Love and Treasure (44 page)

Thus, Mr. S. did not find his daughter. He could never have imagined that she and Gizella would take refuge in the disreputable Tabán on the southern slopes of Castle Hill in Buda, in the apartment Endre Bauer shared with three friends, men who were, like him, former members of the Galileo Circle, who had come to believe that that organization’s liberal mindedness and social radicalism were too cerebral and thus ineffectual, and that the time had come for radical political action.

I have it on the authority of both Nina and Gizella that their friendships with the young men who sheltered them remained platonic. Both women were adamant on the subject, and I have no reason to disbelieve them, particularly because in the years since, I have come to the conviction that Nina’s libido, prematurely awakened by the trauma she experienced at the stream and (though she and I never had opportunity to explore this, and I am thus making an educated guess) by excessive masturbation in early childhood, leaned toward the homosexual. Homosexuality is one of the essential traits of the obsessive-compulsive constitution, and though her only obsessive-compulsive symptom was her devotion to her academic studies, it was likely that she was at the time under the sway of a transient lesbianism that protected her from sexual involvement with the young men, and incidentally from developing a fully realized transference with me. Nina herself would have objected to this conclusion, insisting that her affections for Gizella were only ever sororial, but my readers no doubt are aware that homosexual inclinations are most often unconscious.

Endre and one of his compatriots, a Ruthenian from Northeast Hungary by the name of Miloš, vacated for the girls the small bedroom they shared, and set up their own pallets in the parlor in which the residents of the apartment took their recreation and their meals. One can only imagine
Nina’s reaction to these bachelor accommodations. She was, after all, a product of the Jewish bourgeoisie, and thus used to the ministrations of maids and laundresses. Girls like Nina slept on pressed linens scented with lavender water, beneath soft eiderdowns and on pillows of the finest goose down. The dirt-stiffened and yellowed sheets and the rough woolen blankets would have felt miserably harsh on her fine milk skin. And yet she overcame her disgust, even embraced these deprivations as evidence of her liberation from the tyranny of her father’s rules and expectations, from his insistence on seeing her ambitions not as proof of a rigorous and able intellect but as the delusions of a neurotic.

Nina and Gizella hid in the apartment for a fortnight, never leaving even for a breath of air. In a cautious move, the young radicals switched their allegiance from the New York to the Japan Coffee House. This move, protested by Endre but insisted upon by the more cynical and thus wiser Miloš, saved them from discovery. The threatening but decidedly unimaginative detectives hired by Mr. S. spent nearly every evening in the New York Café, drinking coffee and eating pastries, and waiting patiently for Nina to appear. Periodically they would interrogate the patrons about the whereabouts of “a pretty blond girl and a dark-haired dwarf,” and who knows what information one of Endre and Miloš’s fellows might have inadvertently let slip under the influence of the glasses of Pálinka they regularly imbibed.

Fortunately, the dull-witted detectives never bothered to trouble the denizens of the Japan Coffee House, despite its fame as the favored gathering spot of various radicals, even including those women of Budapest’s feminist movement who were not afraid to be seen in such a place without the chaperoning company of a male relative.

The plan was perfected at the Japan Coffee House and brought back to the apartment where the girls were by then growing tired of their own company and eager for a change of circumstance and an alleviation of the boredom that is an inherent result of being confined to cramped quarters in a time of great stress. The plan was complex, and required the participation of more than half a dozen individuals, including, among others, an employee of the Budapest Opera House, an ancient prostitute, a lady’s seamstress who was Miloš’s occasional mistress, the chauffeur of a wealthy merchant, and a middle-aged circus acrobat who had once worked the boards with an uncle of Gizella’s. It was Nina, with her scholar’s fine penmanship, who hand-lettered the banner with the simple slogan, “Votes for All! We Demand Universal Suffrage!”

On the day of the action, Nina and Gizella donned sumptuous evening dress, Gizella’s her own, Nina’s Parisian finery borrowed by Miloš’s seamstress from the wardrobe of a Viennese noblewoman so wealthy and spoiled by her Hungarian husband that it would have taken a fleet of accountants six months to catalogue the contents of her closet. Even were Nina to bump into the baroness at the opera, the great lady was not likely to recognize her own gown. Accompanying them as their putative chaperone was the elderly whore, whose costly widow’s weeds the seamstress had purloined from yet another client.

