Louisa Read online

  She entered in the full moonlight;

  she looked towards the sky.

  “Distant in life, yours in death.”

  And gently, heart broke on heart.

  The notes ran the length of Margit Bridge. Gabor felt his arm reach to hold something steady, and he thought: How can I walk this girl the rest of the way home? Who is she and who am I? What does she want from me?

  He didn’t even know when the song ended until he felt Louisa’s presence at his side and heard her say, in a very ordinary voice, “How can you not like Schubert?”

  “Did I say that?” Gabor shook his head out like a dog by way of coming to his senses, and he thought that he had never really been in love and never would be, things he’d known before, but which for the first time struck him as unfortunate. These thoughts managed to take him and Louisa the rest of the way over the bridge and most of the distance to her house.

  Louisa touched his arm. They had been walking apart since she’d sung. She whispered now, with a slight, pained smile. “I’ll have to go in through the cellar door.”

  “Bad girl,” Gabor said, absently.

  “But you must promise me you’ll write another Lied.”

  “Sure,” Gabor said.

  “How long will it take you?”

  “A week, maybe,” Gabor said. He had never in his life finished a song.

  “We’ll meet in a week, then,” said Louisa, and she stepped back, putting between them the same distance there had been on the bridge. It was daring of her; she was in full view of the house. That house was substantial: stone front, peaked roof, green shutters, and two first-floor window boxes stuffed with perfect white geraniums. It looked displaced, as though even the flowers had been imported from Germany.

  Gabor did not stay to see how Louisa would manage to get in through the cellar. He turned up Castle Hill and began his own long walk back to our flat on Prater Street, wondering what sort of song he would write in a week.

  6

  ONE YEAR LATER, in 1944, I would unlock that same cellar door; it would be slanted and either weather-beaten or damaged by flying shrapnel. The heaps of coal below would look soft and not quite real.

  I would climb down and find myself swallowed by damp. The door would close from the inside and a match would throw enough light to make the walls glisten and to sugar-glaze the grate that led to Louisa’s practice room. When Louisa was home, that grate gave off a bent square of crosshatched light.

  In one corner, Louisa would provide me with blankets, and a bucket full of water and a wooden crate. If I stood on the crate, I could easily reach the ceiling and even free the duct; a tight squeeze would force my head and shoulders through; I would be underneath the piano.

  Louisa would sing the song my son had written for her:

  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.

  Three months, I’d hide there, and the cellar door eventually would be sealed from the outside by snow, layered with dirty ice, and piled to buckling point with rubble. Not one house on the block would be intact. From Pest, Soviets would spray streets with gunfire and blast every roof and window until handsome old Buda would be pretty much gone. Three months would draw from those damp walls generations of stench, coal, wine, horses, and the fishy Duna. Wrapped in Louisa’s blankets, with my head against the crate, my eyes would be as round and stupid as the eyes of a fish, gazing up through the grate to the belly of the Bauer piano. At first, the blasts would make the strings vibrate, but then they didn’t vibrate anymore, and on the day I would finally abandon my hiding place, I didn’t think to look at much of anything at all.

  AND FIVE YEARS later, at the border station, inside that train, Louisa cried, “I won’t leave you!”

  Midday, full sun, crisp air cut with coal smoke from the train, and Louisa in the reeking fur coat she’d soon abandon, with her arms latched on my waist like clamps and her face filthy and distorted with hysteria. “You don’t know where I’m going,” I said.

  “Yes I do.”

  “How can you?”

  “Where else could you go?” She struggled against my attempts to dislodge her, and I could feel her quick, sharp heartbeats through all that rabbit fur and at the same time the acceleration of the train that I must move her from at all costs.

  I spoke with conviction. “It’s no place for you.”

  “It will be.”

  By then, there was no logical way to make her go unless I flung her through the open door, and at the rate we were moving that would probably kill her. How had she even found me? Who had she bribed? What had it taken? Her hair dripped with perspiration and hung in strings before those soft, gray eyes, and I thought: When we’re across No Man’s Land and we face those border guards again, that will be that.

