Gaudi Afternoon (24 page)

“Cassandra,” said Eva. “She doesn’t speak English. But it’s late, come in. I’ve put you in my bedroom.”

The flat was tiny, consisting of a kitchen, a bath, and two other rooms, one of which was Eva’s. There was also a winter garden, a glass-enclosed balcony, full of potted plants and boxes of potatoes and cabbage.

Mrs. Nagy was like one of those fascinating flip books where you can put together different heads with different torsos and legs. Her lower half did not correspond with her upper; looking only at her feet, for instance, in their little-girl white ankle socks and single-strap shoes, you would not deduce a face with the consistency of moldy Spam. Like Eva, Mrs. Nagy was very short, but her figure went straight from the shoulder of her tightly buttoned cardigan to the hem of her wool skirt. She held her arms stiffly by her sides, as if afraid to touch anything in her own flat. Yet her eyes were as inquisitive as a ferret’s. Her white hair was bundled on her head in a way that suggested she was just about to take it out with the garbage.

Mrs. Nagy may not have spoken English, but she knew how to get her point across. Eva might have foreign women friends, but her aunt didn’t have to like them. Mrs. Nagy gave me a push on the shoulder and pointed in a threatening manner in the direction of the bathroom. It appeared she was telling me not to use the shower. Eva said brightly, “She says, Our home is your home.”

Mrs. Nagy frowned and waved at the kitchen door; she snapped her fingers and said, “Papf, papf.” I thought she might be warning me not to use a gas stove that might blow up. Eva smiled. “She says, Help yourself to anything you want to eat.”

Mrs. Nagy pantomimed either a flood or a vast conflagration.

“My aunt wishes you a good sleep.”

“Tell her not to worry. I won’t destroy anything. Once my head hits the pillow I’ll be out like a light. I won’t be any trouble at all.”

I thanked both of them for their kindness in putting me up and went into Eva’s bedroom and closed the door. It was a long narrow room, with a single hard bed covered in cushions, a small desk and bookshelves that held economics textbooks in English and German. Over the desk there was a cork bulletin board, fluttering with notes, cartoons and postcards from countries around the world. There were some framed color photographs of a little gymnast doing handsprings and bar work with the Olympic logo in the background, but as I moved closer to study them, there came a harsh tapping on glass, and I looked up to see that the window at one end of Eva’s room faced the winter garden. Mrs. Nagy was standing there, with her solid body and deranged hair, watching me suspiciously.

I waved in a friendly manner as I stepped away from the photographs; then I sat down on the edge of the bed and mimed yawning and closing my eyes. When I looked back up she was gone.

It wasn’t what you would call private accommodation.

I got into my nightshirt and went out to the bathroom to brush my teeth and wash my face. When I came back to Eva’s room the light was off. I turned it back on, all 30 watts, and got into bed to read Elias Canetti. Without a knock the door opened. Mrs. Nagy was standing there with a pained expression on her face. I couldn’t have left a mess in the bathroom, could I? She pointed to the weak bulb in the lamp overhead and slapped her palm a few times with the fingers of her other hand. Eva appeared behind her, wearing a thin red slip that came straight out of
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
She said, apologetically, “My aunt wants to tell you that she is a widow.”

“I’m very sorry to hear that,” I said.

“On a pension,” Eva translated.

“Yes?”

Suddenly the overhead light snapped off.

I said, “I guess she’s careful about her electricity bills, right?”

Eva sighed. “See you in the morning, Cassandra.”

I consoled myself by remembering that on some of my travels there’d been no light to turn off at all, and eventually fell asleep.

The next morning Eva brought me a tiny porcelain cup of instant coffee in bed. She was dressed again in the red suit and high heels, and smelled of duty-free Chanel. As usual I’d doffed my nightshirt during the night and was enticingly nude under the sheets.

Eva appeared not to notice.

“I told Jack I’d be at the office at eight-thirty. Here’s the address. Will you join us later in the afternoon? Perhaps we can go to bathe at the Gellért Hotel, yes?”

“Ummm,” I said, remembering that Budapest was full of bathhouses dating from the Turkish occupation.

