Love and Treasure (42 page)

“He most certainly was,” I said.

“For a dwarf,” she said.

“A very handsome man,” I said firmly.

Mrs. S. seemed excessively annoyed by my mild flirtation with her daughter’s friend, and came to hover over us until I belatedly offered her the section of sofa next to her daughter where I sat. Gizella perched on a small upholstered stool that Sophie S. had graciously made available for her.

The doctor’s wife joined us now, bearing a silver tray on which were arrayed small squares of flatbread spread with smoked salmon mousse
and decorated with sprigs of chives. The ladies demurred, but I helped myself to an hors d’oeuvre.

“Mm,” I said to Sophie. “Delicious.”

“I have the most wonderful new cook,” she said. “She’s a village girl, but her last job was at the French embassy. She was only a kitchen maid, but the chef was from Paris, and he taught her well.”

“You’re always so lucky with your servants, Sophie,” Mrs. S. said. “I’ve had Riza forever, and still anything beyond a simple
paprikás
completely defeats her. You should have seen the catastrophe she made of last night’s fried goose liver.”

“It was fine, Mama,” Nina said.

“It was black! And as dry as the skin on an old crone’s feet.”

“Sister-in-law!” Sophie said. “How you talk! Dr. Zobel will think we are a family of farmers!”

“Perhaps farm animals,” Nina said.

“My father-in-law wasn’t a farmer,” Mrs. S. said, determined both to ignore the joke and to defend her family’s bourgeois credentials. “He was a wheat merchant.”

Nina said, “Grandfather taught me how to drive a plow when I was a little girl.”

“That was for show, darling,” Sophie said. “Do you remember, Irma, our father-in-law’s team of carriage horses? Those beautiful black Hanoverians and his grand barouche? How many times as young brides did we make him drive us up and down the Corso, so we could show off our splendid hats?”

The arrival of the E.’s interrupted the sisters-in-law’s reverie.

Mr. Jenő E. was a man of substantial girth, more substantial, I daresay, even than my own. His bald pate was decorated with a sprinkling of pinkish brown moles. His voice was loud, and he was a friendly, if not particularly intelligent, man. Of his wife, Berta, it was difficult to garner any impression at all, so languid was she. Her hand was limp in my own, and she mustered no more than a faint moue in lieu of a greeting.

Ignác E. gave the impression of being a fine, healthy young man, tall like his father, with the broad shoulders and protruding chest of an athlete. The boy was a gifted swimmer, a member of the Hungarian Olympic team, who placed fourth in the four-hundred-meter freestyle in London in 1908, painfully close to earning a medal. He was quite nearly as busy in his position as treasurer of the Hungarian Athletic Club as he was in his job as one of the only Jewish lawyers in the Royal Prosecutor’s Office
of Budapest. Ignác described to me his latest acquisition, something he called a Jantzen elastic swimsuit, which he felt confident would increase his speed in competition.

I fear I do not share the obsession with athletics that consumes so many of my fellow Hungarian Israelites, for whom love of sport is second only to love of nation. I often wonder if this urge to display physical prowess, to compete and above all to win, might not be a symptom of a lingering sense of inferiority. After all, no small number of the strapping young Jewish men who fill the myriad fencing clubs, swimming associations, rugby societies, and water-polo teams are descended from bent-backed Galicianers, who concerned themselves with the development of their brains and their bankbooks rather than of their physiques. Still, it is men like Ignác E. who are the norm in our community, not I, and it speaks well of him that he achieved so much in his chosen sport.

I wondered if this athleticism was something Nina and young Ignác might have in common. After all, though I was not aware of her being currently engaged in any organized sporting activity, Nina once told me that as a girl she’d won prizes in archery. Also, she possessed a pretty female version of the broad shoulders and nipped waist that made Ignác such a striking young man.

My musings about their common interests were interrupted by a vigorous argument between the two. Though it was difficult at first to determine the precise genesis of the discord, soon I realized that the young man must have cast aspersions on the set to which Miss Weisz had recently introduced Nina.

“Radicals and layabouts?” Nina said, her voice shrill with outrage.

Ignác said, “They agitate against the government! They make no secret that they wish to see the king deposed.”

