Cafe Europa

by Ed Ifkovic

  An amused flick of his head as he tore off the page, crumpled it, and blithely tossed it to the edge of the table. A passing waiter deftly removed it, and bowed.

  Winifred picked at a piece of the cherry strudel and twisted her chair so that her back was to Harold. “Our Soon-to-be-Countess Cassandra, that delightful young American, woke me up last night,” Winifred began.

  “Where?”

  “You know that she and Mrs. Pelham, her dreadful duenna, have that suite of rooms at the end of my floor. Her mother and father are safely ensconced on the above floor, the entire floor. Their servants stomp a little too loudly late at night, by the way. Anyway, I was readying for bed, perhaps eleven last night, putting down my book, when I heard Cassandra passing my door. Despite Mrs. Pelham’s pleading for quiet, Cassandra was retelling some joke someone had told her at supper. Laughing like a hyena, that girl, disturbing the quiet corridor.”

  “Well, she is spirited.”

  “I’d use a different word, dear Edna.”

  “Did you say anything?”

  “No, of course not. With Mrs. Pelham grumbling—her rumbling was strangely more annoying than Cassandra’s cackle—the two managed to enter their rooms without waking the entire floor.”

  At that moment Mrs. Pelham appeared in the doorway, one foot tapping angrily. She glanced behind her, impatient, and said something to a slow-moving Cassandra. Ever vigilant, Markov scurried to greet them, ushering the pair to the same table they’d occupied the day before.

  Mrs. Pelham snapped her fingers, ordering tea for both, but Cassandra was shaking her head. “Nothing for me.”

  “Now, dear…”

  An icy voice, cutting. “I said nothing for me.”

  Mrs. Pelham sat back, narrowed her eyes, and kept still. She addressed Markov, waiting by the table. “Two teas, sir. Acacia honey with tea.” A long pause. “I have a spring cold.”

  Cassandra was dressed in a blue satin morning dress, her hair dressed in a pompadour with an abundance of ivory and silver hair combs. But there was something wrong with her face—yes, she’d powdered her cheeks, gently rouged her cheekbones, but unevenly, haphazardly.

  Mrs. Pelham, drawing attention to her incomplete toilette, hinted that Cassandra had best return to her rooms—“Do I need to tell you again?”

  Cassandra shrugged her shoulders and took in the room. The crowded café was staring, mesmerized by her entrance.

  At that moment her eyes caught mine, and I saw curiosity there. She held eye contact with me. I didn’t know how to interpret her startled look. There was irritation, yes, but hesitancy, fear, anger, a welter of flashing emotions the untutored girl entertained. Something was wrong. In that second I felt a jolt of electricity. It was as though she’d been given a secret she found baffling and was asking me for an answer. But that was impossible. Her lips trembled. My pulse quickened. What was going on here?

  Winifred whispered, “Our spring daffodil is losing her petals.”

  Intrigued, Harold had put down his pencil, folded his arms across his chest, and blatantly stared at the young girl. He cleared his throat. “Ah, Miss…?”

  I broke in. “Harold, no.”

  “What?”

  “You’re going to say something I’ll regret.”

  He chuckled. “God, you’re no fun, Miss Ferber.”

  “Allow someone her privacy.”

  “Then I’d be out of work.”

  “Maybe you should be,” Winifred sniped.

  He winked at me. “See? She’s thawing already.”

  Winifred growled and stuck her fork into the cherry strudel.

  But at that moment the skittish György emerged from the kitchen with a tray, a pot of hot tea, cups, a basket of breads and biscuits. On his face that foolish country-bumpkin boy smile. He was nervous approaching the beautiful girl. His hands shook, and the teapot shifted. He began bowing before he approached her table, not the wisest behavior for a scattered young man toting a tray. Mrs. Pelham nodded at him as he placed it on a side table and lifted the teapot.

  Cassandra cried, “I told you I don’t want tea.”

  Mrs. Pelham breathed in. “I requested…”

  “I don’t care what you requested. Didn’t you hear me say…”

  The boy twitched, swung around, as though looking for Markov. He held the teapot in the air, suspended, hands shaking, uncertain what to do.

  Mrs. Pelham tapped his arm emphatically. “Here, child.”

