by Miriam Sved
‘Yes, in fact it is almost too obvious, only 2n–2 + 1 for an n-sided polygon. Do you know that you have stumbled on to a branch of a field called Ramsey theory? I have never paid it much attention before but I think I will make a study of it. The classic Ramsey theory problem is about being at a party and the number of connected people one will inevitably encounter. But of course physicists tend to go for it too because it might guarantee the emergence of structure and order on a cosmic level if you have enough variables, a universe of sufficient size. To anyone who does not understand the mathematics it might even seem like the work of a divinity.’
There was a long pause, then Ildiko repeated flatly, ‘The work of a divinity.’ She was looking at Pali, her face completely expressionless.
I was in an agony to speak to her, although I did not know what I could say in my defence. I gave Pali your problem because I could not work up the courage to kiss him.
Still without once glancing in my direction, she said, ‘I have to go,’ and began to pack up her satchel.
‘Wait,’ I said, as Tibor said, ‘But we have not discussed what to do next regarding the professor.’
Ildiko turned to him. ‘There is nothing to do next. Clearly he is not interested or he would have requested another meeting, he would have asked to see more of Pali’s work.’
Pali said, ‘We have not discussed whether we might get to a Ramsey theory proof.’
Then Ildiko rounded on Pali. ‘Get the damn proof yourself,’ she said, quite fiercely.
Everyone fell silent. It was a terrible moment. Pali’s face was impassive but he took a step backwards, almost as though he had been struck, his hands moving jerkily in front of him.
‘I am sorry,’ Ildiko said, her voice unsteady. Her face was flushed. ‘I must go home. I am needed at home.’
Levi got up with her and put an arm over her shoulders. ‘I’ll come with you,’ he said. ‘Let me walk you out of the park at least.’
‘No.’ She shrugged away from him and began to walk quickly down the path, saying as she went, ‘I’m sorry. Really. I will see you here next Thursday.’
I watched stupidly for a few seconds as she strode away, then I recovered my senses and shoved my things into my bag. ‘I have to go too,’ I said to the others. ‘I need to speak to her. Tibor, I will try to come to your meeting if I can.’ And I hurried after Ildi.
She was walking at a fast clip, already some distance away on the path by the small lake. I had to run to catch up.
She did not slow her pace when I fell into step beside her. I had no plan for what to say to her, so the two of us only hurried along in silence.
Finally we came to a bench and I touched her tentatively on the arm. ‘Ildiko? Can we just sit for a minute? You have tired me out.’
She stopped abruptly and seemed to wilt a little, some of the stiffness leaving her body, looking around almost as if she didn’t know where she was. Wisps of hair drifted loose around her face. I took her arm and she let me lead her to the bench. The castle facade was looming over us and children played football in the distance, their shouted voices floating towards us.
‘I’m sorry,’ I started, but she waved me quiet.
So I sat and waited for an eruption of anger, which previously I had only ever seen her direct at others, never at me.
Eventually she said, ‘What an idiot I am.’ She did not sound angry so much as tired.
‘You are not! If there is an idiot here it is me. I don’t know what possessed me to tell Pali about the upper limit problem. You mustn’t blame him for it, it was all my doing.’
Ildiko waved her hand in that same dismissive gesture, not looking at me. ‘Of course, one can’t blame Pali for anything. He is as blameless as a child.’ She paused. ‘A rich, precocious child with all the advantages in the world. Probably he would have found it out anyway. He would have … I don’t know … sniffed it out of the air around us, the way he always knows when someone is working on something interesting. It doesn’t matter how hard I work or how clever I think myself, Pali will always finish first.’
She sounded so downcast, so defeated, I almost wished for her to be angry instead.
‘Is it so bad?’ I said quietly. ‘That Pali knows about the problem and is working on it? The work is the same either way, and he will help us get to a proof quicker.’
She looked up from her hands, looked straight at me. ‘But don’t you see, Eszti? There is more at stake than this one proof.’
I looked back at her blankly.
‘Weren’t you the one describing what is happening in Vienna?’
‘Oh, that.’ I felt embarrassed to have my hysterical fears thrown back at me.
‘Yes, that.’ She got up from the bench and walked a little way down the path, turned abruptly and came back to stand in front of me. ‘I thought you understood. We need to get out, as soon as we can. Preferably out of Europe altogether.’ She was no longer defeated but flushed and bright-eyed. ‘I thought that if I could make enough progress on the upper limit problem we could send it to the Annals or the American Journal of Mathematics. Somewhere affiliated with a university that might help us to emigrate, especially if your cousins there will be sponsors.’
I suppose I will seem very dense when I say that this sounded radical to me. But all our talk of war, of the little psychopath and the risks of staying in Hungary, before then it had been somehow contained and removed from reality, an elaborate mental exercise or game – and always focused first and foremost on Pali.
‘We will try to leave,’ I said to Ildiko, feeling like some slow, blinking creature in the afternoon sun. ‘All of us, as we have discussed, we will get Pali a fellowship and then the rest of us can follow.’
But I could hear the hollow thump with which the words fell, this refrain that had always been a soothing mantra. Ildiko was shaking her head. ‘It won’t work, Eszti. Nothing is happening fast enough. Nothing will happen if we leave it up to the others.’
