AFTER BELA BEGAN to study through the summers, his family stopped coming to Kisbarnahely. I wrote him once a week. It helped me practice German and improved my penmanship until it was as exact and blotless as his own. He lived on Dob Street. One day I’d know that big apartment well. I would spend a winter in its parlor, reading all of Bela’s books on a green sofa, with a lumpy throw across my shoulders and a cheek pressed against a pillow embroidered with strawberries.
Yet all of that was still to be imagined. Abandoned, I wrote in broken German: Wie geht’s? I don’t know how many pages I filled and rejected before I would consider the letter ready, and I saved the versions I’d discarded in one of my mother’s sturdy Budapest shoe-boxes and kept it under my bed. By the time I turned fourteen, the letters Bela saw were written in a dry, economical style that left little room for error.
Bela’s German was a different story, headlong and overflowing. Later, I’d know the desk where he had written his letters, a scarred warhorse, blackened with varnish. I could well imagine him hunched in the chair with one hand deep in his hair and a little ink on the joint of his right thumb. When he got one of my letters, he always wrote back the same day.
Bela was a heroic writer of letters. At the same time that he wrote me, he corresponded with Zionists in Palestine, Berlin, and Minsk. When he wasn’t writing letters, he was attending secondary school at the Budapest seminary, frequenting lectures or concerts where he could do a little fund-raising for his youth group, and trying to teach himself Arabic.
He took on the last task with nothing but a dictionary, a grammar, and a newspaper one of his father’s friends sent him from Jaffa. It was lonesome work. Once, walking along the promenade by the Duna River, he saw two Arab gentlemen well-settled on a bench, smoking cigars, and a few sentences drifted by that made him jump out of his skin. He threw himself upon them and blurted out a salutation: “Taeshaerrafna!”
They stared.
He tried: “Sabah ael-kher.”
This made more of an impression. The stouter of the two produced a line of German. “Sir, you are addressing us in Arabic?”
Bela turned purple and tried to speak again, but the man raised his hand for silence.
“It is a beautiful language, young man, and it is very admirable that you approach it with such zeal, but I am afraid I do not understand a word you say. Do you plan to go into the foreign service?”
Startled, Bela said, “No, sir.”
“Well, in any event, learn English. It’s a tougher bird than Arabic and will stand more abuse. Good day.”
After that encounter, Bela redoubled his efforts and haunted the docks in search of conversation partners. When I read his letters, I could see him, wandering around Budapest with all those dictionaries, listening hard for languages he didn’t know. His clothes, though clean, were never pressed, and when the weather turned warm he would take off his coat and leave it on the chair of a café or on the hook by someone’s door, or folded behind a throw-pillow. Hats were worse. He had too much hair to keep a hat. Once he left something behind, he never bothered to find it again, and you were forced to run after him or to simply accept it as a gift.
His work at the seminary involved the commonalities between the verbs of Middle Eastern languages and Hungarian. In his letters, he would keep me abreast of the latest trends in scholarship. I skipped those parts. What I read instead, over and over, were simply the accounts of his days. First, a breakfast, over which he would make corrections on a translation while sister Adele cleared his plate out from under him and Aunt Moni boiled fresh coffee. Then, a last-minute dash for the trolley where, still refining, he would turn the translation into something like prose just in time to hand to a professor, who by the way invited him to dinner as there would be a guest from Palestine, and so Bela must arrange for that guest to speak at his Zionist club before he left town: a flurry of visits to households, more coffee and cakes—I imagine all the cigarettes and light one of my own—more arrangements and a room confirmed and then the man himself: the phlegmatic owner of an orange plantation, a Hungarian-Ukrainian named Mr. Manuel Lorenz who was, in fact, anti-Zionist.
So much the better, Bela wrote, though by now his squarish handwriting had little points, like waves. They never got to meet anti-Zionists who actually lived in Palestine. Lorenz was told they were a walking club with an interest in botany. Bela asked him about fertilizers and backed off when it was clear he knew nothing about them. Then Bela turned the conversation towards climate and steered a friend away from the obviously sensitive point of labor relations. Muttering answers under a dirty-white mustache, Lorenz made it clear that Palestine was a dead-poor country for hiking, and they would all catch malaria. Later, he took Bela aside and said, “My boy, I hear you know some Arabic. Come by tonight at ten. I have something to show you.”
After the meeting, over more cake and coffee in a friend’s kitchen, Bela and his comrades speculated. Had they misjudged the gentleman? He had been in Palestine for so long that something of the land must have rubbed into him and made him a new man.
