Louisa Read online

  “You don’t know what the hell you’re doing,” I’d say to him.

  He’d look down with a playful smile. “Why should you have to struggle with it?”

  “Maybe it passes the time.”

  “Then find a better way to pass the time,” he would reply from the height of the chair, a distance that made flirtation meaningless. Afterwards, he would lower himself by degrees, implying age, a sore back, and a hesitant nature. I knew that in another year, he would start coming once every few months, and in another year, he wouldn’t come at all. As he drove off, I wanted to lean out the window and wave that old white sun hat at him, some helpless gesture.

  Then there was Yossel Berkowitz. Without warning one night, there he was in my room, with the same stains on his leather jacket and the same deep wrinkles in his trousers. He’d removed the fur hat, though, and he’d combed his hair with brilliantine. Straddling a chair, he stretched his feet to the radiator and said, “There’s a happy ending for you. Everyone gets his way.”

  I admitted some confusion and confessed I’d wondered if he’d thought we’d made some sort of bargain.

  “Bargain? With you? What makes you think you have anything I want? I’ve got my own problems, Nagymama. Here. Have a cigarette. You probably don’t get ones like these in this town.” He was right, as ever. I couldn’t scare up any Lucky Strikes. He lit mine with his own, and we smoked together for a while, something we’d never done before. “You know those Transylvanian girls?” he asked me. “Well, they’re in the army now. Every last one a paratrooper. With those girls floating from the sky, I’ve got my hands full. Who knows where they’ll land?”

  ONE AFTERNOON, I was about to go out for a walk when I collided with someone opening the door. It was Jonah, with both arms around a paper bag. He’d stopped by on his way to the dry-cleaners. It seems it was around the corner from the boardinghouse. He addressed me in Hungarian. “Are you busy? I could use a little company.”

  I probably tried to read something into his voice, but there was nothing to read. Although this was the first time we had been alone together, he acted as though it were something that happened every day, and now I tried to take it in the same spirit, and I said, “Sure, I’m busy. The girls are all going to the cinema. There’s some Russian film about a woman aviator.”

  “Oh, well, then,” said Jonah, but I led him up the street towards the café I frequented, a cramped place where the tables were covered with stained white cloths, but the coffee was as good as anything you could get in Budapest. He ordered a raspberry soda. There was something touching in this stout, cigar-smelling fellow drinking through a straw.

  “So,” I said, “dry-cleaning.”

  “Dry-cleaning,” said Jonah. “What’s wrong with that?”

  “Don’t you always leave the ticket somewhere. And if you leave it somewhere, do you have to retrace your steps and go to everybody’s kitchen and if they find it first, do they pick your laundry up for you or hold it hostage?”

  Jonah rubbed his chin, and maybe he smiled. “You wear me out, Nora.”

  “Good,” I said. “Somebody has to wear you out.” My own coffee was getting cold, but I didn’t care. “If nobody wears you out, you’ll keep on getting younger, and then one day, you’ll disappear.”

  “No, I won’t,” said Jonah.

  “Yes, you have,” I said.

  He didn’t answer. Why did I say that? It was idiotic. Here was my cousin at last, and I make a fool of myself. Why can’t I make peace with my own nature? When I open my heart, I drive people away. Well, I thought, so he’ll go. What’s done is done.

  But although there was no soda left in the glass, Jonah showed no sign of leaving. His eyes, those heavy, soft, black eyes, he rubbed, and he had rubbed his chin, and maybe he was trying to confirm that he was still there. And he was still there, impossibly but firmly. It was a good thing I was sitting down, because I felt a little giddy.

  Then he did something I hadn’t expected. He put his hand in his pocket and took out something that looked as though it must have once been a cigarette. It was bent, and half of the tobacco had come out of it. He put it on the table and said, “There.”

  “What is this?” I asked him. “Is this your idea of a gesture?”

  “It was in the pocket of a pair of work-pants I grew out of,” Jonah said. “Got it from one of your old boyfriends I ran into around the time you came. Lu found it yesterday. I think she couldn’t believe I hadn’t washed those pants in all those years.”

  “So she told you to give this to me?”

  “Nora, be fair,” said Jonah. “You remember that day in Vidam Park when I said I’d pass all my cigarettes on to you when you came to Israel. I just wanted you to know, I keep promises.”

  I lifted that cigarette up between my thumb and forefinger. I couldn’t even tell what brand it was. “I can’t possibly smoke this thing.”

  Jonah cocked his head like a boy and asked, “Why not?”

