Louisa Read online

  “Are you always planning on acting against your own best interest?” Lorenz asked him as he turned to go.

  Bela said his last words in German to be certain he was understood. “No, sir. But you won’t be the one to determine my best interest.”

  “That’s too bad,” said Lorenz, but he turned back to his drink and conversation and let Bela leave the restaurant in peace.

  IT WAS Nathan Sobel who eventually returned with the news that the Jewish National Fund had granted them a thousand dunam of land in the Galilee. He’d run to the office during lunch and returned with the documents raised up in his fist in a gesture of victory. They dropped their shovels and let out a whoop that made the other laborers drop their own tools and walk over to find out what had happened.

  One young Arab said, “I know that part of the Galilee. The soil’s no good.”

  By then, most of the comrades understood a little Arabic, but Bela had to translate Nathan’s response. “Soil can be fertilized.”

  “Well, what will you plant there?” the man asked.

  Sobel answered, “Whatever we choose to plant, we’ll plant. We’re not afraid to work.”

  Bela found the simultaneous translation tiring, and eventually he took the man off to the side to ask him about the region, what his own village planted, how they fertilized, what water sources they found and how that water was transported, and he pressed a little too hard. The worker stopped him with an upraised hand.

  “Listen, you think that if that land gave anything back, I’d be here clearing stones?”

  Bela shrugged and said, “Aesef sadiq.” He felt a brief, quick sinking of the heart but made himself speak again and asked him, “Momkid taeqolli aeynae . . .” Midstream, he pulled an old map from his pocket and shook out its folds. The young man squinted, and his finger climbed along the ridges to a point just south of Safed.

  “Taell al-Taji,” he said.

  Taell meant hill. As they debated names that night, it was Bela who pushed for a Hebrew variation: Tilulit.

  They gathered all their old and new friends in their favorite ice-cream shop—a dilapidated storefront with its screen door half-off the hinges—and they overtook the place, polishing off whole tubs of strawberry, lemon, and tutti-frutti. Sandor climbed on a stool and turned an empty tub into a drum, and Tibor took up his mouth organ and played. Completely drunk on cream and sugar, they pushed back the flimsy tables and danced, gripping each other’s shoulders, knocking over chairs, rattling the walls.

  “I want you to call me Arielle!” Dori screamed in Bela’s ear. “I want to be a daughter of Zion!”

  Bela gave her a squeeze. “You’re still a mouse.”

  “Mice are vermin! They’re Galut!”

  Eleazar grabbed her then and spun her at the center of the circle. The owner despaired, announced he was going to bed, and let them close the shop themselves at dawn, when they fell asleep in a fragrant and slightly sticky heap in that adobe house they would soon leave forever.

  THIS HISTORY OF Tilulit came to me by way of Bela’s letters, hardly the most reliable of sources. Bela doesn’t lie, but Bela tends to overlook divisions, petty squabbles, and everyday annoyances—a quality which, at points, drove me mad. The first years couldn’t have been easy. Yet Bela wrote about the first working shower, the Hebrew poetry Tibor set to melodies he’d heard in the Arab village, the village itself, Taell al-Taji, which lay just over a gully, white and silent.

  Bela was the go-between. He must have been a spectacle, appearing in that village in his worn gray trousers with the cuffs rolled up and a half-buttoned white shirt, one hand steadying his bicycle. Palestine hadn’t cured him of his fear of bridges, and he had to ride that bicycle kilometers out of his way to find a land-crossing. In Taell al-Taji, he paused by an open doorway where two old men crouched. They offered him coffee which he drank down at once; it had been a long, dusty ride.

  The older of the two had a jaw like a nutcracker and only a few teeth in his head; his Arabic almost eluded Bela. “A very beautiful machine you have. The British make beautiful things.”

  “It’s German,” Bela said, and he felt foolish; what difference did it make?

  The younger man broke in. “There are how many of you Muskovites in those tents?”

  Bela accepted the name. It was better than what the Arabs commonly called the Jews: the Children of Death. He said, “There are seventeen of us.”

  The man was silent for a moment, running his finger along his mustache and letting it linger at the edge of his mouth. “You plan to do what?”

