The Moslem Wife and Other Stories (10 page)

“You are a very lucky little girl, going to the mountains
and
the sea,” said Mme. Bataille, in something of a whine. Véronique took no more notice of this than she had of Dijon, except to remark that she was going to the seashore tomorrow.

“Not tomorrow. You’ve only just arrived.”

“Tomorrow!” The voice rose and trembled dangerously. “Papa is meeting me at Orly.”

“Yes,” said the stupid woman soothingly, “but not tomorrow. In August. This is June.”

The seats between us were now filled. When I next heard Véronique, the corruption of memory had set in.

“It was the stewardess who cut up your meat,” said Mme. Bataille.

“No, a lady.”

“A lady in a uniform. The lady you were with when I met you.”

“
No
.”

The reason I could hear them was that they were nearly shouting.

Presently, all but giving in, Mme. Bataille said, “Well, she was nice, the lady. I mean, the stewardess.”

Two ideas collided: Véronique remembered the woman fairly well, even though the flight no longer existed, but Mme. Bataille knew it was the stewardess.

“I came all alone,” said Véronique.

“Who cut your meat, then?”

“I did,” said Véronique, and there was no shaking her.

Even if Peter Dobay had not instantly recognized me and called my name, my attention would have been drawn by the way he and his wife looked at the station of our village. They got out of the train from Montreux and stood as if dazed. One imagined them blinking behind their sunglasses. At that time of year, we saw only excursion parties – stout women with gray curls, or serious hikers who would stamp from the station through the village and up the slopes. Peter wore a dark suit and black shoes, his wife a black-and-white silk dress, a black silk coat, and fragile open sandals. Her blond hair had been waved that day. I wondered how she would walk in the village streets on her thin high heels.

When we were face to face, Peter and I said together, “What are
you
doing here?”

“I live here – I teach,” I said.

“No!” Turning to his wife, he said excitedly, “You know who this is, don’t you? It’s Erika.” Then, back to me, “We’ve come up to see my wife’s twins. They’re in a summer school here.”

“Better than dragging them round with us,” said his wife, in a low-pitched, foggy voice. “They’re better off in the fresh air.” She touched my arm as if she had always known me and said, “I just can’t believe I’ve finally seen you. Poodlie, it’s like a
dream
.”

I was faced with two pandas – those glasses! Who was Poodlie? Peter, evidently, yet he called her “Poodlie,” too: “Poodlie, it’s wonderful,” he said, as if she were denying it. His wife? Her voice was twenty years older than his.

He went off to see to their luggage and she stopped seeing me, abruptly, as if now that he was gone nothing was needed. She looked at the village – as much as she could see, which was the central street and the station and the shutters of the station buffet. All I could see was her mouth and the tight pinpoint muscles around it, and the flour dusting of face powder.

“Well?” she said when Peter returned.

“I can’t believe it,” he said to me, and laughed.
“Here!
What are you doing
here?”

“I teach,” I began again.

“No, here at the station, now, on Sunday.”

“Oh, that. I was waiting for the train with the Sunday papers.”

“I told you,” he cried to his wife. “Remember it was one of the things I said. Even if Erika was starving, she’d buy newspapers. I never knew anyone to read so many papers.”

“I haven’t had to choose between starving and reading,” I said, which was a lie. I watched with regret the bale of papers carted off to the kiosk. In half an hour, those I wanted would be gone.

“
We’re
starving,” he said. “You’ll have lunch with us, won’t you? Now?”

“It’s early,” I said, glancing at his wife.

“Call it breakfast, then.” He began guiding us both toward the buffet, his arms around our shoulders in a peasant-like bonhomie that was not like anything I remembered of him.

“The luggage, Poodlie,” said his wife.

“He’ll take it to the hotel.”

“What hotel?”

“The biggest.”

“Then it’s there,” I said, and pointed to an Alpine fortified castle, circa 1912, of yellowish stone, propped behind the street as if on a ledge.

“Good,” he said. “Now our lunch.”

That was how, on a cool bright day, just before the start of term, I saw Peter again.

In the dark buffet, Peter and his wife kept their glasses on. It seemed part of their personal decorum. Although the clock had only just struck twelve, the restaurant was nearly filled, and we were given a table between the serving pantry and the door. I understood that this was Peter, even though he didn’t look at all like the man I had known, and that I was sharing his table. I avoided looking at him. Across the room, over an ocean of heads, was an open window, geraniums, the mountains, and the sky.

