Memento Park Page 17

  What a contrast this gallery was. If the previous galleries had depicted a Hungary limping to keep up with the currents of the art world, this gallery was an unabashed tribute to a style of romantic painting long gone. Traditional compositions on classic themes. Székely was partial to nudes. A luxuriant Leda and the Swan. A painting of what I presumed was a geisha. I looked at these idealized figures and remembered Matisse’s reclining odalisque, that electrifying moment with Rachel. Could these polite, restrained nudes evoke the same response? It seemed unlikely.

  I was drawn to a self-portrait, a shockingly handsome, idealized self. It’s possible he was, in fact, so beautiful a specimen; I’ve never seen an actual photograph to argue otherwise. But as the actor knows, self-images are the most unreliable visages of all. Still, there was something about the sheer romanticism of his portrait, of the outer beauty implying an inner transcendence that actually took my breath away, and I remained staring at it for an indecent interval. The more I looked, the deeper I looked, the stranger I began to feel. It was as though he and I had become locked in a staring contest, each daring the other to look away.

  Hours later, it seemed, Rachel touched my elbow. It was time to go.

  * * *

  WE SAT IN THE TAXI for several minutes, lost in our thoughts. The throb of my hangover was now replaced with the echo of the irruption I’d experienced in the galleries. Rachel stared out the fogged window at the gray Danube racing past, chin in hand. She exhaled as though she’d been holding her breath since we left the museum.

  “They’re not going to help,” she said.

  I was surprised, though I shouldn’t have been. Everything had been going our way for so long, the setback was probably inevitable. This is another trait of my father’s, this waiting for an unseen shoe to drop. I once mentioned the Concorde to him, how I wanted to fly it despite my own fear of flying. It had never crashed, after all. “It’s due,” was all my father said. When a Concorde disintegrated at Charles de Gaulle Airport a few years later, he began our phone call with the words “I told you.” He would have seen this turn coming.

  “Why not?”

  She couldn’t say for sure. The stated reason was that the documents were inconclusive, particularly with respect to the journey from my family to the Yuhaus collection. But she detected another agenda at work, probably some desire to lay claim to the painting themselves. She shrugged. It didn’t matter. It would have helped, she said, but it wasn’t fatal to our claim—provided that they did not side with Rabbi Wolfe, though she felt they treated both claims with equal disapproval. We would just have to see what turned up from my family.

  * * *

  AND SO THAT ENDLESS LUNCH with my relatives, the unwanted beverages, the stifling, airless good cheer. Eszter’s worry. Once the proceedings wound down, Tibor ferried us across Styx to my father’s childhood home in his Peugeot.

  “This is it,” Tibor said. I was surprised how quickly we were upon the place, how without ceremony it rose up before us, though why I persist in expecting, what—trumpets? Fireworks? I should sort out my propensity for the dramatic. The building was a shabby two-story beige square around a courtyard, the paint peeling off in patches the size of bedsheets. The bars over the windows made the whole thing feel like a prison, which is no doubt how my father experienced it. I wondered what he’d make of the graffiti on the door and walls, unimaginable in his time. I sat in the car for a moment, taking it in.

  “Would you like me to wait here?” Rachel asked. Tibor was already out of the car, walking to the building, no niceties of privacy for him. I shook my head and took her hand. She let me, an answering pressure. I was briefly ashamed of my clammy palm, aware of my racing heartbeat. We made our way to the front door of the building, which Tibor had already nudged open. He walked in as though he belonged there, and Rachel and I followed hesitantly through a short corridor of saffron walls and faded checkerboard tiles underfoot, lined with mailboxes and trash cans. We emerged in a small courtyard, where Tibor whispered to me, “Time stops here.” For once, his portent matched the occasion.

