AS I’VE SAID, JANOS put no faith in photographs. When Gabor was two years old, I asked Janos to come with us to a studio on Andrassy Street to take a family portrait. He refused. “Photographs reproduce perceived perspective. They have nothing to do with objective truth. For example, look at our son.” Aside from three hours of work in the afternoons, I had done nothing but look at Gabor since he was born. Janos said to me, “How big do you think his head is, Nora?”
“Counting hair?” I asked.
“You could factor in the hair.”
“He has a lot of it.”
“Theoretically, hair doesn’t matter.”
“You would say that,” I said to Janos. “You’re losing yours.”
“I’m serious,” he said, in case I doubted it. Frankly, I’d hoped to drive him out of the house, because I’d almost, and I mean almost, gotten Gabor to take a regular nap, and I knew that Janos would be pulling out his tape-measure in a minute and wrapping it around Gabor’s head.
“Look,” I said to Janos, “all I want is to take a little picture of the three of us to send to my cousin in Palestine.”
“That’s the whole point,” Janos said. “Photographs only reproduce individual perception. There’s no objective reality to a photograph. A photograph would tell your cousin more about the photographer than it would about our son.”
He shook his finger at me while he said this, and he stumbled back a little in his agitation, looking no different than he had four years before, like a pipe-cleaner with a frayed end, like a lost soul, like someone schoolgirls would snicker over in the hall. As time went on, the oddness felt increasingly like affectation. He couldn’t possibly think that shaking his finger would make me pay more attention. Eventually, I got the photograph taken without him, by a man who had a little shop on the Great Boulevard, and I mailed it off to Bela with a short note in German: Measure Gabor’s head. According to every study I’ve read, it’s the right shape for a Cossack.
What I did not send Bela was a longer letter in Hungarian that I wrote around that time, in 1926: It was his sadness that made me marry him. What is it like to be married, you asked me. It is like knowing you’re being watched, then wondering how he can’t be on to you. I think I am a mystery to him, Bela. It’s like I speak another language. I wish I was a linguist, like you, and understood everything.
I had reverted to them again, those letters, the way another wife might revert to drink. Although I hadn’t time enough to fill the pages at the rate I had as a girl in Barnahely, there were six boxes now. I kept them in a deep drawer in the living room, under a lot of bedding, and took them out sometimes to read through while Gabor napped. I would put my legs up on the couch and pile them on my lap, smoking and reading, and it was as though the flat were crowded with myself at fourteen, eighteen, twenty-five. I didn’t keep them hidden, really. I told myself I wasn’t the one with something to hide. I wasn’t Janos.
I THINK GABOR’S birth made me less tolerant. Once, Janos decided to use our flat for storage. Of course, there was no warning. At eight, when he’d already left for the library and I was making Gabor a pancake, a boy showed up at the front door with a handcart piled with parcels.
He squinted up at me. “I’m supposed to leave these.”
He pushed right past, dragging that wretched, squeaking cart to the center of the flat and dumping the parcels. There were maybe thirty of them wrapped in thick brown paper and crisscrossed with lengths of twine, each around the right size to hold thirty or forty contraband magazines or a hundred leaflets or half a kilo of explosives.
“All right, then,” said the boy. Then he left. So there I was, and there was Gabor, and there were the parcels. Was I supposed to line them up neatly against the wall? Was I supposed to hide them under the bed? The only thing I knew I wasn’t supposed to do was open them. I went to the window and looked after that boy, a spindly, dead-pale creature who dragged that empty cart behind him so carelessly that one of its wheels dislocated and scraped along the road. Then I looked at Gabor.
That afternoon, Janos got home before I did, and I noticed that he’d put the parcels somewhere out of sight. He was leaning over his bowl of soup and the spoon was just in front of his mouth when I said, “I want those things out of the flat.”
He put the spoon down. “What? You mean my papers?”
“They’re not your papers. They might as well be rat poison. They’re out of here tonight.”
Janos did not say anything for a while. He looked into the bean soup and moved the stem of his spoon first one way and then the other. Gabor sat in his high-chair, observing the movement of the spoon with more interest than the expression on his father’s face. Then, Janos said, “All right. But it’s not possible until morning.”
