Louisa Read online

  By the look of the broken box, I’d guess the letters dated from the late twenties. He glanced up and asked, “You wrote all this?”

  “They’re yours,” I said. “Just read.”

  Bela settled back onto the duffel with the page in his hand. The air in the room throbbed, and lamplight fell unevenly, filtering through Bela’s hair, the stuff of his shirt, the closely written page. I could see the faint lines around Bela’s eyes deepen. He turned the page over, and without looking up at me, kept reading.

  Then I couldn’t watch him anymore, so I checked the clock. It was well after eight. Gabor would be home soon, and we would pack our things. If we could go by airplane, he wouldn’t put up much of a fuss. And it was easy to imagine Gabor brown and happy among the chicken coops, chasing away the rooster, baking cakes in the common kitchen, and it all seemed so natural that I didn’t have to think too hard about where I would fit into the picture, and how a picture exposed to light would start dissolving. Time was short. I couldn’t bear it. I forced a glance at Bela, but he had picked up a second letter, and I thought: I must fetch my son now, before it’s too late.

  I left Bela there. I wasn’t running away, but running towards—racing against time—as though if I could present Gabor, hold him up like evidence, Bela would have to take us both. How could he not? That Gabor was nearly fifteen and could not be held up like a parcel didn’t occur to me. Rather than risking a late tram, I broke down and took a taxi to Istvan Lengyel’s house, and by then half an hour had passed. The minutes were like a trail of bread crumbs; I would soon be empty handed.

  I rang the bell. No one answered. Yet there was a light in the window. I hesitated, and then I turned the knob. The door was open.

  The foyer was dark; there wasn’t a single coat on the rack, and a sharp heat flowed through the French doors. I stepped forward, almost called out Gabor’s name, and hesitated. I could hear faint voices coming from a room far away, and then laughter, Gabor’s unmistakably. A low voice. Then a few notes on a piano.

  Slowly, I moved through the French doors and down the hall, feeling cold in my bones. A chord was played then, and another. Every room I passed had a fire burning in it, yet somehow I still felt cold, and I pulled the coat around me as I walked up the stairs to the library. Through the open door, I saw them.

  Gabor was stretched out on his back on the piano bench with his head dangling upside down. His shirt was out of his trousers. One arm extended, hand resting on the keys. He lazily played another chord. Lengyel sat on the couch in his pajamas, reading a newspaper. Neither had noticed I was there.

  I said, “Gabor, it’s time to go home.”

  Lengyel put down the newspaper and rose. Gabor sat up and knocked his head against the piano. “Um, Momma?”

  “It’s late,” I said. “I can’t know—”

  “Madam,” said Lengyel, but then he seemed at a loss for words.

  “I was only learning to play,” said Gabor, rubbing his head and walking towards me none too steadily. “It was going to be a surprise. I’m learning—”

  “I don’t want to know what you were learning,” I said to Gabor. I grabbed hold of his arm, hard. “I don’t want you to lie to me either.”

  Lengyel took a step forward. “Don’t draw rash conclusions.”

  “It’s true!” Gabor said. “I’m not lying to you. Why would I lie?” He looked bewildered, but his voice caught in a way that made me doubt him, and I veered between anger and fear and something darker, knowing only that I had to get the two of us out of that house before I lost my mind.

  We caught a tram, and the lights of Buda streaked by as we crossed the Duna and turned a corner into the heart of Pest. By that time, Gabor had calmed down, and I could risk a few questions.

  “How long has that man been teaching you?”

  “A long time,” said Gabor. “It started with basic theory, and I was bored at first, but then I wasn’t. We only started piano a few months ago. Don’t be angry, Momma. I was only learning.”

  I stroked my son’s hair, and he took my handkerchief so he could blow his nose. In ten minutes, we would arrive at my flat, where I would find Bela gone and this letter waiting.

  Nora,

  What I have read stuns me and makes me proud. You have shown me your heart. It is everything I knew it to be, honest, tender and brave. I do sincerely hope that you will one day bring that brave heart with you to Palestine, but I think we both know you shouldn’t go under these circumstances. Nora, I can’t save you from anything. There is too much I don’t have the strength to do and too many things I don’t understand.

