The Choice Read online

  “There was a bird,” he says, “and the bird was about to die. A cow came and warmed him up a little—from his rear end, if you know what I mean—and the bird started to perk up. Then a truck came and finished off the bird. A wise old horse came by and saw the dead bird on the road. The horse said, ‘Didn’t I tell you if you have shit on your head, don’t dance?’ ” Béla laughs at his own joke.

  But I feel insulted. He means to be funny, but I think he is trying to tell me, you have shit on your head. I think he means, you’re a real mess. I think he’s saying, you shouldn’t call yourself a dancer if you look like this. For a moment, before his insult, it had been such a relief to have his attention, such a relief to be asked who I was before the war. Such a relief to acknowledge the me who existed—who thrived—before the war. His joke reinforces how irreparably the war has changed and damaged me. It hurts for a stranger to cut me down. It hurts because he’s right. I am a mess. Still, I won’t let an insensitive man or his Hungarian sarcasm get the last word. I will show him that the buoyant dancer still lives in me, no matter how short my hair is, how thin my face, how thick the grief in my chest. I bound ahead of him and do the splits in the middle of the road.

  * * *

  I don’t have TB, as it turns out. They keep me for three weeks in the hospital all the same to treat the fluid building up in my lungs. I am so afraid of contracting TB that I open doors with my feet instead of my hands, even though I know the disease can’t be spread through touch, germs on doorknobs. It is a good thing that I don’t have TB, but I am still not well. I don’t have the vocabulary to explain the flooded feeling in my chest, the dark throb in my forehead. It’s like grit smeared across my vision. Later, this feeling will have a name. Later, I will know to call it depression. Now all I know is that it takes effort to get out of bed. There’s the effort of breath. And, worse, the existential effort. Why get up? What is there to get up for? I wasn’t suicidal at Auschwitz, when things were hopeless. Every day I was surrounded by people who said, “The only way you’ll get out of here is as a corpse.” But the dire prophecies gave me something to fight against. Now that I am recuperating, now that I am facing the irrevocable fact that my parents are never coming back, that Eric is never coming back, the only demons are within. I think of taking my own life. I want a way out of pain. Why not choose not to be?

  * * *

  Béla has been assigned the room right above mine. One day he stops by my room to check on me. “I’ll make you laugh,” he says, “and that will make you better. You’ll see.” He waggles his tongue, pulls on his ears, makes animal noises, the way you might entertain a baby. It’s absurd, maybe insulting, yet I can’t help myself. The laugh rises out of me like a tide. “Don’t laugh,” the doctors had warned me, as though laughter was a constant temptation, as though I was in danger of laughing to death. “If you laugh, you will have more pain.” They were right. It does hurt, but it also feels good.

  I lie awake that night thinking of him in the bed just above mine, thinking up things to impress him, things I studied in school. The next day, when he visits my room, I tell him everything I have been able to remember in the night about Greek myths, calling up the most obscure gods and goddesses. I tell him about Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, the last book Eric and I read together. I perform for him, the way I used to perform for my parents’ dinner guests, my turn in the spotlight before Klara, the headlining act, took the stage. He looks at me the way a teacher looks at a star pupil. He tells me very little about himself, but I do learn that he studied violin when he was young and still loved to play chamber music recordings and conduct in the air.

  Béla is twenty-seven years old. I am only a child. He has other women in his life. The woman he was kissing on the train platform when I interrupted him. And, he tells me, another patient here at the TB hospital, his cousin Marianna’s best friend, a girl he dated in high school, before the war. She is very ill. She isn’t going to make it. He calls himself her fiancé, a gesture of hope for her on her deathbed, a gesture of hope for her mother. Months later, I will learn that Béla also has a wife—a near stranger, a woman with whom he was never intimate, a gentile, with whom he made an arrangement on paper in the early days of the war in an effort to protect his family and his fortune.

  It isn’t love. It’s that I am hungry, so very hungry, and I amuse him. And he looks at me the way Eric did that long-ago day in the book club, as though I am intelligent, as though I have worthwhile things to say. For now, that’s enough.