  “We plan to farm,” said Bela.

  The man waved his hand dismissively. “Farming won’t make you rich. You should keep bees.”

  Bela crouched beside the bicycle and set his chin in his hand, settling in to listen as the man unraveled the mysteries of bee-keeping, of hives, honey, beeswax, and also of the intricate and fascinating lives of the bees themselves. This, Bela outlined in a letter that reached me not so long after I married Janos. The bee-keeper, Ahmad, invited Bela to see his own hives. Remarkably, Ahmad wore no net, and as Bela watched from a respectful distance, he allowed his front and forearms to grow fuzzy and yellow and alive with bees.

  Honey from the honey-comb, Bela wrote, is nothing you can get off a shelf. I brought it back to where I knew it would be treasured. Vera made a honey-cake but most of it we just ate with our fingers. We had a long meeting about something afterwards—some of those meetings last all night—and Mouse took notes and kept the honey-pot next to her. The pages got all stuck together.

  Ahmad agreed to train some of the boys in bee-keeping. He came at first on foot and then took pleasure in the kibbutz gift of the bicycle. He became a fixture near the foundation of what would become the dining hall, sitting on a blue three-legged stool surrounded by David, Sandor, Eleazar, and a few more wondering, adolescent boys, speaking Arabic Bela would translate. He helped them build hives and allowed those hives to be painted yellow, though that seemed, to him, ridiculous. He saw them through their first harvest and admitted that the honey was acceptable. His motivations seemed, to me, obscure. Why would he want competition? Bela attributed to him an altruism which seemed ridiculous. He’s a neighbor, Bela wrote, and knows what a neighbor is.

  I wrote: He must like bossing Muskovites.

  But Bela replied, You’re thinking like a Galut Jew. He’s at home in his life. Can you imagine?

  That line must have been the only hurtful thing Bela ever wrote to me, implying that I was not at all at home. I started a few letters back, some sharp, some simply base justification. Finally, I wrote: No, I can’t imagine. I have a poor imagination. Send me physical evidence or I won’t believe you.

  In a package that contained a beeswax candle and a letter twelve pages long, Bela described the first anniversary of the founding of Kibbutz Tilulit. They still lived in tents, but they had built a cowshed and a dining hall, and there was talk of a generator, which would mean hot water for the shower and eventually electricity. Soon they would start a nursery. Bernadette and Tibor were expecting a child. Eleazar’s school fellows were on their way, twenty of them by all accounts, maybe more.

  WHEN I RECEIVED the candle, Janos had just started his first semester at the Polytechnic. Those were the best days of our marriage. He came home straight from his class to study in our tiny dormitory room. Wintertime, we moved his desk right up against the gas heater, and as he read me bits of his engineering textbook, I would keep my stocking feet on his lap and he would rub them absentmindedly. Once in a while, he would dislodge the bag of lenses I had received from Laszlo, and he would tell me how glass fractured light.

  One day, he turned one of the lenses towards the window and sent a beam of light straight at the candle.

  “But your papers,” I said. The room was overflowing with things that could catch on fire.

  Janos was in an unusual mood, almost playful, and he said, “Do you think you married a pyromaniac.” I held my breath, but the bea
m was exact: the wick smoked, sizzled, and took.

  The candle had a steady flame and it smelled good. Janos stretched back his neck and frowned. Then he took out his measuring tape. There was a lot of afternoon sun in that room and he made a careful calculation of the angle of the shadows, the height of the flame. All the while, the wax dripped down. I was afraid he would set the room on fire, so I leaned over and blew the candle out.

  9

  LOUISA HAS NEVER asked about my husband. One would think that Gabor sprang out of my head, or out of that piano in that practice room. The winter Louisa lived with us on Prater Street, she seemed to have opened every drawer, and pulled out every photograph, postcard, and letter I possessed, but she found no sign of Janos. In this regard, she lacked imagination. Granted, by then he had been gone for six years, but his engineering journals still lay piled in his study, and for economy’s sake, I couldn’t bring myself to give his clothes away. His yellow scarf hung on a coatrack by the door.

