Suffice it to say that the result of Erzsébet’s confession was more tears, and my wife’s demand that our daughter never lay eyes on the young man in question ever again. I wisely kept to myself the observation that given that we lived in the same building, that was a feat not even my accomplished spouse could engineer.
Though I would not have confided my own family troubles in Nina, I was not even permitted to inquire into the ramifications of her outburst in her own home. She arrived for her appointment on time, but she did not sit down. She stood in the middle of my consulting room, forcing me to keep to my feet as well. She held her fine kid gloves in her hands, twisting them with a ferocity that caused me to wince.
“I cannot stay, Dr. Zobel,” she said.
“Have you another commitment?” I picked up my leather appointment book and leafed through it. “Shall we reschedule for later in the day, or simply resume tomorrow at our usual time?”
“No, sir.”
“Dear girl. There can be no formality between us. Clearly you have something to say. Speak up.”
“I can’t see you anymore.”
“Has your father forbidden it?”
“No. Though I imagine that if I’d seen him he might have done. My father is a man who likes to apportion blame, and I’m sure he’ll levy some on you.”
“You haven’t seen him since our dinner? That was two days ago.”
“I haven’t been home.”
I was astonished and horrified at the thought of a young girl, the age of my own daughters, absent from her home for so long. “Nina! Where are you staying? With whom? This is very grave news. Very grave indeed.”
“Don’t be concerned, Doctor. I am safe and well. I’m staying with Miss Weisz. She rents a room from a relative in Király Street.”
I grimaced at the thought of this lovely and gracious young lady living on a street populated by laborers and tradesmen of the lowest kind. “Do your parents know where you are?”
“No, and I hope you won’t tell them. I have had no choice but to cut ties with my parents.”
“Nina! Sit. Please. You are in need of counsel, surely you realize that. A girl of your age cannot simply ‘cut ties’ with her parents. I am confident that nothing you have done is irrevocable. There is still time for you to go home.” I fervently hoped that this was true.
“I will not go home, Dr. Zobel.”
“Are you afraid, dear girl? You mustn’t be. Your father was deeply angry, true, but by now his rage will have calmed. I will go with you to ensure your safety.”
“You miss my meaning, sir. I am not afraid to go home. I simply won’t. Things have progressed beyond that now.”
Chill dread crept up my spine. What had she done? “Is there someone else staying with you? A man? Dear God, Nina, have you moved in with that young radical, what was his name? Endre?”
“What must you think of me, Dr. Zobel, to ask such a question? I told you, I am staying with my friend.”
“Then what are the ‘things’ you speak about? What has ‘progressed’?”
Nina extended her hand to me. “Thank you, Dr. Zobel, for your company and counsel over these past few months. I can’t say that you’ve cured me of my menstrual cramps, but I have found our sessions interesting nonetheless. I shall remember them and you with fondness.”
“What in heaven’s name are you about, girl, with these valedictory speeches? What are you planning?”
But she left without another word.
I did not know what to do. As a father, I felt strongly that the appropriate action was to go to Nina’s parents and inform them of her whereabouts. At the time I had no idea of the extent of her peril; I worried only that she and Miss Weisz were planning to run away, to Vienna perhaps, or even to Paris. Were I merely a family friend I would have considered it my duty to rush to her father. But I was also Nina’s physician, and as her physician I owed her a certain duty of confidentiality. I wasted precious minutes wondering about the extent of this duty. Were I to have discovered during an examination, for example, that Nina suffered from a fatal disease, I would immediately have told her parents, even if I deemed it unwise to tell the patient herself. Did this rise to that level? Was her peril sufficient to justify becoming an informant? Surely her parents knew her well enough to look for her first at the home of Miss Weisz. A moment’s thought would be sufficient to reach the conclusion that that was where she was likely to be. I tried to reassure myself that they knew of her whereabouts and had chosen, for the moment, at least, to allow her to remain there unmolested.
But what if they had been turned away by Miss Weisz? What if the dwarf had convinced them that Nina was not with her? I could only imagine my own wife’s reaction under such circumstances. She would be beside herself with anxiety and fear.
So why was I hesitating? I determined to look unflinchingly at my motivations. Was it the patient herself who inspired my inclination to confidence? Did I seek to protect her from her father’s wrath for her sake, or for my own? Did I fear her anger if she found out that it was I who informed them? Had I stopped being an observer and wise counselor and become something else in my own heart, if not in hers? Had I lost control of my countertransference, succumbed to my emotions? Did I desire that beautiful young girl?
No! No! Nina was my patient, a hysteric who was incapable of making wise decisions. The voice within me that argued in favor of her stability, her sanity, her right to do and go where she wished, was nothing more than an expression of my failure as a psychoanalyst, my refusal to recognize and wrestle with my countertransference. I had no choice but to go to her father.
And so I rushed to the S. apartment on Andrássy Avenue, where I left a note for Mr. S. with the maid, informing him of Nina’s whereabouts. My responsibility carried out, and my conscience assuaged, I went back to work, though I fear I did not bring my best attention to the rest of my patients. It was difficult to ignore the foolish sensation that I had committed an unforgivable betrayal.
