Mrs. Tuesday's Departure: A Historical Novel of World War Two (16 page)

I shivered. “Then it is more urgent that I take Mila away.”

“Why not hide her here in the Buda? I have a friend, Mrs. Gödel, she has a home, and…”

“No, I don’t want to put your friend in danger.”

“But you admitted yourself that you need to go somewhere no one knows you. She lives in a different neighborhood. Up in the hills. You could be her daughter. Or a niece.”

It was tempting. I knew the woman. I had no doubt she would accept Mrs. Szep’s suggestion, or that she would keep our secret safe. I wasn’t familiar with the attitude of her neighbors, would they become suspicious of the timing of our arrival?

“Let me think about it,” I said.

“How is it possible for you to be so different from your twin? Living in the same house. How is this possible?”

I shook my head. “The answer would take too long to explain, Mrs. Szep.” I put my hands on my knees and stood up. “But now I have to go upstairs to see how my sister and niece are doing.”

“Think about my offer,” she said.

“Thank you, I will,” I said. “In the meantime, please come up and visit us. I know Anna and Mila would welcome the company.”

I went over to the chair where Mrs. Szep was sitting and leaned down and kissed her forehead. “Please come and visit.”

Mrs. Szep smiled and nodded. “I’ll bring some of Anna’s favorite pastry. Maybe that will make her feel better.”

I retraced my steps down the corridor to the front door and stepped back into the stairway, closing the door behind me. I hoped Mrs. Szep wouldn’t forget to lock it before she went to bed. I looked up toward the next landing and the entrance to my apartment and slowly began to climb the stairs.

There was
a
time when evening meant quiet community, I could look up from my book and see Anna at the doorway smiling as she waved good-bye on her way out to spend the evening with Deszo at the opera. I would hear Mila down the hall, perhaps with a friend from school visiting, talking conspiratorially in her bedroom about some cute boy’s antics in class that day as they made some effort to get through their nightly homework. We were still a community of women then. Ilona and her husband were rarely around.

Still, I missed my husband. Anna or Mila could never fill the intimacy of understanding that Max and I shared. They filled the void he left with a different kind of love. We shared meals together. Sat and drank coffee afterwards and talked and more importantly, laughed.

             
Now that community had split apart.

I entered the apartment and found it quiet. I walked to the kitchen and looked at the dishes neatly stacked to dry on the washboard. There was no pot of soup warming for me on the stove, though the smell of the meal remained in the air. My stomach rumbled, reminding me that it had been hours since I’d last eaten.

I walked down the hall. The doors to Mila and Anna’s doors were open. I looked in one and then the other. Mila was sitting on her bed, leaning against the headboard reading. Anna’s room was empty.

“Where is Anna?” I asked.

Mila looked up from her book and said, “Where were you for so long?”

“I had a meeting,” I replied. “Where is Anna?”

“You got mad at us and we were only gone a couple hours.” Mila’s voice became a pout. “You’re a hypocrite.”

“Mila!” I tried fruitlessly to contain my rising anger. She’d never been so arrogantly defiant before. Clearly, this was Anna’s influence. I can imagine the bitter recriminations Anna must have filled her head with while I was gone. “Mila, my absence and yours are two different things. Now, tell me where is Anna?”

Mila hugged herself and turned to the wall. “Find her yourself.”

“Where did she go?”

Mila merely shrugged. Miss Szep had assured me that neither Mila nor Anna had left the apartment since my departure to meet Deszo. Then again, she was an old woman; it was likely that she could have been napping when Anna left the house.

“Mila you must tell me where Anna went.” I walked over to her bed and grabbed her chin, turning her to face me. “Tell me what happened.”

Mila’s eyes filled with tears, she was visibly frightened of me. I recoiled and dropped my hand. “I’m sorry Mila. You know she’s not well, it’s not safe for women out on the streets at night.”

I sat down on the edge of her bed and took her hand in both of mine. “I know how difficult this is to understand. I know that I seem like a different person to you. I haven’t changed.”

“You have!”

“No honey, I haven’t changed, the circumstances…”

“Even Anna says you’ve changed!”

I nodded and looked down at our hands. “You’re probably right. I’m not the same person that I was a week ago.” I needed to find someway to reach Mila. “It’s just that so much has happened. I’m trying to find a way to keep you safe since…”

“Since Momma left.”

“Yes, since your mother left. I wasn’t prepared for that. I was hoping that she would take you with her, so that you’d be safe too.”

“And you can’t understand why she didn’t?”

“Can you?” I looked into Mila’s eyes, scarred by pain since the scene at the train station.

“She never loved me like you did.”

“Like I still do.”

“But you’re not so nice now. Maybe you’ll…”

“Leave you too?” I softened my voice, caught by grief that my darling child, yes, my child, that’s how I’d always thought of her. Ilona knew that and as much as she’d considered Mila a burden, she resented my relationship with her daughter. As if I were a trespasser. “I will never leave you Mila.”

Mila wiped an angry tear from her eye. She leaned forward and hugged me tightly. I held her to my chest and let her cry for the first time since her mother had left.

I whispered in her hair, “What happened tonight, after I left?”

“Anna went to your study. She shut the door.”

Mila’s sentences came out in slow gulps in between her breaths from crying. “She stayed in there for awhile. And then she came out carrying some books, they looked like notebooks.”

I held m
y
breath, willing myself to stay and listen to the rest of the story instead of running to my study to confirm my suspicions. “What did she say Mila?”

“She was mad,” Mila replied looking away. “She said that you’d betrayed her. That you were going to run off with Deszo and leave us alone.”