I think I knew what she meant, but like a child facing a disappointment and determined not to accept it I shook my head and looked at her vacantly.
She sat down next to me again. ‘I love Tibor,’ she said gently. ‘You know he is a dear friend. But these are all his ideas, his plans, and he is not … I don’t know how to put it into words. His heart is not in reality. I don’t believe that he really wants to get out and start a new life. I know he says he wants that for all of us, perhaps he even thinks he does. But what he likes is the heroics, making elaborate plans to save others and put himself at risk.’ I went to protest but she shook her head and went on, ‘He is very noble, I have nothing but admiration for him. But those political groups of his, all his comrades looking up to him – he can’t leave them behind. He will probably work out a way to get Pali to safety, and then he will turn to his next project and plan the next rescue, and the next. He will never leave, and if we don’t make a plan for ourselves it will be too late.’
I stared at her, with the wisps of hair floating around her head, her eyes bright, a little manic. I had the sudden feeling that she had become a different person; she had rushed on ahead of me while I was not paying attention.
‘What about you and Levi?’ I said.
She blew the hair out of her face with a quick, exasperated breath. ‘Poor Levi. He will be in the cinema when the troops march in, or the theatre.’ She spoke so coolly that I must have looked shocked. ‘I am not saying this to be cruel, Eszti, I am very fond of him. I might have even married him eventually if you and Tibor got married.’ (Such a strange comment: her marriage was contingent on mine? It dropped like a hard little shell into my flooded mind and I did not have the quickness to swim after it.) ‘But someone like Levi,’ she went on, ‘he has never known any hardship, nothing has gone very wrong his whole life, and he thinks he can charm his way out of any situation. He thinks that he will smile winningly at
the Wehrmacht and they will let him go about his life and us with him.’
A kind of numbness or detachment was coming over me, as though Ildiko’s words had thrown me out from the centre of my life and I was only watching on from some place slightly to the side. From this removed vantage point I said to her, ‘So what do you think we should do?’
‘I don’t know.’ She stood and began to pace before the bench again. ‘I have been trying so hard to think of something. With your American relations, we might get a visa, but only if we have a good fellowship or academic placement, and there is the problem of our diplomas.’ The diplomas we did not get. ‘I thought perhaps if we could make a very good publication in the next few months we might attract sufficient attention for scholarships. I will go to the American and British consulates and ask what we can do, but you know the queues stretch down the street.’
I sat there dumbly, too dazed to speak. It was as though I had been living in Plato’s cave and Ildiko had spun me around to the confrontation of a new reality. But the shadow world was much brighter than the real one she revealed. All the happiness I had felt in our little group seemed suddenly like a flimsy construct. Perhaps none of it had ever been real.
‘What about Pali?’ I knew it was the wrong thing to say after her anger, after how I had betrayed her loyalty, but I couldn’t stop myself.
Ildiko stopped her pacing and stood looking down at me, almost, it seemed, with pity. ‘Oh, Eszter.’
‘No,’ I jumped in, not meeting her eyes. ‘I am not being silly; it is not that I hope for anything to happen between us.’ I was glad then that I had not told her about the look we shared in the train carriage. ‘But what about everything the four of us have discussed? He is our responsibility somehow, isn’t he?’
She sat down beside me. ‘Why, Eszti? Why should we owe Pali so much more than ourselves, or each other?’
I started to speak but she cut me off. ‘Yes, he is brilliant, and I’m sure he will go on to do great and important work. But he is not our responsibility. He has his parents and servants, he has money. He still has support at the university – more than the rest of us, at any rate. Someone will always look after Pali, because he is brilliant and hopeless at the same time. I have noticed that people can’t resist the combination of brilliance and hopelessness in men.’
Her bitterness about Pali tugged at some memory, some associative string in my brain. At that moment I recalled the day when she showed me her upper limit problem, and what she had said then about Pali being the one the faculty protected when we were set upon at the university. And for some reason this thought hit me like a blow to the head: they must have known that something different was to happen. The academics, our geometry lecturer Dr Nagy, who called Pali to the lectern after class and hustled him away to some safe inner sanctum.
Of course everyone knew, roughly speaking: a few posters had even appeared around the university as the day approached, although whether they were meant as a call to arms for the gentile students or a warning for Jews to stay home was unclear from their blockish, matter-of-fact text about Hirig Simon. (I realise as I write this that I don’t know whether Hirig Simon was already an established event before your family left Hungary: the annual Jew-baiting.) Very few students stayed home, it was understood that this would be a shameful acquiescence. And, to be clear, nothing terrible was done to us. A few bruises, ugly words hurled in a corridor. The real shock of it was how the gentiles broke the ‘rules’ of the day, which somehow we all knew, or thought we knew. The ritual was meant to inspire some fear, but was otherwise not a genuine threat. In the days and weeks beforehand there was advice given and taken about when to fight back and when to flee, how to avoid being cornered and what to do if you were. Always the person imparting their wisdom about the rules of Hirig Simon – most often Sámuel or one of his group – would emphasise that nobody got seriously hurt during the annual rite. And the most important rule was that we would not be set upon by our own classmates. It gave the whole thing the feel of some tasteless game: the gentile students would ‘swap’ Jews; engineering students might go over to physics if they wanted to take part, physics to biology, biology to mathematics and so on.
