The Red Thread Read online

  My mother is developing one of her favorite themes—her lack of roots. To give the story greater power, or because she really believes what she is saying at that moment, she gets rid of an extra parent: “I never felt I had any stake anywhere until my parents died and I had their graves. The graves were my only property. I felt I belonged somewhere.”

  Graves? What does she mean? My grandmother is still alive.

  “That’s so sad,” he says.

  “Don’t you ever feel that way?”

  He tries to match her tone. “Oh, I wouldn’t care. I think everything was meant to be given away. Even a grave would be a tie. I’d pretend not to know where it was.”

  “My father and mother didn’t get along, and that prevented me feeling close to any country,” says my mother. This may be new to him, but, like my cousin at a musical comedy, I know it by heart, or something near it. “I was divorced from the landscape, as they were from each other. I was too taken up wondering what was going to happen next. The first country I loved was somewhere in the north of Germany. I went there with my mother. My father was dead and my mother was less tense and I was free of their troubles. That is the truth,” she says, with some astonishment.

  The sun drops, the surface of the leaves turns deep blue. My father lets a parcel fall on the kitchen table, for at the end of one of her long, shattering, analytical letters she has put “P.S. Please bring a four-pound roast and some sausages.” Did the guest depart? He must have dissolved; he is no longer visible. To show that she is loyal, has no secrets, she will repeat every word that was said. But my father, now endlessly insomniac and vigilant, looks as if it were he who had secrets, who is keeping something back.

  The children—hostages released—are no longer required. In any case, their beds are needed for Labor Day weekend. I am to spend six days with my cousin in Boston—a stay that will, in fact, be prolonged many months. My mother stands at the door of the cottage in nightgown and sweater, brown-faced, smiling. The tall field grass is gray with cold dew. The windows of the car are frosted with it. My father will put us on a train, in care of a conductor. Both my cousin and I are used to this.

  “He and Jane are like sister and brother,” she says—this of my cousin and me, who do not care for each other.

  Uncut grass. I saw the ring fall into it, but I am told I did not—I was already in Boston. The weekend party, her chosen audience, watched her rise, without warning, from the wicker chair on the porch. An admirer of Russian novels, she would love to make an immediate, Russian gesture, but cannot. The porch is screened, so, to throw her wedding ring away, she must have walked a few steps to the door and then made her speech, and flung the ring into the twilight, in a great spinning arc. The others looked for it next day, discreetly, but it had disappeared. First it slipped under one of those sharp bluish stones, then a beetle moved it. It left its print on a cushion of moss after the first winter. No one else could have worn it. My mother’s hands were small, like mine.

  1969

  AN UNUSUAL YOUNG LADY AND HER UNUSUAL BEAUX

  Gyula Krúdy

  MASZKERÁDI—were he asked in the great beyond to speak truthfully about his earthly doings—would confess that he had especially feared those women who remembered his lies the day after; otherwise, he had preferred to pass his days at weddings.

  Maszkerádi had lived in Pest back in the days when one could see on Chamois Street in the evening the white-stockinged daughters of the bourgeoisie sitting on benches under fragrant trees in the courtyards of single-storied townhouses, listening to the music of distant accordions, their hearts overflowing with love, like a stone trough whose water drips from a little-used faucet. In winter this part of town gave off the smells of the grab bags of itinerant vendors; in summer the predominant scent was that of freshly starched petticoats. Had he the inclination, Maszkerádi could have seduced and abducted the entire female population of Chamois Street. He was a stray soul, French or German in origin, variously prince in exile or cardsharp, refined gentleman or midnight serenader, fencing master or freeloader, as the occasion demanded. Married middle-class ladies cast down their eyes when he flashed a glance at them, while their husbands loathed the sight of his lithe limbs; in her book of hours every girl had a certain prayer picked out for her by Maszkerádi. Sometimes there were as many as four or five young misses bent piously over the supplication of a fallen soul at Sunday Mass in the Franciscans’ Church. At night the occasional report of a firearm disturbed the tranquility of the quarter: a father or husband taking a shot at Maszkerádi who had been glimpsed lurking around the sleeping household. He sported a black beard and there was animal magnetism in his voice. He must have retained in his possession intimate letters from some extremely prominent Inner City ladies (for a while he had resided in that quarter)—to have avoided incarceration in the darkest prison of Pest.

