Love and Treasure (45 page)

Gulya tore the banner loose, flipped it around, and hammered it in again.

“Hurry!” Nina called. “We have no time.”

Gulya slid down the column, gripping the free end of the banner in his teeth. Miloš bent over at the base of the other column, his hands pressed to his knees. Gulya loped four steps and, using Miloš’s back as a springboard, vaulted up the other column. He shinnied to the top and hammered in the other side.

As he slid to the ground, the banner slowly unfurled. Once it had reached the ground, Miloš and Gulya took up position on opposite sides.

“Ready?” Miloš asked.

Endre pulled a sheaf of pamphlets from beneath his frock coat. Nina had not been made aware of the plan to release any pamphlet, nor had she been consulted on its message. The banner’s plea—“Votes for All! We Demand Universal Suffrage!”—was simple. The pamphlet called for something else entirely. It demanded an end to the parasitic Hapsburg monarchy, denounced the Diet of Hungary as a tool of repression, and called for a revolution by workers of all nationalities against a system that allowed for the privileges of a few based upon the slavery of all. It enjoined that society be established on a new basis, where all property would be held in common and where each, producing according to his abilities and his strength, could consume according to his needs.

As Miloš and Gulya flung the curtains open, revealing the banner painted in Nina’s educated script, Endre threw the pamphlets off the balcony.

For a moment there was no reaction. Then, one by one, the audience noticed the white pieces of paper falling like snow from the royal box. They lifted their heads and saw the banner. They strained to make out the text in the dark.

The singers, blinded by the stage lights, kept on warbling their doomed phrases.

“Where is he!” Endre cried furiously. And as if in response, the house lights blinked on, revealing the conspirators’ demands for universal suffrage.

At that moment the doors of the box burst open and the guard, accompanied by two ushers, burst through.

“Run!” Miloš shouted.

Nina hitched her skirts up and ran, dodging around the thick arm of one of the ushers. The guard and ushers were intent on capturing her male companions and did not bother to give her chase. She tore down the passage to the private royal staircase and flung herself down the marble
steps, just ahead of the guards who soon swarmed it. The ginger-haired man had done his job, extinguishing the lights in the lobby as he lit the ones in the house, and so Nina was able, as planned, to disappear into the crush of audience members as they poured out of the hall into the dark. She hurried out the door, now one of many astonished operagoers whose evening of lady vampires and bad music had been interrupted by the action of radicals.

A man standing next to her balled up one of the pamphlets and threw it to the ground. She picked it up and, keeping herself hidden in the crowd, hurried onto Dalszínház Road, and then turned into Lázár Road, where she found the merchant’s chauffeur waiting as planned. She flung open the door and collapsed into the rear seat.

“Where are the others?” the chauffeur asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Gizella isn’t here?”

Gizella had been supposed to take advantage of the hullabaloo to duck away. If all had gone well, she would have been the first to arrive at the getaway vehicle. Terribly anxious for her friend, Nina began to cry. The plan was for the car to wait no more than ten minutes after the first alarm bells and police sirens, no matter if the conspirators arrived or not, and though she tried to argue with the driver, he had served nearly a decade in a hussar regiment and knew that above all a soldier must stick to the plan. And so they left, Nina and the chauffeur the only members of what would come to be called the Opera Conspirators to avoid capture.

It was only as they were driving away that she read the inflammatory pamphlet. “My God,” she said aloud as the car careened through the streets of Budapest. “What have we done?”

•
40
•

THOUGH I WOULD LIKE
to think that it was the atmosphere of trust and caring that I had created during my consultations with Nina that led her to my home that evening, honesty compels me to admit the possibility that she came to me simply because she had nowhere else to turn. Afraid that if the police had arrested Gizella, Endre, Miloš, Gulya, and perhaps even the prostitute, it would not be long before they determined their identities and discovered their address, she did not go back to the apartment in the Tabán. This decision proved critical in saving her, as within an hour the police were indeed at the door to the apartment and promptly arrested everyone inside, including not only the two other official residents, neither of whom was directly involved in the action, but also the cousin of one, a young man recently arrived from a distant town, who chose that inauspicious evening to drop off a bundle of his cousin’s laundered shirts and a mended suit jacket. Had the poor young man been even slightly more derelict in his promise to his aunt, he would have avoided spending sixty miserable and pain-wracked days in the Budapest prison, would have kept his full set of teeth for at least a few more years, and might even have embarked on the brilliant career as a painter that he had imagined when he left for the big city. As it was, he returned home bereft of both his front teeth and his dignity, and from then on labored not as an artist, but as a factotum in his uncle’s flour mill.

