The Painting on Auerperg's Wall

by Erika Rummel

  “Don’t you resent that?” he asked.

  “Resent what?” she said. “Being a foundling, you mean?”

  “The whole thing.”

  She shrugged. “That’s just how it is,” she said.

  “It doesn’t bother you at all?”

  “Oh well,” she said. “Sometimes, when I’m in the dumps and need a lift, I write poetry. I look at the shape of the lines. Long lines draw me out, short lines pull me back, until I’m in good shape again.”

  They were sitting on a rock under the pines that night at camp when she described the lines of her poetry. She was rocking back and forth in a kind of davening, a worshipping of poetry. “Long, short, long, shot. They balance out eventually,” she said, and stopped the rocking motion. “Then I feel steady again. Sometimes, instead of writing poetry, I fantasize about Eva. I pretend she’s my mother, and that she abandoned me because she wasn’t married to the man who got her pregnant. I confront her, and she admits it. There’s a thrill in a nicely managed pretend game, don’t you think?”

  “I don’t play pretend games,” he said. “I prefer reality.”

  “You want your real mother?”

  He considered her question. “I don’t know,” he said. “She’s dead. I have no memory of her. I can’t tell whether I’d be happier with my own mother than with Eva.”

  “You don’t understand anything, do you? You can’t tell whether you’re sad or happy. It’s a mystery to you, right?”

  He had to admit it was a mystery.

  “I could tell right away that afternoon when Eva brought you along,” Livia said. “I knew you were dumb as far as emotions are concerned.”

  He remembered being sent out of the room. Go and play with Livia, they said.

  “They wanted to get rid of us so they could have their adult talk, about your aunt’s cancer.”

  They played on the balcony. It was small, with a cast-iron railing that rattled when you touched it. Zoltan was afraid it would give and drop to the courtyard below, where a woman with a kerchief tightly wound around her head was beating a carpet, dust flying. Nah, Livia said and rattled it on purpose. You are scared, she said and laughed.

  Livia had a kitten, which followed them out on the balcony, mewling for attention. She picked it up and held it over the balcony railing. It is scared, too, Livia said. The kitten clawed the air frantically and cried like a baby, and for a moment he thought she would drop the animal. He was frozen, fascinated by her cruelty, could not move even a finger to prevent the kitten from falling, but she didn’t drop it. She put it down, finally, and quickly pulled back after she released her hold on it. The kitten flew out of her hands, a furry ball bouncing on the balcony floor and hiding behind a broom and dustpan leaning in the corner. Livia herself was bouncing rhythmically against the railing, rocking it, and the woman below stopped beating the carpet and looked up, giving Livia a warning glance. She stopped bouncing, slid down the railing and sat on her haunches, facing him. She was no longer interested in the kitten. She was watching him.

  You had the hots for me even then, she told him that summer at camp, moving close to him in the pine forest, under the night sky. I opened my legs, she said, and you looked up my skirt. I did it on purpose to see what you would do. I made it easy for you to touch me, but you were a coward. I had to take your hand and make you do it, and I could read it in your eyes: You were afraid. You thought I would tell on you later on.

  The moment she said it, Zoltan remembered his twelve-year-old self, and that same desire rose up in his crotch with teenage furor. He pawed at Livia there, in the pine forest, as her eyes turned the colour of night, and she didn’t object. She talked dirty while they were doing it, describing what they were doing, in that deliberate way she had, a slow crescendo, giving him for the first time in his life instant feedback and instant understanding of what went on inside him.

  I was hooked on Livia, Zoltan thought recalling that night, hooked on living in the moment with her help, and of course she knew it. She shrugged back into her T-shirt and pulled up her pants after their teenage lovemaking, looking at him with calculating eyes. He was afraid she would be as cruel to him as she had been to the kitten on the balcony.

