by Miriam Sved
Now, as she goes to the bedroom to get her demanding daughter, feeling the familiar sharp edges of irritation and guilt and joy, she wonders if those pages of scribblings will be the last mathematics she ever does. A death rattle of her old life. You never know when the last of a set is upon you; these phase transitions sneak by without announcing themselves. She is always on guard against irrevocable loss.
‘Hello, lelkem,’ she says to Illy, who has pulled herself upright in the cot and is swaying back and forth, braced against the bars like a prisoner driven mad by confinement. When Illy sees her mother the little face breaks open with that burst of a smile. It is bewildering. You are mistaken, she would like to say to the baby. I am not one you should be pinning such hope on. But the baby’s face says, You. Exactly the one I want.
‘Up?’ she says to the child as she lifts her from the cot. ‘We will get you dressed nicely for Papa.’ As usual, she speaks with Illy in careful English: it aggravates András, with a flailing resentment that she knows is related to his own faltering English – his grasp of the language, like so many of his skills, not nearly as solid as he had implied before they migrated – but this is one act of defiance she will not give up, and they have come to a surly understanding about it. Her daughter will not grow up a linguistic outcast. Illy will be successfully American.
‘Do you need to be changed?’ she asks the baby now, and Illy burbles back at her. She takes the baby to the corner of the bedroom, a towel on the floor that serves as a change table. Luckily the child is only damp; no need to worry about the smell lingering in the apartment when András gets home. Then she picks out one of the baby dresses – she made it herself, with little bows around the sailor collar and on the sleeves, because she thinks this is how men must like to see a girl-child dressed (she herself would be just as happy to have Illy in an undershirt and nappy). While she manoeuvres the wriggling limbs into arm and leg holes she finds herself, unusually, chatting to Illy. She tells her that it has been a good day, Mama did good work and a lady offered to give her a job. ‘We could buy some nice things,’ she tells the child. ‘You could have some toys.’ And she herself could have some toys, some of the American conveniences she has learned to want: a new refrigerator that doesn’t leak or frost, perhaps a vacuum cleaner. She is always doing sums in her head – about time, and money, and how much she needs of both. She puts booties on Illy’s feet. ‘Perhaps tomorrow we will go to the zoo,’ she says. ‘Would you like to see the monkeys?’ And then, while Illy is reaching for a loose curl of her hair, ‘One day, would you like to play with the big girls downstairs and be looked after by their mama? She is a nice mama and I would come down and see her with you.’ She feels quite daring for speaking her fantasy aloud, even to the pre-verbal baby. Illy blows a solemn spit bubble in response. ‘I think the lady downstairs will give you treats.’ She pulls the child upright and stands her up on the newly functional feet. ‘Would you like that? Some matzo, maybe some babka?’
‘Babka,’ Illy says, with perfect pronunciation. And immediately again: ‘Babka.’ Before this there have been consonants that could be interpreted as Mama, once or twice perhaps Papa, but she has heard nothing as clear and deliberate as this syrupy word the child has snatched from her conversation. She laughs at the baby, picks her up and almost throws her in the air. ‘What did you say, you cheeky monkey? You want some babka?’
‘Babka,’ Illy says again, delighted with herself.
Somewhere at the back of her watchful mind it occurs to her to worry that the child will repeat this linguistic trick in front of András, who will apply his sharp-eyed paranoia and glean its origins, the rabbit neighbours infecting his family. But she dismisses it – she herself is becoming paranoid. ‘Good for you,’ she says to Illy. ‘One day you will have some babka.’
