BIRDS OF PASSAGE. Chapter 2: A Novel Requires More of Him
There’s a flash of a bright pink headband, and a figure moves into Gábor’s view, running as though her life depended on it. It’s the Canadian woman, Alice. She’s nearly home now, and with energy to spare, she runs flat out along the level road to the apartment building on the comer of Golya Steps. She looks best like this, or better than usual, anyway — in motion. She is so obviously a foreigner. The headband has something to do with the effect. There aren’t too many headbands in Budapest. And then there’s the running. Hungarians have a great love of tracksuits in brilliant, complementary, toxic colours, what they call leisure outfits, and entire families parade around in them on weekends. But most of them have no interest in actually running in them, especially not on the streets of Budapest.
Running seems to Gábor very North American. Alice is a practised runner, with a girlish body unusual in a woman in Hungary, where most men like a bit of fat on a woman. If they want a girl, they’ll find a girl. A woman should look like a woman. And she should make an effort to look good. By these standards, Alice is no prize. Especially not in those clothes. Imagine her in clothes that fit her properly, and in colours that suited her, and with her hair grown out…
Her colouring certainly is unusual, but it isn’t only her colouring. While fair skin and grey eyes are uncommon in Hungary, and natural red hair is rare, you do see them once in a while. But where would you see a broken nose like that one? Long and fine and dainty enough to be the nose of a Renaissance queen, it has a bend in it like a boxer’s. Put this woman’s colouring together with features that are too delicate, though, too tiny to belong among the assertive noses and lavish mouths and enormous dark eyes of Hungarian women, and there’s no doubt about it. A foreigner.
If he didn’t know she’s a Canadian, though, Gábor decides he would be hard put to say what kind of foreigner she is. It’s unlikely she’d be mistaken for an American. She looks too unfashionably weird, for one thing, as though she doesn’t know how to put herself together. Far too gauche to be a continental European, either. What is she doing wearing that pink with that hair and with those baggy, mustard-coloured pants? And, judging by the length of the red roots edging out the brown ends of her thick hair, she must have stopped tinting her hair a good while ago. The red is more interesting than the brown she’s covered it up with. Why would a redhead want to be a brunette? That’s such an oddity, especially in Hungary. Whatever effect she has in Montreal, she has succeeded in making herself conspicuous in Budapest.
As she reaches the abandoned house, Alice slows down. No longer flying, no longer buoyed by strength and energy, she walks backwards up Golya Steps. Her energy has dissipated, leaving her exposed and vulnerable, as she edges her way slowly towards the villa, gazing across the field, over the valley. There’s something uncertain about her, and naive. In some ways she is at a loss. Gábor can see no further than that, but there’s something else there he doesn’t understand.
The white stucco of the villa is crumbling here and there under the weight of the ivy hanging all around the wide balcony and the huge French doors, and from the edge of the rust-coloured tiled roof. Alice’s black-haired son, Peter, is under the huge cherry tree in the garden, playing with Eszter’s little girl.
At the iron gate of the villa on Golya Steps stand two towering poplars so old and so important that they are marked on municipal maps. The boy runs over to stand between the poplars as Alice draws close to the villa. For a minute they stand close by each other, in silence, the boy looking at Alice, she staring obliviously into the distance. When she finally pulls her attention away from the view and sees the boy, she opens her arms wide to him and, as the dusk closes in around the window boxes of red and pink geraniums that line the path from the iron gate, the boy leads her up the stone steps to their apartment on the main floor of the villa.
The music in the bedroom ends as unsatistyingly as it began. Turning away from the window, Gábor picks his way thoughtfully over the debris on the carpet. An idea is taking shape.
Gábor has more ideas than he will ever be able to use. His problem is how to keep them from evaporating the second a new one strikes him. Writing is of some help here, but he is a writer with no patience for rereading anything he has written, so that the most extensive notes are only as useful as his own memory. The sets and the figures are there to help him visualize the scenes and characters that are forming in his mind, to touch them, to hear them speak, sing, weep, to know the foods they eat, imagine the smells of their hair and their breath, taste their kisses and their tears. Gábor has a great gift for putting himself in others’ shoes, seeing with others’ eyes. Hearing what people are thinking is easier still.
