Louisa Read online

  “So I got sprinkled. I’m a new man,” Gabor said as we ate white cake to celebrate. “I don’t know why I didn’t do it years ago. Now I’m absolutely free.” Louisa kept a piece of cake in her cheek for a long time until I thought she wouldn’t manage to get it down.

  The wedding took even less fuss than the conversion. One of the teachers at the Katona Jozsef School had a friend who knew a willing judge to bribe with some of Louisa’s Reichmarks. The dark wood benches of the office and the chandelier with its tulip-like bulbs put me in mind of my own wedding. Louisa wore the gold velvet dress, steamed in our bathroom into something like its original shape. As she had no wedding ring, I gave her mine, though she had to secure it with a bit of twine to keep it from slipping off her finger. I arranged for a wedding portrait at a studio, and Louisa posed Gabor and herself dutifully in front of a tinted oval, but Gabor pulled away so suddenly that Louisa stumbled forward and overturned the camera and tripod with a crack.

  Louisa asked, “Did something break? How much was it? Tell me. We have money!”

  “No, we don’t!” Gabor pushed her back with such force that she fell against the panel. I stepped in to help her to her feet and threw Gabor a look I hadn’t thought myself capable of. Maybe he was also startled. He set a hand on Louisa’s arm, and said, “I need some air.”

  “I’ll come with you,” Louisa said at once. Her eyelids fluttered and her mouth seemed to take on a life of its own, twisting this way and that.

  It was senseless for him to object, as she wouldn’t let go of his arm. In my cloth coat, she looked urchin-like. They went out together into the cold.

  IT WENT ON THAT way for a while, Gabor escaping, Louisa trailing behind. He would try to slip away in the middle of the night, and there Louisa would be, running as she tried to work on a pair of my boots, calling out, “Gabor! Gabor!” and half-tripping down the stairs. I’d force myself out of bed and watch the two of them through the window. The streets would be deserted; and I couldn’t think of where they’d go.

  One night, Louisa shook me out of a stupor, whispering, “There were men following us!”

  “From your parents?”

  “They trailed me. Gabor got away.”

  I straightened up on the couch and tried to keep my temper as I asked, “Did they trail you here?”

  “Bitte?” Louisa drew her hand to her mouth, and though her face was pink with cold the color drained from it slowly. She stared at the ceiling. “We’ll move, then.”

  “Where to?” I asked her. “Dear, come clean. Tell them. You’re married now. You’re carrying their grandchild. What can they do?”

  But Louisa didn’t answer. She settled on the couch, still staring at the high, pale ceiling, and in that position she waited for Gabor, who did not return that night.

  As for me, I shuffled to the kitchen to wash the supper dishes. Though I moved like an old lady, I was only forty-four. No gray in my hair, good posture and firm flesh. Yet within the year, my hair would fall out in clumps and I would lose enough flesh to make a whole other Nora. Within the year, Gabor would be dead and many other things would come to pass. Other stories; no time for them now.

  No, now I will describe that year’s beginning. As an added precaution, we managed to arrange a second wedding in a church, and Louisa and I waited for Gabor. He arrived drunk, mumbling something about missing an important appointment. He did give Louisa a fierce kiss afterwards, which softened matters.

  Gabor asked the minister, “Do you do this often?”

  The minister, a dim-bulb I’d been lucky to track down, gave Gabor a benign smile. Gabor clarified.

  “I mean, do you marry two separate species? Our baby will have wings and horns. We’ll sell him to the circus.”

  “Idiot!” I said, when we were alone again. “Do you want to die in a minefield? These people could save your life.”

  “All right! All right! Stop blowing your stinking breath in my face,” Gabor said, wheeling away from me. “Give me a little room to do my own thinking for once.”

  “What thinking is that?” I asked him.

  “I can’t live like this, all right? I know my limitations.”

  “If you want your freedom, take it,” I said. “Take Louisa and go.”

  “You mean you’d turn us out?” There wasn’t an ounce of worry in his voice. In a moment, Louisa entered with her nervous smile, and that was the end of the conversation.

