IN THE FIVE DAYS SINCE the incident in the town square, it seemed that Eva’s expectation of a quiet summer had gone completely off course. Her father had returned early, and to her dismay, not alone, but with an ensemble of guests. There were two families, one belonging to the director of Creditanstalt Bank in Vienna, whom he hoped to charm enough to fund his latest wine export venture. The other belonged to a distant cousin whom he’d run into by chance during his stay at the Imperial. Six people in all—a boy of ten with skinny legs and glasses who seemed perpetually pinned to his mother’s skirt; two women in their forties who spoke to each other with a polite affection that did not meet their eyes; her uncle, Janos, a quiet man who spent the entire day with his nose in a paper smoking a pipe; and her cousin Isabel. Isabel, who was two years younger but carried herself as though she were twenty-five.
The last thing that Eva had wanted was the company of this girl—not only because the last time she’d seen her was at her mother’s service and couldn’t help being reminded of it whenever she entered a room but also because she seemed entirely incapable of enjoying one silent moment. Not one. Every minute was filled with unabating chatter, about how Vienna had become such an awful bore, how the air-raid sirens wasted everyone’s time since nothing was happening at all, how the latest New York fashions, now with Paris under German rule, were all the rage. She’d practically begged, begged Eva to show her a picture of her dress, unfinished as it was, and gasped, flushing with pleasure and what Eva thought was some envy, tilting the photo against the window and studying it from every angle as if she could somehow conjure it into a three-dimensional existence.
“To marry in this dress.” Isabel swooned while Eva lay on her bed with her nose in a book. “My goodness, Princess Elizabeth herself would be green with jealousy!” She plopped herself down next to Eva and pulled the book away from her face. “So, tell me,” she said, glancing at Eva over the top of the pages, her hair wound up in pink ribbons. “Tell me about him. About your intended.”
“Oh, surely my father has filled you all in during the drive from Vienna. He approves, it would seem, although I’m certain he’d happily marry me off to the highest bidder.” She swallowed back a tinge of bitterness. “At least now he won’t have to worry about me not dressing properly for his associate dinners or blurting the wrong thing, or generally causing gossip among those society ladies he’s always trying to impress. He more than approves.”
“Uhm,” said Isabel, not really listening. She scooted herself up to the top of the bed beside Eva and pulled a pillow behind her. “So I hear: promising doctor, great family; however, I gather only marginally well-off. Oh, yes, and I hear his grandfather was a baron, sometime, oh, I don’t know, during the Napoleonic Wars, or something.”
“The Great War,” Eva corrected. “You know, the war twenty years ago in which a Serbian prince was murdered, which was then blamed on the Germans, which then eventually led to the mess we’re in now. That war.” She looked at Isabel for a nod of understanding, but Isabel’s expression was deadpan. She only wanted to hear about the groom.
“Well, he’s… wonderful,” Eva said finally, because in fact, there was no other way to describe Eduard. Instantly, a thread of anxiety tugged at her. For nearly a week it had been there, simmering in the depths of her stomach. She didn’t allow herself to pay it any attention, although she knew well enough why it was there. That fiddler, with his black eyes, which seemed to pierce through every layer of her. Perhaps, after all, it was good that Isabel had arrived to provide a distraction, for Eva could no longer return to the town square in the afternoons. Not if she had any sense.
“But this calls for a party!” Isabel exploded, making her flinch. “We must celebrate! I know he’s not here, I know, but we can still celebrate! I can help you plan it!” She squeezed Eva’s hand and squealed as if she were to help out in the preparation of the royal wedding. “How else are we going to spend the next two weeks till I go back to Vienna? At least it will pass the time! It will give us something to do!”
“No,” Eva said, shaking her head. “No, no, no. No more parties. I had enough of that before leaving Budapest to last me ten years. And besides, there is plenty to do. I can show you how to garden. There is a lovely vegetable garden that I helped Dora plant two years ago, and you should see it already! Or I can show you some incredible things in my medical books. Did you know, for instance, that if our blood vessels were laid out end to end, they would go around the world four times?”
Isabel was gone from the bed, dashing through the door, her heels clattering through the hallway.
“Papa!” Eva heard her shout. “Papa! Uncle Vladimir! I’ve just had a brilliant idea! Brilliant!”
