We step off the train in Košice. Our hometown is no longer in Hungary. It is part of Czechoslovakia again. We blink into the June sun. We have no money for a taxi, no money for anything, no idea if our family’s old apartment is occupied, no idea how we will find a way to live. But we are home. We are ready to search for Klara. Klara, who gave a concert in Prague only weeks ago. Klara who, somewhere, is alive.
We walk through Mestský Park, toward the center of town. People sit at outdoor tables, on benches. Children gather around the fountains. There’s the clock where we watched the boys gather to meet Magda. There’s the balcony of our father’s shop, the gold medals blazing from the railing. He’s here! I am so certain of it that I smell his tobacco, feel his mustache on my cheek. But the windows of the shop are dark. We walk toward our apartment at Kossuth Lajos Utca #6, and here on the sidewalk near the place where the wagon parked before it carried us to the brick factory, a miracle occurs. Klara materializes, walking out the front door. Her hair is braided and coiled like our mother’s. She carries her violin. When she sees me, she drops the violin case on the sidewalk and runs to me. She’s moaning. “Dicuka, Dicuka!” she cries. She picks me up like a baby, her arms a cradle.
“Don’t hug us!” Magda shrieks. “We’re covered in bugs and sores!”
I think what she means is, Dear sister, we’re scarred. She means, Don’t let what we’ve seen hurt you. Don’t make it worse. Don’t ask us what happened. Don’t vanish into thin air.
Klara rocks me and rocks me. “This is my little one!” she calls to a passing stranger. From this moment on she becomes my mother. She has already seen in our faces that the position is empty and must be filled.
It has been at least a year and a half since we have seen her. She is on her way to the radio station to give a concert. We are desperate not to have her out of sight, out of touch. “Stay, stay,” we beg. But she is already late. “If I don’t play, we don’t eat,” she says. “Hurry, follow me inside.” Maybe it is a blessing that there is no time to talk now. We wouldn’t know how to begin. Though it must shock Klara to see us so physically ravaged, maybe that is a blessing too. There is something concrete Klara can do to express her love and relief, to point us in the direction of healing. It will take more than rest. Perhaps we will never recover. But there is something she can do right now. She brings us inside and strips off our dirty clothes. She helps us stretch out on the white sheets in the bed where our parents used to sleep. She rubs calamine lotion into the rash that covers our bodies. The rash that makes us itch and itch, that passes instantly from our bodies to hers so she can barely play her concert for the burning all over her skin. Our reunion is physical.
* * *
Magda and I spend at least a week in bed, naked, bodies doused in calamine. Klara doesn’t ask us questions. She doesn’t ask us where our mother and father are. She talks so that we don’t have to. She talks so that she doesn’t have to hear. Everything she tells us is phrased like a miracle. And it is miraculous. Here we are together. We are the lucky ones. There are few reunions like ours. Our aunt and uncle—our mother’s siblings—were thrown off a bridge and drowned in the Danube, Klara tells us, blunt, matter-of-fact, but when the last remaining Jews in Hungary were rounded up, she escaped detection. She lived in her professor’s house, disguised as a gentile. “One day my professor said, ‘You have to learn the Bible tomorrow, you are going to start teaching it, you are going to live in a nunnery.’ It seemed like the best way to keep me hidden. The convent was nearly two hundred miles from Budapest. I wore a habit. But one day a girl from the academy recognized me, and I snuck away on a train back to Budapest.”
