by Erika Rummel
She had made mistakes. A six-week holiday in Laura’s skin would set her back on the right path. “It was a mistake to marry Laszlo,” she said. “And another mistake to move back with anya after I found out that he cheated on me, but I didn’t know what else to do. I am at the end of the line with him.” She shot Laura a look to see if the “end-of-the-line” idiom worked, then stowed her bag in the car and got in beside Laura. “I want a divorce,” she said. “That’s why I moved back with anya. I had nowhere else to go. I will stay only as long as it takes to sort things out.” She drew a breath and continued as Laura started up the car. She kept the words coming. Perhaps they were words she couldn’t say to anya and had had to keep in storage until now. The monotous flow of Cereta’s words merged with the noise of the car engine. She was absorbed in her story. “Laszlo was using me,” she said, “making me do secretarial work when I came home from teaching. He said there was too much work for one assistant but not enough to hire a second one.” She paused as if to look for road signs in her life that could point her to the truth. “The truth is, he was screwing his assistant and letting her get away with a lot. She spent her time at the office primping or playing solitaire, and I had to take up the slack. I want to get out of Hollókõ. The only thing that is keeping me there is necessity. And maybe I should say, anya. She is good at manipulating people. She has given me a giant guilt complex, you know. She constantly talks about killing herself. I’m afraid she will do it one day, and I will blame myself because I was not there to help her. But really, how can I help her? She is depressed. I told her to take medication. She does not want to. She says antidepressants inhibit her creativity. Screw her creativity! I can’t take it anymore.”
“Your vernacular is very good,” Laura said.
“My vernacular? What do you mean?” Cereta said.
“Screw her.”
“Oh, that,” Cereta said. “I heard that on British television. But really, I can’t stand living with anya. It’s worse than living with Laszlo. I will move when Hungary becomes part of the European Union when I can work anywhere in Europe. I will go to Vienna. Or London. Or come back here to L.A. Zoltan will sponsor me.”
Laura could hear the threat in her voice. The threat of competition.
She paid at the exit of the garage. Cereta watched her put the card into the slot, and the amount due light up.
“Everything is automatic here. It will take a long time for Hungary to catch up,” she said as if they were through with the topic of her flight from Hungary and the scam arranged by Zoltan.
But Laura was unwilling to let her off the hook.
The bar lifted, and she eased into the airport traffic.
“Dad made me believe it was absolutely essential for your health to come here,” she said, resurrecting the topic. “That it was a done deal. I couldn’t back out, couldn’t refuse to co-operate. He railroaded me into this crazy plan. I should have stood up to him. I’m taking an enormous risk here, Cereta. I hope you understand that.”
Cereta kept her eyes on the traffic, on the car in the next lane, on the L.A. cityscape, the office buildings, the fast-food places, the on-ramp to the highway. She refused to understand anything or owe Laura anything. “You think I’m not nervous?” she said. Her voice was belligerent. “Let’s go over those names and places again, in case someone asks me.”
For the rest of the trip she rehearsed being Laura.
In Santa Monica, Laura turned into the cavernous city hall garage, deserted because it was Saturday, and parked next to her father’s Mini. That’s how they had worked it out. She turned off the ignition and handed Cereta her purse. It was the surrender of her identity. Cereta offered up her purse in exchange.
“So what are you going to do while I’m here?” Cereta said.
“Dad left me his car,” Laura said, pointing to the Mini. “Mine has to stay put, obviously. I’ll go to the cabin and stay out of sight.”
“That is his car?” Cereta said. “It is very small. I thought everyone drove a large car in California. On the highway there were so many, ah, what do you call them? Soofs? And so many Audis and BMWs.”
“They are called ‘SUVs’. And Dad isn’t rich, you know.”
“Then he should stop sending money to anya. She does not appreciate it. She wastes his money.”
“On what?”
“She donates his money to causes.”
“What causes?”
