Louisa Read online

  AS IT TURNED OUT, the commune didn’t last through fall. A White Army marched up from Romania. Word of its arrival drew out neighbors from their houses and they stood at the crossroads, whispering: They are three days off, they are fifty kilometers away, they will reach Kisbarnahely by dawn.

  It was maybe four in the morning when I heard a crack at the door. Then another. Mother answered in her robe. On the threshold stood a drunkard who pushed her aside and blundered through our overfurnished living room, calling back: “Hold the dogs! I’ll get him!”

  In fact, he easily pulled my father from between the covers and dragged him back outside. Father wore a nightshirt and he kept feeling his way through empty air as he crossed the little courtyard, and Mother trailed after to give him his spectacles. “Gyorgy! Tell them you don’t even work there now! Your name is clear!”

  From my window, I could see them frog-walk my father up the road towards the market square; the three men and two yapping dogs made a parade. I could have told her: They were not Communists. They were local men I’d seen in the Kismacska , or coming out of the brickyard in dirty overalls. They had waited out the summer of the Soviet to see which way the wind blew. Now they were anticipating the arrival of the Whites. They were killing Jews.

  It stood to reason. Kun was a Jew. The Komsomol on the train was a Jew. And my father. And Uncle Oszkar.

  My uncle they could not dislodge from his shop. The men found him at work with Laszlo. Uncle Oszkar and Laszlo had already had a morning shot of pálinka, and maybe it gave them strength because when the man came at my uncle, he dodged them and Laszlo hiked up his stool and aimed for their heads. The stool cracked and split, and the men fled, leaving Laszlo to turn to see to Uncle Oszkar. My uncle had fallen on his bed. Laszlo gave him a shake, but he didn’t respond. He’d had a coronary.

  Laszlo stumbled out of the workshop and found himself ankle-deep in fog, a fog typical of September. He faced the square. Maybe two-dozen Jews shivered there, my father among them. There were not many Jews in Kisbarnahely. Other towns had more, also more Communists. The Communists were shot, hanged, or exiled. As for the Jews, their treatment was less systematic. In some towns, they burned the Jewish Quarter. We had no Jewish Quarter, just the cemetery and a modest synagogue some distance from the park. I could see smoke from my window, and a little ash floated across the yard and clung to the apricot tree.

  Later that day, Laszlo sat in our kitchen, the blood still on his hands, hair, and apron, and he told my mother how my father had died. Some of the Whites had rifles, and three were on horseback, in their old uniforms from the Great War. They cocked their rifles at the Jews and one called out: “Here’s the road to Budapest! Go run to that Red bastard! Run to Kun!”

  Then the horses broke into a gallop straight into the line of Jews and the Jews ran, nightshirts, bare feet, and all. Some fell at once and were trampled by the horses. The rest were shot in the back. My father reeled well off the road and fell with a bullet in his neck.

  “Did you see the body?” my mother asked Laszlo. “How can you be sure he’s dead?”

  Laszlo shook his head. “He’s dead. As for the bodies, they cleared them off, Mrs. Csongradi. There’s a lime-pit near the brickyard. But I wouldn’t go there.”

  My mother set off at once for the lime-pit. She found it empty, save for some broken brick. In the market square, she picked up a pair of glasses, but they didn’t belong to my father. That night, we stayed with Laszlo’s family, which was brave of them. The next day, I found out why our house hadn’t been burned. Someone wanted to claim it. Apparently, it had been purchased through foreclosure by my great-great-grandfather, and a fellow with an enormous red mustache had the documents to prove his family had owned the property since the time of the Turks. He brought the paper to Laszlo’s house and gave my mother some advice.

  “You and your girl had better leave the country anyway. Go to Vienna.”

  You would think my mother would be beaten down, but she said to him, “If you put your faith in an army from Romania, what kind of Hungarian are you?”

  That touched a nerve. Blood rushed to the man’s head, and he shouted: “I’m a true, full-blooded Magyar, and you shits don’t know how lucky you are to be alive!”

  Laszlo interjected. “The house is Mrs. Csongradi’s by right.”

