Fatelessness (5 page)

Twice a week I also visit my mother, as usual, on the afternoons to which she is entitled. I am now having more problems with her. Just as Father predicted, she really is quite irreconcilable to the idea that my place is beside my stepmother, saying that I “belong” to her, my natural mother. But as best I know the court awarded in my father’s favor, so in that light his word is surely what goes. Yet this Sunday too my mother was badgering me about what kind of life I want to live, because in her view all that matters are my wishes and whether or not I love her. I told her, of course I love her! But my mother explained that love means being “attached to someone,” and as she sees it I am attached to my stepmother. I tried to convince her that she was wrong to see it that way, for after all it wasn’t me who was attached to my stepmother but, as she knew full well, that was what Father had decided. Her response to that, though, was that this was about me, my own life, and I should be making that decision for myself, and furthermore, love “is proved by actions, not words.” I came away feeling rather troubled: naturally I could not allow her to go on supposing that I didn’t love her, but then on the other hand I could not take entirely seriously what she had said about the importance of my wishes, and that it was up to me to decide on my own affairs. When all is said and done, it was their quarrel, and it would be embarrassing for me to pass judgment on that. Anyway, I cannot be disloyal to Father, particularly not now, while he is in the labor camp, poor man. All the same, I boarded the streetcar with uncomfortable feelings, for of course I am attached to my mother, and naturally it bothered me that again I could do nothing for her today.

That lousy feeling may perhaps have been the reason why I was none too eager to take leave of Mother. It was she who insisted it would be late, given that those with yellow stars are only permitted to show themselves on the street up to eight o’clock. But I explained to her that now that I have the identification papers, I no longer need to be so dreadfully punctilious about each and every regulation.

For all that, I still climbed onto the rearmost platform of the last car of the streetcar as usual, in compliance with the pertinent regulation. It was getting close to eight when I reached home, and although the summer evening was still light, people were already starting to set the black- and blue-colored boards in some windows. My stepmother was also showing signs of impatience, though in her case that was more just out of habit, because I have the ID papers, after all. That evening, as usual, we spent at the Fleischmanns’. The two old codgers are well, still arguing a lot, but even they had been as one in favoring the idea of my going to work, in their case too due to the ID, naturally. In their enthusiasm, they still contrived to quarrel a little. With my stepmother and I not knowing the way out toward Csepel, we asked them for directions the first time we went. Old Fleischmann suggested the suburban train service whereas Uncle Steiner plumped for the bus, because it stops directly by the oil works, he said, but one was still left with a walk from the train—and that is, in fact, the case, as it turned out. We weren’t to know that then, however, and Uncle Fleischmann got extremely worked up: “It’s always you who has to be right,” he groused. In the end, the two fat wives had to step in. Annamarie and I laughed about them a lot.

As to her, by the way, I am now in a somewhat peculiar situation. The incident occurred the day before yesterday, during the alert on Friday night, down in the air-raid shelter, or to be more precise, in one of the deserted, dimly lit cellar passages onto which it opens. Originally, I only wanted to show her that it was more interesting to follow what is happening on the outside from there. But when, about a minute later, we heard a bomb actually go off nearby, she started trembling all over. It was really good, because in her terror she clung to me, her arms around my neck, her face buried in my shoulder. All I remember after that was searching for her lips. I was left with the vague experience of a warm, moist, slightly sticky contact. Well, and also a kind of happy astonishment, for it was my first kiss with a girl after all, besides which I had not been reckoning on it right then.

Yesterday, on the stairwell, it emerged that she too had been very surprised. “It was all because of the bomb,” she considered. Basically, she was right. Later on, we kissed again, and that was when she taught me how to make the experience more memorable by also doing certain things with your tongues.

This evening too I was with her in the other room to look at the Fleischmanns’ ornamental fish, because in truth we have frequently been in the habit of looking at them at other times anyway. This time, of course, that was not quite the only reason for us to go there. We made use of our tongues as well. Still, we returned quickly, because Annamarie was afraid that her uncle and aunt might suspect something was up. Later on, while we were talking, I learned one or two interesting things as to her thoughts about me: she said she would never have imagined “a time would come when I might mean something else” to her other than merely “a good friend.” When she got to know me, she took me, at first, for just another adolescent. Later on, though, she admitted, she had looked a bit closer, and a certain empathy toward me had sprung up in her, maybe, she supposed, due to our similar lot with regard to our parents, while from the occasional remark I made she had also concluded that we think about certain things in a similar way; yet even so, she had not suspected any more than that. She mused a little on how odd that was, and even said, “It seems it was meant to happen this way.” She had a strange, almost severe expression on her face, so I didn’t argue with her, even though I was more inclined to agree with what she said yesterday about it being because of the bomb. But then, of course, what do I know about anything, and anyway, as far as I could see, this other way was more to her liking. We said good-bye soon after that, as I had to go to work the next day, but when I took her hand, she dug sharply into my palm with her fingernails. I understood it was her way of hinting at our secret, and the look on her face was as if to say “everything’s okay.”