I drifted then into an erotic dream painted by a French orientalist at the turn of the century. Immured in the harem of the Grand Seraglio, we odalisques reclined around pools of water that reflected the rich magenta and indigo of silk carpets and latticed windows. Eunuchs stood, arms crossed, in the background, while Eva and I soaped each other with languorous movements, and ladled perfumed water over each other’s shoulders and breasts. Afterwards we rested on divans piled with cushions, drinking coffee, smoking opium and feeding each other melon and delicately scented sherbet, while fountains bubbled in the pools at our feet.

I lay dreaming until I saw the solid and threatening figure of Eva’s duenna through the glass window at the end of the room. I yawned and waved. She glared at me and looked at her watch. I got the impression she thought I needed to be up and about. And fast.

When I came out of the block of flats I found myself in one of the old Pest districts, which at the turn of the century had been jammed with workers and peasants flooding in from the countryside. The golden-brown stucco facades of the nineteenth-century buildings were still riddled with bullet holes from the last war and from the Soviet occupation of 1956.

It was early still, and the fresh green scent of the acacias and linden trees still had a fighting chance against the industrial and car pollution that would later become almost lethal. Budapest was an easier city to like than Vienna; it had been the capital of the other half of the Dual Monarchy, but even then, during the Habsburg era, Budapest had been the wilder younger sister who wanted to play music all night (Bartók, not Brahms), and invited all the unsavory ethnic neighbors into the living room for a party.

These days the Hungarians were throwing off the last remaining traces of forty years as a Soviet satellite. They’d dumped the Soviet statues into the river, and now they were enthusiastically changing all the street names. Maps were practically useless; everywhere you saw street signs with the names crossed out in red: a big scarlet slash through
TANACS
, through
MAJAKOVSZKIJ
. And everywhere were new names too: Burger King, Siemens, Philips, Sony, Minolta.

Andrássy út had once been the most fashionable boulevard in the city; it spent seven years as Stalin’s Street and (very briefly) in 1956 became Hungarian Youth Boulevard, until it settled down resignedly to being the Avenue of the People’s Republic. I was glad it had gone back to Andrássy út, because I never really could get my tongue around Népköztársaság útja.

My first stop that morning was the MÁV office on Andrássy, where I stood in line for over an hour in order to request a seat on the Trans-Mongolian Express. It would be at least a week, perhaps two before Moscow telexed back a reply and I could actually buy my ticket, but at least I’d set everything in motion. It was salutory, too, to stand in a queue that seemed not to move for fifteen minutes at a time; a good reminder that I was no longer in the West and needed more patience than usual. It’s interesting how you adapt to circumstances. If I were standing in a grocery line in New York with six people in front of me and a checker taking his sweet time, I’d be in a state of frenzied indignation like everyone else, muttering loudly, Do I have all day to wait here or what? They oughta fire this guy.

Here I drew into myself, almost physically; my head dropped into my chest, my shoulders slumped forward. I was at the point of passing into the state known as “queue-zen” where you no longer wonder when your turn will come or what the possible reason could be for such a delay or why the people in front of you are taking so unconscionably long with their trivial and idiotic requests… when I saw a familiar face come into the crowded office. It was unmistakably Bree, with her long black hair and nose ring, her torn tee-shirt and leather jacket. She looked around curiously. Was she searching for her grandma, the loo, or just a map of the city? Then she recognized me too, and came over.

“Hi,” she said eagerly. “Cassandra, right?”

“That’s right. And you’re Bree.”

“I was just walking down the street and saw you through the window.” She gave me a sideways, flirtatious glance. “How fantastic to run into you!”

“It’s the railway booking office,” I said. “I’m arranging my ticket to China.”

“That’s so fantastic you’re going there. I’d love to go to China. Why don’t you take me along?”

“Oh, I don’t think your grandmother would like that,” I answered, more sternly than gallantly.

I wasn’t sure why I was so uncomfortable. Perhaps it was that around Bree dairy metaphors kept springing to mind. She was like a bowl of freshly whipped cream, a firm vanilla pudding, a pitcher of cold white milk. In contrast, I felt like a strip of beef jerky, or maybe just a hunk of barbecued tofu that someone had forgotten to put back in the refrigerator.

I felt ancient at forty-six, and age made me awkward.

