Louisa Read online

  What can I say? I didn’t mail that either. The shoe-box of unsent letters filled, and I began another. Those letters were written front-and-back on the cheapest possible paper. If those kids can spend half a day on a train to go to a dance, why can’t you spend half a day to visit me? Do you know how often I’ve watched trains between Budapest and Szeged and wondered if you were on them? If I did see your face, what would I do about it, Borzas Medve? Throw myself in front of that train so it would stop here? One afternoon, I worked myself into a state and actually stuffed a number of those pages in an envelope addressed to Bela, but somewhere between our front gate and the post-office, I stopped dead. If he got that sort of thing from me, he’d never write again.

  I was nineteen, three years out of secondary school, and my self-pity was only matched by my intolerance. The world seemed to me petty, alien, and full of gloom. I was not half-wrong. Since the Great War, a pall hung over Kisbarnahely. The park by the town hall was occupied by loafing veterans. Train service was cut back, as was construction, and men who might have found jobs with the railroad or the brickworks returned to their family farms only to find no market for the crops. Crown currency was worthless. No one went to the market square anymore. Instead, they bartered at the train station, villagers arriving on the slow, local trains, carrying sacks of yellow peppers or crates of eggs to trade for parts of plows or sacks of coal.

  As a watchmaker, Uncle Oszkar was the only Csongradi who produced something of value, and he kept our family larder stocked. I still stopped by his workshop, not as often as I once had. In fact, I felt a little guilty. It was clear he’d thought I’d make more of myself. My future was uncertain. Three afternoons a week, I apprenticed to a pale little lady stenographer at my father’s office, but I could already best her at shorthand and typing and found the entire enterprise embarrassing. Uncle Oszkar said, “You ought to make some friends, meet some fellow who can make you laugh.”

  I said, “With Laszlo spoken for, what’s the use?” I was sitting on the stool which no longer felt so very high. I did still see Laszlo occasionally. Since returning from the war, he had become a full partner in my uncle’s shop and he no longer rode a bicycle. Sometimes I would catch him and his wife and little son on their way to church. His wife always waved. I wondered how marriage had turned him overnight into such a dull old man.

  When I came home, I would find my mother sitting on the couch, knitting tight cylinders that eventually turned into hard covers for cushions. Although the factory sometimes shut down for weeks at a time, my father still worked late, and dinner was kept in the stove for him until it was inedible. I would cross the length of the house: fifteen paces. Such were our evenings. Then I’d hear the train.

  The humming came up through the floorboards. Instantly, I would run outside and wait for the first sign of the signal light over our wall, pale as water. I would wish on that signal light the way that other people wished on stars, the way you can just say, “I want, I want,” without being able for the life of you to say anything more.

  THEN I’D GET another letter. Bela was training with the other Pioneers in the Bakony hills just north of Veszprem. A Youth Leader who trained them was the cousin of somebody’s sister-in-law, a fellow whose name was so outlandish that I remember it perfectly: Ami Chai Jezreel. It meant: My People Live in the Jezreel.

  Why is that so strange? Bela asked me. Your family name is Csongradi. Your people probably used to live in Csongrad.

  My first name isn’t My People, I replied.

  Bela let the comment go and told me more about this Ami Chai Jezreel. He had spent five years on a kibbutz called Gan Dahlia, but as far as I could tell that was about all he had to recommend himself. Most of the time he spent trying to find some shade, eating meat-paste sandwiches out of a paper bag, and adjusting the Primus stove to make what he identified in a condescending way as authentic Turkish coffee. From beneath the nearest tree, he called out orders to the boys and girls who labored in the sun.

  The work lasted from sunrise to sundown. Ami Chai Jezreel was in his sleeping sack by ten, but the rest of them boiled coffee, lit a fire, and kept the day from ending for as long as possible, singing and dancing the old dances or the new ones Ami Chai Jezreel had brought over from Kibbutz Ma’Otz: two steps forward, two steps back, clap twice over your shoulder. The Yemenites had danced this way since the days of Alexander the Great.