  One day this disreputable adventurer was found dead in mysterious circumstances in his apartment at Number Ten, where irate husbands had so often waited, posted by the front entrance, expecting to see their dear little errant wives. (Although the road to Maszkerádi was fraught with peril, women still ran off to his place on snowy afternoons before a ball, on spring mornings before an outing to the Buda hills, or after a funeral, aroused by the tears shed at the last rites. On rainy nights there were barefoot women lowering themselves on the drainspout—in short, no other man in town could lay claim to such traffic.) The coroner readily agreed to inter this dangerous individual without a thorough inquest; he didn’t even insist on dripping hot candle wax on the fingertips of the deceased. Although the knitting needle stuck in the victim’s heart and the nail protruding from the crown of his head were duly noted, the reprobate was not deemed worthy of much fuss. The sooner the meat wagon transported this carrion out of town, the better.

  Not two weeks after Maszkerádi’s demise the thunder of a gun was again heard late at night in Autumn Street. The newlywed Libin­yei had discharged his blunderbuss; he must have seen a ghost, although he swore up and down that he awoke from a nightmare to glimpse Maszkerádi jumping up from his bride’s side and escaping through the window. Lotti was pallid, trembled from top to toe, and later confessed to her mother, in strictest confidence, a most peculiar dream that had surprised her like a warm breeze. “If I become pregnant I’ll throw myself in the Danube!” the young bride swore, but later reconsidered the matter.

  Less than two weeks later, Lotti’s sister-in-law, the other Mrs. Libinyei, Helen of the springtime blue eyes, white shoulders like a Madonna, and the sweetness of walnuts, had to wake up her husband in the middle of the night.

  “There’s someone in the room,” she whispered.

  The husband, a dyer in blue, pulled the quilt over his face but even so he could hear the door quietly open as someone exited through the front entrance. His trembling hands groped for Helen’s shoulder.

  “Phew, you have such a cemetery-smell. Just like Lotti,” blurted the surprised dyer.

  Although this scene had transpired in the innermost family sanctum, the townsfolk still learned about the affair and began to give the two Mrs. Libinyeis the strangest looks. After all, it was most irregular that sisters-in-law should share a dead man of ill repute as their lover.

  At the civic rifle club meeting, over a glass of wine, one tipsy citizen, possibly a kinsman, brought up this evil rumor in front of the two husbands. By then the story had it that it was the two Mrs. Libinyeis who had done away with the adventurer: one hammered the nail into his skull, the other plunged the knitting needle into his heart, for being unfaithful to them. Apparently he had gone serenading elsewhere in the night, attended the latest weddings and whispered his depraved lies into the ears of the newest brides. So now the dead man was taking his revenge by leaving the cold sepulchral domain of his cemetery ditch to haunt the two murderous women.

  Did the Libinyei brothers give credence to the words of their bibulous companion? A nasty row ensued, in the course of which the Libinyei boys, b
efitting their noble Hungarian origins, and in homage to their warlike kuruc freedom-fighter forebears, broke the skulls of several fellow citizens. Swinging chair legs, rifle butts and their fists, they defended the honor of their women. For this reason the rifle association’s get-together ended well before midnight, the precious ecstasy of the local Sashegy wines evaporated from under the citizens’ hats, and the ragtag band of Gypsy musicians quit playing their discordant tunes among the early spring lilac trees of the municipal park. The grim and much booed Libinyeis hung their heads and trudged homeward on Király Street—the abode, in those days, of midnight-eyed Jewesses and dealers smelling of horsehides.

