When the Summer Was Ours

by Roxanne Veletzos

  “Why, Andro?” Lukas’s voice was sleepy, his arms somewhat listless as they went around his neck. “I tried to go to sleep, but I couldn’t. It’s too hot in there. And you know I can’t sleep without you.”

  Back inside, where the twins were already asleep, Aleandro made Lukas some tea with a few drops of a lemon he’d picked from a yard. He smoothed a slice of bread with some olive oil he’d reluctantly taken from a tavern, watched Lukas take minuscule bites, which he knew were only for his benefit, then hummed him a song as he rocked him to sleep. After placing him in his cot gently, Aleandro took tonight’s tips from his pocket and counted them by the window.

  Thirty pengös. Thirty pengös was all that he’d walked away with. It would barely be enough to last him another week or two, assuming the baker’s kindness would continue and those half-stale loaves of bread wouldn’t be thrown in the trash at the close of the day before he could get there. Not enough for new oil pastels and paper—all of which he’d soon run out of altogether—not now, surely, when all that remained of his savings would be spent on food for the children. Not enough for aspirin, either.

  Perhaps he shouldn’t have put such faith in the whole affair; perhaps he should have accepted that other offer to play in Burgenland, to play at a real tavern, a real job that would mean steady pay, relief for his family. Yet he’d wanted to stay in Sopron a little while longer, didn’t want to leave this place, his home, and after tonight, after seeing her in the garden, he wasn’t sure he’d be able to leave anytime soon. What a fool he was!

  That night, he couldn’t get a wink of sleep. Couldn’t sleep for a whole week after, and as he scrounged whatever he could earn in the town square playing for disinterested tourists, as he endured the cutting remarks of the maestro, who clearly blamed him, too, for the whole botched gig, Eva filtered through every minute of his miserable day. He didn’t see her again at the café, didn’t see her anywhere in the piazza, and yet he couldn’t stop thinking of her, couldn’t stop replaying every detail of their moments alone in the garden. How she looked in the soft glow from the terrace, how her hand felt like it belonged in his, and how her laughter revealed a whole world, a world that he’d like to know and never would.

  He had to see her again.

  But how? And for what purpose? he tried to reason with himself. What would someone like him possibly have to offer a girl like that, even if she wasn’t engaged? A word of encouragement, a small reason to smile; what else could there be beyond what they’d already shared?

  Nearly a dozen plans he’d concocted in recent nights—all elaborate, over-the-top, likely to get him arrested, and with little chance of success, at that. In his hot sheets, he tossed and groaned into his pillow, praying he wouldn’t wake his brothers, who slept in cots next to him. It was hopeless. But tonight, tonight, just as the silvery light of dawn began to trickle through the window, a fragment of a thought came to him, piercing his state of half sleep.

  The sketch pad of her portraits—there in her hands. But how could he not have seen it before? How could he not have thought of it sooner?

  Later, he would tell himself that he should have stayed in bed, that he should have pulled a pillow over his face, that he should have gone for a swim, but in that moment, none of those things would have been possible. Already in his mind he was walking down the path under the glow of the moon, back toward the manor, guided by the vision of her looking upon what had been born of his hands.

  * * *

  It was still dark when he reached the villa. Around the tall iron gates, he slithered like a nocturnal cat, concealing his shadow from the garden lights, marveling once more at the sheer size of the estate, the vast windows and stately entrance, the statues of polished stone scattered throughout the garden. The stone bench on which he and Eva had talked was nearby—if he could only find it. Her secret corner.

  Fumbling in the darkness, he thrust his hands through the tight iron slats and the brambles of rosebushes, searching for the surface, not minding the thorns scratching his skin. At last he felt it: the unmistakable roughness of limestone under his fingertips. Reaching farther through the shrubbery, he placed the sketchbook upon it, then disappeared as quickly as he had come, the blackness enclosing around him, drawing him further into its folds like a protective cloak.