Well, with some trepidation, at ten precisely, Bela went to call on Manuel Lorenz. Lorenz was staying at a spinster sister’s in a well-appointed flat on Josef Street. He appeared in his dressing gown and slippers, as though he hadn’t been expecting company. Bela was ill at ease, and kept his coat on, which wasn’t in his nature.
Lorenz settled into the most comfortable chair in the room, offered Bela a cigar, and lit his own before rather abruptly beginning.
“Young man, you realize, don’t you, that Hebrew is on its way to becoming the lingua franca of the Yishuv. What’s your opinion on the matter?”
The question took Bela by surprise, and he answered it honestly. “It’s the language native to the land.”
“You’re planning on settling Palestine, of course,” said Lorenz. “I’ve seen enough of these Pioneers. They all look like you. They’re not bad workers if they live through the first few years, but you can’t pay them the same as blacks, and in the end it just makes trouble. Take a look at this.” He passed Bela what looked like a handwritten broadside. “You know the language?”
“Arabic,” Bela said, but at close range it didn’t look like Arabic at all, at least not the Arabic he’d read in grammars, dictionaries, and newspapers. In fact, it didn’t look like anything he’d seen before.
“Who knows?” Lorenz said. “I’ll tell you the truth. None of the Arabs I know can make out more than half of it.”
Bela beetled his forehead and spoke softly. “The script is beautiful.”
“What they did understand was seditious.” Lorenz drew on his cigar. It looked queer and big in his sunken, soulless face. “Something about a strike. Now there had been some trouble, but I know the ringleaders can’t even write their names, let alone this.”
Bela had less than half an ear for Lorenz as he struggled through the text. Will we not walk out together like Men?
“You Pioneers, you think it’s Zion,” Lorenz said. “But it’s no different from any other backward hole. You have your land, and on that land you have your brute labor, and they’re not poets. They’re brutes.”
Bela read on. What are these orange groves? Imported weeds! We will not fertilize them with our Blood. We will not Slave for another man’s Profit!
“Not that I’m worried about a strike. The blacks can no more organize than jackals. In the end, it’s all about the tribe, the clan. If someone gives you trouble, send him back to his village. But I need a smart boy who understands Arabic.”
“Can’t Arabs?” Bela asked him.
Lorenz looked exasperated and said, “Look, son, you know how to ride a horse, don’t you? You can handle a rifle.”
“Tell me,” said Bela, “why did you emigrate to Palestine?”
The question couldn’t help but seem uncharitable. Lorenz didn’t answer at once. He sat back with the cigar burning down between his fingers. Then he said, “You want to know why I emigrated? Because it was impossible to live in the Ukraine. Impossible.”
“But you didn’t go to Hungary. You didn’t go to America. You went to Eretz Yisrael,” Bela said. “What good is living in Zion if you act as though you were living anywhere else?”
Lorenz stubbed out his cigar and decided there was no further purpose in the conversation. “When you get there,” he said to Bela, “come see me. We may find we have more to say to each other.”
As Bela rose, he said, “You know, you can’t send him back to his village.”
“Who?”
“The Jew,” said Bela. “The one who wrote what you gave to me. The vocabulary lapses into Hebrew more than once.”
After that, Bela was shown the door. He took the broadside, though he left his hat behind. He spent the whole of that night in translation: If we demand Wage Parity between Pioneer and Peasant and make common Cause against the Exploiters and Imperialists we can create here in Palestine a Worker’s Paradise. What can stand in our Way?
The grammar was erratic, and entangled in the Arabic and Hebrew were a few stray words of Russian. As for the script, it was unpracticed but visually stunning, like stems, roots, wings, and bursts of water. The whole of the page he copied time and time again, and he sent one to Dori Csengery, who by that time was in medical school in Szeged. She told him that it smacked of Internationalist Infantile Romanticism. She must have been a pretty serious girl. To me it looked more like an artist’s rendering of birds stripping an orange grove.
That night, Bela said in closing, I missed my sleep. I need my nine hours or I am impossible, so off I go to make up for lost time. Adele and my mother send their love. Regards as ever to your mother, father, and wonderful uncle. Affectionately, Bela.
By the time I finished Bela’s letter, a second cigarette was worn down to a nub. In the solitude of my room, I lulled back on my bed in my half-unbuttoned nightgown, and the letter fell from my hands as I stared at the ceiling, purely happy. Drawing the cigarette to my lips for a final drag, heedless that my mother would smell smoke, I’d think: How long before I write him back? A day? Two days? The waiting was a luxury, and I let it gather just long enough for my cigarette to burn my fingers. Then I pulled out my German dictionary:
Cousin, I think you sleep too much. I would prefer to be impossible. Just now, it’s past two, and I have been planning our future. You will become a producer of orange marmalade and I will bottle it in Barnahely. Maybe then you would visit as you promised. I put that page in the shoe-box, started again: Cousin, sleep or no sleep, you are impossible. But that wouldn’t do either, because somewhere along the line I wasn’t sure what I meant by the word impossible.
