Love and Treasure (26 page)

Krisztián changed his search to the term “girl dwarf,” and found a second hit in a newspaper called
Magyarság
, from the issue of August 15, 1913. This was a front-page story, prone to a certain tone of alarm, reporting that on the previous night a gang of foreign ruffians, including a female dwarf, had stampeded the royal box at the Budapest Royal Opera House during a performance of Sándor Szeghő’s one-act opera
Erzsébet Báthory
. Thankfully, the writer said, the king himself had been absent, though a member of the royal guard was injured during the fracas.

This was big news at the time, reported in all the papers that Krisztián searched. “According to the right-wing papers,” he said, “shots were fired, a banner demanding universal suffrage was hung from the box, and the conspirators dumped onto the crowd pamphlets calling for the assassination of Franz Josef and the redistribution of wealth. The left-wing papers describe it somewhat differently. They agree about the banner, but they make no reference to gunshots. One reprinted the pamphlet, which says nothing about assassinating the king. It says only that the monarchy should give way to government by the worker.”

“It must be Gizella,” Natalie said. “What do the articles say about her? What exactly did she do?”

“You see here?” He pointed to the screen on which was reproduced a page of newsprint. “This paper is, what do you call? A scandal paper? It writes about sexual affairs and divorces. That kind of thing.”

“A tabloid?” Natalie said.

“Yes, exactly. The headline is ‘Bolshevik Girl-Dwarf and Conspirators Wreak Havoc on Opera!’ It says she used her sexual perversions to distract the guards.”

“What kind of ‘sexual perversions’?”

Krisztián dutifully scrolled through the rest of the article, looking for prurient details with the air of a biologist counting fruit flies.

“They do not say,” he said at last.

Amitai said, “I imagine that in 1913 any hint of sexuality at all from a dwarf would have been considered perverse.”

Krisztián said, “Only this paper talks about perversions. The others say only that she was a conspirator. They do not say sex.”

Natalie said, “So, what, this ‘sexual perversion’ thing is just the tabloid being dramatic?”

“Probably.”

Amitai said, “Let’s figure out what happened to Gizella, if it is her, after she and the others were arrested. They went to prison, I assume? Were they executed?”

Krisztián continued searching. After a few minutes he said, “Okay, well, I find here information that the others from the conspiracy were sentenced to hard labor after a big trial. Very public, you know? It was even covered in other countries. But I don’t find anything about the girl dwarf. It is like she disappears from the case.”

Amitai said, “Schwimmer was politically powerful. There was that picture of her with the mayor of Budapest, remember? And she later on became an ambassador. She must have used her clout to get Gizella off.”

“Also maybe just the judge cannot believe this little girl dwarf is really such a criminal,” Krisztián said.

“Don’t call her that,” Natalie said. “ ‘Girl dwarf.’ ”

“Why not?” Amitai said. “You did.”

“I know, but it’s insulting. We shouldn’t call her a dwarf. She was a ‘little person.’ ”

“No, I’m quite sure she was a dwarf,” Amitai said. “You can see in her picture, her proportions are not normal.”

“I know. I mean, yes, she had dwarfism. But I’m pretty sure we’re supposed to call people with dwarfism ‘little people’ now.”

Amitai said, “You think ‘little person’ is less insulting than ‘dwarf’?”

“It’s not what I think. It’s what they call themselves.”

“This particular dwarf has been dead a very long time. I think probably when she was alive she was relieved to be called a dwarf and not something ugly.”

All the while they were talking, Krisztián kept up his search, stopping only periodically to blow a lock of lanky hair out of his eyes.

Krisztián said, “Gizella Weisz’s family called themselves ‘Lilliputs.’
I mean, I think they are her family. The articles said the girl …” He paused, then continued. “The little person … girl …”

Amitai laughed.

Krisztián flushed but plowed on. “The girl little person was from Transylvania, so, look. I search for dwarfs named Weisz in Transylvania, and here is a whole family of them from Tăşnad.”

“Transylvania!” Natalie said. “Is Tăşnad near Nagyvárad?”

“I don’t know. Maybe one hour? Two hours?” Krisztián said. “Transylvania is very large. The Weisz family, they were singers and performers.”

“Performing dwarfs?” Natalie said.

“Performing little people,” Amitai said.