“You could throw them in the Duna,” I said.
“Nora, be reasonable.”
“Not here,” I said to Janos. “Reason stops here.”
I didn’t even let him finish his soup. He had to knock on a neighbor’s door to borrow a handcart, claiming he had to move some books to his cubby-hole in the library, and I think that was where he stored the packages that night, though that meant getting them past the guard who was a reactionary and suspicious. I do know he came home without them, just before midnight. He dragged in the empty handcart and stood, sweating, in his coat. He said, “Can I at least leave the cart?”
I came up behind Janos and removed his coat, setting it on our coatrack next to my lamb’s-wool jacket and Gabor’s little winter parka. He didn’t shake his bad humor that night or the next, but I did notice that he was home for supper for the rest of the week, and when he returned the handcart next door, he made a great show of complaining to the neighbor about how a woman never understands the importance of a man’s work, and he actually let himself get invited in for a glass of pálinka like any other husband drinking with a husband to make common cause against their wives.
IN 1927, WHEN Gabor was three years old, Janos graduated from the Polytechnic, and it was then the future he had laid out for me in the Horivag cukrászda was supposed to begin. It was June, the end of the semester at the Katona Jozsef School, and I had never seen him so close to profound happiness as after that final math class. Not once had he complained about the girls, mind you, not once had he said a word to make me think he knew what they thought of him, but that afternoon, he burst into my office with a demonic grin. His style was telegraphic.
“Done,” he said. “Over. Gone. Never again. Say,” he added, looking down at my paperwork, “can’t you get out of here? I want to show you something.”
I followed him outside into the milky sunshine, and when we were in the open, he took my arm and guided me to a side-street where workers were drilling through the cobblestones. I said, “I can’t stay away long. I’ve got a full afternoon’s work ahead.”
“An afternoon? An afternoon?” Janos turned full around to face me, and then he laughed, surprising me to the point of panic. I had never heard him laugh before. Then he pointed to the drillers and said, “Molten iron switch-boxes. All over Budapest. Mains-fed. Activated by an astronomical clock.” Then he drew me to a lamp-post and said, “See that? It’ll be timed to come on at sunset, whether that’s four in the afternoon or ten at night. And that’s my job,” he said. “Ganz Electrical Works. Complete overhaul of the circuit system. Tear out the old equipment, bring it up to date, and when Ganz asked around at the Polytechnic, they got my name.”
I never did get back to work that day. Janos measured the distances between the future switch-boxes and made me hold one end of the tape as he walked backwards with the other. The brilliant metal strip extended like a band of light, and when he shouted out a measurement, I’d let myself be pulled forward to meet him, giddy and bewildered. I don’t know what pedestrians made of the two of us, all doubled over and sweaty in our good clothes with that tape-measure, making our way up Andrassy Street. Janos wrote numbers on a little pad and pointed out the lamp-posts that would be timed to dim at midnight and the lamp-posts that would burn until dawn. By the time our knees gave out, it was twilight, and we were perhaps a mile from where we had begun.
Janos lit his pipe. “You know, they’ll probably climb on the boxes, those schoolgirls.” As ever, when he spoke around the pipe-stem, I could barely make out what he said, and I moved in a little closer.
I asked him, “Do you want to sabotage the boxes and electrocute them?”
“As a class?” Janos asked, and then he took his pipe out of his mouth and kissed me.
By then we had been married for four years, and I didn’t know at first why that kiss seemed to run so deep and turn the world fuzzy and green. I fell back hard against something but didn’t care. Janos dug his hand under my little suit jacket and pulled it halfway off, and it was so dark, no one could see or mind, and little Gabor was at Aunt Monika’s and wouldn’t be the wiser, so what made me abruptly pull away? We were on a bench in Vidam Park.
“You knocked your head,” Janos said, not looking at me.
“A little,” I replied, gently. “Not much. You know, I’d better put our things in to soak. They’re filthy.”
“Yes, soak the jacket. I won’t need it. It’s a warm night.” He handed it over, and I bunched it up in my arms and held it so tightly as we walked home that it had to be pressed later. I laid it out under our mattress. That did the trick.
