Louisa Read online

  The rooms face each other across dull maroon tiles. He is supposed to sign with the lady at the desk, and of course, he does no such thing, but simply swings his way into an unoccupied room and fills the rack above the piano with notes for a composition.

  There are three songs in all: Rocket One, Rocket Two, and The Booming Rocket. All were in their initial stages. He’d been beginning compositions for years; the first pages of torch songs, comic duets, operas, and choral works littered his room and sometimes overflowed into the hallway to the point where I used the fair sides for grocery lists. He didn’t mind. He even tried to set the grocery lists to music.

  It was the third unfinished song Gabor looked at that afternoon. He had already completed two measures: Boom, Boom! The Happy Missile Sings! For a tenor, he thought, with the bass family breaking through. Then where should it lead? Up, probably. He had a rudimentary knowledge of theory, enough to take the form of a faint headache and some frustration.

  His room was snug, just big enough to fit a bench and an upright piano. The door was padded with a leather cushion embedded with a tiny pane of crosshatched glass. Gabor had raised the piano lid and spread his papers on the stand, and he was rolling the nib of a pencil between his thumb and forefinger when he heard a tapping.

  He turned. There was the face of a girl, divided into twenty-four small squares. Her voice was faint and she said: “Entschuldigen Sie bitte.”

  Or it might have been, “Come hither,” or “Bedsitter,” or something equally absurd. With all hope of a morning’s work gone now, Gabor hoisted himself from the bench and with elaborate resentment, opened the door a crack and answered in frankly rude Hungarian. “Nem szabad.”

  Of course, though Louisa had been living in Budapest for three years, she knew no Hungarian, so she smiled over her blue canvas schoolbag, and replied, “Ich habe ein Zimmer reserviert.”

  This time, Gabor answered in German. “That doesn’t mean a thing. No one with a brain in his head follows those rules.”

  Louisa took his fluency as a matter of course, and didn’t seem to think him worth an argument. “You’ll have to leave.”

  “I’m staying here,” Gabor said. “You don’t need a piano. Your father’s rich as Croesus and you’ve got a grand at home.”

  She turned a little pink then. “I don’t see how you know.”

  “I know everything,” said Gabor. In fact, he hadn’t been sure. Louisa was dressed in the green pinafore of a schoolgirl and might have been at the Academy on scholarship, but her manner was so unapologetic that she had to have some money. Besides: She was German. In Hungary, every German was a millionaire. He added, “You don’t even play piano.”

  Here, he was on firmer ground, as he knew most of the serious girl pianists at the Academy and had never seen this specimen before. She wasn’t a bad specimen at that, straight-backed and slim with a clear complexion and fine, light-brown hair. Her age was hard to pin down. She had a very young girl’s seriousness, but there was something knowing in the curl of her frown that had appeared when he’d said he knew everything. He made her a proposition.

  “We could share the room,” he said.

  Louisa shook her head. “I need the whole room.”

  “Depends,” Gabor said, “on proximity.” He swung the door wide open and moved back, not too far. “What do you play? Tuba?”

  “I sing,” said Louisa.

  “Well, then, you sing and I’ll accompany you. Hand over the score. Don’t be shy.”

  “I’m not shy,” said Louisa. “But it’s impossible.”

  Gabor took possession of her Schubert. He gave it a dismissive glance. “This old thing?”

  Louisa did not reply. She watched Gabor as he opened the score, and after a moment, asked, “Can you manage it?”

  And of course, it was too late for Gabor to say no. The score was, in fact, well beyond his strength, a task for a real pianist. Now he had to slap the music over Booming Rocket and plunge right in.

  It was worse than difficult. It was impossible. The notes piled on like cord-wood and his right hand had to pump the keys while the left found its way to a sequence of notes against the rhythmic grain, and so complete was his absorption that the voice took him by surprise.

  Who rides so late through night and wind?

  It is the father with his child.

  It wasn’t what he had expected, not like her speaking voice at all.