  HE WAS OFTEN AWAY now, playing piano at a dancing school. The pupils had strong bones and straight backs, and there was a reality to them that Gabor relished. Louisa had begun, recently, to stoop. Her hair thinned and her features thickened and her small, bright eyes grew large and solemn. We spent a lot of time together.

  “You know, Mutti,” she said once, “I think I could give singing lessons.”

  I poured out tea, and she drank it down not with her old apologetic sips but all at once. Then she folded her hands around the cup, a sad, plain woman.

  “When we get to Turkey,” she said, “we’ll need more money. Especially once Gabor starts composing again.”

  What could I say to that? She practiced, sometimes, in the room which had once been my husband’s study. She did exercises, with two fingers pressed to her mouth: lu lu lu. She sang about losing things. Then there was the afternoon in late January when, without warning, this flew across the room:

  “I love you, your fair form allures me.

  And if you don’t come willingly, I’ll use force.”

  “Father, father, now he’s seizing me!

  The Eorl-King has hurt me!”

  The father shudders, he rides swiftly.

  Holding the moaning child in his arms.

  With one last effort he reaches home;

  The child lay dead in his arms.

  I didn’t like the effect of that voice, but I also couldn’t escape it unless I, like Gabor, fled and walked until my head was clear of who this girl might somehow be.

  I did take a little walk once, in early February, and it led me to an old haunt, the Hovirag cukrászda. It was a mild day, and I borrowed Gabor’s lamb’s-wool coat. When I put my hands in the pockets, I felt a key. That key, I examined. It was small and rather new, a key for a cheap padlock, easily mislaid in a coat’s lining, completely trivial. Yet it remained in my hand for some time as I let my cup of tea chill, and I remembered the days when I had a son whom I believed told me everything, when I could tell myself that every lock had a key. But now I knew better. I had wanted to be a woman to whom no one need lie. I was asking for something impossible.

  LATER THAT MONTH, Louisa fell ill. The household was upside down. Gabor paced the kitchen, slamming his fist against first the right wall and then the left, infused with an emotion that I couldn’t classify. I sat by Louisa’s bed myself, and she wouldn’t let go of my hand.

  Nor could she speak; she gasped and sobbed and the sheets were drenched with perspiration. The medicine Gabor had brought for her stood loosely capped on the nightstand, in an oily paper bag. I kept the hand she didn’t grasp tucked behind her head; her hair was rank and slippery. Slowly, I pressed that head on the pillow, and reached out for the bottle to tighten the cap. The label was obscured by dark stains, and I turned it to the light and read:

  PORTUGUESE TANSY WOMAN’S ELIXIR

  RELEASES MONTHLY FEMALE FLOW

  “Mutter,” Louisa gasped now, “I’m bleeding. I—it’s my fault. I’m bleeding on his bed.”

  I pushed a little hair out of her eyes, and then I said, “Do you want me to get towels?”

  “Don’t leave me,” Louisa whispered. “I’m going to die. I don’t want to die alone.”

  “You’re not going to die,” I said, but to tell you the truth, I wasn’t sure. She looked as though she might die; she’d lost a lot of blood. Whatever overtook her had her now. Could I have called a doctor? I don’t know.

  But I did not let go of her hand. I didn’t leave that bed. I missed two days of work, and didn’t know i
f they would have me back again. In fact, I would lose that job soon enough, along with everything else, just as Louisa had predicted. I lined Louisa’s legs with towels, washed her thighs with water from the dish-basin, and sponged her forehead. I watched her fine skin turn to rice-paper and new blue veins appear on her temples. On the third day, she said, again, “I’m going to die.”

  I said, “No, you’re not. Let go.”

  Louisa looked as though I’d struck her. Her fingers froze around my wrist. I spoke again.

  “Let go and open your hand. I’m going to read your palm.”

