by Miriam Sved
I don’t think I have told you yet about what Ildiko did for me when we were still at school and our hated Snakeman tried to sabotage our entry to the university. Perhaps it will help to explain why I owe her this chance.
It was another ice-cold day, like the one on which we met. Ildi and I were in the final throes of preparation for the national mathematics competition. You remember that the top students in each subject would be admitted to the university without reference to the numerus clausus. This was our best opportunity and we had talked of little else for weeks.
On that day, just a week or so before the competition, Snakeman found a way to mention to us quite casually, while holding forth on another topic, that whichever of us was to enter the competition had better refresh our multivariable calculus. I began to stutter something, but Ildiko gave me a warning look and reached out a hand beneath the desk. When Dr Antal turned back to the board she told me, in a whisper, not to worry. Her face was set with that lock-jawed determination that I knew well. She did not want to give our teacher the satisfaction of any reaction.
After the class ended she marched straight to the principal’s office with that same expression of stony resolve. I waited outside for her, twisted up with worry.
When she came out, she sat down beside me and said, ‘It is okay. It is fixed.’
So we would both be able to enter the mathematics competition? I asked her.
She would not look directly at me but only said again that it was okay, we would both be able to compete for a place at the university.
Eventually I got it out of her: there had been some ‘external pressure’ on the school, as a Jewish institution, to limit to one the number of students entering in each subject. ‘I’m sure it was him, it was Snakeman,’ Ildiko said. ‘He managed this somehow.’
Of course, if only one of us could sit the competition it had to be Ildiko, who stood the best chance of winning a prize. She was still evasive, and would not meet my eyes.
What she had done, I found out eventually, was arrange that I would sit for the mathematics competition and she would sit for physics, which she also excelled at, although not as reliably. I argued with her but I could not change her mind.
In the end, we both gained places at the university but it might easily have turned out otherwise: Ildiko might have sacrificed her whole future by relinquishing the mathematics competition. There is nobody else in the world who would have done such a thing for me. I have never repaid her very well for that loyalty. My strongest wish is that she will be happy in America, and I know that once you have a chance to get to know her you will want the same thing.
As for me, I am surprisingly content now everything is settled. Nothing has turned out in any kind of order I could have foreseen, and yet this strange new world seems truer, more honest and free than the one we had twisted ourselves to fit into before. Tibor and I have not changed the official footing of our relationship – in fact, I am closer to his mother and his whole family than I have been for a long time, having re-established myself as a regular presence in their beautiful home. It is a great comfort to my parents that I have such a steady and respectable young man. Needless to say, they don’t know about his political work, which I have become slightly involved in: I got quite a tantalising insight through the business of getting Ildi’s passport changed. It is good, since the anti-Jewish laws passed, to feel that I am doing some small thing for the people who need it. (But don’t be worried: in Hungary we are still quite sheltered and it is only political dissidents who need new papers.)
In any case, Tibor and I seem to have arrived at an easy and friendly accommodation, without that physical awkwardness that existed before. The other day he even hugged me as I was leaving the villa, putting his arm around my shoulders quite spontaneously. Neither of us, I think, has any romantic expectations left, but I might go ahead and marry him, if our circumstances ever allow for it.
And, of course, Tibor and I are working to help Pali establish himself, something I can now collaborate in fully without guilt or self-consciousness. Since we sent Pali’s work on the Ramsey theory problem to the Annals there has been a small flurry of interest in him. He is no longer quite unknown, and might even be invited to a conference in California this year, which would surely lead to a fellowship.
Nothing else has happened between Pali and me, no repeat of that intensity in the train carriage. And perhaps nothing ever will. I don’t think Pali is made for that kind of connection. But I have accepted that my relation to him will be a defining pattern of my life, even if it is invisible to the world at large. I can no more wish for a different pattern than I can wish for a different set of vital organs, or different parents. It is unarguable. An intrinsic condition.
Forgive me for the length of these ramblings, I will stop here. Ildi will give you this book when you meet her in New York; I’m sure I don’t need to ask you to keep it safe. My parents would send their love if they knew I was writing to you. My love to all of you, until we meet.
Sydney, 2007
Surprisingly, as they are making their way through the toy-town streets of the university campus, Illy remembers the last sculpture she worked on.
She remembers it intimately, intricately, remembers where she was up to with it and how she felt about it. It had been large, reaching almost to the ceiling of the little sunroom off her bedroom in the Newtown house, the room she used as a studio. She remembers she had to stand on a chair to work on the upper branches of the structure, the bones of which were constructed of coathangers and festooned with brightly coloured swathes of material scavenged from friends’ hand-me-downs and her own wardrobe and some industrial cuttings she’d got her hands on. The bright coathangers were thicker down the bottom and expanded into a welter of multi-directional movement at the top of the structure, like a flock of birds launching itself at the ceiling: this was the effect she wanted, and by the time she showed the sculpture to Russell she thought it was starting to work, at least when you stood back and squinted, so it was strange that what she felt more than anything was embarrassment – shame, even – when he cocked his head at the structure and said, ‘Is it a metaphor about flight, or about overcoming limitations or something like that? I think it’s metaphorical.’ Until then the meaning of the thing hadn’t existed for her as words, but she supposed then that it was metaphorical, and that Russell had nailed the metaphor to the floor right there with one line, and that if what she’d experienced as a clamour of disparate feelings could be trussed and nailed so easily, then what was the point of it really?
