The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg

by Deborah Eisenberg

  Paige’s sigh fluttered like a long silk scarf. She said: I have nothing but pity for mean-spirited people.

  Well, how would you have felt if I showed up from nowhere at your home the way you did at mine? The fact is, you just slid right in there, and then I was the stranger.

  I was asleep; I woke up suddenly, the way children do when something is wrong. My room was unfamiliar in the dark. I listened, but there was only the usual slightly eerie lullaby of voices and laughter from the living room.

  I reached for my clothes, which I’d slung over the chair, and I crept down the hall, blinking in the light.

  Oh, my, Peter—how unfed and pretty you were! So different from the sleek, the…oh, let’s say “personage” I got a glimpse of yesterday. You were like a weedy little flower poking its way through a crack in the pavement. Even your clothing, your dark little jacket, your trousers, your shirt, were as thin as ragged petals.

  But what on earth was happening in that room? It was as if my ears were scrambling what they picked up—just ever so slightly—before passing it on to me! Was I, in fact, still asleep? Ah—no, you and Sándor and Lili were speaking Hungarian…

  I remember your small, pointed chin and huge, sleepy, skeptical eyes. You looked as though you might bite if someone tried to pet you. I remember your hair falling around your face in black squiggles, and your white, white skin. As white as mine, but bad—a catalogue of privations. The faintest ray of daylight would have scorched you lifeless.

  You lifted your eyes to me; you seemed entirely unsurprised to see me there, peeking out from the entranceway. Sándor was speaking—I heard a cataract of water as you and I gazed at one another.

  I wonder what it was you were seeing. In my jeans and plaid shirt perhaps I looked like a boy, myself—a delicate little boy; perhaps you were gazing at yourself, younger, in some vision of alternate possibilities. It certainly seemed to me, as I stood there—the happiness of your conversation deafeningly amplified by the unrecalled language—that the three of you were together in a vivid, hardy, enclosed past, and that I was looking on longingly, dissolving into the shadow of an unsatisfactory and insubstantial future.

  What did you want from us? You’d arrived in the country, I gathered, some two years earlier, equipped with that most powerful item—a slip of paper, on which were a few names and addresses. Your formidable gift for languages provided you with sparkling English in no time. You’d distinguished yourself at college and had already catapulted, at your tender age, well into graduate school. In short, you had plenty. So couldn’t you leave us alone?

  No, Lili said. What was the matter with me? It was a marvel, a blessing that you’d come to find Sándor, that you’d tracked him down. That you intended to bring his work into English; it was the most precious gift possible that Sándor (according to you) once again represented something to young people back home.

  “Home,” Sándor said mildly. And just what was it he was said to represent, he mused, wandering back into his room.

  But why did I think, Paige asked me, when we first discussed you, that every single person who was in this country had “escaped” from some place? “Maybe he just left, you know, Anna.”

  In school I learned simple facts: such and such a country is rich in natural resources; a railroad was built between this place and that; the area was contested—“simple facts,” staggering volumes of blood.

  Paige was too polite to say it in so many words, but I’m sure it had occurred to her, nearly as often as it had occurred to me, that everything I said in my room was a lie. Actually, I don’t think it was until I was in high school that the particular tragedy which Paige and I had struggled to fathom on those afternoons cooled down into Facts, which people spoke of publicly, as if what my mother experienced in her room were a matter of dates and numbers, a distant aberration.

  Your own, much more modest, catastrophe was quite a different thing. Now, there was a disaster one could speak of; the sort of disaster that might be experienced by human beings like ourselves; victims we could all—including Mr. and Mrs. Chandler—endorse! I must have been right, Paige told me excitedly, only a few days after her Doubts, you probably escaped—there’d been Communists swarming all over Budapest!

  How gratified you would have been to hear Paige’s conjectural account of your escape, lined as it was with monuments to you—You Scrambling Over Tanks in the Streets, You Dodging Bullets, You in Hand-to-Hand Combat with Soldiers…

  “Peter?” was what I said. “I’ll bet Peter was hiding under the bed.”

