A Universe of Sufficient Size

by Miriam Sved

  Josh glances over at his mother and sister. Illy is drooping over herself with one hand cupped around her forehead; Zoe is curled into a small package around her bent legs. They both look like people who have stumbled into the wrong place, lost and afraid. Josh is just as lost.

  He decides to leave that place, leave them there all tangled up with the personal – sticky and inexplicable – and focus on what he knows. ‘What are you working on?’ he says to the old people.

  Pali Kalmar looks up at the interruption and blinks in surprise, as though he had forgotten that anyone else was in the room.

  Nagymama says to him, ‘This is my grandson, Josh. He is a mathematician.’ Her face crinkles into a smile that makes Josh proud and embarrassed and ashamed: he is not the mathematician she thinks he is, or he thought he was.

  Pali Kalmar turns his gaze fully onto Josh with such open, childlike interest that Josh feels heat rush up his neck. Abruptly, Pali picks up some papers from the table, unfolds himself and moves around to the row of chairs: hunched almost double but surprisingly fast; a jerky, spring-loaded machine. He sits next to Josh, alarmingly close, and holds out the pieces of paper. Pali Kalmar, the real Pali Kalmar, is giving Josh his work to look at. Josh takes the papers.

  It is the upper limit problem – the great open conjecture about whether a sufficiently large set will guarantee structure; what are the fixed conditions for order to emerge? There is some notation down the side of the page but mostly it looks like the old people have been toying with different arrangements of shapes. The shapes, convex polygons, are composed of points in mirrored relation to each other. Josh recognises it as the outline of the old cups and caps method first proposed by Kalmar, which has brought the problem closer to a proof than anything else, although the lower bound is still tantalisingly far away.

  ‘You’re trying to get the cups and caps together without limiting their size too much,’ Josh says, to show that he knows where he is.

  Pali Kalmar’s face cracks into a smile so whole and radiant, Josh wonders if he has ever before facilitated such happiness. ‘This is exactly the problem, young man,’ he says. ‘As we limit the size of the structures to make this combination work they become so small that it does not serve our purpose anymore.’

  Josh and Nagymama both nod along with this.

  Illy, watching them from the profound distance of her new knowledge and her complete lack of any surety in the world, feels a pressure blooming in her chest. Shut out of the scene, once again, by maths. This is really not the conversation they should be having. But the surreal cast of this day makes her doubt herself, and when she clears her throat and tries to formulate the right way to pull them all back to where they should be – her mother’s lifelong identity fraud (what the fuck?) – she feels a flash of something like embarrassment, as if she is about to commit some social faux pas. She pushes through this absurdity, and says, ‘I don’t think we need to be talking about maths right now.’

  The middle-aged man at the seminar table with Illy’s mother – Illy thinks he might be one of Josh’s teachers – says in a gust, ‘Yes, well, and we actually have a rather important university function to attend, so perhaps we might …’

  Her mother cuts him off. ‘Darling,’ she says to Illy. She says it quietly, just the one word. It is almost enough to unstitch Illy’s righteousness and resolve.

  It’s okay, Mama, she could say. Whatever happened, why ever you did this, I will understand. So conditioned as the gatekeeper of her mother’s wellbeing.

  And then she will hate herself and hate her mother for it afterwards, when the chance for utterance is passed. A little shudder runs down her neck. ‘No,’ she says. ‘This is not …’ There are so many things it is not, she doesn’t know what to lead with. It is not okay. It is not normal. It is not her mother.

  Except it is. This first and last trick, this lifelong evasion, is so exactly her mother that the bubble of surprised clarity forces its way up Illy’s diaphragm in a laugh: a quick, insane-sounding laugh that bounces around the quiet room and makes her flush hot.

  Then she puts her head down on her knees and gives way to it – waves of juddering laughter that might be on some precipice of crying or shouting.

  Someone starts patting her on the shoulder – tentative little pats that somehow strike her as funny and make the whole thing worse.

