Cafe Europa

by Ed Ifkovic

  Then Harold left our table, first chatting with Markov, who’d come back into the room and was ordering around two of the older waiters. Next he sauntered to the corner where the two Hungarian artists were busy over their sketchbooks. Startled, both looked up as Harold occupied an empty chair. He engaged the tall one in a lively conversation, though the shorter man kept nodding his head. Harold burst out laughing, slapping his side, and the shorter man looked confused by his behavior, a flash of irritation in his eyes, but then he laughed. The deaf and dumb one, I realized. Harold was talking in German, which surprised me, given what I knew of the Hungarians dislike of speaking the language of the Austrians.

  I heard him refer to Winifred and me—“the foreign ladies”—adding, in English, “so famous, those two. At least outside of Hungary.” That made no sense, but all three men stared at us, with Harold, the cheerleader, pointing rudely. The tall man tore off a sheet from his sketchbook and handed it to Harold who rushed back to our table and thrust the sheet down before us.

  “Look,” he gushed. “From Bertalan Pór.”

  The artist had used a thick pencil to sketch Cecelia and Marcus Blaine at their most imperious—slapdash caricatures really, cruel but painstakingly honest renderings of the pompous couple. Winifred found herself smiling, and I joined her. Cecelia’s nose was pointy now, pinched, upturned, with large, ocean-wide nostrils. Very Jonathan Swift. Her hair was a horrible nest of glittering baubles that looked like wild birds, caged. And Marcus, haughty with his dark dull eyes and cascading chins, grasped that elegant timepiece that seemed a body part peeking out the silk vest with the mother-of-pearl buttons.

  “Good Lord,” Winifred commented. “Bull’s-eye, this sketch.”

  Harold was grinning at me, clearly up to no good.

  “What?” I waited.

  “Ah, Miss Ferber, the deaf one—his name is Lajos Tihanyi—impossible to remember, I know, unless you’re…me…well, he wants to paint you. You! Your face, he says, is magic.”

  I groaned. “Will I end up looking like Cecelia Blaine?”

  “No, he likes you.”

  “He doesn’t know me to like me. This is ridiculous, Mr. Gibbon. What are they up to?”

  “Well, it seems Tihanyi’s father József owns a café nearby on Rákóczi at Szentkirály utca and is friends with the owner of this café. The father was a headwaiter at Weingruber’s—and here, years back. Well, Tihanyi and his friend Bertalan are planning a book of sketches. You know, café society, Budapest-style. The Paris of Eastern Europe. Lively nightlife till dawn. Bertalan tells me there are over six hundred cafés and coffee houses in this city, small and large, busy all day and night. Filled at ten o’clock at night. Some haven’t closed for twenty years, he says. Writers, artists, politicians—they spend all day and night at tables with Turkish coffee and wine and whiskey and newspapers—they’re the real heart of the busy city. Gypsy violinists nightly. Revolutions begin in them. People fall in love. Well, this month they’re here, Lajos and Bertalan, sketching the foreigners.” He grinned. “Like you two lovely ladies.”

  Winifred looked at them. “Really.”

  “Impossible,” I added. “What nerve!”

  I turned to face the two young men, both staring back, eager but also uncertain.

  “So it’s all set,” Harold concluded.

  “Hold on.” I touched his sleeve. “What’s all set?”

  “They want to make your acquaintance.”

  I shook my head. “Please. Not more of this kiss-the-hand blather.”

  “Well, you are in Europe, Miss Ferber.”

  I bit my lip. “I know where I am, sir. I excelled in geography at grammar school. Perhaps they don’t understand common courtesy.”

  Harold laughed. “The squirrelly-looking one, this Lajos, wants to know if you’ve been to Buffalo, New York. I think he said one of his paintings was exhibited there a year back or so—or will be exhibited there. He’s hard to follow.”

  “Tell him no one willingly travels to Buffalo. It’s cold most of the year. Ice gets into the soul there.”

  I gathered my belongings, nodding at Winifred, and stood up. “Time to leave this place.”

  Yet I didn’t move away. A breeze swept in from the terrace and I sighed.

  Harold smiled at me. “Everyone lingers in the Café Europa.”

  “Is something going to happen here?”

  Impudently, he winked at me. “Everything happens here. But you’ll have to wait and see.”

