They were a strange family, and real to Sophie like people in stories; these people she knew mostly from stories told about them; people who were either dead like Grandfather Ripper and his first wife; or Grandmother Ripper and Aunt Rosa who didn’t live in Budapest, whom she saw only once; or the famous Buena Tante who didn’t live in Hungary either, who may have been her mother’s dead stepsister or her aunt, who lived in a foreign country. She remembered dimly a woman visiting from far away, dressed very fancy and colorful, laughing, with jewelry and fat arms, like she remembered things that happened before they moved to Buda.
Of her mother’s two stepbrothers who lived in Budapest, Sophie mostly heard that they were small, unsuccessful, unlucky people.
Sophie saw her uncles once or twice a year. There was something special about the visits to her mother’s relatives—it belonged to another life, like when she spent the day with the maid and her boyfriend. She went with her mother on the trolley; her mother was dressed more simply than usual. She had explained to Sophie before that they were going to see Uncle Jani or Uncle Emil to make them happy. They were always asking about Sophie and wanting to see her. Her mother knew it wasn’t very interesting for Sophie to visit grown-ups and had made excuses for her, but she couldn’t always refuse. Her mother explained it to her so nicely: The visit was a favor she was doing for her mother as well as the uncles so the uncles wouldn’t be cross at her mother.
It was one of those rare occasions when she felt well with her mother. It was the way a picture in a schoolbook of a mother and her daughter in the trolley made her feel simply right and, at the same time, festive because it happened only on rare occasions. She watched her mother; and the way she chose a seat, paid for their tickets, and all her small gestures were new and different from the way she appeared to Sophie in the house. She talked nicely as if everything were always fine between them. It made Sophie feel guilty: maybe her mother was really this nice person all the time but everybody, including Sophie, was mean to her and didn’t see her as she really was.
Her mother’s brothers didn’t act like relatives—as if she belonged to them and they were terribly important to each other. They seemed just like any other people, whom one was free to like or dislike and with whom one was naturally polite.
Uncle Jani was a small man with bushy gray hair and an old-fashioned moustache; everything about him, his shoulders and forehead, was always furrowed with worry. His wife was a very big, kindly and helpless-looking woman and it seemed especially horrible and unnatural to Sophie that a fat woman like that couldn’t have children. They were really poor; they lived in one small room with a table, sofa couch, a buffet and some chairs, everything cramped and painfully neat. You had to go through the court to the toilet and Sophie didn’t know if they had a kitchen. There was a bowl of fruit behind the glass of the buffet that Uncle Jani’s wife put on the table, urging Sophie to take something. It was all the food they seemed to have, and they were saving it for guests. She didn’t want to take it. Aunt Marta took an apple and, shining it with her sleeve, offered it to Sophie in an apologetic way—afraid Sophie really wanted something she didn’t have in the house—so she took it quickly. She gave all her attention to eating the apple and showing how much she enjoyed it and not showing how awkward she felt because of the way Aunt Marta looked at her. Her mother was talking to Uncle Jani about money matters. Sophie knew she mustn’t appear to be listening to them because it was embarrassing that her father was helping him out financially and Sophie shouldn’t know about that. In a sense she was alone with Uncle Jani’s wife looking at her with a strange helpless intensity, sad and yearning. Sophie knew she was terribly unhappy that she couldn’t have a child, everybody had said it and here Sophie was, a child, not her child, eating an apple she gave her and this made Sophie feel very awkward.
Afterward when they were out in the street her mother always said they were good people, such poor people, kind people, unhappy people and thanked Sophie for behaving nicely. Then they took the trolley to one of the coffee houses by the Danube and had pastry and hot chocolate.
Uncle Emil was a bachelor and very different from the sad and timid Uncle Jani—he had a brisk manner and showed his gold teeth a lot and enjoyed talking gossip and money matters with her mother. They met in a coffee house. He had always a comfortable air about him and looked at home in the world the way he leaned back, motioned to the waiter or laughed about some rotten deal. Even if business was bad and he wasn’t making out (and he didn’t pretend he was a happy man or particularly enthusiastic about anything) he was still altogether at home in this world. His pale gray eyes scanned lightly or looked sharp and quick. They didn’t have that trapped and baffled look of the Landsmanns. Both Uncle Jani and Uncle Emil were different from her father’s brothers: they didn’t try to make an important thing out of being uncles: they were probably just curious to see Sophie once or twice a year. They seemed so much like ordinary people that it was hard for Sophie to believe that they were Jewish.
Uncle Fritz, her mother’s