  So that was another name, Ami Chai Jezreel, and there was Bernadette, the star milker, and her brother Eleazar, who read a lot of poetry, and Tibor, who played mouth-organ and wrote songs in Hebrew. I could see them as Bela had described them in his letters, sweaty and tenacious, wearing broad hats and short trousers, the girls dressed like the boys, outlandish creatures. The Bakony hills were scattered with vineyards, lush and green. It was enough like how they pictured the Galilee to make them homesick for the future.

  Dori would sometimes pull Bela away from the rest and the two of them would try their hand at duplicating Ami Chai Jezreel’s “authentic Turkish coffee.” While the attempt boiled in the pot, she would check Bela’s bandage where he had fallen off the stool trying to milk the cow. Her concern was like her dancing, correct, but full of self-parody.

  Dori would say, “Authenticity is an imposition. Things aren’t authentic because we think they are, but because we don’t think at all.”

  “Stop using your doctor voice,” Bela would say to Dori. Maybe he gave her a kiss then. I don’t know; he didn’t say. He did tell me that there wasn’t enough coffee to go around, so they ended up sprinkling it on the staked tomato plants to see what it would do to them.

  They had been permitted to plow a fallow field, but first the stones had to be cleared away. They couldn’t find a wheelbarrow, so after much debate, it was Bela who was asked to approach the nearest neighbor and borrow what he could.

  The nearest neighbor turned out to be a convent, and it is easy to imagine Bela taking a few steps towards the front entrance and hesitating there with his hand cupping his chin before he thought to try the back. He could make out the crowns of fruit trees over the stone gate, and as he approached, the leaves gave a shudder and a dozen blackbirds burst out and flew straight for the belfry.

  He’d figured on a nun, but he was greeted by an old man in felt trousers and a floppy hat, the gardener. He made his request. The man asked, “What do you plan to do with the stones?”

  Bela answered honestly. “I don’t know.”

  “I thought Jews were supposed to be so clever,” said the gardener. Then he took Bela by the elbow and led him among his raised soil beds where he’d grown rows of velvety lettuces, and the walls of tiny stones were just about the size of the pebbles the Pioneers had pulled from the dirt. He pointed out the value of chrysanthemums and drew Bela’s attention to the local pests, particularly the blights common to fruit trees. His own cherry tree had been pruned so ruthlessly that it looked like a fist. “Prune and prune. Don’t think it won’t grow back,” he said. “It will. You say you’re going to the Holy Land? To farm? Like Father Abraham?”

  Bela could have pointed out that Abraham had been a nomad, not a farmer, and for some reason he felt suddenly foolish. He said, “That’s right. Like Abraham.”

  “I’ll let the sisters know. They’ll pray for you,” he said. Then he led Bela to the storage shed and from a pyramid of garden tools dislodged two wheelbarrows.

  Bela thanked him and was about to drag each of the wheelbarrows by a handle when the gardener set a hand on his arm and hoisted the smaller of the two into the larger.

  “Half-wit,” he said to Bela, obviously feeling pleased with himself. He gave Bela a smack on the shoulder. “God protect you. You’ll need it, you half-wit Jews.”

  THUS BEGAN BELA’S career of neighborhood diplomacy which would extend for at least twenty years. He always claimed it was because it was all he could do well. He couldn’t plow straight. The tents he pitched fell down. Whenever he tried to lay his hand on any animals, the rest
of the collective were wise enough to leave the barn.

  I wrote, You’re such a Jew, and you don’t even know when you’re being insulted. Or I wrote, If you’re so fond of mice, come back to Barnahely and I’ll trap a few for your amusement. I was proud of this reply. It was just the sort of Nora he expected—teasing, bold, dismissive. Also, I had managed to include an invitation in a way that didn’t smack of desperation. I continued in that vein. Why do you think that being a peasant is any more authentic than being a Budapesti?

  Bela replied, I live in Budapest because someone has granted me permission. As Jews, we’re here on borrowed time.

  Speak for yourself, Borzas, I wrote. As far as I can tell the only thing that makes me a Jew is that I’ll be buried in that cemetery.