  Reaching their house in Autumn Street at this unusually early, pre-midnight and sober hour, they stopped short, astonished hearts a-thumping, in front of the ground-floor windows. They saw, behind the white lace curtains, the rooms lit up by festive lamplight, while the sounds of music filtered out into the night, just like at certain Inner City townhouses marked by red lanterns where even a stranger from distant parts could count on the warmest reception. The screech of the violin resembled a serenade of tomcats on moonlit rooftops.

  The elder Libinyei clambered up on the quoin that was decorated by a carving. (It must have come under the scrutiny of every Josephstadt dog by late February.)

  Having climbed up, Libinyei the elder peeked through the window into his own home.

  Whereupon, without a sound, he tumbled from the wall and fell headlong on the pavement, stretched out very much like one who has concluded his business here on earth.

  In a furor Pál Libinyei, the younger brother, sprang up on the cornerstone. His eyes immediately narrowed, as if he had received a terrible blow in the face. The wealthy blue-dyer glimpsed a sight he would not have thought conceivable. The two women, Lotti and Helen, in a state of shameless undress, were treating Maszkerádi to the pleasures of a fully laid groaning board. The ham loomed like a bulls-eye and the wine from Gellért Hill glowed as if a volcano had deposited lava in it. Slices of white bread shone like a bed inviting the tired traveler. In the corner an itinerant musician’s calloused fingers twanged the strings, with enough energy for a whole orchestra, while he witnessed the hoopla with the pious expression of a medieval monk.

  Libinyei’s murderous fist smashed the window.

  In the last flicker of the guttering candles he could see the pilgrim-faced musician leap to his feet in the corner, raise his gleaming instrument and deal Maszkerádi’s skull a deadly blow, fully meaning to dispatch him to the other world, this time once and for all. Indeed, the libertine collapsed like a whirling mass of dry leaves, when the autumn wind suddenly withdraws behind a tombstone in the municipal park to overhear the conversation of two lovers. The reveler with the bushy, overgrown eyebrows and black evening wear vanished into the flagstones of the floor. For years, the inhabitants of the house would search for him in the cellar, whenever they heard a wine cask creak, but it was only the new wine fermenting in the silence of the night.

  By the time Libinyei made his way into the house he had grabbed an iron bar and was savoring glorious visions of murder as his sole road to salvation. However, both women (each in her own bedchamber) appeared to be as sound asleep as if there were no tomorrow. The itinerant musician had slipped away like a mendicant friar. Libinyei spent the night in his brother’s wife’s room, and attempted to convince Lotti that her dead husband lying under the window would arise and presently enter the house bleeding and gasping, to hold ordeal by fire over her. In a whisper Lotti confessed her mortal sins to her brother-in-law: she alone had laid Maszkerádi to waste, by means of the iron nail and the knitting needle, thereby earning the gratitude of every Josephstadt mother. Above all, Lotti had been outraged by the balding libertine’s latest schemes to seduce the youngest girls awaiting confirmation.

  “Oh, you witch,” the blue-dyer stammered, sobbing and in love, “I’m going to take care of you from now on. And I’ll skin you alive if you ever conjure up Maszkerádi from the beyond to come for dinner again.”

  Lotti solemnly swore, and at dawn they brought the corpse in from the sidewalk, where the itinerant musician had been guarding it as tenaciously as a ratter.

  Such were the circumstances surrounding Malvina’s birth.

  Lotti died in childbirth; the attending doctors delivered the child of a mother who was more dead than alive. For the first fifteen years of her life she never heard a word spoken about her parents. She was raised by a black-clad, thin-lipped, dagger-tongued woman (Helen) to whom Libinyei, the girl’s stepfather, never said a word. This woman spent her nights in a separate apartment of the house, with the taciturn itinerant musician on her doorstep, performing all sorts of hocus-pocus to keep the ghosts away. Libinyei, at times, addressed the girlchild as Miss Maszkerádi. (Later, after she had left her boarding school, Malvina used the pen name “Countess Maszkerádi” in her correspondence with classmates.) One day the monkish itinerant reported that Helen was in her last hour, whereupon his mysterious presence vanished forever from the household. By that time Libinyei had amassed such a fortune that he barely grieved over the death of his neglected wife. His possessions included mansions, land in the country, and real estate in Buda.

