When the Summer Was Ours

by Roxanne Veletzos

  “My life? Oh. Well, it hasn’t been quite like yours. But it’s been a good life. I became a nurse. I love my work. It isn’t glamorous, and most days you could say that it’s almost mundane. But there have been moments… moments when it did feel… glorious. Moments when I thought I could make a significant change.”

  “Yes, I remember how much becoming a nurse meant to you. You used to carry those big biology books with you wherever you went. You’d bring them down by the pond, and while I was drawing, you’d recite to me all the muscle groups. The town children, I remember, would run around afterward, making rhymes with those words they’d overheard. They called them spells. Do you remember that?”

  She shook her head, not smiling as he’d hoped, looking into the light of the garden. “Oh, Aleandro, your brothers. I’m sorry, maybe I shouldn’t bring it up, but… I had no idea. I cried for days… They were so lovely. I just don’t know this world anymore. To endure so much loss, it just seems so very cruel.”

  “It’s all right, Eva. I don’t mind speaking of them. Especially not with you. I know how fond you were of them, Lukas above all.” He had to pause, startled by the intensity of his stirred grief, and had to swallow a sip of wine against the forming tears. “For whatever it’s worth, they still live inside me. They always have. They live through my art. Not just the camp paintings but what I draw today. I try to look at life through their eyes, through their innocence, and capture it as they might see it. And in a way we are still together. As long as I keep painting, they are never far from me.”

  If anything this only seemed to deepen her sadness. Her hand traveled up to her cheek, rested there, her eyes still on the garden and the potted white roses abutting the window. When it came away, he noticed that her fingernails had left faint crescent marks on her skin.

  “Ah, let’s talk about happier things,” he quickly said.

  Her eyes returned, and she smiled. Finally, she smiled. “Yes. Happier things. Tell me about New York.”

  “New York. What shall I tell you about New York?”

  “Everything,” she said, echoing his earlier words, and he refilled their wineglasses, thinking where to start.

  Over the next twenty minutes or so, it was he who did most of the talking as he recounted the brutal fourteen-day trip over the ocean amid a sea of refugees, and his first impressions of that daunting, incandescent city he now called home. He told her about his early days with Rudolf, and that first exhibit where his art had been called raw and honest, revolutionary, and how in the short year that followed, he went from bussing rat-infested kitchens to dodging camera flashes. Of how he still painted on the doorstep of his first building in New York, because it was for him (and always would be) a bridge to his past.

  Some things he left out. He didn’t speak, for instance, about how in every woman he’d dated he’d searched for her—the sound of a voice, a gesture, a likeness of her tiny stature, and how his hands, roughed by paint and turpentine, had touched many bodies but had truly only ever touched hers. Nor did he speak of his drawings of them, in which he tried to re-create her semblance, women he ended up withdrawing from because they weren’t her. They could never be her.

  Such things he couldn’t speak of, so he stuck with the larger themes, but spoken or not, these thoughts were there between them, and without meaning to, he reached across the table and brushed his fingers over hers. Touched the golden band on her ring finger, which had consumed him the entire evening. Her hand flattened under his on the lavender tablecloth.

  “You married.” He didn’t want to ask so abruptly, but now the words were out there, searching for an answer. “You married Eduard?”

  She didn’t say anything, just nodded her head.

  “And you have children?”

  Again, she wavered. “Yes. A daughter. We have a daughter.”

  And there it was, the hammer on his heart that he’d been almost expecting. Of course. Just like that letter had said—that letter that he was burning to mention and couldn’t bring himself to mention—her life had gone on, she’d married, had a child, while he’d been living like a phantom caught between two planes, waiting for this moment—to sit with her again, to talk to her, to look into her eyes. But it was too late now not to delve forward, and so, closing his eyes, he asked:

  “And are you happy, Eva?”

  “I was. We were, for a long time. Eduard and I… Oh, it’s difficult to explain. There have been some recent developments, some… unpleasantness in our lives. It’s not something that I can talk about. As I said earlier, it’s been a difficult year.”

