Mrs. Tuesday's Departure: A Historical Novel of World War Two (17 page)

Mrs. Tuesday lifte
d
her reading glasses to the bridge of her nose and took the pages from her granddaughter’s hands. She had moved back into the city to attend college. After her parents divorced, her granddaughter and her mother moved to Long Island and Mrs. Tuesday watched Mila grow up on weekend visits and holidays. With each visit, Mrs. Tuesday had brought books for her granddaughter to read. Her granddaughter’s maturation measured by her progression from the fairy tales of Hans Christen Andersen, to Little Women, Jane Eyre and then novels that her granddaughter checked out from the library.

Her granddaughter had expressed an early interest in writing. At the age of eleven, she had begun sending Mrs. Tuesday short stories to ‘edit’. When she was old enough to come into the city alone, they had begun these monthly meetings.

“You know you come from a family of writers.”

“Publishing, not writing. Mom edits romance novels, and you edited literary novels.”

“Your great aunts were very important writers.”

Her granddaughter sighed at the reiteration of well-worn territory, “I know Grandma.”

“You should get to know them better.”

“Their books haven’t been published in years,” her granddaughter countered. “Even the library archives don’t have them.”

“Your mother says you haven’t come out to the house in a month and when she calls you’re always out.”

Mila looked down and shrugged. “Momma’s not the same. Have you noticed?”

“Yes, it seems to have skipped a generation,” Mrs. Tuesday said.

“What do you mean?”

“Things fall apart with age,” Mrs. Tuesday looked toward the window on the other side of the room. “In some it happens sooner than others. Bodies, minds, some before their time.”

“Grandma,” her granddaughter reached out and gently placed a hand over hers, “We’ve taken her to a doctor, they think it might be early onset Alzheimer’s.”

Mrs. Tuesday nodded. “Is that what they call it? My Aunt’s mind began to disintegrate when she was about your mother’s age. I always thought it was because of the war. Now, the same is happening to my daughter, your mother, but without benefit of a war.” She shook her head at the unfairness of it all, how gladly she would trade places with her daughter, to erase some of her own memories would be a blessing.

Mrs. Tuesday picked up the journals, flipped through one and then the other.

“This was written by my Aunt Natalie. It is her record of the last part of World War Two. The other journal is Anna’s. Both will tell you about their lives as writers. I’ve translated both journals for you.” She handed another stack of typed pages to her granddaughter, “And this is a story that Aunt Natalie wrote during our last days together.”

Her granddaughter looked through the pages, “How is this supposed to help me?”

Mrs. Tuesday clasped Mila’s hand and gave it a gentle squeeze. “I want you to see that others have gone through what your mother now faces. How you deal with it, is up to you, these journals will show you what others did.”

“What about the envelope?” Mila asked.

Mrs. Tuesday looked but did not touch it, “One last bit of business I must attend to, and I’m leaving tomorrow.”

The temperature ha
d
dropped in the short time that I’d been inside. Or was it the chill that comes when fear seeps into the bones?

I knew where Anna had gone. The possibility filled me with more dread than being stopped by the Nazis.

I kept to the shadows and the side streets and hurried along with my collar up, avoiding eye contact. The storefronts were shuttered, the lights of the apartments above blackened by shades or sleep. Knowledge that there would be no witness to an assault heightened my sense of vulnerability.

As I neared Deszo’s building, I looked up and saw the lights were on in his apartment.  I slipped in the door and crept up the stairs. At his door, I hesitated straining to hear Anna’s voice. It had been more than a year since I’d been here. The last time was during one of Anna’s delusional episodes after the end of their affair, when she’d come to confront Deszo’s wife, Katya, as being her usurper, as Anna believed she was now Deszo’s wife. At that point, our phones still worked and I was called to find the two women facing off in the kitchen. Anna was raging, threatening Katya with a rolling pin. Deszo had the wretched task of facing both his wife and his mistress, neither of who
m
were pleased to see him.

I’d come in and talked Anna out of her hallucination, using a mixture of cajoling and promises I’d never keep. Rather than being grateful, Katya had accused me of conspiring with my sister and threatened to turn us over to the police, as she knew that at the time Ilona and Bela were still living with us.

Her threat was real. She’d been humiliated for ten years. I sympathized with her. She’d married a man, knowing that he’d not been in love with her, but married her because their families had important business ties. I imagined that at the beginning she was willing to accept the bargain, hoping as all people in love do, that with time their beloved will see them differently, will return their loyalty and long-suffering with love. Like a dog waiting for a crumb from the master’s table, day after day, looking with hopeful, pleading eyes.

At some point, the dog’s mind turns from wanton hunger to resentment and then fury. Not so stupid to strike out at the master, but at that which keeps its master’s attention.  This had happened to Katya. Though she was the same age as Anna, her bitterness had aged her, creasing her once lovely face with ugly furrows, and withered lips seamed shut by unspoken venom.

She married a man in love with another woman. Not the mistress he’d later taken up with but her sister. Her twin.

We were so young then. We’d grown up together. Deszo, Anna, and I’d known each other since we were children. Our parents were friends, our father’s business associates, and our mothers in the same social clubs. We’d entered those frightful years of adolescence together when childhood playmates begin to recognize the difference in their sexes.

Anna had professed her attraction to Deszo to me many nights in the bedroom we shared in our parent’s apartment. I’d laughed when she’d told me that her flirtations were frustrated by the fact that he was attracted to me. “But that’s impossible, we’re twins. He should like you as much as he likes me!”

He didn’t.