  On my last night in the TB hospital, I lie in my snug little room and a voice comes to me, from the bottom of the mountains, from the very center of the Earth. Up through the floor and thin mattress, it envelops me, charges me. If you live, the voice says, you’ve got to stand for something.

  “I’ll write to you,” Béla says in the morning, when we say goodbye. It’s not love. I don’t hold him to it.

  * * *

  When I return to Košice, Magda meets me at the train station. Klara has been so possessive of me since our reunion that I have forgotten what it is like to be alone with Magda. Her hair has grown. Waves frame her face. Her eyes are bright again. She looks well. She is bursting with gossip from the three weeks that I’ve been away. Csicsi has broken things off with his girlfriend and is now unabashedly courting Klara. The Košice survivors have formed an entertainment club, and she has already promised that I will perform. And Laci, the man from the top of the train, has written to tell us that he has received an affidavit of support from his relatives in Texas. Soon he will join them in a place called El Paso, she tells me, where he will work in their furniture store and save money for medical school.

  “Klara better not humiliate me by marrying first,” Magda says.

  This is how we will heal. Yesterday, cannibalism and murder. Yesterday, choosing blades of grass. Today, the antiquated customs and proprieties, the rules and roles that make us feel normal. We will minimize the loss and horror, the terrible interruption of life, by living as though none of it happened. We will not be a lost generation.

  “Here,” my sister says. “I have something for you.” She hands me an envelope, my name written on it in the cursive script we were taught to write in school. “Your old friend came by.”

  For a moment, I think she means Eric. He is alive. Inside the envelope is my future. He has waited for me. Or he has already moved on.

  But the envelope isn’t from Eric. And it doesn’t contain my future. It holds my past. It holds a picture of me, perhaps the last picture taken of me before Auschwitz, the picture of me doing the splits by the river, the picture Eric took, the picture I gave to my friend Rebeka. She has kept it safe for me. In my fingers I hold the me who has yet to lose her parents, who doesn’t know how soon she will lose her love.

  Magda takes me to the entertainment club that night. Klara and Csicsi are there, and Rebeka, and Csicsi’s brother Imre. Gaby, my doctor, is there too, and perhaps that is why, weak as I am, I agree to dance. I want to show him I am getting well. I want to show him that the time he has devoted to my care has made a difference, that he hasn’t wasted his effort. I ask Klara and the other musicians to play “The Blue Danube,” and I begin my routine, the same dance that a little more than a year ago I performed my first night at Auschwitz, the dance that Josef Mengele rewarded with a loaf of bread. The steps have not changed, but my body has. I have none of the lean, limber muscle, none of the strength in my limbs or my core. I am a wheezing husk, a broken-backed girl with no hair. I close my eyes as I did in the barracks. That long-ago night I held my lids shut so that I wouldn’t have to look at Mengele’s terrifying and murderous eyes, so that I could keep from crumbling to the ground under the force of his stare. Now I close my eyes so that I can feel my body, not escape the room, so that I can feel the heat of appreciation from my audience. As I find my way back to the movements, to the familiar steps, the high kick, the splits, I grow more confident and comfortable in the moment. And I find my way back i
n time, to the days when we could imagine no worse encroachment on our freedom than curfews or yellow stars. I dance toward my innocence. Toward the girl who bounded up the stairs to the ballet studio. Toward the wise and loving mother who first brought her there. Help me, I call to her. Help me. Help me to live again.

  * * *

  A few days later, a thick letter arrives, addressed to me. It’s from Béla. It is the first of many long letters he will write, first from the TB hospital, and then from his home in Prešov, where he was born and raised—the third-largest city in Slovakia, just twenty miles north of Košice. As I learn more about Béla, begin to assemble the facts he gives me in these letters into a life, the gray-haired man with a stutter and sarcastic sense of humor becomes a person with contours.

  Béla’s earliest memory, he writes, is of going for a walk with his grandfather, one of the wealthiest men in the country, and being denied a cookie from the patisserie. When he leaves the hospital, he will take over this same grandfather’s business, wholesaling produce from the region’s farmers, grinding coffee and grinding wheat for all of Slovakia. Béla is a full pantry, a country of plenty, he is a feast.

