When the Summer Was Ours

by Roxanne Veletzos

  On this particular afternoon, a week after her arrival, she was sipping a lemonade when a dark-haired boy, no more than nine or ten, appeared at the side of her table. He stood before her, barefoot and snotty-nosed, swaying on his heels. Eva smiled and held out a chocolate mint, which had come with her drink, but the boy didn’t take it. Before she could reach for her purse to extract a few coins, he was dashing across the square, his feet slapping the cobblestones. It was a moment before she realized her satchel was no longer next to the glass.

  “Goodness,” said a stunned Eva to the waitress behind her, who’d witnessed the whole thing and stood there with hands on her hips. “That was swift. Unfortunately, you see, I’ll have to find my companion before I can pay you. Or I can come back tomorrow. I’ll make good on it, I promise.”

  “Those goddamn gypsies,” spat the woman in reply. Picking up a few empty plates and glasses from adjoining tables, she walked back inside, shaking her tightly wound curls in disgust.

  Eva had almost laughed, wanting to say that he was just a boy. Sopron was full of hungry gypsy boys. She’d seen them all over Budapest, too, sleeping under awnings, selling flowers in the middle of winter—certainly, they could do with a few pengös more than she. Then, with a staggering jolt, the real magnitude of her loss hit her.

  * * *

  Some time later, after looking around the maze of alleys radiating from the square for any semblance of the boy, Eva ambled back in tears and plopped herself down on a bench. For the first time in thirteen years, she wept for her mother and for herself, she wept for her lost satchel, which was the only thing she had to remember her mother by. She felt angry, angry with herself for being so careless with the only object she had been able to salvage from her mother’s boxed possessions in the days after her funeral. Angry, above all, that in all thirteen years since her mother had died, it had taken this absurd act to unleash her tears. She didn’t even have a handkerchief to wipe her nose, so she used the hem of her dress. Then she looked up and, catching a glimpse of the gathering clouds, realized it would begin to rain any minute. She needed to find Dora.

  Wearily, Eva stood and scanned the square. There was no sight of her, only a few pedestrians dashing by, a band of musicians packing up their instruments near the Trinity Column, where they gathered to play for change. She shot a look in the direction of the chapel. Often, Dora would go in to light a candle for her husband after she finished her shopping, yet it looked as though the doors had been locked long ago. There was no one nearby, no one other than a tall figure, a man, seated on the ledge of a flower bed at the far end of the chapel.

  The first thing she noticed about him was the way he seemed utterly lost in a drawing, the way his hand moved in quick bursts over the large sheet of paper balanced on his knee. He looked like an apparition from another century—his hair a mass of black ringlets grazing his shoulders, his features gathered in such concentration that it almost resembled pain. He seemed not to notice her in the least—then, as if sensing her gaze, he looked up from his drawing and their eyes met. There was nothing unusual about it—strangers’ eyes met all the time—but the way he held her gaze, and smiled as if he knew her, made her breath catch.

  As if on cue, he tucked his pad and pencils inside a brown knapsack and picked up the other object at his side—a battered violin case—which he hoisted high onto his shoulder. An instant later, he was making his way in her direction in firm steps, smoothing those dark curls from his forehead. There was a fresh carnation pinned to his vest, his matching trousers perfectly pressed despite being somewhat faded. A fiddler, Eva realized. He was a fiddler, like dozens playing in impromptu ensembles all over the Hungarian countryside—probably belonging to the very troupe by the column.

  “Forgive me,” he said in a deep and grainy voice that sounded amused more than apologetic. “I’ve startled you. I didn’t mean to.”

  Eva gave a brisk smile. Did she appear startled? Certainly, she wasn’t accustomed to being approached by random strangers—fiddlers, least of all. Up close he looked like no fiddler she’d ever seen but more like a count in a Dutch painting. His face was a play of contrasts, his mouth square yet as full as a peeled plum, those dark eyes soulful but alert, lit from within. She took in the trace of a smile, the playful glint in the walnut eyes, and a mortifying thought crept into her. God. No doubt, he was good-looking in a rough, exotic sort of way, but just glancing in his direction couldn’t have given him the impression that she was interested in him.

  “You didn’t startle me in the least,” she said flatly. “I was just going. Can I help you?”

  “Nothing would be more pleasing, miss, than to require your help,” he replied, his smile widening to reveal a tiny chip in an otherwise perfect set of teeth, “but I think I might be able to help you.”

