Triptych Page 2

  Only!

  Évike could not ignore the gnawing fear she felt for her mother. But wouldn’t she be proud to know that her daughter had not so much as moved a finger to wipe the sweat away? “They could not break me, Mother. I told them nothing.”

  Évike shifted, peeling her moist thighs from the wooden seat, tugging her blouse away from her clammy skin, flicking the damp fabric. The movement cooled her ever so slightly; it also made her conscious of her full bladder. She had not used the toilet since before school had begun. Then the numerous glasses of water poured by the major…

  The door opened. Major Dumpling entered. In one hand, she held a photograph; in the other was a paper bag. She slid the photograph—actually two, one on top of the other—onto the desk, near the girl. The intense bulb, still trained directly at Évike, also cast light on the photo. Évike strained to see the image, but it was just beyond her line of vision. Tones of gray on glossy paper.

  What did the photographs hold? What was Dumpling up to?

  Évike breathed deep, a trick she’d practiced with her mother. “It will help you to remain calm.”

  The major rattled the bag, spilled its contents onto the empty desk surface. Walnuts. A nutcracker and pick appeared next. Still, the major said nothing. Instead, she cracked nut after nut until a parade of meaty walnut halves formed a column along the length of the photograph.

  The terror inside Évike swelled. The urge to urinate was also more and more insistent. Long minutes passed, the only sound the cracking of shells. Évike, inconspicuously as possible, began to squirm.

  “I need to visit the toilet.” Her voice sounded composed. “May I?”

  The major leaned forward. “Did you say something?”

  Évike’s bladder ached. “I need to go…”

  “Go? Ah, yes. Go. Go to another meeting with your mother? Distribute subversive materials?” The major lifted the pick. She gestured with it to the photograph. “Pick it up.”

  Évike reached, felt a hot spurt.

  The image…Her mother at the meeting the other evening! Évike had not been paying close attention because she’d been drawing. But she recognized the classroom where they’d been. And she remembered her mother’s heated voice, her demand. Évike was struck by how young her mother looked, like an older sister and so beautiful. Even with her mouth open, her features twisted in a fervent expression—Évike could almost hear the words again—“The hammer and sickle of Soviet Russia must go!”

  The second image on the desk showed her mother with Juliska, the young student who’d burst into the meeting. The scene flashed before Évike’s eyes. Juliska, her face shiny with sweat, standing just inside the door, panting, fighting to catch her breath. Before anyone could even react, she had covered her eyes, sobbed into her hands.

  Her mother had gone to her, grabbing her by both shoulders. “Juliska, calm yourself. Tell us what happened.”

  Juliska looked up and wiped her face with the back of her hands. “We are at our drafting tables, in class…It is completely quiet when Tibi’s compass springs loose, collapses. ‘Damned compass,’ he says, ‘Must be Russian made.’

  “The instructor’s head snaps up. From the students, no reaction, no sound. Everyone has stopped breathing. Only a moment. It passes. All seems normal again. Later, a group of us, we go to the coffeehouse t-toooo…”

  Her voice faltered. Évike had anticipated another tearful outburst. But Juliska cleared her throat, dabbed her eyes, her mouth lifting in a bitter smile. “We go inside, all of us laughing. The compass really was a shit piece of work…”

  A similar crooked smile on her mother’s mouth. “Yes, go on.”

  “We order our coffee. Then, through the windows…A black Poboda car. Black curtains drawn. Everyone freezes. Two men in dark coats, hats pulled low, get out, come inside. Tibi is wrenched from his chair. They shove him toward the door. ‘We should like to visit your apartment,’ the AVO man says. None of us dares to move. He gives us a long look, says, ‘Watch yourselves, poets. You may be next.’ ” Now the woman’s sobs would not be stopped. “Ti-ibi…has Western books.” Tilos, forbidden.

  Évike’s stomach clenched. Someone…a Soviet sympathizer?…Infiltrated the school hall meeting? Took the shots, gave them to the AVO? Gombóc …AVO?