“They must make some secret of it,” Miss Weisz said calmly. “Otherwise they’d be dining on bread and water in the Budapest prison, not coffee with cream in the New York Café.”

“Nina doesn’t really know these people,” Mrs. S. interjected. “And she never frequents the New York. Certainly not unescorted.”

The young people gazed at her, momentarily flummoxed at her blatant untruth.

“But I’ve already told him I was there, Mama,” Nina said.

“Once! You went there once. And only because she took you.” Mrs. S. glared at Gizella.

Ignác said, “I don’t know why your radical friends haven’t ended up
in prison, Miss Weisz, given that my office prosecutes radicals and instigators every day. If they aren’t being prosecuted I can only imagine that it’s a result of their sloth. They’re all talk, no action. I went to gymnasium with men like these, and I can tell you that if any one of them does a single decent day’s work in a year, I’ll eat my hat.”

“Shall I bring you a knife and fork?” Nina said. “Perhaps you’ll want some salt and a pepper pot to make it go down easier. Because I can tell you with utmost confidence that they work.”

“Scribbling sonnets and submitting them for publication in their friends’ two-pfennig periodicals is not work. And that’s all they’re good for, these New York Café fops. Poetry and anarchism.”

“An ideal existence!” I said with, I fear, forced joviality. “As long as it’s accompanied by a plate of
kiflie
and a nice strong espresso.”

Nina, too angry even to acknowledge my joke, said, “You ridicule these men, Ignác, men who spend their days trying to create something beautiful, and yet what do you do all day? What do you create?”

“I create a just society.”

“You prosecute the destitute and inoculate the wealthy. You protect the titans of finance at the expense of the poor. How you can live with yourself I have no idea.”

“Nina!” Mrs. S. said. “Apologize to Ignác immediately.”

“Apologize for what? For telling the truth?”

“For being rude!”

Ignác bowed stiffly from the waist. “I require no apology. Indeed it is I who owe Miss S. an apology. I was not aware that she was so closely associated with the New York Café set. Had I known they were her intimates I would not have criticized them.”

“They are not my intimates!” Nina said furiously. “But I do know them well enough to know that they aren’t dilettantes. Right, Gizella?”

“Some are dilettantes perhaps,” Miss Weisz surprised us all by saying. “Though there are others who work as hard, I expect, as you do, Mr. E. My good friend Endre Bauer not only writes poetry but he’s also an office clerk. And he tutors Latin and Greek in the evenings. Endre is poor and supports his mother and at least three sisters with his wages. I think the man lives on coffee and air.”

Ignác, shamed perhaps to contemplate the difference between the hours of his employment and those of a poet who earned his bread copying documents and tutoring the sons of the wealthy, said, “I apologize again for my comments.”

“Oh for goodness’ sake,” Nina said. “Stop apologizing. We know you don’t mean it.”

“Nina!” Mrs. S. snapped.

Never has the dinner bell been greeted with more relief.

The evening’s discomfort, however, was not yet at an end. As we approached the dining table, Sophie S. hovered over us, trying to distribute five men and one boy amongst eight women in a way that would permit neither siblings nor husbands and wives to sit side by side. I have always detested this insistence at dinner parties on separating the spouses. My work schedule is so onerous, my leisure time so limited, that what I miss most of all is proximity to my wife, whom on most days I see only briefly, for a few minutes at breakfast, and when I have no engagements for the midday meal. Though we continue, despite our advanced age and the disapproval of our housemaid, to share a bed, it is only rarely that my wife is sufficiently immersed in a novel or bit of needlework to be awake when I return from my coffeehouse in the evenings. All of which is to say that normally I would have preferred being seated next to her. However, my perch between Mrs. S. and Miss Weisz allowed me to experience at close range the bombast that resulted from the girls’ failure to raise their glasses when Dr. S., as is his custom, toasted the king.

“To his imperial and royal apostolic majesty, Franz Josef I, emperor of Austria, king of Hungary!” Dr. S. said, raising his glass.

Busy as I was raising my own glass, I did not notice that neither Miss Weisz nor Nina had lifted theirs until Nina’s uncle drew the company’s attention to it.

“Do you not like the wine?” Dr. S. said, scowling. “Shall I pour you something sweeter? A honeyed Pálinka, perhaps?”