  “Oh?” Eva glanced at the case on his shoulder. “Well, as much as I’m sure you are wonderful with that violin, I haven’t a single coin, you know. Truly, I wish I did. But you see, it can’t be helped.”

  At this he said nothing more, only reached inside his knapsack and extracted an object that he tucked quickly behind his back. Then with a slight flourish, slowly, as if he intended to draw out the moment, his hand extended to her and Eva couldn’t help giving a tiny gasp. There in his hand was her mother’s satchel.

  Instantly, she was on her feet, stunned more than confused. “I don’t understand. How did you…?” A heat rose in her cheeks, and before she realized what she was doing she ripped the satchel from his grasp. “What is this? Is this some kind of a game? Did you help that boy steal it? Did you?”

  It was his turn to flush, violently, as if she’d slapped him. “Steal? No, miss, I assure you I did nothing of the sort. I don’t steal. I would have returned it to you sooner, except that I didn’t want to disturb you. It seemed like you needed time alone, so I didn’t want to… to interrupt your thoughts. Go on. Check to see if the money’s still in it.”

  Eva frowned and bit her lip and looked inside the satchel. The money was there, intact, rolled up in a cylinder precisely as she’d left it. The blood in her cheeks spiked all the way to the tops of her ears as she realized he’d seen her crying, then wiping her nose on her dress. And now she’d managed to insult him. Part of her wanted to run, part of her wanted to explain what this satchel meant to her, to tell him how she’d never been able to weep for her mother and what he’d witnessed had been a monumental break—a cleaving of a shell she’d spun around her grief since she was a girl. But he was a stranger after all—how could she say such things to a stranger—and she’d behaved no better than the waitress at the café. In the end, all she could manage was to withdraw a few bills from her satchel.

  “I’m so sorry. Here. For your trouble. Please take it.”

  She shook the bills at him, once, twice, but he wouldn’t take them, and eventually her hand dropped away.

  “More? Sure, I can give you more. You can take it all. Take all of it.”

  Again, she was fumbling with her purse. It was impossible to get it open now; in her fluster she’d knotted the strings too tightly. All of a sudden, his hand was on hers. It was a light, casual touch, meant to calm her, yet she felt it shoot like an electric current from the tendons in her hand through the full length of her arm.

  “I was happy to help,” he said, withdrawing quickly, as if he, too, was stunned by his own brazenness. “You looked so distraught back there at the café, and I thought, no one should be so unhappy. Not all of us Cigánz are in it for a few pengös, you know.”

  “Of course not. I never meant to imply…”

  Now her heart was pounding, but she couldn’t think of what else to say and looked down at the ground, where a line of moss snaked through the cobblestones. The silence stretched. Nothing was happening at all yet something was. She could feel his eyes on her, burning through the space between them. Was it with expectation? Or—judgment? Straightening her spine as if she was pulling herself up to her full height, she met his fixed st
are, held it, and a staggering, terrifying thrill coursed through her. Then the moment passed. He took a few steps back, tipping his head to her, and it came to her with some slight panic that he was going.

  “Wait! But why… why then would you want to help me?”

  A bright, easy smile reignited in his face. “That boy in the market—let’s just say you are not his only victim today. I’m Aleandro, by the way. Your knight in shining armor. Your savior.” His arm swept downward theatrically, as if he was bowing at the end of a performance, just as thunder broke—one long boom, followed by a shorter, more intense one. “Don’t get caught in the storm, miss,” he said, gesturing lightly to the sky; then he turned and departed in the direction of the Fire Tower, the violin case thumping against his back, his head raised to the clouds as if in welcome.

  The storm had already come, fat raindrops darkening the cobblestones, which he traversed in quick, long steps, passing the café where the waitress was stripping the oilcloths from the tabletops and farther on, where a side street forked away from the piazza. Just before rounding the corner, he turned and looked straight at her one last time. Then he was gone, and Eva stood there for a long moment fixed in place. Without knowing, she pressed the hand he’d touched to her cheek and held it there, despite the rain, which started falling down in pelting sheets.

  3

  THREE, FOUR DAYS IN A row, Aleandro had been drawing the girl in the square. At times, it felt somehow wrong, as if he were stealing something from her, but what harm was there in it? It was the only hour in his long day when he felt unburdened, free. There were no demands of him here in the cool shade of the church, no brothers to feed, no fiddle to play, no one to answer to. It was only him and his charcoals and this face, this Botticelli face that inspired his hands to move as never before.