JANOS DID NOT GET the job at Ganz. They never contacted him again, and when he gathered enough nerve to go to their office, he was told that they had given the position to another recent graduate who had more “hands-on” experience. “What was the Great War if not experience?” Janos said, but then he pretended not to be surprised. “Something will turn up,” he said. By then, it was early July.
I worked through summers; Janos did not. Thus, in theory, he would have all day free to look for a job. Every afternoon, I would pick up Gabor at Aunt Monika’s, have a cup of tea with Adele, and return to find Janos sitting hangdog at the kitchen table cleaning out his pipe, with his good suit-jacket slung over the back of the chair. I didn’t even ask if he’d had luck.
“I need to throw a wider net,” he said at first. He had stopped calling himself an electrical engineer and tried to spread word that he could take on any project. No one was interested. Then he thought it was because he was too old, but the other war veterans his age were hired by firms that valued their maturity. One morning in early August, Janos said to me, “How do I look?”
“The same,” I said to him. He was wearing the coat I’d pressed and a pair of very baggy trousers, and he had made an unsuccessful attempt to slick back his hair.
“The same? What I mean,” Janos said, “is do I look, well, like . . .” His hesitation seemed to pain him. He wanted to get it out. “Do I look suspicious?”
“Suspicious?” I’d picked up his own habit of echoing back questions.
“I overheard them,” Janos said. “They said I was suspicious.” He dropped his voice. “I can’t risk it.”
He muttered something else, but to be honest, I was getting tired of having to get close to hear him. Why be so conspiratorial? Who was going to listen in now? Gabor? The boy had already climbed out of the trousers I had put on him, and now he was opening the kitchen drawer and dropping cutlery on the floor a handful at a time. I had to stop him before he got to the big knives. I didn’t have time for this sort of conversation. What was I supposed to say to him? That he was right not to become an ordinary man without politics who could get an engineering job? The Katona Jozsef School would be opening in less than a month. Janos had still not officially given notice. I could see the beginning of the new term rushing towards him like the floodlight of a train, and he was miserable to the point of paralysis.
“Maybe,” he said, “I could just become an electrician.”
“A suspicious electrician? Wouldn’t they be afraid you’d blow things up?” I asked him. I think I was trying to make him laugh. Sometimes, I could get that little half-smile out of him, but not that day. He didn’t even answer. In the end, I dressed Gabor, and off I went to work. I took my time about getting home, and in fact stayed at Adele and Aunt Monika’s for supper. I sang to Gabor about exploding cows, about a giant bear who danced with boys and girls in cemeteries, about magic bread that wise people know better than to eat, and though I did my best to put off the inevitable, I was met by Janos, who told me, in case I didn’t know, that he would be teaching at the Katona Jozsef School again that fall.
AFTER THE TERM began, Adele was not at home as often as she had been. She’d fallen in love. The man in question was not a surgeon, not even a pharmacist. He was an unassuming little fellow from Szeged named Matyas who owned a shoe factory. The first time I met Matyas, I could tell by Adele’s pleading look that she’d been afraid to have the two of us in the same room. Well, what could I do? Bite his head off? Gabor was on my lap most of the time, so I could barely make it off the sofa. They had met the day of the Martin Buber lecture. Apparently, that walk I’d taken with Bela had served some purpose.
“So are you moving to Szeged?” I asked Adele.
“Nora, it’s not as though we’re getting married,” she said, but of course, they did, after a leisurely courtship. The worst of it was that they were going to take Aunt Monika south to live with them, and I didn’t know who would watch Gabor, let alone where I would go when I wanted to avoid conversations with my husband.
The wedding itself took place in Budapest in December of 1929 in an Orthodox synagogue. It seemed that this Szeged fellow was a Jew in the old style. The ceremony was brief and incomprehensible, and the chanting sounded like gypsy music. From my perspective on the women’s balcony, I could make out no more than the top of the embroidered canopy. Around me sat guttural-accented Szeged provincials in their dresses from before the Great War. There were also a few girls from Adele’s old circle of nursing students, straining to see the ceremony like anthropologists. I knew Bela had not been able to come, but I still found myself searching for him among the men below.