  But Louisa clung to me.

  WITH LOUISA’S HELP, I managed to get hold of a Haifa telephone directory and decipher the Hebrew, but we found no Bela Hesshel. As far as Louisa was concerned, that was the end of it. “I’ve put us on a waiting list for flats,” she said. “Then we’ll be in the telephone book, Mutti. Wouldn’t that make it easier?”

  I’d heard about those flats. They were in abandoned villages, huts sprinkled with bits of furniture left over by Arab occupants. A Rumanian woman told me about her sister who thought she was going to get a house in Tel Aviv and ended up in a gutted mosque.

  In fact most of the places were refused by self-respecting Europeans. They stayed put. I would run into mobs of them everywhere, complaining in Yiddish about the rationing, the beds, the wait for a shower, the Arab-speaking Jews, the children always underfoot, the strain of dragging buckets of water back to the barracks. There was something about the camp that encouraged dislocation: caftans, fur coats, dusty sack-suits, embroidered blouses, khaki shorts, and just about every stench and language in the world.

  Then there were the Transylvanian girls. They were considered excellent human material because they were young and hadn’t been sterilized. Their ages ranged from ten to seventeen and they were so commonly dark and rat-faced that they might have been sisters. Rumor had it that they’d crossed the border in a pack and negotiated their way through Serbia by selling themselves to Tito’s partisans. In Greece, they’d stolen sheep and corn, and some of them still wore sheepskin. It smelled like rotten meat. Maybe that’s why they liked it.

  Before the war, they’d lived in Szatmar and had never gone more than thirty paces from their front doors. They had never heard a word that wasn’t Yiddish or Hungarian or met a soul who didn’t keep the Sabbath. Now they’d appropriated a shack which had been meant for bed linen and had decorated it with advertisements for face cream torn from American magazines they had gotten from the Red Cross. Some of the younger girls had also received dolls. They buried them in different corners of the camp to be sure they weren’t stolen.

  These girls were fascinated by Louisa. They would follow her around or sometimes waylay her between the barracks, calling in their weirdly innocent Hungarian: “Szép lány, szép lány! Sing a little song for us!”

  Louisa didn’t know what to make of the girls. She seemed to vacillate between disgust and pity and managed to focus somewhere above their heads, not always easy if, for instance, one of them hung upside down from a rafter like a bat. It was instructive to watch her face at such times. It struggled towards a discipline and symmetry that must have been a lot like the face she wore when she sang on stage.

  Once, she asked me, “Who takes care of those little girls?”

  “They’re old enough to take care of themselves,” I said.

  Louisa said, “No one is that old.”

  There was no answering Louisa on that particular point. I lay back on
the bed and streaks of sunlight fell across my face.

  She sat beside me, took my hand between her own, and pressed it. “Everyone needs someone. What if you died alone and no one ever found you?”

  “Girls like that don’t die,” I said, still looking up, but I wasn’t thinking about the Transylvanians now. I was thinking about never being found, about my cousin.

  “You make life so hard,” Louisa said.

  There was justice in that remark; I do make life hard. But what I want doesn’t come easily. Here is Louisa. She exists. So do the camp’s cold showers and plates of strange cold salads and those gruesome girls. But none of those things exists in the same way Bela does. Or certain longings.

  I found a Lucky Strike that afternoon. It had been balanced, deliberately, on the metal foot of my bed, untouched and already burning. I had not seen Yossel Berkowitz since that first night, but that cigarette was like a tap on the shoulder or a wink. Was it a gift? I took it up, inhaled, and tried not to think about the consequences.

  I didn’t ask for much, just a little arbitrary human kindness, nothing grand, nothing epic. I needed something that wouldn’t cost me much. Sometimes, that’s asking for the impossible.

