The Choice Read online

  One day as I board the bus to work, my head is so full of my own discomfort—girding up for the rattling pace of the factory, stewing over George’s unpleasantness, obsessing over our relentless worries about money—that it takes me several moments to notice that the bus hasn’t started to move, that we are still at the curb, that the other passengers are staring at me, scowling, shaking their heads. I begin to prickle with sweat. It is the feeling I had when I woke to hear armed nyilas banging on our door at dawn. The fear when the German soldier held a gun to my chest after I picked the carrots. The feeling that I have done wrong, that I will be punished, that the stakes are life and death. I am so consumed by the sensation of danger and threat that I can’t put together what has happened—that I have boarded the bus the European way, taking my seat and waiting for the conductor to come and sell me a ticket. I have forgotten to put my token in the change box. Now the bus driver is yelling at me, “Pay or get off! Pay or get off!” Even if I could speak English, I would not be able to understand him. I am overcome by fear, by images of barbed wire and raised guns, by thick smoke rising from chimneys and obscuring my present reality, by the prison walls of the past closing in on me. It is the opposite of what happened to me when I danced for Josef Mengele my first night at Auschwitz. Then, I transported myself out of the barracks and onto the stage of the Budapest opera house. Then, my inner vision saved me. Now, my inner life makes me interpret a simple mistake, a misunderstanding, as catastrophe. Nothing in the present is really wrong, nothing that can’t be easily fixed. A man is angry and frustrated because he has misunderstood me, because I can’t understand him. There is shouting and conflict. But my life is not in danger. And yet, that is how I read the present situation. Danger, danger, death.

  “Pay or get off! Pay or get off!” the driver shouts. He stands up from his seat. He is coming toward me. I fall to the ground, I cover my face. He is above me now, grabbing my arm, trying to yank me to my feet. I huddle on the floor of the bus, crying, shaking. A fellow passenger takes pity on me. She is an immigrant like me. She asks me first in Yiddish, then in German, if I have money, she counts the coins in my sweaty palm, she helps me back into my seat and sits with me until I’m breathing again. The bus pulls out onto the street.

  “Stupid greener,” someone says under her breath as she walks up the aisle to her seat.

  * * *

  When I tell Magda about the incident in a letter, I turn it into a joke—an episode of immigrant—“greener”—slapstick. But something changed in me that day. It will be more than twenty years before I will have the language and psychological training to understand that I was having a flashback, that the unnerving physical sensations—racing heart, sweaty palms, narrowing vision—I experienced that day (and that I will continue to experience many times in my life, even now, in my late eighties) are automatic responses to trauma. This is why I now object to pathologizing post-traumatic stress by calling it a disorder. It’s not a disordered reaction to trauma—it’s a common and natural one. But on that November morning in Baltimore I didn’t know what was happening to me; I assumed that my collapse meant that I was deeply flawed. I wish I had known that I wasn’t a damaged person, that I was suffering the fallout of an interrupted life.

  At Auschwitz, at Mauthausen, on the Death March, I survived by drawing on my inner world. I found hope and faith in life within me, even when I was surrounded by starvation and torture and death. After my first flashback, I began to believe that my inner world was where the demons lived. That there was blight deep inside me. My inner world was no longer sustaining, it became the source of my pain: unstoppable memories, loss, fear. I could be standing in line at the fish counter, and when the clerk called my name I would see Mengele’s face transposed over his. Walking into the factory some mornings I would see my mother beside me, as plain as day, I would see her turn her back and walk away. I tried to banish my memories of the past. I thought it was a matter of survival. Only after many years did I come to understand that running away doesn’t heal pain. It makes the pain worse. In America I was farther geographically than I had ever been from my former prison. But here I became more psychologically imprisoned than I was before. In running from the past—from my fear—I didn’t find freedom. I made a cell of my dread and sealed the lock with silence.