After the wedding ceremony, there was a reception at a supper club, and I shared a table with some of my companions from the old days. Most of them were married by now. Andras the surgeon was there with a sweet little girlfriend who might have been Adele’s younger sister. Kalman Nagy took a seat across from me; he was still single and so unchanged that he might have been preserved in formaldehyde. He gave a weak giggle at the sight of me and kept trying to light my cigarette with a faulty lighter.
There was a surprise. Seated to my left was Laszlo. At first, I didn’t recognize him. Somehow, in the years since I’d left Kisbarnahely, he’d gotten fat and had grown a thick, blond mustache. “Well, Norika,” he said, “where’s the engineer?”
“Prior engagement,” I said. Janos had said he’d try to go, but I knew better. I’d seen him literally shrivel at the sight of a synagogue.
“You two should move back to Barnahely,” said Laszlo. “They’re wiring the whole town for electricity. The man we have working on it now is no good. He’s the mayor’s brother-in-law.”
“Does he look suspicious?” I asked Laszlo. He gave me a bewildered smile, then rose and pulled out a seat beside him. I got the second surprise of the afternoon. There was my mother.
She didn’t greet me, just looked at me across the tablecloth with her pince-nez glinting over her little hard eyes. I straightened and said, “Well, you finally made it to Budapest.”
“I was finally invited,” my mother said. “Where’s my grandson?”
“I fed him to the wolves,” I said. Actually, he was with the landlady.
She ignored me, which was her own way of telling me nothing had changed. She took a long time about removing her hat, drawing out at least five pins before she managed to place it on the table. “I can’t even take off this thing without it being a production with all the trimmings. It’s arthritis. Watch for it, child. You’ll get it as certain as you’re sitting here.”
“Nothing in life is certain,” said Laszlo.
I felt as though they expected me to take sides. Really, it was just too strange, seeing that little beetle of a woman looking just as she had eight years ago, sitting there replacing the pins in her enormous hat. I tried to master myself. “How are you, Mother?”
“I told you. Arthritis,” she said. “Where’s my grandson? I came here to see my grandson.”
“Anna,” Laszlo said, taking hold of my mother’s arm, “you’ve got days and days to see them all—Nora, Janos, little Gabor.”
Days and days? I swallowed hard and said to Laszlo, “You’re staying—”
“I’m going home tonight,” Laszlo said at once. “Your mother booked a room near the train station. She wants to take Gabor to the zoo.”
“The zoo?”
“I am a grandmother,” my mother said, not nicely, I thought. “Grandmothers take their grandsons to the zoo. Of course, grandmothers generally don’t stay at hotels.”
“You’ll stay with us,” I said. And all the while I was trying to remember the condition of the flat, not to mention how easy it was for me to bear my mother. Not so easy. Even as we ate the fish course with our little forks, I could feel my worst self surface.
“I was making a joke,” my mother said. “Of course I’ll stay at the hotel. Who just appears and moves in?”
“You do, apparently,” I said to her, and then I managed to smile. “Laszlo,” I said, “why don’t you stay too? You could take the couch.”
“No, me? I’m going home.”
“Please. Stay,” I said, trying hard to keep my eyes pinned on his.
“I’ve already got the ticket. It’s a reserved train,” Laszlo said, clearly taken aback. “I’ve got my own son waiting for me. Daughter too, did I write you?”
“Apparently, Nora likes to write letters,” my mother said to Kalman Nagy. “To everyone but her mother.”
“Mother, that’s not fair,” I said.
“A line or two a month? On a postcard? Well, that’s to be expected. After all, after all this time, aren’t we practically strangers?”
Kalman giggled, and said, “I’d know you were her mother anywhere. You two are like peas in a pod!”
I had to excuse myself from the table then, rush outside, and take a few gulps of air. Then I had a smoke and felt a little better. My head cleared, but I couldn’t take the invitation away.
AFTER THE SUPPER ended, my mother put her hat back on, and as I couldn’t see myself putting her on a trolley, I had to hail a cab, something that brought back memories of long, stupid evenings with boys like Kalman, and also, admittedly, made me feel wistful about Adele.