  6

  AT PRECISELY FIVE O’CLOCK, LIKE every morning, hours before a single stirring would emerge from the rooms upstairs, Dora dragged herself from her bed and made her way down the hallway to the kitchen, where she put on a kettle and dropped a bag of Earl Grey in a mug. Still in her robe and hair wound in curlers inside a net, she slipped through the back door and into the vegetable garden, where she sipped her tea at the wrought iron bistro table she had set up for herself under the olive tree. She relished the stillness, the white roses moist with dew swaying like tiny phantoms in the yielding darkness, the night breeze caressing her cheek in a cool whisper.

  It was a busy time. The cleanup effort after the banquet—which had been left entirely in her hands after the temporary staff hired for the occasion had departed—had dawdled endlessly, and Isabel had been asking constantly for freshly pressed skirts and ribbons, changing three times a day, dragging in girls she knew from whatever corner of the province for tea or a game of cricket.

  It was not that she minded Isabel (at times her joie de vivre injected the home with a much-needed energy) but rather that Eva, in the flurry of all that activity, seemed to have disappeared. Most mornings she didn’t even come down for breakfast and slept until Dora went to her room and wrenched open the curtains. Then she would be out on the veranda with her books, sunglasses perched on her nose to hide her gaze, which seemed always pinned not on the pages but on the contour of the hillside or the vastness of the sky.

  How strange she’d been this summer, Dora thought. Ever since she’d arrived more than three weeks prior, she’d been removed, taciturn. Even their conversations about the vegetable garden, which they’d planted together (their joint work of love, as Eva had described it only the summer before), were met with only mild interest. And that bothered Dora the most, this new distance between them, which had been in the past reserved for others, the space that Eva created around herself like a fortress that couldn’t be breached.

  In the months after Mrs. César’s death, Dora came to think of Eva as her own child. During that long summer, not a word of tenderness was addressed to Eva—only commands, which Eva had met with a silent obedience. It made Dora’s blood boil. Sit, go upstairs, brush your hair, brush your teeth. Mr. César himself was hardly able to meet her eyes during those weeks, and his sister, who’d joined unexpectedly, regarded her with a thin, immutable smile, as if waiting for her to finish recounting whatever story so that she could be sent on her way. No one seemed to consider that the girl, too, had suffered a great loss, that perhaps she needed a kind word or a smile, a set of arms to embrace her. The only available ones, it seemed, had been Dora’s.

  The day she packed Eva’s luggage to go back to Budapest, Eva burst into tears.

  “Don’t send me back,” she begged. But what could she say, Dora remembered fretting, as Eva spread herself out on the bed and buried her face in a pillow. At the end of the season, the villa would be closed, the furniture draped in sheets, and Dora would return to her home. Surely they couldn’t stay here, in this vast empty space, just the two of them, and besides, Dora needed to get back to her steadier restaurant job, which she worked outside of the summer months. But the way Eva had looked up from the depths of the pillow shattered Dora’s heart, and in the glimpse of a moment, she’d made her decision.

  Later that afternoon, perched on a damask chair across from Mr. César and his sister, she explained that it could be done. That Eva was in no shape to return to Budapest, where only three months earlier she’d seen her mother’s casket lowered into the ground, and that besides, now that Dora’s home was empty as well, she could take care of her through the fall, if they didn’t mind having her stay.
It had seemed like a preposterous proposition, downright ludicrous, and Dora had expected a definitive no, perhaps even a stern admonishing. Instead, the pair exchanged a long look. Mr. César looked in the fireplace, then looked again at his sister, and in that single look, it seemed as if a decision had been made.

  “If you’re sure,” the sister said, leaning against the fireplace and wrapping her woolen cardigan tightly around her. “We will pay you, of course.”

  A week later, Dora took Eva to her one-bedroom home with the leaky roof and noisy pipes on the outskirts of Sopron, and as the leaves fell from the trees later that year, then the frost came in an overnight storm, there was no sign of her father. It wasn’t until the following summer that he returned, not with the sister this time, but with a lady friend, a tall, exceedingly slim young woman with a minuscule, upturned nose and large gray eyes who looked upon Eva as though startled to learn of her existence.