“You have beautiful eyes,” said Peter’s wife. Her voice, like a ventriloquist’s, seemed to come from the wrong place – from behind her sunglasses. “Poodlie never told me that. They look like topazes or something like that.”

“Yes,” said Peter. “Semiprecious stones from the snow-capped mountains of South America.”

He sounded like a pompous old man. His English was smooth as cream now, and better than mine. I spoke it with
too many people who had accents. Answering a question of his wife’s, I heard myself making something thick and endless out of the letter “t”: “It is crowded because it is Sunday. Tourists come for miles around. The food in the buffet is celebrated.”

“We’ll see,” said Peter, and took the long plastic-covered menu with rather an air.

His wife was attentive to me. Parents of pupils always try to make me eat more than I care to, perhaps thinking that I would be less intractable if I were less thin. “Your daughter is not only a genius but will make a brilliant marriage,” I am supposed to say over caramel cake. I let my self be coaxed by Peter’s wife into having a speciality of the place – something monstrous, with boiled meat and dumplings that swam in broth. Having arranged this, she settled down to her tea and toast. As for Peter – well, what a performance! First he read the whole menu aloud and grimaced at everything; then he asked for a raw onion and a bunch of radishes and two pots of yoghurt, and cut up the onions and radishes in the yoghurt and ate the whole mess with a spoon. It was like the frantic exhibition of a child who has been made uneasy.

“He isn’t well,” said his wife, quite as though he weren’t there. “He treats it like a joke, but you know, he was in jail after the Budapest uprising, and he was so badly treated that it ruined his stomach. He’ll never be the same again.”

He did not look up or kick me under the table or in any manner ask me not to betray him. It occurred to me he had forgotten I knew. I felt my face flushing, as if I had been boiled in the same water as the beef and dumplings. I thought I would choke. I looked, this time with real longing, at the mountain peaks. They seem so near in the clear weather that sometimes innocent foot travellers set off thinking they will be there in three-quarters of an hour. The pockets of snow looked as if they could have been scooped up with a coffee spoon. The cows on the lower slopes were the size of thimbles.

“Do you ski at this time of year?” said Peter’s wife, without turning to see what I was staring at.

“One can, but I don’t go up any more. There’s an hour-and-a-half walk to the middle station, and the road isn’t pleasant. It’s all slush and mud.” I thought they would ask what “the middle station” meant, but they didn’t, which meant they weren’t really listening.

When I refused a pudding, Peter said, with his old teasing, “I told you she was frugal. Her father was a German professor at Debrecen, the Protestant university.”

“So was yours,” said his wife sharply, as though reminding him of a truth he forgot from time to time.

“It never affected me,” said Peter, smiling.

“That’s where you met, then,” said his wife, taking her eyes from me at last

“No,” said Peter. “We were only children then. We met when we were grown up, at the University of Lausanne. It was a coincidence, like meeting today. Erika and I will probably meet – I don’t know where. On the moon.”

It is difficult enough to listen to someone lying without looking shocked, but imagine what it might be to be part of the fantasy; his lies were a whirlwind, and I was at the core, trying to recognize something familiar. We met in Lausanne; that was true. We met on a bench in the public gardens. I told him I had lived in Hungary and could speak a few sentences of Hungarian still. He was four years younger than I. I told him about my father in Debrecen, and that we were Germans, and that my father had been shot by a Russian soldier. I said I was grateful for Switzerland. He told me he was a half Jew from Budapest and had been ill-used. His life had been saved in some remarkable way by a neutral embassy. He was grateful, too.

He was the first person to whom I had ever spoken spontaneously and without reserve. We met every day for ten days, and when he wanted to leave Switzerland because he thought
it would be better somewhere else and would not go without me, I did not think twice. The evening lamps went on in the park where we were sitting, and I thought that if I did not go with him I would suffer every evening for the rest of my life, every time the lamps were lit. To avoid suffering, I went with him. Yet when I told my father’s old friends, the people who had taken me in and welcomed me and kept me from starving, I said it was my duty. I said it was Peter who could not live without me. It is true I would never have gone out of Switzerland, out to the wilderness, but for him. My father had friends at the University of Lausanne, and although after the war some were afraid, because the wind had shifted, others took me in when I was seventeen and homeless and looked after me until I could work. I was afraid of telling about Peter. In the end, I had to. I quoted something my father had once said about duty, and no one could contradict that.

