The Choice

by Edith Eva Eger

  * * *

  Béla shows his old boss at the warehouse the results of the aptitude test, and the boss introduces Béla to his accountant, a generous man who agrees to employ Béla as his assistant while Béla takes CPA classes and works toward his license.

  I am restless. I have been so consumed with money worries and Béla’s illness, so wrapped up in the cramped routine of hours at the factory and counting coins to buy groceries, that the good news unmoors me. The release of worry leaves me with a gaping cavity that I don’t know how to fill. Béla has new prospects, a new path, but I don’t. I change jobs several times in an effort to earn more, to feel better about myself. The extra money helps and the advancements do lift me for a while. But the feeling never lasts. At an insurance company, I am promoted from my station at the ditto machine to bookkeeper. My supervisor has noticed how hard I work, she will train me. I feel happy in the company of the other secretaries, happy to be one of them, until my new friend advises me, “Don’t ever sit next to the Jews at lunch. They smell.” I don’t belong after all. I must hide who I am. At the luggage company where I work next, I have a Jewish boss, and I think I will finally fit in. I feel confident, accepted. Although I am a clerk, not a receptionist, one day the phone is ringing and ringing, and seeing how taxed the secretaries are, I jump in to answer the phone. My boss storms out of his office. “Who gave you permission?” he yells. “Are you trying to ruin my reputation? No greener will represent this company. Am I making myself clear?” The problem isn’t that he chews me out. The problem is that I believe his assessment of my worthlessness.

  * * *

  In the summer of 1952, shortly after Béla’s recovery and a few months before Marianne turns five, Magda does move to Baltimore. She stays with us for a few months until she can find a job. We set up a bed for her in the dining area, near the front door. Our apartment is always stuffy in the summer, even at night, and Magda cracks the door a little before she goes to bed. “Careful,” Béla warns. “I don’t know what kind of palace you were living in in the Bronx, but this isn’t a safe neighborhood. If you leave that door open, someone might walk right in.”

  “Don’t I wish,” Magda purrs, batting her eyelashes. My sister. Her pain visible only in the humor she uses to transcend it.

  We host a small party to welcome her—George and Duci come (George shakes his head at the small expense), and some of our neighbors in the apartment building, including our landlords, who bring their friend Nat Shillman, a retired Navy engineer. Magda tells a funny story about her first week in America, when Aunt Matilda bought her a hot dog on the street. “In Europe, when you buy a hot dog from a vendor like that, you always get two hot dogs, and they’re covered in kraut and onions. Matilda goes to pay for my hot dog, and she comes back and there’s just one puny hot dog on a flimsy little bun. I thought she was too cheap to pay full price for two, or that she was making a point about my weight. I held a grudge for months, till the day I bought my own hot dog and learned that’s how it is here.”

  All eyes are on Magda, on her expressive face, waiting for the next funny thing she’ll say. And she has more; she always does. Nat is clearly fascinated by her. When the guests leave and Marianne is asleep, I sit with Magda on her bed, gossiping the way we did when we were girls. She asks what I know of Nat Shillman. “I know, I know, he’s Daddy’s age,” she says, “but I have a good feeling about him.”

  We talk until I am half asleep on her bed. I don’t want to stop. There is something I need to ask Magda, something that has to do with the cavity in me, but if I ask her about the fear, the emptiness, then I must acknowledge it, and I am so used to pretending it isn’t there. “Are you happy?” I finally work up the courage to ask her. I want her to say that she is, so that I can be too. I want her to say that she’ll never be happy, not really, so that I’ll know the hole isn’t only in me.

  “Dicuka, here’s some advice from your big sister. Either you’re sensitive, or you’re not. When you’re sensitive, you hurt more.”

  “Are we going to be okay?” I ask. “Someday?”

  “Yes,” she says. “No. I don’t know. One thing’s true: Hitler fucked us up for sure.”

  * * *

  Béla and I are now bringing in $60 a week, enough to try for a second child. I get pregnant. My daughter is born February 10, 1954. When I awaken from the anesthesia that American doctors routinely administered to all women in labor at that time, she is in the nursery. But I demand to hold my baby, I demand to nurse her. When the nurse brings her to me, I see that she is perfect and sleepy, not as big as her sister was when she was born, her nose so tiny, her cheeks so smooth.