  A new wave of pain pulsed through his chest, for in these unspoken difficulties, a life had been built, moments had been lived, changes had been traversed. A life. She had lived a life without him, and now it seemed impossible to mention anything at all about the letter, and whether, in all this time, he still existed for her in some small chamber of her heart. Instead, he braced himself for whatever his next words would invite, interlacing his hands on the tabletop to keep them from trembling.

  “Please tell me about your family.”

  She toyed distractedly with the golden links of her watch. “Oh, what does it matter now?”

  “Because it matters to me. And it always will. Also, because more than anything, I want to listen.”

  Her expression shifted; she looked at him in a new way, a thankful way, and for an instant, he thought she would open up. But there was a brisk cough from one of the staffers hovering near the kitchen, and she straightened in her seat and shot a glance at the small dial on her watch.

  “Oh, it’s late, Aleandro. They’re trying to close up, and I really should have been home long ago.”

  “Can I see you again, Eva? My plane leaves tomorrow, but I can rearrange my flight for another day. Maybe we can finish this conversation tomorrow. You know, this is my first time here. Maybe you can show me around, and we can talk a bit more. Just say that you’ll see me again.”

  “Aleandro.” She was already out of her seat, collecting her coat, which she held in a jumbled bundle. “You know that I would love that. I really would. But what would it add in the end? We are not what we once were. Please try to understand.”

  “Then why did you come? Why are you here, Eva?”

  She took an abrupt step back from the table, pulling her coat and purse closer to her chest. “Perhaps I shouldn’t have come.” She shook her head. “But things between us were left unfinished, and I thought… I thought this was our only chance to make peace with that chapter in our lives. And it’s been wonderful seeing you, Aleandro. More than you will ever know.”

  She might as well have thrown kerosene in his face saying those words. No, they were not what they once were. She was gone, still here for another moment but already gone from him, as she’d been all these years. All he could do was stand from his seat numbly and lift her hand to his lips.

  “Let’s not say good-bye,” he heard her say as he stared down at her hand. “I’m just going to go now. And we will not say good-bye.”

  But it was good-bye. He watched her turn and walk through the length of the restaurant and through the main hotel lobby, and his heart twisted inside his chest like a dying bird.

  31

  AT HALF PAST TEN, EVA slipped quietly into the apartment and took off her shoes at the door. She’d walked all the way from Hotel Gellért, not minding that, since the uprising, it wasn’t safe for a woman to be alone on the streets past sundown. She needed the walk, needed to get her emotions in check, but it hadn’t really helped. In her bedroom, she peeled off her skirt and shirt, ambled into the bathroom in her slip and bare feet, and splashed some cold water on her face. Splashed it again, dipping her head under the faucet, letting it cool her fevered skin.

  His beauty had stolen her breath. She’d been staggered by it because it was not only intact, but enhanced by the passing of years, the majestic, stark lines of his face, the expensive suit, those black piercing eyes made even more stunning by t
he soft lines beneath them. And to hear him speak to her the way he did! To lay himself open to her as though no time had passed, to look at her that way still—it had fissured every brick and barricade she’d erected between them in the time since.

  She curled into a ball on her bed. Pulled a pillow into the crook of her body and pressed it into her stomach. She ran her fingers over the other pillow nearby, forcing her thoughts to Eduard. Eduard, who was her husband. Eduard, who’d been her husband through occupation and poverty and revolution. Yet her existence with him had been mostly one of quiet contentment—they knew each other well and loved each other, but it was a calm sort of love, the kind displayed by older couples with forehead kisses or a squeeze of a hand over a dinner table.

  With Aleandro tonight, she’d felt every atom in her body come out of its inertia as if a part of her had been dead in all the years that he’d been gone. This sensation overwhelmed her. Pushing the pillow into her face, she cried silently.