  You, of course, having brought it with you, were unable to appreciate the new atmosphere of industry and purpose that permeated our apartment. Which seemed to be twice as full of people as it had been, though in fact the only newcomers were you and some intermittent girlfriends of yours.

  And, oh, what a dilemma you posed for Mrs. Spiegel—Too bad you never got to hear her fretting to Lili in the kitchen! On the one hand, she was elated: Finally they’d come to rescue Sándor from anonymity! On the other hand, they, she’d remember, was you. Disorder saddened her and made her fearful, and the truth is, Peter, even if you hadn’t been a mere student, you were a little raffish for her taste, really. A little oblique.

  But Lili! Seriously, Peter, no sooner had you arrived, it seemed to me, than there was a rapid diminution in her sensitivity to the idiotic. Time to stop practicing, girls—Do you remember the way she’d say that? Peter and Sándor have work to do. Do you remember the way she enumerated our accomplishments to her bored and irritated beaux—Sándor’s accomplishments, your accomplishments, even my accomplishments. And I can promise you, Peter, those guys were every bit as impressed that you’d read Herzen, Gombrowicz, and Freud in the original as they were that I could play To a Wild Rose on the piano!

  Sándor himself never would have demanded silence. Sándor wasn’t a show-off. Don’t you agree? Peter? But Lili was suddenly never without an ornamental book. Oh, all right, without a book, I mean. And do you remember those funny, unconvincing horn-rims she brought home one day from the office?

  Once I came upon you reading to her. In Hungarian, naturally. That day it was she who was stretched out across the sofa, and you were sitting in an awkward, straight-backed chair next to her. Neither of you even noticed me come in! And I was simply stunned, I have to say, by Lili’s dreamy, unformed expression, as though she were still only a girl, to whom anything might yet happen.

  Oh, look. Do you think I grudged my poor mother pleasure? Well, I didn’t! And obviously it was a tremendous relief to me that there were so few of those episodes, during that time, in her room. But how deeply, deeply unfair it all was. There you were, conducting Sándor and Lili back and forth between me and the world that had more than wished them dead so long before. And how eager they were to see that world; how much you had to show them! what everyone had been doing, what everyone had been saying, in the years since they’d left. So many questions, so much talk! Europe. Who cared? I didn’t even exist there. We’d been going along so happily where we all actually did live—America; I had welcomed Lili into America—that was what I’d been born to do.

  I was the American on the premises! That was my position and it was an exalted one. But the moment you come sauntering along, my position and I get a demotion! What’s that all about, please?

  Sándor, at least, didn’t think you were so very wonderful. Sándor didn’t just jump up from his desk and throw open his door every time you came over. Sándor wasn’t looking to you for some muzzy little miracle. Sándor hadn’t lost his sense of humor.

  Oh, yes, I know he sat with you in his room…“working” (as I thought of it) hour after hour. But it was clear to me, at least, that he was indulging you. That he lent himself to your purposes out of sheer respect for the surrealism of…reality. It’s true, Peter—He shook his head: No good will come of this, he said—as though he had no power over the matter at all, as though it were all a fait accompli. He seemed to be standing on a bridge,
watching himself be carried along on the currents below.

  I shook my own head in sympathy; things had been thus far ideal for him, I felt—sitting outside on the benches with the other déclassé Europeans, gossipping, reminiscing, playing chess…coming back in to write, for a few hours, in a language that few around him could even read, or to read in a language that he would never speak with complete ease…What more could anyone ask, Sándor and I agreed on one of our walks—he had a very good life.

  I happen to remember, Peter—do you?—the occasion on which it seemed to occur to Lili that you, like her suitors, could be put to practical purpose. It was an afternoon when you were still draped over the sofa, following several hours of “work.” Yes, Lili proposed, she and Sándor, if you would consent to stay and look after me, could go out simultaneously.

  I can still see your momentary look of astonishment! And recall my own little frenzy. But of course they could both go out, I objected; I was virtually fourteen! I was actually starting high school and I certainly didn’t need looking after!