  He has the boy in his arms.

  He holds him safely, he keeps him warm.

  Father— father—

  A shiver shot up Gabor’s neck. He stopped dead and turned, as Louisa trailed off:

  Do you not hear

  What the Eorl-King softly promises me?

  Gabor asked, “How old are you?”

  Caught off-guard, Louisa paused before answering, “Seventeen.”

  “The hell you are.” It felt right to belittle her now. It put things in perspective. “What are you doing in Budapest?”

  “It’s obvious that I can’t work here,” Louisa said. She reached for her schoolbag. “I have a lot of work to do. In three months, I tour Europe.”

  “And you’re singing Schubert? No you’re not,” Gabor said. He pushed the piano bench back, scraping the floor so violently that Louisa flinched. “You’re going to sing my music.”

  “I can’t,” she said, so taken aback that she lost a grain of composure, and her voice broke. In that break, Gabor heard a note, a trill, so like that other voice, her singing voice, that it renewed his determination.

  “You can,” he said. Now he turned on her the full force of his charm. His black eyes, below all that thick, black hair, sparkled, and he leveled them on her own, conscious too of how close they stood, breath-distance. “Don’t lie. There’s nothing you can’t do. I’ve heard you sing.”

  Louisa said nothing for a moment. She lowered her bag and almost shyly asked, “Do you compose?”

  Gabor thrust into her bag the page of Booming Rocket.

  Louisa said, “It’s not up to me.”

  Gabor only laughed, for in fact, she was correct. It wasn’t up to her at all. He let her go. As for Louisa, she stepped out of the practice room into air which must have felt unearthly clear and open, as it wasn’t filled with my son. It might not have been until she met her teacher that she realized she had left her Schubert score behind.

  The realization hit Louisa so suddenly that she didn’t know what to do. Under the clear brown eye of Professor Istvan Lengyel, she searched her bag: a half-filled notebook, her harmony text, and a bag of lemon-drops she’d bought a month before that lay among the lint and paper in a yellow, gummy ball. Then there was something she tried to hide under the notebook.

  “What’s that there?” Professor Lengyel asked. “It looks as though it was copied by an epileptic.”

  Louisa had no choice. She had to hand it over.

  He let his eye pass across a few measures and he asked, “Is he making love to you?”

  Blood rushed to Louisa’s face, and she said, “Of course not!”

  “That’s fortunate,” said Professor Lengyel. He set the manuscript aside. “This young man is a Jew.”

  3

  I TURNED OUT EVERY set of stockings I had worn between Trieste and Jaffa, but there was no sign of the telegram. Louisa stood over me, watching with maddening detachment. “Mutti, I need to make up the bed. They told me I could bring our breakfast here, so long as I kept clean.”

  Through the window sunlight streamed in, dappling everything and making it impossible to sort through the mess I’d dumped on top of our sheet. I thought I found it, once, twice, but it was some obsolete paperwork in an alphabet I couldn’t even recognize. I said, “It couldn’t just disappear.”

  “You mustn’t worry,” Louisa said. “You mustn’t make trouble for yourself.”

  “How can I make more trouble than we’re in?” I said. How could I make her understand? Without Bela, we might as well have landed in the Wild West surrounded b
y Red Indians.

  Louisa laid out our rolls and margarine on a fresh handkerchief, and she broke my roll and buttered it for me. “Eat something. You’ll feel more at home.”

  All the while, I wondered if the telegram had slipped out of my stocking when I disembarked. Such a little piece of paper, why hadn’t I put it into my bag? Why had I wanted it where I could touch it?

  Louisa munched on her own bread, careful to gather the crumbs into a napkin. “Leave it in my hands, Mutti. I’ll just fold up your nice things,” she said to me. “Then you can have a little rest.”

  I said to her, “You want to do something useful, dear? Walk back to port and swim until you see something floating past that looks like a telegram.”