  It was impossible that she would get any sleep, and after an hour of tossing, she went into Dora’s room and shook her shoulder gently, but Dora didn’t move, so she slipped in next to her, nestling her forehead against her damp, papery temple, taking comfort in her scent of cold cream and camphor. After a few minutes, Dora woke, and in the darkness Eva felt her warm palm on her cheek, brushing it gently.

  “Another tough night, darling? What time is it? Do you want to talk?”

  “No. I don’t want to talk. Just want to lie here next to you.”

  “Darling, you can’t lose hope. Right? You know that you can’t. Bianca needs you to be strong. And you are strong. You’ve always been strong, Eva. A solution will emerge, you will see. It will come soon.”

  “I saw him, Dora.”

  “You saw him?” Dora shifted and scooted herself up against the headboard. “What do you mean, you saw him?”

  “Not Eduard. That would have been impossible, right? I saw… I saw Aleandro. I went to the exhibit.”

  “Dear Lord, Eva.”

  It sounded like a reaffirmation of her foolishness, a condemnation that Eva could only meet with a desperate need to be closer to Dora. She moved up right next to her, buried her face in her shoulder. “I couldn’t help it, Dora. I just couldn’t help it. I didn’t intend to stay; all I wanted was just to have a glance at him, and then I would go. But then he saw me, somehow, and, well, we talked for a little while, and it was… it was the same as before.”

  “Dear Lord,” Dora repeated. “Sometimes, Eva, I think you are your own worst enemy. And how much did you tell him? Please tell me that you did not speak about your family’s situation. That above all, you didn’t mention anything about Bianca.”

  “I only mentioned that I had a daughter, that’s all.”

  “And what of Eduard?”

  “Only a bit. There wasn’t much time, and besides, I thought it best if he didn’t know.”

  “Well, that was wise,” Dora said with an undeniable tinge of sarcasm. “Because, absence or not, Eva, you do still have a husband.”

  “You don’t need to remind me!” Eva scooted away to the edge of the bed away from Dora, swung her feet onto the floor. “I am well aware of my obligations, and my seeing Aleandro changes nothing. It’s just something that I had to do. For my own peace, I had to do it, and now it’s done with.”

  “I’m sorry, darling. Please forgive me.” Dora’s hand now was in her hair, her fingers threading firmly through its length, and Eva reclined back against the pillow, relishing in this small comfort.

  “I just don’t understand, Dora,” she resumed, pulled back into her thoughts. “All these years he’s been living in New York, and in this whole time, there was not one word from him. Not one word. I know it’s not easy to get correspondence from the West, but surely he might have found a way, if for no other reason than to let me know he was alive. And you know what’s strange? When he first came up to me, when he approached me in the gallery hall, he said that I was the reason he came to Budapest. At first, I thought he was just saying it in jest, but he looked quite serious. Why would he say that, Dora? Was it out of guilt? Was it to torment me?”

  “I don’t think it was to torment you, Eva,” Dora said pensively, her fingers still in Eva’s hair. “Although, yes, maybe out of a small sense of guilt. For whatever it’s worth, I think perhaps he, too, grappled with some demons of his own, wondering perhaps all these years if he should have been more persistent.”

  “Persistent? Persistent with what?”

  The hand came to an abrupt halt. She felt Dora slide away from her and from the bed, saw her move across the room where she sat in a rocking chair by the window. “Oh, it’s nothing. Really, don’t mind me. It’s really nothing, darling.”

  “Never mind what? What’s nothing, Dora?” In the darkness, the creak of the chair as Dora’s heavy frame rocked against it was like the ticking of a clock, a building to something that severed Eva’s breath. And then the words came:

  “He did write. Once.”

  “What? Are you making this up? To make me feel better?”

  “No, it’s true. He did.”

  “You are making this up. I never received any letter from him.”

