by Erika Rummel
“But, Zoltan, last words are important. What did Eva say?”
“She was barely conscious. She said a few words. They didn’t make much sense. She mentioned Leo’s and Livia’s names.”
The conversation with Leo made a staccato comeback in his mind.
“Did she talk about me?” Leo had asked.
“She did,” he told him. “Not at the very end, but she talked about you earlier, that you helped her escape from Vienna, that you bought a painting from her.”
Leo was waiting for more.
“She said she didn’t get as much as she expected for the painting,” Zoltan said.
A steepled furrow appeared between Leo’s brows. “You have to consider the circumstances,” he said. “We had to stay under the radar. I gave Eva as much money as I had on hand.”
Last words. Escape. Leo’s furrowed brow. Money on hand.
Nancy interrupted the flow of his synoptic memories. “Then you don’t know,” she said.
Zoltan forced himself to pull away from the past and concentrate on Nancy’s words.
“Don’t know what?” he said.
“I’m trying to tell you, Zoltan. But it’s so difficult.” She bent over her salad and poked at the leaves. “Max only told me after he had the stroke. Sometimes, I think I misunderstood him. It was hard to make out what he was saying. Guesswork, really, but perhaps you can help me sort it out.”
“Nancy,” he said patiently. “I thought we were having a pre-birthday dinner, but this is turning into a therapeutic session.”
“I’m not asking for your help because you are a therapist, Zoltan. I’m asking because we are…”
Another of Nancy’s half-thoughts.
“Lovers?” he suggested.
She lowered her eyes. She can’t get herself to acknowledge our unregulated relationship, he thought. It was one of those disturbing things that needed exorcising. Nancy longed for the exorcism of a wedding ceremony.
“Because I want us to be open with each other,” she said.
“I don’t know what you are getting at.” Their conversation was adrift. “What exactly did Max say to you?”
She took a deep breath. “He said that Leo and Eva. That they. He…”
Zoltan waited for her to get over the hurdle of the elision points.
“…fathered a child with Eva.”
Zoltan’s breathing stalled. A cranial storm blew up in back of his head, Livia’s Rape poems flashed through his mind like lightning, exploding his thoughts, leaving him wordless.
Nancy dabbed at her mouth with her napkin and looked at him, waiting for him to explain things away.
“I see,” he managed to say, falling back on his couch-side manner to cover up the tempest. He tried to sound calm, to play down what she had said. “And why was it so difficult to tell me about an indiscretion that happened long ago? Or is there more to it?”
“More? How can you be so matter-of-fact about it, Zoltan? It reflects badly on the family. On Leo and Eva at any rate. But, yes, there is more. The child. That is the difficulty. Max said...” She reached for her glass to take a sip, changed her mind, took a reinforcing breath instead, something to take her to the end of the sentence. “Livia is Leo’s daughter.”
The truth unfolded in Zoltan’s brain with a churning motion, the untold story, half-told in a spill of words, in the dying minutes of Eva’s life. The pressure on his ears and eyelids was tremendous. His eyeballs were going dry.
“I wonder why Eva never told me,” he said. He could hear himself speak, an external voice, on automatic pilot. But perhaps Eva did tell him. His thoughts curved into space. With sudden clarity he remembered her last words: I was desperate to hold on to someone. It was wrong. He felt surprise at his sudden understanding, or was it shock? He felt something, it occurred to him, something vaporous but surprisingly close to the surface. A feeling. He could almost put a name to it.
“Do you think I misunderstood Max?” Nancy was saying with a glimmer of hope.
“No, I’m sure you are right,” he said. “It all makes sense now. Eva’s last words. The fact that she mentioned Leo and Livia together.” He added to the list of his proofs: Eva’s visits to the Orbans, Leo’s sponsorship of Livia, Leo asking Laura and Cereta to call him Opa, Livia fantasizing about Eva being her mother.And Livia’s “Rape” poems inspired by what she had seen in Eva’s eyes, confirmed by what she had seen in Leo’s eyes.