  What could Louisa do then but release her hand from mine and, with hesitation, open the fingers. The whole hand was flushed from the pressure of her grip, and there was a streak of blood by the base of the thumb, but I didn’t look at those things. Rather, I turned that open hand towards the secondary light of the hallway—the curtains in the room were drawn—and I looked at what I saw.

  “All right,” I said. “You’re not going to die. Or not for a long time.” I knew it too. There was a perseverance to the hand itself, and to the lines, which seemed to change in character from subtle tracery to something strong. “And also,” I said, “listen, Louisa, you’re going to have a child.”

  I felt a tremor shoot up through the wrist. She started to say something, but I silenced her.

  “You’ll have a child one day. I’ll be a grandmother. I swear, it’s God’s own truth.”

  I released Louisa’s palm, and now she didn’t speak, but turned her head from her pillow with her hair in her eyes and the hand still open on the bed. She drew her other hand to her mouth, and kept it there, looking up at me in a way I didn’t want to bear. I went to get more towels.

  On the way, I passed Gabor. He’d grown leaner; his face had hardened. I placed my hand on his arm and he shook it off like an insect, and with a sudden shudder of nerves, he went in to his wife.

  I thought: This is all madness, a mistake, but mistakes have their own momentum. If only we were not held accountable, or could move on, or were commonly innocent or guilty. If only it were that easy.

  PART

  THREE

  1

  THE ONLY REAL thing about Gan Leah was the mud. It was blood-colored, rich, and so deep that a series of planks lay across the path between the parking lot and the administrative office. I paused to tie Levin’s frilly white hat below the chin.

  “Making a good impression?” Levin asked me.

  “For who?” I answered, and I tried to smile. From the moment Levin’s jeep entered the Galilee, I’d quickened with such foreboding that I’d three times almost told him to turn back, but didn’t because it felt ridiculous.

  He took my arm, an old habit by now, and he helped me negotiate the mud. I still didn’t believe we were in the right place. For one thing, the topography was wrong. If there was one certain thing about Tilulit it was its placement on a hill, and as we neared the location Levin had circled on his map, I scouted hill after hill; telegraph poles linked them like charms on a chain, and sometimes there would be a flash of white rooftops and my heart would freeze over, but Levin would keep driving. Then those hills leveled off, and suddenly there was a brightly painted sign in Hebrew and Latin characters: GAN LEAH: EST. 1923

  I said, “There’s some mistake. This isn’t it.”

  Levin took off his sunglasses, and said, “Nora, there’s no mistake.”

  Beyond the sign there was a burst of garish sunlit rectangles, patches of bilious green and overlaid asphalt, and that mud. Nothing I recognized from any letter. Frankly, I was relieved. I let myself be walked towards that neat white shack at the end of the path and adjusted the hat as he rang the buzzer.

  A young girl with blond pigtails opened the door; her face was pleasant enough, but of course she spoke Hebrew, so her conversation with Levin was incomprehensible. She left us sitting on folding chairs in a dark little office with a window-fan.

  Levin reached for a water pitcher and offered me a glass.

  “I’m fine. Drink the water yourself.”

  “You don’t look fine,” said Levin. “You’re white as a ghost.”

  I lit a Lucky Strike, and found an ashtray weighing down some loose papers on a bookshelf. There were old notebooks on that shelf, some spiral bound, some with thick, cracked cardboard covers. The thicker ones had dates on their spines: 1927, 1928, 1932, 1924. The oldest of them lay topmost, and its cover had been carefully repaired with masking tape. I pulled it out, and it opened of itself to the middle; the language was Hebrew, but the scrawl so wild and blotted that the pen had probably exploded. Beyond that point, a few of the pages had gummed together with something sticky that had crystallized around the edges.

  All right, then. So someone took notes while she ate honey with her fingers. By the time I stubbed that Lucky in the ashtray I wasn’t so surprised to hear the door open and see Nathan Sobel.

  As with Dori, I would have known him anywhere from the photograph, though he’d gone fat. His eyebrows still grew together. He took maybe two steps into the office before telling us in Hungarian that he didn’t have much time to show us around. Then he took two steps out of the office before saying to me, “Why didn’t you come in ’forty-four?”

