Love and Treasure

by Waldman, Ayelet

  I nodded and closed my hands around the locket. “Do you know what they say about peacock feathers?” I asked her.

  “That they bring ill fortune. Mrs. Schwimmer always said that was superstitious nonsense. She said that if one is seeking to change the world, one must always embrace what others fear.”

  “I will give your friend the gift.” But I did not. Not right away. Because whatever Mrs. Schwimmer said or did not say about fortune and superstition, it seemed to me that both Miss Weisz and my darling Nina could benefit from a little good luck.

  “To be female is no picnic,” I said to Ignác when we were safely ensconced in the rear seat of his British Rolls-Royce automobile.

  He laughed sourly. “That particular female’s troubles are of her own devising. They have nothing to do with her sex.”

  I glanced meaningfully at the back of his chauffeur’s bristled neck.

  “Speak freely,” Ignác said. “My father imported James from London along with this car. The man speaks passable German and French, but not a word of Hungarian.”

  “I trust that Miss Weisz won’t turn on her friends.”

  “Everyone turns eventually, Dr. Zobel. There are very few strong enough to resist interrogation. In my years of legal practice I’ve never met one.”

  “But, respectfully, sir, you are young. You have not been practicing for very long. Perhaps Miss Weisz will surprise you.”

  “This is a large conspiracy with many players, most of whom are now in custody. The rest will surely follow. Someone will speak. There is only one way to save Nina.”

  I felt a profound relief. I had feared that there would be no solution at all to protect my darling girl. “And what is that?”

  “She must speak first.”

  • 42 •

  THAT AFTERNOON A CONFERENCE was held in the apartment of my sister. Never had those modest rooms hosted such illustrious company. In addition to Ignác, there was his father Jenő E., Nina’s own father, her uncle, and a cousin of the family, the famed solicitor Zoltán Thuz, who boasted good relations with the Budapest police and who had the greater advantage of being a convert to Catholicism whose confessor was none other than Archbishop János Csernoch of Esztergom. In addition, though he would never himself attend such a gathering, the Baron Móric E. had sent his personal secretary. And of course there was I.

  The topic of our consultation and concern might as well have been absent, so little was her opinion sought. As the room filled, Nina sat in a ladderback chair, her eyes cast down at her lap where her fingers knotted and unknotted. She had brushed her hair back and tied it in a severe bun at the nape of her neck, and borrowed from my sister a drab shirtwaist and skirt, which hung on her like a sack. Only her feet betrayed her. Jolán has tiny feet, a characteristic of all Zobels, female and male, and so Nina wore the high-heeled slippers of scarlet satin that matched the stolen evening gown. Her only other choice would have been to go barefoot.

  Mr. S. did not greet his daughter when he entered the room. Even for me he had only the barest of civilities. The other gentlemen were more generous, but only Ignác came to Nina. He extracted one of her hands and raised it to his lips. He then bent to her ear and whispered something. When I later asked him what he said, he told me, “Just that all would be well, and that she could trust me to care for her, now and always.”

  Nina, when asked the same question, told me that his actual words were, “It will take time, my darling, but someday I know I will forgive you.”

  The negotiations were complex, and involved esoteric matters of law, questions of criminal culpability and evidence, and a heated debate about the average dowry of a girl of comparable class. In the end, the dowry that was agreed upon was ten times what otherwise would have been Nina’s portion. It was so large that her father would be compelled to appeal to his family and his bank for loans. When even this was insufficient, he would have no choice but to sell the family’s summer cottage in the Carpathian Mountains. The lawyers were confident that with Nina’s agreement to give secret testimony against her accomplices, and with the substantial influence they together wielded, they would not only be able to secure her freedom, but also to keep secret her identity.

  “And what if they return at some point, those men?” her father asked. “If they try to blackmail her?”

  Mr. S.’s cousin, the famed solicitor, dismissed the possibility. “You can rest assured, sir. We will not be hearing from any of them ever again.”

  “And Miss Weisz?”