  Béla brings Marianne, now six years old, to see the baby. “I got my sister! I got my sister!” Marianne celebrates, as though I have put away money in an envelope and ordered her a sister from a catalog, as though I have the capacity to always grant her wishes. She will soon also have a cousin, because Magda, who married Nat Shillman in 1953, is pregnant and will give birth to a daughter in October. She names her Ilona, after our mother.

  We name our own new daughter Audrey, after Audrey Hepburn. I am still dazed from the drugs the doctors used to sedate me. Even the intensity of labor, of meeting and nursing my baby for the first time, have taken on the numb quality of my life in hiding.

  * * *

  It is a reflex to expect the bad with the good. The first months of Audrey’s life, Béla studies for his CPA test as though preparing for the ultimate test, the one crucial trial that will determine forever whether or not he will find his place, his peace with himself and our choices.

  He doesn’t pass the test. Moreover, he is told that with his stutter, his accent, he will never get a job, no matter if he is able the earn his license.

  “There’s always going to be a block in the road,” he says, “no matter what I do.”

  I object. I reassure him. I say we’ll find a way, but I can’t stop my sister Klara’s voice from creeping into my head. Two cripples. How is that going to work out? I cry in the bathroom. I do it silently, come out cheerful. I don’t know that fears kept hidden only grow more fierce. I don’t know that my habits of providing and placating—of pretending—are only making us worse.

  CHAPTER 13

  You Were There?

  In the summer of 1955, when Marianne was seven and Audrey was one, we loaded up our old gray Ford and left Baltimore for El Paso, Texas. Demoralized by the lack of job prospects, tired of his brother’s judgment and resentments, worried about his own health, Béla had contacted his cousin, Bob Eger, hoping for advice. Bob was the adopted son of Béla’s great-uncle Albert, who had immigrated to Chicago with two of his brothers in the early 1900s, leaving the fourth brother—Béla’s grandfather—in Prešov to run the wholesaling business that Béla had inherited after the war. It was the Chicago Egers who had supported George’s immigration to America in the 1930s, and it was also they who had secured our opportunity for visas by registering the Eger family before the war. I was grateful for the generosity and foresight of the Chicago Egers, without whom we never could have made a home in America.

  But when Bob, who now lived with his wife and two children in El Paso, told Béla, “Come west!” I was worried that we might be walking into another dead end disguised as opportunity. Bob reassured us. He said the economy was booming in El Paso, that in a border town immigrants were less segregated and marginalized, that the frontier was a perfect place to start from scratch, to reinvent one’s life. He even helped Béla find a job as a CPA’s assistant at twice his Baltimore salary. “The desert air will be good for my lungs,” Béla said. “We’ll be able to afford to rent a house, not another tiny apartment.” And so I agreed.

  We tried to make the upheaval into a fun adventure, a vacation. We drove scenic highways, we stopped at motels with swimming pools, and got off the road early enough in the day to have a refreshing swim before dinner. Despite my anxieties over the move, the cost of gas and motels and restaurant meals, the miles stre
tching once again between Magda and me, I found myself smiling more often. Not the mask of a smile worn to reassure my family. The real kind, deep in my cheeks and my eyes. I felt a new camaraderie with Béla, who taught Marianne corny jokes and bounced Audrey in the water when we swam.

  In El Paso, the first thing I noticed was the sky. Open, uncluttered, vast. The mountains that girded the city to the north drew my gaze too. I was always looking up. At certain times of day, the angle of the sun would flatten the range into a faint cardboard cutout, a movie set, the peaks a uniform dull brown. And then the light would shift, the mountains rainbow into pink, orange, purple, red, gold, deep blue, the range popping into relief like an accordion stretched to expose all its folds.

