Triptych (19 page)

Chapter Fourteen

In my bedroom, getting dressed before going to view Gustav's photographs, I round the foot of my four poster bed. My toe catches the basket piled high with Adriatic blue thread.
Vaclav's dream piece
. I am righting the basket when I glimpse my streaked blonde hair in the long pedestal mirror across from me.
Ildikó's nightmare
. This is not my sort of weather, I grumble, walking to the mirror, corralling the frizzed locks, coiling them into a French twist, clipping it.

In the glass, I pick up the reflection of Mariska's shawl, strewn across the desk chair. In the midst of the cascading border of floral clusters, my Kandinsky circles. What had Vaclav said, seeing the needle work experiment: “I think you are layered, like those circles. Complex, bright, bold, full with many gifts.”

Well, I am not full with his baby, I think, regarding my figure in the mirror, smoothing my flat stomach, savoring the rich feel of the crushed silk fabric of my white vintage skirt. I had unearthed the treasure at a flea market several years ago. The white cotton tank top I am wearing with it is contemporary, but the assortment of antique black and crystal beads I had adhered to its front adds a stylish Old World look. I adjust the top's straps then tie a black sash loosely around my waist, tugging the knot, letting the long fringed ends cascade down the skirt's side.

I assess the effect. Eva's funky touch rubbing off on me?

The bedroom door is partly open, and I can hear the telephone ringing in the living room. Zsófi picks up. I listen, but catch only a series of muffled responses.

“Ildikó,” she calls from the living room. “Telephone. A gentleman.” Her tone is sing-songy, mischievous.

“Who is it?”

I suspect Gustav. In old school fashion, he had wanted to pick me up. I had demurred. He'd persisted. I'd protested. “The German Cultural Center is not far. I can walk over.”
Will
walk over. In flat
walking
sandals.

At last, he relented and the tug of war had ended. At least I'd thought it had.

A knocking on my door. I am slipping the backing of my earring onto its post. I turn. Zsófi is in the doorway, hands folded primly before her.

“It is no gentleman.” Her lips purse disapprovingly. “It is Vaclav.”

Soon after my arrival, Zsófi had sensed something was troubling me besides my concern for Mariska. Teamed up together in the store for hours, she eventually wheedled the truth from me. I had tried not to paint Vaclav in a bad light. He'd been an extraordinary lover; I'd had the affection and attention I craved. Developing as an artist, learning more about myself through the work and through him, had been cherries on the sundae. Besides, I had known all along the affair was what it was. An affair. Zsófi viewed the relationship through lioness eyes. Vaclav had cheated on his wife and had led astray a friend who was like a sister.

Silent seconds pass while my fingers remain pinched to my ear. I let go, flick the silver disk suspended from my lobe, watch it swing freely. “Would you mind taking a message please, Zsófi?”

The chirping notes of the tune she begins whistling recede into the living room.

Zsófi is at my door again, quickly. She rolls her eyes. “That one he is not shy. The message: ‘Tell Ildikó, good news. Because of the showing she arrange for me at the library, I have wonderful new commission. I should like to speak with her about it. Ask her, when may I see her? And please to tell her I very miss her.'

“He make me repeat this, in his exact words:
I very miss her
. He is waiting.”

Not,
I very love you
, the broken English turn-of-phrase that had been my opium for seven months. Instead, like with the floral clusters in Mariska's shawl there's been an alteration. But what did it mean? Code? Different on the surface; same underlying message?

I take a deep breath. What does it matter?
Love? Miss him?
Not options.

Vaclav is a rock in the pond of my life.

I ask Zsófi to tell Vaclav not to call again.

At 5:30 p.m., I arrive at the German Cultural Center, an imposing sandstone structure on a busy commercial block. I press an intercom button. The door buzzes and an elevator whisks me to the fourth floor. A zaftig young woman with rosy cheeks, a pert nose, and a thick blonde plait greets me.

“We are technically closed.” She leads me down a hushed corridor.

The gallery space is completely black and white, except for the polished hardwood flooring. Track lighting illuminates photographs mounted along the fixed walls and on the portable walls standing in the room's middle.

