In the Forest of Forgetting

by Theodora Goss

  That’s how I saw when Ildiko came home, right around six o’clock as I said. She went upstairs and said something to him. When he didn’t answer she threw her coat down on the chair, and her purse on top of it. Then she turned on the stove and started cooking dinner.

  Now what you want to know is, how did the store burn down, with her body in the basement? I’ll tell you what I’m going to swear to in court. I’m going to swear that I saw Ildiko Horvath go down to the store and open the basement door, then go down to the basement. You can see the door through the store window. And I’ll swear that I saw István fall asleep on the kitchen table, spilling the bottle of pálinka. Remember, the stove was on. It was a small kitchen—easy enough for some of the pálinka to spill on the flames. That would explain why the firemen smelled peaches. You don’t think I could see that far? Check my army record. I was a sniper in Vietnam. My vision’s still better than twenty twenty.

  Oh, but I wasn’t drunk by then. I’d been standing out there about an hour. I’d had plenty of fresh air. All right, so Ildiko had a bruise on her head. Maybe she got that trying to escape the fire. It spread so fast, I barely got István out. Someone should talk to the mayor about these old buildings.

  I thought you would find the cages. Of course they were empty. You don’t think I actually saw those things? István probably kept the cages for catching raccoons.

  But I’m going to tell you something, Sergeant. Off the record. You don’t have one of those wires, do you? I’ve watched cop shows on TV. That’s why I wanted to meet here, instead of at the station. István Horvath, he wouldn’t hurt a fly. Those things—I don’t know what they were, but I think he cared about them. Remember the stories he told Eva. I think that’s what he really meant, when he talked about the treasures of his country. I mentioned how he let the mice out in the cemetery? Once, when I was sitting there by Eva’s grave, I saw her. The scaled girl. She was sitting on the grass by the pond, and sort of humming. And once I saw the biggest bat I’ve ever seen. Two feet across, it must have been, like a black kite. I don’t even want to talk about its eyes. But it was getting dark, so I could have been mistaken.

  What if, off the record now, István did start that fire? First, he would have set those things free. Some things shouldn’t be in cages. You can understand that, right? You’re Polish, your people are from the old country. And Ildiko Horvath? Like I said, István wouldn’t hurt a fly. But she wasn’t a fly, more like a spider in her web, or a cat waiting for the mouse to come out of its hole. What if, when she went down to the basement, István followed her, with the bottle of pálinka in his hand? What if he showed her the empty cages, then poured what was left in the pálinka bottle over those pieces of lace, and told her he would burn the things in the basement before he’d let her sell them? And then he lit a match. I figure she would fly at him with those red nails of hers. If he hit her with the bottle, well, that’s self-defense. It wouldn’t be his fault that the fire spread so quickly. But hey, I’m just telling a story. There are no windows in the basement. If something happened down there, I wouldn’t have seen it, even if I wanted to. Anyway, I tell you, whatever she got she deserved. And I think Eva would agree.

  But that’s between you and me. István’s not talking. I told him, this is America. We have rights in this country. So I’m your only witness. As far as I’m concerned, the fire was an accident. And I’m not going to say different, not if I have to swear on the Bible, so help me God.

  DEATH COMES FOR ERVINA

  “You have a visitor.”

  There is something vaguely bovine about the nurse, whose name Ervina has once again forgotten. She reminds Ervina of the cows that she milked during the war. She would wake in the darkness, before the rooster crowed from his perch on the hay wagon, and fetch the water so her mother could make breakfast: boiled potatoes on which she dripped lard for flavoring. Then she would milk the cows, whose names were, she remembers, Rózsa and Piroska. In winter, when a rim of ice formed on the milk pail, she would warm her hands in their breaths. When Rózsa stopped giving milk, she was taken to the butcher, and Ervina cried for three days.

  “Jésus Mária,” said her mother, who always appears in her memories wearing an apron, “all those tears for a cow.”

  Then she would collect the eggs. Surely, at first, there were eggs with the potatoes, fried in lard? And later there were no eggs, no lard, and finally no potatoes, just boiled cabbage flavored with salt. The faces of the children at school became pale above their uniforms, which were ragged from being worn every day of the week, for doing chores or playing football. They had no other clothes.