• 39 •
WHEN I NEXT SAW Nina S., she came to me in a storm of tears, her life in tatters and her future likely destroyed. Though my own agitation and anxiety during that period cloud my memory of the events, I will do my best to re-create them as she recounted them to me, and also as I read about them in the newspapers. Since that terrible week, I have had opportunities to discuss what transpired with a few of the players, including Gizella Weisz, whom I had the pleasure (and relief) of encountering a number of years later, at Bad Gastein in Austria, where I had repaired to take the waters and where she and the other members of her talented family of singers had been engaged to perform. More immediately to the events I describe, I spoke at length with Ignác E., who sought me out to beg my discretion in the matter. Though it is routine practice to change the names and identifying features of patients in published case studies, in this case because of the infamy of the incident and the particular characteristics of the actors (an anarchist dwarf!) mere anonymity might not have sufficiently protected the identity of Nina and her family. It was out of respect for his wishes that I refrained from publication until now, more than a decade after the events transpired, when the changes in our government are such that no harm can come to any of the participants, even if someone should trouble to discover who they were.
The reader will forgive me, yet again, for describing the incidents as though I were myself present. My temerity is understandable, I think, because of the intimate knowledge I possess, both of the events and of the psyche and character of the major player herself.
My supposition that my message to Mr. S. would result in Nina’s immediate return to the bosom of her family was incorrect. On the contrary, I fear my betrayal of her confidence resulted only in forcing her into the arms of the people who would be her undoing. Though I believe the events of July 1913 must have been in the planning stages for some time before Nina made her escape, I have often over the years wondered if I unwittingly set in motion Nina’s catastrophe. Had I re
mained silent, might she have chosen in the end not to involve herself in such radical and foolhardy action?
I cannot know. All I do know for certain is that when Mr. S. went to Miss Weisz’s lodgings to demand his daughter’s immediate return, he was not permitted to enter. He might have forced his way in, but for the menacing brawn of the concierge’s son. Mr. S. went immediately to the police and returned not an hour later, this time accompanied by two armed constables, but by then the two girls had fled the premises, leaving behind no clue to the location of their next refuge. It is possible that even they did not know where they would be going after quitting the establishment.
Mr. S. sought the arrest of both the concierge and her son, on grounds of interference with a father’s legitimate authority over his daughter, but the constables found convincing the woman’s pleas. How was she to know that Mr. S. was in fact the girl’s father, and not an angry suitor posing as such? Or worse! After all, the man was unfamiliar to her, and as the girl had given her name as Maria Horváth, they did not share a surname. Moreover, the landlady told the constables, they looked nothing alike. Mr. S. was a swarthy man, obviously of the Hebrew persuasion. It had seemed impossible to her that the pretty blond Maria was a Jew.
“ ‘White slaver,’ that’s what I thought,” the woman said. “And why wouldn’t I? After all, that’s what so many of their kind get up to, isn’t it? I’ll not be blamed for trying to protect a good Hungarian girl from the likes of him.” She stuck a derogatory thumb in Mr. S.’s direction.
To Mr. S.’s fury, the constables nodded sagely, blowing air through their brush mustaches. “She’s got a point, sir,” one said.
The other chimed in, “She was only trying to protect your daughter. You like as owe her thanks, if you think about it.”
“Thanks?” Mr. S. fumed. “Thanks? To the woman who kept my daughter from me, who has sent her on to who knows where?”
“Now I won’t take that for a minute,” the lady said. “I didn’t send her no place. She went on her own, her and sweet little Gizella.” To the constables she said, “The darling little one I’ll miss for sure. Wee thing, no bigger than a baby, with the most astonishing head of hair. Nearly down to her knees! She used to let me comb walnut oil into it, just like I do to my own. She’d sit on a little stool and I’d smooth the oil through her hair and she’d tell me stories of her family, all of them itty-bitty dwarfs like herself. Oh I will miss her. I surely will.” She glared at Mr. S. She would neither forget nor forgive that it was because of him that she’d lost her sweet little Gizella.
Mr. S. reported the egregious behavior of the constables to an acquaintance in the office of the mayor, but no action was taken against them, either because the man’s position was not as glorious as he had led his friend to believe, or because the constables’ superiors felt as their underlings had, that the actions of the concierge and her son, while unfortunate and ultimately mistaken, were understandable. After all, she’d spoken no more than the truth. The conspicuous role of Jewish brothel keepers and procurers in prostitution in central and eastern Europe in the late nineteenth century has long been a source for much anti-Semitic rhetoric.
Thus, Mr. S. did not find his daughter. He could never have imagined that she and Gizella would take refuge in the disreputable Tabán on the southern slopes of Castle Hill in Buda, in the apartment Endre Bauer shared with three friends, men who were, like him, former members of the Galileo Circle, who had come to believe that that organization’s liberal mindedness and social radicalism were too cerebral and thus ineffectual, and that the time had come for radical political action.