  Chapter Three

  Winifred touched my elbow and whispered, “Edna, don’t leave yet. Look.” She pointed.

  Her words were interrupted by a sweep of violin music filling the room.

  Harold shouted, “Ah, good. Now for some czárdás music. Hungarian folk music. And then some Gypsy music, melancholy and haunting.”

  I sat back down, thrilled.

  The old violinist, his instrument tucked under his chin, began playing and singing in a voice that cracked and growled, lost notes, flattened them, but the passion was there, deep and throaty. The rhythmic Magyar tongue soothed, though the mournful tune made me flash to an image of my mother condemning my sojourn in Budapest, clicking her tongue at her errant daughter, suddenly a rebel.

  At that moment an enormous man leaning on a gold-tipped cane slowly walked into the café. He settled into a chair near the platform, nodded as Markov hurriedly placed a bottle of slivovitz on the table, the fiery plum brandy that made me shiver with one sip. In a scratchy voice, quivering, he said, “Köszönöm.” Thank you. Markov bowed and backed off.

  Harold whispered, “János Szabó.”

  “And he is?” I asked. I watched the man adjust his gold-rimmed monocle.

  “Nobody, really. He’s in his eighties. He lives in the hotel, gets fatter by the year, and only comes to the café when his darling appears. So…”

  “Mr. Gibbon, what are you talking about?”

  The old man tapped his fingers on the table, impatient. He was wearing a long mulberry-colored silk dustcoat, stained and frayed, with dark gray trousers. He looked shabby.

  “You’ll see.” A smug smile from Harold. “A man smitten twenty or so years ago in a Vienna tavern.”

  When the music stopped, there was a smattering of applause. A raised glass, a salute. Someone yelled out a request—or at least I assume it was, for the violinist nodded and began a rollicking song. A man at the table behind us punctuated the lyrics with his own off-key contribution. The violinist yelled and stamped his foot. Harold leaned into my neck and translated quickly.

  “A drinking song.” Harold paraphrased the words in a singsong voice: “Away with sorrow and with tears, we fill our hearts with wine. No water for me. A Magyar drinks wine. A German swallows beer, but a Magyar hungers for the grape. With tears we sing…” He broke off. “A loose translation.”

  “Jolly,” I told him.

  “Drink up,” Harold said. “Hungarians savor life lived with melancholy eyes.”

  Halfway through the song, the violinist stopped and bowed toward the doorway.

  A woman approached the platform. The old man in the mulberry-colored coat bellowed out a name—“Zsuzsa, Zsuzsa”—and folks joined the sporadic applause.

  She bowed toward Szabó, who raised his glass to her, but the smile on her face vanished as she spotted Cassandra and Mrs. Pelham sitting nearby. She hesitated, looked back over her shoulder as though debating whether to leave, but then, with a fatalistic shrug, approached the violinist who, of course, kissed her hand. The other two men kissed her hand. She expected it.

  “The plot thickens,” Harold told us. “Zsuzsa Kós, the cabaret singer and actress from the comic opera stage and the rowdy beer halls of Vienna.”

  “Are we supposed to recognize her?”

  “Only the old men remember her now.” He indicated János Szabó, whose f
ace was bright red.

  Zsuzsa was a fleshy, buxom woman perhaps in her mid-fifties, maybe older, a little haggard looking, but it could just be the garish red lipstick, the pancake powder slathered on her wrinkled face, lavish stage makeup probably worn to hide from sunlight. Poured into a snug canary-yellow dress, with a tattered hem that dragged on the carpet, a Moroccan shawl draped over her shoulders, she’d clearly never reconciled her weight with the wardrobe she’d kept from her days onstage. A sensual woman, clinking bracelets sliding up and down her arms, her too abundant dyed-blond hair a hayfield under the fringed mantilla covering her head. A Lillian Russell with a classic hourglass figure now gone to seed. Yet the old men in the room put down their newspapers and saluted her. Others applauded wildly.

  “Years back she was famous in Vienna, popular at the Burgtheater, a confidante of Franz Josef’s current mistress, Katharina Schratt. Songs were written for her—about her. You’d see her reading a French novel and sipping tea laced with rum at a table in the Café Central, or riding around the Ringstrasse in a fiacre drawn by a pair of black Russian trotters. Shopping for jewelry on Koerntnerstrasse for diamonds. She was the first to use blood-red lacquer on her fingernails, a cause célèbre, really.”