  “My God! Do you actually expect me to answer that question?” I asked my cousin. I’ll admit we were both laughing. He looked for all the world like the boy he had been that summer in Kisbarnahely, who danced with me in the cemetery and sang, We’ve come to rebuild the land, and be rebuilt by it, and swung me around until we’d fallen with our breath knocked out. What did he want from me? To rebuild what we had, a half a cigarette at a time?

  Well, then, I thought, I’ll let him. I liked the thought of my cousin spending his twilight years in Israel as my source for cigarettes. Besides, it meant we’d go on having these coffees once in a while. I said, “Borzas, why did you really come here? I hope you’re not planning to try to teach me Hebrew. The girls at the boardinghouse tell me it’s a miserable language. No vowels at all.”

  ACTUALLY, I HAVE other plans for my cousin. Recently, I received a package in the mail. It was a press release for an upcoming exhibition in Jerusalem. At first, I thought they’d misaddressed the envelope, but then I saw the title: Assimilation and Ashes: The Girls of the Katona Jozsef School.

  Someone had attached a typed note to the letter, an apology. Apparently, they’d only recently managed to track me down. They would be thrilled and honored if I would be their special guest as the most long-standing surviving school employee. Perhaps I could shed some light on some of the stranger items in the collection.

  From a glance at the catalogue, I believe I could do just that. They reprinted pages of their literary magazines, and alongside sentimental stories about the Galilee there was a comic poem about Janos. A partial list of artifacts: tickets to the Zionist Club’s spring dance; a biology notebook, where some girl filled the margins with Hebrew; and a poster advertising Buber’s lecture of October 1921. On the cover of the catalogue was a color reproduction of the mural of the blue-faced seamstresses worshipping the Crown of Saint Stephen. After the Germans invaded, some vandal painted in a Star of David.

  I can’t decide whether or not to go to the exhibition. Jerusalem isn’t so far away, but I’m not up to traveling. It’s hard enough for me to get up and down stairs these days. Yet if I could talk Jonah into driving down with me, it would be worth it. Maybe they’d even have the key to the boiler room.

  The text of the press release for the Jerusalem exhibition contained the following in Hebrew, English, French, and Hungarian. The martyrs of the Katona Jozsef School evoke the dilemma of Diaspora Jewry where one’s sense of self can only be a hard-fought compromise and the clarity of vision which comes from a full acceptance of national destiny. Their ache for clarity, their love of people, their tragic story, is uniquely Jewish.

  I showed that to Jonah and I asked him, “What the hell are they talking about?”

  He shrugged. “Who knows? It reads worse in French, if you can believe it.” Then he added, “I know they’re not all dead. I’ve met a few. They all remember me.”

  Smiling, I said, “I’ll bet they do.”

  I think of the photograph I lost some years before which showed Be
la, Dori, and Nathan in front of that chicken coop. The remarkable thing is, everyone in that photograph is still alive, but the photograph itself is gone.

  I SAW IT LAST IN February of 1944 when Louisa found it with the letters and confronted me, weeping and weeping as though her heart were broken.

  “You’ll leave us,” she said. “You’re bound to leave and go to Zion, Mutti. You’ve got a place to go, and what about me? Where will I go?”

  I comforted her, an act neither novel nor demanding. All it took was a pan of warm milk with sugar and a rhythmic stroking of her hair. In those days, it wasn’t hard to love her because I knew how to please her. Maybe it’s that simple. She asked nothing of me but that I stay, and I wasn’t going anywhere; this in contrast to her husband, who was bound to leave, or at least wouldn’t return until Louisa had already cried, been comforted, and sent to bed.

  “Hush, dear,” I said. “I’m not going to leave you.” I tucked the blanket around her. “Certainly not for Palestine.”

  Louisa sat up among the pillows and said, “But it’s the Holy Land.”

  I said, “Shh, shh, hush now. There’s no such place.”

  THE AUTHOR WISHES to acknowledge the generous support and encouragement of: Rebecca Tannenbaum, Juan Sebastian Agudelo, the Russian Teacher Retrainees of the University of Veszprém, Jeff Georlett, Shankar Vedantam, Stessa Cohen, Jeff Loo and the Loose Cannon Writer’s Collective, Elizabeth Collins Smith, Luise Hirsch, R. P. Burnham, Joshua Yanovski, Susan Viguers, Zsuzsanna Gasparics, and the many friends and family members who were this novel’s first readers. The University of the Arts Venture Fund and the Pennsylvania Council for the Arts made possible additional research and revision. I am particularly grateful to my agent, Gail Hochman, and my editor, Laura Mathews, who helped me guide my readers through a complicated story while in no way compromising how that story had to be told.

  Special thanks to Doug and Jane, who appeared just when my life had turned upside down. It has been spinning ever since.