I have it on the authority of both Nina and Gizella that their friendships with the young men who sheltered them remained platonic. Both women were adamant on the subject, and I have no reason to disbelieve them, particularly because in the years since, I have come to the conviction that Nina’s libido, prematurely awakened by the trauma she experienced at the stream and (though she and I never had opportunity to explore this, and I am thus making an educated guess) by excessive masturbation in early childhood, leaned toward the homosexual. Homosexuality is one of the essential traits of the obsessive-compulsive constitution, and though her only obsessive-compulsive symptom was her devotion to her academic studies, it was likely that she was at the time under the sway of a transient lesbianism that protected her from sexual involvement with the young men, and incidentally from developing a fully realized transference with me. Nina herself would have objected to this conclusion, insisting that her affections for Gizella were only ever sororial, but my readers no doubt are aware that homosexual inclinations are most often unconscious.
Endre and one of his compatriots, a Ruthenian from Northeast Hungary by the name of Miloš, vacated for the girls the small bedroom they shared, and set up their own pallets in the parlor in which the residents of the apartment took their recreation and their meals. One can only imagine Nina’s reaction to these bachelor accommodations. She was, after all, a product of the Jewish bourgeoisie, and thus used to the ministrations of maids and laundresses. Girls like Nina slept on pressed linens scented with lavender water, beneath soft eiderdowns and on pillows of the finest goose down. The dirt-stiffened and yellowed sheets and the rough woolen blankets would have felt miserably harsh on her fine milk skin. And yet she overcame her disgust, even embraced these deprivations as evidence of her liberation from the tyranny of her father’s rules and expectations, from his insistence on seeing her ambitions not as proof of a rigorous and able intellect but as the delusions of a neurotic.
Nina and Gizella hid in the apartment for a fortnight, never leaving even for a breath of air. In a cautious move, the young radicals switched their allegiance from the New York to the Japan Coffee House. This move, protested by Endre but insisted upon by the more cynical and thus wiser Miloš, saved them from discovery. The threatening but decidedly unimaginative detectives hired by Mr. S. spent nearly every evening in the New York Café, drinking coffee and eating pastries, and waiting patiently for Nina to appear. Periodically they would interrogate the patrons about the whereabouts of “a pretty blond girl and a dark-haired dwarf,” and who knows what information one of Endre and Miloš’s fellows might have inadvertently let slip under the influence of the glasses of Pálinka they regularly imbibed.
Fortunately, the dull-witted detectives never bothered to trouble the denizens of the Japan Coffee House, despite its fame as the favored gathering spot of various radicals, even including those women of Budapest’s feminist movement who were not afraid to be seen in such a place without the chaperoning company of a male relative.
The plan was perfected at the Japan Coffee House and brought back to the apartment where the girls were by then growing tired of their own company and eager for a change of circumstance and an alleviation of the boredom that is an inherent result of being confined to cramped quarters in a time of great stress. The plan was complex, and required the participation of more than half a dozen individuals, including, among others, an employee of the Budapest Opera House, an ancient prostitute, a lady’s seamstress who was Miloš’s occasional mistress, the chauffeur of a wealthy merchant, and a middle-aged circus acrobat who had once worked the boards with an uncle of Gizella’s. It was Nina, with her scholar’s fine penmanship, who hand-lettered the banner with the simple slogan, “Votes for All! We Demand Universal Suffrage!”
On the day of the action, Nina and Gizella donned sumptuous evening dress, Gizella’s her own, Nina’s Parisian finery borrowed by Miloš’s seamstress from the wardrobe of a Viennese noblewoman so wealthy and spoiled by her Hungarian husband that it would have taken a fleet of accountants six months to catalogue the contents of her closet. Even were Nina to bump into the baroness at the opera, the great lady was not likely to recognize her own gown. Accompanying them as their putative chaperone was the elderly whore, whose costly widow’s weeds the seamstress had purloined from yet another client.
An hour before the curtain was to rise, Nina
, Gizella, and the costumed prostitute set off, escorted by Gulya the acrobat, who looked only slightly uncomfortable in his guise as bourgeois father and second chaperone. Endre and Miloš had left precisely thirty minutes before, as they were to travel by tram, but a hansom cab was waiting for the others. That neighborhood of dark and dismal tenements had not often seen the services of a hansom, and the driver’s resentment at having to navigate the narrow rutted street was only partially assuaged by the novelty of helping two attractive young ladies, one a perfect miniature, up into his cab.
The four arrived at the Opera House and joined the crowd streaming up the steps to the triple-doored entrance, between the seated statues of Franz Liszt and Ferenc Erkel that adorn either end of the magnificent Neo-Renaissance façade. I imagine that the girls’ anxiety and excitement were such that neither bothered to notice the glorious lobby, with its soaring double staircase, columns of gray marble, and rich red arches. But of course Nina at least had been there many times before.
Gizella’s appearance caused its usual stir, with elegant ladies spying and whispering from behind their fans, and gentlemen not bothering to hide their ogling. But her expensive gown and the propriety of her two chaperones reassured the crowd that the dwarf’s presence at the opera, if curious, was not unacceptable, and though she was noticed, she was not accosted.
Love and Treasure Page 34