“Save the whales, empower women in Africa, what do I know? Or she buys up kitsch and burns it ‘to keep it from blighting homes,’ that’s what she says. She did the same with the compensation she was offered by the company that caused the chemical spill — the chemicals that made me ill. She wouldn’t touch the money. She told them to give it to Greenpeace.”
It was time for Laura to go. There was a plan to implement, but she could not get herself to open the car door and walk away. She was mesmerized by her sister’s words, the secret markers they contained, clues to a past she had chosen not to live. She was looking for links, for patterns, something that twinned the two of them, made them interchangeable. Perhaps anya was that link. Or was she the one who set them apart, the mark that distinguished the captive from the escapee?
“You are going to the weekend house in the desert? ‘Zoltan’s folly’ — that is the nickname, right?” Cereta asked, as if she was checking a fact sheet for details to memorize, to have at her fingertips when playing Laura. “Why do you want to be in a primitive place without the nice things you have here in the city?”
“Zoltan likes roughing it,” Laura said. “I don’t. But the cabin is the ideal spot in the circumstances. Remote. Isolated. I won’t run into anyone I know.”
“And what will you do there?
“Catch up on my reading. Catch up on my life. Too bad I didn’t bring along a Hungarian dictionary. I could have translated anya’s poem.”
“I will translate it for you. As I said. But you should go now, Laura.”
Yes, she needed to get away from here where someone might spot the two of them together, but she didn’t move. There were so many questions left to ask.
“Tell me,” she said to Cereta. “Whose idea was this charade, yours or Dad’s?”
“I don’t remember how the conversation went exactly. I think it was Zoltan who came up with the idea when we talked on the phone. So don’t blame me. If you need a scapegoat, blame Zoltan. Maybe I planted the idea. Is that the phrase, ‘plant an idea’? But Zoltan did not object.” Cereta had her hand on the car door, ready to step out and begin her life as Laura. The purse gave her a certain authenticity. “Zoltan wanted to see me,” she said.
Laura shook her head. Is that why he had made her run this risk, to see Cereta? It wasn’t plausible. “He could have visited you in Hungary,” she said.
Cereta took her hand off the car door. She wasn’t going. Not yet. She was standing her ground.
“No, it wasn’t a question of visiting me in Hungary,” she said. “He wanted to see how I react to America. Not as a tourist, but experiencing the system, you know? To see how it would change me. He said I have to run the gamut of American life. Just me. Without you being around.”
Laura recognized the desire, the longing to stand alone, to break loose from the sister bond and be unique. Perhaps they were alike after all.
“Without anyone to model myself after,” Cereta was saying. “I think he wanted to study me in isolation.” She smiled. There was a lipstick smear on her teeth, as if she had tasted blood. “As an exhibit in the case of Nature vs. Nurture,” she said, and broadened her smile into a rueful laugh. “I think Zoltan takes a clinical interest in me. Not like a father, more like a psychologist.” She had her hand on the car door again, getting ready to launch the test run of Cereta in America. “And, on the other side there was anya, waiting for you,” she said reproachfully. “She wanted to see you.”
Cereta pursed her lips. “You are making a joke of this, right? But I will answer you seriously. No, it is all about the inner truth for anya. She wanted to tell you the truth in person. That’s what she said to me.”
“Tell me the truth about what?”
“The truth, whatever it is for her. Don’t ask me, Laura. It is not up to me to tell you. When you changed your mind and cancelled the trip, anya felt you played a dirty trick on her.”
Because when she let go of one slave, she expected a replacement?
“Because she wanted to tell us both at the same time, you see. To me before I left, and to you when you arrived. So, instead she put it in writing. She handed me the ‘Rape’ poem and gave me a second copy for you, because she wanted to treat us exactly the same.” She smirked. “Like identical twins. Because we are identical twins.”
“Why didn’t you ask her what the poem means?”