The next day, though, her behavior was decidedly odd. In the afternoon, having come back from work and first washed myself down, changed shirt and shoes, and run a wet comb through my hair, I went with her to visit the sisters, because Annamarie had in the meantime carried out her original plan of arranging to introduce me to them. Their mama too was pleased to welcome me (their father is away on labor service). They have a fair-sized apartment with a balcony, carpets, a couple of larger rooms, and a separate, smaller room for the two girls. This is furnished with a piano and lots of dolls and other girlish knickknacks. We usually play cards, but today the older sister was not in the mood. She wanted to talk to us first about something that has been preoccupying her recently, since the yellow star has been giving her plenty to puzzle over. In fact, it was “people’s looks” that had woken her up to the change, because she finds that people’s attitudes toward her have altered, and she can see from their looks that they “hate” her. She had observed that this morning as well, while she was out shopping for her mama. To my way of thinking, though, she was making a bit too much of it. My own experience, at any rate, is not quite the same. At the workplace, for instance, everyone knows that some of the bricklayers there can’t stand Jews but they have still become quite friendly with us boys. Not that this does anything to change their views, of course. Then again, the example of the baker came to mind, so I attempted to explain to the girl that they did not really hate her, that is to say not her personally, since they have no way of knowing her, after all—it was more just the idea of being “Jewish.” She then said she’d been thinking the same thing right before, because when you get down to it she doesn’t even know exactly what “Jewish” is. Annamarie, admittedly, said to her that everyone knows: it’s a religion. What interested her, however, was not that but its “sense.” “After all, people must know why they hate,” she reckoned. She confessed that at first she’d been unable to make any sense of the whole thing, and it had hurt her terribly that they despised her “merely because she is Jewish”; that’s when she had felt for the first time that, as she put it, something singles her out from those people, she belongs to some other category. That had started her thinking, and she had tried to find out more about it all from books and conversations, which was how she had come to recognize that they hated her precisely for that. It was her view, in fact, that “we Jews are different from other people,” and that difference was the crux of it, that’s why people hate Jews. She also remarked how peculiar it was to live “being aware of that differentness,” and that sometimes she felt a sort of pride but at other times more a shame of sorts because of it. She wanted to know how we felt in regard to our differentness, whether we were proud of it or rather ashamed. Her younger sister and Annamarie didn’t really know; I myself hadn’t so far been able to find a reason for these feelings either. Anyway, a person cannot entirely decide for himself about this differentness: in the end, that is precisely what the yellow star is there for, as far as I know. I told her as much, but she dug her heels in: the difference is “carried within ourselves.” According to me, however, what we wear on the outside is the more crucial. We argued a lot about this, though I can’t think why, because to be honest I didn’t see any of it as being all that important. Still, there was something in her line of thought that somehow exasperated me; in my opinion it’s all a lot simpler. Besides which, I also wanted to win the argument, naturally. At one point or another, it seemed that Annamarie wanted to say her piece, but she didn’t get a chance even once, as by then the two of us were not paying much attention to her.

In the end, I brought up an example. I had already occasionally given some idle thought to the matter, which is how it entered my head. Then again, I had also read a book, a sort of novel, not long ago. A beggar and a prince who, leaving that one difference aside, conspicuously resembled each other both facially and physically, to the point they could not be told apart, exchanged fates with each other out of sheer curiosity, until in the end the beggar turned into a real prince while the prince became a real beggar. I asked the girl to try and imagine the same thing about herself. It was not very likely, of course, but then all kinds of things are possible, after all. What could have happened to her, let’s say in very early infancy, when a person is not yet able to speak or remember, it didn’t matter how, but suppose she had somehow been swapped or got mixed up with a child from another family whose documents were in perfect order from a racial point of view. In this hypothetical case it would now be the other girl who would perceive the difference and of course wear the yellow star, whereas she, in view of what she knew, would see herself—as of course would others—as being exactly like other people, and she would neither think about nor recognize any difference. As far as I could tell, that had quite an impact on her. At first she merely fell silent, then very slowly, but with a softness I felt as almost palpable, her lips parted as if she were wishing to say something. That was not what happened, however, but something else, much odder: she burst into tears. She buried her head in the angle of her elbow, which was resting on the table, her shoulders shaken by tiny jerks. I was utterly amazed, as that had not been my aim at all, and anyway the sight in itself threw me somehow. I tried leaning over to pat her hair, shoulder, and a bit on her arm, begging her not to cry. But she exclaimed bitterly, in a voice that choked as it went on, something along the lines that if our own qualities had nothing to do with it, then it was all pure chance, and if she could be someone else than the person she was forced to be, then “the whole thing has no sense,” and that notion, in her opinion, “is unbearable.” I was perturbed, given I was to blame, but I had no way of knowing that this notion could be so important to her. I was almost on the point of telling her not to worry about it, because none of it meant anything to me, I didn’t despise her on account of her race; but I sensed right away that this would be a slightly ridiculous thing for me to say, so I didn’t say it. Nonetheless, it bugged me not to be able to say it, because that was really what I felt at that moment, irrespective of being in the situation of not being able to say it freely. Though it is quite possible, of course, that in another situation I might perhaps see things differently. I didn’t know, and I also realized there was no way to test it. Still, the thing somehow made me feel awkward. I couldn’t say exactly why, but now, for the very first time, I sensed something that I suppose indeed slightly resembled shame.

It was only in the stairwell, however, that I learned I had apparently upset Annamarie with this feeling of mine, for that is when she started to behave oddly. I spoke to her, but she didn’t even reply. I tried to put my hand on her arm, but she tore herself out of my grasp and left me standing on the stairs.

I also waited in vain for her to appear the next afternoon. As a result, I couldn’t go to the sisters’ place either, since up till now we had always gone together, so they would undoubtedly have asked questions. Anyway, I was now more inclined to appreciate what the girl had said on Sunday.

She did show up at the Fleischmanns’ that evening, however. She was still very stiff about talking to me, her expression only softening a little when, in response to her remark that she hoped I had had a nice afternoon with the sisters, I told her that I hadn’t gone up there. She was curious as to why, to which I replied, since it was only the truth, that I hadn’t wanted to go without her. I could see that this answer must have pleased her. After some more time, she was even willing to go and look at the fish with me, and by the time we returned from the other room, we had completely patched things up. Later on that evening, she made just one more remark about it all: “That was our first quarrel,” she said.