  When it subsides, she heaves a few breaths and stays there with her face in her lap, not ready to meet the room again. Awkward silence. Then Josh, on her left – quietly as though he might not be heard in the death-stillness of the room – says, ‘Have you ever thought about trying to divide the points into a number of different subsets?’

  It starts her off again, and this time the shoulder patter beside her, who turns out to be Zoe, joins in.

  Five minutes later Illy is reading the notebook. The last pages that explain what her mother did, what she and her mother’s best friend together conspired to do. Nagymama is sitting with them, on the other side of Zoe. Only the middle-aged man is left alone at the seminar table, arms crossed defensively over his chest.

  When she has finished, Illy looks up at her mother.

  She should have questions. She thought she would have questions, hundreds of them swarming for answers. But looking at her mother, at Ildiko, she thinks perhaps most of the questions are superfluous. They applied to that other woman, to Eszter. With this tilt of perspective, a swinging from one camera angle to another, Illy can fill in many of the blanks herself. Why her mother has always been so evasive; the through-line of who she is. Her mother is Ildiko. Eszter’s friend. Illy will have to read the book again, all the way from beginning to end with this new knowledge as a key, but already she can begin rifling through in her mind, fitting this and that piece together with what she knows. Her mother was beautiful and poor. She was spiky; abrupt. Loyal. She was smart – so smart – and insightful; she saw how things were and tried to make those around her see, to change the galloping course of the world. She was arrogant and hubristic, and made all the mistakes of action, none of inertia. All of this fits so well.

  ‘Ildiko,’ Illy says. Her mother’s name, the precursor to her own.

  In the end, when she has whittled away all the false questions born of the lie, the only ones she has left are questions she is not sure she wants answered. So she is relieved, really – amused and exasperated and relieved – when Josh breaks the spell again. ‘Oh, so you’re using the pigeonhole principle to arrange points within the spikes.’

  Josh and the old man, Pali Kalmar, have their heads close together over the papers spread across their knees. They have been drawing more structures – bigger ones, sprawling multi-limbed constellations of dots with lines cutting through them, demarcating other shapes in the spaces between, spaces themselves filled with dots that Pali and Josh reach over each other to join up in strings of ordered space, like a child’s dot-to-dot drawing. Illy, as ever, is flummoxed by it. She turns back to her mother and sees her staring intently at the patterns, practically vibrating towards them. It is almost enough to set her off laughing again, or crying. She sighs, a deep heaving sigh of release. ‘Do you want to swap seats, Mama, so you can work with them?’

  Her mother – Ildiko – doesn’t respond. She looks from Illy to the work.

  Suddenly Zoe is up and moving. ‘Here, you sit here, Nagymama,’ she says, pulling a chair in front of Pali Kalmar, helping her grandmother up and leading her to it. She pulls another chair in for herself, so they are in a rough circle. ‘Now, maybe you should all finish whatever this is’ – gesturing at the pieces of paper sprawled across with dots and shapes – ‘before we try to sort out the rest of it.’

  Pali gives a delighted little laugh – a giggle. ‘You are marvellous, young lady,’ he says. ‘You remind me very much of your grandmother. But this is not a thing that will be finished today. It is a problem that has been in my brain, tormenti
ng me, for seventy years. And better brains too, like your grandmother.’

  Josh, who has been staring fiercely at the large sets of points, turns to Nagymama. ‘You really came up with the original Ramsey theory problem?’

  She waves a hand in her standard dismissive gesture, but Pali says, ‘Of course. Your grandmother is a brilliant mathematician, young man. These things are like little toys in her brain.’ He is looking at Nagymama as he says it; everybody is. Josh feels something warm and comforting slide into place. A small burnished coin that has been rolling around inside him. Pali Kalmar is no relation of his. Who needs him?