  Évike knew what Gombóc wanted now. It was in the photo she held. Her animated mother waving a sheaf of papers. Rally notices from the printer’s. They’d picked them up before the meeting, but Gombóc could not have distinguished what they were in this grainy image, surely…

  She could not resist a downward glance.

  It happened fast. A flash of metal, then a startling burning sensation as the nut pick scratched the flesh along the top of her hand. The photo slipped from her grip. Évike’s bladder gave way.

  A hot puddle spread beneath her thighs, soaking into her worn skirt. Her only skirt. A sour smell. She felt tears running down her cheeks. She made no attempt to wipe them away, willing them to be absorbed into the perspiration, go unnoticed.

  Her concentration turned to the photo of her mother.

  Pull yourself together, she seemed to say.

  Think, think…What else would Mother say? Surely there was a way to sidestep Gombóc’s trap.

  Chapter Three

  Chicago, 1956-66

  I was a wisp of a child, the youngest of five, and drew little attention. Concealed on the stairwell just off the kitchen, I spent hours absorbing my parents’ private conversations. Eventually knew the details of my mother’s past as well as she did, or so I thought. At sixteen, I would dismiss a revelation. It was to become the instrument of my mother’s death and would haunt me for the next twenty years.

  My parents were both born in Győr, Hungary. My father’s father was a boot maker; my mother’s father, a stationery shop owner. As a young man, my father left home to attend theology seminary in Helsinki. His calling was missionary work and, prior to embarking on his first assignment to China, he took a two month leave and returned to Győr. Asia was a long way from the Civilized World, his mentor pointed out, recommending my father find a bride to take with him. It was 1939. My mother had been in Holland, completing her nursing training, and was also temporarily home.

  Both in their mid-twenties, they’d taken religious classes together as teens but had not seen one another since. Their hometown Lutheran minister orchestrated a reunion. Two months later, after several chaperoned dates, the minister also presided at their wedding on St. Valentine’s Day.

  It all sounds romantic, but no bridal night was possible, let alone a honeymoon. Instead, on the day of the wedding, my father took an express train to Vienna, then to Marseille, before a month long journey by ship to Hong Kong then Peking. The separation would stretch into a year before the necessary documentation allowed my mother to join him.

  My mother was a needlework artisan. As a child, I enjoyed coaxing exotic tales of China from her. One quiet evening in 1956, when I was seven, we were alone in the parsonage living room. I was reclining against a doily-covered armrest on one end of the couch, doing what I loved—reading. My mother, nestled in the opposite corner, was engrossed in her pastime, embroidering.

  “Ildikó,milyen szinut?”

  What color? She always let me choose. With my nose buried in my favorite book, The Twelve Dancing Princesses, I ignored her. The princesses in gauzy pastel-colored gowns were descending the secret staircase that took them, nightly, to the Twilight Kingdom. There, under a mysterious spell, in a ballroom far from the reaches of their fretful father, their beautiful satin slippers would shred as they waltzed away the night. I fingered the worn page, itching to turn it, knowing that if I did I would be transported to the grand ballroom with its gleaming mirrored walls reflecting crystal chandeliers, but I resisted. Instead, I decided to use my secret power (conjured from what I had absorbed about my mother’s history) to get her to op
en her treasury of memories to me. Inside were gripping tales of China and “home.” Home was Győr, Hungary; and later, after her mother and sister had been transplanted there, Budapest.

  “Milyen szinut?” my mother repeated.

  I gauged my first move carefully. My mother liked that I wanted to know her stories but her reticence kept them tightly bound up. I turned to the framed needlework pieces mounted on the living room wall. Intricate designs stitched in black and white, red and black, solid Delft blue, and my mother’s masterpiece—a floral composition in an eye-popping palette of violet, gold, crimson, and tangerine, positioned dead center. She had left the blue ribbon it was awarded at the county fair attached to the frame’s corner.

  “Pink.” I glimpsed a princess gown in my open book. “Princess pink.”

  My mother had a soft spot for my original designs. A scrap of linen, pencil-sketched with one of my creations, rested in her lap. The pattern was simple—a handful of daisies, interspersed with blades of grass, forming a horizontal line across the center. Several flowers in shades of baby blue, whisper yellow and delicate peach had already been completed.