  “It wasn’t possible,” I said.

  “That’s ridiculous,” said Nathan Sobel. “But you’re here now, you made it through hell, you’ve come home, eh? And where’re you living? With this man?”

  I was appalled to see Levin turn red. He answered for me.

  “She’s still waiting for housing.”

  “Well, you look just like I thought you would from your letters,” Sobel said. “Nothing like that cousin of yours. How is your son?”

  “He’s dead,” I said. I thought maybe he’d ask me how he died, but he only pressed his liver-lips together and motioned us down a path shaded by young trees.

  “These saplings were planted in ’forty-two. We’d just doubled in size, and Leah and the other orphans lived in tents. Who had cement or lumber for new houses? At least after digging up a road and planting trees they didn’t think a tent was so uncomfortable. It builds character,” Sobel said.

  Levin asked about the harvest and about kibbutz policy on using hired labor, and those questions allowed me to observe everything around me without fear of interruption. What could I know here? The laundry? The dining hall and library? They were a lot of ice-cubes freshly shaken from the tray. There was nothing I knew here, nothing.

  In spite of myself, I broke in. “What about the bee-hives?”

  Sobel looked surprised. “Bee-hives? Well, these days, we don’t go in much for small industry. There’s a hive in the children’s quarters. Educational purposes. That’s in the old part of the kibbutz.”

  “The old kibbutz,” I said, “that’s Tilulit? On a hill?”

  “You could call it a hill,” said Nathan. “Look, it’s time for lunch. You must be awfully hot in that fancy pink thing you’re wearing.”

  “Is it painted yellow?” I asked him, and he gave me a long look. I clarified. “The hive.”

  For some reason, he didn’t answer me. He left us at the dining hall and I felt suddenly faint. Levin seated me at a table near the door and got me a plate of tomato salad and a glass of fruit juice. He whispered, “Nora, there’s a guest room you can use, I’m sure, if you need to have a rest.”

  “No, no,” I said. “Who needs to rest?”

  “Why didn’t you ask that fellow anything about your cousin?”

  While we were whispering, our table filled up with young people who chattered away in Hebrew. One stocky boy with red hair gave us a friendly greeting. Levin answered him. Never had the language sounded to me so impossible to penetrate, or so artificial. Levin turned to me and said, “There’s going to be a performance at the children’s house in three hours. Then the kibbutz string quartet will be playing in the auditorium, and afterwards there will be a special dairy supper and a dance. This boy has been here for eight years, he
says. These people might know something.”

  I doubted it. In their cotton shirts and shorts, with their sun-bleached hair showing under the brim of their cotton hats, they didn’t look as though they could recognize their own fathers and mothers. They were like happy cattle.

  I said to Levin, “Ask them,” and after a little thought, I finished the sentence. “Ask them about the Arab village Taell al-Taji.”

  Levin did just that, and I watched their faces. One of them addressed Levin. He translated for me. “We’re sitting in it.”

  This was what Levin told me: The villagers had fled during the War of Independence in ’48, and afterwards most of the older houses had been bulldozed, but a few had been salvageable and could be absorbed into the kibbutz. The office where we sat when we’d arrived, for example, had once been a stable. Below the asphalt of the parking lot was stone, beautiful but badly cracked. Gan Leah made use of what they could: bricks, roofing, and beams. Such fragments had been incorporated into the new dining hall; the beams lined a verandah of gray slate.

  “And the water,” I said to Levin.

  “What water?”

  “There was water,” I said, “between the kibbutz and the village. A gully with a plank bridge.”

  Levin shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe they rerouted it for irrigation. That would have been the sensible thing to do.”

  From the verandah, I could at last see what might have been old Tilulit. It wasn’t a hill, precisely, more of a slope dotted with purple wildflowers. The shaggy, forgotten look of that slope made me wonder if I had been mistaken. Perhaps there had never been a Tilulit; perhaps it wouldn’t exist on any map at any time. It was like that telegram from Bela, something I might as well have never had at all.