Gizella was far too short to see over the crush of people, and Gulya’s accent too provincial (and the prostitute’s utterly inappropriate), so to Nina had been assigned the task of finding the correct ticket taker. Her instructions were to locate a man with ginger hair and a mustache sharpened into aggressive points. Upon presenting her tickets she was to say, “My aunt bought us these tickets, and I do hope the seats are good.”
All went according to plan. The ticket taker nodded gruffly, took from Nina the cheap tickets and instead of tearing off the stub and directing her up to seats high in the gallery, returned to her four tickets of thick, creamy card stock, with a box number embossed in gold.
“Enjoy the performance, mademoiselle,” he said.
She thanked him, and the four conspirators swept up the grand staircase to their newly assigned box.
Though the boxes benefited from the Opera House’s elaborate air-conditioning, a state-of-the-art ventilation system with fans blowing across blocks of ice beneath the floorboards, sending cool air up through grates beneath every seat, Nina’s excitement made the atmosphere seem to her thick and stuffy, and she wished she had thought to bring a fan. Her palms were damp with sweat, and she longed to peel off her long satin gloves. She fanned herself with her program and gazed out over the crowd. At one point she believed she recognized a former classmate in one of the seats below, and immediately sank back, hiding as best she could in the gloom of the velvet-upholstered box.
After a few moments, as agreed, Gulya repaired to the smoking lounge, where he met up with Endre and Miloš. The fog created by the smoke of hundreds of cigars and cigarettes in the lounge was said to be so absolute that lovers could meet there for trysts without fear of discovery. Nina hoped that rumor would not in this case disappoint, because the plan called for Endre, Miloš, and Gulya to wait in the lounge, hiding from view in the smoke.
The first strains of the opera Erzsébet Báthory filled the house. It was perhaps appropriate, given the circumstances, that the opera on that evening was Sándor Szeghő’s variation on the vampire myth, a cataclysmic failure that opened to dreadful reviews, and closed immediately thereafter, only partially a result of the ruckus caused by Nina and her coconspirators.
Nina’s parents, like most of their set, regularly attended the opera, and from the time she was a small girl, she frequently joined them. My own daughters, though not musical, found the costumes and scenery exciting enough to sustain their interest at least until the interval. But for Nina, it was the music that enraptured. She had, as was expected of a girl of her class, studied the piano from childhood, and like many individuals with great scientific and mathematical gifts, she was similarly adept at music. She alone in her family possessed such skill. At one point Nina’s piano instructor suggested to her parents that she might be a prodigy, but though she played exceptionally well, and even composed, it was always science that compelled her closest attention, and once she became a serious student, she allowed her musical education to take second place in her efforts.
Uniquely on this evening, Nina could not listen to the music. She was flush with excitement, and to her surprise only very slightly afraid. When the strains of the first aria hung tremulously in the air, she and Gizella, without looking at one another, rose to their feet. Abandoning the prostitute, whose services were now complete, they slipped out of the box in a rustle of silk petticoats, their long trains whispering over the carpets that muffled the gentle creaking of the well-polished wooden floorboards.
The girls walked swiftly down the hallway toward the Red Parlor and the royal box behind it. But for the occasional evenings when the Dual Monarch or a member of his family was in residence, the royal box sat empty, guarded only by a single officer of the Hapsburg household guard, armed with a decorative sword that had never once been drawn. As the girls strode purposefully down the passage toward him, the guard raised his hand in warning. “Entry is forbidden!” he called out in German. At that moment, Gizella collapsed with a cry of distress.
The guard, a gallant old gentleman, in his last posting before retirement, would soon enough regret the combination of chivalry and curiosity that caused him to leave his post and come to the aid of the lovely little dwarf. When his attention was thoroughly engaged by the prettily moaning Gizella, who had hitched up her skirts to show him a miniature ankle in supposed agony, Nina called out the planned words:
“Oh my dear little friend! Please help her!”