Sometime in the summer, she got a letter from our parents. It was the letter they had written while we were in the brick factory, telling Klara where we were imprisoned, that we were together, safe, that we thought we would be transferred to a work camp called Kenyérmező. I remember seeing my mother drop the letter onto the street during our evacuation from the brick factory, since there was no way to mail it. At the time I thought she had dropped it in resignation. But listening to Klara tell her story of survival, I see things differently. In releasing the letter, my mother wasn’t relinquishing hope—she was kindling it. Either way, whether she dropped the letter in defeat or in hope, she took a risk. The letter pointed a finger at my sister, a blond-haired Jew hiding in Budapest. It gave her address. While we trundled in the dark toward Auschwitz, someone, a stranger, held that letter in his hand. He could have opened it, he could have turned Klara in to the nyilas. He could have thrown the letter away in the trash, or left it in the street. But this stranger put a stamp on it and mailed it to Klara in Budapest. This is as unbelievable to me as my sister’s reappearance, it’s a magic trick, evidence of a lifeline that runs between us, evidence, too, that kindness still existed in the world even then. Through the dirt kicked up by three thousand pairs of feet, many of them headed straight for a chimney in Poland, our mother’s letter flew. A blond-haired girl set her violin down to rip open the seal.
Klara tells another story with a happy ending. With the knowledge that we’d been evacuated to the brick factory, that we expected any day to get shipped away, to Kenyérmező or who knows where, she went to the German consulate in Budapest to demand to be sent to wherever we were. At the consulate, the doorman told her, “Little girl, go away. Don’t come in here.” She wasn’t going to be told no. She tried to sneak back in the building. The doorman saw her and beat her up, punching her shoulders, her arms, her stomach, her face. “Get out of here,” he said again.
“He beat me up and saved my life,” she tells us.
Near the end of the war when the Russians surrounded Budapest, the Nazis became even more determined to rid the city of Jews. “We had to carry identification cards with our name, religion, picture. They were checking these cards all the time on the streets, and if they saw you were a Jew they might kill you. I did not want to carry my card, but I was afraid I would need something to prove who I was after the war. So I decided to give mine to a girlfriend to keep for me. She lived across the harbor, so I had to cross the bridge to get there, and when I got to the bridge the soldiers were checking identification. They said, ‘Please show me who you are.’ I said I had nothing, and somehow, I don’t know how, they let me go across. My blond hair and blue eyes must have convinced them. I never went back to my friend’s house to retrieve the card.”
When you can’t go in through a door, go in through a window, our mother used to say. There is no door for survival. Or recovery either. It’s all windows. Latches you can’t reach easily, panes too small, spaces where a body shouldn’t fit. But you can’t stand where you are. You must find a way.
After the German surrender, while Magda and I were recovering in Wels, Klara went to a consulate again, this time the Russian consulate, because Budapest had been liberated from Nazi control by the Red Army, and tried to learn what had become of us. They had no information about our family, but in exchange for a free concert, they offered to help her get home to Košice. “When I played, two hundred Russians attended, and then I was brought home on top of a train. They watched over me when we stopped and slept.” When she opened the door to our old apartment, everything was in disarray, our furniture and possessions looted. The rooms had been used as a stable and the floors were covered in horse manure. While we were learning to eat, walk, write our names in Wels, Klara began playing concerts for money and scrubbing the floors.
And now we’ve come. When our rashes are healed, we take turns leaving the apartment. There is only one good pair of shoes among the three of us. When it’s my turn to wear the shoes, I walk slowly on the sidewalk, back and forth, still too weak to go far. A neighbor recognizes me. “I’m surprised to see you made it,” he says. “You were always such a skinny little kid.” I could feel triumph. Against all odds, a happy ending! But I feel guilt. Why me? Why did I make it? There is no explanation. It’s a fluke. Or a mistake.
* * *
People can be sorted two ways: survived; didn’t. The latter are not here to tell their tale. The portrait of our mother’s mother still hangs on the wall. Her dark hair is parted down the middle and pulled back in a tight bun. A few curly strands feather across her smooth forehead. She doesn’t smile in the picture, but her eyes are more sincere than severe. She watches us, knowing and no-nonsense. Magda talks to her portrait as our mother used to do. Sometimes she asks for help. Sometimes she mutters and rants. “Those Nazi bastards … The fucking nyilas …” The piano that lived against the wall under her portrait is gone. The piano was so present in our daily lives that it was almost invisible, like breath. Now its absence dominates the room. Magda rages at the empty space. With the piano gone, something in her is missing too. A piece of her identity. An outlet for her self-expression. In its absence, she finds anger. Vibrant, full voiced, willful. I admire her for it. My anger turns inward and congeals in my lungs.