  At the sound of the soft, tremulous voice, the men in the room turned to Nina, astonished.

  “Miss Weisz?” she said, more strongly now. “She must go free, too.”

  “Be still!” Mr. S. thundered.

  Nina lifted her eyes, defiant. “I won’t agree unless you promise that Miss Weisz will also go free.”

  “My dear girl,” said Zoltán Thuz, “your friend is in the hands of the authorities. She was arrested at the scene of the crime. It would be a much more complex endeavor to secure her release.”

  “But not impossible,” Ignác said softly.

  “No,” Thuz replied. “Not impossible. Just damned difficult.”

  “Nina, if I give you my word that we will do our best to save her, will you agree to the terms?” Ignác said.

  “How can I trust you?” she said, speaking only to him.

  Jenő E. sputtered. “You, who have proved yourself absolutely untrustworthy, question the honor of my son?”

  Ignác said, “I can give you no more than my word. But my word is good. Surely even you will allow me this.”

  Nina gazed into his eyes for a long moment. Then she nodded. “Yes. I will agree. But please, Ignác, please save my friend.”

  • 43 •

  NINA CAME TO VISIT me once more, a few months after her wedding, to which I had not been invited. This exclusion had not surprised me—though I knew myself to have been instrumental in her salvation, I did not expect her family to acknowledge this, for to do so would compel them to admit that she had needed saving. My wife had been hurt to find no invitation in the post, but soon enough she was busy planning a wedding of her own. Erzsébet made as lovely a bride as a father could dream of, and her young groom was both bashful and dashing, a combination designed to delight any girl, and any girl’s mother, as well. My dear wife had initially resisted my decision about Erzsébet’s marriage, but once she realized that my resolve was firm, she came around. A successful publishing house provides a fine employment on which to support a family, and though those in my profession know more than most that love is no guarantee of marital success, neither does it impede that possibility. At any rate, Simon Goldziher has made us grandparents three times over, and Erzsébet seems very satisfied with her match. For a brief while we even nurtured the hope that Lili would take Erzsébet’s place in the affections of thrown-over András, but he ended up marrying a lady from Debrecen. In the end we were spared tragedy. András served as a physician in the Great War, and died during the Siege of Przemyśl. Lili settled adequately, though less happily than her sister, with the heir to a moderate dry-goods fortune.

  When Nina came to visit me in my consulting room that final time, she told me that she and her new husband had spent a restful three months at Bad Gastein, the very spa at which I would, years later, encounter Gizella Weisz.

  “And I see that you are expecting,” I said.

  She startled. “How did you know? It’s very early yet. I have not even told my mother.”

  I pointed to her bosom. “A swelling of the breasts is often the first indicator of pregnancy, even before a missed menses.”

  She put her hand to her chest, which did indeed swell delightfully beneath the sheer organza of her blouse.

  I asked, “And your marriage? Is it happy?”

  Ignoring my question, she turned to my bookshelves and slid her finger along the spines of the volumes.

  “Anatomy: Descriptive and Surgical,” she said, taking the book from
its place. She leafed for a moment through its pages, staring as if entranced at the complex and graphic illustrations.

  “I used to own this book,” she said. “Though my English is not really good enough to understand it well.”

  “You own it no more?”

  “My father took my medical texts. He gave them to a deserving but poor young student at the medical college, along with a scholarship to complete his studies.”

  “Ah.”

  “So you see, Dr. Zobel, because of me there will be another physician in the world. A male one. But still, I can find comfort in that.”

  “Yes,” I said. I came and stood next to her. Her full skirt brushed the wool of my slacks. I burned at that moment with the injustice of what had been lost. I knew Nina would be a fine mother, a good wife, but she would have made an outstanding physician. An unusual talent, a brilliant mind. I found and still do find myself furious at the squandering of her gifts, not only for her sake, but for the myriad patients she will never cure, the discoveries she will never make, the lives she will never save. How many people will die, have died, because of the wasted talents of intelligent and gifted women, forced into domestic drudgery, corseted by paternal demands, strangled by denial of opportunity? Too many to count. Too many to contemplate. Too many.

