When the Summer Was Ours

by Roxanne Veletzos

  “Another drink?” asked Tamás, raising his salt-and-peppered eyebrows to Aleandro. His coat collar felt too tight, and he unbuttoned it, then undid the top button on his shirt as well. The sudden longing for his brothers was so overwhelming that he couldn’t draw a clean breath.

  “Thank you, you’re very kind,” he said. “I do not wish to overstay my welcome. But there is something I’d like to ask.” He pushed back his coat sleeve, and without further thought, he unlatched the band of his watch and set it down on the table. “How much could you pay me for this?”

  “This?” Tamás lifted the watch from the table, his eyes widening as he brought it closer to his face. He set it back down gingerly with evident dejection. “This cannot buy. Not money enough for this watch here.”

  “I don’t need much. Let’s say… a thousand forints. Enough for a train to Sopron and back. On the overnight, for which I imagine I might have to hurry. You see, to go back to the hotel now in Buda would be a great hassle, and I’m afraid I would miss the last train. And I expect that I will be quite busy here in Budapest for the next few days, so I must go tonight. It is not something that can wait.”

  “I cannot take watch here.” Tamás shook his head, his hands on his knees, eyes downcast, which he lifted a moment later. Then he held up a finger. “But only to hold, for loan. I give you loan, yes? When you come back to Budapest and get money from hotel, you pay and I restore watch.”

  “You are very kind, thank you. And thank you for the brandy. Köszönöm. It has been my honor,” said Aleandro, repeating Tamás’s earlier words. “It’s been my honor to meet your family.” Then, taking the money that Tamás had extracted from a drawer beneath the bar, he handed over the watch and walked back into the street.

  * * *

  The Sopron overnight train was only slightly better than what he’d experienced in the days of the war: a darkened, dank, heatless cabin with cracked windows through which a freezing gust of air whistled. On the wooden bench that was his seat (at least there was a seat here), Aleandro, bundled in his coat, listened to the rumbling of wheels, watching the span of darkness where fields unfolded and farmers slept in scattered cottages, and apple orchards lay barren, covered in early frost under the starless sky.

  The sun was just appearing on the horizon when he descended at the station. It was colder here than in Budapest, a light layer of snow on the ground, and he walked the two blocks toward the trolley station, only to realize that the trolley lines were no longer there.

  An hour later, exhausted, hoping that he could find a place to rest, he reached the main square. His eyes scanned the vastness of the cobblestoned piazza as a chill crept into his chest. The church had been burned—a wing of it lay under a scaffold, windowless, and the entrance had been barricaded with planks of wood. Across the square, past the moss-stained column where Eva had once sat under a balcony of flowers, there was nothing but a gaping hole. No bougainvillea tumbling in a cascade of violent magenta, no balcony, no golden letters in a semicircle on the window beneath which Eva, in her red dress, lemonade at her side, read her books.

  More because he couldn’t bear the cold than anything else, he left the square and made his way to the end. The intersecting street signs bore new names of Soviet rulers. He walked past the baker where he once collected those stale loaves of bread to bring to his brothers, passed more buildings that had been bright peach and green and were now faded to a sad, muddied pastel. He paused before the tavern where his father used to play and where he’d had his first draft of beer. More wooden planks and broken windows clashed against his recollections. The absence of life was like a noose that had been coiled around his neck. It would suffocate him if he stopped to ponder all these changes long enough.

  The road opened up to him again at some point. No Citroëns with summer guests from Budapest zigzagged it now, only a few Trabants, the Soviet cars that also peppered Budapest, their horns weak and exhausted as they bleated for him to get out of the way. From the window of one, an arm emerged and something was thrown in his direction—a scattering of cigarette butts, which he ducked, and a curse spilled through the window as the car rounded the curve.

  “Bourgeois ass! Next time I’ll run you over!”

  He paid it no mind; his sole focus now was pinned only on where he needed to go next, the only place that truly mattered. He took off his beige cashmere coat to prevent attracting that sort of attention and kept walking until he reached the bend in the road he knew so well.

