Immigration day, October 28, 1949, was the most optimistic and promising day of my life. After living in the crowded room at the Rothschild Hospital for a month, and spending another five months in a tiny apartment in Vienna, waiting for our visas, we were on the threshold of our new home. A sunny blue sky lit the Atlantic as we stood on the deck of the USAT General R. L. Howze. Lady Liberty came into view, tiny in the distance like the little figurine in a music box. Then New York City became visible, a skyline emerging, intricate, where only horizon had been for weeks. I held Marianne up against the deck rail.
“We’re in America,” I told her. “The land of the free.”
And I thought we finally were free. We had taken the risk. Now safety and opportunity were our rewards. It seemed a just and simple equation. Thousands of miles of ocean separated us from barbed wire, police searches, camps for the condemned, camps for the displaced. I did not yet know that nightmares know no geography, that guilt and anxiety wander borderless. For twenty minutes on the upper deck of a passenger ship, standing in the October sun, my daughter in my arms, New York in sight, I believed the past couldn’t touch me here. Magda was already there. In July she had finally received her visa and sailed to New York, where she now lived with Aunt Matilda and her husband in the Bronx. She worked in a toy factory, putting the heads on little giraffes. It takes an Elefánt to make a giraffe, she had joked in a letter. In another hour, maybe two, I would embrace my sister, my brave sister, her jokes at the ready to transcend pain. As Marianne and I counted the whitecaps between the ship and solid land, as I counted my blessings, Béla came up from the tiny cabin where he was packing the last of our things.
My heart swelled again with tenderness for my husband. In the weeks of travel, in the little cot in the room that rocked and bobbed across black water, through black air, I felt more passion for him than ever before in our three years together, more than on the train on our honeymoon when we conceived Marianne.
Back in May, in Vienna, he had been unable to decide, unable to choose, up until the last minute. He stood behind a pillar at the train station where he was to meet Bandi and Marta, suitcase in hand. He saw our friends arrive, saw them searching the platform for us. He continued to hide. He saw the train pull in, heard the announcement that passengers should board. He saw people getting onto the train. He saw Bandi and Marta at the door of a train car, waiting for him. Then he heard the clerk on the loudspeaker calling his name. He wanted to join our friends, he wanted to board the train and meet the ship and rescue the boxcar holding his fortune. But he was frozen there behind the pillar. The rest of the passengers filed on board, Bandi and Marta too. When the train doors closed, he finally forced himself into action. Against his better judgment, against all the bets he had made for what he hoped would be a safe and financially secure future, he took the biggest risk of his life. He walked away.
Now, minutes away from our new life in America, nothing seemed deeper or more profound than that we had made the same choice, to relinquish security in favor of opportunity for our daughter, to start over together from scratch. To have his commitment to our daughter, to this new venture, to me, touched me deeply.
And yet. (This “and yet” closing like a latch.) I had been ready to forsake our marriage in order to take Marianne to America. However painfully, I had been willing to sacrifice our family, our partnership—the very things Béla had been unable to accept losing. And so we began our new life on an unequal footing. I could feel that though his devotion to us could be measured in all that he had given up, he was still dizzy from what he had lost. And where I felt relief and joy, he felt hurt. Happy as I was to greet our new life, I could already feel that Béla’s loss put a dangerous pressure on all the unknowns ahead.
So there was sacrifice at the heart of our choice. And there was also a lie: the report from the medical examiner, the X-rays we had pressed inside a folder with our visa applications. We couldn’t allow the ghost of Béla’s old illness, his TB, to deter our future, so Csicsi had posed as Béla and gone with me to the medical examiner. We now carried pictures of Csicsi’s chest, clear as spring water. When the naturalization officers cleared Béla for immigration, it would be Csicsi’s body and medical history they legitimized, another man’s body they determined to be sound.
I wanted to breathe easily. To cherish our safety and good fortune as miracles, not guard them close and warily. I wanted to teach my daughter confidence in where she stood. There she was, hair whipping around her head, cheeks red from the wind. “Liberty!” she called, pleased with her new word. On a whim I took the pacifier that hung on a ribbon around her neck and threw it into the sea.
If I had turned around, I might have seen Béla caution me. But I wasn’t looking. “We’re Americans now. American children don’t use pacifiers,” I said, heady and improvising, tossing my daughter’s one token of security like it was parade confetti. I wanted Marianne to be what I wanted to be: someone who fits in, who isn’t plagued by the idea of being different, of being flawed, of playing catch-up forever in a relentless race away from the claws of the past.
She didn’t complain. She was excited by the novelty of our adventure, amused by my strange act, accepting of my logic. In America we’d do as the Americans do (as if I knew a single thing about what Americans do). I wanted to trust my choice, our new life, so I denied any trace of sadness, any trace of fear. When I walked down the wooden ramp to our new homeland, I was already wearing a mask.