  After her father came back from the war, without Dénes or Ödön, it was her mother’s turn to cry. She could not, Ervina supposes, have cried for three years, but that is what she remembers. When she began school again, with a new uniform and a red kerchief around her neck, her cheeks were damp with her mother’s tears.

  “Miss Kóvacs, did you hear me? You have a visitor. Someone from the ballet school. You want I should open the window? I don’t know how you stand it in here, under all those blankets.”

  Her father did not want her to go to the ballet school.

  “She’s just a child,” he said. “Who will raise her in Budapest? You say she will be raised by the school, but I spent a week in the city during the war. It’s filled with gypsies and prostitutes. Why should I send my daughter to such a place?”

  Because, explained the teacher, his daughter had a talent for the ballet, and it was his duty to the Party—and why, by the way, hadn’t he joined the Party, didn’t he know it was created to benefit farmers such as himself?—to use her talent in the service of the People’s Republic.

  Ervina listened from behind the kitchen door. Budapest was as unreal to her as the frog prince in the fairy tale. Once, she had tried to kiss a frog she had found in the reeds by the river Tisza, with no result. Not that she wanted the frog to become a prince. But she wanted, herself, to become a princess, with a gold ball. After she had milked the cows, she would stand by the barn door to make her révérence, and the cows would stare at her with appreciative brown eyes. But when her father returned from the war, alone and leaning heavily on a cane, her mother went back to milking the cows and collecting the eggs, while Ervina sat at the kitchen table practicing her sums.

  It seemed strange that she should be taken to Budapest because she could point her toes or arch her back better than the other children in her class, away from the mother who no longer told her fairy tales but cried into the cabbage soup, the father who told her to practice her sums so she could train to be an accountant, because on the farm she would never be as useful as a boy.

  The smell of exhaust and roasting eggplant fills the room. When she first moved to this apartment in Brooklyn, there was a Hungarian bakery across the street. Each morning she would buy a slice of poppy seed beigli and eat it slowly, in miniature bites, with her morning coffee, as though to reward herself for a lifetime of hunger.

  At the ballet school in Budapest, breakfast was two pieces of toast, a boiled egg, and a sliced tomato. How hungry they were, the girls whose shoulder blades appeared through their leotards, like vestigial wings. How proud they were of their hunger, the girls from farms as far away as Debrecen, as they watched their muscular waists become slender, watched the suppleness of their legs, which had once struggled in farm boots through fields to be mown for hay. Even the fourteen-year-olds drank their coffee black and smoked Bulgarian cigarettes.

  Now the Hungarian bakery has been replaced by an Armenian restaurant. But she can no longer eat sweets, she thinks approvingly, looking at her wrists, which have never been so thin: blue veins covered by layers of tulle, like the skirts of the Swans Maidens surrounding Odette, who wears a crown that to the audience looks like gold, although Ervina knows that it is gilded papier maché. She has worn it often enough.

  “Isn’t that better? It’s about time you got some fresh air. He says his name is Victor. He says he knows
you from the ballet school. Miss Kóvacs? Should I tell him you’re too tired? Or should I tell him to come in?”

  But it was not in Swan Lake that she first met Victor Boyd.

  She danced in Swan Lake the first time she came to New York. It was an era when cultural exchange was encouraged, and the Budapest Ballet had been invited to Carnegie Hall. From their rooms in a hotel on West 83rd Street, the ballerinas could hear the continual honking of taxis, and smell hot dogs being sold in the park.

  Perhaps it was that, although she was Ervina Kóvacs, whose photograph hung in the ballet school dormitory, who had a sponge cake named after her at Gundel’s, who had received a standing ovation from Chairman Brezhnev himself, she had to share a room with Ilona Nagy, who danced Odile. Perhaps that, from the car window as the ballerinas were driven to Carnegie Hall, she could see buildings taller than any she had seen in Budapest, or Prague, or even Moscow, whose windows reflected clouds. Perhaps she was tired of dancing Petipa, of Jardins Animés or bayadères endlessly pirouetting across the stage behind her. Perhaps it was only the smell of hot dogs.