“Maybe that’s what Eva was trying to tell me when she coupled their names,” he said to Nancy. “That they were father and daughter. And the time frame is right, too. Livia was born in June of nineteen forty”
“But if it’s true,” Nancy said, “how could they? At a time like that, with the Gestapo dragging off Eva’s husband. I can’t understand it.”
“You can’t?”
Nancy blushed at her inability to understand Eva’s adultery. “In those tragic circumstances, I mean. Max said they did it ‘in a moment of abandon.’ But I still don’t understand.”
“In a moment of desperation,” he said, trying to cut through the wad of clinical terms for abnormal behaviour, the vocabulary of psychopathology lodged in his brain. When you care for someone, it is cruel to speak of hyperdopaminergic foundations and critical levels of stress. You look for the consolation of familiar terms. “When you are in despair,” he said, “behavioural norms don’t apply.” Still too clinical. “When they took away Joseph, Eva must have been desperate, but to save me, she had to act unconcerned. When you suppress your feelings, they are transformed…” He tried to find the right words for Nancy. Transformed into what? A suffocating cloud of grief? A pulverizing rage? A searing need to press your body against another, to know you are not alone? But somehow those words seemed to be rooted in his own memory and couldn’t be plucked to describe Eva’s case. He could only give a generic description to Nancy. “Suppressed feelings cause a disruption of the soul,” he said.
Nancy listened breathlessly, but not to his explanation, it seemed to him, because the reflection he saw in her eyes wasn’t a reflection of his words.
“You say you have no emotional memory,” she said. “And you’ve just explained why. Because you went through a disruption of the soul.”
My God, Nancy had put her finger on it. And now he could feel it, too — a lingering despair deep down buried below jokes, capers, and hoaxes — the unmooring effects of violence, of being trapped in the labyrinth of terrifying events. “Yes,” he said. “I’ve had a brush with that kind of despair.” Subconsciously perhaps, when I was a small child, and later during the Revolution when I saw men lynched and people spitting on the dead bodies of Russian soldiers, and my aunt dying, her bed shunted into the corridor as if she no longer deserved a place among the living. “I felt it the day Eva died. I needed to hold on to someone, I needed the warmth of another body to shield me from my own chilling thoughts. I went home, and there was Livia.”
Nancy sighed. “And when Eva went back to the apartment in the Herrengasse, there was Leo. I accept that explanation, Zoltan. At one level, I do, but in here…” She put her hand on her heart. “I still don’t understand.”
She never would. Nancy believed in beauty. She refused to regard evil as more than a temporary aberration. She wanted the world to be as it had been Before the Fall, perfect. It was naïve of her. Silly even, but I love her for it, he thought, taken by surprise when the word floated up like a speech bubble, an emotion identified in real time. Perhaps there was hope for him yet.
“I love you, Nancy,” he said and carefully listened to himself as he said the words. They rang true. “I’m sorry I haven’t told you before.”
“You don’t look sorry,” she said. “In fact, you look happy.”
Right again.
“What you see is anticipation.”
Nancy waited for Zoltan to slip his credit card
into the folder with the bill and for the waiter to take it away before she said:
“What are you anticipating?”
“Burying the past.”
Her smile, kept largely in abeyance during dinner, made a comeback. “You mean, we needn’t tell anyone about this? That Livia is... And that crazy business about Laura and Cereta switching identities? The whole...”
“The whole genealogical soap opera?”
Too flippant for Nancy’s taste. Her mouth straightened. “The whole thing,” she said weakly. “The past, as you say.”
“Let’s hope Cereta will leave the past alone as well. She threatened to confess all to David, you know.”
“Oh, Zoltan,” she said. “You shouldn’t have told me. Not on my birthday.”
