by Miriam Sved
‘Trust me, sweetheart,’ she says. ‘I don’t think I’m the product of a secret affair between Eszter and Pali.’ After a few moments: ‘I mean, I suppose it’s not impossible. Damn it, I wish I’d finished the book.’
Zoe says, ‘What do you mean, Mum?’
They are pulling up at the house but she doesn’t open the garage. ‘Wait here,’ she says, ‘I’ll be back in a minute.’ She practically launches herself out of the car and runs up the path to the front door, which she leaves open while she goes in.
‘Do you think the cops broke her?’ Josh says into the sudden silence.
Nobody laughs.
When she comes back out she is carrying a small hard-covered book, which she hands to Zoe. ‘This is what I was telling you about today,’ she says, ‘the journal. There’s a lot in there about Pali Kalmar.’ She starts the car again and they head back out onto the main road.
‘Huh?’ Josh says. ‘What journal?’
Ignoring him, her mother says, ‘She loved him, but I don’t think anything happened between them. It’s even possible she ended up hating him. I don’t know, the fact that she left with your grandfather, I think perhaps she wanted to get away from Pali.’
‘Huh?’ Josh says again, louder.
Zoe says, ‘What did he do?’
‘The book’s in Hungarian, you won’t be able to read it, but look at the loose pages at the back with the patterns of dots. Then flick through the book for a page with those patterns on it, about a third of the way in.’
Josh is feeling a bit panicky now, almost desperate with FOMO: his mother and sister are having a collusive conversation that he doesn’t understand at all about maths?
‘Give it to me,’ he says, reaching into the front. ‘I’ll be able to interpret it.’
Zoe hands him the book.
‘It’s some kind of problem to do with geometric patterns,’ his mother says. ‘Apparently it was a big deal. Nagymama and her friend Ildiko worked on the original problem and Pali Kalmar took it. Or, well, Eszter gave it to him, but I think she regretted it and he seems to have got famous out of it without giving her any credit.’
Josh flicks through the book – slightly dusty feel to the pages, the Hungarian like a code that some part of him feels he can crack – until he comes to it: he knows immediately what his mother is talking about. ‘But this is the original upper limit problem of Kalmar’s Ramsey theory conjectures.’
‘It was Eszter and Ildiko,’ his mother says. ‘They came up with it.’
‘No way. I’ve studied this, it was a huge development, people have been looking for a proof for seventy years.’
‘I’m telling you,’ she says. ‘It was your grandmother’s.’
He stares at the little hand-drawn figures, trying to get his head around it. ‘I thought Kalmar came up with this in the States, in the forties or something.’
He takes his phone out of his pocket, thinks for a minute and googles: Ramsey theory, development of. In a fraction of a second there are two hundred and eighty thousand results. He goes to the first Wiki page and scans, not really knowing what he is looking for. The combinatorial theory that seeks regularity amid disorder. Kalmar is all over it, of course. He finds a reference – ‘A Combinatorial Problem in Geometry’ – and clicks on the external link. His screen goes blank, the little wheel churning for many long seconds before the paper appears. Old roneoed font and a slightly skewed photocopy, and there, in the very first line: Our present problem was suggested to me by Eszter Kún and Ildiko Balint in connection with the following proposition.
‘Holy shit,’ he says. ‘Nagymama’s famous.’
Sydney, 2007
While she waits to see Pali, towards the back of the crowd of other people waiting to see Pali, she feels an unexpected calmness coming over her. As though she has not watched this moment approach with longing and dread for over half a century. As though it were ordinary. It seems freshly impossible that they are the only two left. The others will be waiting for them in some easily accessible place: at the base of the statue, where everything will be put back together into a manageable shape and all will be forgiven.
She doesn’t let herself linger on that distant past. She thinks instead about the first meeting she had with her PhD supervisor, only two decades ago. He was a skinny young person; his profile in the department’s brochure said that folk music was his vocational passion alongside mathematics. She was already an old woman, almost in her seventies, excited and terrified about what she had propelled herself into. One element of her excited terror was the possibility of encountering Pali’s work, or even his name. And yes, the young folk musician had mentioned Pali in that first meeting: abstract geometry wasn’t Kalmar’s main area of research but he suggested that she review the great man’s ideas in that field anyway. Kalmar, he said, defined the limits of what was interesting.
Kalmar. She had let the name reverberate through her. The way her supervisor weighted it with authority and meaning.
Pali has been a figure in the world for decades. The people in this room think they know him, own him. There have been two books written about him. What does she, by contrast, have to show for a life? Perhaps that was the main reason she wanted to bring Josh today. Pali has co-authored more than fifteen hundred articles. Here is my grandson.
The knot of people waiting to speak to him contracts a little. Her back aches from standing. She focuses on the ache, a radiating arc from her lower spine.
