by Miriam Sved
But a German soldier saw Eszter and Levi and demanded that they get into the deportation lines. When Tibor tried to intervene the officer recognised his Hungarian accent. His luck with the German uniform had run out. He was pulled away by two officers. Nobody saw what happened to him but he must have been shot.
Pali stops speaking.
Ildiko looks down at her hands and finds that she has been twisting a piece of paper. It has notation on it, some of their work with the ordered sets; she has twisted it into a knot. She feels, absurdly, as though she must tell someone, report what has happened to the authorities. Her friend, her old friend Tibor. He has to be saved from himself. This is what some higher authority has to understand: that Tibor must be made to see that he doesn’t need to enact these heroics to prove he is worthy of existence. But Tibor has been dead for decades. She already knew this. She needs to stop and let the newly brutal knowledge seep into the foundations and become part of the world. But there is no time, because she also needs to hear what happened to the others. To Eszti. She looks up from her hands and gives Pali a little nod to continue.
He nods back, his eyes never leaving her face. ‘Eszter and Levi were taken away in the trains,’ he says. ‘To Auschwitz.’
Ildiko concentrates on her breath, in and out. The world has fallen away, the last seventy years cease to exist, she has no family. She is fourteen, she is twenty. She will not survive this.
Pali keeps speaking. ‘I could find no record of either of them at the death camp. Many people died on the journey. It was ten days in the locked carts with barely any water or food. People who died were thrown off by the side of the road. But a few escaped. I heard a story about one man who cut his way through the bottom of one of the trains. Groups of Jews somehow got out and lived in the woods. Perhaps one or both of them did that. They might have gone home to Budapest and lived with fake documents. After everything they had been through together, perhaps they married and raised children.’
It is a ridiculous idea. Ildiko can see that clearly. Eszter and Levi died in a train, on the way to Auschwitz. She has known for such a long time that Eszter is dead, it was set firm in her mind. But the other story is a tiny crack through which hope dribbles, making everything malleable. If she lets herself live beneath that drip drip drip, she will go mad. Eszter wouldn’t have stayed away all those years. Ildiko thinks of the letter folded in her bedside drawer. Eszter wouldn’t have stayed away from her.
‘Mama?’ someone says beside her. She turns. The woman is her daughter; her granddaughter is on the other side. Ildiko is somehow inhabiting two people, two separate time spaces. The woman, her daughter, Illy, puts a hand on her arm. Ildiko realises with a shock that her own face is wet. She has been crying, tears seeping out. Her daughter and granddaughter look terribly worried, quite devastated, their faces pointed at her in mirrored expressions, and Ildiko would like to comfort them. It is okay, she would say, these things happened a long time ago, seventy years. They are in the past. But the part of her that is in the past will not allow her to speak and acknowledge that it is over, they are all gone.
At what feels like the last moment before some irreversible rupture she is saved by the middle-aged man sitting behind her, the one who has no stake in this story. Alone at his abandoned seminar table, Josh’s lecturer, who understood none of Pali’s words, slaps both his hands on the table. ‘Can we please do this later?’ he says loudly. ‘Some of us have been keeping the vice-chancellor waiting for an hour. The vice-chancellor.’ He glares around, defying them to come up with a higher priority than the vice-chancellor.
There is a long pause. The five people sitting in a circle look around at each other as though they have just arrived there, blinking and startled.
Eventually Pali says, ‘Your nagy important chancellor will have to wait. Or my friends will have to come to dinner. We still have much work to do on our upper limit problem.’
Everyone looks at Ildiko, at Nagymama, who sits up straighter. She pulls a handkerchief from her sleeve and blows her nose, her crumpled face regaining some sense of itself, going from an inchoate assemblage of features into an almost lofty expression. ‘Eh,’ she says, and waves a hand in the air. ‘Maybe we will go to the dinner. Is the vice-chancellor a mathematician?’