“Who would have thought it?” my mother said. “You, in Budapest. You must have quite the apartment here if you give up a perfectly good country house.”
I rolled my eyes. “How could I forget? The healthful fumes from the express trains. All the peace and quiet. And such a rich cultural life there. Just the place to raise a happy child.”
“Nora,” my mother said, “you haven’t changed. You always say the wrong thing at the wrong time and call it honesty. And you don’t have a feeling heart. How could you let those years pass without visiting?”
“You never invite me to visit,” I said. “You just tell me to move back.” How could a cab ride take this long? How much worse could I get? I tried to think, was there someone, anyone, with whom I was a human being? I was a human being with Gabor. No, I was a mother with Gabor. Was the driver taking a long route? What was wrong with me?
We pulled up, and my mother made a long, insistent ceremony out of pulling the correct change from her purse. I led her up the two flights, and as soon as I reached the landing, stopped dead.
“What’s going on?” my mother asked. “Don’t tell me you left your key at the supper club.”
“I did,” I said.
“Well, then, we’ll use a hat-pin.”
“Um,” I said, as she pulled one from that hat; I should have known my mother would be an expert at breaking into flats. I could have thrown myself against the door, I suppose, or had a fainting spell, or otherwise caused a diversion, but I finally said, flat-out, “Mother, there’s a meeting going on inside. I can hear them.”
“A meeting? Whose meeting? What meeting?”
“It isn’t supposed to be here,” I said, though I don’t know why I said it, as it made no difference. I took out my own key and turned it. The door held firm. Obviously, someone inside had locked the dead-bolt.
“I’ll go knock on the window,” my mother said, and before I could stop her, she’d hurried up to the window that faced the courtyard and gave it a sharp little rapping like a woodpecker. My heart stopped.
The front door opened. There was Janos gazing out from a cloud of cigarette smoke, looking so terrified and angry that I was struck dumb, though believe me, I had plenty to say.
But he spoke first. “You weren’t supposed to be home until after nine.”
“My mother’s here,” I whispered, though of course she could hear me.
“Your what?”
“Mother. I have one. She’s here. My God, Janos, tell me Gabor isn’t in there with you.”
Janos didn’t answer. Then, I heard a peal of laughter and an unmistakable crash—Gabor had pulled down the coatrack. I forced my way past Janos and, without looking right or left, went straight for the pile of strangers’ coats that covered my son, who by now was screaming. There were cloth coats, fur coats, coats with lush collars and cuffs, worker’s coats without linings, and I threw aside coat after coat until I reached the hard rack, under which lay Gabor with a little blood on his head, screaming his lungs raw.
I held him and spat a little on the edge of my sleeve to wipe the blood away, and he struggled free and tried to dive back under the coats, but people were collecting them now and quietly filing out the door into the hallway. Gabor grabbed hold of one fur collar, hard, and wrapped himself in that coat so tightly that there was no getting it off of him. The owner, a short fellow with a bald head and soft eyes, just stood there for a moment with his hands loose at his sides. Then he said to Janos, “Well?”
“Take mine,” Janos said, and he handed the man his overcoat so he could go.
That left Janos, my mother, and me. He was so tall, she was so short, he looked so scared, she looked so angry, and all at once what I wanted to do more than anything was join my son inside that coat. I said to Janos, “Get out.”
“You’re not serious.”
“Get out,” I said. “Go to another meeting. There must always be one running somewhere, like a crap game. But don’t bring your shit here again.”
“Nora—in front of the baby!” my mother cried out. Then, she knelt and gathered up Gabor, coat and all, in her arms. She couldn’t lift him; he was five by then, and a good size. Still, after a struggle, he settled on her lap with his eyes peeking out of the coat and was too curious to keep on crying. My mother looked up at Janos, who showed no sign of leaving. “Well,” she said finally, “the child’s a beauty. Looks like my side of the family—he’s got Moni’s curls. But obviously my daughter’s temper. Young man, get me a cup of something hot, preferably tea with a slice of lemon.”
“We have no lemons,” I said to my mother.
“Well, then, I’ll make do,” she said, “with my own sour nature.”
