HOW WELL HAVE I described the Bauer cellar? It was damp and lined with coal-colored moss. It hadn’t been used for some time, though an ancient heating vent led up to the grid which, as I’d mentioned, opened below the pedals of the piano in the practice room. When the grid was removed I could fit head and shoulders through it, though that head was bound to hit the piano.
In happier times, the cellar had held wine; I could make out mossy, bottle-shaped impressions on the floor. No wine now; for comfort, I made do with horse-hair blankets, and, of course, cigarettes.
All in all, not so bad. When Louisa discovered me that night, she leaned over that grid with a struck match; her face was lit ghoulishly from below. I noted changes the few months had wrought. Her soft, pink mouth had a line down each side now, and her downcast eyes looked dry.
She didn’t ask me how I got there. At first I wondered if she’d speak at all. But then she whispered, “You can’t stay. We’re leaving Budapest next week.”
I said, “I’m not leaving.”
The match spent itself. There was a little second-hand light coming to the practice room from the hallway, and I knew she was still there.
I said, “I’m staying here, and I’m not planning to die.”
Louisa’s voice caught. “What can I do?”
“You want to turn me in?”
Now my eyes adjusted to the dark and I could make out a faint shine in Louisa’s eyes, almost fear.
“You’re not leaving,” I said.
So gray and indistinct did Louisa look, so sick at heart, that you would think it was she, rather than I, who would soon be forced to live down in that cellar and wait for death. You would think she had something to complain about. I could hear her harsh, treble breathing. I thought: She’ll stay.
And she did. I don’t know how. The Deutsche Reichsbahn had sent her father east to help transport war workers, and her mother was preoccupied with ordering the servants to roll up the rugs, pull trunks through hallways, and throw sheets over furniture to prepare to move to the relative safety of Austria. Did Louisa tell her mother she had unfinished business here? What sort of unfinished business would keep a young girl in this house alone through that explosive winter? Perhaps she lost her in a crowded station, slipping away as the train pulled from the gate. Perhaps she feigned sleep in the back of an automobile, and crept out just before the border. I did not ask her. She did not tell me. Nor was she sought, I think. Resourceful girl.
The grate remained between us, and it divided her face into twenty-four squares, each of which held her fine-pored skin, the down below her ears, and her light hair. That face, seen from above, hung off her bones. Sometimes she would remove the grate to pass down food, water, or cigarettes, and once or twice I thrust my own head up, and that gave her a real scare because she didn’t know what I would do.
Later, she’d sing. The piano was no longer in tune, and to play must have been torture for her, so I made her play. From below, I could gaze diagonally across her narrow, skirted legs up to a chin trembling and bobbing with the music. Sometimes she’d hit a note so false that she would pause and look down at me.
“I’m still alive,” I’d say then. “Sing more, dear. Finish the song.”
So she would.
“Schubert!” I’d call up. She would sing Schubert’s “Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel.”
My bosom yearns
to go to him.
Ah, if I might clasp
and hold him!
and kiss him
as I would wish,
at his kisses
I should pass away.
Then I would call for that song I knew well.
What is lost, what is lost
We can not have back again.
Then it would be more Schubert.
My peace has left me,
my heart is heavy.
I shall never find peace, never again.
“I’m still alive,” I’d say if she paused to catch her breath or to steady her hands. “Finish those songs, dear. Give those songs an ending.”
So she would. Afterwards, she would crouch to get a better look at me, to make sure I was a real person, not some voice emerging from a hole below the piano. It’s God’s truth: She wasn’t sure. Yet I ate everything she passed me: bread, tinned meat, apples, bags of dried apricots. I smoked so many cigarettes that I could light each with the last.
“Sing more,” I’d say. “Sing everything my son wrote.”
“There’s just one,” Louisa would say.
“Why just one? Surely you know more.”
“Mutti,” Louisa would say, her voice breaking, “can I get you something? Are you cold?”
“I’m thriving,” I’d say. It was true.
So passed some weeks, during which my body took the shape of that crawlspace, wide and low. I defecated into a bucket that I passed up through that grate. Around this time the cold gave way to an illogical heat that nearly peeled my skin from my bones, and my mouth turned brown from all the cigarettes. They were, in some ways, the most satisfactory weeks of my life.