Therefore, when the day’s entertainments got underway, it was not so much the pitch of the violence that shocked me – although this was worse than we had been led to expect (Sámuel, I was later told, almost lost an eye when one of his attackers hit him with a broken bottle). It was the fact that, as Ildiko and Levi and I left our first class of the day, our own classmates surrounded us and began to jeer and spit. Perhaps we had never been on equal footing with those people, but we had sat with them in lecture halls, occasionally exchanged courtesies or even study notes. All those familiar faces surrounded us, cornering us, and they became strange and unknown to me. I remember thinking: so this is what the world is. This was there all the time, only loosely restrained by some semblance of civilisation. All the familiar faces had, seemingly instantaneously, become a mob.
Some projectile hit me on the side of my face and I raised my arm to cover my head and felt warm globules of spit land there. Ildiko was beside me; she grabbed my other arm and pulled me forward, and we broke through the circle of people with a few blows landing on us. A short flight of steps led away from the lecture hall; we were halfway up when we realised that Levi was not with us. Before I knew what was happening, Ildiko had dashed back down and pulled Levi through the wall of bodies, and then the three of us were moving backwards up the steps, shielding ourselves as we went. We reached the double doors at the top and broke through into the grounds of the university, and we ran. I remember it was a beautiful day, incongruously so, and I gulped at the warm air, feeling that I could not get enough oxygen even after we slowed our pace. The mob did not follow us; presumably there were other Jewish students coming from the lecture hall, easier pickings.
Finally Ildiko made us stop and sit on the ground until I had partially recovered. There was a bruise forming on my arm. I kept pressing on it with my hand to feel that dull pain beneath the skin so that I had something to focus on besides the images in my mind, the thought of how the world fell away as the mob closed in around us.
Later, when the four of us reconvened at the statue – Tibor had made a similar escape from a group of his engineering classmates – it was unspoken knowledge between us that we would not go back. I remember we made a plan to meet at the statue the next morning when we would normally have been in classes, as though filling that first block of time would make our new lives official.
There was still no sign of Pali. I was briefly adamant that we should go back to the university to look for him, but the others convinced me that he would be safer alone since our lecturer had decided to protect him and not us. Tibor and Pali both had telephones at home, and Tibor assured us that he would contact Pali to check on him as soon as he could.
And the next morning Pali was there at the statue. Unscathed and quite oblivious to what had happened; he did not know what we were all so worried about. He had merely had a civilised tête-à-tête with our lecturer Dr Nagy, who had kept him a while in his office and then walked with him to the streetcar (He wanted to get my opinion about Veblen’s new geometry, Pali said). We had a difficult task explaining to him why we were not returning to classes. His expression became confused, almost hurt, as we told him what contempt our classmates held us in, that the university would not protect us, they wanted us out. He was so innocent.
I did not say any of this to Ildiko when we were sitting together on the bench. We had been quiet for some minutes and I looked at her obliquely as she sat staring off into the distance. I found myself wondering how long she had been thinking so seriously of leaving. Planning it. There was a sense of desolation in the idea, and a new distance from her. On that terrible day of Hirig Simon, even then I had found some comfort in the feeling of solidarity, the five of us banded together against the harsh world. Now Ildi
ko was ready to splinter off from the group into some uncertain future.
And she would do it, I had no doubt. She would find a way. From the first day we became friends she had always been the brilliant one, the resourceful one. And the beautiful one, of course. Everything I had ever achieved felt in some way tied up with Ildiko: my entry to the university, any good mathematical work I had managed to do. My engagement to Tibor, which the world saw as an achievement: even that felt, in some way, owed to Ildiko. She had known him first, there was some understanding between them. It was as though she had bequeathed him to me.
Only Pali, I thought. Only what I saw in and felt with Pali was truly my own. Ildiko could not understand it. I thought of that long, steady look in the train carriage. The feeling of closeness, our heads rocking together gently over the work. I thought of his hands, forming connections in the air between our world and the almost mystical one of his numbers. They were delicate hands, but long-fingered and dexterous as well.
I didn’t turn to look at Ildiko when I said, ‘Let’s wait a little longer. Things are not really so bad. I shouldn’t have been so hysterical about Vienna.’
She said nothing, but seemed to slump down subtly on the bench beside me.
I went on, ‘We are safe here. We can still work. Nothing is so bad while we can work together.’
‘No, I suppose not.’
I looked at her then. The side of her face was stiff. I had an idea – it felt almost superstitious – that she understood exactly what I was thinking, although I knew not to share it with her. I was thinking that I would not leave without Pali. This was clear to me now. Not while he remained, or while he was in any danger.
Ildiko’s jaw was set. She was still looking off into the distance, towards where the children’s game of soccer continued on and on. I fell to watching it too, the little figures running here and there after a ball too small to see. We sat in silence until the chill of early evening set in, then we went our separate ways.