  Imagine how I felt when Lili’s gaze rested absently on me for only an instant, and she said, “No, you don’t mind, Peter? A few hours only?”

  You closed your eyes, haughtily. I longed to clamp my teeth around your ankle. Lili riffled your hair; you opened your eyes, sniffed, and closed them again.

  I remember you and Tócska on that evening, and subsequent ones, padding around after Lili and Sándor had left, humiliated and sorrowful. I generously offered to entertain you by turning on the TV, and was rewarded by a blank look that sent me flouncing off. You, I’m sure, remember none of it (your nubby little sweater, the way you lay on the sofa, reading, with your feet up rudely on the arm, some coffee with hot milk you made once and shared with me—its profound, mysterious taste)…but I, Peter, remember it all, with a special, ringing clarity. I was—I admit it—that happy.

  Perhaps your own demotion—from severe scholar, or from spoiled princeling—to domesticated animal, gave you some feeling of solidarity with me. I couldn’t say, of course, but I certainly remember the moment you abruptly put down some journal you’d been reading and looked at me narrowly, as though I were a specimen that had just been brought to your attention.

  “Why are you such a barbarian?” you said. “Why are you having trouble with your math? It’s impossible that you’re an actual imbecile, but look at you—you’re always staring as though you’ve been lobotomized!”

  “‘Lobotomized’?” I scoffed.

  “And your vocabulary”—you invited me to marvel with you—“your vocabulary is a disaster.”

  You demanded to see my math text. I can see you this instant, plucking it disdainfully from the pile of schoolbooks on my bedroom floor and thumbing through it, frowning. What page was I on, you wanted to know.

  Why? Were you so great at math?

  You were great at everything, you said, squinting at the book as you settled yourself on my bed. Or hadn’t I noticed? No! Off! Who was I to sit next to the great You? I was to grovel respectfully in the little chair over there.

  So how was I supposed to see the book, please?

  Hmm, you conceded. A plausible argument; evidently the situation wasn’t hopeless.

  “Anna’s doing so well at school,” Lili boasted to Mrs. Spiegel. “Thanks to Peter.”

  You and I looked up at one another from whatever we were reading, and glowered. Mrs. Spiegel drew back. “So sweet,” I can remember Lili saying, imperturbably. “Aren’t these two? So dear.”

  When I cried with frustration, alone with you in my room, and hurled my book onto the floor, you waited, you retrieved the book, and you explained again. Don’t be so frightened, you told me. Don’t be so impatient. Don’t fight so hard against it; if you want to know something you don’t already know, you have to let yourself change.

  It was quite natural, don’t you think? That we began to speak of Lili and Sándor. How, in fact, could we have avoided it?

  Were you surprised to find how little I knew? That I knew virtually nothing at all about either Lili or Sándor? I wonder at what point it dawned on you that I was only then learning—and from you—how Sándor had been smuggled out of Berlin after his brief stint in hiding, with the best fake papers money could buy; how, at the end of the war, Sándor haunted the agencies, going daily to study documents, sign papers, scour the records for anyone who might be left. How, when Sándor went to meet the stranger who was to arrive on the boat, it was Lili who appeared, wearing a little navy-blue coat presented to her by some organization or another, carrying a small suitcase and a one-and-a-half-year-old child.

  Her cousin’s uncle? I said.

  Anna, you said. I could see my own shock in your face as I stared at you, measuring the great, blank space that lay between Sándor and Lili.

  And what could have gone through your mind when I asked if you knew whether I might have cousins somewhere, myself: when you realized that the only person there to answer was you; to inform me that (as you’d gathered from Sándor) my father’s large family had been eradicated, and that in Lili’s there had been only the one other child.