  Soon he stood at the edge of the bluff. As he’d expected, the stretch of land down below that dove into the glassy pond was barren, scattered only with a handful of wooden structures. With his heart silent and obedient in his chest, he walked over to a few old barrels of wine lying in the muddy span, decaying, splintered. Above one of the structures, a sign reading Bartok Winery hung askew, the letters faded and adorned in rust.

  He walked farther, walked through the ashes of his childhood, walked to the one thing that might still be here, and when he found it, he fell to his knees and embraced the bark. His chestnut tree, the tree that stood in front of the hut where he’d lived with his brothers, was still here. It seemed a miracle, the biggest miracle that he’d ever lived. He ran his hands over the bark, over the grooves cut by a knife, felt the words before he opened his eyes to see them. And he did see them. He steadied his eyes on the words and the childish writing, letting out a sob that seemed to come not from him but from them all—a joint cry rising into the lead sky and echoing back to him: Tamás, Attia, Lukas. Their names, still there, where he’d shown them how to carve them. He pushed his face into the bark and wept.

  * * *

  Some time later, Aleandro ambled down to the edge of the pond where the children used to splash about in the summer time. The fishing pier rose over the lead glass like the skeleton of a beached whale—white and fractured, the end of it collapsed in the water. Near that pier was where he’d first sat with Eva, but it wasn’t her that he was thinking of now, nor of his brothers, but, strangely, of the girl in the red coat. The girl who’d stirred his heart with her violin playing and her stark hazel eyes, and the conviction that her father would come for her.

  Sitting on the grass by the pier, he dropped his head between his knees. He’d tried to convince Eva to stay, to be with him, to bring her daughter with her. He thought if he persisted long enough, her eyes would close, and she would be his again. What he’d been too blind to see until now was that in severing a child from her father, a father from his child, he would be inflicting the same intense pain he’d just felt under that tree. He’d be causing a loss not all that different than he’d endured at the hands of the Nazi guards.

  The sun had set. It was nearly dark again when he rose from the grass and began up the graveled path toward the main road, yet it wasn’t with heaviness now, nor with sorrow, but with the knowledge of what he had to do.

  I’m going back to see if, after all this time, there is still a chance for me to start living in the full sense, to become that man you can be proud of in every way, he’d written in his letter to Rudolf, and perhaps now, at last, if he had the strength, he could fulfill that promise.

  At the bend in the road, as he’d done many years ago, he turned and looked behind him one last time, imprinting the landscape of hills and the brassy indigo of the setting sky, the tiny white structure at the top of the hill that had been Eva’s summer villa. A whole life was engulfed in this landscape. A life in which he’d played his music and found his art and danced and loved.

  “Good-bye, my beautiful, enchanting, battered Sopron,” he whispered to himself. Good-bye. Then he walked on, scrunching his shoulders against the chill.

  36

  My dearest Eva,

  Of all the injustices that both you and I have endured, I believe the greatest one on my part has been to interject myself once more into your life. You see, for all of fourteen years, since I last saw you, I’ve lived in a world of my own making in which you and I n
ever stopped. I walked the valleys with you, I sat holding your hand under the stars, I made love to you a hundred times as I had that first time in the cellar the night before the fire. And I came to Budapest to find you, to take back at any cost what I believed was rightfully mine.

  Selfish, I know, to think that your life couldn’t resume without me, even though I knew well enough it would. Nothing at the time could keep me away; nothing could dull this blind ambition of mine to have you for myself again. Then yesterday, I went to Sopron to visit the old gypsy camp and found a tree that still bore my brothers’ names, and I realized that in this hopeless pursuit I lost something that was important to me.

  To put it in not so many words, I lost my honor.

  So I leave you with one final token of my eternal love: the sketchbook of your portraits. I hope you will look at it once in a while, as you did all those years ago when I drew them for you. During my days at Dachau, it was the only thing to give me hope and led me to everything that I am today.