I followed Janos back into the kitchen, gathering ashtrays full of cigarette butts on the way, and then I almost stepped on a wide fan of diagrams, sketched with a ruler on lined paper, crowded with figures, taking the shape of who-knows-what. I gathered them up, and when we were out of earshot, I slapped them down in front of him and said, “So you were passing these around? What for?”
“They’re engineers,” Janos said. “The information’s valuable.”
I couldn’t bring myself to laugh. “What do you do? Sneak into Ganz at night? Too bad you can’t do it on their payroll.”
Janos turned to face me. “What do you want me to say? I’m not doing anything illegal. I read the journals. I make a few notes and share them with my friends.”
“Friends in Russia, I suppose.”
“That’s absurd. You think they don’t have technology far beyond this in the Soviet Union?”
“If it’s so advanced, why don’t you get an engineering job there? You can’t get one here. All you get here is trouble. What on earth do you think you’re doing?”
“You want me to lie to you?”
“Yes,” I said. “Lie to me. Like the time you said you wouldn’t bring your shit home.”
Janos sighed. The kettle was on now, and I think we both hoped it would start whistling, but the water had been cold; it would take a long time.
“I don’t understand why you keep this up,” I said. “The Commune was, what? Ten years ago. You don’t want to be a worker. You want to wear a suit and tie and light lamp-posts. Is it because of those men in the photographs?”
“Nora—” Janos began, but I kept going.
“They’re in better shape than you. I hear Bela Kun’s in Russia now. I’ll bet he doesn’t have to teach a bunch of girls arithmetic. I’ll bet he thanks the White Guard every day for getting him out of some clerk’s job in Budapest. At least he’s not stuck! You may as well have stayed in that village and been a tinker! We’re just as trapped!”
I don’t think I even noticed when I stopped shouting and started sobbing. What I wanted was for that kettle to whistle or for Gabor to cry or for something, somehow, to break through. I managed to control myself, and silence thickened.
From the other room, I heard it: Little dog, little dog—
My mother had found the music box. It had been a long time since I had turned the handle, and given the erratic melody, there was no question: It was being turned by Gabor. Was it possible for a heart to break and melt at the same time?
Little dog, little dog, you will lead the sheep to me. Janos was searching for the teabags, and I looked up at him and said, “I’m sorry.”
Janos didn’t look at me.
“I just don’t want to turn into my mother,” I said.
The kettle finally whistled, and he took it off the burner, letting that comment pass. I had a terrible feeling that he hadn’t understood a word I said. And honestly, did I? What was I afraid of? Really, as seen through the archway of the kitchen, my mother looked almost regal, like Queen Victoria, with her neat little body and her dark hair. Gabor seemed to like her. He had played with the music box years before, and now he was discovering it all over again. My mother held it between her hands, and he lay belly-down on the floor. My mother sang the words: Oh my black-eyed love’s a bold love, he will wander, he will stray—
I approached slowly. From behind I could hear Janos trying to pick up the hot teacup, but I didn’t come to his aid. Rather, I crouched down next to my mother. I said to her, “So do you go to many dances these days?”
She jerked her head around and said, “Who’d dance with me?”
“Laszlo,” I replied. “He likes you, for some reason. Too bad he’s married.”
“Ah, you should have been the one to marry Laszlo,” my mother said, and that more softly, barely managing to finish the sentence before lapsing back into: But my blue-eyed love’s a true love—
But I wouldn’t let that pass. “Mother, don’t judge him. He’s been going through a hard time. This is all he has left.”
“Since when do I judge?” my mother asked, smiling at the same time down at Gabor, who took the music box from her and stumbled off towards the door. My impulse was to follow him, but I was determined to make my point.
“He’s remarkable in his own way. He’s stuck to his political convictions, and they’re unpopular, unfashionable. They cost him his career.”
“Convictions?” Without Gabor there, my mother was free to stop smiling. She rose, slapping her gray dress back in place, and she said, “Convictions didn’t cost him a career, Nora. Look at the man. Look at his name. Maybe you think I’m provincial, but there are laws in this country. You think they’ll hire a Jew?”
