Cafe Europa (6 page)

“I'm afraid I do.”

She shook her head. “A foolish man, and a dangerous one.”

“Why do you say that?”

“He talks too freely with the Hungarians about Franz Josef, the Habsburg Empire, the war he expects. Franz Josef's agents are around. Spies everywhere.”

“Are you serious?”

“The Austrians don't expect the Hungarians to be loyal to
their
empire. Yes, Queen Elisabeth loved Hungary, but an Italian anarchist killed her in 1898 in Geneva. Nowadays the Austrians hate the Magyars. Harold Gibbon, stoking the fire, is a troublemaker. And someone could get hurt.”

We lingered at the table, shaded under an umbrella as the heat of the day rose, and the tables filled up with folks. A young couple, giddy with each other, smiled over orange ice, the girl in a Capri blue dress, the boy in a suit with billowing trousers, a brass-studded belt, and glossy high boots. A man strolled by with a string of pretzels on a stick, calling out to passersby.

A lazy afternoon, my eyes half-shut.

“There.” Winifred pointed. Nearby, debating whether to approach us, were the two young artists who were sketching in the café—and who shared with us that menacing caricature of Cecelia and Marcus Blaine.

Winifred, sitting up, waved them to our table. They hesitated, looked at each other suspiciously, and then walked over.

“What?” I asked Winifred. The invitation struck me as odd because Winifred turned away from men.

Winifred leaned into me. “The tall one—whatever his name—intrigues me with that drawing of those awful Blaines.” She smiled broadly. “And I have a love of artists. Painters, well…” Her voice got foggy as she stared intently into my face. “Something you don't know about me, Edna.” Then she confided, “In Paris Gertrude Stein showed me Picasso.”

I had no idea what she was talking about—she'd mentioned a woman I'd never heard of. Modern art confused me, though I'd enjoyed the news accounts of last year's scandalous Armory Show in New York, with that scandalous
Nude Descending a Staircase
abstraction making clergymen across America sputter in their pulpits. Teddy Roosevelt, who wrote me gushing letters about my short stories, had condemned the invasion of decadent French art into America. I'd seen one painting by Picasso in a gallery window in New York, and it struck me as the work of a madman. Obviously Winifred Moss, my traveling companion, was a more complicated woman than the forceful, monomaniacal protestor for woman suffrage I'd come to know.

And, I soon learned, the two young Hungarian artists understood they'd encountered an advocate for their vision. Winifred, her voice animated, told us that her father had been an art historian at Cambridge, drummed out because of his passion for the new Impressionists. “Cézanne,” she hummed. “My father met him.”

Both artists were wide-eyed, staring at her.

The tall one introduced himself as Bertalan Pór, and I rehearsed the name in my head. He was a lithe, willowy man, dressed in a hard-pressed linen suit, a perfectly knotted purple bowtie. With his watery blue eyes and long bony face, a high forehead that exaggerated the sadness of those eyes, he struck me as patrician, an aristocrat in a way the brutish Count Frederic was not.

“I speak a schoolboy's English,” Bertalan Pór admitted. “Learned in Paris, of all places.”

But I found I could not take my eyes off his companion, introduced as Lajos Tihanyi, who could neither speak nor hear. “But,” Pór added, “Lajos reads lips, understands German and some English, and will sputter sounds he believes are words he cannot hear. He
can
manage some words, though it seems his private dictionary.” Then he sighed. “I need to warn you—he gets frustrated when he can't get across what he wants to say, and he…he gets moody, even angry. But just smile when he does that.” He laughed and touched Tihanyi on the arm. “It's part of his charm.”

Tihanyi, I noticed, was following the words closely, his eyes glued to his friend's lips, and he didn't look happy with him.

Bertalan Pór tapped a pad he'd extracted from a pocket, and said Lajos Tihanyi would jot down remarks. “In Hungarian or German, as you prefer.”

Frankly, I preferred nothing at the moment, uncomfortable with the small man who stared at me with untoward attention, his head bobbing and his eyes amused. He was the one who wanted to paint me. Yes, me. Of course, I had little patience with that notion. In Bavaria Clara Ewald had executed a reasonable likeness—all my features positioned where God intended them to be. I would not be a part of any composition titled
Edna Ferber Descending a Staircase.

Lajos Tihanyi had a disheveled look, his skinny body lost in a rumpled tan jacket, stained, with a thin scarf wrapped tight around his neck despite the day's sticky temperature. A jester's mobile face, with small squinty eyes and a slack mouth, a vaudeville comic up to no good—or looking to prank for fun. He reminded me of the old rollicking comedians of the New York Yiddish theater, all whoop-it-up guffaw and grotesque pantomime. Perhaps it was my own horrible bias. Poor Tihanyi grunted, gestured, rolled in his chair, at one point looking jealous of Winifred's attention to his friend. And yet, as I watched that sad-sack face, I discovered softness in his eyes, a faraway melancholy that utterly charmed me.