  The culture, too, had dimension. I had expected the dusty, out-of-touch frontier village of a Western movie, a place with stoic, lonely men and lonelier women. But El Paso felt more European, more cosmopolitan, than Baltimore. It was bilingual. Multicultural without the stark segregation. And there was the border itself, the union of worlds. El Paso, Texas, and Juárez, Chihuahua, weren’t separate cities so much as two halves of the same whole. The Rio Grande cut through the middle, dividing the city between two countries, but the border was as arbitrary as it was distinct. I thought of my hometown: from Košice, to Kassa, to Košice again, the border changing everything, the border changing nothing. My English was still basic and I didn’t speak Spanish at all, but I felt less marginalized and ostracized here than I had in Baltimore, where we lived in a Jewish immigrant neighborhood, where we had expected to find shelter but instead felt exposed. In El Paso we were just part of the mix.

  * * *

  One afternoon soon after our move, I am at the neighborhood park with Audrey when I hear a mother call to her kids in Hungarian. I watch her, this other Hungarian mother, for a few minutes, expecting to recognize her, but then I chide myself. What a naïve assumption, that just because her voice is familiar, a mirror of my own, we might have anything in common. Yet I can’t stop tracking her as she and her children play, can’t let go of the feeling that I know her.

  Suddenly, I remember something I haven’t thought of since the night of Klara’s wedding: the postcard tucked into Magda’s mirror in Košice. The cursive script across the picture of the bridge: El Paso. How had I forgotten that ten years ago, Laci Gladstein moved here, to this city? Laci, the young man who was liberated with us at Gunskirchen, who was on the top of the train with Magda and me from Vienna to Prague, who held our hands in comfort, who I thought might marry Magda one day, who had come to El Paso to work in his aunt and uncle’s furniture store to save for medical school. El Paso, the place I thought looked in the postcard like the end of the world, the place where I now live.

  Audrey pulls me out of my reverie, demanding to get on the swings. As I lift her up, the Hungarian woman approaches the swing set with her son. I speak quickly to her, in Hungarian, before I can stop myself.

  “You’re Hungarian,” I say. “Maybe you know an old friend of mine who came to El Paso after the war.”

  She looks at me in that amused way that adults look at children, as though I am delightfully, impossibly naïve. “Who is your friend?” she asks. She is playing along.

  “Laci Gladstein.”

  Tears spring into her eyes. “I’m his sister!” she cries. She has read my code. Old friend. After the war. “He’s a doctor,” she says. “He goes by Larry Gladstone now.”

  How can I explain the way I felt in this moment? Ten years had passed since I rode with Laci on top of a train with other displaced survivors. In that decade, he had fulfilled his dream of becoming a doctor. Hearing this made no hope or ambition seem out of reach. He had reinvented himself in America. So could I.

  But that is only half the story. Standing in a park in the hot desert sun, I was indeed at the end of the world, farther in time and space than I’d ever been from the girl left for dead in a pile of bodies in a muggy forest in Austria. And yet I had never, since the war, been closer to her, either, because here I was almost acknowledging her to a stranger, here I was meeting a ghost from the past in broad daylight, while my daughter demanded to go higher and higher in the swing. Maybe moving forward also meant circling back.

  * * *

  I find Larry Gladstone in the phone book and wait a week or more before I make the call. His wife, an American, answers the phone. She takes a message, she asks several times how to spell my name. I tell myself he won’t remember me. That evening, Bob and his family come over to our house for dinner. Marianne has asked me to make hamburgers, and I make them the way my mother would have, the ground beef mixed with egg and garlic and breadcrumbs, rolled up like meatballs, served with Brussels sprouts and potatoes cooked with caraway seeds. When I bring the meal to the table, Marianne rolls her eyes. “Mom,” she says, “I meant American hamburgers.” She wants flattened patties served between tasteless white buns, with greasy french fries and a puddle of bland ketchup. She is embarrassed in front of Dickie and Barbara, her American cousins. Her disapproval stings. I have done what I have promised myself never to do. I have made her feel ashamed. The phone rings and I escape the table to answer it.

  “Edith,” the man says. “Mrs. Eger. This is Dr. Larry Gladstone.”

