[sic]: A Memoir (11 page)

Of course, I said. (What does one say?) What can I do?

The charade was quintessential propaganda, Kádár-style. I’d be imprisoned for a week. But my magazine would report—and the national media would repeat–that I was hospitalized for an undisclosed ailment. I’d wear a fake IV; I’d appear, every now and then, on a balcony, in a wheelchair, with a fake catheter sticking out of my chest. After a week, I would miraculously recover, and nothing more would be said of the event. On Friday at midnight, a limo would whisk me home. Did I have any questions? he asked.

Yes, I said. Why not just throw me in prison for a week?

Because the Kádár government, he said, does not imprison writers.

That was the brilliance of Kádár, and in a way—even though I’m certain he killed my friend Andy, people don’t just disappear, we all knew Andy participated in the uprising—I do wish I’d met him, just to see how the air reacted when he displaced molecules of it. Of course everyone would decipher the true story. Even if I’d wanted to keep it a secret, it would have been impossible. But Kádár
didn’t
want it kept a secret. His power lay precisely in the very transparency of the charade.

I suppose part of me worried. I’m sure I asked myself what would happen if Friday midnight rolled around and there was no limo waiting downstairs; if my “hospitalization” was extended; if the “doctors” had found some type of complication that necessitated another day or two, just to keep me under observation. But when I strolled into the hospital, threw on this hospital gown, when they glued fake IVs to my chest and arms, sat me in a wheelchair and rolled me out to the balcony of my suite—it was very nice, really, like a good hotel—and my editor and I smoked a cigar, I felt this kind of giddy amusement at the sheer absurdity of the situation that I do feel is inimical to Eastern European culture, a temperament that the West will never apprehend.

The one thing I worried about was my mother. She had never fully recovered from the death of my father. I remember once—I think I was around twelve—I awoke in the middle of the night. Someone was crawling past my bedroom door. I lay in bed, frozen, for God knows how long, terrified. Finally I jumped up and swung my door open. My mother, bejeweled and in evening clothes, was dragging herself along the carpeted corridor, humming drawn-out glissandos from the bottom of her register to the peak. “Are you all right?” I asked.

“I’m at the edge,” she said. “I think I’m going over the edge. Or at least—I can see the edge.”

When she arrived to visit at the hospital I could tell something was wrong—the look of etched concern half-hidden under rudimentary graciousness. She took a seat in a chair of striped canvas that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a steamship in 1910. In fact, she herself wouldn’t have looked out of place on a steamship in 1910, where, in a sense, she forever was.

We chatted, rather aimlessly, about an article she had been reading about glaciers. Then she glanced at me and asked in a different voice if she could bring me anything, and suddenly she was on the verge of tears.

“You do know this isn’t real,” I said, but before I’d finished I knew she didn’t. How far along she was into senility? Alzheimer’s? Something else?

“I’ll be back every day,” she said, oddly, and she got up and kissed me and left, and I saw her speaking with one of the pretend nurses, and I wondered what exactly the actress employed as the nurse had been instructed to say to those unfortunate souls like my mother who weren’t in on the masquerade.

Finally Friday rolled around. By now I had cabin fever. My mother returned. I asked her when she knew she’d marry my father. She didn’t answer directly. She spoke of being a couple versus being together, and how that changed things: the subtle recalibrations in the way friends and acquaintances greeted them as they entered social gatherings, the country-house weekends, the piano bars, the shooting parties: a door would open the same way, she said, and then the welcoming gestures would be replicated with a degree of exactitude—the same approach to the handshake, the same curve of the hand through the air, as if algorithmically preordained—that betrayed their artificiality. I realized that a possible definition of love is the sharing of very particular forms of social alienation. Then I wondered if this were the only definition of love. And suddenly this thought made me feel lethargic. Or maybe, out of respect, I wanted to leave my mother alone with these intimate memories and, not physically able to leave the space, opted for sleep, feigned or otherwise. It was eight o’clock at night; I wanted to sleep through the final four hours of my stay, which felt like the last few hours of a very long flight, that mix of anticipation and fatigue.