“I asked, but she said everything was right there, contained in the words. She had nothing to add. You know what she is like — obstinate. God forbid she should make things easy for anyone.”
“But you see her every day. You must have some idea of what’s going on in her mind.”
Cereta shrugged. She got out of the car, clutching Laura’s purse, her new ID. Laura got out as well.
“Don’t you want to know what it means?” she said to Cereta. “Aren’t you even interested in what she has to say to us?”
“Not really. I’m living with anya, and I am tired of her and her cryptic poems and her ‘truth.’ I see her every day, as you say. I have to listen to her every day. I hear a lot about the meaning of things, what the trees tell her, what the clouds tell her. The mould on the walls speaks to anya, you know. Be glad you don’t have to put up with her and her mysteries. The poems are just like her paintings. You remember her paintings?”
“Of course I do. The swirls, in black and white.” She wanted to keep on talking in spite of the risk of being observed. What if someone who knew Laura saw her here in the garage with her copycat sister? No matter, she had to know what Cereta thought about those paint swirls. Decoding them seemed crucial information all of a sudden, a message explaining everything, tying up the loose ends of her life.
“You remember when we asked her what they meant?” Cereta said. “And she said: my thoughts, my feelings. That’s the kind of answer you get when you ask about her poems. So, yes, I did discuss this ‘Rape’ poem with her, and she said it was her vision. She said that’s what she read in Aunt Eva’s eyes.”
They stood in the windy garage. Cereta faced her defiantly.
“Does that answer your question?” she said before walking away, to the mall, to play her part in the charade.
THAT WAS SIX weeks ago. When she arrived at the cabin, Laura had a strangling sensation in her throat, a knot of fear about being alone with her thoughts, alone in the shadeless desert, in a place unforgiving and hostile to human needs. But she rallied before her thoughts could thicken into something more sombre and took a tactile comfort in lugging canned food and bottled water from the trunk of Zoltan’s car into the house. She stashed them away under the kitchen counter in columns and rows, restful patterns keeping her mind balanced. She cleaned the house, wiped the accumulated dust from the table and chairs, and put fresh sheets on the bed. And at night — she had been afraid of sleepless nights — she settled into the silence of the cabin and found that sleep came easily after all, blacking out worries. The next morning, she looked around and adapted to her makeshift home. She gave up ambition and sank into good-enough. She let the images of perfection fade from her mind — the sculpted bodies, the curated art shows, the brightly spun inspirational messages, the faith-like dedication expected at work, the faked collegiality and creditable counterfeit of warmth and interest, the rooms with the staged look. She folded her hands in her lap and looked with relief at the imperfections of the unstaged cabin, the calming effect of necessary objects. Slowly, the crispness she felt when she was in the city, the tautness of her skin, a kind of allergy against required perfection, went away. Her skin felt roomier. She had a sensation of well-being, of safety, of having survived a catastrophe. Nothing unforeseen could happen in a place governed by a slow natural cycle. Her kaleidoscopic city life, shaken up and reconfigured a million times, was turning into a still life of durable objects. She stepped outside and stood still under a vacant blue sky in an immobile landscape of rocks and straw-coloured grass, the mineral glint of grit on the road the only variable in sight. No man-made sound reached her, except one day, like a warning from another world, the screech of fighter planes passing overhead, likely returning from a training mission to an army base nearby. Laura watched the vapour trail in the sky fade to white. Apart from that, there was no kinetic energy except the wind edging across the land and raising dust that seeped through the windows of the cabin like a sad emotion.
Time seemed endless in the desert, undivided except for day and night, no schedule popping up on a screen, no agenda, nothing to keep Laura from rethinking her life, checking her gallery of friends and those missing from it, the lack of a male friend who could double as a lover, for example, someone like David. His name came up too frequently in the solitude of the cabin to count as random recall. Looking back now at the days of her retreat, Laura saw that it had to end the way it did, in David’s bedroom. There was a prescient murmur in her heart even then, an augury in the desert air that she would reconnect with David after returning to the city. David was on her mind, even though she was preoccupied with the exchange engineered by her father: Cereta turning into Laura. Was there a corollary, she wondered. Was she turning into Cereta? She felt a certain levelling had already taken place, in the garage at the airport and later on in Santa Monica. She had become a little more like Cereta.