  That day, while Siegfried began his pas de deux with Odile, she pulled out the hairpins that held on her crown, threw a coat that the janitor had left on a hook over her shoulders, and left through a back door. She waved her arms on the street until a taxi swerved to the curb, splashing her pointe shoes with mud.

  “New York Ballet,” she had said, repeating it three times until the driver understood. Her pronunciation was not so good in those days. He cursed her when, in front of the ballet school, she jumped out of the taxi and handed him a purse full of forints.

  The door opens again and Victor walks into the room, looking as when she first saw him, in jeans and a t-shirt with Rolling Stones written on it, the blond hair ragged around his shoulders, as awkward and graceful as a young swan.

  But no, this Victor has gray hair above his ears. This Victor is wearing a gray suit and a watch with Bulova written on it, and his name is Mr. Boyd. There are traces, still, in his movements of the boy to whom she once said, “If you would only apply yourself, Vic, you would be the greatest ballet dancer in the company, perhaps in the world. I mean, of course, after me.”

  “Ervina,” he says, taking her hands, which are as pale as milk, with blue veins running through them. She approves of their delicacy. “Madame Petrovna told me you were sick.”

  She was already a teacher then, training to succeed Larissa Petrovna, who had trained with the Kirov Ballet and was the most famous teacher at the ballet school. She had already danced in Paris, in London, in Tokyo, and in a public television special. But she could feel that her calloused feet, which had long ago conformed to the shape of a pointe shoe, were no longer as subtle as they had been, and that her back could no longer bend like a reed in the river current. She had already stopped dancing the roles that Mr. D had created for her, the Blue Note in Symphony in Blue, Elena in Three Sisters, the Hyacinth Girl. She was preparing, with a pragmatism she supposed she had inherited from her father, who was lying in his grave in Szent Miklós, presumably no longer shocked that she had become a ballerina, which was no better than a prostitute, for the day when she could no longer dance. It had not been easy, realizing that she would soon have to stop dancing even Odette. But one could still, she had thought, be useful, one could still have a sort of fame, after one no longer wore the papier maché crown.

  She had thought of her mother, one of those interchangeable widows dressed in black at the Museum of Cultural History in Debrecen, who issued visitors felt slippers so the floors would not be scuffed. In her last letter she had sounded almost happy, had written about a geranium she was growing in the apartment window. She had sent Ervina her gingerbread recipe. So, Ervina supposed, old age contracted one’s interests until such things were enough. Perhaps, she thought, one day I will no longer care if the audience

  applauds.

  And then into the studio had walked Mr. D, leading a young man with ragged hair around his shoulders. He had said, “Ervina, this is Victor Boyd. You must teach him to dance.”

  “But he is too old!” Ervina had said.

  And then Victor had danced for her. Had she fallen in love with him that day? Or had it been later, on a day that they danced together in the studio, as the Black Pawn and White Queen in Chess perhaps, or the Herons in Birds?

  He had been badly taught. It would take months before she could unteach him all he had learned, before she could teach him what he needed to know. Months in which, after mornings at the barre, he would meet with her individually. In the afternoons, with sunlight slanting through the studio windows, they would watch him move in the mirror, while the pianist played Prokofiev or Tchaikovsky with the endless precision of a machine.

  What is he telling her? “Did she mention that Juliette left me? The day Jim left for college. She said, ‘Now that the children are out of the house, there’s no reason for us to stay together, is there?’ Her suitcase was already packed. She’s living with an investment banker on Long Island. But you’re not interested in this. How are you doing, Ervina? Rosemarie said you’re getting excellent care.”

  That’s why the nurse reminds her of a cow. Rosemarie is the name that she’s forgotten.

  “So we’re finally through.” He begins to laugh, then stops abruptly. When did his face become wrinkled? She prefers it to the blank twenty-year-old face he had when he told her, “I’m going to marry Juliette.”