  The ground-floor units huddled around a cracked, uneven concrete slab with a small, lifeless garden languishing in the middle of the courtyard. Even at the height of summer, the plot was bare. Empty rows suggested the presence of a long-gone herb garden. A single evergreen jutted bravely past the roofline. The garden was encircled by chipped black wrought-iron bars. The apartment facades, rising three stories around us, were painted in different shades of yellow. The whole place felt smothered by neglect. Dizziness washed over me, a feeling that I might faint, so close was I at last to something palpable about my father, something we had never shared but shared now, here, as I stood in the presence of his ghost.

  It will not speak. Then I will follow it.

  To my right, a dark, dank stairwell, with a serpentine staircase twisting from view. Tibor nodded. First apartment, second floor, he said. I indicated he should wait and entered the stairwell alone. My footfall disturbed a black cat—yes, Virgil; really—that bolted into the courtyard as I made my way up, past the crumbling walls, gripping the rusted handrail. At last I came to rest in front of my father’s apartment door. Two thick lacquered brown halves, a square brass doorknob in the middle of the right half, and two opaque strips of ochre windows, covered with bars. No name. Nothing to indicate its current occupant. I stood there staring at the door for a long moment, expecting … expecting what? I really did expect something, it wasn’t just the usual pose. I wanted to feel my father.

  I thought about knocking but to what end? My Hungarian was insufficient to the task, and I did not want to reengage Tibor. Not that I would have known what to say. I still don’t. So I walked out instead, onto the narrow walkway that overlooked the courtyard, where I watched Rachel bent over, petting the cat that had surrendered itself to her attentions. I imagined my father, running around as a child, ducking into stairwells, playing in the garden, trying to sneak home after a long night out. I remembered a story he told me after my first beating by bullies, about a night he’d gotten so thoroughly beaten up by a group of local toughs that his mother initially refused to let him into the apartment, failing to recognize her own son. It had been years since I last thought of that. How many other submerged memories were lying in wait, ready to be tripped to life? How much more did I know than I thought? Rachel turned to look up at me and smiled.

  Our eyes held the moment longer than either of us was prepared for. Then I imagined the courtyard filled with the Arrow Cross, looking for Jews. Saw Rachel being dragged away. I shook myself clear and was about to return to her when I heard a woman’s voice:

  “You are the son, yes? Gabi’s son? From America?”

  I turned to the source of the sound, an emaciated, white-haired woman in her seventies, leaning on a chipped walking stick. I nodded.

  “You look exactly like him,” she said. I recoiled at the thought of any resemblance between us.

  “Did you know my father?”

  She smiled. “Oh yes. When he was your age. Would you like to come in?”

  * * *

  WE SENT TIBOR AWAY, told him we’d take a cab to the hotel. The woman’s name was Klara. She’d lived in the same apartment her entire life, knew my father through childhood and his teen years. I looked at an old black-and-white photo she handed me while she made some tea. I was shocked. My dad was handsome, dashing like Székely’s self-portrait. He wore a brown leather jacket, and a flashy metallic wristwatch. I was most struck by his rakish ease as he leaned on the handlebars of a motorcycle, a lit cigarette propped between his lips.

  “He smoked?” I asked plaintively. “I didn’t know he smoked…” I looked at Rachel, confused and lost. Klara limped into the room and served us a meager tea from a cracked, grimy set of cups. As shabby and forlorn as the courtyard had been, I was unprepared for the stark poverty of the post-Soviet collapse. The apartment was crumbling around us as we sat. Huge, jagged cracks ran along the walls in all direction
s, like a network of varicose veins. The furniture was broken and wobbly and the upholstery stank of age.

  Klara took the photo back and stood there regarding him, hand on her hip.

  “It was a prop, he liked how it looked in the photo.” She shook her head. “We all knew he didn’t belong here. Look at him. How could a man like this live in a Communist country?” She sighed and returned the photo carefully to a drawer. The reverence of her action told me they’d been lovers. She sank into an easy chair and began to talk about my father, telling us stories. How he’d had “many friends”—her surprising words—and yet, though he was popular, he was not intimate with anyone. She told us a story about a night at a jazz bar when their group had been seated at a table with a large column obstructing the view. You were expected to tip to upgrade your table. My father saw through it and refused to pay. He planted himself and waited, until he was eventually shuttled away in exasperation from the moneymaking table. That was his way: break the system, wait the bastards out.