VI. ALL TOGETHER NOW
DAVID SAT AT HIS COMPUTER DESK which was still in its old position, angled toward Nancy’s backyard. He could no longer remember what it was that irritated him about the view. The swimming pool? Why? The rippling surface was rather pleasant to look at. Zoltan’s presence? There was a time when Zoltan annoyed him, but that was last summer when everyone and everything annoyed him. There had been a sea change since then. Zoltan was as loopy as ever, but David was back on track, had recovered his balance in time for the fall term. His lectures were going smoothly. He had been afraid of a relapse into moroseness, but the first day of classes passed and gave him only a dull headache, no worse than a hangover. It was October now, and he was still coping, staying on top of his lectures and seminars, posting assignments on time, making a convincing show of interest at department meetings. He answered his phone, checked his email, and replied within a reasonable time. He even started watching the news again without experiencing adverse reactions. It was the soothing effect of Laura’s company. Certainty had returned to David’s life. Laura had the gift of explanation. She was able to lay out the world for him in a grid that was solid at the centre and intuitive at the edges, a layout that accommodated even Zoltan’s wildest plan, his latest caper -- the Laura/Cereta exchange. The way Laura explained it left only a mild surprise in David’s mind, as if he had always suspected it, had been minutes away from discovering the illusion for himself. It almost made sense even if it was legally questionable. A kind of historical truth was shaping up, with events proceeding in a straight line. All facts checked out. There were no obvious contradictions.
He logged off. Time to go next door. Nancy’s party was getting under way. From his desk, he saw people milling around on the patio. It looked like a big do. The invitation, which had arrived by snail mail two weeks ago, was printed on cream-coloured stationery with a lacy ribbon tacked to one corner, mimicking a wedding invitation, but the occasion for the party was: “Zoltan has won the lottery.” David wasn’t sure what to make of that. Another example of Zoltan’s wacky sense of humour?
“What’s the party about?” he asked Laura when the invitation arrived. “Zoltan didn’t really win the lottery, did he?”
“No idea what’s going on,” she said. “The bit about winning the lottery could be a coy reference to the progress his lawyer has made with inquiries in Switzerland. Maybe he’s finally tapped into the Wassermann accounts. I no longer ask any questions of Dad. I can’t get a straight answer from him. Ever.”
Through the window, David could see Nancy doing the round of the guests, touching shoulders, and pecking cheeks. The caterers carried trays of drinks and bite-sized food that looked like something from the florist’s, tiny flower arrangements in cups. People popped them into their mouths. They were edible at any rate.
He didn’t see Laura. She must be inside, he thought, and doing the audio. Nancy had put her in charge of streaming the music. She had a timed playlist. It was a party with a musical theme, apparently.
David put on his jacket and walked across the driveway, past the two valets chatting on the sidewalk. Their work was done. The guest cars had been parked in a lot on Neilson Way. He had his hand on the latch of the gate, but the occasion looked too official for a casual entrance through the back, and he walked up to the front door. Right. A rent-a-maid checked his name off the guest list. He walked through to the patio, and in passing noticed the black-and-white photo of Max Auerperg, which had been on the second floor, was now hanging in the downstairs hall. Had he been demoted? Or were there specific stages of grieving, involving the gradual removal of keepsakes from the intimacy of one’s bedroom to more public spaces like the upstairs hall, then the downstairs hall, and from there into storage? He wondered what Nancy had put in place of Max Auerperg’s portrait. He stopped at the staircase and looked up: Ah, the Picasso was there now. It had been in Nancy’s bedroom, right?
Then he saw the feet. Laura’s feet in strappy sandals. She was sitting on the floor in the corridor, knees pulled up, head resting on her knees, face hidden behind the shiny black curtain of her hair. Sick?
He bounded upstairs.
“Laura?”
She looked up, pale and beautiful even when she was upset.
The door to Nancy’s bedroom was ajar, and Laura said, “Look at this!” pointing to a landscape painting. The disputed Liebermann, he realized, even before Laura said it.
