All Around Atlantis (26 page)

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
squeamish, 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?

Paige was simply stunned, and I remember looking at Sándor, for help, because he really did like Paige, you know, and always listened so seriously to all those ideas and opinions of hers—but instead he just made that little bow and said something to the effect that he himself could see clearly into his future, by looking at his hand or by not looking at his hand, that it was the past that was opaque, it was the past that only special insight could reveal, and as for what was going to happen tomorrow, I think he said,
that
was something anyone at all could see if he would only consult his memory of what had happened yesterday, and now, if we would excuse him…

Of course by then I could feel it on my skin, in my body. But Paige was simply
lost
. Everything was happening so fast, and she was talking and talking, something, something about the Gypsies,
didn't you adore them? didn't you love to see them, at least, and talk to them?

And obviously it was to pacify her that you grabbed her hand and looked at her palm and said—goodness knows what you said, yourself—that yes, you'd known some, you'd learned all sorts of this or that:
I see a concert hall…
I remember you saying, and then Voitek saying,
This guy sees a concert hall; I see a two-car garage in Bronxville…

Of course he'd intended no more than a flippant little end to the business, I'm sure, but instead of sealing something shut, it tore something open, and where was Voitek then?

Where were we all? And how many people were in that room? Millions, yes? Literally millions of people had been there all that time, just waiting to be recognized.

And who, in particular, was Voitek seeing, I wonder, in the white stillness of your face, when he started to scream,
yes you adored them, “adored” them, shit, shit, opportunist, coward
, or whatever it was, exactly, until it became really impossible to make it out because it was all in Polish, I guess, except for a word here and there of German.

Thank heavens for Lili, yes, Peter? Because you didn't even have the presence of mind to duck. And thank heavens, too, that evidently Voitek had some dim awareness it was Lili, out of all that vast crowd, who'd touched his arm. Otherwise, he would have killed her, I'm sure, within moments.

 

Was it I who went to the door? Usually that's how I remember it, but sometimes in my memory it was you. Actually, I suppose, it could have been any of us, but usually I remember myself, threading my way toward the pounding on the door through the whirlwind of debris that had just been our possessions, and the curiously weightless way it was flying around, as though our apartment had only been waiting for one touch to send it wheeling, in splinters, through the air.

But the thing I always remember in exactly the same way is how Mrs. Spiegel just stood there in the doorway as those guys tore in and tackled Voitek. I'm sure neither Lili nor Sándor ever forgot it, either—the uniforms, the truncheons, the sound of Voitek's head as it hit the wall; the utter absence of expression on Mrs. Spiegel's face…

 

And what was I thinking as I watched Paige cry? I was thinking about the way she looked, crying. I wouldn't have imagined that something so extreme, so complete, could happen to someone's face from the inside. Paige's pretty face—where was it?

I wonder if she ever noted that she got her date with Sándor. Because I gathered, eventually, that after he called her mother, Sándor took Paige to the coffee shop to wait for the driver, and the two of them had a soda.

He certainly did his best to get me out of the wreckage, too. And if you hadn't offered to stay with me, I would have had to leave. But how could I have left? I knew Lili would go to her room. I knew she would, and she did, and then there I was, evaporating, and she was on the other side of the wall, unreachable, spiraling back down…

I guess I never really had a chance to thank you. But obviously you understood how serious I was when I asked you to leave me alone and go check on Lili. I know it took courage, Peter, to open that door and go in.

And once you had—do you know?—I calmed right down. I stopped shaking, and that blinding silence dimmed. I raised my head and opened my eyes. There was the world, all around me—the sky, the earth, a bird, a voice…

 

Did it ever occur to you to wonder what happened when Sándor came back? Well, he looked around mildly for a moment, and he asked how I was. I realized I was holding a book you'd stuck in my hands when you'd gone in to see Lili. I was fine, I said. And Lili? What about Lili? And Lili was fine, too.

Sándor glanced at Lili's door. “She's all right,” I said. “Really. She's fine.”

“Yes?” he said, and hesitated. “Well. So, what would you say to a movie?”

Lili was perfectly serene when I came in for breakfast the next morning—as serene as you found her when you eventually joined us yourself, looking disheveled and mightily confused. I hope I didn't snicker, Peter, when she said she was glad you'd stuck around, that there was a lot of cleaning up to do.

 

You, though! You were really insufferable, there, for a while, were you aware of that? I don't know who you thought you were—my brother? my father?

I suppose you were just panicked, really. These days no one bothers even to remark on a very young man and an older woman, but it certainly was a novelty back then.

With all due respect, Peter, I have to say that I don't really attribute Lili's happiness in those days to any individual qualities of yours; no doubt any pretentious twenty-one-year-old Hungarian would have done as well.

But I very much doubt that anyone else at all could have parlayed, as you eventually did, some translations and what amounted to a small essay into so much celebrity for Sándor (and celebrity, consequently, my point is, for…well, you get my point, I'm sure).

Of course it was just one of those moments, wasn't it, when attention was on such things, when even writing as rarified as Sándor's was likely to be hijacked—and by just about anyone. Absolutely every poor shnook seemed to be out there scrounging up some piece of art with which to beat up some ideological adversary or intellectual competitor, something that could be said to validate some thesis, or buttress some argument, or represent some something or other—an indictment of totalitarianism, or an indictment of repressive capitalism, or these particular currents of psychoanalytic thought, or those particular currents of Marxist thought, or an esthetic of the elite, or an esthetic of the people, or currents of Jewish mysticism, or an expression of Christian acceptance, or an expression of Buddhist acceptance…

Now, of course, no one wants art for any purpose whatsoever—let alone for its own. But that was the moment, wasn't it? And you seemed to have a perfect understanding of just how to exploit it, how to take it all as far as possible. Something so very exactly what Sándor never wanted.

Hypocrite, you say; ingrate
—Gon
eril couldn't have put it better. What do I think you should have done? Surely I can't mean to vilify you for having had a few
thoughts
about work to which you were so devoted! And don't I think a readership deserves something useful in return for its admiration? Besides, anyone whose stance (like Sándor's) is fastidious high-mindedness is simply demanding that others be exploitative on his behalf. Also, who am I to say that you
were
in any way exploitative? Were you not, in fact, entirely sincere in your efforts to bring Sándor's work to a wider and more receptive audience?

Did it mean nothing to Sándor to make contact with the living? Or that his lyric, glimmering salvagings from a lost world were received with deep gratitude? Did it mean nothing to Lili that her life, too, was in some measure reclaimed? What did I wish for them—that they be eternally voiceless, adrift? Plus, where did I think my tuition came from, and how did I think I would have gotten into college in the first place, the way I'd been going on without you?

All right, I give up, you win, thanks. But
Sándor
? A
bastion
against
Communism
? Oh, please, Peter. For shame.

A paradox, as Sándor once said; a conundrum. If no one was listening, at least no one misheard you. If what you made was of no value to anyone, no one stole it and went running off; no one bothered to colonize it and set up little flags. It was his home, he said, his work, and all
I'm
saying is that it seems very hard, that a man who was exiled so many times over was harried again, and in his most intimate refuge.