  It’s true he left us, but most of the women in my situation were left by their husbands. Some of those husbands were transported east, some slaughtered during a forced march. I could count myself lucky that my own found work abroad before something else took him from me. As things stood, I could tell myself that he would return. After all, he’d taken no more than a single suitcase. He’d even left his pipe behind.

  WHEN I FIRST MET Janos, we were both employed at the Katona Jozsef School for Girls, and I saw him at a faculty meeting, bent like a pretzel in his seat, knocking that pipe against the table in a way that wasn’t endearing him to me as I was trying to take notes in shorthand and found it hard to concentrate.

  I had been secretary there since the school re-opened in 1921. It was a gaudy, pink-white pastry of a place with neo-classical pillars and slippery floors. Two years before, under the Commune, it had been The Institute for Proletarian Education, and in the foyer was a mural of blue-skinned, wild-eyed seamstresses with their arms stretched towards a red horizon. The school was reluctant to paint over the mural because the artist had fled to Vienna and there was some chance he might turn out to be famous, but at some point someone added the Crown of Saint Stephen where the horizon used to be, thus giving the rapture of those seamstresses an acceptably patriotic object.

  I did not actually speak to Janos until one afternoon when I was drinking a cup of tea at the cukrászda across from the school. I looked up and there he was, standing a foot away and staring. I started to get up, and almost irritably he waved me down again.

  “That’s a big cup,” Janos said. He sat down. “They hold twice as much as coffee cups. I’ve measured them. I take it you’re not independently wealthy. No rich husband.”

  I blurted out, “Who’d marry me?”

  He pulled his tape-measure from his pocket and drew my cup across the table. Wrapping it around the rim, he frowned. “Yes, twice.” His mustache was damp, and he wiped it with a napkin before saying, “Do you want me to buy you more tea?”

  “Why should you pay for my tea?”

  “It’s a bourgeois custom,” Janos said, and from that I understood that he was courting me.

  That courtship lasted for perhaps three months and involved a small wading pool of very bad tea. We always met at the Hovirag, a tea shop with gilt-trimmed mirrors, lace-trimmed tablecloths, and limp peonies in bud-vases. On the whole, the cheap sentimentality suited Janos. To me, he seemed like a real thing in a false place. He was too tall to fit himself comfortably into the wire-backed chair, and his hands were too big even for the handles on the teacups.

  He liked to compare teacups; apparently sizes varied. He would guess circumference and jot down the number on the tablecloth. Then, I’d hold the lip of the measuring tape while he pulled. If the true figure matched the estimate, half of his mouth would turn up, which was the closest he would get to a smile. “Good to train your eye,” he’d say, “but there’s no substitute for measurement.” All of this would be said with his pipe between his teeth, and it was some time before I could make sense of it at all.

  I will admit that I kept waiting for Janos to measure me. It seemed possible. At points, those estimating eyes would settle on me, almost accidentally. They were gray-blue, slanted, deep-set, and miserable, presented across a table like a couple of old coins. He was ten years older than me, a grown man who had gone through the Great War and the Commune, and now he was spending his afternoons in my company. There had to be some reason why.

  AS TIME PASSED, he chewed his pipe a little less and said more to me. He had been born near the Slovakian border to an Orthodox family, given the name Jochanan ben Ezra, and was made apprentice to a tinker at fourteen. Most of the work was dull and meticulous, done in a cellar underneath an inn. By sixteen, he already had a stoop. Even the synagogues were cramped and musty. As a journeyman, Jochanan sometimes went to bigger towns, and at the sight of a church spire, gaslights, and carriages, he would almost instinctively tuck his side locks behind his ears and try to see how long he could mix with a crowd in a café before he lost his nerve. Janos told me that he knew even then that he did not believe in God, that the knowledge was inborn, like a talent for mathematics.

  One day, a German engineer passed through on his way to Debrecen, and because he was Jewish, he stayed in the quarter, though he was like no Jew anyone there had ever seen, with hair shaved well above the temples and a neat mustache. He spoke Yiddish, of course, but awkwardly, and as it was well known that Jochanan spoke some German, he was commandeered to show the gentleman to his room. There they spent most of the night in conversation, and in the end he gave the young man three engineering journals and the names of some good textbooks, as well as a few addresses in Budapest.