Magda grows stronger as the days pass, but I am still weak. My upper back continues to ache, making it difficult to walk, and my chest is heavy with congestion. I rarely leave the house. Even if I weren’t sick, there is nowhere I want to go. When death is the answer to every question, why go walking? Why talk when any interaction with the living serves to prove that you move through the world in the company of an ever-growing congregation of ghosts? Why miss anyone in particular when everyone has so many to mourn?
I rely on my sisters: Klara, my devoted nurse; Magda, my source of news, my connection to the greater world. One day she comes home breathless. “The piano!” she says. “I found it. It’s in the coffeehouse. Our piano. We’ve got to get it back.”
The coffeehouse owner won’t believe that it’s ours. Klara and Magda take turns pleading. They describe the family chamber music concerts in our parlor, how János Starker, Klara’s cellist friend, another child prodigy from the conservatory, played a concert with Klara in our house the year of his professional debut. None of their words holds sway. Finally, Magda seeks out the piano tuner. He comes with her to the café and talks to the owner and then looks inside the piano lid to read the serial number. “Yes,” he says, nodding, “this is the Elefánt piano.” He gets together a crew of men to bring it back to our apartment.
Is there something inside me that can verify my identity, that can restore myself to myself? If such a thing existed, who would I seek out to lift the lid, read the code?
* * *
One day a package arrives from Aunt Matilda. Valentine Avenue, the Bronx, the return address reads. She sends tea, Crisco. We have never seen Crisco before and so have no idea that it’s a butter substitute to be used for cooking and baking. We eat it plain, we spread it on bread. We reuse the tea bags again and again. How many cups can we brew with the same leaves?
* * *
Occasionally, our doorbell rings, and I jolt up in bed. These are the best moments. Someone is waiting outside the door, and in the seconds before we open it, that person could be anyone. Sometimes I imagine it is our father. He survived the first selection after all. He found a way to work, to appear young throughout the rest of the war, and here he is, smoking a cigarette, holding a piece of chalk, a long measuring tape slung around his neck like a scarf. Sometimes it is Eric I imagine on the stoop. He holds a bouquet of roses.
My father never comes. That is how we know for sure that he is dead.
One day Lester Korda, one of the two brothers who rode with us on the train from Wels to Vienna, rings the bell. He has come to see how we are making out. “Call me Csicsi,” he says. He is like fresh air rushing into our stale rooms. We are in an ongoing limbo, my sisters and I, between looking back and moving on. So much of our energy is used just to restore things—our health, our belongings, what we can of life before loss and imprisonment. Csicsi’s warmth and interest in our welfare remind me that there is more to live for than that.
Klara is in the other room, practicing violin. Csicsi’s eyes light up when he hears the music. “May I meet the musician?” he asks, and Klara obliges. She plays a Hungarian czardas. Csicsi dances. Maybe it is time to build our lives—not back to what they were, but anew.
Throughout the summer of 1945, Csicsi becomes a regular visitor. When Klara has to travel to Prague for another concert, Csicsi offers to go with her.
“Shall I bake a wedding cake now?” Magda asks.
“Stop it,” Klara says. “He has a girlfriend. He’s just being polite.”
“Are you sure you’re not falling in love?” I ask.
“He remembers our parents,” she says, “and I remember his.”
* * *
When I have been home a few weeks, although I am barely strong enough, I make the journey on foot to Eric’s old apartment. No one from his family has returned. The apartment is empty. I vow to go back as often as I can. The pain of staying away is greater than the disappointment of vigilance. To mourn him is to mourn more than a person. In the camps I could long for his physical presence and hold on to the promise of our future. If I survive today, tomorrow I will be free. The irony of freedom is that it is harder to find hope and purpose. Now I must come to terms with the fact that anyone I marry won’t know my parents. If I ever have children, they won’t know their grandparents. It isn’t just my own loss that hurts. It’s the way it ripples out into the future. The way it perpetuates. My mother used to tell me to look for a man with a wide forehead because that means he’s intelligent. “Watch how he uses his handkerchief,” she would say. “Make sure he always carries a clean one. Make sure his shoes are polished.” She won’t be at my wedding. She won’t ever know who I become, whom I choose.