“Did she say anything else, did she say where she was going?”

Mila remained silent, I couldn’t decide whether she was recalling Anna’s words or choosing which ones to tell me. “Mila please, this is important! Anna could be in danger!”

“She said that you’d betrayed her twice. She said you weren’t working on her journals, you were working on your own stories because you were jealous of her.”

I rolled my eyes and yet I could clearly imagine Anna’s reasoning. I’d given up writing in the early years of my marriage. And then, at my husband’s insistence, I’d begun again. I’d chosen children’s stories knowing they were well out of the realm of Anna’s interest. I wrote in obscurity for years, most of my stories published with the assistance of Max’s money rather than public interest. But slowly, I had earned a following.

My popularity was growing; there were requests to publish some of stories in other countries in Europe and even in America. I had once again begun to surpass Anna in recognition. And then Max died. And so did my voice. After three years of silence, there was an offer from a publisher. It was then that Anna suggested that I edit her journals instead.

“Did she say where she was going?”

Mila shook her head.

“How was she dressed?”

Mila furrowed her brow as if wondering why I would ask such a simple-minded question. “She went to her room and put on a dress. I walked to her door and watched her put on her make-up. I asked her where she was going but she just laughed and said she was going to take care of things. Then she went down the hall and put on her coat and left.”

“Which dress she was wearing?”

“It looked like one of the dresses she wore when she went out dancing.”

I shut my eyes and sighed. Now I knew where she’d gone.

I opened my eyes and grasped Mila’s hands. “I have to go out to find Anna. I don’t want you to stay here alone. Will you go down to Miss Szep’s? You can spend the night there and I’ll come and get you in the morning.”

Mila pulled her hands out of my grasp. “What if something happens to you and Anna? What if you don’t come back?”

There was no point in giving her false assurances. We both knew it was possible that anything could happen tonight.

“If that happens Miss Szep has a friend you can stay with. You’ll be safe wit
h her. And I will come back
for you.”

I stood and looked down at Mila. “Come on, get some clothes to wear tomorrow, you can just put your robe over your pajamas.” I tried to smile. “And take a good book to read to her cat.”

I left Mil
a
and walked down the hall to my study. Papers were strewn across my desk. I shoved them aside, underneath was my journal, also open, to the entry I’d made this morning.

I look in the mirror and I see my sister. I am afraid that I will become her. I was jealous of her once. Now I feel pity. She was the successful one. Does she wonder how much of her success is because I left the field in which we used to compete? Then, I was patronized for the ‘nice little fables’ I wrote. Now my grasp exceeds hers. She will decrease and I will increase.

“You were wit
h
Deszo.” The ghost of Anna turned in my chair and looked at me. “Weren’t you!”

“I met Deszo for coffee. We were discussing what we should do.”

“About keeping your affair secret?” her apparition sneered.

“No,” I sighed. “About finding a safe place for Mila.”

Anna pointed at my journal and continued, “So, you feel pity for me?”

I looked at the entry. “Yes, I’m sorry that you are losing your mind.”

She laughed. “That would be the only way you could surpass my achievements.”

Anna picked up one of the pages she’d scattered across my desk. “You call this literature.” She read one of the lines from my story, “The sharks nipped at Herkimer in their attempt to separate him from his mother. Looking back, Momma whale suddenly realized in horror, that Herkimer was gone.” She tossed the page aside. “You’re pathetic. I gave you my journals to edit so that you wouldn’t continue to embarrass yourself and me with your insipid little stories.”

I clenched my teeth and my jaws trembled with rage. “I am a writer.”

“Please,” Anna rolled her eyes. “You are nothing. You married a man old enough to be your father and spent your youth playing wife. Now you are forty and a dried up passionless woman who stole the affections of your sister’s daughter. You are a disgrace.” I turned to the next page in the journal.

Deszo kissed me last night. He hasn’t kissed me like that since we were eighteen. We were so young then. He only had eyes for me. He said that when he looked into Anna’s eyes he only saw everything I was not. He wanted me. I chose Max. I fell in love. I was young, Max was older, so sophisticated I thought. Now after all these years, he wants me still. What do I want? I will always want Max. He is the only one I want. I am sorry that Anna will never know how wonderful it is to be loved as I have been loved.

“So you want him back?” Anna said.

“No, of course, not,” I said, putting down the book and looking at the shimmering image of my sister in the chair. “Where did you go, Anna?”

Her apparition laughed and threw the book across the room. “You’re my twin, where do you think I went?” Then she disappeared, wearing the dress that told me her destination.

I took Mil
a
downstairs. Miss Szep was distressed to learn that Anna had slipped out without her knowledge. I knew she felt that she’d failed in her responsibilities as the self-appointed sentry. “It’s alright,” I assured her. “Anna probably went out through the back.”

She agreed to let Mila spend the night. She took Mila down the hall to a small spare bedroom and told her to make herself at home. Mila put her small satchel of clothes on the floor and turned to me, “Don’t go.”

I stepped into her arms and held her close. “I’ll be back,” I whispered into her hair.  I inhaled the scent of her as if I would have to remember it forever. “In the morning I’ll bring you something sweet to have with your coffee.”

Then Miss Szep took my arm and led me down the hall. She told me that if I hadn’t returned by the morning that she would contact her friend and take Mila to Buda herself. I kissed her on both cheeks, thanked her and asked her to say a prayer for me. She smiled and said that she’d already lighted a candle to the Virgin.  Then I left, going down the stairs and back into the cold night.