An hour before the curtain was to rise, Nina, Gizella, and the costumed prostitute set off, escorted by Gulya the acrobat, who looked only slightly uncomfortable in his guise as bourgeois father and second chaperone. Endre and Miloš had left precisely thirty minutes before, as they were to travel by tram, but a hansom cab was waiting for the others. That neighborhood of dark and dismal tenements had not often seen the services of a hansom, and the driver’s resentment at having to navigate the narrow rutted street was only partially assuaged by the novelty of helping two attractive young ladies, one a perfect miniature, up into his cab.

The four arrived at the Opera House and joined the crowd streaming up the steps to the triple-doored entrance, between the seated statues of Franz Liszt and Ferenc Erkel that adorn either end of the magnificent Neo-Renaissance façade. I imagine that the girls’ anxiety and excitement were such that neither bothered to notice the glorious lobby, with its soaring double staircase, columns of gray marble, and rich red arches. But of course Nina at least had been there many times before.

Gizella’s appearance caused its usual stir, with elegant ladies spying and whispering from behind their fans, and gentlemen not bothering to hide their ogling. But her expensive gown and the propriety of her two chaperones reassured the crowd that the dwarf’s presence at the opera, if curious, was not unacceptable, and though she was noticed, she was not accosted.

Gizella was far too short to see over the crush of people, and Gulya’s accent too provincial (and the prostitute’s utterly inappropriate), so to Nina had been assigned the task of finding the correct ticket taker. Her instructions were to locate a man with ginger hair and a mustache sharpened into aggressive points. Upon presenting her tickets she was to say, “My aunt bought us these tickets, and I do hope the seats are good.”

All went according to plan. The ticket taker nodded gruffly, took from Nina the cheap tickets and instead of tearing off the stub and directing
her up to seats high in the gallery, returned to her four tickets of thick, creamy card stock, with a box number embossed in gold.

“Enjoy the performance, mademoiselle,” he said.

She thanked him, and the four conspirators swept up the grand staircase to their newly assigned box.

Though the boxes benefited from the Opera House’s elaborate air-conditioning, a state-of-the-art ventilation system with fans blowing across blocks of ice beneath the floorboards, sending cool air up through grates beneath every seat, Nina’s excitement made the atmosphere seem to her thick and stuffy, and she wished she had thought to bring a fan. Her palms were damp with sweat, and she longed to peel off her long satin gloves. She fanned herself with her program and gazed out over the crowd. At one point she believed she recognized a former classmate in one of the seats below, and immediately sank back, hiding as best she could in the gloom of the velvet-upholstered box.

After a few moments, as agreed, Gulya repaired to the smoking lounge, where he met up with Endre and Miloš. The fog created by the smoke of hundreds of cigars and cigarettes in the lounge was said to be so absolute that lovers could meet there for trysts without fear of discovery. Nina hoped that rumor would not in this case disappoint, because the plan called for Endre, Miloš, and Gulya to wait in the lounge, hiding from view in the smoke.

The first strains of the opera
Erzsébet Báthory
filled the house. It was perhaps appropriate, given the circumstances, that the opera on that evening was Sándor Szeghő’s variation on the vampire myth, a cataclysmic failure that opened to dreadful reviews, and closed immediately thereafter, only partially a result of the ruckus caused by Nina and her coconspirators.

Nina’s parents, like most of their set, regularly attended the opera, and from the time she was a small girl, she frequently joined them. My own daughters, though not musical, found the costumes and scenery exciting enough to sustain their interest at least until the interval. But for Nina, it was the music that enraptured. She had, as was expected of a girl of her class, studied the piano from childhood, and like many individuals with great scientific and mathematical gifts, she was similarly adept at music. She alone in her family possessed such skill. At one point Nina’s piano instructor suggested to her parents that she might be a prodigy, but though she played exceptionally well, and even composed, it was always science that compelled her closest attention, and once she became a serious
student, she allowed her musical education to take second place in her efforts.