  Ildiko, partly to deflect Pali’s steady gaze, takes one of the sheets of workings from his lap. In fact, she has not worked on this problem for the last seventy years; she avoided it all her working life, scared of its associated longings. She was surprised, today, to find the remnant flutterings of a proprietorial pride in the work. Now she locks into Pali’s workings, still so close to what she and Eszter did at the statue all that time ago. She is studying it, trying to settle herself into the work, when Josh says, ‘Maybe you could try dividing up the points into subsets this way.’

  They all look over at the page Josh has been working on, where he has drawn a strange hybrid structure: lines intersecting to make consecutive triangles that shelter collections of dots within them. It takes a moment for the eye to adjust and pick out the larger pattern – the triangles meet around a central hull: a large, asymmetrical, badly drawn star.

  ‘That’s cool,’ Zoe says.

  Pali nods slowly. ‘Cool,’ he says, drawing the central vowel into a long shape with his accent.

  Josh turns to Nagymama. ‘I thought of this structure because, see, you can put any of the spikes together and it guarantees the cups and caps inside them are strictly above or below each other.’ His face is flushed. He looks up and catches Illy’s eye and holds out the piece of paper to her, an offering. ‘Because any of the spikes can be brought together like this’ – hovering his hands over opposite sides of the star, then closing the space between them – ‘and the spikes are all in a convex position, so we can combine cups and caps from any of them.’ Illy can tell he is trying to sound casual, unexcited. She feels a rush of protective love.

  The man sitting by himself at the seminar table says, ‘Could we maybe do this later?’

  Illy leans in and runs a finger over a series of dots in one of the spikes. ‘So you could combine half of a shape here’ – she finds a corresponding arc in one of the spikes opposite – ‘with one over here?’

  Nagymama nods slowly while she studies the new configuration.

  Pali Kalmar’s legs are twitching convulsively. ‘This is exactly it,’ he says, ‘exactly what we will try to do, because of the young man’s cleverness.’

  Josh looks very solemn, as though it would not be fitting to smile with all of them looking down at the mystery of the structure he has created.

  Pali says, ‘I wish Eszter and Tibor and Levi could see this.’

  It seems to break the spell of the work. Illy looks at her mother. Ildiko looks at the floor.

  Zoe says, ‘Who are Tibor and Levi?’

  This is the moment Ildiko has set them all in motion towards. The one she has longed for and feared and shied away from each time it came close. She could never speak of her old life while András was alive, and now that it is no longer verboten she finds that the muscles of concealment are welded, fixed; she opens and closes her mouth with no sense of how to propel herself into the full story. She meets her daughter’s eyes.

  ‘They were friends, in Budapest,’ Illy says. And then, speaking to the old people, ‘What happened to them?’ The question that remained at the core when all the rest fell away; the one she isn’t sure she wants answered. ‘What happened to the others?’

  Ildiko sets her mouth in a line, sets herself to steel. ‘I am never able to find out much details,’ she says. ‘They were unlucky. Many of the Budapest Jews survived.’

  Her daughter’s face crumples for just a moment and rights itself quickly. It comes as a shock, that neuron-fast sequence of expressions: the recognition that Illy has some stake in those long-ago people. Ildiko reaches out a hand; pulls it back again.

  When Pali starts to speak she is lost for a few seconds, unable to catch the thread. She had forgotten that he might know more than she does: he has travelled around the globe many times; he has been back there. He speaks in a quiet flow of Hungarian, and typical of Pali there is no preamble, no lowering into the story. He says, ‘First they were all moved into yellow star houses. Then, after the Germans took over in 1944, Tibor managed to get the families into a safe house. All three of the families. The house was on Pozsonyi Street and protected by the Swedish legation. Tibor had a contact who arranged it.’

  ‘Wait,’ Ildiko cuts in. ‘You know what happened? Who told you?’

  Pali looks at her with his same steady-eyed gaze, but she knows he is not calm because of his hands, which always gave him away with their spectrum of agitation. They are cutting jagged shapes through the air. ‘Erzsébet,’ he says. ‘Tibor’s younger sister. She survived. The only one. She was able to tell me some details when I returned to Budapest, many years after.’