Klara is my mother now. She does it out of love and a natural competence. She also does it out of guilt. She wasn’t there to protect us at Auschwitz. She will protect us now. She does all the cooking. She feeds me with a spoon, like I’m a baby. I love her, I love her attention, I love being held and made to feel safe. But it is suffocating too. Her kindness leaves me no breathing room. And she seems to need something from me in return. Not gratitude or appreciation. Something deeper. I can feel that she relies on me for her own sense of purpose. For her reason for being. In taking care of me, she finds the reason why she was spared. My role is to be healthy enough to stay alive yet helpless enough to need her. That is my reason for having survived.
* * *
By the end of June, my back still isn’t healed. There is a constant crunching, piercing feeling between my shoulder blades. And my chest still hurts, even to breathe. Then I break out in a fever. Klara takes me to the hospital. She insists that I be given a private room, the very best care. I worry about the expense, but she says she will just play more concerts, she will find a way to cover it. When the doctor comes in to examine me, I recognize him. He’s the older brother of my former schoolmate. His name is Gaby. I remember that his sister called him the Angel Gabriel. She is dead now, I learn. She died at Auschwitz. He asks me if I ever saw her there. I wish I had a last image for him to remember her by, and I consider lying, telling him a story in which I witnessed her do something brave, speak of him lovingly. But I don’t lie. I would rather face the unknown void of my father and Eric’s last minutes than to be told something that, however comforting, isn’t true. The Angel Gabriel gives me my first medical attention since liberation. He diagnoses me with typhoid fever, pneumonia, pleurisy, a broken back. He makes a removable cast for me that covers my whole torso. I place it on the bed at night so that I can climb inside it, my plaster shell.
Gaby’s visits become more than just physically therapeutic. He doesn’t charge me for his medical care. We sit and reminisce. I can’t grieve with my sisters, not explicitly. It’s too raw, too present. And to grieve with them seems like a defilement of the miracle of our togetherness. We never hold one another and cry. But with Gaby I can allow myself to grieve. One day I ask Gaby about Eric. He remembers him but doesn’t know what became of him. Gaby has colleagues working at a repatriation center in the Tatra Mountains. He says he will ask them to see what they can learn about Eric.
One afternoon Gaby examines my back. He waits until I am lying down on my stomach to tell me what he has learned. “Eric was sent to Auschwitz,” he says. “He died in January. The day before liberation.”
I erupt in a wail. I think my chest will break. The blast of sorrow is so severe that tears won’t come—only a jagged moaning in my throat. I am not yet capable of clear thoughts or questions about my beloved’s last days, about his suffering, about the state of his mind and his spirit when his body gave out. I am consumed by the grief and injustice of losing him. If he could have held on for a few more hours, maybe even just a few more breaths, we could be together now. I moan into the table until my voice goes hoarse.
As the shock dissolves, I understand that in a strange way the pain of knowing is merciful. I have no such certainty about my own father’s death. To know for sure that Eric is gone is like receiving a diagnosis after a long ache. I can pinpoint the reason for the hurt. I can clarify what has to heal.
But a diagnosis is not a cure. I don’t know what to do with Eric’s voice now, the remembered syllables, the hope.
* * *
By the end of July my fever is gone, but Gaby still isn’t satisfied with my progress. My lungs, compressed too long by my broken back, are full of fluid. He worries that I might have contracted tuberculosis and recommends that I go to a TB hospital in the Tatra Mountains, near the repatriation center where he learned of Eric’s death. Klara will accompany me on the train to the nearest village in the mountains. Magda will stay at the apartment. After the effort of reclaiming it, on the off-chance of an unexpected visitor, we can’t risk leaving it empty, even for a day. Klara tends me on the journey as if I am a child. “Look at my little one!” she exclaims to fellow passengers. I beam at them like a precocious toddler. I practically look like one. My hair has fallen out again from the typhoid and is just starting to grow back, baby soft. Klara helps me cover my head with a scarf. As we gain elevation, the dry alpine air feels clean in my chest, but it’s still hard to breathe. There is a constant sludge in my lungs. It’s as though all the tears I can’t allow myself to shed on the outside are draining into a pool inside. I can’t ignore the grief, but I can’t seem to expel it either.