  György jumped as if slapped, and hot tea sloshed from the decanter, mostly onto the table and floor, but a few drops landed on Cassandra’s sleeve. She screamed and threw out her arm.

  The boy backed away.

  Again, Mrs. Pelham touched his arm. “Leave it, young man. Do you hear me?”

  Cassandra glared. “Speak English.”

  Unintelligible language seeped from his mouth—probably no language, this amalgam of Slavic, German, and English. The boy froze, his face crimson, his eyes blinking madly. I thought he might break down sobbing.

  “This is unacceptable,” I declared.

  “Well, that’ll end that boy’s infantile infatuation,” Winifred added.

  Mrs. Pelham glanced our way. Harold frowned, tipping his chair so two of the legs were in the air.

  Vladimir Markov rushed in from the kitchen. “What? What? Was ist los?” His glance took in the petrified boy and the by-now hysterical Cassandra who was waving her arm in the air as though it had caught fire.

  “Him,” she cried. “This…this child is allowed to dump boiling water on the guests. Is this how things are here?”

  Mrs. Pelham reached out to stop her flow of words, but Cassandra pushed on. “I want him fired.”

  Markov said softly, “So sorry, dear madam. He is a boy. In training. My wife’s…” He stopped. “My apologies, please.” He swung around and gripped György’s arm tightly. “Leave now.”

  But György was stuck to the spot, though he’d begun swaying back and forth like an unstable toy. Finally Markov shoved him, smacking him across his skinny chest, and the boy grunted. Stunned, hurt, he walked away slowly, and my heart went out to him, an adolescent boy who found himself mired in muck. As the kitchen door slammed behind him, I heard a woman’s voice, soothing, comforting, a run of Slavic words that ended in what sounded like a sob. The boy’s or hers—I didn’t know.

  Infuriated, Harold stood up and addressed Cassandra. “Was that necessary?”

  She drew in her lips, her eyes dark marbles. “How dare you? You gossipmonger.”

  Harold glanced toward the kitchen. “He’s a boy.”

  “He’s a servant.”

  Mrs. Pelham bristled. “Cassandra, my dear…”

  “Enough,” the girl snarled. “Drink your spilled tea and leave me alone.”

  The room drifted into silence, heavy and uncomfortable, broken by Cassandra. “I cannot sleep in this country. I want to go home.”

  Ms. Pelham ignored her.

  Cassandra began to sob quietly.

  Vladimir Markov was at a loss how to handle the woman, fidgeting, shifting his feet, watching her from across the room. Finally, with a shrug, he addressed Harold. “Sir, I told my wife her family should stay goat herders in the mountains. The goats…they do not care what you say to them.”

  The preposterous lines enlivened Harold, who whooped and banged on the table.

  Suddenly Cassandra stood up and pointed out onto the terrace. Everyone near her followed the gesture. Zsuzsa Kós was standing by an iron grill near the garden in conversation with another woman, both in flowery summer dresses. Zsuzsa wore a monstrous hat with ostrich feathers and paradise aigrettes, something that may have looked natural in one of her old musical reviews but now seemed tawdry, best left in an attic trunk.

  “You,” Cassandra yelled. “You.”

 
Zsuzsa didn’t realize she was being addressed until her companion, probably sensing every eye in the café riveted on the pair, nudged Zsuzsa.

  Cassandra ignored pleas from Mrs. Pelham and headed toward the terrace. “You! You betrayed me. You made believe you were my friend. The afternoons in City Park. The picnics on Margaret Island. Suppers at the Green Band. And then you sold me out for a few pennies.”

  Zsuzsa walked toward the opening but stopped, uncertain. “Cassandra, you foolish child.” She spoke in German, harsh, bitter. “Leave me alone.” Her friend pulled at her sleeve, but Zsuzsa shook her off.

  Cassandra talked back at the tables in the café. “Everyone talks German. Whatever happened to English?”

  Then Cassandra rushed at the older woman and slapped Zsuzsa in the face. It sounded like gunfire. Or the crack of thunder.