Uniquely on this evening, Nina could not listen to the music. She was flush with excitement, and to her surprise only very slightly afraid. When the strains of the first aria hung tremulously in the air, she and Gizella, without looking at one another, rose to their feet. Abandoning the prostitute, whose services were now complete, they slipped out of the box in a rustle of silk petticoats, their long trains whispering over the carpets that muffled the gentle creaking of the well-polished wooden floorboards.

The girls walked swiftly down the hallway toward the Red Parlor and the royal box behind it. But for the occasional evenings when the Dual Monarch or a member of his family was in residence, the royal box sat empty, guarded only by a single officer of the Hapsburg household guard, armed with a decorative sword that had never once been drawn. As the girls strode purposefully down the passage toward him, the guard raised his hand in warning. “Entry is forbidden!” he called out in German. At that moment, Gizella collapsed with a cry of distress.

The guard, a gallant old gentleman, in his last posting before retirement, would soon enough regret the combination of chivalry and curiosity that caused him to leave his post and come to the aid of the lovely little dwarf. When his attention was thoroughly engaged by the prettily moaning Gizella, who had hitched up her skirts to show him a miniature ankle in supposed agony, Nina called out the planned words:

“Oh my dear little friend! Please help her!”

Gizella chose this moment to gyrate in the guard’s arms, revealing her entire black-stockinged leg, and even giving a hint of the dark cleft at the top of her thigh. The guard thus distracted, Endre, Miloš, and Gulya appeared and slipped unnoticed into the Red Parlor and then through the set of double doors into the royal box.

“Please help her!” Nina repeated to the guard. “Carry her down to the lobby and ring for a doctor!”

The guard glanced warily at the empty hallway. “I can’t leave my post.”

“Please!” Nina said.

“It’s not permitted. I’ll stay with her while you go find an usher.”

At this Gizella cried out loudly, overcome by nonexistent pain.

“She’ll disturb the audience!” Nina said. “Never mind. I’ll take her myself.”

Nina was a strong girl, fully capable of lifting the child-sized Gizella,
but she made a great show of strain as she hoisted the tiny woman a few inches off the ground, and promptly dropped her. Gizella wailed loudly and the guard paled.

“Stop!” he said. “For God’s sake, you’ll hurt her!” Effortlessly, he picked Gizella up in his arms. “You stay here and watch the door. I will send someone up in a moment. No one ever tries to pass, but if they do, just bar the way.”

I am confident that I know Nina well enough to presume her moment of regret, as the gallantry of the kindly guard whose career she was about to ruin proved to her that just as an omelet requires the breaking of eggs, so too does revolution demand the destruction of innocents.

As soon as the poor man had disappeared down the passage, Nina ducked into the box, where she found her fellow conspirators busily at work. The curtain was drawn, blocking the box from the view of the audience below. The acrobat Gulya had removed his gloves, shoes, and stockings and had shinnied up one of the columns flanking the curtain. He clung there, his toes digging into the grooves in the moldings.

Nina lifted up her skirt. She and Gizella had folded and rolled the banner into a flexible tube of fabric that they had pinned to the bottom of Nina’s corset. She removed it now, and handed it to Endre. Endre stared at the bulges of soft naked flesh at the top of her stockings, and only then did she comprehend that she was standing before a man, her skirt hitched high above her waist, her chemise and undergarments exposed. Blushing furiously, she dropped her skirts.

Endre recovered his composure, and tossed the banner up to Gulya, who stretched out his arm to catch it. For a perilous moment it looked like the acrobat might fall, but he dug in his toes and maintained his perch. He removed from his pocket a hammer, its iron head covered in noise-dampening felt, and spat a nail from his lips into his hand. Holding on only with his thighs and toes, he silently hammered one corner of the banner into place. Once it was secure he was about to let go when Miloš whispered furiously, “Goddamn it, you buffoon! You’ve done it backward.”

Nina craned her neck and saw that Gulya had indeed affixed the corner of the banner so that the painted text was visible to them, inside the box. Had Miloš not noticed, when they opened the curtains the audience would have seen nothing but a blank canvas.