What had become of all the others in the Yellow Star House? It was in those weeks that they began the marches to the border. The eleven strangers with whom I’d shared the flat probably figured I was dead. At this stage, I never asked Louisa what she saw on the street, and she never volunteered information. It was during that time, as well, that the Soviets took Pest, yet I never thought about the war. Nor did I think of Janos, or even, I’ll admit, of Bela. My days and nights, even my dreams, were full of Louisa.
The girlish, flower-like scent of her wafted over the heat-duct. As she passed above, through the dark stuff of her skirt, her bloomers, white and loosened, swayed before my eyes. I said to Louisa, “Sing again. You sing that song you stole from me.”
She crouched, blinked down, and said nothing. She passed more cigarettes through the grate.
“You must think little of that song,” I said to her.
“I don’t think at all,” Louisa said. Dropping her voice, and looking at me between her own bent elbows, she added, “If I thought, I’d kill myself.”
“Would you?”
“Let’s not talk about it.”
“Why not?”
“What can I get you?”
“More cigarettes. Are they hard to get?”
“Yes.”
“Dear,” I said to Louisa, “don’t go to any trouble. Stay here. Sing for me.”
So passed October. In November, the provisions dwindled. Sometimes there would be a little bread with lard, or loose tobacco. Also, I saw less of her. This galled me. I found myself capable of swallowing enormous chunks of Louisa, as though she were sponge cake, and if she wasn’t there, my being was like a jaw snapping at nothing. Also, when she was gone there was always the possibility that she would die and I would live, or that I would die and she would live, neither of which would have suited me at all.
So I insisted on knowing where she’d been each day. I’m sure she lied to me; I wanted her to lie. She’d recite her route through Buda in a whisper which would fall lower yet as she spoke, though nobody could have heard her. “There’s a hospital,” she said, “with wounded children. No children should be left here. It’s not right.”
“Why not?” I asked her.
“Because they’re innocent.”
“And where should innocent people go?” I asked her, staring up.
“There are safer places than Budapest.”
“And those safe places, they’re full of innocent people?”
Louisa didn’t reply. Almost without a sound, but unmistakably, she let tears fall. She hovered over the grate and let her fingers dip through four holes towards me. I didn’t touch her. The rattle of the foundations of this Buda house as bridge after bridge blasted away allowed me to resist such temptations. Still, Louisa wept and soon forgot restraint. Her weeping had so little power over me that I could wonder at how novelists were wrong, how tears make no one beautiful and involve secondary fluids such as sweat and snot and even drool, which soiled Louisa’s blouse.
“Dear,” I said as she wept, “what can I do? You’re out there and I’m down here and there’s nothing more to say. Did you bring more tobacco?”
Lifting her red face from her hands, Louisa said, “No.”
“Well, find some for me. Don’t soldiers have tobacco?”
“I can’t take anything from them.”
“Why not? Because they’re innocent?”
Louisa didn’t answer. She looked down at the dark spot on her blouse, and pushed her matted hair away to free her eyes. I could read her face, and maybe if I saw there anything but emptiness I would have let her go, but nothing I said seemed to really touch her; nothing could change her. The worst of it was knowing there was no limit to how hard I could push because she would always give way.
“Sell them your body,” I said to Louisa. “They’ll pay in cigarettes.”
Maybe she did. She brought me packs again, and then I made her tell me what they did and where they did it, in their quarters, below the bridge, in the backs of the old Turkish baths. She told me what surprised her and what was commonplace, who entered from behind, who made her use her fingers or her mouth. As she told me these things, which might have all been lies, I smoked. Plumes of that smoke rose through the grate and filtered through her golden hair.
SHE COULD NOT come Christmas week. She filled my hole with bread, jam, artificial meat-paste, and water, and then she backed away with her coat draped around her shoulders. I let her go then because I knew she would be back. In solitude, I ate the bread smeared with the paste and sipped the water. I felt myself return to myself, and I thought: She is really gone.
Yet what I felt for Louisa wasn’t gone. It was renewable as blood, recreating itself, cell by cell. All I needed to do was let my mind wander a little and I would be back on Prater Street, in late March, the day I had my last encounter with Istvan Lengyel.
