All Around Atlantis (25 page)

A ring was collecting around the bloody lump on my plate, soaking the potatoes red. “Oh, dear,” Mrs. Chandler said.

“No, I do,” I said. Paige was watching carefully, consideringly, as I sank my ornate silver fork into the steak. “Really…”

 

You might not have taken much notice of Paige, Peter, but Paige took plenty of notice of you. It was as if she'd been waiting to see what we really added up to—and
voilà
, yes? It was you.

She insisted to me you were beautiful. No, I said, you were—and this was the very word—creepy. The most beautiful person in the world, Paige said. Next to Sándor, of course, but Sándor was too old for her.

I didn't see why, I said. In only one more year we'd be in high school and her parents would let her go on a date, and Sándor would only be sixty-two. Though naturally by then Mrs. Spiegel might have nabbed him.

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 declassé 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.