  And one final thing. I’ve decided to donate half of my Dachau collection to the Hungarian National Gallery. I’m told by a reliable source back in New York that this should be sufficient to secure from the Hungarian government three exit visas to Austria. I don’t not know how long it will take for this arrangement to come to fruition, only that I’ve had assurances that it will. Perhaps it will be soon, perhaps in a year. But I do know that the angels will be watching, and faith now is all we have.

  In Vienna, should you find your husband, live happily. Live with your family as you’ve never lived before, laugh, love. Forgive Dora. When I came to leave the sketchbook for you this afternoon, we made our peace, and I believe you should do the same. Sometimes, to protect those we love, we must breach our own hearts, as she so eloquently said, and no one understands that better than me. So let her back into your heart as she longs to be. Let there be new beginnings.

  As for me, do not worry. By the time you read this letter, I will already be in the sky, crossing the ocean to the only home that I have now. A family of my own awaits there—a father and mother, and a son, whom I intend to embrace in a way in which I have not and could not before. And at the end of the day, isn’t the love for family worth everything?

  Yours,

  Aleandro

  The letter dropped from Eva’s hand.

  * * *

  She didn’t know how long she sat on the terrace with the sketchbook, only that it had grown dark and the first snow of the year fell from the sky. Dora had come out to bring her a blanket and a hat and had retreated inside to prepare dinner. Through the narrowly open French doors, she heard Bianca practicing her violin, and on the boulevard a streetcar clattered by, its bell fading into the span of the city, toward Heroes’ Square. A family passed underneath the terrace, the mother’s voice telling her children to slow down, to not run, for the pavement was slippery. There was the smell of roasted chestnuts, of burning wood coming from one of the neighboring apartments, and a dog was barking on a balcony as if startled by the falling snow.

  Someday, she would remember all these surrounding sounds and smells and sights, and how her fingers passed over the portraits, as if seeing them anew, as if for the first time. Aleandro would never be far from her life, for in his final gift, he was making it whole again, and they would always be bound by his sacrifice as much as by their child, of whom he did not know.

  She imagined her life going forward. She, Bianca, and Dora would pack up the house, abuzz with excitement and a little sadness as they prepared their belongings for the estate sale, making plans of things they would do and see when they got to Vienna. They would glance back at their home, with its whitewashed cornices and rounded terrace, holding one another in an embrace before climbing into the car taking them to the train station. They would cry meeting Eduard at the end of the journey—Eduard, who’d gone completely gray in the two years they had not seen him, who would cry on their shoulders, vowing to never let them go again.

  There would be bridges to rebuild between mother and daughter, daughter and friend, husband and wife. Walks under the lush canopies of trees, and evenings spent at concert halls where Bianca played. And unexpectedly, they would lose Dora one morning, when she simply didn’t wake from her sleep. Eva would have love in her life—tears, too, but mostly love.

  But for now, for another hour before Eva would walk back inside and into the rest of her life, there was just her and the sketchbook. She closed her eyes and pressed it to her chest and let herself be carried to a different decade, when a young man had rescued her mother’s satchel and spoken to her under the gathering rain clouds.

  And it was enough. It was enough for now.

  Part IV TRUTHS

  37

  New York

  Summer 1991

  BELOW THE BALUSTRADE, TREETOPS DRENCHED in dew glistened like ornaments in the budding sunlight. All night, Aleandro had watched and waited for the sun to rise over Central Park, wondering why in all these years, he’d never been able to capture its silent, magnificent beauty. Plenty of times he tried, but each attempt left him more disillusioned than the last. For a while, he reminded himself that landscapes were not his strong suit, never had been. It was people he enjoyed painting—people, with their conflicting emotions, their struggles and triumphs. His art had always been about people.

  Even that, however, he hadn’t been able to pull off in quite some time. How long had it been since he’d last held a brush? How long since he’d exhibited in a gallery? It astounded him each time he opened a newspaper or an art magazine and caught his name still in the headlines. Yet that’s how the trouble had started, with an article in ARTnews, which Frank, his faithful assistant, had delivered that Sunday morning, along with his double espresso from the coffeehouse down the street.