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “Time, for one. You can’t be young and pretty forever. And a falling out with some women in Franz Josef’s circle, for another. Perhaps a snub to la Schratt. So she drifted back to Hungary where she was born, now lives off the courtesy of old admirers, a pittance here, pittance there.” He whispered. “Jànos Szabó pays for her tiny room at the Hotel Árpád.” Then Harold swallowed his words. “There’s a trace of madness, I hear—a slipping from reality.”

  Winifred sneered. “Is no one safe from your gossip, Mr. Gibbon?”

  Eyes wide, bright. “No one. And no one should be. Gossip is the…spice of my life.”

  Winifred turned away.

  “But she seems startled by Cassandra’s presence,” I went on.

  “As well she should be. Zsuzsa Kós was the go-between employed by Cecelia Blaine to find a count or duke to marry her Cassandra. With Zsuzsa’s connections, feeble though they are these days, and the fact that once a month she sings in this café, well…”

  “And a pocket full of coins, I imagine…”

  “…the union is blessed. Well, maybe not blessed—but, at least, happily contracted.”

  “But why is she startled to see her?”

  He was nodding wildly. “It’s a wonderful story, really. Cassandra doesn’t like her, considers her a destructive woman, a grubbing conniver, a panderer. You know, they had been friendly here because Cassandra loved Zsuzsa’s Gypsy songs. Zsuzsa is rumored to have Gypsy blood—you see it in the corners of her eyes, that wariness that allures. That was one of the rumors that got her exiled from Vienna, in fact. A taboo, that blood. Anyway, Cassandra believes Zsuzsa sold her out for hard cash.”

  I stressed my words. “She did, indeed, but I would think Cassandra would be angrier at her parents.”

  “Didn’t you notice, Miss Ferber? She is. She won’t obey them, though she knows she has to marry the count. But Zsuzsa is the face of crowns clinking in the pocket as well as back-room negotiation. And Zsuzsa, even at her age, is rumored to be a woman generous with her affairs, supposedly many of them, a woman not to be mentioned in some parts of polite society. Zsuzsa routinely lived with lovers—unmarried. What the Hungarians call vadházasság, a wild marriage. Cassandra repeatedly threw that in her face. They’ve had scenes—one nasty one in here.” He chuckled. “Memorable. I took notes.”

  At that moment, her steps tentative, Zsuzsa approached Cassandra, but Cassandra waved her back.

  “No,” she yelled.

  Confused, twisting around, Zsuzsa stumbled toward the platform, and the old man extended his hand, drew her up next to him. For a moment the look in her eyes was dark, but the violinist whispered in her ear. Her smile became bittersweet. Standing under those bright chandeliers up on that platform, she sparkled like old crystal struck by a shaft of afternoon sun. For a second I understood the beauty she once was. Drawing in her breath—I feared her generous bosom would escape the buttoned bodice meant for a more svelte performer—she sang. Beautifully, to my surprise and pleasure. She had a rich contralto, rough at the edges, raspy, but there was something—what?—absolutely heartfelt, sure, raw. She sang a melancholic ballad that played off the sad violin, a hint of tears in her thick whiskey voice, a lament that silenced the café. Even Vladimir Markov, repositioning a vase of flowers on an empty table, paused, eyes half-shut, his body swaying. He looked ready to weep. In fact, everyone looked ready to cry inconsolably. János Szabó sobbed out loud.

  Then Cassandra spoke loudly over Zsuzsa’s singing, deliberately rude, shattering the mood. Mrs. Pelham placed a hand on the girl’s arm but Cassandra shrugged it off.

  “I want to hear ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’ now,” she called out, naming that dreary American ditty then ubiquitous throughout Europe. “Come on along, come on along, it’s the greatest…” All through my travels, it followed me like a pesky family dog. And now, to my horror, in regal Budapest. Zsuzsa narrowed her eyes. Tipsy and plagued by a trace of madness, she faltered, finishing her plaintive song so softly no one could hear her.