They are walking now through a large vine-strewn courtyard like something out of a nineteenth-century idyll of university life, Josh stalking ahead, leading Illy and Zoe towards his maths department. Sal had detached herself quietly, tactfully, when they got to the campus, whispering something to Zoe and saying to Illy, ‘I’ll leave you to your family business,’ walking away before anyone could object.
Josh is still holding the notebook and the three of them have not spoken since they entered the university grounds, some ominous sense of what they are going towards having established itself between them. They pick up their pace imperceptibly as they leave the courtyard, faster still as they walk down a long curving road through the campus, so that when Josh turns a corner and leads them into the wide grey building they are almost jogging, and they take the stairs two at a time.
They are in a long corridor. ‘This way,’ Josh says, pointing towards an unmarked door at the other end of it, and now the three of them break into a proper jog, careering towards that door and towards whatever tipping point is behind it, and Illy is anxiously grateful to have her children with her on this day that feels weighed down with their family’s history, it is right that they should be confronting it together, Josh reaching the door first and all of them rushing into the room.
At the front of the room is a long white table, Illy’s mother sitting at it
with a stooped, ancient-looking man whom Illy recognises immediately as Pali Kalmar. She doesn’t know what, exactly, she had expected to find (Eszter kissing him, or standing over his body with a blood-soaked pair of her sewing scissors?), but what the old people appear to be doing is drawing. A number of pieces of paper are splayed out on the table in front of them – blank paper and graph paper – covered in red and blue lines, shapes within shapes, jagged and multi-limbed. Her mother has a pencil in her hand and has stopped mid-gesticulation, the two old people looking up at the interruption with mirrored expressions: avid and preoccupied and also a bit guilty, a surreptitious poise to their faces as though they have been caught in the act. There is a third person at the table – a man around Illy’s age who sits a little apart with his arms crossed and shoulders hunched. Everyone looks at each other for a few long seconds, then the man, the one Illy doesn’t know, says, ‘Hello, Josh. You should have told me about your grandmother’s connection to our guest. Do you think you could convince her to let him go now? There are some important people waiting for us at a rather expensive Italian restaurant around the corner.’
Pali Kalmar blows a gust of air out his nose and says, ‘What do we want with this important people? I have only just got inside my friend Ildiko’s brain for the first time in seventy years and you want me to stop for Italian food?’
‘Ildiko?’ Josh and Zoe say at the same time.
Illy stares at him for a few seconds, then turns to look at her mother.
The old woman’s eyes haven’t left Illy’s face. ‘You should sit down, darling,’ she says.
It occurs to Illy that her mother looks different. Vivid somehow: still small and wrinkled and wizened, but … illuminated. And this new mother says, ‘I will try to explain these things. But first Pali has some silly ideas about upper bounds for this colour set; I think we have to fix them before anybody can talk or have the dinner.’
Illy feels slightly light-headed. She reaches for a chair as the two old people turn back to their scribblings and begin to speak in low, urgent Hungarian, both of them smirking like naughty children who have agreed on the terms of their parental insurrection.
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ says Illy.
Brooklyn, 1951
On a stifling afternoon in the small apartment she stands by the open kitchen window. There is precious little breeze coming through the window, only a wafting of voices from the building’s stoop. She cannot hear what the Hasidic woman is saying, but her voice and the soft lilt of her accent are a balm.
She does not know how long she has stood like this. The baby has started to stir. The air in the apartment is so close and sticky that she had worried Illy would not sleep, but there was no noise from the bedroom for some time so the baby must have settled. Now, though, there is murmuring and the occasional bleat on the other side of the kitchen wall, and she is trying to ignore these sounds because of a welling despair that she has not done more, not achieved anything with this one free hour of the day. She spent some of it wiping the grimy stovetop, before drifting into a reverie that she can hardly account for. Still she stands and listens to the Hasidic woman’s voice floating up. The woman, whose name is Ruth, has been speaking with various neighbours in that combination of English and Yiddish and supervising numerous children. András calls the family the Burgers or sometimes the rabbits because of all the children. Relatively recently, when they had been in Boro Park for more than a year, she realised that not all the children belong to the one family: the woman runs a babysitting business from the apartment downstairs.
A few weeks ago, the woman, Ruth, had seen her struggling up the front steps with the baby on her hip and the stroller loaded up with shopping bags and had said, ‘You can leave the bubbala with me while you take the bags up.’ Ruth had smiled, and she noticed there was a wide gap between her two front teeth that gave her face a surprising impishness. She wondered what colour her hair was beneath the mousey wig she always wore, and felt a stirring of some long dormant possibility. She stood rooted to the top step. Would she get in trouble with András if she left the baby on the front stoop with the rabbit mother? She had not replied when Ruth went on, ‘Even you could drop her off with me sometimes. We are neighbours, and it is no trouble with the big girls around always to help with the little ones.’