I'd expected more elaborate compositions showcasing costumes representative of Chicago's ethnic mosaic, but the portraits focus as much on the individual as the native attire.

Gustav, in jeans and an open-collar white shirt, is talking to a young man with a dark ponytail at the other end of the gallery.

A “tsk” from my guide. She's glaring at the portrait of the Italian lady resting against the wall near Gustav's foot. “They still have another piece to mount.” She checks her watch then calls, “Yoo-hoo,” to get the men's attention.

Gustav looks over. I wave shyly. He smiles and gestures to the Italian lady. “Just a couple more minutes,” he says.

The conversation between the two men resumes. Beside me, a second exasperated “tsk.”

“I have a few more things to do,” my guide says, the blonde plait bouncing as she turns to leave. “We close in fifteen minutes.”

“Fifteen minutes?” My voice is incredulous. “I was invited for a private preview.”

She hesitates. “Sorry.”

She is the center's marketing and events person. Today technically is her day off, but final preparations for the opening had pulled her in. Now, with the hanging of the last portrait, her duties are done. Tomorrow will be a hellish day.

“I need to get out of here, get some rest before I have to return.” She squints in Gustav's direction. “That is, if the artist and the art committee would like this gala to actually take place. Good to meet you.”

With another whisk of her thick plait, she takes her exit.

Cool air blasts from an air conditioning vent above. I adjust Mariska's shawl on my shoulders and drift to the center walls. The photographs are all matted in white and mounted in simple black frames with the subject's country of origin annotated at the bottom. I almost regret having passed on attending the next night, but thankfully the show will be up for several weeks. I stop at an arresting image.

An African American woman, originally from Senegal, in North Africa, with flawless dark skin, full lips, a perfect nose, and a calm unlined expression, stares sideways, away from the camera, slender chin-length cornrows framing her face. Around her neck, oversized beads rest atop a tribal hatch-print robe. Another length of small cylindrical beads, strung together with what look like white Life Savers, winds about her head in a complicated manner to form an elegant hairpiece. My gaze skips from the headpiece to her eyes. I rethink my initial appraisal. The woman is not serene. What is her story?

A few images later, I cannot resist an elderly woman with a flat nose and sunken smile. Around her head a thick band woven in a traditional design supports a fluff of feathers. The woman hails from the Luzon Islands in the Philippines and her delicate frame and obvious sweetness are a stark contrast to the woman I pause before next.

A sturdy-looking elderly Uzbeki, from Uzbekistan in Central Asia, with a round, weathered face, stares unabashedly into the camera lens, her slightly open down-curved mouth exposing a wide gap in her top teeth. A print scarf is tied like a turban around her head. In the V-neckline of her dress is a diamond-pattern inlay made of a discordant flowery print. The mismatched designs are jarring to me, but the woman wears them with undeniable dignity. Her stout frame firmly planted, she looks out through fleshy narrow eyes as if daring the viewer—or any sort of trouble—to take her on.

Gustav comes up beside me.

“Survivor,” I comment. “You should add survivor to her descriptor.”

“Yes.”

“I'm in awe. Your work is amazing.”

A slight bow of his head. “Thank you. I thought you might be disappointed.”

“No, my only disappointment is your gatekeeper.”

He apologizes for the abbreviated showing. “I should like to make this up to you. Dinner perhaps?”

I hesitate, then, “Yes, that would be nice.”

Gustav's helper has left. We approach the wall where they'd been working, veer right.

“When did you discover you had this talent?” I ask.

Gustav shrugs. “In Budapest. I was sixteen. My uncle had a big job with a company making camera lenses. He also liked taking photographs for fun. Nature, people, landscapes. Sometimes he took me along on outings. I got hooked, he began teaching me. Then, the camera.” A nostalgic smile. “Not many people could have them but my uncle he often went to East Germany on business. He bought a very simple one, giving it to me on my birthday.

“Back then, we live in a narrow world. Petty, confined. Connections with all of western culture, severed. Read Russian books, see Russian plays, study Russian philosophy, that is the dictate. Even music we listen to, controlled.