It was to be a quiet affair. Just the eight of them, eight, yet as Eva watched from her bedroom window all the cars queuing up in the driveway, she knew it wouldn’t be anything of the sort. All day long, Dora had been running around wringing her hands on her apron, fretting that the lawn was still to be mowed, that the chairs had not been placed in the garden in a way that would invite a late-night chat, or a drink, or a smoke, that the oven wasn’t heating to optimal temperature, that the butcher was yet to deliver the ground meat for her stuffed peppers. Behind her agitation, there was a flare of satisfaction to be in charge of a proper affair, to prove that she wasn’t just a cook or a nursemaid, after all. The cake, which had arrived in a huge pink box, was hauled from the delivery car by two men and carried into the house as gingerly as a newly concocted model of the Tour Eiffel. Then her dress was delivered as well, not the wedding dress, but a long, floral lamé number that Isabel had taken upon herself to order.
In her room, where Eva was finishing getting ready, she could hear the voices of arriving guests through the open window, the pop of champagne bottles going off in near tandem and then being propped in ice buckets on the terrace to keep them cold. She finished rouging her mouth in a deep crimson, examined her own image in the mirror, wiped off some of the lipstick with a tissue, blew out a bubble of air through her smeared lips. One more week and the house would be hers again. All she had to do was be patient. Isabel, after this evening, would sleep all day. That thought alone gave her enough motivation to walk downstairs and into the hubbub of activity already in full swing in the foyer.
No more than ten minutes into the dinner, however, Eva lost her patience. She sat staring at the lemon wedges garnishing the roasted fish on her plate, taking small sips of water, waiting for the inevitable. Next to her, her father was frowning into his glass and helping himself to the wine carafe again. Seated on his left, Uncle Janos was addressing him in his usual mild tone though waving his fork around as if directing a small symphony. She was only mildly surprised when her father slammed his fist on the table.
“Vladimir, please, calm down,” Janos said, touching his sleeve at the elbow. Her father pulled away, then refilled his glass again.
“Horthy!” he spat. “Do not speak to me, Janos, about what a nationalistic hero he is! A patriot, ha! He should follow the examples of Mussolini, Kemal—men who are molding their countries, not driving them into ruin by refuting the Reich’s wishes. Those are great men! Those are men to admire for their commitment to a new Europe! Not this excuse for a leader, this utter imbecile.”
Janos stared glumly at his hands. “I was only suggesting, Vladimir, and please hear me out, that his job can’t be an easy one. To balance our national sovereignty with Hitler’s wishes, it can’t be accomplished easily.”
“Don’t you see, my dear Janos,” Vladimir retorted in a somewhat calmer tone, which seemed to suggest that dear meant dim, “our national interest, our Magyar interest, cannot be unaligned with that of Germany. We all want the same things. We all want a world order of racial purity, of—”
“That’s enough,” Eva found herself saying. “Please, Papa. That’s enough. You promised me that you wouldn’t talk like this anymore.” She closed her eyes and breathed out through her nose. “I’m leaving.”
She was halfway up from her chair when his hand descended on her forearm, squeezed it. She didn’t expect it. Not that he wasn’t rough with her once in a while—she’d been accustomed to his terrible moods since she was a child, but never in public. Never at a party where they were the center of attention. She looked at his hand, glared, but he only tightened his grip and forced her back down in her chair. Her face pounded with shame. Everyone had seen it. Even Isabel, suspended as she was in the middle of a sentence, her face still partially turned to the woman with a huge diamond necklace and a beehive of hair seated next to her. Vladimir, too, noticed the looks, the trailing voices, and withdrew his hand.
“Oh, but I nearly forgot! Dora!” he shouted across the room in the direction of the door. “Dora, where’s the entertainment?”
Dora rushed to his side, head bowed, no doubt beet red under her bonnet. “You said after dinner, sir, that they should wait until the dessert was served—”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Vladimir snapped. “Bring them in at once! What do they need, a written invitation?”
“Right, of course,” Dora said and made herself swiftly invisible.
They came in through the door behind Eva, several figures in dark jackets with an array of instruments. If Eva didn’t turn in greeting or pay them any attention, it was because she was somewhere else altogether. She had never been less in the mood for entertainment, for having to continue to smile, for having to be anywhere near her father. Her father, who’d disrespected her, humiliated her, treated her like an errant child.