  You are my friend. That is steadfast. I trust you to trust it, and to forgive me.

  Bela

  P.S. I am taking the overnight train to Szeged, and have left a few things for you and your family. It makes the bag a little lighter. I’ll write to you soon.

  He did write to me as soon as he returned to Palestine, and we exchanged a few more letters before war put an end to our correspondence. Then there was the note presented by a stranger that called for me to gather his family and transport them all to Palestine, the note I burned.

  As for Gabor, he did continue on the piano, taking lessons from the music teacher at the Katona Jozsef School, and through her he made friends at the Academy, and that would lead to another story, one you know, that moves on to a cellar and a train station where a girl would not let go, and forgive me if I don’t have the strength to begin that story again. I am exhausted at the thought of reconstructing the look on Gabor’s face as the tram rattled towards our flat on Prater Street, towards home, where Bela wasn’t, where Janos wasn’t, where I had to dump the burnt roast in the trash-bin and sleep long enough to face the office in the morning. Bela had left a dipper carved out of olive wood and three jars of honey. What would my life be, by the time those jars were empty? What could be sweet? What could be mine?

  What do I have? I thought then, as the tram turned towards a street where lamplight filled many windows. I have my son.

  10

  THE MORNING AFTER Louisa appeared, I woke up, and for a moment, I didn’t know where I was. There was the mammoth wardrobe and the frozen window. There was the door, half-open, letting in a slant of dusty sunlight. From the pipes in the walls came a note which could only mean that someone was filling them with hot water.

  I wanted to keep still. If I moved then I would be awake and if I was awake I’d have to take some action. Yet what choice did I have? When I pulled myself from bed, a red wool blanket fell to the floor, Gabor’s blanket. I called: “Hello?” The flat seemed bigger than ever, and my voice couldn’t carry past the room. Reluctantly, I moved into the open, and called, “Louisa!”

  This time, I was met with a creak and a splash. The bathroom door flew open and there was Louisa wrapped in my husband’s old white robe and shaking out a quantity of long, fair hair. With her free hand, she twisted that hair and pulled her face towards me with a dazed expression. “You’re up?”

  I couldn’t even remember falling asleep but had a vision of someone walking me off the couch; the thought of being caught in such a vulnerable state disturbed me. Louisa squeezed a trickle of bath water from her hair, loosed it, and combed it with my own comb as she spoke.

  “I’ve been up forever. I bought cream and rolls, and I made coffee too.” She seemed very proud of herself. In fact, by the stove sat two of the Herendi teacups, and the pot itself, which by some miracle wasn’t leaking very much.

  “I expect,” I said, “you didn’t call your parents.”

  I’d hoped to keep the conversation on a level of irony, but Louisa continued to look at me with a kind of dizzy wonder. I turned towards the windowsill and was relieved to find my cigarettes. I lit one, which cleared my head considerably.

  “It would help if you gave me their number,” I said, “but I can track it down.”

  I pulled my cloth coat off the rack and felt the pocket for change, at the same time thrusting my bare feet i
nto winter boots and wondering what I’d say to these strangers. Louisa cried out: “Don’t call!”

  Something in her voice stopped me short. I turned. Her eyes sparkled with panic.

  “I want to stay here,” she said. “Just for a while, please, Frau Gratz, until I can find Gabor.”

  All this came out in a burst. In spite of all my good horse sense I took the coat off and allowed Louisa to pour me a cup of coffee. The shepherdesses on that pot were rubbed down to a few raised blue and yellow smudges. Louisa’s hand trembled as she reached for her cream. I said, “I’m flattered that you want to stay here, but your parents are bound to track you down.”

  She didn’t answer. She stared into her coffee cup.

  “When they do find you here, you’ll get me into trouble too. I don’t want trouble.”

  “It’s true, what Gabor told me,” Louisa said. “You don’t hold back what you say. I can know where I am with you. You don’t lie.”

  “I’d lie to save my own skin,” I said.

  “And to save your son?”