  “What’s she paying you?” the man asked Laszlo.

  “Get off my property. We’ll settle this in court.”

  “Are you fucking the daughter? Or maybe you’re still buggering the old watchmaker. I hear he likes it in the ass!”

  Somehow, Laszlo kept his temper; maybe his head still hurt. At any rate, the man with the mustache left, and what followed was six months in court; in the end, my mother did get to keep the house she’d never liked, and she also inherited Oszkar’s share of the workshop. The house, so dearly won, would be where she would spend the rest of her life until she was transported east.

  As soon as things calmed down enough for Laszlo to have a coffee with me alone, he said, “Oszkar remembered you in his will.”

  That brought on tenderness and guilt. “You should have everything,” I said.

  “I have enough. Now look, Nora,” Laszlo said. “There’s nothing for you here. Don’t you have family in Budapest?”

  “My mother—” I began, but he interrupted.

  “Your mother can take care of herself. Why don’t you go stay with those cousins? You liked them, didn’t you? I remember that girl with all the dolls.”

  Then he pressed something into my hand. It was a velvet sack, and when I opened it, there were three crystal prisms and a variety of lenses, thick and thin.

  “I put this together for you,” said Laszlo. “Just a keepsake.”

  The glass felt smooth and cool; by now, it was March of 1920, and I was twenty years old. I held one of the lenses to my eye, and Laszlo shrank back to a pinprick.

  “Get on a train to Budapest,” said Laszlo.

  In an unsteady voice, I asked him, “Do you have a cigarette?”

  He rolled me one and lit it for me. “See? You can smoke in front of me now.”

  I did. The smoke felt tender going down. I blew it out of my nose and looked through a second lens. Laszlo turned into the earth and sky, and his brassy hair and pink face were so overwhelming that I had nothing more to say.

  8

  BEFORE I LEFT FOR Budapest, I sent Bela a letter written in such a rush that I leapt straight into Hungarian: So now you’re in for it. So far as I can tell I’m entering a whirlwind, and if everything you led me to expect is true, my life is going to begin, which will include protecting you from cows, collecting your stray hats, and keeping you honest. I have both invented and applied for this job. Meet me at the station. I mailed that thing before I could think better of it and ran out the door of the post-office to double-check the schedule of the train.

  I took the Szeged Express. The second-class compartment had brass ashtrays, wood paneling, and velvet cushions. I opened the window a crack. The fringes on the curtains fluttered. I had worn a traveling suit that matched the green upholstery. What did I have in mind? To become the car itself? Who knows? I could have closed my eyes and still named every village on the way: Lajosmizse, Orkeny, Dabas, westward to Cegled. Above me was a new brown cardboard suitcase with leather trim, at my feet a carpetbag. We picked up speed. I had a deep sensation of fitting into my life like a hand into a glove—that exact, that wonderful.

  The feeling lasted until I got to Nyugati Station. Aunt Monika stood on the platform. “Nora, dear. You have so little luggage.”

  I looked past her, but I think I already knew.

  She gave me a kiss. “I’m so glad you’re here. You can have his room.”

  Bela and his friends had left for Trieste the week before. The departure had been sudden and at first Aunt Moni was vague as to the circumstances, but later my cousin Adele told me that some members of the group were under investigation as Communists and had to leave the
country in a hurry. I demanded to know why the idiotic boys and girls in question didn’t emigrate to Vienna like everyone else, why they had to drag the whole group off to Palestine, and who Bela thought he was to leave his widowed mother and little sister alone at a time like this.

  “A time like what?” Adele asked, and she tactfully ignored the fact that my own mother had been widowed less than a year before. “Honestly, Nora, you’d think this was a surprise. He’s had his passage paid for since last January.”

  I spent my first week in Budapest ignoring the electric lights, the avenues, even the trams. I couldn’t bring myself to ask if Bela had received that letter before he’d gone, and sitting on the couch that served as Bela’s bed with its yellow crocheted cover, I pulled down the blinds of the window and stared at the bookshelves, reconstructing line after line of that letter until there seemed no question it had driven him away.