Gizella chose this moment to gyrate in the guard’s arms, revealing her entire black-stockinged leg, and even giving a hint of the dark cleft at the top of her thigh. The guard thus distracted, Endre, Miloš, and Gulya appeared and slipped unnoticed into the Red Parlor and then through the set of double doors into the royal box.
“Please help her!” Nina repeated to the guard. “Carry her down to the lobby and ring for a doctor!”
The guard glanced warily at the empty hallway. “I can’t leave my post.”
“Please!” Nina said.
“It’s not permitted. I’ll stay with her while you go find an usher.”
At this Gizella cried out loudly, overcome by nonexistent pain.
“She’ll disturb the audience!” Nina said. “Never mind. I’ll take her myself.”
Nina was a strong girl, fully capable of lifting the child-sized Gizella, but she made a great show of strain as she hoisted the tiny woman a few inches off the ground, and promptly dropped her. Gizella wailed loudly and the guard paled.
“Stop!” he said. “For God’s sake, you’ll hurt her!” Effortlessly, he picked Gizella up in his arms. “You stay here and watch the door. I will send someone up in a moment. No one ever tries to pass, but if they do, just bar the way.”
I am confident that I know Nina well enough to presume her moment of regret, as the gallantry of the kindly guard whose career she was about to ruin proved to her that just as an omelet requires the breaking of eggs, so too does revolution demand the destruction of innocents.
As soon as the poor man had disappeared down the passage, Nina ducked into the box, where she found her fellow conspirators busily at work. The curtain was drawn, blocking the box from the view of the audience below. The acrobat Gulya had removed his gloves, shoes, and stockings and had shinnied up one of the columns flanking the curtain. He clung there, his toes digging into the grooves in the moldings.
Nina lifted up her skirt. She and Gizella had folded and rolled the banner into a flexible tube of fabric that they had pinned to the bottom of Nina’s corset. She removed it now, and handed it to Endre. Endre stared at the bulges of soft naked flesh at the top of her stockings, and only then did she comprehend that she was standing before a man, her skirt hitched high above her waist, her chemise and undergarments exposed. Blushing furiously, she dropped her skirts.
Endre recovered his composure, and tossed the banner up to Gulya, who stretched out his arm to catch it. For a perilous moment it looked like the acrobat might fall, but he dug in his toes and maintained his perch. He removed from his pocket a hammer, its iron head covered in noise-dampening felt, and spat a nail from his lips into his hand. Holding on only with his thighs and toes, he silently hammered one corner of the banner into place. Once it was secure he was about to let go when Miloš whispered furiously, “Goddamn it, you buffoon! You’ve done it backward.”
Nina craned her neck and saw that Gulya had indeed affixed the corner of the banner so that the painted text was visible to them, inside the box. Had Miloš not noticed, when they opened the curtains the audience would have seen nothing but a blank canvas.
Gulya tore the banner loose, flipped it around, and hammered it in again.
“Hurry!” Nina called. “We have no time.”
Gulya slid down the column, gripping the free end of the banner in his teeth. Miloš bent over at the base of the other column, his hands pressed to his knees. Gulya loped four steps and, using Miloš’s back as a springboard, vaulted up the other column. He shinnied to the top and
hammered in the other side.
As he slid to the ground, the banner slowly unfurled. Once it had reached the ground, Miloš and Gulya took up position on opposite sides.
“Ready?” Miloš asked.
Endre pulled a sheaf of pamphlets from beneath his frock coat. Nina had not been made aware of the plan to release any pamphlet, nor had she been consulted on its message. The banner’s plea—“Votes for All! We Demand Universal Suffrage!”—was simple. The pamphlet called for something else entirely. It demanded an end to the parasitic Hapsburg monarchy, denounced the Diet of Hungary as a tool of repression, and called for a revolution by workers of all nationalities against a system that allowed for the privileges of a few based upon the slavery of all. It enjoined that society be established on a new basis, where all property would be held in common and where each, producing according to his abilities and his strength, could consume according to his needs.