  THEN ONE day I heard a rumor that telegrams could be traced. Louisa offered to look into the matter. It made good sense. After all, with her inborn talent for persistence, surely she could do anything to which she set her mind. When she wasn’t scrubbing our dishes or doing our wash, she attended patriotic and vocational lectures, she volunteered time at the dining hall and laundry, and she took classes in everything from language to geography to needlework. How hard would it be for her to trace a telegram? Yet I had a suspicion I could not shake; Louisa would sooner the telegram wasn’t traced at all.

  When I brought it up, she would break in and ask, illogically, “Please, Mutti, are you unhappy with me?”

  “It has nothing to do with happy or unhappy,” I said. “My cousin is the reason I came here. When we find him, he’ll know what to do.”

  “But I know what to do,” Louisa said. “We don’t need him. He’s just an old man.”

  “Two years older than I am,” I said. “Not much past fifty.”

  Louisa didn’t answer, pointedly I thought. She opened her book on the laws of family purity. Bela would have taken that book from her, glanced at the awful wood-cut illustrations and the sentimental German text, cocked his head to one side, and asked what was meant by “purity.” What would Louisa answer? I could not imagine. The two were of such different make that they could not exist at the same place at the same time. It was as though if Bela stepped into this barrack, Louisa would have to disappear.

  Perhaps Louisa knew. She let the matter drop and buried herself in her lesson, with her girlish lower lip thrust out, and a line forming between her eyebrows. She wasn’t going anywhere.

  ONE AFTERNOON, outside the administrative barrack, I was approached by an Israeli I hadn’t seen before, an older man with thick grayish hair, who wore the lightweight shirt and khaki trousers of an official of the Jewish Agency. He extended a hand and addressed me in Hungarian: “Nora Gratz? I am Dov Levin. Come with me, please.”

  He moved us through a crowd of Poles and Rumanians who were waiting to complain about something or other, and who glared at me and sputtered out Yiddish in righteous disbelief. I barely heard them. I was unable to take my eyes off Levin, whose Pesti accent made my heart pound. This man could have been Bela’s brother. He had his build, his eyes, even his plodding walk. He motioned me towards the staff office, and as he opened the door, I asked him, “Is there some news?”

  “Nothing to worry about. Just some routine questions,” he said.

  “About my cousin?”

  “Cousin? I thought she was your daughter-in-law,” he said.

  So much for that. What could I do but let him sit me down in his stuffy cubicle. I said, “You want to know about Louisa? She saved my life.”

  “Yes, that’s what I hear,” said Dov Levin. “Apparently, it’s a remarkable story. But you must realize, Mrs. Gratz, that there have been other stories going around.”

  “Oh yes,” I said, suddenly exhausted. “The stories.”

  “Some people in the camp claim they’ve seen her before,” said Levin.

  “I take it you’ve noticed that the stories contradict each other,” I said.

  “It’s true, the details are admittedly a little shaky,” Levin said to me, “but we know so little about her. How old is she? What brought her family to Budapest? Do you know anything about her background, what her father did for a living?”

  His desk chair creaked, and he laid his elbows on his old green blotter and set his chin in his hand. It was such a Bela-like gesture that I had to fight back vertigo. I asked him, “When did you come to Palestine?”

  “This isn’t Palestine. It is called Eretz Yisrael. I came here in ’ twenty-six,” he said.

  “From Budapest?”

  He hesitated and then said, “Yes. From Budapest.”

  My throat knotted abruptly. “Then you must have known Bela Hesshel.” The urgency in my voice made me ashamed. I half-believed that if I’d pressed that Budapesti hard enough, his outlines would have blurred and deepened and I would be sitting across from my cousin.

  But that wasn’t so. Dov Levin wasn’t Bela. He was a Hungarian bureaucrat such as I’d met before in countless forms. “Your daughter-in-law came here,” he said, “the same way as everyone else in this camp. She is not a Jew, but that’s no novelty. Many refugees bring Christian spouses. The trouble is, Mrs. Gratz, is that her presence is seen as a direct affront. We don’t know why. Nor are we so simple as to believe that where there is smoke there has to be a fire. But these people are insisting that we take them seriously.”

