The double loss of a world and of the person who belonged to that world was experienced by an anonymous schoolgirl in a sailor-blouse uniform and high brown laced shoes. Sophie Landsmann, the name on the trolley pass, who was she?
In the gymnasium a child’s eyes were studying the legs extending from the black shorts of the class lined up against the wall: their form and proportion, the different skins—pale and ruddy, hairy, smooth—asking what were the distinguishing signs, because one pair of legs didn’t belong in the room, in this building in Budapest or anywhere on earth.
From the fall of 1938 till the spring of 1939 no one knew whether Rudolf Landsmann and his daughter would really be going to America. School occupied most of her days, and the long trolley ride from Pest to her school in Buda and back. Everything hinged on a piece of paper.
• •
One Sunday morning in the spring of 1938 her mother invited Sophie to her bed.
“Would you be very unhappy,” her mother asked, “if I left the house and married Zoltan?” They had been discussing the question of the divorce, her mother continued; her father and she had decided it would be for the best, but they wouldn’t do anything against Sophie’s will. Her father was worried that Sophie would be unhappy if they separated. “But I know you wouldn’t be unhappy—” her mother was smiling, she spoke with great verve. “We were always good friends,” she told Sophie and she hoped they would be even better friends in the future, however she was quite sure Sophie wouldn’t miss her. She would want to stay with her father, naturally; she had always preferred her father. Her mother understood how Sophie felt. The conversation they were having was just a formality; it was to reassure her father. In a sense she was asking for Sophie’s permission but really telling Sophie that it was to her advantage.
“You will have your father all to yourself like you always wanted,” her mother said gaily; “you will have two fathers.”
The divorce wouldn’t change anything, her mother went on; Papi and she would always be the best friends, and whenever Sophie needed her mother or felt like seeing her...
She was staring at her mother’s rings which had always fascinated her. She heard the sound of the gardener raking the gravel under the window. Looking up she noticed her mother’s breakfast tray with the broken eggshells on the chair. She had eaten and her face was painted; she was wearing a peach-colored satin bed jacket, the same color as the pillow case. Her mother’s eyes were very bright, her mouth quavered.
“Aren’t you a little sad I’m leaving?” she asked.
Her father asked her afterward if her mother had spoken to her and told her.
“Well, that’s how it is,” he said. “A divorce is not a good thing...But under the circumstances...” He spoke in the tone he used for unpleasant matters, as if he were talking about other people’s troubles. “I couldn’t live with your mother any more,” he said, “we are too different. I want my peace.”
She sensed uneasily her father’s new position and that he was not the sweet, good man her mother and his family made him out to be. He was getting rid of her mother because she annoyed him; fortunately there was someone who wanted to marry her. But he didn’t like the whole thing. From the way he pronounced the word “divorce,” Sophie sensed it was something ugly, sad and terrible; but she didn’t know how to apply it to him or her mother or herself who were never really a family.
It was both sad and exciting to think of her mother marrying Zoltan. Sophie was impatient to see her mother’s new house; she looked forward to living in two houses. She wondered if when her mother left she would have her room or whether her father would sleep there. But her mother didn’t leave right away; even after she was married all the furniture and some of her things remained in her room. She didn’t visit her mother and Zoltan—their place wasn’t ready or they were away on a trip. Her father told her that he might go to America. Uncle Isidor and his family were definitely planning to leave Budapest. He hadn’t decided yet. Perhaps he and his brother would join them in America a year later. They would decide about all this in the fall.
She spent the summer with her father and his sister in Dubrovnik. When they returned to Budapest she learned that the villa was going to be sold. They stayed there briefly. There was a lot of packing to be done. Sophie went to live with her grandmother. Her father came to see her there. After the house was sold he stayed in a hotel and she saw him only at Grandmother’s with the family. Uncle Isidor, Aunt Olga, and their two sons whom she didn’t know very well before came to visit at the same time. They talked about Hitler, money matters and whether her father would get his visa. Sometimes Uncle Isidor addressed her in his loud, unnatural voice that made the most ordinary remark sound preposterous. “You will go to America