His little papier-maché world has served him well in the past, and he clings to it now as to a talisman. But a novel requires more of him, and where he most needs help now — in describing and, above all, in telling a story — this little world is of no help at all.
The bed-linen is black, and the old woollen blanket is red. Veronika rolls over on to her back, stretches her thin arms above her head, and looks over at the window as if it has all the answers. Her body is long and narrow, and her pale yellow hair trails away sideways onto the pillow like a plume.
On the bedside table, beside a well-thumbed book of verse by Gizella Hervay, Veronika has a paperback entitled God Is an Astronaut. She found this on the bookshelf in István’ s apartment. The only men she knows now are friends of Gábor’s. She’s vaguely interested in István, and the more that Gábor ignores her, the more she likes to think that István is interested in her. Gábor has mentioned that Istan has been seeing some woman called Magda, but the woman is nearly fifty, and grey, and large, and Veronika has well-justified confidence in her own beauty. She chooses to interpret István’s readiness to lend her the book as evidence of interest in her. She’s been reading it from time to time over the past two months to improve her English. Gábor thought it would be a good idea for her to be able to speak English. It bothers him that she cannot participate in conversations with the theatre people from all over the world who converge on Budapest to see the great playwright. With Brecht dead and Havel otherwise occupied, Gábor is the favourite among English-speaking visitors. Veronika has no interest in any of them. It’s as much as she can bear just to take the ritual photograph of each pilgrim with his arm draped possessively across Gábor’s shoulders.
When she does pick up the book, she studies István’s signature, looking for a message that isn’t there. Then she daydreams of ways of arranging to see István alone. The only reason he hasn’t declared his interest in her must be that Gábor is always around when they meet. Not that she sees István often, now that he’s taken up with this Magda woman, but that can’t be serious. This is what Veronika tells herself. Anyway, with one thing and another, she rarely gets through more than a few sentences of the book before dozing off.
She spends her days having long telephone conversations with her sister Judit. They have no other family in Budapest, for they are from Vojvodina, and all their relations still live as members of the Hungarian minority in Serbia. Veronika has not said anything to her sister about István. She will as soon as there’s anything to tell.
Gábor had told himself he was marrying Veronika to cheer her up. She had insisted she was miserable when they were apart. In his heart of hearts he knew all along that the real reason was more selfish. He has not succeeded in cheering her up, nor has he found the intimacy he craved. Instead, Veronika has become increasingly morose as the months have passed. With the theatres starved for funds, she has had nothing to take her mind off herself — and, more immediately to the point, to get her out of the apartment. Cooped up in the apartment with the birds, she has begun, to Gábor’s dismay, to see them as her enemies. And he would do anything for her, he tells himself, anything else at all, but the birds must stay.
There have been times when the sparrows have provided the only reason Gábor had for getting up in the morning. For years his plays were banned and his political activities curtailed. Unlike some, he never lived in squalor, for he was allowed to keep his apartment. That had originally belonged to an unmarried aunt, his mother’s sister Noémi, a textile artist who would say what she thought about the Communist regime to anyone who dared to listen, and who had enough of a gift and enough of an international following to get away with It.
Gábor grew up on the other side of the little street in the villa that his grandparents built in the 1920s, and that has belonged ot his sister Eszter since shortly after her marriage. Increasingly alienated from his parents as he got older, he spent more and more time in the sceptical company of his aunt Noémi and of some of her friends in Italy, in France, and England. When arthritis twisted her hands so that she could no longer work, she got him to turn her studio into a bedroom and to put his name beside the bell so that he could keep the apartment after her death. So he moved in with her, and when she died, he stayed on alone. That was when he started keeping sparrows.
There was excitement during the years of defiance, excitement and sometimes fear. There was respect, too, among people who mattered to him, both in Hungary and abroad. There were friends on whom he knew he could depend. It was a satisfactory, even an exemplary public life. Oh, it was more than that. It was a hard life, but a good one. Lonely, but exciting. The truth is that Gábor would give up everything he has just for the chance to lead such a life again. He can admit this to no one. Certainly not to Veronika; hardly even to himself. But he doesn’t have to say anything to István. István understands.