Flustered by the spectre of András and by the idea of the woman’s hair, she could not think of the right thing to say or even properly understand what was being offered. She shook her head and muttered, ‘I don’t know.’ It was only when she got upstairs and put the sticky baby down on the floor and sat on a chair to collect herself that she realised Ruth had been offering her babysitting services.
It is impossible. She shakes her head now, shaking off the idea. She needs to put it out of her mind. She reapplies herself to scrubbing the stovetop.
If she is honest, Ruth had begun to infiltrate her imagination before the unexpected offer. Not long after she and András moved here – reluctantly, continuing their slow slide of downward mobility that started in Princeton and brought them to this neighbourhood, this patchwork quilt of all the different colours and nationalities – she heard the woman’s accent (subtle and with a distinct New York twang) and realised she was Hungarian. After that she noticed the way Ruth spoke to people. She thinks of the first time they were all visited by the officious American landlord, inspecting the apartments and issuing veiled threats about late rent and inappropriate water usage. She said nothing about the malfunctioning faucets or the copious cockroaches: the American system of short-term rental agreements still appeared terrifying and rigged, so she kept quiet and tried to smile nicely at the little man as he addressed himself to her bust. Then she hovered in her doorway as he went down the stairs and knocked at the Hasidim apartment. The woman’s voice floated up. Politely but with no hesitation, there was a litany of complaints that she managed to make sound vaguely comic, as though the landlord was in on the joke and so should not take it badly. Mr Fine, I’m so glad, baruch Hashem, the water again, you know, hot and cold with no way of knowing which from one day to the next, the cold tap comes out brown and the hot, oy, I think I got an ice burn this morning. And come to look how the radiator rumbles …
She couldn’t hear every word of the landlord’s response, but it sounded polite; solicitous even. He said something about a plumber. No hectoring about the rent.
A plumber did arrive some weeks later, and she was able to glean through the echoing acoustics of the building’s vents that it was Ruth who spoke to him, ushering him into the apartment and walking him around to the problematic taps, although the sidelocked husband was at home at the time.
It was the same with street vendors. She has seen the woman, demurely dressed and in the awkwardly fitting wig, speak with that deprecating confidence to the milkman, the iceman, the man who wheels a barrow round the streets selling pre-cleaned lettuces (upbraiding him with semi-comic outrage when she found a bug, one solitary bug, in one of his products). It is clear to her that the Hasidic woman is the true head of her populous household, despite the symbolic Rav with which she addresses the scurrying, studious mouse of a husband. She has a feeling Ruth would be able to deal with András; she would brook no ridiculousness and would know how to tidily sweep away the rages and resentments. Ruth would dispatch the fantasy that András has cooked up about migrating to Australia. Ruth, she is sure, sleeps soundly at night and is not haunted by her own bad choices.
Of course, the offer of babysitting is one she can’t accept, but she has lapsed back into thinking about it with wistful resentment today. It has been a good day: Mrs Nowak, the old Polish lady around the corner for whom she has done some tatting, was impressed by the work and told her about a position vacant at a garment store in Bay Ridge. ‘I know the owners,’ she said. ‘They will take you on my word. A real quality establishment and none of your schwarzes.’ That meant that it wasn’t a factory staffed by Puerto Rican girls,
one of the places with poorly paid piecemeal work, airless rooms and blue paint over the windows like the last factory she had worked in before the baby came. She would have her own money, and might be able to keep some of it from András. There would be a reason to talk with the woman downstairs when she picked up the baby. The two of them having a cup of tea in Ruth’s kitchen, children playing in another room. Does she take the wig off in her apartment?
But this fantasy is contingent on the impossible scenario of András agreeing to Ruth’s offer to babysit.
Illy is unequivocally awake now and squawking for attention. Everything in the kitchen is somehow exactly the same as it was an hour ago except for one clean white square of stovetop. András will be home from the car plant in the next two hours, ready for his dinner and primed for anger. She thinks of the work folded surreptitiously in her underwear drawer, along with the older work and the letter from Eszter she keeps hidden there. The new work is barely anything, just a few pages of doodlings about immersed manifolds that had somehow appeared in the air above her head, begging to be snatched at while the baby was napping one day last week. She straightens up from her scrubbing stoop, her bones feeling much older than their thirty-four years. Her mathematics is as creaky as her body; when she tried to harness her mind to the first and second forms of what she wanted to conjure it was like moving in an old forgotten element, grasping for landmarks to pull herself through. But still, something had beckoned to her, a snake in a figure of eight not quite eating its tail; she wanted to see if she could find an immersion for this structure, and after putting herself through some basic paces of differentiable functions she had started to feel old mental elements fizzing slightly, a glimpse of the beauty of that other world, if she could just move freely enough to get there. But the baby hadn’t slept for long enough, and there was Mrs Nowak’s needlework and the washing dripping into the tub, which would disgust András if she couldn’t find a way to get it dry and out of sight before he got home. So the pages have sat in her drawer all week, silent emissaries from that other world. She could feel them breathe.