  A horrible moment, raw, cruel, ugly. Cassandra faltered, overwhelmed by her own fury, opening her mouth to speak. Nothing came out. Rubbing her hand against her face, Zsuzsa let out a trapped animal’s gravelly howl—I swear we all trembled—and then disappeared onto the quay. Her companion stood flabbergasted. Cassandra, penitent, waved sloppily at all of us, and then retreated to her table where she hung her head and sobbed.

  I was surprised to see that Mrs. Pelham wore a tight-lipped, satisfied look that translated—See, all of you. The American brat. See how my labors are rewarded. See what I have to deal with. Madness all around me.

  Cassandra looked up and caught me looking at her. I shook my head slowly as I tried to convey—what? My concern, my worry about her. No mother to guide her, as they used to say in Victorian novels. And I thought of my own mother demanding that I obey, stay at her side, comfort her. I grew dizzy.

  For a second Cassandra shut her eyes, as if debating something. Then, startling her chaperone, she jumped up and mumbled something about leaving. “Have to. Have to. This place…”

  She headed toward the terrace but staggered, as though drunk, one hand grasping a chair rail. She swung around and headed toward the door into the hotel lobby. She stopped, her right hand fluttering in the air, finally touching one of the gaudy hairpins. It slipped out and fell to the floor. She ignored it. Then, nearing my table, she toppled into an empty chair next to me.

  Winifred gasped, but I remained calm. I had become part of the drama in the old café, but I didn’t know what that meant.

  “You,” the girl got out. “The American writer. You write those short stories in the magazines. I’ve read…” She glanced at Winifred, but then turned her body so that she was facing me, leaning in confidentially. Close up, behind the sloppily applied powder and rouge, I saw a pale face, blotchy and streaked.

  “What?”

  “You. You watch me. You look at me as if I’m…” She stopped, at a loss for words. “Like I’m hurting. You see that. Your eyes. You are…”

  “Edna Ferber, my dear.”

  She swung her head back and forth. “I know—I read a story…You…I need to talk to an American. I need someone who doesn’t know me…I need to ask you…”

  I touched her hand, resting on the table. “Of course.”

  “People say I’m a fool, but I’m not, really. You think I don’t hear them talking here? A spoiled girl, just an empty…shell. But”—she glanced around the room, so many eyes on her—“I can’t understand this world here, these people, these…My mother tells me…I can’t make sense of things. I missed something. Maybe not. I don’t know. I don’t understand what Count Frederic says to me…his English is so bad…now Endre he…”

  “Please,” I began, but she held up her hand.

  “I…My German is so bad. My French…my Hungarian is ten words maybe…I just want to hear everything in English. Is that so bad? I don’t understand things any more…” She mustered a gaze so intense I jerked back my head. “How do I know what’s happening to me?”

  She broke down, sobbing into a sleeve.

  Mrs. Pelham had been standing next to the table, rumbling like a stockyard bull. In the most emphatic English accent I’d ever heard, she swelled up and roared, “Stuff and nonsense, young lady.” She pulled Cassandra’s sleeve and hissed through clenched teeth. “Your mother will be horrified at this…this display of hysterics.”

  Cassandra allowed herself to be pulled out of the chair. As she was led to the doorway, she glanced back before disappearing into the hallway.

  “My Lord.” Winifred was bothered. “What was that all about?”

  I was silent for a minute. “Something has happened to her.”

  “But what?”

  “A spoiled, indulged young girl has suddenly looked into a mirror and doesn’t like what she sees.”

  “She’s just another vain, dreadful rich girl.”

  I shook my head emphatically. “Oh no. I don’t think so, dear Winifred. This time she saw darkness that scared her.”

  “Her soul?” Winifred added, a remark that I didn’t expect from her.

  “No.” I struggled with the words. “Darkness coming at her.”

  Winifred and I were two genial travel companions who’d come to Budapest to see the sights, but now, shaken, we sat wordless in that old café.

  Our silence was broken by a loud voice. In a strained, phlegmatic voice, thick with bile, the poet István Nagy, his fingers idly twirling the fuchsia scarf that circled his neck, told the room in accented English, “Ah, the Americans. They continue to think that they discovered the Old World. We are their play toy to do with as they see fit.”