There were many women during those years, but none of them mattered as much as the cause, and none of them lasted. In the ruin of any life that could be thought personal, Gábor turned to the birds for comfort. And then the world changed, and when Veronika arrived at the door with her suitcase, Gábor made it clear: she might move in, but on condition that the birds stay. And she agreed, willingly, he thought, unhesitatingly, it seemed; she was more willing then in many ways than she is now. When she wanted to get married, he couldn’t think of a good reason not to. The war was won by then, that war anyway, the one against the Communist regime. Who could have guessed at the disillusionment to follow?
He enjoyed having meals prepared for him. He found it miraculous that there should be clean clothes in his closet when he needed them, and fresh bread in the kitchen when he was hungry. He loved waking before her, running his hand over her back, turning her over, touching, kissing her till she woke, wanting him too. He was a man who had led a hard life for the better part of twenty years and who had been prepared to continue leading such a life indefinitely. He had not thought to enjoy such pleasure, such luxurious tenderness, as he enjoyed with Veronika in the first months of their marriage.
He cherished thoughts that perhaps Veronika would come to love the sparrows as he did. And possibly she tried. He thought perhaps she did. But slowly the complaints started, first about how dirty it was, having them flying all over the apartment, perching on the backs of chairs, the desk, the sets, the pots of glue. Then about how stuffy it was. Couldn’t they cage the birds and open a window? And what about all this clutter? You can hardly move in here.
Each time he would answer her patiently and propose some other solution, but then she would accuse him of loving his sparrows more than he loved her. And this alarmed him. He feared that she was right, so he would say nothing, just hold her in his arms and stroke her lemony hair. But he would not let the birds go.
“How are you feeling?” Gábor goes into the bedroom without opening the door fully, like a thief in his own home.
Veronika looks at him steadily, as it judging how he will react to something, and turns off the radio. She looks paler than ever. The bedlinen has robbed her skin of what little colour it has. “I go to bed sleepy, and I wake up sleepy. But I’ll come to the stupid dinner,” is her answer.
It sounds to Gábor like a threat. Unhappiness washes over him like an incoming tide. For the first time, he realizes, he would rather go without her. The perils of the public life are nothing compared to the perils of the private.
The dinner is to be in the apartment that Eszter has rented to Alice and Daniel. After Eszter’s husband died last year, she found the villa too big and her expenses unwieldy. When Gábor told her about the producer coming over from Montreal with his wife and son for a year to set up the Atrium Theatre, she didn’t hesitate to rent out the main floor to them, moving her family downstairs into the garden apartment. And things have turned out well enough so far, although Gábor, who knows his sister very well, wonders how long that will last. For his own sake, Gábor hopes it does last. Daniel is a more interesting man than Gábor had imagined, and Alice — well, Gábor is intrigued by Alice.
Veronika, though, has taken an active dislike to Alice. Veronika finds Alice insufferable: sly, strange, hostile and condescending. It has occurred to Gábor to wonder if the vehemence of Veronika’s dislike might not have been fuelled by an awareness that Gábor finds Alice interesting. There is room for jealousy in a troubled marriage.
It is true that Alice is unpredictable. Sometimes, too, it is difficult to know if Alice means what she says seriously. There have been a few misunderstandings. Probably it is inevitable that Hungarians adept at reading one another’s evasions and hypocrisies and peculiar honesties will be irritated by the unfamiliar codes of the foreigners in their midst. A Hungarian can with impunity spend a dinner party raving to his hostess about the meal he ate at another woman’s table, and he can ask the slightest acquaintance how much he earns, but he will not readily forgive the foreigner who confesses that she isn’t too fond of Hungarian grapes, robust as they are in flavour and jammed with large seeds, and that she really prefers the Californian grapes she buys at home.
Veronika is convinced, as well, that Alice is pathologically stingy. More familiar than his wife with the peculiarities of westerners, though, Gábor knows that Alices kind of stinginess has a political seal of approval. Feigning poverty may have gone the way of communes and bell-bottom jeans, but self-sacrifice has found its way back into fashion. The masochism of western children of privilege has always seemed wryly amusing to Gábor, from the middle-class egalitarianism that flourished during the 1960s to today’s self-flagellating environmentalism. He has sometimes wondered how he himself would have behaved it he had grown up in the west. Perhaps he too would have felt burdened by luxury and compelled to make amends to the rest of the world.