  Then, like that, it was over. The one song ended, the aged chanteuse refused to start another. She glared at Cassandra as the violinist helped her join Szabó at his table. Quietly Markov, bowing, placed a glass of cognac before her. She smiled her thanks, though I noticed her hand trembled as she lifted the glass. Amazing. This woman, this once-celebrated performer in the dated dress, somehow demanded attention. She had glided across the floor with the grace of a Broadway ingénue. Zsuzsa would never relinquish the image she had of herself. She didn’t have to. She had fashioned a definition of herself that satisfied. I liked that about her. Worlds apart, Winifred Moss, the independent suffragette, and Zsuzsa Kós, the unrepentant coquette, both understood what was needed for a woman to survive in a man’s narrowly charted world.

  Winifred was talking about Cassandra’s errant behavior—“A hickory stick, mind you, that’s what I’d recommend”—as Harold returned the drawing to Bertalan Pór and motioned toward us, which rankled.

  Markov nudged the boy György toward Zsuzsa’s table, a bottle of spring water in his hands. The jittery boy carried it as though it were some precious Arthurian chalice while Markov tsked. Just as he placed the bottle before Zsuzsa, who smiled sweetly at him, another man walked over, touched Zsuzsa on the shoulder affectionately, and sat down. She looked startled—and unhappy—with the interloper.

  It was the elusive man I’d spotted earlier, the stranger who’d hidden in the shadows by the entrance, watching Cassandra. The man who’d disappeared into those shadows. Even the boy György had been bothered by the intensity of his look then. Now he was back. He called out to the boy in a brusque American voice, unfriendly. “Another glass. Am I invisible?”

  Stumbling, probably not grasping the harsh English, György disappeared into the kitchen and didn’t reappear. Meanwhile Harold was back at our table.

  “Who is that man?” I flicked my head toward the burly man who was watching Markov approach with a goblet on a tray.

  “Why do you assume I know everyone in the Café Europa?”

  “Because you tell us you do.”

  He grinned. “My job.”

  “Sooner or later you’re going to be in trouble.”

  “Then I’ll write about it.”

  “I hope I don’t regret my words, my dear Mr. Gibbon.”

  “Well, I never regret mine, Miss Ferber.”

  “And that’s probably a character flaw you should work on.”

  He guffawed and banged the table, “Miss Ferber, you are something else.” He winked at Winifred. “Ain’t she, though?” Winifred ignored him. Then his face tightened. �
��Jonathan Wolf. That’s his name. A rich American who appeared here a few weeks ago.” A puzzled look on his face. “He always sits alone. That’s why I’m surprised he’s there with Zsuzsa and Szabó now. Strange.”

  “Maybe not so strange.”

  “Why so?”

  “I saw him watching Cassandra earlier from the doorway. And his look was icy.”

  My remarks confused Harold. He wasn’t happy having missed something in the café.

  “He’s mysterious, I’ll grant you that. One time I saw him approach Mrs. Pelham in the corridor, but she snapped at him. He was ready to ask her something. She had little patience with the man. I learned that he’s from the East Coast. Boston, someone said. Lots of family money. A Harvard graduate. In the city on business, supposedly. Maybe he knew the Blaines back in Connecticut.”

  I sat back. “If so, he didn’t look happy to see the pouting daughter sitting here carrying on.”

  Harold looked at us with mooncalf eyes. “Maybe she broke his heart back in the States.”

  Winifred said dryly, “Mr. Gibbon, for a hard-bitten reporter, you do have a streak of knight-in-shining-armor romance coursing through your veins.”

  Harold winked conspiratorially and wagged a finger at her. “That’ll just be our little secret, ladies.”

  Chapter Four

  Winifred and I strolled past the outdoor tables at Tabán, a tiny eatery on the Corso, steps up from the murky waters of the Danube. We’d been walking along the embankment, behind the wrought-iron railings, watching the sun glinting on the Buda hills. A serene June day, the air rich with the intoxicating aroma of baking bread from an unseen kitchen. A whiff of sulfur from the mineral baths across the river. A short distance away, the Hotel Árpád caught the midday sunshine, and its terra-cotta marble façade gleamed like an old earthenware pot. Earlier a light drizzling rain had fallen, and the landscape still glistened with beads of wetness. Idly, we watched Vladimir Markov throw open the expansive doors onto the terrace, and two waiters cleaned the slate-top tables and chairs, opened the huge striped umbrellas. When Markov clapped his hands, satisfied, the waiters left the terrace. Within seconds a man sat down at one of the tables and opened a newspaper. It was István Nagy, I realized, the poet we’d seen before, his face lost in the newspaper. A waiter poured coffee for him.