There was the Danube and the Parliament, apartment houses, stairways, streets, trees and trolleys. There were rooms and scenes dimly remembered, but she was absent from them, or another person; like in her dreams, she wasn’t really herself. She didn’t remember her parents before they lived in Buda or any other person, with the exception of Grandfather Ripper, her mother’s father, who died when she was three. He had a foxy pointed face and pale eyes. She remembered him in a dingy room with yellowed walls. He ran around in a loose white nightgown. They treated him like a naughty child, coaxing him to get back into bed, and he’d pop out again and rush to the table. He covered sheets of paper with marks that formed narrow columns. Then he folded a long strip of paper very small, made a few cuts with scissors and when she unfolded it, it was a row of bandy-legged clowns holding hands. Later her father explained he went wrong in the head when he lost his fortune.
She remembered that a glass door led from the room to a terrace which ran along the four walls of an inner court. There was an iron railing. Afraid to lean over, she looked down through the lattice on the cobbles below and remembered her stomach rise as it registered the depth.
“Do you remember?” Papi asked on their Sunday walks, and told her about things she did or said, and that they two did together when they lived on the other side of the river and she was three years old, or just a baby.
“Don’t you remember,” he said, “you had two enormous teddy bears when you were three years old. I must have paid fifty pengos for the pair.”
“What happened to them?” she asked.
“You threw them out the window! Don’t you remember?”
“Why?” she asked.
“You said you did it to punish them.”
“Why didn’t you go down and get them?” she asked.
“I was in my office with a patient. We lived on the fifth floor. By the time the maid went down, they were gone. Somebody walked off with them. Two beautiful teddy bears!”
What he said about her and what she really remembered belonged in two different boxes. Except she wasn’t sure what was really her own, it was mixed up with other people’s things: what they were telling her, Papi and Omama and her many aunts and uncles. She really needed a drawer where she could put away their things.
Papi claimed that she smeared her excrements on the wall. He enjoyed telling it to her. It proved his theory. Why didn’t the governess stop her? she wanted to know. But the governess had strict instructions not to interfere; in fact, she was told to call him from his consulting room should Sophie...She had confirmed his theory. He wanted to see it with his own eyes. There was nothing so thrilling as science. He predicted she might become a painter. He was full of theories about children; there were essentially three types: head-bangers, masturbators and rockers. She was a rocker. When she was two and a half years old she hit another child over the head with her shovel because he came to watch her dig and build in the sand. When Papi came in her room to give her a kiss, she pushed him away.
She also said a lot of things he thought very clever, which he put in his book. That, at least, she didn’t have to remember.
At Grandmother’s there were always strange fat women and funny men who pushed their grinning faces close to her and asked, “Do you remember your Aunt Piri who gave you a box of chocolates?” or “Do you remember your favorite uncle?” She knew she was expected to say, “You are my Aunt Piri,” or “You are my favorite uncle.” But maybe it was a trick, she wasn’t really sure. They also remembered things about her they thought clever or funny that Sophie didn’t remember. Aunt Lea prepared chicken paprikas for her because she remembered how much Sophie liked it, when Sophie didn’t.
Omama Landsmann held her pressed against her belly, rocking to and fro, and in a singsong voice told her what she must always remember: She was the daughter of the most wonderful man, a very great man. She would make up for all the wrongs he suffered and she would never be like her mother, she would be a good Jewish daughter, and God-fearing, and learn Hebrew so she could read the Holy Scriptures where it said...
Omama pronounced the Hebrew words one by one, her mouth shaping them, her widened eyes helping to define their outline, then translated it for her, bending down, making their foreheads touch; strange disconnected phrases about women who were a snare and a misfortune, beautiful wicked women whom God punished. But she was her father’s daughter and the granddaughter of the chief rabbi of Budapest and the great granddaughter of a very famous rabbi; she would always be a joy and honor to her father.
Her mother was away most of the time: or so she was told and so it seemed. She