  Bela replied, You won’t be buried in that cemetery if you come with us to Palestine.

  I read that letter on a cold night in March of 1919. It sent a shiver through me. I thought of the day he swung me round and round until we fell and breath blew out of us there on the knoll where Grandmother Naomi Csongradi was buried. I wrote: You’d better watch what you say or I’ll actually go. Then I stuck that version in the shoe-box and tried again. I can’t be as sure of everything as you are, Borzas. That wouldn’t do either. Another attempt: All I can see in your asking me along is that you’re serious and you’ll really go. And all I can read into this talk of burial is you’re going to die somewhere and I won’t know it.

  My mother came in as I was writing and said, “You’ve got to do something about all these papers. They attract dust.”

  “What do you want me to do?” I asked her. “Burn them?”

  “You’ll burn down the house one day. Don’t think I can’t smell smoke,” my mother said. As I got older, my mother and I took on each other’s mannerisms down to persistent scowls. I didn’t like it. Neither did she. She would glare and I would glare until I had to either hide in my room or leave. If I was home, my mother would say, “Nora, stop lurking.” If I left, she would say, “Don’t go out like that without telling me where you’ll be.” In that last demand, there was a note of panic.

  I would say, “How many places are there for me to go? This isn’t Budapest.”

  “I know this isn’t Budapest,” my mother would say. “In Budapest you would have been a different sort of girl.”

  I felt sudden vertigo. My mother had grown up in Budapest, just like Aunt Moni. She had been my age once, not long before she met my father and returned with him to Kisbarnahely. I thought about that first cigarette I had found on the kitchen windowsill when I was six years old, and I knew it had been hers. I had finished what she started. And she could smell it on me. The knowledge made me tremble.

  I WOULD USUALLY end up at the Kismacska, where I had my own little table which may well have been designed for the likes of me. It was solitary, unsteady, and never quite clean. The waitress didn’t even take my order anymore. She just let me wait until she decided to bring me my coffee, cream-cake, and pack of cigarettes and let me be, knowing I’d put my money by the ashtray.

  Once, one of the patrons brought out a fiddle and played badly; it must have been a birthday or a name-day. Old men shouted requests and sang Jaj De Szépen Harangoznak or Szép a Fekete Barany, songs about beautiful bells and beautiful black lambs, and refugees from Transylvania would sing out in yearning voices:

  Little dog, little dog

  You will lead the sheep to me

  But my love has grown so wayward

  She will never come to me.

  Oh my black-eyed love’s a bold love.

  She will wander, she will stray

  But my blue-eyed love’s a true love.

  She will never go away.

  “Little dog! Little dog!” one squat man sang out, crossing the dark, slippery floor and leaving brown boot-tracks. He made his way to me. He was the uncle of someone I knew from school, a bricklayer from Koloszvar who’d fled west when his city fell under Romanian rule after the Great War, a melancholy man who grabbed my arm and whispered, “Little black-eyed love, come dance. Come make a party with me.”

  And why couldn’t I simply rise on my hind legs and dance? He would be happy. I even had little heels on my boots, like a good country girl. My black hair was tied back with a white ribbon. We would stomp from one end of the grim Kismacska to the other, and maybe I’d marry him. How terrible would it be to keep house for a bricklayer? He would come home from work and bathe in an iron tub. I would scrub his back with birch-twigs. In December, in the heavy snow, we would take a carriage to his brother’s farm for a pig-killing, and I’d join the other women as they boiled the blood to pudding. Wouldn’t that make for a good letter to my cousin in Budapest? And then I’d bite my lower lip to keep from crying.

  MY FATHER WAS having an affair. I don’t think my mother knew. I saw him leave the Hotel Oasis with the same secretary who had taught me shorthand. It was three in the afternoon, and they must have dined together; the girl had a fresh gravy stain on the front of her blouse. That the matter went further than supper was speculation on my part. I did notice that she took his arm rather than the other way around, and that it was she who guided him unsteadily past the Town Hall towards the brickworks where, no doubt, she would unlock the office door for him and make sure he was seated comfortably before she took dictation.