“Imagine the escape that was possible in taking pictures then. It was like nothing else for me. By day, I go to school, wear a red tie, repeat Communist lies. But outside, behind the camera, I am free. I become an addict. Practice. Spend every possible moment with my camera. Can you understand?”

I was a keen practitioner of escapism myself. “Yes, of course.”

“Ahh,” Gustav turns to the photo of an elderly woman with thick, black-rimmed glasses peering into the distance. “A different sort of conformity.”

He is referring to the narrow-brimmed black felt hat perched precariously on her head, tassels spilling from its tall crown. The woman's fleshy face is plain, almost manly, made all the more masculine by a thick black band which covers nearly all of her white hair and holds the too-small hat in place. The profile of another woman on her other side wearing an identical hat is blurred.
Women from Gotzens in the Austrian Tyrol
.

“Normally, a woman would be horrified to show up at a party only to discover another woman wearing the same clothing.” Gustav smiles. “Not so at folk gatherings. Uniformity, it is a mark of regional identity. There is pride in that.”

“But you escaped the oppression,” I say, remembering the photo of the revolutionaries I had seen at his apartment. “Were you a freedom fighter?”

A slight lift of his shoulders, a noncommittal shrug. “In university, students gathered regularly in covert meetings. It was a twenty-third October rally organized by students that started things—But do you know this, the history behind the Hungarian Revolution?”

“My parents never talked much about what was behind the uprising, but as an adult I've read a great deal.”

“I was among those who went to Parliament Square,” Gustav says. “I was still at the Square when word came of the violence erupting at the radio building.”

“A demonstrator was shot wasn't he?”

“Yes. And a peaceful demonstration escalated into a revolution.”

“And you left in '56?” I ask.

Gustav nods. “The AVO were blood-thirsty. They wanted scapegoats. I learned of a small group making plans to come to America. I joined it.”

“And the photo of the couple, the revolutionaries, that I saw at your place. Yours?”

“A memento. A reminder of friends gone, of why I left, of why I do what I do.”

“But did you take the picture?”

“Photojournalists were there during the fighting. Afterwards, it came into my possession.”

I meet his gaze, anticipating the fuller explanation. Gustav's eyes darken. He looks away.

We are nearing the exit. Gustav speaks. His voice is earnest, low. “Ildikó, please you must try to understand. Against the odds, in the face of the lowest of betrayals, I made it here. To America. I find work, then art school. Now the big challenge. We are taught: look for beauty. How do you create beauty when the world has shown you such unspeakable ugliness? This is difficult. Then, a vision. Instead of composing beautiful pictures, I will capture the world as it is. The ordinary around us. My beginning…the church member photographs for the directory.”

“My mother's idea.”

Gustav nods. “Through the frame, I learn I could make a living. It also was how I discover myself.”

“By finding a world around you that is not-so-ordinary.”
Through your gifts you shall succeed.
“I believe I can understand your journey, Gustav.”

The final photograph nearest the exit speaks exactly of this. It is of a Chinese couple, and I am immediately taken with them. Maybe it's their deeply-lined faces and big smiles, showing imperfect teeth, yet they look completely at ease, happy to be alive, delighted to be photographed. Or maybe it's that the couple might have walked out of the parsonage curio cabinet, players from my childhood fantasies. Like the carved wooden figures that lived inside the cabinet, the couple wears broad-rimmed straw Cantonese “coolie hats” and plain tunics, buttoned to the neck. My figurines had not worn a festive hat with a ruched fabric fringe like the woman wears, but my miniature rickshaw driver did have a long, feathery white mustache and goatee, like the man in Gustav's photo.

“Hakka minority people from Hong Kong,” Gustav says, standing beside me. “Hakka people have migrated many times in China's history, both within the mainland and also to other countries. They told me each time they move, they carry with them something old and something new. A firmly rooted tradition.”

Like the Hakka, my parents had picked up and moved more times than I can remember. Numerous times as a child, I'd moved with them, but only from one small midwest town to the next. My adult years have all been spent in one place. Gustav had talked about living in a narrow world under Soviet rule. What about my narrow world?