“Ah, here they are—at last, they’ve appeared!” she heard him say to someone across the table louder than was necessary. “Such an honor! I’m assured they are the best damn band in all of Sopron. You wouldn’t know it from the look of them, right? Surely they could do with a few tips, ladies and gents! Those coats, dear God, were they resurrected from the labor service?”
It was only when she heard that voice—“We are ready when you are, sir”—that she turned in her chair and a swell of heat rolled through her body. She felt self-conscious all of a sudden, of her hair, which had been done up in an exaggerated coil and fastened on one side with a diamanté comb, of the terrible light gold dress, which made her look like an overgrown goldfish. She wished she’d worn something brighter, less makeup. She wished that she’d left her hair loose.
Hello, Eva thought she mouthed. He tipped his head to her, made that same sweeping gesture from the square, smaller, less conspicuous—something only she would understand, which made her laugh. She laughed a little too loudly. She wanted to say something back, but was too stunned to see him, and so she only smiled, too long. It was only when her father stood from his chair that she was forced to redirect her gaze to the length of the table, to the glint of crystal and silver, which seemed too bright in her line of vision.
“Ladies and gentlemen, before we get on with the music,” her father said, tapping his wineglass with his signet ring as he swayed a little at the edge of the table, “I would like to make a toast! To my daughter, Eva, whose happy engagement we have all gathered here to celebrate. As you are all aware, our esteemed groom could not be here with us this evening, busy as he is attending to our brave soldiers and whatnot, but I know I speak on his behalf when I say this is a most joyous occasion. Most joyous! May the two of them live a very long and happy life. To Eduard and Eva! Egészségedre!”
“To Eduard and Eva!” repeated all twenty guests in unison, clinking their glasses and raising them in Eva’s direction. “Egészségedre!”
For a long moment, she couldn’t look at the fiddler, then she did again, and saw the understanding seep into his gaze. It grazed past her, to the terrace door, to the grandfather clock, then to the violin at his side, which he lifted heavily. He placed it under his chin, positioned his bow, still as a statue, his hair slicked back with brilliantine, the hollows in his cheeks like shallow spoons. Serious now, the jaw stern as he motioned toward the others to begin.
“Ready? On three.”
And begin they did, slowly at first, each of the three violins joining the notà in intervals, working around each other in a dance of sound, building their rhythm. She saw him close his eyes, flying with the music, no longer there in the room, no longer in any place where he could be reached. The other violins slowed, dropped off at the next break. Then it was only him, taking it higher, faster still, his face twisting with the sound, with what she imagined was joy, and the love of it.
“My God,” the woman with the diamond choker gasped. “They’re spectacular.” But as she said this, Eva saw that her eyes were only on one fiddler. Her bejeweled, plump fingers came up to the hollow of her neck, where the matching diamonds sparkled, then traveled a little farther down, to the top of her cleavage, where they pressed slightly against the powdered skin, as if to steady the pulse there.
The maestro nudged Aleandro, pointed with his chin in an almost imperceptible way in her general direction. For a moment nothing happened, nothing changed, but then the maestro circled back around and nudged him again, this time with his elbow, whispered something in his ear.
A look was exchanged—sternness on the maestro’s part, protest on Aleandro’s—then he broke from the trio and made his way slowly across the room, working the bow faster, faster still. The woman reached into her purse, extracted something, flashed it in a nondescript way—either for the spectators or perhaps for the fiddler—and he moved closer, so close that she could now touch him. The woman leaned back in her chair so as to enjoy the full performance, her chest rising and falling.
There was a sound, a terrible scrape, which Eva realized with horror was her chair. The music tapered off, and all the eyes in the room fell on her. The room spun. She was trembling, so she stood and stepped away from her chair, nearly tripping on the edge of the rug.
She laughed, something that to her sounded more like a shriek. “Please excuse me, I’m not really in the mood for music tonight. I’ve really got a terrible headache. Please don’t mind me. Enjoy your night.”
Then she walked from the room, fighting the urge to run. On the other side of the door, she leaned on a wall, pressed her fingertips into the hollows of her eyes.