  Once he was able to name his deficiency, to use clinical terms — loss of neural synchronicity, alexithymia — it was a case of doctor heal thyself. Perhaps that’s why he studied psychology in the first place, to learn how to manage his disease. Because there was no cure. He learned the necessary tricks to compensate for his shortcomings. He recapped his experiences. He wrote them down and read the words back to himself aloud, or he listened to himself telling his experiences to others. Absorbing the information in that way allowed him to identify his emotions, but those tricks didn’t always work, and they didn’t slake his desire for direct living.

  After making love to Livia that time in the pine forest, he dutifully kissed her and said, “I love you.” He didn’t know whether he loved her, but he thought that was the default ending for such scenes, that’s what he was supposed to say.

  She turned away from his kiss. “No,” she said, “you don’t love me, Zoltan. You are just horny, that’s all.”

  He knew she was right the moment she said it. She had read him correctly. But later I did come to love her, he thought, although he wasn’t sure because she never said, “You love me, Zoltan, don’t you know?” And Livia’s feelings? He knew better than asking Livia, “Do you love me?” because that was something he could tell, the feelings of others. Livia, he realized, did not love him, couldn’t love anyone, he suspected, because she knew too much about feelings and couldn’t stop knowing. Such clarity was sure to deaden the heart, the part not connected with any tissue. “Soul” was perhaps a better name for it than “heart.” It’s bad if you know too much about your soul. Or too little.

  THE CLOSEST THEY came to love was in 1956 during the chaotic days of the Revolution in Budapest. The chaos helped, he thought, the suspension of ordinary rules of engagement, the abandon that came from sensing danger, the joy of last things in the face of death, although the death that registered most on his mind wasn’t caused by gunshots. Eva was in hospital during those October days. She was dying of cancer. Zoltan visited her every day, and every day he was trying to sort out his feelings. He got no help from Eva. They didn’t talk much. She was pumped full of morphine. She wasn’t lucid enough to sort out even her own feelings. Is this the end, she asked him once, or is there something else, something that comes after death? Should I be afraid? Imagine her asking him, a teenager, who knew nothing of death. But the question was urgent, and she had no one else to ask. She suffered from the loneliness which suspicion inflicts on people in a closed society, the constant fear that someone might betray them. Don’t ask. Don’t tell. Someone might report you. Zoltan was the only one she could trust. You are the only one I have, she said, and there is so much to tell you. About Leo Auerperg, she said. About him and me. But she didn’t have the strength to go on and sank back into a morphine dream.

  On a day in October, Zoltan came back from the hospital, made himself a makeshift dinner of sausage and boiled potatoes, and choked it down with water. Afterwards, he did his homework, huddling in the kitchen close to the hotplate, which still gave off a faint residue of warmth. He wasn’t going to light the stove. He was trying to save on coals until it got really cold. There was no money for a luxury like coal. He decided to do his reading in bed, keeping warm under the duvet. He was gathering up his books when there was a knock on the door. It was too late for any of the neighbours to come by, and he hadn’t heard any opening and shutting of doors in the corridor or steps going up and down the stairs. A weightless being, he thought, a ghost. When he opened the door, he saw Livia standing in the hall. In the dim light, in the mysterious gloom of the thirty-watt bulb, she looked like a maenad, a mythical madwoman. Her black hair was loose and wind-ruffled, streaming down over the
shoulders. She pushed by Zoltan and closed the door behind her, leaning against it, as if to keep out the dark forces.

  Have you heard, she said, breathless with excitement, her eyes unnaturally bright. Heard what? he said. The revolution, she said. Turn on the radio! But there was only classical music, sombre strains, an orchestral warning. Livia fiddled with the dial, moved through aural glitch, gave up, grabbed Zoltan’s arms, and made him sit down on the only chair in the kitchen, standing before him as if to deliver a lecture.