Her father, she thought, didn’t understand the momentous nature of the switch. Giving away one’s identity meant nothing to him. He had been named Samuel and was raised as Zoltan. His life was saved by exchanging his Jewish identity for that of a gentile, by switching from the arms of his mother to those of his aunt. After that, identity was perhaps no longer important. He had developed a blind spot to himself, a vacancy in his mind that made him receptive to taking risks, to welcoming life’s vicissitudes. He was reckless, a gambler. It occurred to Laura that her father, who had seemed inexplicable until now, was in fact entirely explicable. He was the result of a peripatetic life, from one country to another, from one continent to another, vistas gained and lost, people loved and let go. He had become unmoored. Perhaps that is what drained him of all fear, all compunction, all the feelings other people had naturally. No, drained wasn’t the right word. Her father didn’t lack feelings. They just kicked in belatedly, after she remonstrated with him, after she put it to him that he should have been afraid, should have been more considerate, should have loved her more. He freely granted her point then and, like a repentant child, asked her forgiveness, took up the wanted emotion, loved her, feared for her, was solicitous for her welfare, but by then it was too late. I shouldn’t have asked you to take the risk, he said on the day he left for the Nile cruise with Nancy. I should have taken out a loan to pay for the hospital expenses.
Too late. Cereta had left Budapest by the time Zoltan regretted his plan. She was headed for L.A. and the fateful exchange.
From time to time, in the splendid isolation of the cabin, Laura looked at the poem anya had sent her, read the lines, mouthed them, sounded them out, searched her memory for the meaning of those foreign words, but too many gaps remained to tease out even a ghost of meaning. She had to wait until her return to the city, until she could read Cereta’s translation.
AS PROMISED, Cereta left behind an English version of “Rape III.” It was sitting on top of Laura’s purse, car keys, and dry-cleaned clothes from which Cereta’s touch and scent had been chemically remove
d. The translation was the only tangible memento left of their exchange, a page handwritten on a piece of Zoltan’s office stationery, as if it was a counselling memo, and perhaps it was. Laura speed-read through the lines, then read them a second time, slowly.
Rape III
Leopold is a manufacturer of waste water treatment
addressing the self-created problem
buying the silence
of those who have been violated
air, water, earth, woman,
or maybe they are willingly silent
because saying the word is too painful
even the memory hurts
Cereta was right. The translation explained nothing.
“I don’t understand it, even in English,” Laura said to her father. He had handed her the bundle of her possessions and the poem in the close atmosphere of his messy apartment, with boxes of files and clothing still unpacked three weeks after his move, and destined to stay that way for some time, she knew. Her father was an incorrigible slob. I shouldn’t have come here, she thought. I should have asked him to come to my place, where the aesthetics encourage organized thinking.
“I’m totally lost,” she said to him.
“What did you expect?” he said. “Every translation is an exposition. This is Cereta’s take on those lines. Ultimately, you have to interpret them for yourself.”
“That’s so typical of anya,” she said, “sending me a mysterious message and leaving it up to me to tease out a meaning. Do you think she is talking about the chemical spill that made Cereta ill? Cereta thought it might refer to the rape of the environment. I even googled waste water treatment companies. There is a large company, F.B. Leopold, a subsidiary of Xylem, with headquarters in Pennsylvania. Maybe that company was involved in the cleanup. And the title: ‘Rape III.’ Is there a ‘Rape I’ and ‘Rape II?’ I should ask Cereta. Or anya herself, but I doubt I’ll get an answer from her if I write.”