As Miloš and Gulya flung the curtains open, revealing the banner painted in Nina’s educated script, Endre threw the pamphlets off the balcony.
For a moment there was no reaction. Then, one by one, the audience noticed the white pieces of paper falling like snow from the royal box. They lifted their heads and saw the banner. They strained to make out the text in the dark.
The singers, blinded by the stage lights, kept on warbling their doomed phrases.
“Where is he!” Endre cried furiously. And as if in response, the house lights blinked on, revealing the conspirators’ demands for universal suffrage.
At that moment the doors of the box burst open and the guard, accompanied by two ushers, burst through.
“Run!” Miloš shouted.
Nina hitched her skirts up and ran, dodging around the thick arm of one of the ushers. The guard and ushers were intent on capturing her male companions and did not bother to give her chase. She tore down the passage to the private royal staircase and flung herself down the marble steps, just ahead of the guards who soon swarmed it. The ginger-haired man had done his job, extinguishing the lights in the lobby as he lit the ones in the house, and so Nina was able, as planned, to disappear into the crush of audience members as they poured out of the hall into the dark. She hurried out the door, now one of many astonished operagoers whose evening of lady vampires and bad music had been interrupted by the action of radicals.
A man standing next to her balled up one of the pamphlets and threw it to the ground. She picked it up and, keeping herself hidden in the crowd, hurried onto Dalszínház Road, and then turned into Lázár Road, where she found the merchant’s chauffeur waiting as planned. She flung open the door and collapsed into the rear seat.
“Where are the others?” the chauffeur asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Gizella isn’t here?”
Gizella had been supposed to take advantage of the hullabaloo to duck away. If all had gone well, she would have been the first to arrive at the getaway vehicle. Terribly anxious for her friend, Nina began to cry. The plan was for the car to wait no more than ten minutes after the first alarm bells and police sirens, no matter if the conspirators arrived or not, and though she tried to argue with the driver, he had served nearly a decade in a hussar regiment and knew that above all a soldier must stick to the plan. And so they left, Nina and the chauffeur the only members of what would come to be called the Opera Conspirators to avoid capture.
It was only as they were driving away that she read the inflammatory pamphlet. “My God,” she said aloud as the car careened through the streets of Budapest. “What have we done?”
• 40 •
THOUGH I WOULD LIKE to think that it was the atmosphere of trust and caring that I had created during my consultations with Nina that led her to my home that evening, honesty compels me to admit the possibility that she came to me simply because she had nowhere else to turn. Afraid that if the police had arrested Gizella, Endre, Miloš, Gulya, and perhaps even the prostitute, it would not be long before they determined their identities and discovered their address, she did not go back to the apartment in the Tabán. This decision proved critical in saving her, as within an hour the police were indeed at the door to the apartment and promptly arrested everyone inside, including not only the two other official residents, neither of whom was directly involved in the action, but also the cousin of one, a young man recently arrived from a distant town, who chose that inauspicious evening to drop off a bundle of his cousin’s laundered shirts and a mended suit jacket. Had the poor young man been even slightly more derelict in his promise to his aunt, he would have avoided spending sixty miserable and pain-wracked days in the Budapest prison, would have kept his full set of teeth for at least a few more years, and might even have embarked on the brilliant career as a painter that he had imagined when he left for the big city. As it was, he returned home bereft of both his front teeth and his dignity, and from then on labored not as an artist, but as a factotum in his uncle’s flour mill.
Nina considered going home, but she feared that once Gizella’s involvement was publicized, her own would not long be kept secret, and she refused to bring the wrath of the police down onto her family. And so it was to me that she came, and it was only by extreme good fortune that she found me at home alone. In those days of my middle age, it was my custom after dining with my family to return to work, but rarely to my consulting rooms in the front of the apartment. Usually I spent an hour or two visiting those of my patients too infirm to come to me. On the rare evening I did not spend trundling about Pest from sickbed to sickbed, I repaired to my coffeehouse, where I read medical journals or made notes for the case studies I had lately begun to assemble for publication. That evening, unusually, my wife and daughters were visiting with a neighbor, the chambermaid and cook had been given the evening off to attend a vaudeville performance, and I was home alone.