Klara is due back in Košice for another radio performance—her concerts are our only source of income—and can’t accompany me to the TB hospital where I am to stay until I am well, but she refuses to let me go alone. We ask around at the repatriation center to see if anyone knows of someone going to the hospital, and I’m told that a young man staying in the nearby hotel is also going there to be treated. When I approach him in the lobby of the hotel, he is kissing a girl.
“Meet me at the train,” he growls.
When I approach him on the train platform he is still kissing the girl. He is gray haired, at least ten years older than I am. I will turn eighteen in September, but with my skinny limbs and flat chest and bald head I look more like twelve. I stand beside them awkwardly as they embrace, not sure how to get his attention. I’m annoyed. This is the man to whom I’m to be entrusted?
“Could you help me, sir?” I finally ask. “You are supposed to escort me to the hospital.”
“I’m busy,” he says. He barely breaks his kiss to respond to me. He is like an older sibling shaking away an annoying sister. “Meet me on the train.”
After Klara’s constant fawning and attention, his dismissiveness cuts. I don’t know why it bothers me so much. Is it that his girlfriend is alive while my boyfriend is dead? Or is it that I am already so diminished that without another person’s attention or approval I feel I am in danger of disappearing entirely?
He buys me a sandwich on the train and a newspaper for himself. We don’t talk, other than to exchange names and formalities. Béla is his name. To me he is just a rude person on a train, a person I must grudgingly ask for help, a person who only grudgingly gives it.
When we arrive at the station, we learn we have to walk to the TB hospital, and now there is no newspaper to distract him.
“What did you do before the war?” he asks. I notice what I didn’t hear before—he speaks with a stutter. When I tell him that I was a gymnast and I danced ballet, he says, “That reminds me of a joke.”
I look at him expectantly, ready for a dose of Hungarian humor, ready for the relief I felt at Auschwitz when Magda and I hosted the boob contest with our bunkmates, the lift of laughter in terrible times.
“There was a bird,” he says, “and the bird was about to die. A cow came and warmed him up a little—from his rear end, if you know what I mean—and the bird started to perk up. Then a truck came and finished off the bird. A wise old horse came by and saw the dead bird on the road. The horse said, ‘Didn’t I tell you if you have shit on your head, don’t dance?’ ” Béla laughs at his own joke.
But I feel insulted. He means to be funny, but I think he is trying to tell me, you have shit on your head. I think he means, you’re a real mess. I think he’s saying, you shouldn’t call yourself a dancer if you look like this. For a moment, before his insult, it had been such a relief to have his attention, such a relief to be asked who I was before the war. Such a relief to acknowledge the me who existed—who thrived—before the war. His joke reinforces how irreparably the war has changed and damaged me. It hurts for a stranger to cut me down. It hurts because he’s right. I am a mess. Still, I won’t let an insensitive man or his Hungarian sarcasm get the last word. I will show him that the buoyant dancer still lives in me, no matter how short my hair is, how thin my face, how thick the grief in my chest. I bound ahead of him and do the splits in the middle of the road.
* * *
I don’t have TB, as it turns out. They keep me for three weeks in the hospital all the same to treat the fluid building up in my lungs. I am so afraid of contracting TB that I open doors with my feet instead of my hands, even though I know the disease can’t be spread through touch, germs on doorknobs. It is a good thing that I don’t have TB, but I am still not well. I don’t have the vocabulary to explain the flooded feeling in my chest, the dark throb in my forehead. It’s like grit smeared across my vision. Later, this feeling will have a name. Later, I will know to call it depression. Now all I know is that it takes effort to get out of bed. There’s the effort of breath. And, worse, the existential effort. Why get up? What is there to get up for? I wasn’t suicidal at Auschwitz, when things were hopeless. Every day I was surrounded by people who said, “The only way you’ll get out of here is as a corpse.” But the dire prophecies gave me something to fight against. Now that I am recuperating, now that I am facing the irrevocable fact that my parents are never coming back, that Eric is never coming back, the only demons are within. I think of taking my own life. I want a way out of pain. Why not choose not to be?