  I didn’t answer. She got up and took away our empty cups. Such a pretty girl, I thought, and such an odd fish. My husband’s robe slipped down her shoulder, and the smell of her damp hair mingled with the coffee. It seemed, just then, as though she were toying with me in an unforgivable way and at the same time had no idea what she was doing.

  She called to me from the kitchen. “I want Gabor to go with me to Turkey.”

  That stunned me. “To what?”

  “Turkey,” she said. “I’ve thought it through. We could escape together tonight. You could come with us.”

  As dryly as I could manage, I said, “Kind of you to think of me.”

  Louisa stuck her head out of the door so quickly that her hair flew in her face. “You think I could leave you to this? To what’s going to happen? Because,” she said, “it’s going to happen.”

  “Will it?” I paused, and then I said, “I’ll admit that I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about.”

  “You’re going to lose everything,” she said. “Your job. Your home. Your family. Because Hungary will be part of the Reich, it must be, and the Israelites in the Reich—”

  I interrupted her. “Hungary is not part of the Reich. We’re Germany’s ally. There’s no reason why you’d invade—”

  “Not me,” Louisa said. “No, please, we can escape. I have money.” And that’s when she showed me the clump of Reichmarks she’d gotten from who-knows-where, maybe her mother’s purse. Those banknotes, still damp, lay on the table like old rags. They had the feel of something secreted away for months, as though Louisa had known all along that it would come to this. The effort of revealing them seemed to exhaust her. She said, “I can’t go back. Don’t make me explain why. But it’s not me. I can’t even say what I am.”

  My perplexity deepened. Admittedly, I was a little touched too. “I can’t accept that money.”

  “It’s Gabor’s,” she said. “What good is it if it doesn’t belong to him? He’s given me too much—too much I don’t even know what.” Then she stopped talking, and her eyes grew moist again. It was a moment before she took possession of herself, and then she said, “I’ve never sung for you.”

  Embarrassed, I said, “This place doesn’t have the best acoustics.”

  Then she sniffled or she laughed, and took a step away from the table, raising her arms a little away from her hips, and in an almost conversational way, she began:

  What is lost, what is lost

  We can not have back again.

  It is like a breath we’ve taken.

  We can not breathe it again.

  It is like good bread we’ve eaten.

  We can not eat it again.

  It is like a heart we’ve broken

  Or our own heart, lost in vain.

  I felt the skin float off my bones, and did nothing until she’d finished. Then I asked her, “Where did you learn that song?”

  Louisa said, “But it’s your son’s.”

  It took me a moment to relocate myself in the present where this pale, fair, pregnant girl stood wiping her hands on a tea-towel and also wiping her eyes. Could Louisa mark some change on my face? Or maybe she thought the song had moved me. Yes, I was moved, moved back, as away from some horrible thing. I could say that it was her voice that changed the words, but those were my words, and I could not tell where those words ended and her voice began. I could say: This isn’t me, this isn’t me, but I was going to be sick.

  I said, “I’m going out for a while.”

  Louisa didn’t look happy. She might have been disappointed that I said nothing about her voice or about my son’s song. More likely, she was afraid I’d call her parents.

  But I couldn’t call her parents now. Previously, what happened to Louisa was not my doing. Now, somehow, it was. I said to her, “I’m going to get myself some cigarettes. Then I’m going to find my son.”

  FIRST, I TRIED THE clarinetist’s. Louisa had been correct; Gabor wasn’t there. Furthermore, the clarinetist made it clear that he wouldn’t be welcome back again. He’d returned from his aunt’s to find the room in such a state of heroic disorder that at first he’d thought he’d been robbed. Now he’d piled Gabor’s things on the broken couch; a paper sack of boxer shorts and socks and linen dress shirts, assorted magazines, a pitch-pipe. There were at least a dozen empty baskets stacked crookedly against the windowsill. “If he doesn’t come back for them in three days,” the clarinetist said, “I’ll throw them out the window.”

  I also tried the Academy, where the lady at the desk asked for identification and wouldn’t let me through the labyrinth of practice rooms. The padded doors, seen from afar, hardly seemed a place where once a young girl with a folder full of Schubert would have knocked and knocked. Finally, I had a premonition. I took a tram to Nyugati.