  Like my mother, Béla lost one of his parents when he was very young. His father, who had been the mayor of Prešov, and before that, a renowned lawyer for the poor, went to a conference in Prague the winter Béla was four. He stepped off the train and fell into an avalanche of snow. Or that is what the police told Béla’s mother. Béla suspects that his father, a controversial figure because he rebelled against the Prešov elite by serving as an advocate for the poor and disenfranchised, was murdered, but the official word was that he’d suffocated under all that snow. Ever since his father’s death, Béla has spoken with a stutter.

  His mother never recovered from his father’s death. Her father-in-law, Béla’s grandfather, kept her locked up in the house to keep her from meeting other men. During the war, Béla’s aunt and uncle invited her to join them in Hungary, where they were living in hiding using false identification papers. One day Béla’s mother was at the market when she saw a group of SS soldiers. She panicked. She ran up to them and shouted a confession. “I am Jewish!” she said. They shipped her off to Auschwitz, where she died in the gas chamber. The rest of the family, exposed by Béla’s mother’s confession, managed to flee to the mountains.

  Béla’s brother George has lived in America since before the war. Before he immigrated, he was walking down the street in Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia, when he was attacked by gentiles, his glasses broken. He left the brewing anti-Semitism in Europe to live with their great-uncle in Chicago. Their cousin Marianna escaped to England. Béla, though he had studied in England as a boy and spoke English fluently, refused to leave Slovakia. He wanted to protect everyone in his family. That was not to be. His grandfather died of stomach cancer. And his aunt and uncle, coaxed out of the mountains by Germans who promised that all Jews who returned would be treated kindly, were lined up in the street and shot.

  Béla escaped the Nazis by hiding in the mountains. He could barely hold a screwdriver, he writes, he was afraid of weapons, he didn’t want to fight, he was clumsy, but he became a partisan. He took up a gun and joined ranks with the Russians who were fighting the Nazis. While with the partisans, he contracted TB. He hadn’t had to survive the camps. Instead he had survived the mountain forests. For this I am grateful. I will never see the imprint of the smokestacks mirrored in his eyes.

  * * *

  Prešov is only an hour’s drive from Košice. One weekend Béla visits me, pulling Swiss cheese and salami from a bag. Food. This is what I fall in love with first. If I can keep him interested in me, he will feed me and my sisters—this is what I think. I don’t pine for him the way I did for Eric. I don’t fantasize about kissing him or long to have him near. I don’t even flirt—not in a romantic way. We are like two shipwrecked people staring at the sea for signs of life. And in each other we see a glimmer. I find that I am stepping into life again. I feel that I am going to belong to someone. I know Béla is not the love of my life, not the way Eric was. I’m not trying to replace Eric. But Béla tells me jokes and writes me twenty-page letters, and I have a choice to make.

  When I tell Klara that I am going to marry Béla, she doesn’t congratulate me. She turns to Magda. “Ah, two cripples getting hitched,” she says. “How’s that going to work?” Later, at the table, she speaks to me directly. “You’re a baby, Dicuka,” she says. “You can’t make decisions like this. You’re not whole. And he isn’t either. He has TB. He stutters. You can’t marry him.” Now I have a new motivation for this marriage to work. I have to prove my sister wrong.

  Klara’s objection isn’t the only impediment. There is the fact that Béla is still legally married to the gentile woman who protected his family fortune from the Nazis, and she refuses to divorce him. They have never lived together, never had a relationship of any kind other than that of convenience—for her, his money; for him, her gentile status—but she won’t grant him the divorce, not at first, not until he agrees to pay her a large sum of money.