I opened my eyes to see the long thinner wand gleefully click six degrees to her right, jumping atop her short fatter bedfellow. I congratulated my internal alarm. But no wonder, I thought as I got out of bed; it wasn’t as if this time hadn’t been inscribed somewhere deep in the folds of whatever part of the brain is responsible for the perception of time’s passage. My mom was asleep, in the chair that looked like it belonged on a ship. I nudged her awake as I took off my hospital robe. “We’re going,” I said.

“Where?” she asked, confused.

“Home. There’s a limo outside, waiting.”

“No,” my mother said, “you’re in the hospital.”

A pretend nurse walked in, smiled knowingly. I returned her smile, then looked back at my mother and said, “It’s okay. My editor’s waiting outside in a limo. The hospital story is just a cover—it was the article I wrote. The prime minister wanted to send a message. But we can go now.”

My mother shook her head. “No, you’re sick. You’re in the hospital. On the Upper East Side.”

Upper East Side? What was that? “Mom, we’re like twelve blocks from Andrássy Street. Valentina’s waiting for us.”

“Honey,” she said, “you can’t leave. You’re in the hospital. You’re very sick.”

Suddenly, dread. Everyone had lied to me. My editor, the minister of culture, the prime minister. But of course he had—he’d killed Andy in 1956. I was in prison. My mother was right. I looked around the room. It looked different, suddenly, like a camera lens had been replaced, and the color balance had been adjusted. After years of relative nonchalance, I was experiencing the dark side of Goulash Communism. I realized with horror that since Andy’s disappearance I’d been faintly telling myself, “After all, he knew what he was getting into.” Meaning the uprising of 1956. But he participated. Why would I pose a threat? My own editor—my employer, my closest intellectual companion, the father-figure that eased me into society—betrayed me? Of course. He sold me out, just as he had surely sold out others. How else had he uniquely been able to procure intellectual freedom for the magazine? By forsaking his son.

Ligeti got out, I thought. I glanced out the door. Another pretend nurse walked into the room. She left the door open. She stood there, listening, saying nothing. I couldn’t see guards in the yellow hallway behind her. At first that was a relief—but then I realized that was worse. Where are they hiding? I silently calculated the time it would take to run on foot from Gellért Hill to Andrássy Street. It was midnight, so the streets would be empty. It was dark. I had to get to Valentina, get her out of here, head to—where?

I felt the first hints of panic. “We’ve got to get out of here, Mom,” I said, ripping the eight fake IVs out of my chest. Fake blood went everywhere. They really thought of everything, I remember thinking. “This is turning into a very dangerous situation.”