  “You warned me, didn’t you?” he says, looking down at her hands, absentmindedly running his fingers over the veins. “You said, ‘Juliette Biró will never be more than a soloist, and if you marry her you will never be the dancer you were meant to be.’ That was the night we danced Oberon and Titania together.”

  It had been a benefit for the New York Diabetes Foundation, his debut and her farewell performance. They had danced Mr. D’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the last ballet he would create for her and, she realized with chagrin, one suitable for her diminished talents. Despite her elaborate costume, which was covered with leaves that had to be sewn on by hand, Titania’s role was largely ornamental, while Oberon had been choreographed for a dancer who could leap like a stag, from one end of the stage to the other. With Oberon’s antlers on his head, dressed only in a bronze loincloth and bronze paint, Victor looked like a god of the forest. She pirouetted to meet him, the green tulle fastened to her shoulders fluttering like wings. With fairies piquéing around them, Peaseblossom, Cobweb, Moth, and Mustardseed, students from the ballet school, she met him not in the embrace Mr. D had choreographed, but with a kiss worthy of a forest god and the queen of fairies. And afterward he had told her, behind the curtain, “I’m going to marry Juliette.”

  “So here I am. This morning I met with the planning committee. This afternoon I’m going to a fundraiser for the school.” He laughs again, uncomfortably, then abruptly leans forward until his forehead is resting on the backs of her hands. “You were right, you know.” His voice is muffled, but she hears it as clearly as the call before the raising of a curtain. “You were right about everything. But you scared the shit out of me. You were the great Ervina Kóvacs, and what was I? A kid from Oklahoma who grew up on basketball and got stuck in a dance class because the coach thought it would help him jump.” He raises his head and looks at her, so that she sees herself in his eyes: the gray hair lying on the pillow, the face like a wrinkled sheet. “I just wanted you to know that.”

  There is something she must tell him, about mornings during the war when she milked the cows, and nothing for breakfast but potatoes. She must tell him that he has misunderstood her. But it is she who has misunderstood: the revelation comes slowly, like sunlight filtering through the mud in the river Tisza, illuminating the carp that slide beneath the surface. It wasn’t you I loved, she wants to tell him. It wasn’t you after all. It was—but she’s not certain how to finish.

  She feels her eyebrows extend into antennae.

  He takes off his jacket, unbuttons
his white shirt. It is not the body she remembers, the shoulders almost too muscular for the waist, which was as slender as a girl’s. This waist has filled out, but it is still firm, the skin glittering like bronze. And his kiss, as he bends over the bed, is still the kiss of a forest god. His antlers rise like the branches of an oak tree. Then he moves away from her in a series of soubresauts and stands in front of the window, through which she can hear the noise of traffic, holding out his hands as though waiting for her to join him.

  “Did you have a nice visit with Mr. Boyd?” asks Rosemarie. “He looks so distinguished, like a doctor on General Hospital. I bet he was a dreamboat when he was a boy.” Oberon stands in front of the window, antlered and naked except for a bronze loincloth. “You want I should bring you some lunch? I made chicken broth with dumplings, just like you taught me.”

  The chair on which he had been sitting has sprouted, and the forest is rising around her, cardboard branches casting shadows under the spotlight of a moon. Music is playing from a unseen orchestra, and fairies flit through the forest on wings of tulle, with antennae painted over their eyes. In the forest, Oberon is waiting. Yes, she thinks, this is it, this is what I wanted all along. Titania rises from her bank of flowers.

  “Miss Kóvacs?”

  She pirouettes, reveling in the strength of her feet, the suppleness of her back as she leans over Oberon’s arm, looking toward the darkness where an audience is watching. She sees her mother, holding a potted geranium; her father, dour and disapproving; Ödön and Dénes. A teacher from her school in Szent Miklós, waving a red flag. Students she remembers from ballet class, taking notes. Larissa Petrovna, swinging her famous string of pearls in time to the music. Even Rózsa is standing in the aisle. She can see them all, in the darkness beyond the footlights. Perhaps, she thinks, for what I have done or not done, I have been forgiven. In the wings, hidden behind a curtain, Mr. D is nodding his approval. She smiles at him, then looks again at Oberon as the music begins for their pas de deux.