It is later than usual by the time she straps the baby into her high chair for dinner. She always feeds her early so as not to worry about the mess when András is home, a towel tied around Illy’s neck to protect the dress. She has stewed some peas and some of the lurid American pumpkins. It still surprises her how everything in this ridiculous country seems brighter, bursting with its own youth; even the vegetables have a juvenile optimism. She feels like a stealthy underground creature when she encounters the fresh breeze of American enthusiasm: an earthy little mole next to the women in the department stores with their overt breasts and jaunty hip-thrusting way of addressing you. On the rare occasions when she looks in a mirror – properly looks – she is shocked by the still-attractive mask of her face, which has never represented the inside of her, not one bit. But sometimes this American hopefulness is capable of breaking through the dark air around her heart with a surprising jolt of joy. The golden pumpkin has strained well, sweet and juicy. She spoons vegetable mush into Illy’s mouth, thinking about how many potatoes she should boil for the gratin she will make after this and how long it will take to prepare; and in another corner of her mind she is also thinking about the problem with the geometric immersion, clicking through the steps she has already made with it.
If she could leave Illy with Ruth downstairs, perhaps she could dash to the public library – only four blocks away – and do an hour’s work here or there. The idea glimmers with illicit joy. She is not sure how or when her dormant desire for mathematics was reanimated; she’d thought she had put it away for good, barred herself from that other world out of a combination of pragmatic necessity and self-punishing spite. There were the terrible arguments with András in the early months of their cobbled-together marriage, when they were still in the house in Princeton, András just beginning to sink beneath the waves at the institute: she was never quite sure how much of the critical censure was real – a burgeoning departmental understanding of András’s limitations which might have run a lap or two behind her own disappointed comprehension – and how much of it was his own naturally high sensitivity and paranoia. There was a disastrous dinner party with three of his colleagues – two mathematicians and an experimental physicist – at which, after presenting the soufflé that she had slaved over all afternoon, she found herself in discussion with one of the mathematicians about a pentagonal tiling problem she had been tinkering with in the few spare minutes of her day. The mathematician – an older Texan, drawling and gracious in a way she hadn’t come across in any American before and was finding almost as interesting as his mathematics – had pulled a pen from his breast pocket and started doodling some of the ideas on his napkin, when she became aware of the directed intensity of her husband’s eyes on her from the other end of the table.
The fight they had after András’s colleagues left was conducted partly in code and, like all András’s aggressions, stopped short of physical violence with the apparent intervention of domestic objects: he stood behind the kitchen bench and gripped its edge as though he might rip it off its hinges; he moved towards her quickly but at the last moment was thwarted by the bannister of the stairs and brought his fist down onto it instead. She was trying to unmoor him, he said, trying to show him up. He could not work with a devil woman in his life, capable of such deception. She would be his undoing.
Of course, András was his own undoing – the state of his work at the institute, or his lack of it, was already half clear to her long before the worst of it set in, the months of smouldering depression and inertia; but she decided easily enough to humour him by giving up her own mathematics. The old joy of it was ruined anyhow; she couldn’t work for long without lapsing into a grey gulf – at first it was the terrible uncertainty about the others, and then, once she knew enough, a shuddering grief that she couldn’t indulge: she could never let András see it, sensitive as he was to anything that reminded him of her old life, especially her friends. He would have thought it was for the men, Levi and Tibor, of whom he was jealous. He didn’t give Eszter much thought.
And there was a kind of cleansing, a self-renouncing penance in giving up mathematics. She came back to the g
rating edge of the thought again and again, rasping herself against it: I will be nothing. I will never do the work I was meant to do. And besides, there was dinner to prepare for András and the house to be kept, and when András’s fellowship at the institute wasn’t renewed she had to find work.
And then, when she thought her insides were shrivelled dry, Illy was somehow conceived and everything changed. How perverse that the baby, who makes it almost impossible for her to think, let alone work, somehow brought her back to the irrepressible desire for work. Her proper, old work of mathematics.