  “He liked to drive fast, you know,” she said, “but when he had to stop, he put his arm out like so.” She extended her right arm out across the torso of an imagined passenger. I gave an involuntary cry.

  “Matt, are you all right?” Rachel asked.

  “I … Yeah. Fine.” I addressed myself to Klara by way of explanation for my outburst. “He did that to me, too. When I was a boy.”

  Rachel asked Klara a few questions about Budapest Street Scene. It was a long shot, we both knew, and she shook her head sadly, unable to recall anything about the painting.

  “I was very sorry to learn Gabi had died. I hope you don’t mind if I tell you that I have thought about your father every day of my life. I have always missed him but I was pleased he found life in America.” The kindness in her voice, her obvious love for him squeezed at my throat.

  “Your father used to brag about you,” Klara added.

  That broke the spell. I laughed. “Really? My father bragged? Gabor Szantos.”

  “Just a minute,” she said.

  She left the table for a few moments and returned with an envelope from which she withdrew a glossy eight-by-ten color photo, which she set on the table before me.

  “Go on. It won’t bite.”

  Klara was wrong. It bit deeply, Virgil. It was a cast photo from my short-lived cable sensation. I picked it up warily, as though it were a summons. In thick, black magic marker, someone had scrawled To Klara, Best wishes, Matt Santos across the photo. It wasn’t my father’s handwriting. I could recognize his blocky, angular scrawl anywhere. But it wasn’t mine, either. As I held the photo in my hand, wondering how my father had come by it, whom he’d employed to forge my autograph, I couldn’t escape the single crushing truth of the image: my father, for reasons known only to himself—ego? Pride? Shame?—was unwilling or unable to ask me to sign a simple photo for him.

  I gave Klara a thousand U.S. dollars. My father, tight as he was, would have approved. It was his kind of gesture. She refused it at first, then wept and hugged me. It was all the currency I was carrying but she needed it far more than I did, and her compassion for my father cried out for some kind of acknowledgment. The money would last her the year. She offered to give me the photo but I told her to keep it.

  Documentary evidence, Rachel had said. The courts love documentary evidence. I can’t yet speak to what it does for sons.

  * * *

  WE ENDED THE AFTERNOON at Memento Park, a graveyard of Soviet-era statues outside the city limits. Rachel was solicitous toward me during the bus ride out there, her hand having taken up more or less permanent residence in mine. She wanted, I think, to talk, to ask me questions about what I was feeling. I should have liked that, had she asked. If only I could pluck one from the welter of throbs in my head and heart and assign language to it. Instead we sat in a soothing silence as the city fell away and we traveled along highways that looked like any highway in any country, but for the undecipherable billboards for unknown products.

  As the ride wore on, Rachel apologized for dragging me so far out of our way, though in truth I was enjoying the quiet moments beside her. She hadn’t grasped just how far it was, but she’d seen photos and it was the one thing she wanted to see while here. She also thought I might enjoy it, thought the kitsch of the place might banish some of the day’s ghosts. At length we reached our destination, nearly missing the poorly marked entrance, and receiving no prompts from the bus driver, who must have known where we were headed.

  As the air-conditioned bus belched away, we trudged in the blazing heat across a large lot of sun-bleached gravel. We approached a bizarre Doric facade, suggesting the outlines of a Greek temple but with two arches on either side of the entrance, one containing a towering granite statue of Lenin, the other of Marx and Engels. We seemed to walk toward it for a long time during which it came no closer, and then all at once we were upon it. The monoliths seemed to sag in the humidity, and waves of heat rose from the desultory husk of a Trabi, the monoxide-belching workhorse that was once the People’s Car. A young woman with a buzz cut and a pierced eyebrow sold us two tickets from behind her window, never once setting down her mobile phone.