  * * *

  Marianne, however, was flourishing. I wanted her to feel normal, normal, normal. And she did. Despite my fear that she would discover that we were poor, that her mother was afraid all the time, that life in America wasn’t what we had expected, she was a happy child. At her day care, which she was allowed to attend for free because the woman who ran it, Mrs. Bower, was sympathetic to immigrants, she learned English quickly. She became a little assistant to Mrs. Bower, tending to the other children when they cried or fussed. No one asked her to fill that role. She had an innate sensitivity to others’ hurt, and an innate confidence in her own strength. Béla and I called her the little ambassador. Mrs. Bower would send her home with books—to help me learn English as much as to support Marianne. I try to read Chicken Little. I can’t keep the characters straight. Who is Ducky Lucky? Who is Goosey Loosey? Marianne laughs at me. She teaches me again. She pretends exasperation. I pretend that I am only playing, that I am only pretending not to understand.

  Even more than poverty, I feared my daughter’s embarrassment. I feared that she would be ashamed of me. On the weekends, she came with me to the Laundromat and helped me operate the machines, she took me to the grocery store to find Jif Peanut Butter and a dozen other foods I’d never heard of, with names I couldn’t spell or pronounce. In 1950, the year Marianne turned three, she insisted that we eat turkey for Thanksgiving, like her classmates. How can I tell her that we can’t afford one? I stop at Schreiber’s on the way home the day before Thanksgiving, and I’m in luck, they’ve put chicken on sale for 29¢ a pound. I choose the smallest one. “Look, sweetie!” I call when I get home. “We have a turkey. A baby turkey!” I want so badly for her—for all three of us—to fit in.

  Alienation is my chronic condition, even among our Jewish immigrant friends. The winter Marianne is five, we are invited to a Hanukkah party, where all of the children take turns singing Hanukkah songs. The hostess invites Marianne to sing. I am so proud to see my intelligent and precocious daughter, who already speaks English as if it is her first language, happy and bright-eyed and eager, confidently accepting the invitation, taking her place in the center of the room. She is in kindergarten now and goes to an after-school program run by a Jewish man, who unbeknownst to me has become a Jew for Jesus. Marianne beams at the guests, then closes her eyes, begins to sing: “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so …” The guests stare at her and at me. My daughter has learned the skill I most want her to have, the ability to be at home anywhere. And now it is exactly her lack of understanding of the codes that separate people that makes me want to slip under the floorboards and disappear. This embarrassment, this feeling of exile, even in my own community, didn’t come from without. It came from within. It was the self-imprisoning part of me that believed I didn’t deserve to have survived, that I would never be worthy enough to belong.

  * * *

  Marianne thrived in America, but Béla and I struggled. I still suffered with my own fear—the nightmarish memories, the panic that brewed just below the surface. And I feared Béla’s resentment. He didn’t struggle to learn English as I did. He had attended a boarding school in London for a time when he was a boy, and he spoke English as fluently as he spoke Czech, Slovak, Polish, German, and numerous other languages—but his stutter grew more pronounced in America, a signal to me that he was pained by the choice I had forced upon him. His first job was in a warehouse, where he lifted heavy boxes, an exertion we knew was dangerous for someone with TB. But George and his wife, Duci, who was a social worker and had helped us find our jobs, convinced us we were lucky to have work. The pay was terrible, the labor demanding and demeaning, but it was the immigrant
reality. Immigrants weren’t doctors or lawyers or mayors, no matter their training and expertise (except for my remarkable sister Klara, who secured a position as a violinist in the Sydney Symphony Orchestra soon after she and Csicsi immigrated). Immigrants drove taxis. Immigrants did piecework in factories. Immigrants stocked grocery store shelves. I internalized the feeling of unworthiness. Béla fought against it. He became short-tempered and volatile.

  During our first winter in Baltimore, Duci comes home with a snowsuit she has bought for Marianne. It has a long zipper. Marianne wants to try it on right away. It takes ages to get the snug snowsuit on over the top of Marianne’s clothes, but finally we are ready for the park. We trundle down the five flights of stairs to the street. When we reach the sidewalk, Marianne says she needs to pee.