Krisztián said, “They had a family troupe.”

“Like a circus?” Amitai said.

“Some places they call them circus, but I think not so much circus as performance, in a theater, you know? Singing, dancing. Comedy.”

“Vaudeville,” Natalie said. “Gizella’s family were vaudeville performers.”

Amitai laughed. “So, Natalie, when you decided to find the owner of your necklace, did you ever dream she would be a radical socialist, performing Lilliputian? Or, more accurate, the friend of a radical socialist, performing Lilliputian?”

Natalie ignored him. “So Gizella was from Romania? She wasn’t Hungarian?”

Krisztián said, “This part of Transylvania, it goes back and forth. Before World War One, it is Hungary. Afterward it is Romania. Then it is Hungary again; now it is Romania. There are people in Hungary now, you know Jobbik? The fascist political party? They want it back again. Because it is all, you know, the ancient kingdom of Hungary.”

It seemed to Amitai that Krisztián did not sound entirely averse to the proprietary claims of the party he’d described as fascist.

One long night, his face plowed into the grit of a Lebanese hillside, his clothing soaked with blood—his own and that of the mangled young men beside him—had cured Amitai of humanity’s fetish for homeland. Whatever reflex or impulse that made a man care enough about such things to vote or demonstrate, to pick up arms and die, had been erased in him as thoroughly as the Jews had been erased from eastern Europe. Now he craved only
the anonymity of the immigrant, to be a man with a vague accent in a city of vague accents.

Natalie said, “But Gizella must have been Hungarian, right? Otherwise wouldn’t the papers have said something about her being Romanian?”

“Well, it seems she was a Jew,” Krisztián said.

“But a Hungarian Jew or a Romanian Jew?” Natalie pressed.

Krisztián said, “Like I say, parts of Transylvania are sometimes Hungarian, sometimes Romanian. But Gizella is always just a Jew, you know?”

It was the casualness of his tone that caught Amitai and Natalie off guard, the phrase spoken without awareness of its meaning or power.
Always just a Jew
. Natalie looked away, a flush creeping up her neck, as if she were somehow ashamed, not of Krisztián, Amitai thought, but of herself.

Gruffly, Amitai said, “The Weisz family probably spoke Hungarian, Romanian, Russian, German, and Yiddish. But I’m sure they considered themselves Hungarian, like most Transylvanian Jews at the time.” He ignored Krisztián’s doubtful look and instructed him to continue searching the Hungarian newspaper archives. While Krisztián worked, Amitai shifted closer to Natalie and draped an arm casually around her shoulder. She shot him a grateful smile.

“There were seven Weisz siblings,” Krisztián said, “all of them dwarfs.”

“That seems almost too perfect,” Natalie said.

Of those seven dwarfs, five had been girls, Krisztián told them. The two elder Lilliput sisters played the violin, one of the younger ones played a drum set, another a half-sized cello. The brothers performed on tiny accordions, and the youngest girl played a miniature pink guitar.

“And Gizella?” Amitai asked. “What did she play?”

“This is from the newspaper
Debreceni Független Újság
,” Krisztián said. “From November sixteenth, 1933.” The ad announced the performance of the Lilliputs in the Csokonai Theatre in Debrecen. There was a small photograph of the troupe, each one holding an instrument.

“Is this her?” Krisztián said, pointing to a small woman standing next to a miniature cymbal, a single drumstick in her hand.

Natalie flipped open her locket and compared the photograph. “I can’t tell,” she said. “They all look so much alike.”

The five women, though separated widely in age, were strikingly similar in appearance. They had wide lips painted in a shade of red so dark it appeared black in the old newsprint, heavy brows, and angular cheekbones.
Their noses were long and narrow, flared slightly at the nostrils. Three had dark hair piled high on their heads, one a short bob. They were exotic and striking, even beautiful.

Krisztián said, “According to this article, Gizella was the third of the sisters. Bluma, the eldest, was born in 1886, Franziska sometime after. Then Gizella. The newspaper reports of the Opera House incident give that girl’s age as twenty, which means, if it was Gizella, and it seems it must have been, she was born in 1893. That would make her approximately forty in 1933, at the time of the performance advertised here.”

“The woman in this photo doesn’t look forty,” Natalie said.