He appeared on one of the rare afternoons when Louisa wasn’t in the flat; she had gone to find Gabor, who had been stupid enough to actually go play piano at the dancing school during the third day of the German occupation. I’ll admit that the knock shook me out of a stupor, and given what had been taking place in Budapest in those days, my first impulse was to bar the door. I hesitated and called out, “Who is it?”
“Frau Gratz, don’t keep me on the landing. I’ll catch my death.”
It had been almost ten years since I’d heard his voice, but it was just like him to assume I’d recognize it. There he was, tall, long-faced, and underdressed in a thin overcoat. Before I could think of what to do next, he’d walked inside, and with a sniff, shrugged the coat open at the shoulders and looked down at me through foggy spectacles.
He asked, “How is the girl?”
Speechless, I gestured towards a chair. He shook his head.
“No. The motor of my car is running. This is very straightforward, the way you people like it, an economic exchange. You know they’ll never let him across the border as things stand. But I have some papers here—” and now he dug into an inner pocket of that light coat, and took out something thick, wrapped in a brown envelope. “For him,” Lengyel said. “It’s taken some time, but here they are.”
Just like that, he held it out. I waited half a beat and said, “Professor, her parents—”
“Her parents are fools. They’d sooner lose the girl than make a scene with the police. She is completely wasted on them. An accident of birth,” said Lengyel. He frowned and thrust the package forward. “You don’t want a passport for him?”
“Of course I want a passport,” I said. “We’ve been trying to get a passport for him since December. He’s been at five different embassies. He’s been—”
“You have no idea where he’s been,” said Lengyel. In the silence that followed, he laid the packet on the end-table, and let his gaze wander around the flat, which seemed particularly empty that day, with every blanket folded, every door closed, and a thin, early spring light filtering through the curtains. “So she’s been here three months. Tell me, how does she look?”
Something in his tone made me reply, “She isn’t happy.”
“Funny. She’s with the man she loves,” Lengyel said. “Does she keep up with her vocal exercises?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Good. That’s a good sign. I think this will work itself out nicely. You see,” said Lengyel, “she’s very young. Young people are fickle. And I’m sure,” he said, giving me a strange smile, “that your son will weather the blow. Isn’t there something about Istanbul? Perhaps your son would prefer Morocco. I’ve heard wonderful things about Morocco.” He said, “My motor’s running. I think you understand the terms. Goodbye.”
The moment he was out the door, I tore open the envelope, and there was everything he’d promised, the passport with a picture of Gabor I’d never known existed, everything not too crisp, a remarkable job. When Louisa and Gabor arrived and I showed the papers to my son, he looked as though someone had hit him hard, and his eyes sparkled in a way that looked a little dangerous. He said, “They’re frauds. I’ll die at the border.”
I said, “They’re probably your only chance.”
“But why go?” Gabor asked.
As for Louisa, she’d remained silent through this conversation. The outing had exhausted her; she was still not well. She had no proper clothes of her own, and my tan dress made her look jaundiced. She sat heavily on the couch and watched Gabor leaf through the pages of the passport.
“Why go?” Gabor asked again, looking at me. He sounded almost defiant. “You don’t think he’s going to try to trap me? You think he’s a friend of ours all of a sudden?”
“If he wanted you arrested, he could have done it months ago,” I said, realizing this almost as I spoke. “He’s obviously held off Louisa’s parents until he could find a dignified way—”
“I never thought you’d call that old queer dignified,” said Gabor. But I noticed that he didn’t hand back the passport.
Louisa spoke then. “I don’t have my passport.”
We both turned to her. She spoke almost in a whisper.
“It’s in a safe-deposit box. It would be hard to get it.”
“Lu,” Gabor said, “what’s the sense in all this? Your family knows where you are. They wouldn’t let you across the border.”
“And they’d let you?” Louisa asked him. “You’re the one who’s a Jew.”
“I’m not a Jew,” said Gabor.
“Yes you are. I don’t care how often they baptize you. I know exactly what you are.”
“And I know exactly what you are,” Gabor said to her. “Isn’t that amazing? Hell, I can’t stay here. And I can’t use that queer’s passport. I don’t know where I’ll go, except to hell.”