  “Why didn’t you tell us before!” Béla explodes. He has never yelled at Marianne before.

  “Let’s get out of this house,” I whisper that night.

  “You got it, princess,” he snarls. I don’t recognize him. His anger frightens me.

  No, the anger I am most afraid of is my own.

  * * *

  We manage to save enough money to move into a little maid’s room at the back of a house in Park Heights, Baltimore’s largest Jewish neighborhood. Our landlady was once an immigrant herself, from Poland, but she’s been in America for decades already, since long before the war. She calls us greeners and laughs at our accents. She shows us the bathroom, expecting us to be amazed by indoor plumbing. I think of Mariska and the little bell in the Eger mansion that I used to ring when I wanted more bread. It is easier to feign astonishment, to fulfill our landlady’s expectation of who we are, than to explain, even to myself, the gulf between then and now.

  Béla and Marianne and I live together in the one room. We turn off the lights when Marianne goes to bed and we sit in the dark. The silence between us isn’t the intimate kind, it’s taut and burdened, a rope beginning to fray under the weight of its load.

  * * *

  We do our best to be a normal family. In 1950, we splurge and go to see a movie in the theater next door to the Laundromat on Park Heights Avenue. While our clothes spin in the machine, we take Marianne to see The Red Shoes, a movie written, we are proud to learn, by Emeric Pressburger, a Jewish Hungarian immigrant. I remember the film so well because it moved through me in two directions. Sitting in the dark, eating popcorn with my family, I felt a contentment that had grown elusive for me—a faith that all was well, that we could have a happy postwar life. But the film itself—the characters, the story—upended me with the force of recognition. Something broke through my careful mask, and I gazed into the full face of my hunger.

  The movie is about a dancer, Vicky Page, who catches the attention of Boris Lermontov, the artistic director of a celebrated ballet company. She practices the high kick at the barre, she dances passionately in Swan Lake, she longs for Lermontov’s attention and regard. I can’t look away from the screen. I feel like I am watching my own life, the one I would have gone on to live if there hadn’t been a Hitler, if there hadn’t been a war. For a moment I think it is Eric in the seat next to mine, I forget I have a daughter. I am only twenty-three, but it feels as though the best parts of my life are over. At one point in the movie Lermontov asks Vicky, “Why do you want to dance?” She replies, “Why do you want to live?” Lermontov says, “I don’t know exactly why, but I must.” Vicky says, “That’s my answer too.” Before Auschwitz, even at Auschwitz, I would have said the same. There was a constant inner light, a part of me that always feasted and danced, that never relinquished the longing for life. Now my guiding purpose is simply to act in such a way that my daughter never knows my pain.

  It’s a sad movie. Vicky’s dream doesn’t turn out the way she thought it would. When she dances the lead role in Lermontov’s new ballet, she is haunted by demons. This part of the movie is so terrifying I can barely watch. Vicky’s red ballet shoes seem to take control of her, they dance her almost to death, she is dancing through her own nightmares—ghouls and barren landscapes, a dance partner made of disintegrating newspaper—but she can’t stop dancing, she can’t wake up. Vicky tries to give up dancing. She hides the red shoes in a drawer. She falls in love with a composer, she marries him. At the end of the film, she is invited to dance one more time in Lermontov’s ballet. Her husband begs her not to go. Lermontov warns her, “Nobody can have two lives.” She must choose. What makes a person do one thing and not another? I wonder. Vicky puts the red shoes on again. This time they dance her off the edge of a building to her death. The other dancers perform the ballet without her, a spotlight trained on the empty place on the stage where Vicky should be dancing.

  It’s not a film about trauma. In fact, I don’t yet understand that I am living with trauma. But The Red Shoes gives me a vocabulary of images, it teaches me something about myself, the tension between my inner and outer experiences. And something about the way Vicky put on the red shoes for the last time and took flight—it didn’t look like choice. It looked compulsive. Automatic. What was she so afraid of? What made her run? Was it something she couldn’t live with, or something she couldn’t live without?