* * *
Béla has been assigned the room right above mine. One day he stops by my room to check on me. “I’ll make you laugh,” he says, “and that will make you better. You’ll see.” He waggles his tongue, pulls on his ears, makes animal noises, the way you might entertain a baby. It’s absurd, maybe insulting, yet I can’t help myself. The laugh rises out of me like a tide. “Don’t laugh,” the doctors had warned me, as though laughter was a constant temptation, as though I was in danger of laughing to death. “If you laugh, you will have more pain.” They were right. It does hurt, but it also feels good.
I lie awake that night thinking of him in the bed just above mine, thinking up things to impress him, things I studied in school. The next day, when he visits my room, I tell him everything I have been able to remember in the night about Greek myths, calling up the most obscure gods and goddesses. I tell him about Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, the last book Eric and I read together. I perform for him, the way I used to perform for my parents’ dinner guests, my turn in the spotlight before Klara, the headlining act, took the stage. He looks at me the way a teacher looks at a star pupil. He tells me very little about himself, but I do learn that he studied violin when he was young and still loved to play chamber music recordings and conduct in the air.
Béla is twenty-seven years old. I am only a child. He has other women in his life. The woman he was kissing on the train platform when I interrupted him. And, he tells me, another patient here at the TB hospital, his cousin Marianna’s best friend, a girl he dated in high school, before the war. She is very ill. She isn’t going to make it. He calls himself her fiancé, a gesture of hope for her on her deathbed, a gesture of hope for her mother. Months later, I will learn that Béla also has a wife—a near stranger, a woman with whom he was never intimate, a gentile, with whom he made an arrangement on paper in the early days of the war in an effort to protect his family and his fortune.
It isn’t love. It’s that I am hungry, so very hungry, and I amuse him. And he looks at me the way Eric did that long-ago day in the book club, as though I am intelligent, as though I have worthwhile things to say. For now, that’s enough.
On my last night in the TB hospital, I lie in my snug little room and a voice comes to me, from the bottom of the mountains, from the very center of the Earth. Up through the floor and thin mattress, it envelops me, charges me. If you live, the voice says, you’ve got to stand for something.
“I’ll write to you,” Béla says in the morning, when we say goodbye. It’s not love. I don’t hold him to it.
* * *
When I return to Košice, Magda meets me at the train station. Klara has been so possessive of me since our reunion that I have forgotten what it is like to be alone with Magda. Her hair has grown. Waves frame her face. Her eyes are bright again. She looks well. She is bursting with gossip from the three weeks that I’ve been away. Csicsi has broken things off with his girlfriend and is now unabashedly courting Klara. The Košice survivors have formed an entertainment club, and she has already promised that I will perform. And Laci, the man from the top of the train, has written to tell us that he has received an affidavit of support from his relatives in Texas. Soon he will join them in a place called El Paso, she tells me, where he will work in their furniture store and save money for medical school.
“Klara better not humiliate me by marrying first,” Magda says.
This is how we will heal. Yesterday, cannibalism and murder. Yesterday, choosing blades of grass. Today, the antiquated customs and proprieties, the rules and roles that make us feel normal. We will minimize the loss and horror, the terrible interruption of life, by living as though none of it happened. We will not be a lost generation.
“Here,” my sister says. “I have something for you.” She hands me an envelope, my name written on it in the cursive script we were taught to write in school. “Your old friend came by.”
For a moment, I think she means Eric. He is alive. Inside the envelope is my future. He has waited for me. Or he has already moved on.