He was still carrying the passport when he slammed his way into the kitchen and thrust his head under the faucet. It was the same head I knew, with the mop of black curls, the black clear eyes, the clever mouth. His shoulders spread with relief as the cold water ran between them. He’d had fits of violent rage, lately; sometimes I thought he drank too much, and sometimes I thought he’d always had those fits, but I had never noticed. I was seeing too much through Louisa’s eyes.
By then, Louisa knew not to go to him. If she touched him, he’d slap her. I said to her, “Dear, you shouldn’t have gone out today.”
Then she asked me something surprising. “How did he look?”
“Him? You mean Professor Lengyel?” I frowned. “He asked the same thing about you.”
“He did?” Louisa blinked a lot, and drew her hand to her mouth. “I think I’m going to be sick,” she said. Then I had to take her to the bathroom. She must have eaten something bad. Everything came out one end or the other.
After I’d laid her in bed, I walked out to find Gabor with his hair still wet, sitting back on the couch and staring at the ceiling.
Once, it had been easy to talk to my son; now it felt like a risk even to say something flippant like: “Handsome fellow in that passport picture. Friend of yours?”
Gabor closed his eyes. “No friend of mine,” he said. His voice seemed to come from someplace else; he might as well not have been there at all. But then he said: “Come sit next to me, Momma.”
I lit a cigarette. They were harder to get these days, particularly since anyone in her right mind would be afraid to walk the streets. I settled next to my son on the couch.
Without opening his eyes, he asked, “How much money’s left?”
“I don’t know. Louisa holds the money. You want me to—”
“No, don’t,” said Gabor. He turned his head a little towards me, and said, “I want you to promise me something. Don’t let her go through my things when I’m gone.”
There was such heavy anger in his voice that I couldn’t answer. Then he said something else.
“I smell smoke.”
“That’s me,” I said. “Open your eyes.”
“No,” Gabor said, and he was suddenly awake and on his feet and running towards the kitchen where Louisa stood over the stove, burning his passport. Her face had a stoic expression as the burner singed the pages. Gabor snatched her hand away and slammed her to the floor, and she didn’t cry out. She propped herself up on an elbow.
“Don’t you see?” she said in a voice which must have reverberated at least a little from the impact of the kitchen floor. “I’m saving your life.”
“Stop saving my life!” Gabor shouted. Then he scrambled for the passport itself, which was half-consumed and worthless. He thrust it in her face. “What the hell am I going to do now!”
“We’ll get a real one, the real way,” Louisa said.
“There is no real way!”
“Then we’ll die together!”
“Oh fuck you! Die alone! I’m getting the hell out!”
He crossed to the door and, without putting on a coat, left the flat, and two beats later Louisa padded towards that same door in her slippers, thrusting her head through and calling, “Don’t leave like this!”
Then she went out after him. Down the street, to the tram-stop, onto a tram, she followed Gabor, and who knows what anyone made of that girl in house-slippers, touching that man’s arm and making him leap from the tram onto the sidewalk. She called:
“You can’t leave me!”
“I’ll leave whoever I want to leave!” Gabor shouted back. Where was he now? Did he even know? Near Nyugati Station, probably, because he could hear trains. How much money did he have in his pocket? Was there a freight he could catch? Floating towards him through the exhaust of a street full of automobiles was his wife, and she called through traffic:
“You can’t leave!”
Now he didn’t answer, and he started towards what he hoped was a side entrance to the railway station. There was a faint hum and the sound of signal bells. Or maybe something else was ringing as he pushed open those doors and found himself in the great cavern of the train-shed, full of coal smoke, oily heat, and soldiers. There were Hungarian soldiers, German soldiers, and the ghost-faced Jews with white and yellow armbands, en route to the copper mines.
Gabor took a long breath. Something like drunkenness had overcome him, a mix of fear and complete freedom. He had no idea what would happen next.
What happened next was that Louisa came up behind him, and grabbed his arm. “You come back with me.”
Still with the sense of being in a dream, Gabor turned his head. He even smiled. “Come back where, Angel?”
Louisa had trouble framing the next few words, but they sounded like: “Come home.”