  She did end up going back to Budapest at the end of that summer, fifteen months after she’d arrived. And in all that time spent together, Dora, in her heart, had never been more convinced that Eva had been sent to her by God to rebuild life again. Life again in the wake of loss, love that was still possible beyond a beloved husband, a beloved mother.

  Perhaps—Dora considered now, finishing her tea—it was the engagement that had caused this recent change in Eva. Now that she was soon to be married, Eva needed no nannying, nor mothering; what she needed was her independence. Still, Dora couldn’t help feeling that there was a deeper need in Eva, something that couldn’t be assuaged—and Dora’s inability to fill it as she had in the past deeply unsettled her.

  She looked up at the horizon, which was beginning to lighten, and she stood, lifting herself heavily out of her chair. She began walking back toward the house, when she heard a sound behind her, a rustling of sorts. A bird, or several, she thought at first, but then she heard footsteps. She raised the lantern up to her face but couldn’t make out anything beyond the glare, and a tremor of panic shivered through her.

  “Who’s there?” she shouted in the direction of the sound.

  “It’s me, only me,” came the voice, and Dora breathed out with relief.

  “Eva, sweetheart, what on God’s earth are you doing out here at this hour? You gave me a fright!” On further thought, her eyebrows creased into a frown. “Please don’t tell me you’re smoking cigarettes before dawn now!”

  Eva emerged from the shadow in quick, quiet steps, not in her robe but rather in a chiffon floral dress with a golden locket at her neck—both of which, Dora recalled with a flinch of surprise, were from the night before.

  “I… I was just getting some air,” she explained. “Not smoking, I promise.” Even in this light, Dora could see the flush in her cheeks, an alertness in her eyes, which seemed out of place, given the hour. There was something in her hand, something that Eva drew behind the folds of her skirt.

  Eva said nothing more, just walked past her to the iron table and sat down. She didn’t speak for a while. She placed on the table what Dora saw now was a journal. Shivering, she drew her feet up on the chair and wrapped her arms around her knees, her eyes pinned on the object.

  “You know, Eva,” Dora said, sitting back down in her chair and reaching for Eva’s hand, “you can talk to me about anything. Darling…” What could she really say? How strange she’d been acting? How strange it was that she was here beside her at dawn, in last night’s clothes, at that?

  “Is it the wedding, Eva?”

  “The wedding?” Eva looked up, surprised. “No. I was just out for a walk. What makes you think that?”

  “Sometimes weddings… they can be straining. One like yours, especially. But you know, it will be behind you soon. You mustn’t let it consume you so much. If you can find a way to see beyond it, I think, it will not seem so scary. And, dear Eva, you know I’m here to help.” She scooted in closer and smoothed Eva’s hair behind her ear. “Whatever it is, you know you can trust me. So talk to me, darling.”

  “I do trust you, Dora, of course I do. You are like my own mother. But it isn’t the wedding.” Eva turned her head away and looked out across the emptiness, across the graveled path, the darkness.

  “What is it, then, love?” Dora squeezed her hand. “Your happiness is all that I care about. You know you can tell me anything.”

  “It must be all this heat. It’s… it’s been draining me. I can’t sleep well, that’s all. But thank you, Dora. I know you are here for me. And I love you for it. I love you so much.”

  Yet even as Eva said this, she lowered her eyes and pulled that pad of paper from the table, close to her chest as if to protect it. Then she stood and went into the house, slipping off her heels at the kitchen door, closing it softly behind her.

  7

  A FEW MINUTES AFTER THE UNEXPECTED run-in, Eva slipped inside her room and locked the door, then threw herself on the bed. Under the light of the lamp, she flipped through the sketchbook, seeing that what she’d glimpsed on the garden bench (she had in fact been sneaking a cigarette before sunrise) was not a mirage. It was her, all right, in each of the charcoal drawings. At least half a dozen of them, although not exactly the way she saw herself in the mirror when she combed her hair to a gloss or fastened pearls in her ears.