  The journals were hard going; at first it would take Janos half the night to work his way through a paragraph. But as he persisted, page after page opened, and language and content drew him further on until there was no question what ought to happen next. The morning Janos finished the third journal, he took a carriage to Debrecen, where he got himself shaved down to a mustache and bought a new suit of clothes. Then he took the train to Budapest, the center of the world, home of Andjos Jedlik, the Father of the High Voltage Capacitor Battery.

  He formally declared himself to be without religion. The ceremony took place on the Sabbath and was witnessed by his landlady and a student Janos had pulled in from the street. The student was good-natured because Janos was going to pay him. The landlady, a good Christian, disapproved, but she had a full month’s rent in advance, rare in that district, and so she was willing to placate her new tenant.

  Janos made them both stand in his furnished room where he had not yet unpacked his suitcase. He handed the student his mint-fresh electrical engineering textbook, and set his right hand on it, saying, “As of this day, I cast away all ignorance and take on the mantle of human knowledge and human progress.”

  To mark the occasion, he offered each of the witnesses a cigarette which he lit with such aplomb that they might not have noticed that his hand was shaking. It was the first time he had broken the Sabbath.

  JANOS STILL hadn’t managed to get his degree. The war had interrupted, and then, after the Commune fell, there was the quota on Jews entering universities. Yet before Christmas, he planned to take the exams again and he would do so well, the Polytechnic would have to readmit him, and within five years he figured he could write his own ticket. An engineer could work anywhere in the world. Numbers were a common language. Janos pulled from his pocket the silver measuring tape and drew a length across the table. “A meter and a quarter wide in France, in India, in Australia. One world. The rest is mindless superstition.”

  He ran through measurements with a driving optimism that seemed at cross-purposes with his hangdog face, as though those numbers had to do with the life he would live one day, and his expression with his hangdog present. Why was he telling me all of this? Then, abruptly, he would ask something like: “What do you think of the name Gabor for a son?” Floo
red, amused, shy, horrified, I would agree with everything he said. I think that’s why he considered me sensible.

  At night, I’d sit cross-legged on Bela’s bed and open up his maps. First, I found Janos’s village, north of Eger. It wasn’t in Hungary anymore; we’d lost that territory after the war. Now even its name would be in Slovak. What was it like, to be from a place that no longer existed? Did it make you homeless, or did it make you free?

  It was so strange to sit on Bela’s bed and think about Janos, who was as different from Bela as a broom was from a bear. Bela had left me here with all these maps, roll after roll: Hungary, Central Europe, the Western Hemisphere. One world: Berlin, Rome, Paris, London. Another map took me across the sea to New York, and from thence to San Francisco, and back east again. Map after map lay across my legs like dry, light blankets. Hadn’t I long ago drawn from the deck the card Winter, carrying everything she owned wrapped in a little ragged bundle?

  So it seemed settled; I would marry Janos. Admittedly, I wondered how it would come to pass. There was our life together in all of those far-flung countries where we would live with the son named Gabor. Then there was the grubby little lace-trimmed table where we both sat smoking now. How could we get from here to there?

  It didn’t help that we only saw each other in the Hovirag. After we’d finished our tea, or sometimes even in the middle of a conversation, he would abruptly push his chair back, mumble an apology, and head out the door. Every afternoon, I promised myself I would leave with him, but when he rose, he seemed to shake off any knowledge of my presence, and he left our table without so much as a backwards glance. I will admit, I found him, at those moments, powerfully attractive, as he tucked his pipe in its case, buttoned his overcoat, and strode out onto Andrassy Street. I watched him through the window. He was taller than everyone else, and walked faster.

  Of course, given the circumstances, a less callow girl would have assumed that Janos was already married. Why else the mystery? He’d leave a little loose tobacco in our ashtray, and I’d lean in and take a whiff; it made my eyes water. Maybe he’d even told me where he was going. After all, half of the time, he still spoke through his pipe-stem and I wouldn’t understand a word.