  Chapter Six

  Late that afternoon Winifred and I returned from sightseeing at St. Matthias Church in the Buda hills to find gifts waiting for us. Bertalan Pór had delivered two exquisite drawings—simple but delightful renderings of the Chain Bridge at the foot of Castle Hill. Not realistic depictions, for the bright colored pencil strokes exaggerated, but the opposite: a nighttime landscape captured through the prism of hot fever. Arc lights threw ghostly auras over the steel girders.

  Winifred gushed her appreciation, muttered about Matisse’s reinvention of color and the wild beasts that were defining the world of art. I simply appreciated the gesture, though I doubted I’d display the drawing prominently back in helter-skelter Chicago.

  A note accompanying the drawings invited the two of us to join both men at five for coffee and pastry at the celebrated Gerbeaud’s confectionary on Vörösmarty tér. Written in formal, respectful German, addressing us with the proper distance and etiquette, the note seemed a royal writ, so careful the penmanship, signed first by Bertalan Pór and then by Lajos Tihanyi.

  “Of course we will,” Winifred told me.

  “Isn’t such an invitation a little awkward?” I asked. “I mean, two men we scarcely know. Unmarried women in Budapest do not go out unchaperoned with strange men.”

  Winifred pointed to the drawings. “Of course we know them, Edna. And, yes, thankfully, they are strange men—otherwise I’d shun them.”

  That made little sense, but I smiled. The confections at Gerbeaud’s patisserie were legendary according to my Baedeker guide. I dressed in a navy blue Eton suit and a soft hat with a single rose pinned to the front. At five o’clock, promptly, Winifred and I strolled through two squares, past the Váci Utca, entered the eatery and were greeted in English by an effusive hostess.

  “I thought we blended in,” Winifred said. “I’m trying to look Hungarian.”

  I laughed. “It’s the shoes, they tell me.”

  “Mine are cracked and worn at the heel.”

  “Exactly.”

  Gerbeaud’s thrived on its Old World ambience. Mottled marble-topped tables surrounded by dark red velvet-covered chairs. Gold-gilt woodwork, gleaming chandeliers, a long glass-fronted counter with a mouth-watering display of frosted cakes and tortes. The aroma was intoxicating, the rich chocolate and vanilla cream puffs, the baked pastry, the steaming coffee
drinks with whipped cream fizzed on top, the whiff of coffee ice cream served in deep, slender glasses. Waiters sailed by us with trays covered in tempting treats. A crystal bowl held mounds of chocolate truffles wrapped in silver. Tables were pushed close to one another, the heat of the day making the air thick. At the back of the room, a chamber orchestra played waltzes, but quietly, as if from a gramophone hidden in a distant room.

  Although I was absorbed in the utter sweetness of the room, Winifred was telling me that the Hungarian artists were already at a table, both standing, with Bertalan Pór waving and at his side Lajos Tihanyi, a grin on his face, his hand raised in the air. Two genteel souls—nothing like the shrimp seated with them. A man who remained seated, though his hands fluttered in the air like manic birds of prey. Harold Gibbon, always the unwanted guest.

  We joined them, enduring the classic kissing of the hand, the bowing, the stylized European civility long disappeared from America. I was starting to enjoy its ritual, though a part of me craved down-home Chicago brashness and swagger, folks bumping you on Michigan Avenue without so much as a how-de-do.

  “Harold, you surprise me,” I said to him.

  He snickered. “I wasn’t following you.”

  “No,” Bertalan Pór said resignedly, “he was following us.”

  Lajos Tihanyi attempted some incoherent sentence, looked frustrated, and then scribbled in Hungarian on the small notebook he obviously always had at his disposal. Bertalan Pór took the torn slip from him and smiled. “My friend insists that Mr. Gibbon has a coterie of spies relaying the whereabouts of anyone he wants to visit.”

  Tihanyi guffawed. In his rumpled light tan summer suit with the oversized brown buttons and the white linen shirt, a size too large, he appeared a boy jester. But perhaps I was being unfair: Tihanyi, despite those intense but droopy eyes, so direct and deep under arched brows, had been born with the gargoyle face so that he’d always appear the buffoon. But no simpleton, he—truly the man defied his appearance. Those eyes told you he was seeing everything, analyzing, digesting, loving, celebrating. Nothing got past the man whose penetrating stare read someone’s character in a heartbeat. It was easy to miss his intensity.