ALTHOUGH BELA couldn’t come in for the wedding, he sent his sister a stiff, embroidered gown. She mailed me a photograph of herself in that gown, another one I lost years later when I was forced to abandon the flat. The cotton was so white that it made her skin look swarthy, and with her curly hair and shining eyes, she looked less like a Jewess than an Arab boy.
He’d gotten the gown from a friend in Taell al-Taji. I liked to say that name: Taell al-Taji. Sometimes, when I held Gabor, a sweetness would fill me, and I would whisper to my dark-haired son, “Taell al-Taji, Taell al-Taji.”
I found that village more interesting than the kibbutz, and I pressed Bela for details, claiming I was his conscience. You say the Arabs work as day-laborers? And have you passed them that old leaflet written by the Jew? Maybe they’d take his advice and organize a strike.
I used to be a pretty arrogant kid, Bela wrote. Now I wouldn’t approve of a Jew telling Arabs what to do.
So what do you do with your Arabs then? I wrote.
You ask me aboutourArabs, as if we owned them. You make a funny sort of conscience.
Sometimes he would go on at length. The one thing they used our hill for was grazing and now that we’ve plowed it under, they’d like their sheep to keep on grazing there, impossible of course. And then there’s the water hole. We worked like mules setting up the irrigation system, and not everyone was happy when the people in the village started dunking in their buckets, especially since the water isn’t really meant for drinking. So their intestines react and they overcrowd the clinic. That clinic is Dori’s pet, but it’s a drain on time and resources and it was clear from the start that it brings in a lot of strangers, people we can’t be so sure we trust. Remember: none of our doors have locks.
So it wasn’t an easy friendship. But maybe, he wrote, the best friendships are the most difficult. They are the ones that can transform you because you must come from such a great distance to know each other.
GESTURES OF diplomacy could not help but feel a little forced, though the spirit was genuine. Ahmad’s daughter brought the kibbutz a lamb for Easter. In turn, his family was invited to the Passover Seder. In 1932, it was held in the new dining hall, a cement square with a modern aluminum kitchen, and in addition to the regular members, there were twenty newcomers from Poland who stayed in tents stretched out by the laundry room. In contrast to the regular kibbutzniks, these Poles were white and stunted, still in their European clothes.
Tibor and Eleazar had worked on the Seder for weeks. They’d produced a series of handwritten guides to share among the tables. Seder plates held new symbolic items, olives, a grapefruit, and tamarind. The five children did a dance to represent the ten plagues, and then Dori read a poem about a girl who killed her rapist during a pogrom and lived to ride with the kibbutz Night Watch, disguised as a man.
There was matzo baked in the kitchen; after years of practice, they managed not to burn it. There were four questions, rewritten by Tibor and asked by little Gezer, now a sturdy boy of eight. “On all other nights, we sit unsupported. Tonight, we lean on others and remember the strength of our comrades during hard times.”
The Poles watched all of this with mounting confusion. They had come, almost without exception, from religious families. Perhaps it was when they reached the mixing of the bitter and the sweet on the parti-colored matzo that one of the young men broke in.
“What about the Hallel?”
His high-pitched, agonized voice carried all the way to Nathan Sobel, who answered with equanimity. “We have omitted it this year.”
But the Pole had by now somehow gained the courage to rise. He was a scrawny, rabbinical fellow with a long neck, weak shoulders, and red-rimmed eyes. “Rabbi Hillel says that you must do at a Seder only four things. Drink four glasses of wine, tell the story of our redemption from slavery by the strong hand of Ha Shem, eat the bitter herb with matzo, and recite the Hallel.” Then, without invitation, he sang:
Hallelujah, Praise O ye servants of the Lord.
Praise the name of the Lord.
Bela joined him, and so did Eleazar, who honestly loved the words.
Who maketh the barren woman to dwell in her house
As the joyful mother of children, Hallelujah.
No one else sang. Afterwards, there was a silence you could swallow. Then out came the first course of the meal.
The incident was forgotten in the chaos of the children’s search for the Afikomen. If they didn’t find it, the Seder couldn’t end, and Bela had hidden it in the new chicken coop, under a nest. The five children were followed by forty adults. Bela kept a steady commentary: “Closer, yes, closer now—no far, dead cold, Gabi, over there to the left, you’re hot, you’re burning hot!”