Ildiko, who thought no-one would recognise her without the mask she has worn for seventy years, finds herself walking arm in arm with her granddaughter. They walk in the dusk at her own shuffling pace, at the back of a raggedy procession over the university footbridge towards the restaurant. She is back in the present, and everything has not fallen apart. There is a sturdier order than names underlying things, an identity known in the skin. She looks down at her granddaughter’s hand on her own withered arm. The beautiful firm optimism of it.
Zoe wants something from her. She has been asking questions while they walk: pointed questions about Eszter. She wants a label, some ordering classification, and Ildiko resists giving it to her. She has mostly recovered from the shock of Pali’s story, she doesn’t mind Zoe’s questions, but she answers them without elaboration. Eszter and I met when we were fourteen. Yes, we were very close. At school together and then university. Yes, both with boyfriends.
She is grudgingly impressed: from such a sparse trail of crumbs her granddaughter has found her out. Zoe, the child with strange hair and her own ideas about everything, the one she always watched from a distance because she didn’t want to ruin things the way she had with Illy: it seems that Zoe knows her better than the others, in some heart-blood capacity.
Yes, I cared about her a lot. She was my best friend.
They fall into silence.
Her resistance to speaking it aloud is a hazy impulse. She could easily offer Zoe an order of things that fits with the modern world – this remarkably unconstrained world in which she knows her granddaughter’s sweetheart is a woman. She is not ashamed of it, she has always admitted it to herself: that the love of her life was her best friend, who died. She could tell Zoe that she was prepared to marry Levi, a man she didn’t love, just to stay close to Eszter, and that she married another one she actively disliked to try to save her. But the patterns of a life are pliable, sensorially bendy; they shift around according to where the eye comes to rest. She doesn’t want her life to be a tragedy. Not at this moment, walking to dinner with her daughter and grandchildren and her newly found friend.
Zoe breaks the silence. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘I’m sorry that your best friend died.’
She pats her on the arm. ‘It is okay, darling. I have you and Josh now.’
It probably seems like an evasion or an untruth to her granddaughter, who looks away and stops with the questions. But it is only part evasion. It is also the great surprising equilibrium that arose from the mess at the end: the simple proud love for her grandchildren, one step removed and so much less tangled in the past than her love for her daughter. It’s the reason – she sees it now, unadorned – that she wanted Josh with her today.
So she holds her granddaughter’s arm and they walk together towards the restaurant, where Ildiko will sit between Pali and Zoe. She will keep turning from her work with Pali to show Zoe bits of it: patterns of intersecting lattices that, even doodled on a napkin, are such beautifully ordered turmoil that Zoe will spend the next year on a series of photographs trying to capture something similar in political rallies and in her large group of friends.
Ildiko and Pali will keep working together, in the restaurant and then, after he flies off to stay with a family of mathematicians in Denmark, in letters and eventually electronic mail in which they move towards a breakthrough on the upper limit problem, closing in on the tipping point for patterns to emerge from chaos, for order to fall back into the swamp. Surprisingly, Ildiko’s room at the retirement home – which she moves to quite readily after teasing her daughter with a few weeks of sulky resistance – is conducive to work. She keeps it sparse: her be
d and a recliner on one side and the rest of the space empty except for a small table and straight-backed chair. A view of the branches of a spreading jacaranda and mellow light slanting in: the late afternoons are best for work, her dinners brought in on a tray. She keeps Eszter’s letter and the loose pages of their work in a drawer beside her bed – the work they did together on the Ramsey theory problem. Eszter’s notebook is being translated and indexed by Illy, and the local Shoah group is interested in archiving it, but she has kept this relic for herself. It has the scribblings of both their hands, and she can look at it sometimes late at night when a longing as large and crowded as the night sky fills her chest. Maybe the pages would be of interest to someone, some historian of mathematics or Hungarians or Pali Kalmar, maybe they will be found and filed away somewhere after her death, but there is no way to make their real significance part of the historical record. That will never be of interest to anyone. Only one day she might show them to Zoe, and tell her about the time she and Eszter did this work on the bench beneath Anonymous: the sun striking the castle just so, their delight in the problem, Eszter’s hair falling down towards their busy pencils.