  He speaks in English, but his voice is the same. It brings the past into my kitchen, the sting of the wind from the top of the train. I am dizzy. I am hungry, as I was then, half starved. My broken back aches. “Laci,” I say, my own voice far away, as though it is coming through a radio in another room. Our shared past is pervasive yet unmentionable.

  “We meet again,” he says. We switch to Hungarian. He tells me about his wife and her philanthropic work, their three daughters, I tell him about my children and Béla’s aspirations to become a CPA. He invites me to visit his office, he welcomes my family to join his family for dinner. So begins—again—a friendship that will last the rest of our lives. When I hang up the phone, the sky is turning rose and gold. I can hear my family’s voices in the dining room. Bob’s son Dickie is asking his mother about me, am I really an American, why is my English so bad? My body tenses, the way it does when the past is too near. It’s like a hand thrown out in front of my children when the car brakes too fast. A reflex to protect. Since my pregnancy with Marianne, when I defied the doctor’s warning, when I chose that my life would always stand for more life, I resolved not to let the death camps cast a shadow over my children. That conviction has hardened into a single purpose: My children can’t ever know. They will never picture me skeletal with hunger, dreaming of my mother’s strudel under a smoke-thickened sky. It will never be an image they have to hold in their minds. I will protect them. I will spare them. But Dickie’s questions remind me that while I can choose my own silence, and I can choose the kinship or camouflage of others’ silence, I can’t choose what other people say or do when I’m not there. What might my daughters overhear? What might others tell them despite my efforts to keep the truth locked away?

  To my relief, Dickie’s mother moves the conversation in a new direction. She prompts Dickie and his older sister Barbara to tell Marianne about the best teachers at the school she will start in the fall. Has Béla instructed her to maintain the conspiracy of silence? Or is it something she has intuited? Is it something she does for my sake, my children’s sake, her own? Later, as their family gathers at the door to leave, I hear Dickie’s mother whisper to him in English, “Don’t ever ask Auntie Dicu about the past. It’s not something we talk about.” My life is a family taboo. My secret is safe.

  * * *

  There are always two worlds. The one that I choose and the one I deny, which inserts itself without my permission.

  In 1956, Béla passes the CPA test, earns his license, and a few months before our third child—Johnny, a son—is born, we buy a modest three-bedroom rambler on Fiesta Drive. There is nothing but desert behind the house—pink and purple ceniza blooms, red yucca flowers, the throb of rattlesnakes. Inside, we choose light-colored furnis
hings for the living room and the den. Over fresh papaya that Béla crosses the border to buy in the Juárez produce markets on Sunday mornings, we read the headlines. In Hungary, an uprising, Soviet tanks rolling in to quash the anti-Communist rebellion. Béla is terse with the girls, his stutter edging back. It is hot, I am very pregnant. We turn on the swamp cooler and gather around the TV in the den to watch the summer Olympics broadcast from Melbourne.

  We tune in just as Ágnes Keleti, a Jew from Budapest on the women’s gymnastics team, warms up for her floor routine. She is thirty-five, six years older than I am. If she had grown up in Kassa, or I in Budapest, we would have trained together. “Pay attention!” Béla tells the girls. “She’s Hungarian, like us.” To watch Ágnes Keleti take the floor is to watch my other half, my other self. The one who wasn’t sent to Auschwitz. (Keleti, I later find out, bought identification papers from a Christian girl in Budapest and fled to a remote village where she waited out the war, working as a maid.) The one whose mother lived. The one who picked up the seam of her old life after the war, who hasn’t let her hardships or her age destroy her dream. She lifts her arms, extends her body long, she is poised to begin. Béla cheers wildly. Audrey imitates him. Marianne studies me, how I lean, lean toward the TV. She doesn’t know I was a competitive gymnast once, much less that the same war that interrupted Ágnes Keleti’s life also interrupted—still intrudes on—mine. But I sense my daughter’s awareness of my held breath, of the way I follow Keleti’s body with my body, not just with my eyes. Béla and Marianne and Audrey applaud each flip. I am breathless when Keleti is slow and controlled, when she leans all the way down over her legs to touch the floor, and then revolves from a seated forward bend to a backward arch, and up into a handstand, all grace and fluid motion. Her routine is over.