But it was too late. The pretend nurses grabbed me, forced me back into the bed. My mother, powerless. I thought about Valentina, our marriage in Bulgaria, the Kreutzer Sonata. I thought about Andy laughing when I said I wasn’t going to Vienna, and how we had a slightly similar night years later when he told me—in the same restaurant!—that he was working for the Resistance. And how his disappearances became first more frequent, then longer, and then he was gone. How superior, public executions. At least you know. His wife probably still hopes. Where was Valentina? I hadn’t heard from her in a while, I realized. Meanwhile, my mother was talking. She was holding me, going on and on, a calm, hysteric rant. How long had it been since I’d seen Valentina? I was sitting down on the bed. The fake blood was streaming down my chest. Too watery, I thought. Looks like red water. These special effects teams in 1963. How much are they being paid? Goddamn unions. (I sound like my father.) Nobody’s going to believe this, I said to myself, rubbing my hand against my slippery chest in fury. See, it’s slippery. It should be sticky. Effects will be so much better, won’t they. And then digital. In the 1990s. More pretend nurses now, holding me down. When was it—the last time I saw Valentina? Why can’t I remember? The pretend nurses are sticking needles back into my fake wounds, there are cables attached to the needles. The wonderful thing about Valentina is how beautifully she aged. That was a relief. You never know, when you marry a girl. When you date someone, you’re dating her present self, but when you marry someone, you’re marrying someone known only to your future self. It’s the bone structure. The Bulgarian mixture of Slavic and Russian and Greek and Macedonian and Tartar and Hun and Turk and God knows what else. The olive skin, the almond serious eyes. She could pass for Persian. She is a religious woman. I’m not. She goes to church. A believer, yes. She believes. The book of Job and all that. Question it poses is, why does it exist? Funny. It exists to pose the question of why it exists. Because it shouldn’t exist, a book like that. By all rights, it shouldn’t exist. So why
does
it exist? In order to ask that question. They’re pretending to inject me with something. I almost want to act as if I feel the needle going in. Play along. Needles are hollow things with mouths. My mother won’t stop talking, she’s over the edge now, like she said that night when she was crawling outside my bedroom in a black cocktail dress, wearing diamonds that gleamed in the blue darkness; soon she’ll be getting the time wrong, she’ll think it’s morning when the sun’s going down, I can see us in the future at a diner in America, me sitting across the little table from her aged wounded face, her blank eyes staring into the dull spoon she pretends to float like a ship on the surface of the coffee, a tiny wine-dark sea all her own, nestled in the bay enclosure of a paper cup ringed with a blue and white geometric band filled with meanders for fear of a void. More pretend nurses are running in. In their white gowns, they look ridiculous. They look like high school drama students somewhere in the American Midwest attempting Greek tragedy; they have the effortless, self-conscious beauty of awkward youth, rushing too quickly into a Greek vase pose, their anxious eyes searching for their parents in the overheated auditorium. It’s getting confusing. But I can use that to my advantage, as soon as I take a little rest; no, I’ll pretend to take a nap, the actors will relax, everyone will fall asleep, and I’ll just walk right out as if nothing happened. The only way to deal with these types of threats is to be utterly relaxed. Not even to seem relaxed, but to be relaxed. Just seeming isn’t enough. You can never petition the Lord by prayer. My father thought there were three good examples of English: Shakespeare and Eliot and the King James. But where is Valentina? My wife. I always wondered to whom those two words would refer. Valentina. She has faith. We never discuss it. We had a religious wedding, an Eastern Orthodox wedding. Is it Greek Orthodox or Russian Orthodox? Bulgarian is written in Cyrillic. So exotic. When we met and would make love she’d murmur in Russian. I felt like James Bond. I love the way her inner thigh bone joins her groin. She knows I don’t believe. She never brings it up, never tries to change me, to convert me. We’ll walk into a church somewhere and we’ll see the same icons but they appear differently to us. The fake blood coming out of the wounds, the painted blood on the painted sculptures, she sees all that differently. I know it’s fake when I see it. She thinks it’s real blood. She sees it as real. But I know it’s fake blood. But the thing is what’s New York? Because my mother’s saying as if it’s important “you’re in the hospital, you’re in New York, you’re being treated for

•

IT WAS SOMETHING
about those two words—“New York”—that jolted me out of the morphine delusion. “New York” existed somewhere in a distant corner of my mind, but how did that jive with my studies at the Liszt Academy, my job, my editor, Valentina above all? And all of that crystalline detail?

Budapest and the Danube.

When it came back, it came back block by block. Literally. I mean the first thing that came into my head was the intersection of Sixty-Eighth Street and York. So first was geographic location: the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Wouldn’t you think it’d be something else? Recognizing my mother, for instance? Or remembering my name? The self? No, it was where the self was positioned on the surface of the earth. I saw the subway map in my head, and I zoomed out, saw an overhead satellite image of the island, then the country. Then, for some reason, I thought of Columbia University. Bartók taught at Columbia. I was finishing a music degree at Columbia when I got the diagnosis, and I was teaching a class there. That was the reason I was in New York. Not really, but at this point, that would do. Then the year, I think.