But the envelope isn’t from Eric. And it doesn’t contain my future. It holds my past. It holds a picture of me, perhaps the last picture taken of me before Auschwitz, the picture of me doing the splits by the river, the picture Eric took, the picture I gave to my friend Rebeka. She has kept it safe for me. In my fingers I hold the me who has yet to lose her parents, who doesn’t know how soon she will lose her love.
Magda takes me to the entertainment club that night. Klara and Csicsi are there, and Rebeka, and Csicsi’s brother Imre. Gaby, my doctor, is there too, and perhaps that is why, weak as I am, I agree to dance. I want to show him I am getting well. I want to show him that the time he has devoted to my care has made a difference, that he hasn’t wasted his effort. I ask Klara and the other musicians to play “The Blue Danube,” and I begin my routine, the same dance that a little more than a year ago I performed my first night at Auschwitz, the dance that Josef Mengele rewarded with a loaf of bread. The steps have not changed, but my body has. I have none of the lean, limber muscle, none of the strength in my limbs or my core. I am a wheezing husk, a broken-backed girl with no hair. I close my eyes as I did in the barracks. That long-ago night I held my lids shut so that I wouldn’t have to look at Mengele’s terrifying and murderous eyes, so that I could keep from crumbling to the ground under the force of his stare. Now I close my eyes so that I can feel my body, not escape the room, so that I can feel the heat of appreciation from my audience. As I find my way back to the movements, to the familiar steps, the high kick, the splits, I grow more confident and comfortable in the moment. And I find my way back in time, to the days when we could imagine no worse encroachment on our freedom than curfews or yellow stars. I dance toward my innocence. Toward the girl who bounded up the stairs to the ballet studio. Toward the wise and loving mother who first brought her there. Help me, I call to her. Help me. Help me to live again.
* * *
A few days later, a thick letter arrives, addressed to me. It’s from Béla. It is the first of many long letters he will write, first from the TB hospital, and then from his home in Prešov, where he was born and raised—the third-largest city in Slovakia, just twenty miles north of Košice. As I learn more about Béla, begin to assemble the facts he gives me in these letters into a life, the gray-haired man with a stutter and sarcastic sense of humor becomes a person with contours.
Béla’s earliest memory, he writes, is of going for a walk with his grandfather, one of the wealthiest men in the country, and being denied a cookie from the patisserie. When he leaves the hospital, he will take over this same grandfather’s business, wholesaling produce from the region’s farmers, grinding coffee and grinding wheat for all of Slovakia. Béla is a full pantry, a country of plenty, he is a feast.
Like my mother, Béla lost one of his parents when he was very young. His father, who had been the mayor of Prešov, and before that, a renowned lawyer for the poor, went to a conference in Prague the winter Béla was four. He stepped off the train and fell into an avalanche of snow. Or that is what the police told Béla’s mother. Béla suspects that his father, a controversial figure because he rebelled against the Prešov elite by serving as an advocate for the poor and disenfranchised, was murdered, but the official word was that he’d suffocated under all that snow. Ever since his father’s death, Béla has spoken with a stutter.
His mother never recovered from his father’s death. Her father-in-law, Béla’s grandfather, kept her locked up in the house to keep her from meeting other men. During the war, Béla’s aunt and uncle invited her to join them in Hungary, where they were living in hiding using false identification papers. One day Béla’s mother was at the market when she saw a group of SS soldiers. She panicked. She ran up to them and shouted a confession. “I am Jewish!” she said. They shipped her off to Auschwitz, where she died in the gas chamber. The rest of the family, exposed by Béla’s mother’s confession, managed to flee to the mountains.
Béla’s brother George has lived in America since before the war. Before he immigrated, he was walking down the street in Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia, when he was attacked by gentiles, his glasses broken. He left the brewing anti-Semitism in Europe to live with their great-uncle in Chicago. Their cousin Marianna escaped to England. Béla, though he had studied in England as a boy and spoke English fluently, refused to leave Slovakia. He wanted to protect everyone in his family. That was not to be. His grandfather died of stomach cancer. And his aunt and uncle, coaxed out of the mountains by Germans who promised that all Jews who returned would be treated kindly, were lined up in the street and shot.