  Still in his bathrobe, he’d sunk into the sofa, and, taking small sips from the cup, he began flipping through the journal. There wasn’t much that grabbed his attention, save for an article titled “The Death Effect,” which he began reading with only mild interest.

  It was a piece of fluff, and halfway through it, he’d set it aside with a flare of irritation. Only the expected names were there—Van Gogh, Gauguin, Lautrec, Monet—the great masters of the nineteenth century who never witnessed a day of their fame. If the author had been sitting beside him, he would have grabbed him by the collar. What about the others? he would ask. If you’d bothered to scratch beneath the surface, you’d have discovered there were many others who sacrificed everything for their art and died before selling a single painting. And what of their names?

  Suddenly, however, as he might have expected, there was his name, at the end of the article. Picking up his glasses, which he’d flung onto the sofa, he leaned in for a closer look. Not just a sentence but an entire paragraph had been dedicated to him.

  No one has seen seventy-two-year-old Aleandro Szabó in nearly a decade, leading many to believe that the artist is no longer alive. One could certainly assume that, based on the astronomical valuation set by Sotheby’s last week for one of his early Dachau pieces. While this can be in large part attributed to their scarce availability—most of Szabó’s works are in the possession of the Hungarian National Gallery or are privately owned by business tycoon Hans Luben and decisively not for sale—what gives rumors of Szabó’s demise most credence is that nothing has emerged from the artist’s hands in far longer than he would allow.

  He let the paper drop to his side. Throwing his head back, he laughed heartily, without restraint—not at the obvious error but because, in fact, what the article said was true. He was dead, truly dead in the way that most mattered. If the world thought him so, all the better.

  A sensation of great relief settled upon him, and that same night he left his apartment for the first time in years, to end up here, in Central Park.

  It was past midnight. For a while, it all seemed peaceful enough, and he relished the relative quietness of the city, the fresh air, the chirping of birds in
a nearby bush. From his pocket he extracted a Cuban cigar and lit it, then reclined against a bench, relishing the aroma. Beyond the gates, some of the windows in the apartment buildings were still alight, and he watched them with the usual curiosity and melancholy. One of the windows opened, and there was laughter, notes of jazz dropping into the night like a sash of velvet. In another window, he spotted the face of a young child, a larger figure approaching behind her. The girl draped her arms over her mother’s neck, and as they retreated from view, the window went black.

  He didn’t know why these mundane slices of everyday life stirred him so. Perhaps that he’d witnessed them from the outside for far too long. It was his own fault. In the past fifteen years since Rudolf had died, he’d found himself spending more and more time in solitude, losing interest in the lives of others. At first, there had been a few women, and fundraisers for Holocaust victims, which he always attended. There had been Marlena’s quiet dinners for the three of them, where an extra place setting anchored them to what they’d once been, and larger parties he only attended out of politeness. And Hans. Hans had been his moon and stars, but eventually, he’d grown up, and Marlena had moved to California to start fresh, and more and more Aleandro had succumbed to the walls of his self-imposed prison. He couldn’t help seeing himself for what he truly was: a ghoulish figure like one from his Dachau pieces, lurking in the shadows of late-night Manhattan.

  He departed Central Park for home more dismally than he had come.

  Later that night, he dreamed of Rudolf. Not quite a dream in his agitated state, but more of a hazy, disjointed catalog of their years together. Rudolf alongside him at every gallery opening, his smile bright beneath a chandelier when they’d gone out after his return from Budapest and he’d seen in Rudolf’s eyes the respect he’d always yearned to see. Rudolf so much earlier in the days of their youth, standing guard over him as he painted the scenes of the camp. Rudolf in the infirmary when Aleandro didn’t think he would live another day. Rudolf years later in another hospital bed, from which Aleandro was convinced that he would rise, asking Aleandro to take care of his family.