WHO COULDI depend on in life? You can’t get things back, not the things that matter. Laszlo got married. She was a girl he had been courting for a year, and the wedding took place just after the Great War was declared, a week before he was called up for the army. We were invited to the church ceremony but not the reception, and my mother was so insulted that we didn’t go at all. It couldn’t have mattered less. I sat in my room with my chin on the windowsill, figuring my life was over.
At midnight, there was a rattling at the gate, and to general astonishment, there was Uncle Oszkar, almost too drunk to stand, holding a lumpy napkin. “Hello!” he shouted. “Gyorgy, open up!” My father shuffled out in his spectacles, nightshirt, and slippers, and Uncle Oszkar clapped him on the shoulder. “I brought some cake for Norika.”
Of course, by then, I was in the front yard too, half-hidden by the flowering apricot tree, dazzled by the sight of Uncle Oszkar so entirely out of context, in a snug suit and tie. My father hesitantly opened the front door, and Oszkar stumbled inside and dumped himself on the velvet couch. He unwrapped the wedding cake, and we all had some.
I remember that night well because it was so different from every other night in that house. Uncle Oszkar made my father pull out playing cards. They were Hungarian-style cards, the fine type you don’t see nowadays: the suits of bright, round bells, the spade-like leaves, the hearts and acorns. Then there are the face-cards of the seasons: Spring dipping her hand into a bouquet, Fall sipping from a wine-vat, Summer lazy, though he holds a scythe, craven Winter.
We played a few hands, and my father asked Uncle Oszkar if he still told fortunes. He shook his head.
“I’ve lost the touch,” he said. “But your daughter could try. Laszlo tells me she spends her free time with the gypsies.”
I shot my uncle a look, feeling some superficial anger, though I’ll admit the thought of Laszlo actually mentioning my name made my blood sing. My mother said, “Nora runs wild. I’ve given up where that girl’s concerned.” She poured my uncle more tea, and my father, as oblivious as ever, set his cards down on the table so that everyone could see them. He would lose.
“I can read palms,” I said.
I was used to saying things I didn’t mean; my parents never noticed. But that night, Uncle Oszkar was there, looking at me with both eyes. There was a moment of rich silence, as my mother took a sip of tepid tea and was about to change the subject. But then my uncle presented me with his palm.
I held it with both hands as though it were an enormous slice of bread and lard. It was square, white, and unevenly callused. More than the palm itself, I was aware of him waiting and listening.
“So tell me my fortune, Norika. Will my life be a long one? Will I find a buried treasure? Will I miss my little Laszlo? Will he visit me, now that he’s a grown man with a wife?”
My voice seemed to come from a distance. “I don’t know. I can’t read palms, really.”
“Then why did you say you could?” Uncle Oszkar asked. “I think you can, but you don’t like what you see. It takes a hard heart to read fortunes. My heart’s too soft.” His voice broke then; it startled me, as though a plate had broken. “Nora,” he said, “I want to read your cards.”
“We’re playing,” said my father.
“Playing? You’ve already lost. Why waste our time? I need to think about somebody else’s troubles tonight,” Uncle Oszkar said, and with a few clumsy, disruptive gestures, he managed to gather the cards from my parents, shuffle them, and knock them straight against the table. He said to me: “Cut the deck.”
Shamed, I would have sooner gone to bed. I took a long time figuring out where to cut until I was all turnip-faced like my father. Then I just did it without thinking. Uncle Oszkar turned the topmost card over. It was the card of Winter. The suit was acorn: Four bright nuts floated around the figure and her reversed reflection. She was a crone who walked through a pale blue landscape studded with broken trees. One hand reached across a shoulder to pull the strings of her shawl a little closer. The other held a walking stick.
I didn’t want to ask him what it meant. Sobering a little, he said, “I can’t read cards, really, Nora.”
“Yes, you can,” I said.
“Well, I can then. And I promise you a long life.” Then he said something more surprising. “But not here.”
“Of course not here,” I said, trying to sound offhand, though my heart was beating like mad.
He shook his head. “I see a child, a grandchild, in another country.”
Now this was past imagining. It was as though the walls melted away and outside flowed the world in all directions. I couldn’t pretend not to care, and I spoke with urgency. “What country? Can you tell me?”
“I can’t tell you,” Uncle Oszkar said. And how could he, when that country was not yet invented?