  We bypassed the souvenirs, Stalin hip flasks and CDs of Soviet marches, and wandered out onto the grounds, which were about the size of a football field. Out from under the shade of the entry building, we were again assaulted by the heat. It was unbearable, Virgil, there wasn’t another person in the place. Perspiring, we soldiered out into the open. More blanched gravel, punctuated by occasional patches of dead grass, the whole affair ringed by low, bare trees, with spindly branches. The massive statues dotted the perimeter, rising up from what could reasonably be mistaken for a postapocalyptic landscape, the remains of a war that was never fought.

  They had names, the Martyrs Monument, the Soviet Heroic Memorial, though it scarcely seemed to matter what they were called. The labels seemed like afterthoughts, unnecessary in the shadow of such monstrous grandiosity. Here were Stalin’s gleaming warriors and workers, rushing toward a future that has ceased to exist. A pair of massive bronze boots set atop a two-story concrete foundation looked comic and forlorn, long relieved of the towering Stalin that once filled them. (I would only learn later that the boots were a copy, the originals long lost.) Another enormous figure, a worker, I think, struck me as especially sorrowful. His knees buckling, he reached for the sky as he fell. Or was he rising?

  Rachel broke our silence.

  “I can’t decide if this is funny or creepy or sad.”

  I shrugged. “A little of each?” She nodded.

  We continued to wander, and I paused before a striking pair of bronze hands encircling an umber sphere that floated just within its grasp. Rachel continued on, briefly disappearing from view, but I was mesmerized by the object. If one looked past the megalomaniacal subtext, it was almost possible to apprehend a strange beauty in these statues, like the ugly beauty of the Kálmán painting. If you divorced them from their context, their meaning, saw them as objects only. Can you do that, I wonder?

  Klara was right. How could my father ever have stayed, have lived among objects such as these? With his leather jacket and outsized ambitions. The Eastern Bloc was too small to contain him. I’ve gotten nearly everything wrong, Virgil. I judged my father for the way he left his own father, the way he insistently sought out his own life, but he was a survivor. It is the only reason—the only one—that I am standing here, right now, in this place. The only reason I was able to make my own journey westward.

  Rachel appeared with four small cups of water. She’d found a drinking fountain. She poured the lukewarm water on my arms, on my neck, let it trickle down my back. I shivered and then did the same for her, gently pouring water along her freckled shoulders. Rachel must have sensed something shift within me, because she took the empty cups and whispered, “You seem lost, Matt.”

  I turned to face her, letting her read what was in my eyes. “This has all been … It’s a lot, yo
u know? A lot to take in.”

  She nodded. “Listen, there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you. I should have asked it weeks ago.”

  I nodded, inviting her to proceed, not without a frisson of dread.

  “The painting. Do you really believe it’s yours?”

  * * *

  I FEEL THE WEIGHT OF HER EYES upon me, sense all that is riding on my answer, and I know I cannot fumble this one. It’s so hot. Can’t think clearly. What can it really mean, to be “mine”? Such a loaded question.

  “I really don’t know. I’d like it to be. And not for the money.” I look up at the floating sphere. “I just want to feel…” I trail off, embarrassed. I just want to feel. But she seems satisfied with the answer, because she threads her arm through mine as we walk on. I feel the water where it’s run down her forearm, sinking through my shirt.

  “The thing that I can’t figure out … well, it’s just … my dad. You know? He grabbed at every angle. He would have been all over this. I know it. I know him.”

  Then she says it to me, the words I didn’t know I was waiting for. The words I have needed to hear all along.

  “Matt. Do not make the mistake of assuming that because you know what someone will do, that you know who they are.”

  And she kisses me. And then, to my surprise, despite the heat, despite my guilt, despite everything in the air that day, I gently pull her into a copse of dead trees, hike up her long dress, and—