  And then there is his fiancée in the Tatra Mountains, dying of TB. He begs her friend Marianna, his cousin who had escaped to England but returned after the war, to deliver the news that he isn’t going to marry her. Marianna is justifiably furious. “You’re horrible!” she yells. “You can’t do this to her. I won’t in a million years tell her you’re breaking your promise.” Béla asks me to come with him back to the hospital so he can tell her himself. She is gracious and kind to me, and very, very ill. It rattles me to see someone so physically devastated. It is too much like the recent past. I am afraid to stand so close to death’s door. She tells me she is happy that Béla will marry someone like me, someone with so much energy and life. I am glad to have her blessing. And yet how easily I could have been the one in bed, propped up on scratchy pillows, coughing between words, filling a handkerchief with blood.

  That night Béla and I stay in a hotel together, the hotel where we met. In all of his visits to Košice we have slept in separate rooms. We have never shared a bed. We have never seen each other without clothes. But tonight is different. I try to remember the forbidden words in Zola’s Nana. What else can prepare me to give him pleasure, to pursue pleasure myself? No one has instructed me on the choreography of intimacy. Nakedness has been degrading, humiliating, terrifying. I have to learn again how to inhabit my skin.

  “You’re shivering,” Béla says. “Are you cold?” He goes to his suitcase and takes out a package wrapped with a shining bow. Inside the box, nestled in tissue paper, is a beautiful silk negligee. It is an extravagant gift. But that isn’t what moves me. He somehow knew that I would need a second skin. It isn’t that I want to shield myself from him, my husband-to-be. It’s not cover I’m after. It’s a way to heighten myself, extend, a way to step into the chapter that hasn’t been written yet. I tremble as he slips it over my head, as the fabric falls against my legs. The right costume can augment the dance. I twirl for him.

  “Izléses,” he says. Classy.

  I am so happy that someone is looking at me. His gaze is more than a compliment. Just as my mother’s words once taught me to value my intelligence, through Béla’s eyes I find a new appreciation of my body—of my life.

  CHAPTER 9

  Next Year in Jerusalem

  I marry Béla Eger on November 12, 1946, at the city hall in Košice. We could have celebrated with a lavish affair at the Eger mansion, we could have chosen a Jewish ceremony. But I am a girl, I am only nineteen, I have never had the chance to finish high school, I am falling from one thing to another. And my parents are dead. One of my father’s old friends, a gentile, has been checking in on my sisters and me. He is a judge, and it turns out that he knew Béla’s brother when George was in law school. He is a link between Béla’s family and my own, he is a link to my father, and so he is the one we choose to marry us.

  In the fifteen months since Béla and I met, my hair has grown f
rom meager fuzz to full waves all the way to my shoulders. I wear it down, a white barrette clipped at my temple. I am married in a borrowed dress—knee-length black rayon, with puffed shoulders and a white collar and tapered sleeves. I hold a small bouquet of lilies and roses tied with a wide satin ribbon. I smile for photographs on the balcony of my father’s shop. There are only eight people at the wedding—me, Béla, Magda, Klara, Csicsi, Imre, and two of my father’s old friends, one of them a bank president, the other the judge who marries us. Béla stutters when he says his vows, and Klara gives me a look, an admonition. The reception is in our apartment. Klara has cooked all of the food. Roasted chicken. Hungarian couscous. Potatoes with butter and parsley. And dobos torte—seven-layer chocolate cake. We try to put a happy spin on the day, but all of the absences tug at us. Orphans marry orphans. Later I will hear that we marry our parents. But I say we marry our unfinished business. For Béla and me, our unfinished business is grief.

  We honeymoon in Bratislava, on the Danube. I dance with my husband to waltzes we knew before the war. We visit Maximilian’s fountain and Coronation Hill. Béla pretends to be the new monarch, pointing his sword north, south, east, west, promising to defend me. We see the old city wall, double fortified against the Turks. We think the storm has passed.

  That night at the hotel we wake to pounding on our door. Police officers push their way into our room. The police are constantly checking up on civilians, our lives a labyrinth of bureaucratic necessities, official permission needed for even the minutiae of daily life. They can whisk you off to jail with barely a pretext. And because my husband is wealthy, he is an important person, so it shouldn’t surprise me that we’ve been followed. But I am surprised. And afraid (I am always afraid). And also embarrassed. And angry. This is my honeymoon. Why are they bothering us?