“The painting that used to hang in Opa’s study in Vienna.”
“The painting that turned out to be a copy?”
“No, the copy is back above Opa’s desk, according to Cereta. I’m totally confused. The one in Nancy’s bedroom is definitely the painting that hung in his study when I was a child. I know, because when I was about six years old, I picked off a small paint chip and swallowed it.”
“You did what?”
She laughed, a nervous hiccup of a laugh. “I know it sounds crazy. I guess I wanted to make the painting mine, claim my legacy. Something like that. I checked the painting in Nancy’s bedroom. That paint chip is still missing. You can see the weave of the canvas where it was.”
“Well, let me take a guess,” David said. “The story goes something like this. Leo Auerperg has a copy made of the Liebermann. He puts the copy on the wall and gives the original to his son, who stores it away. Nancy inherits the original with the rest of her husband’s assets. When Cereta demands the return of the Liebermann, Nancy tells her to go ahead and have the painting in Vienna assessed. Cereta finds out that it is a copy and decides it isn’t worth fighting over. The end. What do you think?”
Laura shook her head, and David realized that his story was incomplete. It didn’t explain why Nancy had brought the original out of storage. Was Zoltan behind that move? Was this a lead-up to another of his hoaxes?
“So what’s your explanation?” he asked Laura, but she had no time to give him an answer. Cheers went up outside. Someone came rushing into the house and called: “Laura, where are you? Come out here, or you’ll miss it!”
“Miss what?” Laura said, as they went downstairs.
Nancy and Zoltan were standing poolside between two giant planters with elaborate, porcelain-like flower arrangements, the kind you see in the foyer of five-star hotels. The sunset tinged the scene dusty rose. A distinguished gentleman in a black suit was making a speech. No, holding a sermon. No, officiating.
“This better not be a hoax,” Laura said.
Nancy was pinning a corsage on Zoltan’s lapel now, and Zoltan, with an apologetic glow in his eyes, placed a kind of bird’s nest on the bride’s head, with feathers arcing out and trembling in the breeze that had sprung up.
“A fascinator!” Laura said. A laugh escaped her, and she covered her mouth. “Oh my God,” she said, “I was supposed to…” She rushed back into the house, and by the time the man in the black suit was asking the bridegroom to kiss the bride, “Morning has broken…” floated from the loudspeakers over the lawn. The guests whooped and applauded and swamped the couple with congratulations. For a moment, they froze and radiated in the flash of cameras, then Nancy opened her arms wide and said s
he was just so thrilled for them all to be here. Her voice was Oprah-esque with joy.
As the event photographer moved on to blitz the guests, David thought: There will be an explanation for all of this. Laura will come up with the missing part of the story, put it in place, and complete the Nagy family puzzle. But maybe that was impossible, even for Laura who was good at that kind of thing.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I wish to thank first of all Luciana Ricciutelli, Editor-in-Chief at Inanna Publications, for giving a voice to the marginalized, disadvantaged, emotionally damaged, or merely odd characters who people my fiction.
Many thanks also to my friends who patiently read through the various drafts of my manuscripts and gave me advice on how to improve them: Gisela Argyle, Roberta Johnson, Karin McHardy, Jim Ryder, and Howard Katzman.
And finally, thanks to my copyeditor, Adrienne Weiss, for her careful and close reading and her suggestions and corrections. I am very grateful to all of them.
Erika Rummel has taught history at the University of Toronto and Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo. She divides her time between Toronto and Los Angeles and has lived in villages in Argentina, Romania, and Bulgaria. She is the author of more than a dozen books of non-fiction, and has written extensively on social history. She is also the author four previous novels, Playing Naomi, Head Games,The Inquisitor’s Niece, and The Effects of Isolation on the Brain. She was awarded the Random House Creative Writing Award, 2011, for an excerpt of The Effects of Isolation on the Brain. The Painting on Auerperg’s Wall is her fifth work of fiction.