Zoe visits more often than she would have expected, and sometimes they speak of Eszter in a casual way, as if she was known to her granddaughter, someone she met when she was young, part of an extended family taken for granted.
Josh visits as well, and seems to want to hear about her mathematics, which is a great gift. She can’t help regretting that he has given up his big dreams of America. He seems softer-focus, more remote; he has lost the bulletproof gleam of extreme youth. Her daughter is very relieved that Josh is finishing his degree, being mentored by Sol Milos. But Ildiko, in her contrariness, sees fit to point out that degrees aren’t everything. Pali Kalmar never got one.
And Illy keeps visiting, of course, and takes her every few weeks to the small studio space she has rented in Newtown. Here too the light is perfect, and Illy, who seems lighter somehow, younger, is making a sculpture out of pieces of galvanised wire threaded together into a great heaving tangle. Ildiko pretends to find it inexplicable, but she sits and looks at it for a long time. It has the vague outlines of a human body, and you can peer in from different angles, just a random knot of wire until you look closely and start to make out three-dimensional structures that gleam when the sun hits. A multitude of possibilities: rhombuses and pentagons and triangles, almost any shape you can think of.
Budapest, February 1944
Dearest Ildi (Better Eszter),
Mama has come and told me that the family next door have an escape route for their only son. He is a wheezy sort of boy about sixteen, and has an uncle with a diplomatic pass and special travel papers for Switzerland. I don’t know whether it is true or what will come of it, but the idea – one of our number slipping through a chink into freedom – has sent the hallway into a frenzy.
We are in an apartment building in the Ninth District, near the station. It has a yellow star above the door, and two families in most of the rooms. We share ours with a poor exhausted creature named Mrs Vos, who has two boys of the boisterous roll-around type and a baby with such a thin pitiful wail that I think she already understands the conditions of the world. Mrs Vos and the baby are asleep now, the boys playing in a corner, and my parents are visiting the family next door to hear about the good fortune of the son.
I have come back in secret to exhume my symbolic worldly possessions from their symbolic hiding spot in a pocket of my suitcase. Mama is talking about trying to smuggle out our only actual worldly possessions, which are hidden in our only actual hiding spot, in a crevice beneath the floorboards: a diamond she salvaged from her jewellery collection, and the hopeful little credit note that was all Papa got for his business from the gentile he ‘sold’ it to.
Whereas this, contained herein, is the trace of my own life, which I am consigning to your care, if I can get it there. It is mostly your work anyway, and you will go on to do greater and more important things, but I know you will not think me abject for clinging on to this remnant. It is, of course, our work on the old upper limit problem. It brings the day back to me with such vividness; I suppose I want to memorialise it. I don’t mean to alarm you – I am perfectly well and in no imminent danger. But these pages have come to represent a captured essence of something: the optimism of that time, our hope for a perfect world. Or at least my hope – you were always more tethered to reality than I.
I must not ramble on and let this brief opportunity dribble away rather than telling you useful information.
I am sorry, Ildi, that I can’t report anything about your parents. All I can say is that they are not in this house or the other yellow star houses close by, or I would have encountered word of them in our periods of daily release. But you shouldn’t worry; there are many other yellow star houses throughout the city and they are probably quite safe.
Tibor and Levi are also perfectly all right – both have done labour service near the Soviet border, Tibor twice and Levi once. They came back thin but intact. Levi is perhaps not quite so buoyant as in the past but Tibor, it appears to me, is thriving: animated almost to religious zeal by the dire conditions. He is involved in a supply of goods into the ghetto and people out of it, and he smuggles milk (God knows where he acquires it) to Mrs Vos for the baby. He is also in touch with some connections who may be able to help us to a safer place if conditions worsen, although I won’t say much for fear of this letter being intercepted. Only know that I am able to cower and cringe in relative safety, while Tibor every day ascends closer to actual heroic flight. But then we always knew where the totality of courage was located between us, although I wish it was otherwise.