It lasted only a short time, the adventure, and can be briefly and accurately remembered. Quickly, then: He had heard there was a special university for refugees in a city on the Rhine, and thought they might admit him. We lived in a hotel over a café, and discovered we were living in a brothel. The university existed, but its quota was full. We were starving to death. We were so attractive a couple, so sympathetic-looking, that people dulled with eating looked at us fondly. We strolled along the Rhine and looked at excursion boats. “Your duty is always before you, plain as that,” my father had said, pointing with his walking stick to some vista or tree or cloud. I do not know what he was pointing at – something in his mind.

Because of Peter I was on a sea without hope of landing anywhere. It grew on me that he had been jealous of my safety and had dragged me beyond my depth. There had been floods – I think in Holland – and money was being collected for the victims. Newspapers spoke of “Rhine solidarity,” and I was envious, for I had solidarity with no one now. It took me time to think things out, for I had no illusions about my
intelligence, and I wondered finally why I did not feel any solidarity with Peter. I loved him, but together we would starve or drown.

“You can’t stay here,” said the owner of the hotel one day. “It isn’t safe for refugees. We have the police in too often.”

“We can’t move,” said Peter. “My wife is ill.” But that did not give me a feeling of solidarity, for I was not his wife, and he was a person who would keep moving from one place to another.

He never told the same story twice, except for some details. He said he was picked up and deported when he was ten or twelve. He was able to describe the Swiss or Swedish consulate where they tried to save him. In his memories, the person who hid him was always different. Sometimes he said it was a peasant, sometimes a fat woman who shut him in a cupboard. The forced march must have been true. Someone – he did not say who – was working on his behalf. He hinted he was illegitimate, and that a person of noble birth, who did not wish to be known, was his protector. It is true that sometimes in the marches from Budapest to the border one person in the column was saved, if the order came through in time. It was often at night. The column stopped by the side of the road, and the torches, hooded because of the air raids, moved from face to face. One night, the light picked out an old man who would have died soon in any case, and Peter. He could not see his deliverers – he saw the light moving from face to face. The light was lowered. He tried to hide, but they spoke his name. He thought the light meant an execution. He was taken away in a car, back to Budapest, and in the car was comforted with chocolates. These were the details he repeated: the light on his face, the voice saying his name, and the chocolates. Sometimes, being boastful, he said he was active in the Arrow Cross Party; but he was a victim, and a child. Once, he said he was poor and had sold papers in the street to pay for his shoes. But he was such a liar. He may have been poor, or he may have
been from a solid family who lost him along the way; but it was not a Protestant family, and his father was not a professor at Debrecen. Also, he was not in Budapest during the uprising in 1956. He was in a city on the Rhine, starving, with me.

We stood at the foot of the cathedral in this city one day. We had nothing to eat and nothing to do. I could not understand why Peter had brought me here or what he wanted now. He urged me to write my father’s old friends in Lausanne, or to my aunt in Paris, but I was proud, and ashamed that he would ask such a thing. I think he believed I was a magic solution just in myself. He lived in a fantasy of false names, false fortunes, false parents, and here was a reality of expired visas and dry bread he could not explain away.

“Goethe climbed to the top of this cathedral to cure himself of vertigo. You should try it,” Peter said.

“Oh, Goethe would,” I said, and that was the only thing that autumn that made Peter laugh. We climbed and climbed, and looked down at matchbox cars. I felt vertigo, and was surprised he did not. I held out my arms to receive him if he fainted – I was so sure he would not stand this – but he stood smiling down with no intention of toppling over. Below was the sweet nursery world, nursery-sized, with toy trams and toy people. It smiled back at him; he was its lord, at least from up here. My world was my size, and often bigger. I was afraid of the shrunken world as he saw it; he made me unsteady. I left him that day. He went alone to the post office to see if there were phantom letters from ghost friends, and I made myself as tidy as I could and went to my own consulate with a plausible story. And that was the last Peter saw of me, until Peter, or Poodlie, called my name at the station.