  I pulled my handkerchief from my pocket and made a great show of blowing my nose, to disguise my tears behind a sudden allergic fit. “The autumn winds,” I muttered. “They bring dust from the plains. It disagrees with my sinuses.” I gave a last, honking blow and returned the soaked bit of fabric to its customary pocket. “And Miss Weisz?” I asked. “Have you heard anything of her?”

  True to his word, Ignác had managed to secure Gizella’s release, though on grounds that I had no doubt the girl herself found humiliating. She was like a child, the young attorney had argued to his superiors at the prosecutor’s office. Short in stature and limited in mind, she had been easily swayed by the malevolence of radical men. This argument was not dissimilar to the one made on Nina’s behalf, though in that case influence and gratuity had a greater impact on the outcome of her situation than in Gizella’s. Nina was not only never prosecuted, but her name was kept out of the press. Gizella had no one able to pay for her release and so was forced to rely on the court’s mercy. Acceding to Ignác’s description of her as all but an idiot, infirm in both body and mind, was the humiliating price she had to pay for freedom.

  “I saw her before she left Budapest,” Nina said.

  A condition of Gizella’s release was that she abandon Budapest and return to her family in Transylvania. When she heard that her friend was to be banished, Nina went to the train station in secret, something she accomplished with great difficulty as she was no longer allowed to go out in public unaccompanied. On the morning of Gizella’s departure, Nina repaired to her room, claiming to be suffering from a recurrence of her crippling menstrual pain.

  “Are you sure?” her mother had said. “Surely it’s not time yet.”

  “Yes, I’m sure,” Nina had said. “Perhaps the worry of the past weeks has brought it on early.”

  “Have you enough bandages?”

  “Yes. I just want to lie in a dark room, alone.”

  “I’ll send the chambermaid up with a hot-water bottle.”

  For the hot-water bottle Nina exchanged a pile of cloths that she had soaked in blood from a small incision she made on the inside of her thigh. She then slipped out her window which gave onto the landing, and ducked into the servants’ stairway. Luck was with her, and no one was on the landing, in the stairway, or on the street immediately below, and she hurried away, unnoticed beneath a large hat and veil.

  When she reached the train station, she had very little time left if she was to avoid discovery. Soon the maid would return to take away another pile of soiled linen and refresh her water bottle.

  Nina saw Gizella through the window of the second-class women’s carriage. The dwarf sat on the hard wooden seat, her back stiff and straight. Her head was bare and to Nina’s astonishment she saw that her friend’s gorgeous hair, the endless locks that had been her pride, was shorn, cropped like a boy’s, or like a prisoner’s. Gizella gazed unseeing out of the carriage window. Nina stopped on the platform beneath. The glass was dingy, and when Nina tapped on it, it left gray smudges on the soft white kidskin of her gloves.

  Gizella jumped, but immediately returned her expression to blankness. With only the slightest movement she inclined her head toward the interior of the carriage. Nina backed away from the window to give herself a better view, and saw a man in a policeman’s uniform positioned outside the interior carriage door. To her surprise she felt no fear, only determination.

  “Open the window,” she mouthed.

  Gizella gave a brief, nearly invisible but nonetheless firm shake of her head.

  “Please.”

  Gizella glanced at the guard. She hesitated a moment as if deciding, and then pulled up the sash.

  Nina heard the officers—there were two of them, it appeared—call out.

  “It’s so warm,” Gizella called back to them. “Just for a moment, for air.”

  Nina waited, concerned that one of the police officers would come to the window, but so ingrained was the prohibition against entering the women’s carriage that they only snarled at Gizella to keep it open no farther than a few inches.

  This was enough, however, for the two girls to converse.

  “Are you all right?” Nina said. “Did they hurt you?”

  “No.”

  “Your hair.”