In our las
t
year at university, I’d met Max and fallen in love. My parents threatened to disown me for loving a man who was not only twice my age, but also not Hungarian. At first Anna had encouraged my relationship with Max, as much as it represented rebellion and as it afforded her a chance to supplant my place in Deszo’s heart. It hadn’t. On the night that I came home and announced to my parents that Max had asked me to marry him, Deszo was there. I remember that as I walked him to the front door to say goodnight, he’d pulled me into an embrace and kissed me hard on the lips and then said, “Marry me, Natalie. Not him. I love you. Marry me.”

I was hurt by what I felt was his betrayal of my night of happiness. Yet, I saw in his eyes a depth of anguish that touched my heart and which I have never seen since. Not even in the eyes of my beloved husband.

Not more than six months after my marriage to Max, Deszo announced his engagement to Katya. Anna was devastated. Deszo’s parents, hoping to re-direct his attention, had arranged the marriage. I remember attending his wedding, the detached look on his face. Anna had attended the ceremony, had sat next to Max and me in the church. She was unable to comprehend that Deszo had chosen another woman, when he could have had her, the replica of the one he loved. Wasn’t that enough? She would love him enough for both of us. Throughout the service she whispered to me, scathing comments about Katya’s dress, about how unhappy Deszo looked, speculated that he had been forced into the marriage. That he really did love her. That the marriage wouldn’t last. I wonder if that event carried the seed of her eventual descent.

I knocked at the door. The voices stopped and then I heard footsteps in the foyer.

“It’s me, Natalie,” I whispered into the crack between the door and its frame.

The door’s locks clicked open one by one and then I saw Deszo’s face, pale and angry. I knew I was too late.

“
Come in
,” h
e
hissed. I slipped in the door and he shut it quickly behind me.

“She’s been here.”

“Yes,” he said. “She came two hours ago. I wasn’t here.”

I held my breath. “Katya?”

“Yes.”

“What happened?”

“Deszo?” I turned and saw Katya standing at the far end of the hall silhouetted in light. “What are you doing here?”

“It’s me, Natalie,” I said.

She laughed in a hideous knowing way. “Well it couldn’t be your sister.”

I looked at Deszo. “Where is Anna?”

“Go back to your room, Katya,” he commanded.

“She should be reported too!” Katya cackled and then left us standing alone in the hallway.

“Deszo, what happened?”

He took my arm and steered me toward the living room. “Your sister came here before I got home from the café. Why weren’t you at home to stop her?”

I looked at him, bewildered that he would blame me. “She came here looking for you.”

“Katya was here. They got into an argument.” The exhaustion showed on his face. He crumpled into a chair and motioned me to take the chair next to him. “Anna told Katya that I was beginning an affair with you. That we’d gone out tonight to meet at the café to arrange everything.”

“And Katya believed her?”

“While Anna was here some Nazis came to the door making their random searches. This is nothing new. But this time they asked for me by name.”

“Deszo, I don’t understand.”

He leaned forward giving the words emphasis, “They told her that I was collaborating with the Allies.”

“And then?”

“And then, Katya, pointed to Anna and told them that Anna had been implicated in a riot at the university the day before. That I had nothing to do with it. That Anna had come here to blackmail me.”

“Oh my God,” I whispered. I bent at the chest and buried my face in my hands.

“They took her.”

“Where?”

Deszo looked down at his hands, “To the ghetto, to prison, I don’t know.”

“Can’t you find out?” I jumped from my chair and stood over him. “If what Katya said is true, you must know someone!”

Deszo rose, lead me to the front door, and stepped out onto the landing with me. He closed the door behind him and whispered. “Katya doesn’t know anything. She suspects something because I’ve been gone more than usual. She’s accused me of having another affair. Or, in her more hysterical moments, of collaborating with the Jews.”

I grabbed the collar of his jacket, “Deszo stop lying to me. I don’t care who or what you are doing. I want to find my sister.”

He squeezed my hand, his grip tightened, crushing it in his own. I held back a protest of pain. His eyes met mine and he whispered, “After Katya told me what happened I went to the police station. Anna was not there. I contacted some friends and they are going to find out where she was taken.”

He released my hand and stepped back. “The best thing we can hope for is that the men who took her will be charmed by her and let her go in the morning. She must seem relatively harmless to them. They are only relying on the word of a spurned wife.”

“Then why did they take her? Why not just release her? Or send her home?”

He sighed, leaned against the wall, and looked down the stairs. “Because the atmosphere in Budapest has changed.”

“I have to find her, tell me where to go.”

“You can’t, you’ll only endanger yourself.”

For the first time in my life, I wanted to slap him. “Where do these men go at night?”

A wry smile twisted Deszo’s lips. “They go to places you shouldn’t be seen in. Go home, go to bed. I will come to you in the morning when I have more information,” he said. “Who is watching Mila while you are out?”

“A neighbor,” I responded. 

Deszo shook his head. “I’ll take you home.”

“I can’t go home, I have to find Anna. Anyway, what will Katya say if you leave with me now?”

“She won’t say anything.” He took my arm and steered me toward the stairs. “Let’s go.”

Outside, pinpricks o
f
rain, too light to see unless you looked into the dim streetlights overhead, stung my face. I huddled against Deszo’s arm and watched the pavement move beneath my feet. As angry as I’d been with him, the bonds were too deep to let us separate now.

We walked in silence. My mind was too shocked to notice or care the path we took down the empty streets. Where was Anna? I had no sense of dread, no echo of pain that I’d felt when she’d fallen and broken an arm when we were children. Or the bouts of confusion I’d experienced when Anna’s mind had begun to turn inward and self-destruct.