  Ildiko looks away from him, trying to steady herself, to ready herself. It has been almost seventy years. She will never be ready.

  ‘Go on,’ she says. And then, turning to Illy, ‘You can understand, yes?’

  Her daughter nods.

  Pali says again, ‘The house was on Pozsonyi Street,’ like a child who has been made to memorise this particular detail.

  Ildiko nods at him, determined not to interrupt again or to react. There will be time later.

  In an odd, flat voice – detached, almost dreamy – Pali tells the story.

  It was crowded in the house. More than fifteen people in two rooms. But it was safer than other places. Everyone was hopeful about the advance of the Russians. It was said that they were weeks away at most, maybe days. People were allowed out on the streets for a few hours in the afternoons. Tibor usually went to look for food for all of them, he had many contacts throughout the city. One day he came home from the bread queues with a copy of the Pest newspaper. One of his communist contacts had told him to look in the personals section. There was a message there that read, Soon I’ll be with you. Be calm. Uncle Joe.

  The situation was quite calm and stable until October, when the Arrow Cross Party took over the government. Conditions got much worse after that. Gangs of Arrow Cross men went around the streets; they would pull Jews at random from the yellow star houses, take them to the Danube and shoot them all together. The Arrow Cross were nothing like the Germans. They had no concern for order or rules. They would kill you even if you had protection papers, even if you were in a safe house.

  Tibor decided he could do more out in the city. He wouldn’t be talked out of it, he left the house. He removed the yellow star from his clothes. For this alone they would have killed him if he was caught. For weeks he lived like this, no-one knew exactly where, moving around and staying with sympathetic Christians or communists.

  The Russians were almost there when the Germans began deportations in Budapest. Levi’s family had managed to keep some money hidden and they bribed their way into a bigger safe house, a school that was being used to shelter Jewish families. Maybe twenty-five families, they had paid German officers to protect them there. But Levi refused to go. He said he would stay with Eszter and take his chances in the Pozsonyi Street house.

  Eszter and Levi were still in the house in December when it was attacked by a gang of Arrow Cross men. They dragged everyone into the courtyard. The people could do nothing except huddle together, not knowing if it would mean deportation or if they were to be taken to the Danube. A German officer came into the courtyard, shouting at the Arrow Cross men in German and pushing people back into the hous
e.

  It was Tibor. All the people in the courtyard recognised him instantly but they had to pretend to be afraid. He had somehow got his hands on a uniform. Luckily his German was very good. The thugs from the Arrow Cross grumbled but put up no further resistance. They only counted everyone from the building, as though that was all they had come for, and left.

  Afterwards Tibor told everyone to go down to the building’s cellars and wait there until the Russians came. He pulled Eszter and Levi aside. Erzsébet stayed close and listened. He told them that the deportations were happening that day: all the ghetto Jews were being taken out and marched to Józsefváros station. And the worst news: the school where Levi’s family were sheltering had also been emptied, its occupants marched away.

  There was a little fight then. Tibor said that he would go down to the station and try to get Levi’s family out with the uniform. Levi said he wouldn’t let Tibor go alone. Tibor said it was too dangerous for him to come. They argued about it until Eszter stepped in. She told Tibor not to be silly, that of course they wouldn’t let him go alone. They would go with him and that was final.

  After Eszter had settled this point they had to sneak out without the families knowing. Eszter and Tibor’s parents had gone down to the cellar, and Tibor made Erzsébet swear not to say anything to them.

  Eszter and Tibor and Levi went together to the train station, where the Jews were being herded into freight carts. It was a scene of chaos. Whole families were there with all their belongings, the Germans shouting at people, directing them into different lines. People had been told various things: that they were being sent to Palestine, or that they were to work in factories for the war effort. They could not find Levi’s parents or brother. They did manage to pull some people from the lines. There were two young boys they hid in a woodpile, telling them to come out at night, long after the trains had departed.