  “It’s beautiful, Momma.”

  “Koszonom, thank you.”

  She lifted the cloth, adjusting the pattern, and pricking the needle into a daisy petal. Her motions became automatic, the sharp needle looping the blush thread in and out, filling in the space as surely as the tip of a paintbrush lapping color onto white canvas.

  The swath of linen was small and the section not being worked on draped itself, like a handkerchief, over the gentle rise of my mother’s belly. I longed to cuddle up there, but I knew my mother’s temperament. She found comfort in busy hands. Shows of affection made her uneasy.

  My attention shifted to the glass-doored curio cabinet angled into a corner. My parents’ formal, black and white wedding photograph sat on top. In the photo my mother wore a close-fitting length of white silk and a crown-like adornment securing a long veil billowing down to the floor. A bouquet of calla lilies rested in the crook of her arm, while my father, tall and handsome in black, his chin framed by a high-cut formal collar, stood at her side.

  A family portrait, taken in 1940, on the eve of my mother’s departure for China, stood alongside the wedding photograph. Seated in front, in the place of honor, my mother paired with my great-grandmother in a severe dark dress. Around them, my grandfather, in an ill-fitting jacket over an open-necked white shirt; my grandmother, dignified in a dark polka dot dress; my mother’s oldest sister, Rózsa, curly hair over a high forehead; and, finally, Kati, my mother’s twin sister. Fraternal twins, they did not look alike.

  In this assembly, as in her wedding picture, my mother’s light wavy short hair, parted slightly off-center, framed a moderately attractive, square-shaped face. Behind her, Kati’s dark, straight chin-length hair was pinned back from a striking oval face accentuated with high aristocratic cheekbones. My mother could be coaxed into reminiscing about family members, but she’d never volunteered anything about Kati. It had often made me wonder if the twins’ personalities were as different as their looks.

  In the photo, my mother, her chin tucked, peered out of the top of her eyes, smiling shyly. Kati, chin out, stared directly into the camera with a confident smile. Both of them wore white dresses, but these were starkly different too—my mother’s embellished with a traditional Hungarian design; Kati’s patterned with pale, watery Monet-like flowers. Having studied the photo close-up many times, I did know of one feature the women shared, impossible to see from where I was across the room. A dark mole like a beauty spot in the corner of their left eyes.

  Below the photos, the curio cabinet shelves were crowded with miniature wood-carved figures, illustrative of life in China. When I wasn’t reading, I staged performances with the wooden figurines. I imagined myself aboard one of the sampans, or inside the mystical Chinese temple, or absorbing lessons from the scholar at his desk, the weaver at his loom, and even the man and his water buffalo plowing the rice field.

  From the sofa, I glimpsed the runner pulling the rickshaw inside the cabinet and turned to my mother. “Momma, what was it like when you arrived in Peking? Dad was already there. He met you at the boat, right?”

  I knew her response by heart. Still, no matter how many times I heard it, I was never prepared for the edge in her voice.

  “Yes. By then he was master of Chinese ways. After a welcoming peck to my cheek he turned, expecting me to follow with bags. Coolies rush over, taking most things—a steamer trunk, a suitcase, hatboxes—but I am left to tote my small valise. This, after more than a month-long journey.”

  “And you walked behind him?”

  “Certainly. It was expected.” It was not unusual at this point in the tale for a knot to develop in her thread. I watched her spirited attack on the current tangle.

  My mother showing her backbone was like an injection strengthening mine. “And the rickshaws?” I prompted, unwilling to let her forget, or perhaps deliberately skip, another hurtful moment associated with her arrival.

  She glanced up, eyes narrowed and I worried that our ritual was over, but she continued. “Your father he take superior rickshaw, leaving me to ride in one with tattered seat. Later, I get lice.”

  I did what I always did at this point. I shuddered dramatically. The rosy-cheeked, fair-skinned blonde and brunette damsels in my storybook fantasies would never contract something so plebeian. And, certainly, one of their handsome suitors would never permit a second-rate carriage to appear anywhere within miles of his princess, much less expect her to ride in it.