I am well in all essentials. The old luxuries of life are gone, but we eke out enough. Mama is able to make herself quite miserable, but I am almost comforted by her ability to fret over frivolities: the children’s games getting too noisy or Mrs Vos claiming the coveted corner space in the room. Perhaps Mama cannot contemplate the larger things that have been taken from us, so she focuses on these petty ones. Or perhaps wherever we humans are, whatever meagre claim to territory we can make, we are constitutionally bound to fight over it. (I will not share this theory with Tibor; I worry about its implications for his great socialist revolution.) In any case, nothing is very bad here.
I know you too well, though; I hear you in my head asking for details: you want to know what we have to eat, and whether my boots need resoling, and most of all you want to know how I get on in my mind. Perhaps you also ask when was the last time I did any work: but this is one line of questioning that is based on a misconception, because you were always so much more productive than I, and brilliance is the best measure of your own mental state.
I will admit to you – only to you, Ildi – that a loaf of bread composed partly of sawdust makes for an unpleasantly powdery texture against the roof of the mouth, and that the bottom of my left boot flaps with such abandon against the ground that I fear it is about to exit from the category of footwear and revert to undisciplined leather. And with a little less flippancy I will tell you that I can’t remember the last time I picked up pencil and paper to try to enter that other realm where we used to work or play. It is not for lack of time – we are stuck inside for most of the day and there is not much to do, other than strategising how best to make the dusty bread satisfy us and Mrs Vos’s hungry sons. It is only that I don’t know how to get there anymore. Sometimes I think I catch a glimpse of it, but then I slip back into the grey light of our new daily reality. I need you and Pali, my otherworldly guides.
But when I start to feel any danger of the abyss, I commit myself to thinking about the five of us as we used to be. I try to remember specific times: all of us working at the statue, or the hike that brought us together in the hills. It seems like a translucence, an idyll. At the time I felt it was a beginning only: a transition into some more permanent state of life. And it was, it was. B
ut it was also, I see now, the thing itself. A culmination. I want to feel that we will always be there, contained in that fleeting time, keeping each other close. You would tell me not to be a fantasist. Or no, you wouldn’t say any such thing, but you would look at me with that incisiveness in your eyes and I would know what you were thinking, because you lived in a world of truer, harsher light. As it should be; you are strong enough to live there. I will go on capering in my delusions. Chaos will never claim us. We will carry the pattern with us all our days, hold it gently inside us wherever we go.
My best joy is to know that you and Pali are both safe. Perhaps you enrolled in an American college and have already taken your diploma? I hope you have those new-world blockheads running scared. I expect to hear word very soon that between you in the east and Pali in the west you have fully colonised the place.
Ildi, I need to write seriously now about matters that have weighed on me. I have wished so many times that I had acted differently. I wish that I had been more worthy of you.
I think often about my childishness – worse than that, my dense-witted churlishness – when you tried to help me escape. I can’t quite fathom myself then: I was so concerned about the details of life, whereas you understood not to take the fundamentals for granted. It seems to me now that an expedient marriage falls very much in the category of detail, and so I am able to think of you and Professor Voigt with simple hope and even belief that it has all worked out. Perhaps you have arranged an amicable annulment of the marriage, but I can also imagine you coming to some friendly agreement. Maybe you and the professor work together at the Institute for Advanced Study, as we hoped would be the case. Or perhaps you have even arrived at a loving union. If I knew you were happy, I think I could truly accept whatever happens here.
Ironically it is only Pali I no longer worry about, safe with his host family in California. You may have been right in your conjecture, which I admit I was piqued by at the time, that he will always be looked after.