  I had to walk the full length of the tracks to the place where the station ended, and there was Gabor sitting on a pile of railroad ties. I watched him from a distance before I made my approach. He was staring straight ahead at a cluster of mechanics gathered around something in a wheelbarrow. I started towards him with caution. He saw me, but he didn’t rise. Instead, he leaned back and thrust his chin into his chest.

  I was the first to speak. “Have you been here all night?”

  Gabor didn’t look up. “I wanted to get a job on the railroad, but I need my papers and I left them somewhere. Do you have them?”

  “You know what papers I have,” I said.

  “What are you talking about?” he asked. Then he blew his nose.

  “Your song. Louisa’s song,” I said. “The words from my letters.”

  Gabor looked up at me, and in his red eyes I could have read remorse or sleeplessness or the beginnings of another cold. He rubbed his face as though to force a little warmth back into it, and then he sighed. “All right,” he said. “I’m sorry. You weren’t supposed to know.”

  I said, “She’s home, Gabor. In your father’s robe. With a fistful of Reichmarks.” And then I told him everything. He listened, at first baffled, and then appalled, and finally on his feet and interrupting:

  “I asked her if she was pregnant, and she told me she wasn’t!”

  “Your angel,” I said, “is very protective.”

  Saying this, I felt unaccountably happy, because Gabor laughed, weakly but genuinely, sinking back down onto those railroad ties and shaking his head. Perhaps, I thought, it was all over. He could go back to writing sonnets about sardine cans and posing in the nude and teaching piano. But then I realized the form that girl’s protection might take.

  I crouched on the gasoline-moist dirt so that my eyes were level with the eyes of my son. I asked, “Do you love her?”

  This time, Gabor didn’t laugh. Maybe because he was too cold or stiff, and laughter would have been literally painful. Anyway, he answered indirectly, “I can’t shake her.”

  “Have you tried?”

  “Ye
s, Momma.”

  “I mean really tried.” And here I set a hand on his shoulder and locked my eyes with his own.

  He shook my hand away. “Yes, yes, I really tried. And I can’t, all right?”

  I took a long look at my son, whose face was tucked back into the shoulder of that long-suffering lamb’s-wool coat, and whose eyes were closed, so that his lashes brushed his cheeks. I said, “Marry her.”

  He opened his eyes. “You’re not serious.”

  “She is. She’s a very serious girl, and maybe she could save your life.”

  “My life’s not in danger,” Gabor said.

  I said, “Yes, it is. It won’t be long before you’re called up for the Labor Battalion. This girl won’t let you go.”

  I can only guess what Gabor thought as he sat on those railroad ties and stared past me at the signal light. His eyes hardened, but that might have only been the glare. His hair was in those eyes; I wanted to take a comb and push it back; I wanted to tell him to come home; I wanted to take back what I’d said as well because I didn’t like the silence it brought on, thick and palpable.

  Finally, Gabor said to me, “Momma, is it true?”

  I asked, “Is what true?”

  “That they won’t draft men with Christian wives. What if I marry her in the church and get baptized. Would I get new papers? What are my papers like now? What am I?”

  I finally put my arms around him and gave him a kiss. The poor boy shivered, but his forehead burned. I expect he had a fever. “What you really need is a passport. She wants you to go to Turkey.”

  Gabor pulled back. “Turkey? Turkey? Why not China?”

  Then he started to laugh, and this time he didn’t stop, but fell backwards, laughing and laughing until I was afraid the mechanics would hear and run over, so I hushed him and he pulled me to his side, and we both laughed at life’s absurdity as though we knew it would be for the last time.

  IN JANUARY OF 1944, there was a run on conversions. A line formed in front of the rabbinical office on Wesselenyi Street, where the apostates made their declarations and then the next stop was the Terezvaros parish office where for fifteen pengös one could get a little cardboard certificate from the Union of Christian Jews. There had been a rumor that by the end of the month further conversions would be invalid, but that same rumor had made the rounds many times before, and it had always proved false. Christians are very forgiving.