Then it was very late. The Poles settled in their tents, and Ahmad and his wife and children took their leave. A few members tried their ragged Arabic which made the children laugh and pleased Ahmad’s wife. She was a round, shy woman who hadn’t raised her eyes from the table all through the meal, but now she smiled enough to show a dimple. Ahmad shook Bela’s hand and said, “I didn’t understand a word tonight, but that ugly young man loves God.”
Bela replied, “He didn’t sing because he loves God. He sang because he was afraid.”
Later that night, when Dori, Nathan, and Bela sat in the kitchen eating leftovers and drinking coffee, Nathan said to Bela, “You shouldn’t have encouraged him. He’s going to see plenty of things here that Rabbi Hillel couldn’t have imagined.”
Bela laughed and thought, not for the first time, that Nathan was an ass. He exchanged a complicit look with Dori and said, “Mouse, where’d you come up with the poem about the woman watchman? It’s awfully bad.”
Stiffly, Dori replied, “I wrote it.”
With the coffee cup in one hand, Bela rose from his seat and stood on one leg. He said, “Do not do to others what you would not want them to do to you.”
Someone challenged Rabbi Hillel to summarize the laws of the Torah while standing on one leg, Bela wrote me, and that was what he said. It’s harder than it sounds. I told Nathan that we need to sum up the movement the same way and he accused me of wanting to turn everything into a slogan. Meanwhile, Dori was still put out because of what I said about her poem, and because I won’t call her Arielle.
I wrote Bela that, as his conscience, it was my place to inform him that his mother didn’t want to go to Palestine and neither did his sister or her husband or my husband or my son, so he should stop badgering us about it. We would find Hebrew names absurd, and we had no intention of standing on one leg.
One letter caught me like a blow. He had been wounded, not badly, but enough to keep him from a visit we’d been counting on that spring. I’m writing you instead of my mother or Adele because you’ll know how to break the news. It isn’t serious, but I think my knee will make me more useless than ever. I’m turning into an old man. Handling firearms was never my strong point, and they shot first.
I wrote back: They?
A letter cannot consist of a single word, and my thoughts flowed in two directions. One took me, to be honest, straight to Palestine. How hard would it be to take a train and then a boat and find myself there? How much harder than staying here and not knowing how much of what he said was true? He might have gangrene for all I knew. Then there were Aunt Moni and Adele. Who did he think I was, to tell them?
Who did he think I was? Someone strong enough to write back, in rational German: Can you still stand on one leg? Your mother will be hysterical, of course, but Adele is tougher than you give her credit for. Her husband’s probably rich enough to buy an airplane and fly you to some hospital in Switzerland. As for my son, I know he would have liked to have seen a knee with a hole in it. Janos would have measured the hole. Since you have not met any of these people, you will have to take my word for it, just as I will take your word that this isn’t serious. We have to trust each other, don’t we? We have no choice.
Of course, that letter wouldn’t do at all. The last line gave away too much. It went into the box.
GABOR CAME IN from school one day and caught me reading those letters. He was eight by then, and quick, and I couldn’t manage to gather them together before he grabbed a page. “Did you write this?” he asked me.
“Yes,” I said. I fought the urge to take it from him. By then, I knew it would only whet his curiosity. “I practiced my handwriting years ago, so I would copy out stories from books.”
“Why did you take it out now?”
“Paper’s expensive,” I said. “I thought I could use some of the empty sides.”
Gabor picked up a few more pages, turned them this way and that, and said, “No, Momma. They’re covered all over.”
“It was a good story,” I said, without really thinking about it, and I took my son on my lap and said, “It’s about a magic bear, a shaggy bear who found some magic bread. And as long as you ate the bread, time would stop, no one would get old, nothing would be lost. But it was such good bread, you had to eat it all up.”
“I’m too old for your stories. I tell the stories now,” Gabor said. He was also too old for my lap. His bushy hair made me sneeze, and his long legs took up most of the couch and knocked a lot of pages to the floor. That was fine. He wasn’t reading them. Then he told me a meandering tale about an airplane, and he contradicted everything he said without apology, in the way of an eight-year-old who didn’t need to make sense to anyone but himself.