  In the first portrait, there was a deep crease between her brows as she bent over her book at the café, her bitten fingernails she normally hid inside silk gloves gripping the cover. In the other, her eyes, darkened to a shade of polished steel in fine graphite strokes, stared hauntingly into the vacantness of the square after she lost her satchel. The last one had captured her on that same bench in the piazza, but from a different angle: her hair swept over her shoulder exposed the silvery scar over her right eyebrow, which she’d acquired falling from a swing. That scar, above all, which she took great pains to style her hair around, was now the focal point.

  To be observed so closely! It was as if she’d been drawn naked, in a way that should have angered her, yet as she looked on, at who she really was and what she tried to hide from the world, from herself even, tears rose in her eyes.

  That long afternoon, her gaze stayed pinned on the clock. There was a quick lunch with the guests waiting to catch the three o’clock train. Suitcases were hauled into the great entrance from upstairs as Isabel fretted that she was missing one of her parasols. Someone had brought flowers in from the garden, and the smell of lilac made Eva somewhat nauseous and restless. Restless. She watched the sun soften in the vast windows, then waved good-bye in the driveway, promised Isabel that she’d come to Vienna after the wedding, words that barely touched her ears. Then she was on her old bike, which she’d pulled from the toolshed, knowing that her father was slumped in a chair dozing in an afternoon haze of wine, and that Dora would be too busy cleaning to question where she had gone—and she was riding away from the villa, the wind whipping her hair, the sketchbook thumping in the basket in front of her as she scaled the graveled road.

  At the fishing pond where she’d seen others pass en route to the gypsy camp, she sat in a shady patch and waited, watching the half-naked children splash about in the water. A group of women washed clothes, stretching them out to dry on the bedrock, and she felt self-conscious knowing that in their pleasant enough smiles her presence was seen as an intrusion.

  She withstood their looks nonetheless, but after nearly an hour she was ready to ride back. It was not disappointment she felt but almost a sense of relief—she had come after all and nothing happened. But as she positioned her bike and checked the tires, she saw him—her fiddler. His eyes, she could see even from this far away, were pinned to the ground, the fiddle strap drawn across his chest, a look of consternation in the crease of his eyebrow. When he saw her, he froze, his hands coming down slowly from the strap and landing at his sides. He was wearing the same outfit from that night at the villa, and seeing him again for what he was pierced the grandiose fantasies she’d been entertaining all day.

  Turning
her bike around, Eva began walking it the other way, guiding it alongside the edge of the water. She did not know if he would follow. She no longer knew what she’d intended to say at all. She passed the children, through willows that dove into the bank, through the ensuing patch of reed beds, and farther on. At the narrow wooden pier, she stopped and turned to look behind her—and he was still there. Leaning her bike against a tree, she lifted the sketchbook from the basket, held it in her outstretched hands as some kind of an offering.

  “These,” she began. “They are yours.”

  She felt slightly off-kilter being so close to him in daylight, the slant of sun falling between them offering a barrier so easily crossed. He walked into it and beyond it, closing the space between them, and she felt herself stepping back, as if reaching for some safeguard that wasn’t there. Sensing it, he turned toward the lake, ran a hand through his hair.

  “Do you like them?”

  “Like them? Yes. But… why?” Eva said simply.

  “I can’t explain why, only that I wanted you to have them. Think of them as a gift.”

  “A gift?”

  “Yes, a gift. Do you not believe in gifts, Eva?”

  He turned to her, held her gaze, and in the silence, it seemed to her that a different conversation was taking place. His eyes danced with light, as if no further explanations or reasons were needed, as if any words beyond the ones spoken would only reduce what his drawings meant. They were more than a gift. It was clear in the way he’d drawn her, in the way he was looking at her now, and she knew that she should go. That she should set the sketchbook on the grass and climb back on her bike, ride back to the villa. But she did not move, and she felt some inexplicable sadness or regret rising up within her, which she couldn’t push back.

  Stepping closer, he reached for her hand, flooding her with the familiarity of the night on the bench. “I don’t know why I drew them, Eva. Only that it’s something I had to do. And I wanted you to see them. I hoped that you would see in them what I see.”