  Yet before a week had passed, I got a letter: Take the train to Lublijana or the express straight through. Either way, you can make the boat to Jaffa. Don’t worry about the ticket. Dori will throw something together.

  I wrote: I don’t want Dori to throw something together. I put the pen down, knowing that I would have to write something, but no words came to me. For the first time since arriving, I raised the blind and looked out the window. The room that had been Bela’s had a view of the onion dome of the Great Synagogue. Of course I had the shoe-boxes, three of them now. If I pulled them out and poured their contents on that yellow cover, could I piece something together?

  Adele came in just then and asked, “Are those Bela’s old letters? Can I see them?”

  I pushed the boxes under the bed, probably rudely, and she looked a little shocked.

  “Nora,” she said, “won’t you come out with me to the cinema? There are some people you should meet.”

  “You Hesshels are always asking me to do things,” I said to her.

  “That’s because we like you,” said Adele. She’d grown up into a conventional beauty, with soulful eyes and lush black curls, and she spoke so graciously that there was no way I was going to believe her.

  In fact, Adele had plans for me. She’d always wanted a sister. There was a closet full of clothing we could share. In a stupor of misery, I allowed myself to be taken up, taken up, I must add, like a dress with a low hemline. Adele spent a whole afternoon trying to figure out the best way to do my hair. I sat on the edge of her bed, digging my nails into the chenille spread as the comb raked this way and that.

  “You have a gamin quality,” said Adele when she’d finished. She’d combed everything forward, right over my eyes. “You ought to wear a raincoat with the collar turned.”

  “Good,” I said. “Then no one will be able to see me.”

  “Honestly, Nora, I’m so glad you’re here. We’re going to have so much fun this summer. We’ll cheer each other up.”

  When she said that, I was forced to realize that she too missed Bela. Then all was lost. I had to do exactly as she said.

  SO THAT WAS HOW I found myself rushing all over Budapest with a troop of mostly Jewish girls and boys. The girls were fashionable, talkative, and from good families. Many of them were Adele’s friends from nursing school. The boys were, for the most part, just a little too young to have fought in the Great War or to have taken an active role in the Commune. They were younger brothers and they couldn’t fight battles or have strong opinions. Worse yet, after the Commune fell, a law had been passed that made it almost impossible for a Jew to get into a university. These boys wandered around Pest like pimpled ghosts and attached themselves to fun so desperately that they made it look like hard work.

  There was one named Kalman Nagy, a tall, white-haired boy who always buttoned his collar to his chin and had a way of ending every sentence with a nervous giggle. I think he’d tried his luck with every girl in the circle before I had arrived, and he latched on to me almost at once, offering cigarettes from an oily-looking leather case and trying to take my arm when I got out of the tram. He took to calling for me at the Hesshel apartment every afternoon until I took a course in advanced shorthand just to avoid him. Even Adele admitted Kalman was a bit much. But, of course, she always had to open the door for him and offer him coffee.

  “You can’t just write somebody off,” she’d say to me. “I met David because I was nice to his brother, and his brother is honestly the most unbearable person I ever met.”

  David was Adele’s steady beau, a medical student. He was older, serious, dazzlingly handsome in a wavy-haired matinee idol way, clearly of a different class than the rest of the boys. Yet I never remembered a word David said. As for the unbearable brother, he tagged along one afternoon when we went to the cinema and proved his unbearableness by actually walking out of the film because he didn’t like it. Until that point, he hadn’t struck me one way or another, but afterwards I felt a stir of interest and asked Adele his name.

  Adele’s face lit up. “Do you want me to arrange something?” All interest vanished on the spot.

  “Look,” I said to Adele more than once, “I’m a lost cause. I’m not a social animal.”

  “You really are a scream, Nora,” Adele said. “You should have known Bela’s circle from the Youth Group. They said the most horrible things about themselves but they all had egos big as houses. David went to school with Dori Csengery. You know she dresses like a man? Would you like me to arrange something?” she asked again.