She has coaxed enough of the food into Illy’s mouth and deflected much of it from landing on the floor, the walls, in her hair. She untucks the towel from the baby’s neck, wipes Illy down and lifts her onto the floor where she has set up a pot with some spoons for banging, as well as a red ball and the little sock puppet she made for her. She has to get on with preparing dinner for András, but somehow she finds herself sitting and staring at Illy’s play for a disastrously long time, the potatoes resting unpeeled by the stove. When she finally gives herself a sharp pinch on the inner arm and goes to the kitchen bench the light has already changed; András will be home soon, dinner not ready and the apartment full of cabbage-y heat on this already sticky day.
You are pathetic, she tells herself. She can still hear the Hasid downstairs talking on the front stoop with her children and neighbours, and she conjures her image. Ruth. It gives her comfort, a little release of the tight muscles in her shoulders and neck. She thinks of how her own mother would have laughed at the woman downstairs. Her mother had been brilliant, a respected mathematics teacher before the first Jewish laws in the 1920s swept both her and her husband out of work. What would she think to see her daughter conjuring this woman’s image for strength? She wouldn’t have been nasty about it like András, but she would have called Ruth vallásos dilis, a religious crazy.
She rinses the potatoes, scouring for dirt with her fingertips.
Anyway, strength is no defence against András. She had been forthright enough with him early on in their marriage: when she had not yet accepted the necessary alterations to her sense of self that being a dutiful housewife entailed. Assertions of her own will might have won her some short-lived sense of agency, but they came at too high a price. Like the house in Princeton – a wide-verandaed Victorian that András made a show of considering for the woman real estate agent but was on the point of refusing because of the rent. Bewitched by the expansiveness of the rooms and the light-headed promise of a guest bedroom (this was when she still hoped to get her parents and Eszti out of Europe), she had appealed to András openly, in the presence of the smartly dressed agent. They could afford it, she said, with his salary from the institute; and if not, then she could always find work. She remembers it now with some disbelief and horror, how she had thought she was being strategic, touching him on the shoulder and calling him darling in English. The English, which she had used with some half-formed idea of politeness in front of the American estate agent, she later learned had been an error. When they were alone in the car after signing the lease agreement for the house, András thumped the steering wheel and shouted fragmentary sentences about how she had tried to humiliate him in front of the Amerikaner, and the shame of her threatening to get a job – his own wife – and it occurred to her to wonder how much of his quick acquiescence to the house had been his need to maintain the facade of European gallantry, and to avoid revealing his stuttering ineptitude in an English-language argument in front of an attractive stranger. She had tried to bluster through that argument, which was one of their first: to counter his trembling rage with her own metal will, which had carried her through objectively scarier situations than a scene in a car with an angry husband. She did not yet understand András: she sensed his weakness but had no notion of how it fed the unending stream of his resentment. It took her a few years to grasp the fact that she was already undone, effectively before the marriage began, because on some level András was ashamed of what had been done. There was the matter of using Pali’s work in his application to the institute, and the matter of the lie – although he was perhaps less ashamed of the lie itself than of the fact that he had gone along with it passively, an actor in someone else’s script. The scene with Eszter’s relatives off the boat at New York Harbor had not helped. András, already ripe with indignation after the presumptuous questioning of the immigration inspectors (are you an anarchist? a polygamist?), was spurned and had his efforts to charm rebuffed: Eszter’s cousin Pista refused to shake his hand once he realised the trick that had been played, refused even to glance at the long account that Eszter had written of their situation. András, who had counted on these relatives for certain logistical purposes in their first months in America, had pursued the man and his meek wife as they made their escape through the crowds at the ferry terminal.
They had nowhere to sleep that night, and in the horrid little motel they found near the station he didn’t say a word to her even when he advanced upon her in bed. Her knowledge of being properly alone in this whole vast country, unknown and unrecognised by anyone but this man, made her feel incorporeal, almost nonexistent.