“Oh, Gram couldn’t care less what I do. She’s cool. It’s my mother who made me come,” Bree explained. “Teresa suddenly got worried about Gram on her own in Eastern Europe. She talked me into skipping spring quarter with this
bribe
of seeing Europe and making sure nothing happened to my poor old grandmother. So this is what happens: I get to Paris, where I could easily have stayed the rest of the summer it was so fabulous, and Gladys is just fine and doesn’t even really want me around. I can barely keep up with her and now we’re going off to Romania.” Bree laughed in a manner that was meant to sound sophisticated, but was instead despairing. “To a
geriatric
spa!”

“Well, you’ve got your camcorder.
Nosferatu
and all that.”

“Yeah,” she sighed. “I’m sure it’s atmospheric as hell. But it was hard to leave my girlfriend in Berkeley. Not that we’re monogamous or anything.”

Again the sideways look. I said nothing.

“I’ll come straight to the point,” she said, then she dropped her voice nervously. “Are you a dyke? I personally just identify as queer, it doesn’t matter who I sleep with, I’m always queer.”

In the world I’d grown up in and still moved in, especially when I traveled, bluntness was not a virtue and actions spoke more quietly than words.

“Call me old-fashioned,” I murmured. “It still seems to matter to me who I sleep with. Some twisted Catholic thing, I would imagine.”

The line had moved up somewhat during this exchange, but not fast enough. I wasn’t too worried about people overhearing. Even if they understood English they probably didn’t understand this kind.

“Well, Gram is waiting,” Bree said, but as if she wanted me to stop her, and perhaps suggest a tryst in Mrs. Nagy’s flat. When I didn’t, she reluctantly began to move off. “She’s got a whole day of sightseeing planned, Castle Hill, the works. I’ll probably be a wreck by tonight, and then she’s got us on the train tomorrow morning at seven. Well, Cassandra, hope you don’t have to wait here too long. If you have any time later…”

“I’m sorry,” I said quickly, and gave her an awkwardly maternal pat on the shoulder. “Enjoy your trip to Transylvania, and keep an eye on your grandmother. Gladys might surprise you.”

Was it possible that I had been her age once, that I had once looked to older women for experience? But they could never have been as old as I felt now.

I took my time getting over to Jack and Eva’s office. After leaving MÁV I refreshed myself with an espresso at one of the leafy outdoor cafés on Andrássy and then wandered through the side streets to the Jewish Museum and Synagogue. I had a nice kosher lunch at a small restaurant nearby, and continued reading Elias Canetti.

One of the reasons I’m such a good traveler is that I’m endlessly interested in doing nothing much in particular. There were ten of us in my family, and babysitting and chores every spare minute. I missed parts of my childhood, and travel is, I sometimes think, an attempt to find the curiosity and joy that I sensed but seldom had time to explore growing up. On the other hand, travel could be, as my mother always tells the rest of my family, just an excuse to be a bum.

The office was off Rákóczi út. It was in a nineteenth-century building with an elevator that didn’t function. I walked up four flights and knocked on the door with the small sign:

O.K. Temporary Secretarial Services

English and Hungarian receptionists, stenographers, and business secretaries

Our motto: O.K.!

Opal and Kálvin? Okay…

“Cassandra!” said Jack from a cross-legged yoga position on the floor. “We’ve been waiting hours for you! Eva has gone out; she said she’d meet us at Gerbeaud’s at four.”

The offices consisted of several small rooms. This one had a rug, a couple of chairs, some tables with typewriters, and a reception desk kitted out with a phone, a fax and a Macintosh computer. Through one doorway I could see a futon and another desk; another door, with
KÁLVIN EVA
on a brass plate, was closed. There seemed to be no one else around.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you in an office, Miss Opal,” I said, crouching down beside her.

“Oh, you know I’ve temped for years. Every Australian does.” Jack stretched out one of her long legs and put her head on her thigh. “I had a whole set of different clothes; I was good at taking shorthand, good at taking shit. After all, I was well-paid and it was temporary.”

“But then you met Kálvin Eva and everything changed.”

“It’s not what you think. Okay, so I’d never made it with a former Olympic athlete before. Okay, she’s cute and has that charming Zsa Zsa Gabor accent. But, believe it or not, there were ideals involved, feminist politics.”