  “I can’t marry Dori Csengery,” I said to Adele. “Bela has to marry Dori Csengery.”

  “Oh, everyone’s in love with Bela,” Adele said. She tossed the sentence off, and afterwards, I sat in that room that used to be his, stretching my legs out on his bed, and wondering if she had been fair. How could he help it if everyone was in love with him? At least he asked them all to join him in Palestine. Or he asked me.

  Throughout the years, Bela would continue to write as though he assumed I would take the next boat to Palestine. Even when I met and married Janos, his opinion didn’t waver. When I had Gabor, he wrote about how much my son would like life at Tilulit.

  Although I had no intention of leaving Budapest, I let him go on trying. I was flattered. After all, the boys and girls of Tilulit were remarkable by anybody’s standards—intelligent, brave, original, good-natured, witty, and, on the whole, good-looking. After their arrival, Ami Chai Jezreel helped them find an adobe house on the outskirts of town, and they got jobs on a road crew, working through the blazing heat with wet handkerchiefs draped over their heads. They shared rough Arab bread and handfuls of olives and drank a lot of coffee. Eleazar developed a taste for British cigarettes, but the group couldn’t afford them, so he settled for loose tobacco and rolling paper. But after a day of picking stones, his hands were so cramped that most of the tobacco fell on the floor.

  We are completely unprepared, Bela wrote me. The months with the cow and the wheelbarrows were a joke. There are Pioneers here who have spent two years in training camps, and I won’t even mention the Arab workers who get paid a fraction of what we do and have families to support.

  Then there was the afternoon he ran into Manuel Lorenz. Bela had gone to the office of the Jewish National Fund only to find that their request for land had, again, been denied, and when he stepped outside, the sunshine and heat had fallen on him like a mallet so that he had to sit down on what proved to be the stoop of a little restaurant with a verandah. The voice that called down in German was half-familiar:

  “It’s the linguist! And brown as a nut! Well, don’t be shy, young man, unless you think you’re too good to have a cold drink with me.”

  Bela looked up and could barely see the figure under the canopy, but recognized first the mustache and then the narrow jaw and small, bright eyes. “Well, sir, I can’t—”

  “No money? I have money. Come on, young man. It’s only lemonade, not cognac. I won’t compromise your principles.”

  Bela stood on shaky legs and managed to make his way onto the veranda
h. At once, he regretted his decision. Lorenz was not alone. He shared a table with a gentleman Bela recognized as the manager of the road crew and an Arab in a robe and headdress who raised his cup of Turkish coffee in greeting.

  Lorenz did not bother to introduce the two men, but said to them of Bela: “See? He calls me sir. That’s very typical of his type. They call each other Comrade, but put them before their elders and the Prussian manners surface. Well, young man,” he said to Bela, “do have a seat. There’s a real Arab here. Won’t you address him in Arabic? Or perhaps you’d like to write him a seditious leaflet.”

  The Arab twinkled at Bela, who remained tongue-tied and did not sit down.

  “My dear boy,” Lorenz said, “I did offer you a cold drink. Did you just come up here to stretch your legs?”

  Bela spoke deliberately in Hebrew. “Ha shemesh chazak.”

  Lorenz smiled. “Well, so it is, very hot. Stay under this nice cool awning for as long as you like. Would you care for a cigar?”

  “He’s too pure for cigars,” said the owner of the road crew. “He’d want to divide it into fifty pieces and share it with his comrades.”

  “This is really fascinating,” said the Arab in excellent German. “He doesn’t have that stunned look you see in most of them. I’m familiar with the Russian type. From before the war. Worked alongside the coolies and fell into a dead faint half the time. We buried at least a dozen of them.”

  “At your own expense?”

  “Naturally. What money did they have?”

  “There’s a patron for you, young man,” said Lorenz. “As good as Rothschild. It certainly is one way to get yourself some land.”

  Bela put up with this for a moment longer before taking his leave. Lorenz did make a final attempt to make him stay for lemonade, and in fact, a fat, sweaty glass pitcher sat at the center of the table, clinking with ice. Bela shook his head.