  “Listen,” she said. “There was a demonstration in front of the radio building. Students, workers — we were all yelling slogans. ‘Rákosi must go!’; ‘Russians, go home!’ Then somebody said, ‘But what do you want?’ We had a list of demands, but no one dared to speak up. They didn’t know what to do next. So I said: ‘I’ll read the demands.’”

  “You did?” he said, wondering at her courage. Wasn’t she afraid of the secret police? “The AVH will come after you,” he said.

  “I don’t care,” she said, “but I didn’t get to read it after all. A student climbed up on a table some people had dragged into the middle of the street and read out the demands. They want Imre Nagy to become president. Someone from the radio station promised to broadcast the demands, but he was lying. All that happened was Ernö Gerö going on the air and calling us traitors and enemies of the nation.”

  He took Livia’s hand, as if he could read the pulse of his own feelings by touching her. He looked into her eyes, trying to discover: Was he in favour of the revolution?

  “Can I stay the night, Zoltan?” she said, casting a covetous look past the door leading to Eva’s bedroom, a room of delicious privacy. Livia had no private space at the Orbans. She had to share a bedroom with two other girls in their care. There was little private space anywhere and for anyone. All the flats in Zoltan’s building were shared by more than one family, except Eva’s, which was too small even for one family. It consisted of a galley kitchen, where Zoltan slept on a narrow couch, and Eva’s room, closet-sized, cramped, but hers alone, a little square. It was where she read magazines after she came home from her factory job —Western magazines in English or German, contraband smuggled into the flat, hidden between the folds of Szabad Nép, the daily paper put out by the regime.

  “Will Eva mind?” Livia said. “Where is she anyway?”

  “She’s in the hospital, dying of cancer.”

  “Then you’ll let me stay,” she said unmoved by what he said about Eva, not even bothering to say something conventional like, Oh, I’m sorry. Livia was innocent and hard-boiled, both. What did she — or he — know about death then?

  “But what about your folks?” he said. “Won’t they be worried if you don’t show up?”

  “Oh, fuck the Orbans,” she said, her breath hot with revolutionary fire. “They are bourgeois pigs. They suck up to the regime. They’ll be the first to denounce me to the AVH if they find out that I went to the demonstration. They are shitting their pants already. They found my poetry, you know. They got their dirty paws on my notebook and read it with their dirty eyes and ripped up the pages. ‘If anyone reads this,’ they said — understanding nothing, you know, absolutely nothing — ‘if anyone reads this,’ they said, ‘the AVH will take you in for questioning, and us too.’ That’s what worries them, what the AVH will do to them, not what happens to me. So now they don’t have to worry anymore. I’m not going back to those scumbags. I won’t let anyone shut me up, not the AVH and not people like the Orbans who kiss their asses.”

  She dug her fingers into his arm, keeping him down on his chair. She wasn’t through with her story, with the events of that evening. From the radio station we marched to Városliget, she said, to the Stalin monument. Someone put a steel cable around his neck and pulled him down. Only the boots are left standing, she said and laughed.

  They slept in Eva’s bed that night, sharing body heat, sleeping chastely, because Livia wasn’t a teenaged minx that night. She was a seeker after the revolutionary truth. The next morning, she turned on the radio and listened to the news bulletins.

  And when Zoltan returned in the evening from his visit to the hospital, she said: “I kept the radio on all day.” She didn’t ask him about Eva. She didn’t ask. How is she? The revolution was all that mattered to her, but by that time Zoltan himself had seen it and understood that the wave was unstoppable.

  It will sweep everything away, Livia said. Everything is going to change now that Imre Nagy is prime minister. That night she was still political and untouchable, but the next day they stayed in. She rewrote her poetry, as much of it as she could remember, on the blank back pages she ripped out of Zoltan’s textbooks. She read her poems to him aloud — clashing, dissonant, chaotic cadences, polyrhythmic mayhem, which made his blood boil. Only then did the carnality return to Livia’s eyes, and they made love to the background music of solemn radio announcements and the Soviet tanks rolling into the city. They made love in the rumpled blanket cave of his narrow couch in the kitchen. Because I don’t want to do it in Eva’s bed, he said, and Livia laughed wildly because she thought he was a fool or because she was high on sex and radio announcements, a convergence of lines that made her burst into animal joy.