Not everyone takes such a tolerant view. The holier-than-thou smugness of the environmentalists has a way of grating on the nerves of people who would trade their eyeteeth for the burdens of wealth and privilege. Veronika, for one, reacts to Alice’s sense of environmental responsibility as though it were a personal affront. Alice’s behaviour does seem extreme, even to Gábor, but he imagines it probably wouldn’t be in the least remarkable in Canada or, indeed, anywhere in the west. The last time he and Veronika were in Alice’s apartment — it was a few days before Daniel left for Montreal — Alice soaked a length of plastic cling wrap in soapy water and hung it up to dry with an array of polythene bags.
“It’s waste that’s the ruination of the planet,” she’d said in her singsong voice when Gábor asked what she was doing, and then, peering at the cling wrap against the light, she added, “I’ll be reusing this. There’s a bit of grease there still, but a man on a galloping horse wouldn’t notice.”
Some of what Alice says is unlike any English that Gábor has heard before. “A man on a galloping horse wouldn’t notice” is good. Gábor can use that. It’s rare to find an expression that works as well in Hungarian as it does in English.
In Budapest, where hospitality is tinged with an eastern opulence so generous that a host will go into debt rather than serve a mean table, Alice’s spare, nutritious and sometimes exotic offerings are not only baffling but faintly insulting. When Gábor first met her, she had a plate with a few cubes of hard, dry cheese in her hand. Judging by the air of magnanimity about her at the time, she might have been offering her guests mounds of Iranian caviar. Gábor was bemused. He had come across a similar kind of culinary retentiveness years ago in a boarding house in Edinburgh. Is it peculiar to a certain type of woman from the British Isles? The vegetarian curry Alice prepared for dinner two weeks ago was served in such minute portions that both Veronika and Gábor were relieved to get home to help themselves to chunks of fat smoked bacon, red onions, and crusty bread.
If Veronika dislikes Alice so much, Gábor wonders, why is she insisting on coming to the dinner tonight? It isn’t as though she relishes the idea of whatever morsels of food Alice will have prepared. Veronika resents the way she thinks Alice shows off her taste and skill in the kitchen with meals concocted out of ingredients Veronika has never heard of. Like most Hungarians, Veronika is happy only with Hungarian food. And why not? Most Italians are happy only with Italian food, most Chinese with Chinese. She is young, she will learn.
Part of the problem may be that Alice and Veronika have had very little to say to each other. Alice’s Hungarian is valiant but rudimentary, and Veronika has so far refused to use what English she does have to help out.
Veronika has more time for Daniel than for Alice, but there’s nothing personal about it: Veronika’s an actor, Daniel’s a producer. He should be arriving home this afternoon. But how — the thought strikes Gábor for the first time — is Daniel going to get back from the airport with all the roads blockaded? His flight from Montreal must be getting in about now.
There’ll be a lot of English spoken around the table. French, too, as a friend from Montreal who’s been staying with Alice is supposed to be at the dinner. Eszter will be there, of course, with some or all of her children, so Veronika won’t be entrely dependent on Gábor for conversation. Not that there’s any love lost between Veronika and his sister. Veronika is afraid of Eszter, and Eszter does nothing to reassure the younger woman. In the year that Eszter has been alone, she has used her unrelenting grief as a cudgel.
Anyway, Veronika acts as though her only social function is to sit near her man and look decorative. So, in silence, she will suffer conversation she hardly understands and toy with food she does not enjoy, just for the pleasure of being able, at the end of the evening, to raise forlorn eyes to Gábor and drag him across the street and home.
Standing at the end of the bed, watching Veronika stretch her pale arms over her head, Gábor pulls hungrily on his cigarette. This can’t go on, he says to himself. This has to end.
Veronika is watching him watching her. She takes a deep breath and climbs out of bed, but hesitates at the bathroom door.
“I’m expecting a baby,” she says. Her voice rises at the end. She might have been asking a question.