She thinks about the morning after her husband died – after the late-night call from the hospice to say it had finally happened – when she got out of bed in the quiet house and walked to the bathroom. For the length of that walk she had been convinced that her body was young again. She must have been half asleep, still embedded in dream logic, but for the first time in years movement brought no pain or arthritic stiffness. Then she was at the sink and a shrivelled old woman appeared in the mirror before her and she felt a jolt of betrayal. As if some part of her had always believed that András would take with him all their years together, the decades defined by him and by their collusion, which she could never leave behind. As if that should have fallen away. Then a fresh gust of anger: what was the use of all her messing around in the multifarious rule-defying of abstract geometry? Such a simple time-bound organism.
Only a couple of layers of people now between her and Pali. She has positioned herself behind a large man in a hat, around whom she peers, hoping she can’t be seen.
There should be more time. Not now, but then. In the thick of it, when decisions were being made that would define everything else; phase transitions occurring so quickly, without self-consciousness or ritual, without the trappings that indelible change deserves. You make one panic-stricken move this way rather than that and you are caught in a new pattern of existence, spinning away from the moment of control and from everything familiar. But perhaps that is not the way for men.
She is close enough to hear what is being said at the table. Pali is quiet while two men speak to him about their research, which is probability theory and self-avoiding walks. Pali is not responding at all, but they keep finding ways to rephrase their ideas, wanting to get their money’s worth of genius. The young man who conducted the seminar with him, Josh’s lecturer, says loudly, ‘We might have to wrap this up, folks. Our guest has had a long flight and is jet-lagged.’
The people between her and the table don’t give up their structure immediately but there is a muttering and de-bonding of parts, some of them drifting off to the sides. She closes her eyes for a few moments. When she opens them the man who had sheltered her from sight has moved. She stands there, not three feet away from the table, Pali looking directly at her.
She can tell from the focus and lack of shock on his face that he had already seen and recognised her, he knew she was here. Indeed, at this distance the sense of recognition is overwhelming,
jarring: he is so familiar, it is almost as if they could twist the last seventy years back on themselves and trick time out of its immutability. He is older, of course, obscenely older, when she can take him in broadly, the sharp hump of his back and soft folds of his skin. But these things fall away when she looks at his eyes. Still intense and dark with that unwavering, unnerving gaze. His eyes do not leave her face.
‘Ildiko,’ he says. ‘Hello.’
And when she says nothing, when she can’t respond to the name no-one has called her for seventy years, he says, ‘I am very pleased to see you, my old friend. I was beginning to think you were avoiding me.’
∴
Budapest, 1938
Ildi and I had a scalding row that night, after she read the professor’s letter.
The last of the day’s sun was scattering around us and we took the letter to a nearby park to fight about it. Ildiko already knew, courtesy of Tibor, what was in the letter, but she read it front to back twice anyway, and then started trying to convince me to accept the professor’s offer of marriage.
‘He is your best chance,’ she said. She said this many times, in various formulations. The combination of my relations as sponsors and his connections as employers: this was my best chance at a visa, at a new life, escape.
‘You talk as though it were a business arrangement,’ I said, pacing and waving the letter at her. ‘I would have to marry this man. Live with him.’
‘But it is a business arrangement, Eszter.’ She took the letter back and began waving it at me in turn. ‘That is clearly the light in which he is presenting it. Eventually you can get the marriage annulled if you choose, and by then you will be in America, you will be free and safe.’
Then she turned to lecturing me about the risks of staying in Hungary: the threat of war and the dire employment options for Jews, the belligerence of Hitler and of the racist thugs inspired by him, all the time waving her arms at me in her expressive way.
‘All the more reason for me not to abandon you all,’ I said. ‘Do you think I would run away to save myself if the outlook was so bad?’
‘No, Eszti,’ she said, coming close and taking my arms. ‘You would not be just saving yourself. This is the best way you can help the rest of us. Once you are in America you can contact the Hungarian embassy and find out what it would take for us all to get visas, and we could all come over and join you.’ She gave me a little shake. ‘We could take up our diplomas again, go to university together, you and I.’ She said it with a kind of awe, and I felt it too, imagining Ildiko and I on the expansive lawns of some lush American college.
Then I imagined that professor waiting at home for me.
Anyway, I knew it would be extremely difficult to get them all visas. Otherwise everyone would do it.
Seeing that she had not convinced me, Ildiko changed tack. ‘Tibor thinks you should take the opportunity.’
I swatted it away. I was not ready to think about Tibor after our conversation on the hill. But Ildiko persisted. ‘He knows better than anyone what the risks are here. He has it all worked out already. He thinks you should offer the professor some assistance with his research proposal, to establish yourself as a kind of partner for him when he is at the Institute for Advanced Study. Tibor suggested using Pali’s PNT work.’
‘Oh terrific,’ I said sarcastically. ‘Now I’m to marry a man I don’t know and engage in plagiarism to do it.’
‘Not plagiarism,’ Ildiko said. ‘Just a little sharing arrangement. Like the one you offered Pali with the Ramsey theory problem.’
It was cunning of her to use my betrayal like that. I looked away, disarmed and ashamed. And also despairing: Ildiko knew me so well. I felt that I had no chance against her. Until then we had not mentioned Pali’s name. But she probably knew anyway: she knew that I did not want to leave Pali behind.