  At once I regretted the suggestion, because it was easy enough to imagine her rising and walking straight to the Mediterranean to do just that. She is a very serious girl.

  IT TOOK A DEEP, arresting seriousness to set up housekeeping under our circumstances. She arranged what little we had in a couple of clean crates under our bed, establishing a kind of pantry where she kept our own soap, jam, plates, and cutlery. She even hemmed a blue cloth that could cover yet another crate she called our “breakfast table.” I did not know where Louisa procured these things. They were spotless and smelled of sawdust.

  “She gets what she wants,” a Pole said to me. With the boldness of a street walker, she yanked a jar of jam out of the crate and held it out for inspection. “How do you think she got this, eh? Plum jam. You think we get plum jam? No, they say to us, you can live with a little margarine, you’re used to it, but they take one look at the German girl and they stand up straight and give her jam.”

  Louisa must have known she was the subject of our conversation, but she went on hemming that cloth. I couldn’t help but wonder where she’d found the thread and needle. “She’s resourceful,” I said.

  “You’ve got that right, lady,” the woman said, giving me a strange little smirk. “She’s a girl who gets just what she wants.” The words somehow produced a lump like a plum that lodged in my throat. How was I supposed to talk to these creatures? Why did she keep on standing there, waving the jam? It would have been better if she’d gone and cracked the jar on my head. Maybe it would knock something loose, like my cousin’s new address.

  Louisa looked up from her sewing, and asked me, “Mutti, what does that lady want?”

  “Nothing we can give her,” I said.

  But Louisa asked, “Does she want a little jam? We need to be good neighbors. This is our home now.”

  I MANAGED TO dislodge myself from Louisa’s protection long enough to make my way to the Jewish Agency office, where I tried to put in a call to Kibbutz Tilulit. I made my request to a youth in khaki and was met by a level glance and this reply in Yiddish:

  “No such place.”

  I kept my head and addressed the young man behind the metal desk who had given me the information without so much as picking up the phone. “I sent a wire.”

  “From where? Here?”

  “Trieste.”

  He said, “They sent it back. You said you have a Haifa address?”

  “I lost it. But they’ll know my cousin’s whereabouts at Tilulit.”

  That boy couldn’t have been more than nineteen. He tipped back his chair and lit a cigarette; what he said next was wreathed in smoke. “Look, I fought in the Galilee. I know every settlement, village, and sinkhole in the Galilee. There’s no Kibbutz Tilulit.”

  Without the telegram from Bela, what did I have to throw in his face? I said, “For eighteen years, I wrote him here in Palestine.”

  “The name of this country is Eretz Yisrael,” he said. “Look, do you think you have some kind of special case? You people, you sabonim, you come here, you’re like children. Place the call yourself.”

  He thrust the black mouthpiece at me, and of course what came out was Hebrew. In my life, I have learned my mother-tongue, German, some Yiddish, and a few words in Russian. If I can’t be addressed in any of those languages, you don’t need to address me at all. I shrugged the telephone away. He didn’t look surprised.

  “Yofi. Nice,” he said. “Wonderful. Goodbye.”

  I persisted. “There must be a record somewhere of a Bela Hesshel.”

  He glared dead at me and said, “He changed his name. Sure thing. No one would run around Israel with a name like Bela Hesshel.”

  WHO CHANGES HIS name? Someone who commits a crime or has something to hide or wants to be forgotten. My husband, Janos, changed his name when he left his father’s house for engineering school in Budapest. Perhaps when he left me, he changed it too. The people in this camp would probably all change their names. The parents of that weasel of a desk clerk probably went through a dozen names since the day he was born. What can he know about my cousin?

