He tells her in tears and with wild gesticulations the things that went on in her house in Budapest between her father and mother, the terrible, horrible, outrageous things. She feels along the quilted padding of the wall for the door. Knows all about that. Not a child. Knows what she’s doing.
“Must repeat my mother’s life,” she insists gravely. “No other alternative. The only true atonement. Follow in her footsteps—wherever it leads—nothing can stop me.”
“But it’s not at all the same, what you are doing, terribly, terribly mistaken,” he sobs. So winningly emotional. Has even a touch of Ezra. She blushes, suddenly ashamed; possibility all this is being televised. “Not at all the same situation, totally different from your mother—no similarity, terribly deceived my poor child.”
She refuses to discuss it with him. None of his business, her life. Will not be deterred by consideration of family, doesn’t care what consequences to them herself, once in her life will obey heart’s desire, be her true self. She laughs majestically in the doorway. Takes a bunch of peacock feathers from a vase and throws one at him graciously...
WAKING up in bed on a Wednesday morning, actually closer to noon, Sophie Blind lay staring dumbly at her familiar room. Ivan’s old raincoat still tacked on the window frame, and all around her reminders of lost joys, planted everywhere like Easter eggs, hatch vainly. The pains of waking are unmistakable. In dreams there is not this sense of idleness, staring at your hands surrounded by mute objects. In dreams something must always happen; a bird appears on the window sill...
For a little while longer she tried to understand what induced her to abandon a more exciting, important pursuit for just lying in bed in this room, till she realized it was not a considered choice. She blundered into awakening. If she is still baffled, and even while getting on her feet with relative ease, struggles to recall by what tremendous effort she flung herself or was cast out of sleep, if this Wednesday morning seems so odd in its banality and part of her mind continues to dive for some deep reason it’s because in the dreamer’s world it had to make sense. Dream has its own time. While one is dreaming one does not know this of course; that it will end. In dreaming one assumes it will go on indefinitely, as in living—a reasonable delusion based on life experience: life goes on indefinitely until one is dead. Only dreams end. And in this respect loves and plays and stories are like dreams: they end.
Books were better than dreams or life. A book ended not like life, abruptly; not like a dream, with a clumsy struggle and sense of deception; but gracefully and knowingly, preparing you for the final period. Between life and dream there was not much difference really, however the two wrangled, struggled, played tricks on each other. A book was something really different. To begin with, you know where you are: you’re in a book, and whether the setting is Paris or New York or the moon or not specified at all, you know you’re in a book. Perhaps you’re on a plane, perhaps you’re in a village in the Balkans reading a book in a hotel room, reading or writing, in someone else’s room, or your own kitchen when the children are asleep. You can be dreaming and not know it. You can be awake and wonder if it’s a dream and not believe it. But a book is simply and always a book—you can be sure of that. And with a book, whether you’re reading it or writing it, you are awake. The question does not pose itself. Writing a book appealed to Sophie on all these grounds. In a book she knew where she was. Because, however baffling and blundering and ambiguous, a book was a book.
TWO
A FEW YEARS before the outbreak of the First World War, the son of the chief rabbi of Budapest and the grandson of the famed Rabbi Simon of Nyitra chose as his bride a woman of dubious background and gifts. Rosa Ripper, a brewer’s daughter (in student circles called the Rosa Luxemburg of Budapest), was a communist agitator with degrees in mathematics and medicine, a disciple of Freud and beautiful besides. Rudolf Landsmann met Rosa at the Galilei Club, the gathering place of students, socialists, avant-garde artists and intellectuals, which they both attended regularly. Little is known of the background of the brewer and his wife. Jews of a sort, for generations outside the Jewish community, assimilated, intermarried, with relations in Odessa and Constantinople—a case could be made for Khazar origins. In the eyes of the Landsmann family, they were riffraff. In 1912 Rudolf joined the psychoanalytic movement. At the medical school where he was studying brain histology, Freud’s theory was jokingly spoken of as the “technique grown-up men use to talk to juvenile girls about dirty things.”
Around this time a Transylvanian count who could trace his ancestry to the conquest sought in vain the favor of the same Jewish brewer’s younger daughter, Kamilla. The noble family ruined, bankrupt, mostly drunkards, Count Csaba-Csaba went to Budapest to study law so that he might raise his kin from poverty. No longer a youth, he occasionally attended the Galilei Club in an effort to catch up with the times. Futurism, Symbolism, Marxism, Freud, Esperanto—he lacked enthusiasm for these things. But from the day the blond, almond-eyed sister of Rudolf Landsmann’s fiancée came to the Galilei Club, the count’s attendance became regular. Kamilla, who began to accompany her sister to the club at the age of fourteen, mostly to escape from the house, was not interested in these issues either. After two years of mute adoration on the count’s part, they left the meeting and walked along the corso in the moonlight.
Count Csaba-Csaba did not know that such women still existed. A true goddess, who could