  When he first set his eyes on her all of five days ago, she stopped him in his tracks. She was beautiful, there was no denying it, but he’d seen plenty of beautiful women before. Unlike girls of her age, there was no flirtatiousness in her walk—she walked straight and powerfully, with purpose, a bit like a man—even though everything about her was feminine, the honey-blond tresses reaching down to her waist, the small feet inside the red sandals, the slender calves.

  At the café, she sat at a table under the geranium balcony and took off her sunglasses, and her eyes were yet another enigma. Were they blue or dark? Dark, he thought at first, like ink dropped in a glass of water; blue, he thought as her gaze drifted up to the sky. Definitely blue, the intense aquamarine of a sea where it meets the horizon. In the end, it didn’t matter the color. They were the largest, most luminous, most striking eyes he’d ever seen. Right then and there, he dropped his knapsack at the base of the chapel and reached for his notepad and pencils, forgetting where he was going.

  Since Aleandro was a child, drawing and painting had been his everything, his ballast, his joy, his companion. Yet, since his parents had died two years prior, the responsibility for his brothers, the worry to provide for them, had brought with it a lack of inspiration that had persisted like an incurable illness. The summer before, he’d given it up altogether, although he still carried paper and charcoals wherever he went. He could never let go of it entirely, couldn’t accept that perhaps it had been a momentary phase in his life, yet each attempt of late left him more disillusioned than the last. To be able to draw again! To fall back into it with such ease! As he watched his hands move over the parchment, he nearly wanted to weep.

  And she kept surprising him. Each day, she came bearing small trinkets for the scampering kids in the square—butterscotch candies, stickers, ribbons for the girls. She would ruffle their hair, laugh with them, then she would continue on to that same café with a book under her arm, her heels striking the cobblestones as if to defy the quietness of the piazza. He couldn’t imagine what she read every day in those massive books of hers, only that it had to be good, very good. A whole hour would pass without her lifting her eyes from the pages, tapping her foot under the table, chewing absentmindedly on her fingernails. Love stories, he decided, and smiled to himself broadly.

  On this last day, he was capturing the slope of her shoulder reclined against the wicker café chair when a flurry of movements drew his eye away from the paper. A disruption of sorts. It took him but an instant to grasp what was happening, and then he was on his feet, chasing the little vandal—a boy of about the same age as his brothers he knew from the gypsy town. It wasn’t the first time he’d seen him rob in broad daylight, nor the first time that he’d shaken the life out of him, threatened to take him straight to the police. But never before had he acted with such will, such sheer determination.

  Halfway back to the square, finger-brushing his curls, he imagined her surprise when he brandished her purse. To actually have a reason to speak with her! He couldn’t stop smiling. What he didn’t expect was to find her no longer at the café but on a nearby bench under an alcove, weeping quietly into her hands.

  For a few moments he stood there like a four-year-old lost in a park, staring at the purse in his hand, and after some contemplation, he tucked it inside his knapsack. Not knowing what else to do, he made his way back to his usual spot, and while he waited, he took out his supplies and began drawing again.

  He should have placed the satchel down next to her and gone, but a shard of light broke through the clouds, catching the gold in her hair, and he had to keep drawing. And what happened next—well, what happened next would cause him to spend many nights in bed tossing around.

  There had been no words of gratitude, only a feeble attempt to push some money into his hand, and he’d never felt more conscious of the shabbiness of his clothes, of his dirt-caked fingernails and the stench of poverty emanating from his every pore. Yes, it was easy to see himself through the eyes of someone like her, and he’d departed in a hurry, swallowing his humiliation and what he recognized, even though he’d never felt it before, as the cold sting of heartbreak.

  And yet, despite the voice in his head that wouldn’t stop mocking him, that night after his brothers were asleep, he took out his sketching supplies and went down by the fishing pond with a lantern and began a new portrait of her. From underneath the strokes of his pencils, her face came to him once more, not perfect, no, not at all, but the eyes! Those eyes were captured in near perfection, and he was there with her again in the square under the clouds. This time he painted in her hair the red carnation he’d envisioned extracting from the buttonhole of his vest and handing to her. It was nearly dawn when he fell asleep in the grass with the etching of her face folded against his chest.

  4

  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.”