And already during their early fights – after her errors in front of the real estate agent, and the disastrous dinner with his colleagues in their new home – she could feel the disadvantage of a burgeoning self-knowledge. She wasn’t the same steely rod of a girl everyone had known back home. She was scared of what she had done and where it had brought her, and something vital inside her had twisted up aboard the long, nauseous journey from Naples to Ellis Island, during which András, who managed to get her alone in the tiny cabin she shared with two other women, had let his initial mask of gentle gallantry drop. And in her gut there was always the gnawing fear that would not leave her for many years, not until long after the war ended and she finally found out enough of what had happened to the others and her parents.
So she learned quickly enough not to try to use her old strength, to assert her will against András. There was the brief, drug-enhanced re-emergence of this will after Illy’s birth: her dogged insistence on the baby’s name, which András didn’t want. She dimly remembers the hovering sneer of his face when she said the name, which hadn’t been used for more than a decade. She had so thoroughly renounced it, even in her own mind, that the name felt uninhabited, and attaching it to the baby made it shimmer with the promise of new beginnings: a light and happy, new-world Ildiko who would bend the bad luck of the past around onto itself, the same but different. It had been foolishness: Illy is so much her own little creature, so unquantifiable in her strange selfhood, that she quickly lost sight of this attempt to tie her to some meaning from the past. She is not sure that András has forgiven her for getting her way on the question of the name. And, worse, the idea has begun to hover above her – when she watches András deflect the baby, her outstretched arms or chubby offerings of twigs or food or her own pacifier – the idea that in some buried stratum of his mind András associates their child with the past and with his shame, and perhaps this is part of his resistance to the baby. Perhaps this is why, to her horror, he doesn’t seem to like his own child.
By now she has the potatoes peeled and boiling but has only just started on the cabbage, the baby still bashing at her metal pot, and there is the shuffling tread of András coming up the steps to the apartment. She whips the pot away and offers Illy a compensatory crust of bread to avert the howl of protest, and pushes the hair around her temples back with her wrists. She is a wreck, a crumpled hausfrau. Not that she cares, and she is not sure if he does anymore. She gets his glass and a bottle of beer, puts them on the table and goes back to washing the cabbage as he comes in.
Her husband, who had seemed so much older than she was when they met, as though he was in a different realm of adulthood even though he was actually still a young man in his twenties, now seems to have made another pre-emptive jump into a different realm of
middle age. His hair, which had been a nice sandy brown, has greyed patchily across his forehead, and his face has the disappointed jowliness of a much older man. She doesn’t greet him, and his eyes only skate over her and the baby as he goes to the bedroom to change out of his work shirt, but she turns the wireless on low to the Overseas Service (during the days she never turns it on, but András likes to be surrounded by a low hum of commentary). It is infernally hot in the apartment; she checks the potatoes in the hope that she can turn off the stove but they are still crisp. András never acclimated to the New York summers, this sticky draping of heat is a risky precondition for him. Some clattering game is going on among the children downstairs, the buzzing of voices still drifting up from the stoop where Ruth and her friends sit. If only she could shut the windows.
But when András comes out of the bedroom he shows no inclination to thrash against any of these small injustices. He seems sullen and inward, sitting heavily at the kitchen table and staring down at the beer. Illy, the stubborn contrariness of whose love knows no bounds, reaches out to her father and makes gurgling sounds, and begins the slow process of levering herself up to totter towards him, but she intercepts the baby and picks her up. ‘Leave Papa be,’ she says quietly into the fuzzy head. She takes her to the stove and carries on preparing the cabbage with the baby balanced on her hip, trying to ignore the ache in her back that has begun to flare up whenever she holds Illy for long. She gives the child a whisk, a fascinating implement whose segmental arcs entrance her (an early lesson in Euclidean geometry; she thinks the child has shown an aptitude for cataloguing and counting her small collection of possessions, and the conviction that Illy will be mathematically gifted brings with it a rush of pure proud joy). It is dusk now, and the apartment begins to receive the benediction of a slight breeze sneaking through the fetid city air. When the light starts to fade like this there are minutes when she could be back in the tiny apartment she shared with her parents in Pest, and a disorientating but not unpleasant melancholy lowers itself around her.