Nina considered going home, but she feared that once Gizella’s involvement was publicized, her own would not long be kept secret, and she refused to bring the wrath of the police down onto her family. And so it was to me that she came, and it was only by extreme good fortune that she found me at home alone. In those days of my middle age, it was my custom after dining with my family to return to work, but rarely to my consulting rooms in the front of the apartment. Usually I spent an hour or two visiting those of my patients too infirm to come to me. On the rare evening I did not spend trundling about Pest from sickbed to sickbed, I repaired to my coffeehouse, where I read medical journals or
made notes for the case studies I had lately begun to assemble for publication. That evening, unusually, my wife and daughters were visiting with a neighbor, the chambermaid and cook had been given the evening off to attend a vaudeville performance, and I was home alone.

When the porter’s bell rang, I ignored it, only realizing at the second bong that I had in fact dismissed my help. Grumbling at the intrusion, I answered the intercom that had recently been installed to save our ancient porter and concierge the trouble of climbing the stairs to announce visitors.

“A Miss S. to see you, sir,” the porter said, his voice muffled through the mouthpiece. I of course instructed him to send Nina up, and rushed to open the door for her. I had not seen her since she left my consulting room two weeks before, and my attempts to reach her parents had been fruitless. I was thus beside myself with worry.

“My girl, my girl!” I said, embracing her. I held her close to my chest, my hands splayed over the delicate silk of her gown. She trembled in my embrace and I whispered in her ear, “My dear, sweet girl.”

A tendril of her hair caught in my lips and I breathed in her gardenia scent, and a barely noticeable trace of sour sweat.

Nina’s knees buckled. I wrapped a supportive arm around her waist and led her to the analysand’s couch. I laid her on the Turkish carpet draped over the couch and spread a blanket over her. Then, my knees creaking and crackling with the unaccustomed effort, I knelt down beside the couch and smoothed her hair away from her flushed and perspiring face. I pressed my lips to her forehead in an avuncular kiss.

“My darling,” I said. “What has happened to you? Tell your dear Imré what’s wrong.” (I am sure that no one familiar with the school of loving and supportive mutual analysis created and practiced by my dear friend and colleague Sándor Ferenczi would have found anything unprofessional in my words or attitude.)

Nina said, “Please, Dr. Zobel. I need your help.”

“You have it. Tell me, dearest. Whatever has happened? Is it a man? Have you been … defiled?”

She waved my question away. “Nothing like that. But I can’t tell you anything. I beg you not to ask. Just, please, I need someplace to stay. Until tomorrow, or for a few days perhaps. Just until I figure out where to go.”

Like most women, Nina did not weep prettily, but with a great rush
of tears and mucus, her face mottled red and white. Though my profession has exposed me to a copious amount of tears from both sexes, I have always found it hard to resist those of a young lady, and thus I immediately agreed both to shelter her and to hide her whereabouts. At that moment I thought only that she had been in the company of a man who had treated her ill. That her problems were criminal and political rather than romantic did not occur to me.

Where to put her became my immediate problem. My wife, a mother herself, would not tolerate the idea of keeping such a secret from Mrs. S. I could hear her voice in my mind as clearly as if she’d spoken the words aloud. “How would you feel if someone hid Erzsébet or Lili from us?” My thoughts riffled through my family and acquaintances, trying to come up with someone of impeccable discretion, to whom I could trust the responsibility of the care of a girl in Nina’s distraught condition. I settled, inevitably, on my sister Jolán.