  Good fortune and wealth did their best to console him. After Helen’s death all kinds of relatives came to stay at the townhouse, but none of them won Libinyei’s approval. Springtime visits to spas, quack remedies, barbers and doctors all failed to rejuvenate him. Soon enough he followed Helen, Lotti, and Maszkerádi into the great beyond. Malvina became the wealthiest heiress in Budapest: somber, frosty, intrepid, and miserable.

  Malvina Maszkerádi was Eveline’s best and only friend, entrusted with all of the girl’s secrets, like a private diary.

  A few days after the Tarot reading Miss Maszkerádi arrived at Bujdos-Hideaway.

  “I sensed that you are in some kind of danger,” said the solemn girl, her eyes downcast. “I wanted to be by your side.”

  Miss Maszkerádi had stayed at Bujdos before. She knew by name each dog, each horse and rooster. The migrating swallow and the stork nesting on the chimney of the servants’ quarters both greeted the melancholy maiden. The servants dared not look her in the eye, but stared after her as they would at a creature from another world.

  Eveline both loved and worried about her strange friend. But her vernal insomnia immediately passed as soon as Miss Maszkerádi joined the Hideaway household. Like one preparing for the grave, Eveline related her recent experiences in the minutest detail, including Andor Álmos-Dreamer’s enigmatic demise and resurrection.

  “He’s crazy, but honest. This village Don Juan’s going to be your downfall yet,” observed Miss Maszkerádi. “And what about your gambler?” she inquired. “Show me the gambler’s letters.”

  Eveline shook her head.

  “He’s afraid to write me. Sometimes in the morning I stand by the window and watch the mailman trudging along on the road far away. That gray old man always comes the same way, sad as autumn and just as hopeless. If he were to deliver a letter from Pest one day . . . But I don’t even know if I’d like to receive a letter . . .”

  “Your gambler’s crazy, too . . . He thinks you’re some otherwordly creature,” Miss Maszkerádi replied scornfully. “I assume every man to be insane, and usually the events prove me right. Oh, there’s the ass who believes you are a demon, an angel of death, and who wants to escape into death when he feels he’s lost his freedom. Meanwhile another inane male will worship you like a saint or a holy icon, and expect you to perform miracles. Only I know you exactly as you really are: a scatterbrained, bored, orphaned young miss. Why, by now you should have married a first lieutenant or some young gent with a duck’s ass haircut. But you believe life is more interesting this way. Well, one fine day some maniac will snag you by the throat like a fox taking a goose.”

  “Please calm down,” implored Eveline. “Haven’t you ever been in love?”

  “Oh yes, with a dog . . . or a horse
. . . or a wooden cross at the old Buda military cemetery over the grave of a young officer whose fiancée’d run off to work the cash register at a nightclub. Men stink. If I were to find one guy whose mouth had a pleasing aroma, maybe I’d let him kiss me. Or rather I wouldn’t wait but kiss him myself. If, God forbid, I should find a man I like, I’d pick him like a roadside poppy. If I could only live . . . If it were really worthwhile to be alive, I’d show you how to live life. But I’m not in good health, and I’m not old enough to enjoy being in poor health.”

  “Just simmer down,” Eveline repeated. “Can’t you hear someone lurking around the house? Every night I hear him and my heart almost bursts . . .”

  It was a spring night.

  “Nah, it’s just the unusual weather we’re having,” Miss Maszkerádi replied, unmoved. “It’s all that meteoric crap—ashes and dust from burnt-out stars—the winds sweep into the atmosphere . . . It’s only the night, plucking an old mandolin string in the attic that’s been lying silent for years. No need to go mushroom-crazy, like some fungus that suddenly pops up, so glad to be among us.”