She was looking at me with what I interpreted through the dim light as a knowing glint. I tried to divert the subject. ‘You yourself said that we should all stop following Tibor’s plans so blindly. And besides, Tibor has his own problems – he is not as pure and spotless as everybody thinks.’
There was a silence. The sun was completely gone by then and I could barely make out her face. ‘I know about Tibor’s problems,’ she said, very quietly. I felt a return of that flushed confusion that had come over me during the horrid conversation with Tibor. Some truth was between him and Ildiko, something I could not quite understand but that exerted a gravitational pull I could see operating on the objects around it. My mind skittered away from the thing itself. Only I had the feeling, one I had experienced before with my friends, that Ildiko and Tibor were together in grasping some other order of things. It made me angry, and embarrassed.
‘So you know things that I don’t about my … about Tibor.’ I wanted to call him my fiancé, to throw the word at her, but I didn’t know whether I had access to it anymore. What was Tibor to me now, with this half-obscured thing between us? My parents still thought he was my fiancé. What would they say if they knew he had just tried to convince me to marry another man?
‘What I know,’ said Ildiko, ‘is that Tibor cares for you a great deal and genuinely wants your happiness.’
Somehow this only managed to make me angrier. To be cared for in such an impartial and patronising way. I felt manipulated by them both.
‘So you knew all the time that it wasn’t real, that my relations with Tibor were a counterfeit?’
‘No, Eszti.’ She took a step towards me. ‘It wasn’t like that. I knew – I mean, I had some idea that Tibor was … that he is like Hardy and the Apostles in nature. But he assured me when he started to pursue you that his intentions weren’t to deceive you or anyone else. And I thought, well, of all the men you could end up with … Tibor is good, honourable. He would look after you. And the four of us would always stay close.’
I looked at her as if from some profound new distance. I didn’t know anymore what was beneath anything but was only walking across the cracked and tenuous surface of this world. And for the same reason that I had been avoiding Pali’s name, now I hurled it at her like a dart: because I knew, instinctively, that it would hurt.
‘I won’t do it. I don’t want to leave Pali,’ I said. ‘Especially not now, if things are as serious as you say. I won’t do anything until he is safe. Pali and I have an understanding.’ This was a half-truth at best, and I only dimly understood my own motives for embellishing what there was between me and Pali. I wanted to prove something to her. That I had a life, an autonomous will beyond what I suddenly perceived as the puppet-mastery of her and Tibor. That they could not get at all of me. ‘So I don’t care what you and Tibor have been working out between the two of you or what you both think I should do. Pali needs me here, so I will stay. If you’re so enamoured of this professor’s offer, then you should take it – you go with him to America.’
I meant it simply as a barb. A provocation. The idea never occurred to me or, I’m sure, to her before I uttered the words. But as soon as they were out of my mouth I felt a chill that I can only describe as creative: a new order rippling out of this idea I had conjured so heedlessly.
The two of us were quiet for a few moments. Ildiko stared ahead of herself into the darkness and I looked at her face.
‘You could do that, Ildi,’ I said, all my anger draining away.
She didn’t look at me. ‘Don’t be silly.’
‘I’m not being silly. Why not?’
‘Well, to begin with, because the professor didn’t ask me. Because I don’t have relatives in America.’
‘No, you don’t understand. You could go as me. Tibor knows people who can change papers. We have a slight resemblance and the photo in my passport is blurry.’
She looked at me then, stared into my face. ‘You don’t know what you’re saying, Eszter. It’s ridiculous.’
‘Why?’ I deman
ded.
‘Even if we could get away with such a trick, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t leave you here and take your name to save my own skin.’
‘No, but don’t you see?’ I had inhabited the idea so quickly, I felt that it had been waiting there for me, ready to be picked up and used. ‘You wouldn’t be abandoning anyone. You would be the perfect person to help all of us once you get to America. Everything you said to me, all the reasons why I should go, they apply even more to you. You would have a much better chance of getting into a good college and finding a position, getting contacts. And then you will be in a position to help the rest of us. It is perfect.’
She was not convinced. She was a long way from convinced. Over the following days I raised the subject whenever there was a chance. I spoke to Tibor to establish that the papers could be fixed. I telegrammed you about the sponsorship, even before I had convinced Ildiko to take the plan seriously. I wrote to the professor and presented it as a fait accompli. You may not know this about me, since we have not seen each other for so long: I am extremely determined, once I set mind or heart on a thing. That is why it happened.
I will try to answer any questions you have, once you have read this account. If you send me a telegram I can arrange to use the telephone at Tibor’s house, which can usually get an international line.
How can I convey my sense of the rightness of what we have done? My great fear is that you will think badly of Ildiko for it, and not accept her and help her when she gets to America. But you see, Ildiko is like my better self. Cleverer, more talented and resourceful. I wish you would treat her as my proxy while she and the professor are there without us. I have had moments of petulant ingratitude towards her, but I would have nothing without Ildiko: my friends, my mathematics, everything of value has been thanks to her. And she will be a great mathematician; any work she does under my name will be an honour to it. This plan is my doing from beginning to end. I have thrust Ildi into my life, in a role she would not wish to play.