  I’ve called him many things: Hesshi, Bélácska, Borzas Medve, but all the while I knew that he was Bela; he was satisfied with being Bela. No one would want him to be anyone else. He looked the way he was, like a bear picking apart the bark of a tree to see what was inside. It is impossible to think of him without his chin in his hand, and on his face an expression of bewilderment as he asked his impossible questions. His work, scholarly and otherwise, complemented his nature; it had everything to do with asking questions, listening closely, and drawing straightforward conclusions. He was a linguist. He was also a Zionist, which meant, in his own terms, living in Palestine. Therefore, in Palestine he lived. Such was Bela, who was the most earnest person in the world, and with whom I could never be earnest.

  How could I help myself? What was this Zion? Throughout our years of correspondence before the war, I would ask him: How could you cripple yourself with a dead language and travel to a land where nothing much had happened in a thousand years?

  WE MET WHEN I was nine, the summer after his father drowned in Lake Balaton. In spite of my mother’s letters, I think my Aunt Monika assumed we lived on an estate. Things being what they were, the lady and her two children could hardly vacation at the lake again, so every June, for three years, they took the train from Budapest, and it was impossible to ask them to leave Kisbarnahely before September.

  Kisbarnahely lay two hours east of Budapest. Summers, it was ringed with fields of shoulder-high sunflowers, but by late August they had withered into shrunken heads. The town was a railroad junction with a main street that extended in a straight line from the tracks for a kilometer before ending abruptly at an empty lot where someone piled manure. My father kept books for the brickworks, and our house was no more than fifty meters from the cooling shed. It was a narrow house, with nothing between us and the train tracks but a blind wall. The house measured fifteen paces end to end. I knew because I measured it again and again from the time I could count.

  Now into that house each summer were crammed three carpetbags, two trunks, a lot of leather-bound German novels, and a phonograph, as well as a cigarette case which I’d empty while Aunt Monika slept. They were English Ovals, very good cigarettes. The lady herself was a source of fascination, with her big black eyes and breathless vulnerability. She never talked about her husband, at least not around me. I suspect she found amusement and distraction in my mother’s stream of complaints about the mud, the dust, the brutes they had for neighbors, no proper gaslights, no paved streets, and nothing available in the shops but mule-harnesses and boots full of beetle-droppings. But that is life, my mother would say, tragedy if we don’t make it farce, isn’t that so, Moni?

  Aunt Monika would agree. In short, the two of them had a terrific time. They would sing together to the phonograph, and my mother let me make them coffee, which I poured into peach-pink china cups I hadn’t realized we’d owned.

  Altogether, the children held less interest for me. There was Adele, a girl my own age. She always seemed to be writing letters to her three-dozen best friends, and on the long table beside the bed we had to share, she lined her doll collection shoulder to shoulder, in a row, as though they were a
bout to face a firing squad. They were arranged by hair color, and their dresses were sewn onto their bodies, which I knew because I tried to pry them off. Really, I preferred Bela.

  He was eleven. I had been told he could speak German, so I recited a Heine poem I’d learned in school. He replied with a fluency that knocked me backwards. When I prodded him, he told me that German was what his family spoke at home, and in addition, he knew a little French, and, of course, Hebrew.

  “Why ‘of course’?” I gave him a look. He was still dressed in tweed knickers and a clean white shirt, and there wasn’t a muscle in his body. I had never seen such a Jew.

  By then, I’d led him to the cellar to show him a mouse-hole. He had a middle-class boy’s interest in vermin and actually got on his hands and knees to peer inside. I struck a match so he could see, and of course that scared the mouse away.

  “I teach Hebrew,” he said as he rose from the mouse-hole. He had gotten mold all over his Budapest clothes, and looked so forlorn that I was moved to offer him one of his mother’s cigarettes. He refused with a slightly shocked expression.

  The best thing about Bela was that he made me feel daring, and he believed everything I said. He’d never picked an apricot, and I told him the only really sweet fruit was on the crown of the tree, so we climbed on the roof, and he grabbed my ankles as with a swimming head I hung upside-down and reached out to the tree in the courtyard to pull an apricot free. I swear, it was the sweetest fruit I’d ever tasted. Afterwards, he just sat up there, watching me lick the juice from my fingers and shaking his head.