  “That was mean of him,” I said.

  She shrugged. “I was new. Must catch up. What else to do? Turn around, go home?” She shook her head. “Not possible. Also, he is my husband.”

  A case of lice on her “wedding night” was not the only trial my mother had to contend with upon arriving in China. Unlike my father, she did not have the benefit of a year-long indoctrination. Almost as soon as my mother set foot on the dock in Peking, off they went to central China. She picked up Mandarin by ear. With her rudimentary nursing experience, she was put in charge of the missionary compound’s supply of Epsom salts, aspirin, sulfa drugs, and quinine. With these supplies and the translated instructions of a departing English-speaking doctor, she ministered to the open sores, infections, and other manifestations of smallpox, typhoid, cholera, elephantiasis, and dysentery, while my father ministered to souls. She survived a bout with malaria and the bite of a poisonous snake and claimed to have stared down a coiled cobra preparing to strike.

  In seven years of missionary service in inland China, at a time when much of the world was being blown apart by war, my mother set up house in eight different provinces, all under Japanese occupation. She gave birth to my four older siblings—one delivered by my dad without the help of even a midwife. In 1947, the dangers in China drove my parents to a long overdue “furlough.”

  Another of my favorite stories involved their departure.

  As my parents made their plans to leave, they discovered that the record of my brother’s birth had been destroyed in a raid by Japanese soldiers. They’d had every intention of going home to Hungary, but now they were six people holding a passport with only five names. And where would they go? The Communists had taken over their homeland and refused to acknowledge any such family existed. Finally, the American consul was approached and arrangements were made for a temporary visa.

  In the months before, a missionary friend had encouraged my parents to exchange their Chinese currency for gold. Taking the advice, they traded for four gold bracelets. Three were used to buy provisions and favors in preparation for their journey, leaving just one bracelet remaining.

  The trip involved travel by sampan through partisan-infested territory along the Yangtze River. By then the Japanese had withdrawn their garrisons from the small communities along the river, but the vo
id was filled by Red Army irregulars. The potential for harm to a Caucasian missionary family travelling this route was great. Slouching deeper against the sofa’s armrest, feeling prickly with excitement, I baited my mother.

  “You were nearly at the boat to America when soldiers with guns appeared out of nowhere. They made you take off your clothes so they could search you before they would let you go to meet the ship, didn’t they Momma?”

  Predictably, my mother’s cheeks turned rosy. “Yes,” she whispered.

  Still, I pressed, “You outsmarted the bad guys, though, Momma, didn’t you?”

  A hint of a smile crossed her lips. Pricking the linen swatch with the needle, her fingers accelerated their work.

  “We travel three days in big heat with four restless children to keep happy on small crowded boat. Our sampan has two sails, but it is fully loaded, and there is no wind. One boatman uses his oar to move us. His young helper walks along the shore pulling us by a rope. It is very slow. Your father he is sitting on the front end. Then worst luck happen. A Communist small fry with long-barreled gun sees us, orders us all to shore.

  “I am last to leave. Andras has been napping and I must carry him. As I am stepping onto land the soldier is yelling to his comrades to join him. They come. ‘Go into bushes,’ he commands us. ‘We will search everyone, head to toe.’

  “I remember the gold. I look down. Your brother he is half-asleep in my arms. He is wearing diaper. Quick, I slip bracelet into the soiled pants. True to what soldier say, we all are inspected, head to toe, but no soldier want to touch Andras’ diaper.”

  A three-week ocean odyssey, aboard the SS Marine Lynx, followed. The Lynx, a converted wartime troop-transport ship, was hardly a passenger liner in the traditional sense. In its post-war conversion to emergency service, the front section of the ship was cordoned off, restricted to women and children, with the back section reserved for the men and older boys.

  I could never fathom how my mother—with four kids under the age of six without nanny or disposable diapers or other modern-day conveniences—had managed. But she always shrugged, saying, “The women, we try help each other always.”