  Another child? “Oh—” I remember saying. “Her brother…”

  It collected in the room as we lay there, stretched out—the pink and silver city; the river, reflecting the pink and silver sky, the sleepy stone lions guarding the tunnel through the mountain, the lights twinkling on in the dusk below the castle, the twinkling bridges, the stone, the tile, the arches, the marble, Europe and Asia washing over each other, converging and diverging, the park, glorious with its drapery of snow or blossoms, the cafés, the Gypsies, despised and magical, playing music in the streets, the crowds strolling, laughing, drinking, dancing…or at least that’s how it must have been, you said, while Lili was growing up.

  It was over, of course—all changed by the time you yourself were growing up—gutted, buried. A gray city now, the ghost of itself.

  Lying there, side by side, you and I explored the rainy park, the broad, silent avenues, searching for the big house with the piano and the cook, searching through the ghost city for the missing—you searching for the living city, I for traces of Lili. We were ghosts in the ghost of Lili’s city, just as she and Sándor were ghosts in mine.

  And you were the stranger, then, everywhere…Where was your home, Peter? Were you frightened? I envisioned my own fear rising from my body, encased in a luminous globe—you accepting it into yourself as though it were precious; it left a rift in me like a wound. I remember the springy feel of your hair against my cheek; once in a while I dared to reach out one hand and touch my fingertips to yours. Were you aware of my hand? Whose did you think it was—a girlfriend’s? My ghostly mother’s? The missing boy’s? Mine?

  How often did we talk like that? Every afternoon for a while? Every few weeks? Maybe, in fact, it was only once.

  Because at a certain point you were just there; at a certain point, as long as I could imagine you alive in the world, going about your business, I no longer required for our conversation—which was so necessary to me—your physical presence.

  You know, Peter, Paige was much more grown up around that time than I was. I’d go so far as to say she was actually infatuated. She was getting rather dignified, in her way, and she’d all but stopped talking to me about you.

  I could at least point out to her, I felt, that you were vain, not pleasant, and that you had a different girl tagging along behind you all the time.

  Yes? she said, in an idle manner. And what kind of girls did you especially like?

  Oh, who could tell, I said. You probably didn’t notice what any of them were like. And you dropped them all, anyhow. Or maybe they just got sick of you bragging.

  In fact, though, you liked a very distinct type of girl at the time, didn’t you. I wonder if you still do. Of course, we don’t really produce that type any longer; probably even Europe doesn’t—at least, not in quantity. Fragile, restless, sloe-eyed, ill-tempered, very squeami
sh, in their little striped T-shirts, as if someone had just handed them a sickeningly poor translation of Sartre…

  Those girls! Did you get around to marrying one of them? Maybe you married a whole bunch of them. Or maybe you never bothered yourself about getting married at all. Maybe you married that girl you brought to the party someone gave when your book about Sándor finally came out. Did you, I wonder. That girl had her hand on your sleeve every second.

  That afternoon with Voitek, which changed a lot of things for you—it changed some things for me, too, you know.

  Didn’t you always think, when you were young, that real time starts the year you’re born? You’re born, and then time begins to move—forward. Didn’t you think that there’s sort of an ocean of space that separates you—but completely—from the big lump of everything that went on before?

  Were you particularly aware of Voitek? I wasn’t, as far as I remember. I don’t think Lili had been seeing him long. And she didn’t seem all that interested in him, really—maybe she just felt a little sorry for him. Or, anyway, he was just…there. Thinking about it now, I can see that he was very good-looking, but at the time he just seemed to me like a large—like a large apparatus of some sort, humming with silence…Like, in retrospect, an atomic reactor.

  It started with Tarot cards, that day—isn’t that right? I think Paige had seen a deck of them somewhere, and was sort of going on…to impress you, it seems fair to say: Didn’t we believe there were cultures that were special? Didn’t we believe that there were people who had learned how to—oh, I don’t know—to harness invisible currents, to see something, the future, in cards, in your hand…?

  I don’t really remember what all she was saying, but I remember it seemed so persuasive to me, fascinating…

  And the first thing I do remember clearly is the way Lili simply cut Paige off—how shocking that was: This is not interesting, a movie would be interesting. Voitek? A movie?