  Gizella shrugged. “Have you word of the others? No one will tell me anything. They’ve even forbidden me the newspaper.”

  “Hard labor.”

  “All of them?”

  “Yes.”

  “Even Tanya?”

  “Yes.” The poor seamstress who had stolen only for her lover’s sake had nonetheless been sentenced to seven years’ incarceration, an injustice that would torment Nina in her freedom. Through Jolán, Nina would send the woman packages, though few reached her. Nina was determined to help her upon her release, but never had the opportunity to carry out this wish. Tanya died five years into her sentence, when the Spanish flu tore through the prison camp where she was employed sewing uniforms for the soldiers fighting the final war of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

  Endre and Miloš’s innocent roommates would be released after nearly a year in the purgatory of pretrial detention, and Endre, Miloš, and Gulya would be liberated from prison with great fanfare in 1919, when Béla Kun and his dictatorship of the Proletariat took power over Hungary. Endre Bauer became a functionary in the Political Investigating Authority, where he made it his business to terrorize Ignác E. Had the regime lasted any longer than a few short weeks, he might have succeeded in engineering Ignác’s arrest, and perhaps even Nina’s. In the end it was he at the wrong end of the hangman’s noose. The White Terror that ended the transient Hungarian socialist utopia and saved Ignác proved a disaster for most of the Jews, inspiring as it did the numerus clausus and God only knows what else to come. Of the other conspirators less is known. Miloš left for Ruthenia and thereafter disappeared from view. Gulya returned to the circus, where I understand he remains to this day, the patriarch of a family of gifted acrobats.

  “Poor Tanya,” Gizella said.

  “Yes,” Nina said. “At least the old woman is safe.” And indeed the prostitute who’d acted as chaperone was never captured. Sometimes when I pass crowds of such ladies in which one strikes me as particularly elderly, I wonder if it is not she.

  Gizella said, “They tell me it’s Ignác E. I have to thank for my release. And for yours, I presume?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will you marry him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t.”

  “I have no choice.”

  “You always have a choice. Run, Nina. Go somewhere, study medicine. Be a doctor. It’s all you’ve ever wanted.”

&n
bsp; “There’s nowhere to go.”

  “Go to America!”

  “I can’t.” But for a moment Nina indulged a fantasy of a new life in a new world. A small practice in an anonymous city. A settlement house, like the ones she’d read about in the feminist newspaper, where she could treat poor immigrant women and even perhaps inspire some to follow her into the field. And then she allowed the dream to dissolve, like powdered aspirin in a glass of water, leaving behind only a bitter residue.

  Gizella said, “Did you promise to marry him in return for my release?”

  “Not just yours. Mine too.”

  “A bad bargain.”

  “No.”

  “One prison for another.”

  “A gilded cage is hardly a prison.” As she said them, Nina knew that the words were at once true and false. The petty tediums of a Budapest matron, even those of a Transylvanian performing dwarf, could not be fairly compared with the torments of hard labor. And yet chains, no matter how delicate and finely wrought, still chafe.

  With a great clanking and a rush of steam and smoke, the train lurched to life. Nina stripped off her glove, stood on her toes, and pressed her bare hand to the glass. It was gritty beneath her palm, and cold. Gizella glanced fearfully at her jailers, and then did the same. They remained this way, connected by a pane of glass warming ever so slightly beneath their touch, until the train began its slow, lurching motion out of the station.

  “I haven’t seen her since,” Nina told me. “Nor heard from her. I don’t know if she writes and my father takes the letters. I telephoned Mrs. Schwimmer, but even that lady has had no word.”

  “I have something for you,” I said.

  I went to my desk, took the key from its hiding place, and opened the locked drawer to which none, not even my wife, has access. From the drawer, I removed a small package wrapped in oiled paper and tied tightly with string. With my paper knife I sliced open the string, opened the paper, and revealed a pouch sewn from rich, heavy velvet. Inside that lay an enameled pendant on which was painted a brilliant peacock decorated with gemstones in purple, green, and white.