Béla escaped the Nazis by hiding in the mountains. He could barely hold a screwdriver, he writes, he was afraid of weapons, he didn’t want to fight, he was clumsy, but he became a partisan. He took up a gun and joined ranks with the Russians who were fighting the Nazis. While with the partisans, he contracted TB. He hadn’t had to survive the camps. Instead he had survived the mountain forests. For this I am grateful. I will never see the imprint of the smokestacks mirrored in his eyes.
* * *
Prešov is only an hour’s drive from Košice. One weekend Béla visits me, pulling Swiss cheese and salami from a bag. Food. This is what I fall in love with first. If I can keep him interested in me, he will feed me and my sisters—this is what I think. I don’t pine for him the way I did for Eric. I don’t fantasize about kissing him or long to have him near. I don’t even flirt—not in a romantic way. We are like two shipwrecked people staring at the sea for signs of life. And in each other we see a glimmer. I find that I am stepping into life again. I feel that I am going to belong to someone. I know Béla is not the love of my life, not the way Eric was. I’m not trying to replace Eric. But Béla tells me jokes and writes me twenty-page letters, and I have a choice to make.
When I tell Klara that I am going to marry Béla, she doesn’t congratulate me. She turns to Magda. “Ah, two cripples getting hitched,” she says. “How’s that going to work?” Later, at the table, she speaks to me directly. “You’re a baby, Dicuka,” she says. “You can’t make decisions like this. You’re not whole. And he isn’t either. He has TB. He stutters. You can’t marry him.” Now I have a new motivation for this marriage to work. I have to prove my sister wrong.
Klara’s objection isn’t the only impediment. There is the fact that Béla is still legally married to the gentile woman who protected his family fortune from the Nazis, and she refuses to divorce him. They have never lived together, never had a relationship of any kind other than that of convenience—for her, his money; for him, her gentile status—but she won’t grant him the divorce, not at first, not until he agrees to pay her a large sum of money.
And then there is his fiancée in the Tatra Mountains, dying of TB. He begs her friend Marianna, his cousin who had escaped to England but returned after the war, to deliver the news that he isn’t going to marry her. Marianna is justifiably furious. “You’re horrible!” she yells. “You can’t do this to her. I won’t in a million years tell her you’re breaking your promise.” Béla asks me to come with him back to the hospital so he can tell her himself. She is gracious and kind to me, and very, very ill. It rattles me to see someone so physically devastated. It is too much like the recent past. I am afraid to stand so close to death’s door. She tells me she is happy that Béla will marry someone like me, someone with so much energy and life. I am glad to have her blessing. And yet how easily I could have been the one in bed, propped up on scratchy pillows, coughing between words, filling a handkerchief with blood.
That night Béla and I stay in a hotel together, the hotel where we met. In all of his visits to Košice we have slept in separate rooms. We have never shared a bed. We have never seen each other without clothes. But tonight is different. I try to remember the forbidden words in Zola’s Nana. What else can prepare me to give him pleasure, to pursue pleasure myself? No one has instructed me on the choreography of intimacy. Nakedness has been degrading, humiliating, terrifying. I have to learn again how to inhabit my skin.
“You’re shivering,” Béla says. “Are you cold?” He goes to his suitcase and takes out a package wrapped with a shining bow. Inside the box, nestled in tissue paper, is a beautiful silk negligee. It is an extravagant gift. But that isn’t what moves me. He somehow knew that I would need a second skin. It isn’t that I want to shield myself from him, my husband-to-be. It’s not cover I’m after. It’s a way to heighten myself, extend, a way to step into the chapter that hasn’t been written yet. I tremble as he slips it over my head, as the fabric falls against my legs. The right costume can augment the dance. I twirl for him.
“Izléses,” he says. Classy.
I am so happy that someone is looking at me. His gaze is more than a compliment. Just as my mother’s words once taught me to value my intelligence, through Béla’s eyes I find a new appreciation of my body—of my life.