Upon her return from Germany, Jolán had decided to move out of our mother’s house. At the time I was furious, rejecting her explanation that soon enough Mama’s age and health would require more filial devotion, and that she wanted to “experience solitude” while she still had the chance. “You’ll have time enough for solitude when Mama dies!” I had insisted, but to no avail. My implacable sister ignored my vehement opposition and calmly removed herself to a suite of shabby but genteel furnished rooms within walking distance of the school where she taught. How grateful was I now for her intransigence!

Jolán was not on the telephone—she resisted any technology that permitted our mother to harass her any more than was necessary—and so Nina and I had no choice but to arrive at her home unannounced. She greeted us at the door wrapped in a Japanese kimono, her hair in a long braid over her shoulder. Worn down this way it was suddenly possible to see how much of it had silvered. Far more, though it is perhaps vain to say so, than my own, though I am nearly four years older. As I write this a decade after the events transpired, Jolán is gone, lost to cancer of the breast, and what sparse hair I have left is white as snow. But at the time I recall noting how old she looked, and worrying that she might not be strong enough to handle the responsibility I laid at her door.

“What in heaven’s name are you up to, Imré, traipsing around the city in the middle of the night?” she asked.

“It’s my fault,” Nina said from behind me, where she’d been concealed in the gloom of the hall.

“Let us in, quickly,” I said. Jolán’s apartment was on the fourth story, the floor directly below the one reserved, even in these simple buildings, for the servants, and I feared that someone might peer out and see my young fugitive. At the time I had no inkling that Nina had done something that might result in her being sought by the police. I knew only that I had undertaken to protect her, and I was concerned that she might by some unfortunate coincidence be recognized. The gossip network of servants is notorious.

In the end it was Jolán in whom Nina confided, and then only once I had been peremptorily dismissed and sent on my way home, where I spent an unpleasant night tossing and turning and vowing that my stubborn sister was going to be put on the telephone, whether she liked it or not.

The next day I had a full calendar of patients, and not wishing to spark my wife’s curiosity, I was forced to stay in my consulting room for the entire early part of the morning. I should mention at this point that concealing my actions from my dear wife caused me no small consternation. Over the decades of our marriage, Mrs. Zobel has been more than a helpmeet and a lover, she has been a friend in the true nature of the word, a person in whom one can confide, a person whose counsel one can trust. It pained me to deceive her, but I knew my wife well. As devoted a wife as she is, she is even more devoted a mother, and her thoughts would have been with Mrs. S. She would not have been able to refrain from letting that unfortunate woman know that her daughter was safe.

It is my custom when my schedule permits to take a short break at 10 a.m. to enjoy a cup of coffee and a quiet half hour with the morning’s newspapers. I debated forgoing the ritual and rushing across town to my sister’s apartment, but I had patients due to arrive after the morning break and discretion demanded that I keep to my schedule. I arrived at the Szabadság Coffeehouse, pulled a few newspapers from the rack as I walked in the door, and signaled to the waiter to bring me a coffee.

“
Mit Schlag, Herr Doktor?
” the Viennese waiter asked.

“Why not?” I asked. I only occasionally indulged myself, but even before I opened the papers I felt it a likely morning for the comfort of cream in my coffee.

On the cover of each of the papers I normally read in the morning—
Pest
Diary, Hungarian Nation
, and, my tabloid indulgence, the
Sun—
were screamingly large headlines.
ATTACK ON THE OPERA HOUSE, THE PRIDE OF BUDAPEST!
read the
Pest Diary
.
ANARCHISTS INVADE THE KING
’
S BOX!
read the
Hungarian Nation
. The
Sun
, typically, took it a step further:
BOLSHEVIK GIRL-DWARF AND CONSPIRATORS WREAK HAVOC ON OPERA!

Oh, Nina, I thought. What have you done? What on earth have you done?

•
41
•

IT WAS JOLÁN WHO
determined the course of action that saved both Nina and Gizella from prosecution and incarceration but resulted, to their mutual heartbreak but to Nina’s family’s relief, in their permanent breech. Nina had not waited for the morning papers to arrive. As soon as I was gone, she confided in my sister what she had done, explaining, as Jolán later told me, that the message had gone awry.