When the porter’s bell rang, I ignored it, only realizing at the second bong that I had in fact dismissed my help. Grumbling at the intrusion, I answered the intercom that had recently been installed to save our ancient porter and concierge the trouble of climbing the stairs to announce visitors.
“A Miss S. to see you, sir,” the porter said, his voice muffled through the mouthpiece. I of course instructed him to send Nina up, and rushed to open the door for her. I had not seen her since she left my consulting room two weeks before, and my attempts to reach her parents had been fruitless. I was thus beside myself with worry.
“My girl, my girl!” I said, embracing her. I held her close to my chest, my hands splayed over the delicate silk of her gown. She trembled in my embrace and I whispered in her ear, “My dear, sweet girl.”
A tendril of her hair caught in my lips and I breathed in her gardenia scent, and a barely noticeable trace of sour sweat.
Nina’s knees buckled. I wrapped a supportive arm around her waist and led her to the analysand’s couch. I laid her on the Turkish carpet draped over the couch and spread a blanket over her. Then, my knees creaking and crackling with the unaccustomed effort, I knelt down beside the couch and smoothed her hair away from her flushed and perspiring face. I pressed my lips to her forehead in an avuncular kiss.
“My darling,” I said. “What has happened to you? Tell your dear Imré what’s wrong.” (I am sure that no one familiar with the school of loving and supportive mutual analysis created and practiced by my dear friend and colleague Sándor Ferenczi would have found anything unprofessional in my words or attitude.)
Nina said, “Please, Dr. Zobel. I need your help.”
“You have it. Tell me, dearest. Whatever has happened? Is it a man? Have you been … defiled?”
She waved my question away. “Nothing like that. But I can’t tell you anything. I beg you not to ask. Just, please, I need someplace to stay. Until tomorrow, or for a few days perhaps. Just until I figure out where to go.”
Like most women, Nina did not weep prettily, but with a great rush of tears and mucus, her face mottled red and white. Though my profession has exposed me to
a copious amount of tears from both sexes, I have always found it hard to resist those of a young lady, and thus I immediately agreed both to shelter her and to hide her whereabouts. At that moment I thought only that she had been in the company of a man who had treated her ill. That her problems were criminal and political rather than romantic did not occur to me.
Where to put her became my immediate problem. My wife, a mother herself, would not tolerate the idea of keeping such a secret from Mrs. S. I could hear her voice in my mind as clearly as if she’d spoken the words aloud. “How would you feel if someone hid Erzsébet or Lili from us?” My thoughts riffled through my family and acquaintances, trying to come up with someone of impeccable discretion, to whom I could trust the responsibility of the care of a girl in Nina’s distraught condition. I settled, inevitably, on my sister Jolán.
Upon her return from Germany, Jolán had decided to move out of our mother’s house. At the time I was furious, rejecting her explanation that soon enough Mama’s age and health would require more filial devotion, and that she wanted to “experience solitude” while she still had the chance. “You’ll have time enough for solitude when Mama dies!” I had insisted, but to no avail. My implacable sister ignored my vehement opposition and calmly removed herself to a suite of shabby but genteel furnished rooms within walking distance of the school where she taught. How grateful was I now for her intransigence!
Jolán was not on the telephone—she resisted any technology that permitted our mother to harass her any more than was necessary—and so Nina and I had no choice but to arrive at her home unannounced. She greeted us at the door wrapped in a Japanese kimono, her hair in a long braid over her shoulder. Worn down this way it was suddenly possible to see how much of it had silvered. Far more, though it is perhaps vain to say so, than my own, though I am nearly four years older. As I write this a decade after the events transpired, Jolán is gone, lost to cancer of the breast, and what sparse hair I have left is white as snow. But at the time I recall noting how old she looked, and worrying that she might not be strong enough to handle the responsibility I laid at her door.
Love and Treasure Page 35