  “Would you have chosen dance over me?” Béla asks on the bus ride home. I wonder if he is thinking of the night in Vienna when I told him I was taking Marianne to America, with or without him. He already knows I am capable of choosing someone or something else.

  I defuse his question with flirtation. “If you had seen me dance then, you wouldn’t have asked me to choose,” I say. “You’ve never seen a high kick like mine.” I pretend, I pretend. Somewhere deep in my chest I suppress a scream. I didn’t get to choose! the silence in me rages. Hitler and Mengele chose for me. I didn’t get to choose!

  * * *

  Béla is the first to collapse under the pressure. It happens at work. He is lifting a box and he falls to the ground. He can’t breathe. At the hospital, an X-ray reveals that his TB has returned. He looks more unraveled and pale than he did the day I got him out of jail, the day we fled to Vienna. The doctors transfer him to a TB hospital, and when I take Marianne to visit him every day after work, I am rigid with the fear that she will see him coughing up blood, that she will feel the possibility of death despite our efforts to hide from her how sick he is. She is four years old, she can already read, she brings picture books from Mrs. Bower’s to entertain her father, she tells the nurses when he has finished his food, when he needs more water. “You know what would cheer Daddy up?” she says to me. “A baby sister!” We haven’t allowed ourselves to try for another child, we are too poor, and now I am relieved that we don’t have the pressure of another person’s hunger weighing on Béla’s recovery, on my pitiful paychecks. But it breaks my heart to see my daughter yearning for a companion. To see her loneliness. It makes me long for my own sisters. Magda has a better job now, in New York, using the tailoring skills she learned from our father to make coats at London Fog. She doesn’t want to start over again in a new city, but I beg her to come to Baltimore. In Vienna, in 1949, that is how I briefly imagined my life might turn out—bringing Marianne up with my sister instead of my husband. Then, it was a choice, a sacrifice, to spare my daughter life in a war zone. Now, if Béla dies, or if he becomes an invalid, it will be a necessity. We live in a slightly bigger apartment now, and even with two of us working we struggle to eat. I can’t imagine how I will afford to pay for it alone. Magda agrees to think about coming.

  “Don’t worry,” Béla says, coughing into a handkerchief. “I won’t let our girl grow up without a father. I will not.” He coughs and stutters so badly he can barely get out the words.

  * * *

  Béla does recover, but he is still weak. He won’t be able to resume his job at the warehouse—but he will live. The medical staff at the TB hospital, taken by Béla’s charm and humor, promise that before he is discharged they will help him figure out a career path that can lift us out of poverty and give him plenty of healthy years. They a
dminister an aptitude test that Béla thinks is silly until the results come back. He is best suited to a career as an orchestra conductor or an accountant, the test reveals.

  “We could make a new life in the ballet,” he jokes. “You could dance, I’d conduct the orchestra.”

  “Do you ever wish you’d studied music when you were young?” It’s a dangerous game to play what-if with the past.

  “I did study music when I was young.”

  How have I forgotten this? He studied violin, like my sister. He wrote about it in those letters when he courted me. Hearing him talk about it now is like being told he used to go by a different name.

  “I was pretty good. My teachers told me I could have gone to conservatory, and I might have, if there wasn’t the family business to run.”

  My face gets hot. I am suddenly angry. I don’t know why. I want to say something that will sting, but I don’t know if it is myself I want to punish, or him. “Just think,” I say, “if you’d kept it up, you might have met Klara first instead of me.”

  Béla tries to read my face. I can see him trying to decide whether to tease me or reassure me. “Do you really want to try to convince me that I’m not happy beyond happy to be married to you? It was a violin. It doesn’t matter now.”

  Then I understand what it is that has upset me. It is the seeming effortlessness with which my husband has put to rest an old dream. If he ever suffered anguish over giving up music, he kept it hidden from me. What was wrong with me that I was still so hungry for what wasn’t?