes stopped on his way to work for morning prayers. Though he didn’t insist Adele join him, he was pleased when she did, and sometimes, though it contradicted the whole purpose of the women’s balcony, he would turn in his prayer shawl and try to catch her eye.