  I took to waiting for them there. The secretary’s name was Ibolya, and whenever she saw me she forced her lips into a faint, terrified smile and at once commenced filing whatever was on my father’s desk. Father himself took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes, and then looked at me with that warm, brown candor and said, “What’s the matter, Nora? Does your mother need anything?”

  “I just came to help you,” I’d say, against my better judgment. “There must be something for me to do.”

  More often than not, there I’d be, side by side with my father’s mistress, sorting out receipts for goods or copying inventory lists. At least, then, I would walk my father home. Mother would open the door, clearly startled to see him back so early, and the three of us would knock around the house, shy of each other. It would pain me to see the fuss she’d make over supper, chopping the onion until the whole kitchen swam with fumes. He had already eaten, after all, and I couldn’t force down a thing.

  But to Bela, I wrote, in my most sardonic German: I must refuse your invitation. How can I leave Kisbarnahely now that it’s summer and the Sunnen-blumen are blumen? Besides, I don’t for one minute believe you’re actually going to that awful place. What if you milk a cow and it explodes? What if you get less than nine hours sleep a night? Not even Dori the Wonderdoctor can help you then.

  HAD I BEEN A different sort of girl, I might have been a Communist. That was the year of Bela Kun and the Commune, which reached full strength by early spring. The day that Kun was freed from prison, a Szeged newspaper made the rounds of the cukrászdu, and there was his photograph: tousled hair, sly eyes, a soft mustache. He looked more like an actor than a criminal, although one hand was thrust under his suit-jacket, as though he were about to draw a gun.

  I wondered if my cousin knew this Kun. The man who read that newspaper out loud to us made much of the Jews who held positions in the Party. “And they say Kun’s a convert. But he’s no more a Christian than I’m a Turk.” To Bela I wrote: Why do you need to go to Palestine? The Jews rule here. No answer came. The post had become unreliable.

  In fact, as time passed, it became difficult to get so much as a newspaper from Szeged, and such was our isolation in Kisbarnahely that we did not even know that Kun had taken over parliament until we were told that a representative from the Commune would meet with local farmers and answer any questions about land redistribution. A steam locomotive pulled into the station one hot April afternoon. On board was a Komsomol, smallish and swarthy, and he disembarked and stood on a station platform hung all over with red bunting. He was met by a crush of men in thick, felt coats and hats, some of whom had walked all day, from distant villa
ges. They had been told they’d own the land they worked, and expected to leave with leases in their hands. They looked a little sunstruck.

  I wondered what he said. He didn’t have a carrying voice and before long, the villagers were joined by unemployed men from the brickworks, and the mood was turning ugly. The pistons of the locomotive started and the last of his words was lost in a cloud of steam. I think he called out, “Goodbye, Comrades!” as he stepped back on the Red Train. The men might have mobbed the tracks, but they seemed cowed by the sheer size and presence of the train itself as it pulled away and started east towards Szentes.

  My mother had her own opinion about the Commune. She feared for Aunt Moni and the children in Budapest. “They shoot people in the streets for believing in God.”

  By May, the first and second floor of the Oasis Hotel had become the offices of the Worker’s Tribunal, and my father started coming home for dinner regularly. In fact, he was usually in by four, and we saw a lot of him, enough to notice changes. His glasses had been broken and badly repaired with twine, and his hairline had receded. It was July when he admitted that his job had been given to the brother of a Komsomol.

  My mother smiled, stiffly. “What have you been doing all day, then? Hiding at Oszkar’s?”

  “Helping the new man learn the ropes,” my father said. “It’s a rather complicated system.”

  I asked, “Couldn’t Ibolya help, or has she also been replaced?”

  “She went back to her brother’s farm,” my father said.

  I said, “Good. At least there she can eat.” Then I went outside for some air. The house felt impossibly crowded. That night, I walked its length and counted fifteen paces, as I had when I was nine, when I was twelve, when I was fifteen. What did it matter who ran the trains, the Reds or the Whites? I still watched them pass by.