  Later that evening, a young man knocked on the door of the flat. He was going door to door, he said, looking for empty bottles. The Russians were firing at the freedom fighters, he said, and they needed bottles to fill with gasoline, to make Molotov cocktails to throw at the Russians.

  Livia rummaged in the kitchen cabinets, and found the tomato paste Eva had made and bottled in the fall, enough to last them through the winter. But Livia poured the red paste down the sink and handed the young man the empty bottles to the hollow echo of gunshots.

  The next morning, they went out into the pockmarked streets. You go to the hospital, Livia said, I’ll get us some food. On the way. they saw bodies hanging from lampposts. Members of the secret police, someone said. They saw bodies stomped on, spat on, half-naked bodies hung upside down. Livia wanted to stop and look, but he wouldn’t let go of her arm. He dragged her away. Let’s get food, he said, and she turned away reluctantly and joined the queue at the butcher’s. He walked on, stepping over corpses of Russian soldiers, their limbs awry, their uniforms clotted with blood. Someone had sprinkled their faces with chalk to avoid the spread of disease, but no one buried them. A man was crouching beside a burnt-out Russian tank, his bicycle leaning against the twisted steel. He was painting over the red star and the hammer and sickle, covering them with the Kossuth coat of arms, in red and white.

  Zoltan spent the day at the hospital, sat on the edge of Eva’s bed in the noisy ward. There was no chair for him to sit on. Every available space had been filled with cots to accommodate people wounded in the street battles. He sat on the edge of Eva’s bed, holding her hand, waiting for her to die, measuring the length of her breaths. He was afraid she would ask him what he thought about her condition, and he would have to lie and say there was hope for recovery, would have to enter into the conspiracy of lies expected from bedside visitors, but she was wrapped up in her own aura of thoughts, in a morphine haze. All he was expected to do was listen to her rambling voice. He watched and listened, with no one to help him understand what he was feeling as he watched her, no one to tell him, was he sad, was he afraid when she opened her eyes. She came out of her dreamlike state and told him she was sorry, she had tried to hang on until he was eighteen, to stay alive until May, to save him from a court-appointed guardian, but she couldn’t. She felt death coming on, and she couldn’t stop it.

  “There is so little time left to talk,” she said. “Have I told you about Leo Auerperg?”

  “Yes,” he said. She had told him about the man who saved his life and who became Livia’s sponsor. “I met him two years ago,” he said, embarrassed that he had to remind her. “I met him when he was here on business.”

  Leo had been staying at th
e Hotel Gellért, the epitome of wealth and elegance, a suitable place for a distinguished visitor from the West.

  Eva was supposed to meet him there and introduce him to Zoltan and Livia, but at the last moment, she backed out. I’ve got a killer headache, she said to Zoltan. Why don’t the two of you go on your own? You can translate for Livia. It sounded like an excuse, but why wouldn’t she want to see Leo Auerperg again, after all he had done for them? Zoltan at any rate wanted to meet him. It was a chance to show off his German — good for something after all. Eva had brought him up bilingual but there wasn’t much opportunity in Budapest to use such a skill.

  Zoltan met up with Livia in front of the Géllert. She stood with her shoulders hunched forward, engaged in a pissy argument with Mrs. Orban. When she saw him, she straightened up.

  “Nobody invited her,” she said and gave her foster mother a withering glance. “She just tagged along.”

  “I want to make sure you behave,” Mrs. Orban said.

  “You want to see what it’s like to have coffee in a posh place.”

  “Hold your tongue,” Mrs. Orban said and marched them to the entrance of the hotel. Her shoes creaked. They were brand new, Zoltan noticed.