Amitai said, “The violinists Bluma and Franziska would have been approximately forty-seven and forty-five years old when this picture was taken, but they look much younger, too.”

Krisztián said, “The woman at the drums and the woman with the guitar look far younger than the others, so they are Judit and Gitl. That leaves only the one at the cymbal. The one with the short hair. She must be Gizella. Perhaps it is an old photograph? Or perhaps they just look young? The women of Hungary are very beautiful, even the old ones.” He glanced at Amitai from the corner of his eye, as if to verify that the Israeli had noticed his granting of nationality to Gizella and her sisters. Amitai wondered if, absent their previous discussion, Krisztián might have complimented the beauty of Jewesses, which was, he had been told many times during his visits to Hungary, renowned.

Amitai said, “Does the advertisement give any details about the performance?”

“ ‘The world-famous Lilliput Troupe, players to kings and emperors, presents a program of love songs and popular tunes,’ ” Krisztián quoted.

“ ‘Kings and emperors’?” Amitai asked.

Krisztián smiled. “An exaggeration, I think. In Hungary we never called Franz Josef emperor. Hungary was itself a kingdom, and thus he was our king.”

“You did very good work, Krisztián,” Amitai said. “You’re even a better research assistant than you are a waiter.”

“Do Americans tip their research assistants like they tip their waiters?”

“Perhaps. But then I’m Israeli, not American,” Amitai said, giving the young man the amount they’d agreed on, then, a moment later, the extra twenty euros he’d always planned on adding.

•
20
•

WITH A SECOND NIGHT TOGETHER
, Amitai and Natalie turned a one-night stand into something else, something out of the ordinary in Amitai’s postdivorce life. He’d only rarely been with the same woman more than once, and never two nights in a row. But he had not wanted to let Natalie leave the hotel after they finished with Krisztián, had urged her to come upstairs to celebrate their successful day. She had been as eager as he, and in the morning he’d found himself for the first time not even craving the solitude of the swimming pool. In the elevator she looped her fingers through his. He used to hate it when Jessica did that. His hand had always immediately begun to twitch restlessly, eager to escape. But he found himself enjoying the feeling of Natalie’s cool, smooth fingers in his hand and did not let go until he had to open the taxicab door for her.

Krisztián had agreed to meet them at the library of the Department of Justice. Out of his waiter’s tuxedo he looked much younger, and he’d added to the impression by putting gel in his hair and fashioning it into something that looked more like a porcupine’s pelt than a hairstyle. At the library, a young female reference librarian, made cheerfully cooperative by the lucky coincidence of her sharing Natalie’s name, handed them a thick dossier, the official records of the trial of the opera house conspirators. The Hungarian Natalia helped Krisztián read through the documents, and it was she who discovered the letter from the Office of the Prosecutor to the judge, informing him that a decision had been made not to prosecute a “girl dwarf” by the name of Miss Gizella Weisz for her involvement in the affair.

Krisztián said, “It is because she was, how do you call it? Retard?”

The Hungarian Natalia corrected him, “A mental defect.”

Gizella Weisz, secretary to the most famous Hungarian feminist of the age, was described in the prosecutor’s letter as “defective of both body and mind,” a woman in possession of a “child’s shape and naïveté.”

“They actually said she was mentally retarded?” Natalie asked, aghast.

Natalia said, “Yes. The prosecutor says because Gizella is mentally
retarded, she is not responsible. He says to release her, but on condition that she go to family in Transylvania. She becomes like a child, you know? She must live with her family, and if not with her family, in an institution.”

“So, basically they took away her right to self-determination?”

Krisztián and the librarian shared a glance, neither sure what Natalie meant, only that this information made her angry.

Amitai said, “Clearly she was not retarded, or she could not have become Mrs. Schwimmer’s secretary. Therefore the prosecutor did what needed to be done to justify her release. Actually, she was a very lucky woman. The others were sentenced to years of hard labor. With her physical limitations, she would have died. Mrs. Schwimmer must have intervened to save her life.”

“We should look for a connection, maybe, between the prosecutor and Mrs. Schwimmer,” Krisztián said. “His name is Einhorn Ignác. Also a Jew, right? Just like Gizella and just like Schwimmer. Maybe they all know each other. Maybe they go to synagogue together!”