Gabor removed her hand from his arm. “And where’s your home, Angel of Death?”
Her face contorted then, and Gabor took advantage of that moment of vulnerability to walk, quite calmly, up track three, where a dull-yellow train sat in its own grease, stretching well out of the back of the station.
He walked so far that he began to believe that the train never ended. Was it occupied? None of the doors were open. Such an amazing thing, a train; it could go anywhere. All you needed to do was board. He swung himself onto a door, propped his foot against the body of the train, and gave the handle a tug. When he glanced over his shoulder, he wasn’t very surprised to find himself face-to-face with Louisa.
Sobbing, she cried out: “After what you made me do—after what—you can’t—”
Then his foot slipped, and he fell with a crack to the concrete, because the train door had opened from the inside. He rubbed his head, and saw the bottom of a boot hovering above his nose.
There was a voice in German: “Fräulein?”
Gabor rolled to his side and the bells he had heard when he entered the station pounded their clappers on his skull. He gazed up at these two towering figures: Louisa and an officer whose clean uniform trousers rose like the trunks of trees.
Did Louisa say: “Helfen Sie mir, bitte. Mein Ehemann—” or did she say, “Bitte, mein Jude—”
Pulling himself onto his elbows, Gabor tasted metal in his mouth, and found himself suddenly surrounded by young soldiers who had drifted off the train. They were looking down at him, and he could just see past their boots to the first soldier who was holding Louisa by the arm and trying to make sense of what she was saying. He asked her, “Fräulein, was ist los?”
Everything seemed filtered through molasses, the warm smell of those boots, the bells, the grease he tasted, and the way Louisa reached out towards him. Slowly, her face tightened into something he couldn’t recognize as she shouted words he didn’t know, and those words split the brown thick pool of his stupor with the force of a rocket, speeding, bright, electric. She cried out: “Ich habe es verloren, mein Baby!”
Was it then the rifle cracked Gabor’s head like an egg? Or did they drag him to the tracks? Louisa did manage one more time to pull him towards her before the force of a bullet tore him from her arms.
YOU’VE LOST weight, ”I said to Louisa. It was January now. Buda was rubble. Her hair hung in her eyes and she had a way now of crouching in front of the grate and looking at me for a long time. I stared back, mostly silent, with the last of the cigarettes clenched between my teeth and double strands of smoke rising from my nostrils as from the nozzles of pistols. My discovery that I could say anything to Louisa had run its course. Now I knew that all words were the same as no words, and the more she wanted me to speak, the less I had to say.
She too said little. Mainly, three words, whispered close to the grate. “Let me in.”
At first this took me by surprise, though it made sense. After all, the cellar was the closest thing we had to a shelter. I made no reply.
“Let me in, please,” she said, as though she couldn’t have easily lifted the grid herself and entered. I didn’t tell her so, though even if I had, she still would have pleaded with me, “Let me in.”
Finally, I said, “It’s not your place.”
“I want it to be,” said Louisa.
“Why? What’s your life worth to you?”
“Nothing.”
“And you want to be down here? Why?”
“I don’t know,” said Louisa. Just then, a blast made the walls give a rattle and the strings of the piano sounded in a way I felt clear through my bones. She made to speak again, and I drew a finger over my lips. She drew two over her own, implying thoughtfulness. A hum came through her throat, a lu lu lu. She lowered her face close enough to the grid for me to see her eyes press towards me like a child’s.
I slipped away to bury my own face in my hands. Convulsions of hunger, anger, and disgust passed over me, and buried in blankets stinking of myself, I thought: I am drowning, I am already dead, and she looks at me like that, wants something from me, and I want a cigarette, I want my son, I want my husband, everything at once, like light breaking.
There was no light. Even the bomb-flares died now. Yet the aura of Louisa’s tenderness lingered, and I knew she was still gazing down, with those two fingers at her mouth, staring into the cellar as into a well which might show her a reflection. How much could I even hate that girl? I knew then: not enough. How much could I love her or anyone? I also knew: not enough.
No one can love enough. We are all cowards who can’t look each other in the face or tell the truth. Then I thought of Bela and his beeswax candle burning, and I wept.