  “She wants to be a Jew,” I said.

  He ignored me. “It’s a delicate matter. Frankly, we would all like to see this problem disappear. No one wants to open old wounds or bring up the past.”

  I said, “What past, Mr. Levin? You mean my son who died? She was with him when he died. What do you want? For her to slit her own throat?”

  He didn’t answer. But my words seemed to have some impact on him because he dropped the stiff manner with a little half-shrug and seemed, abruptly, rumpled and unhappy. He opened his top drawer and felt for something, and for a moment I thought he would pull out a pack of cigarettes. He would have offered me one; I was sure. Then he said, “Figyelj, mit szeretnél?”

  He had used the informal, less a sign of disrespect, I think, than helplessness. I almost smiled. “Mit szeretnék, Levin úr? What do I want? I want my cousin’s address. It was on a telegram I lost. A phone call, two phone calls, and I get out of this camp, my daughter-in-law gets out of this camp, and the whole thing stops being your problem. In fact, the problem disappears. You only have another million or so sabonim to worry about.”

  He asked, “Where did you pick up that word?”

  “It’s what the kids in the shorts call us. What is it? An obscenity?” He didn’t answer. Instead, he pulled out a pen and notebook.

  “Write down,” he said, “everything you know about your cousin. Can you remember any part of the address on the telegram? A street name? How old is he? When did he make aliyah? Would there be military records? Maybe I can do something for you. But for you, Mrs. Gratz. I can’t help your daughter-in-law stay. You understand?”

  I gave this Dov Levin a long look. I said, “You have an army, trucks, guns. Why don’t you just send her back to Germany?”

  He ignored the question. “The kibbutz is worth a try,” he said. “What was that name? Tilulit? That’s just the Hebrew word for hill. Galilee is all hills. See if you can remember some of the industries, and give me more names. Have you tried looking for him on the radio? That can be very effective.”

  I took the notepad. It was spiral-bound, the sort of pad I’d used for dictation during my secretarial days at the girls’ school. I said, “He wouldn’t listen to the r
adio.”

  “Everyone listens to the radio,” said Levin.

  “Then he isn’t everyone.”

  Levin nodded. “All right. Then who is he? Fill up this notepad. Tell me about him, about the kibbutz. Give me all the details. But you must promise me something in return.”

  Without hesitation, I said, “You know I can’t make the girl leave.”

  But that wasn’t what he’d meant. He leaned forward over the green blotter on his desk, suddenly mild and foolish, like a sick sheep. I wasn’t surprised when he used my first name. “Nora,” he said, “take some advice from a fellow Hungarian.”

  I turned my face to the window; the sky was the color of wheat.

  Levin said, “Don’t stake everything on him. Start making a life of your own. You won’t regret it. I’ve been working here for a year now. I should know.”

  The road to Galilee, northeast, would take me through the Valley of Jezreel and towards the sea where those Budapesti Jews had been so determined to walk on water.

  Levin said, “Nora, some cousins don’t want to be found.”

  7

  WHAT NAMES could I remember? Dori Csengery, of course. Then there was Nathan Sobel: He’d been in that photograph of the chicken coop, stocky, compact, and square-jawed with thick black brows that met in the middle and an iron-hard grin. Bela had mentioned him in his last letter, some argument about buying more land. Nathan also must have been part of the group from the start because they held fund-raising dances in the ballroom of his father’s Buda hotel. Bela would write to me about those dances, enthusiastic calculations of how many tickets Dori sold. Most of them were to kids in Szeged who had to spend half the day on a train to get up here. Mouse can be very persuasive.

  I replied, So why didn’t she try to sell me a ticket? Then I didn’t mail it because I was frankly afraid that Dori would take that as an opportunity to introduce herself. I also added to that letter, Nobody ever tries to persuade me of anything. This sounds like a complaint, but really I ought to be grateful. If they persuaded me of anything, it would be to kill myself.