“No thank you, Uncle. The wine is fine,” Nina said.

“Then why don’t you drink?”

Miss Weisz took a small sip, but Nina did not.

“I prefer not to,” she said.

“But you just said the wine is fine.”

“The wine is fine. It is the toast that I object to.”

“You object to what? To the king? You object to the king of Hungary? Is that what you’re saying?”

“I object to any ruler who disenfranchises half his constituents.”

At the far end of the table, my sister, whom I know to share Nina’s beliefs, raised her glass to her lips, the better to hide her smile. Others were not so amused.

“Nina!” her father bellowed, causing the women around the table to jump and Ignác to wince.

“I’m sorry, Papa, but as a woman …”

“You are not a woman. You are a foolish, hysterical girl, who knows nothing. Do you hear me? Nothing!”

Those unfamiliar with the feelings of his Jewish subjects toward the king might be surprised at the willingness of a father to so chastise his daughter in company, most especially in the company of the family to whom he hopes to be united in matrimony. But for us Hungarian Israelites and our brethren in Austria, Franz Josef was more than a king. We Jews had seen kings come and kings go, and things had remained much the same. Before Franz Josef, we existed in a state of unease, waiting for the inevitable pogroms and expulsions, the rise of the fanatical and the murderous, from Antiochus Epiphanes’ desecration of the Second Temple to the Teutonic Crusaders’ massacre of the Jews of the Rhineland, to Torquemada’s Spanish Inquisition, to the miseries perpetrated by our own Leopold the First. But even a young and foolish girl like Nina, a girl enamored of the egalitarian and socialist nonsense spouted by coffeehouse radicals, knew what King Franz Josef had done for her people. She knew that it was he who bestowed on us our equal rights, informing the majority by edict that he would tolerate no discrimination by virtue of religion. It is because of his tolerance and protection that we flourished in Austria and in Hungary. It was because of him that we could hear the phrase “Jew-dapest” and respond not with fear but with amusement and pride. And it is only because he is no longer with us that the rulers of this nation have felt at liberty to enact such loathsome statutes as the
numerus clausus
, which make life so much less secure and pleasant for the Jews of Hungary. Loyalty, patriotism, and love of country and king inspired Mr. S.’s fury at his daughter and, I fear, it was foolishness that allowed her to take her haughty leave from the table.

“Excuse me,” Miss Weisz said, leaping down from the cushions placed upon her chair so quickly that I had not the time even to assist her. She followed her friend from the room. We listened in silence as the door to the apartment closed firmly behind them.

Ignác E. rested his forehead in his hand, sighing far too wearily for a man of his young age.

“Oh dear,” his mother murmured.

“And what have you to say?” Mr. S. snarled at me.

“I?”

He stopped his tongue, no doubt not eager to destroy what remained of his daughter’s reputation by referring to her status as my patient.

Nonetheless, I spoke. “I fear that Miss S. and her friend may still be under the sway of the excitement of the International Woman Suffrage Congress. There were so many political speeches, so many radical women storming hither and thither. Young girls are terribly impressionable, and I imagine that such scenes are being enacted throughout the dining rooms of Buda and Pest. But I assure you ladies and gentlemen, these fits of political excitement will pass. Soon enough our young ladies will find another, more suitable outlet for their energies.”

My own daughters gazed demurely down at their plates, though I could not help but wonder if I’d not caught a glimpse of something in Erzsébet’s eye. I hoped fervently that my patient’s disobedience had not communicated itself to my daughter, who, whatever her current objections, was going to end up married to András Nordau, if her mother had to hog-tie her and drag her to the chuppah.

My sister Jolán said, “I attended some of the events of the congress, and I can attest to the general air of excitement. And as a teacher of girls, I can also attest to their impressionability.”

“You know what I find works wonders in distracting a young girl when she’s in a mood like this?” my dear wife said. “A hat. Yes, a hat is just the thing, isn’t it, girls? To take your mind off foolish things.”

I winced, sure that my wife would now suffer rebuke from the furious Mr. S., but before he had time to speak, Lili lifted her eyes and said, “Mama, you read my mind. I was just thinking that if I had a hat with Numidi feathers I wouldn’t have any room at all in my head for anything else. Certainly not for politics.”