  “No, you did not receive any letter. You did not, because it was me who opened it first. Oh, Eva, I don’t—” Dora’s voice fractured, dropped into the space between them. “What I did was wrong, I know, but it was right after the war, and you and Eduard were just beginning to spend time together again. It seemed there would be a chance at happiness for you, and the timing… the timing was terrible. I knew that if you read that letter, everything would change again, that you would once again forgo Eduard, that you would give up everything for even a small chance to be with Aleandro. And what was he going to offer you? What? He’d just survived a concentration camp, and his own life was no doubt in far worse shape than yours. I couldn’t let you throw everything away, not when it looked to me that your life could finally have some stability.”

  The sound that came from Eva’s lips was more of a gurgling than a cry. “So you withheld his letter from me? And kept it a secret all these years?”

  “Don’t you see, I had no choice! I witnessed firsthand what this infatuation of yours, this reckless love, did to you. I was there, remember? I was there when you seemed no more than a corpse as you expected that baby, when you would go down to the gypsy camp and stare at it for hours on end. So when the letter came, when I realized who it was from, when I opened it and read it, I knew it could never reach your hands. And afterward, time took its course and you were happy again. You were happy and content, and that meant everything to me. It was all that I ever wanted for you. It was for your own good, Eva. What I did was out of love for you.”

  In the reverberating silence Eva grasped that it was true, all of it, but Dora’s words still hurt, still angered her.

  “And you thought that was justification enough?” Eva was on her feet now, her back pressed firmly against a wall. “How could you do that to me? He is the father of my child, Dora! Have you forgotten that? How could you take that decision away from me?”

  “Eva, stop it! Keep your voice down before you wake Bianca! Have you lost all your senses?” Dora’s shadow moved across the room, and Eva felt the firmness of her hands on her shoulders, and she twisted her face away because she couldn’t stand to look into Dora’s eyes.

  “So what did you do with the letter? You just discarded it, hoping it would be the last one? Were there others?”

  “No, Eva. There weren’t others. Because I wrote him back. I wrote to him when he was still in the camp. I told him that you were happy. That you had moved on.”

  She laughed. She threw her head back and laughed. She understood now, yet it came to her like a sheath of ice, seeping into her bones. That’s why he’d gone to New York after the war. He’d gone because he’d lost his brothers, and he thought he’d lost her, too. He’d gone because there was no reason to return.

  “I loved h
im, Dora,” she said without any vigor. “I loved him. And if you’d made a different decision, everything might have turned out differently.” Then she peeled herself from the wall and walked past Dora across the flat and into her own room.

  For a whole ten minutes, she ignored Dora’s desperate knocks as she sat on her bed, her hands between her knees. Aleandro would leave in the morning, and she would never see him again, and he would not know this one simple truth.

  She stood. Her hands and legs felt as though they’d been encased in lead, but she slipped into a fresh dress and brushed out her damp hair, and tied her scarf at the chin so she wouldn’t catch a chill. From the stool at her dressing table, she grabbed her trenchcoat, shot herself a look in the mirror as she buttoned it, questioning. Was it too late to tell him? Did it matter at all after all this time? She didn’t know. But she had to tell him. Too many things unsaid stood between them, and she couldn’t let him leave without knowing at least this much.

  She pushed open the door. She did not look at Dora as she walked past her and her insistent words, did not falter as she walked through the front door, too, back into Andrássy, with its array of broken windows and bullet-splattered walls matching the state of her heart. She walked firmly toward the Liberty Bridge and Gellért Hill, where she prayed that she could still find Aleandro. At least this decision belonged to her. Foolish, reckless as it may be, it belonged to her.

  32

  JUST BEFORE THE KNOCK AT the door came at half past midnight, Aleandro was sitting on a pale silk sofa facing the river view, cradling the sketchbook of Eva’s portraits in his hands. Still in the same clothes, drink at his side, doing precisely what he’d grown accustomed to doing back in New York. Mourning her. Mourning her again with her so fresh in his mind, with the vision of her profile against the garden light and the way it caught the tiny gold curls at her temple, with the faint scent of her floral perfume still in his nostrils. Well, he’d done it to himself with his own two hands. Perhaps he deserved this.