Winifred was talking rapidly in German, which I grew up speaking. She was looking at Tihanyi but speaking to Pór, curious about their work, asking about modern art in Budapest. I sat back, fascinated by her grasp of Parisian art movements. Both men had been part of a Hungarian group called The Eight, executing modern Expressionist works, Cubist art, heavily influenced by German and French avant-garde artists. A smattering of pioneer art had come to Budapest—Cézanne at the National Salon, Kandinsky and four Picassos shown at the Artists' Gallery. Kokoschko, Klimt. The names swept past me, a blur, meaningless. So somber had been my few days traveling with Winifred—the awful aftertaste of her agony in a London jail—that I marveled at her now—her vitality, her animation.

“Matisse,” Bertalan Pór enunciated, reverently.

“Ah,” said Winifred, as though saying
amen
at the end of a prayer.

Tihanyi's lips embraced the august name, though what I heard was a garbled blunt of language.

In 1907 Bertalan Pór had spent time at Gertrude Stein's apartment at Rue de Fleures 27, hobnobbing with Juan Gris, Picasso, and their followers. He'd learned English, he said, from Americans drinking in the cafés. And for a few months a nomadic Lajos Tihanyi had lived in the shadow of Matisse's home, though his being deaf and dumb limited his exchanges with the hardscrabble artists working and living at La Ruche. They'd returned to Budapest invigorated, banding with six other artists to exhibit at the Nemzeti Szalon. When Pór exhibited his paintings at the Könyves Kálmán Szalon, on the Váci, the Prime Minister Tisza publicly attacked his art, calling it degenerate, foul, unworthy.

Now he smiled at us. “The way to become famous is to have a politician condemn you.”

Winifred was impatient. “You two are doing a book of sketches?”

Pór nodded.

“Why Café Europa?” I asked.

He smiled and glanced at his friend. “We are fascinated by the Americans. The busy reporters running around like wild birds.”

“Like Harold?”

Again the hasty glance at Tihanyi who shrugged his shoulders, comprehending. “Americans have…let me say…Americans in Budapest…they swagger and they burst out and they…they are”—his accent got thicker, deeper—“the wonder of the New World.”

I repeated, “Like Harold?”

“Harold the journalist is…is peculiar.”

“Perceptive,” Winifred noted wryly.

But Tihanyi nudged his friend and jotted something down on a strip of paper. Bertalan Pór grinned. “Like you, Miss Ferber.”
Leek you Mees Fibber
. Swallowed, wonderful words. “Different, the look.”

“Me?” I stammered.

“Lajos wants to paint you. In red.”

“What?”

“He wants your face on canvas. You, in a red dress.”

I smiled at Tihanyi. “Yes, the scarlet woman afoot in the Old World. Hawthorne would be pleased.”

My remarks made no sense to the pair.

Winifred spoke up. “Your depiction of the Blaines was on target, Mr. Pór. You captured that rather stupid woman and that pompous man.”

Pór rattled off a translation for his friend.

Tihanyi chuckled and pointed at his friend.

“Not all Americans are so…dreadful,” I announced.

Tihanyi had been carrying an old leather satchel slung over his shoulder, cradling it in his lap when he sat down, and now clumsily extracted his sketchbook and flipped it open. The first drawing was startling—an unrecognizable figure, a slapdash jumble of blunt lines and chaotic swirls. I groaned—was this
Nude Descending a Staircase
all over again? But Tihanyi watched me closely, let out a gruff laugh and flipped the page. Staring intently into my face, he tapped a drawing. I was staring at Cassandra, her girlish beauty captured along with a hint of pouting in the puckered lips, meanness in her narrowed eyes. Hastily, eyes still on me, Tihanyi flipped the sheets, pointing, tapping another page showing a softer girl, one ready to cry. Another sketch—the secretive poet in the corner of the café, a man swathed in pastel scarves and arctic stares.

Bertalan Pór saw the question in my eyes. “István Nagy,” he said. “Who hates us…and Americans.”

“Why?”

“He is the darling of the art nouveau Austrian poetry of the last century. He writes pretty poetry about fragile girls with huge eyes lost in veils and garlands of flowers. We…how you say?…scare him…our new art…and Americans scare him. “He says the Americans will flood the Old World with their money disease. Franz Ferdinand, who has toured America, talked of the craziness of the Americans for the dollar bill.”

“So this István sits in the Café Europa for
this
reason?”

“So he can write bad poetry about the loud Americans there.” He laughed. “You can watch him…his lips…they curl…when an American yells at a waiter.”

“Good Lord,” Winifred said. She took the pad from the table and flipped back to the first drawing. “I like this.”

“It's Lajos' self-portrait,” he said.

Sharp, geometric lines, bug eyes, a crooked shoulder.

I kept my mouth shut.

Excited, Bertalan Pór suggested we accompany them to a gallery on nearby Váci Utca, where both had works on exhibit. Winifred was nodding up and down. Giving us no time to refuse, both men stood, and Winifred and I followed them out of the restaurant onto the quay.

***

On busy Váci Utca the aroma of coffee wafted from a café. A baker enticed us with warm Kaiser rolls displayed in wide wicker baskets. A grocer was hanging glossy strings of dried red paprikas and garlic from a clothesline. Nestled between a used book store with stalls spilling onto the street and a haberdashery advertising goods from Paris, the storefront art gallery was empty, dimly lit and musty. But as we walked in, someone snapped on an overhead light, and the narrow room was suddenly bright. I blinked wildly because the walls were covered with canvases that startled. At least they startled
me
, a woman who favored the serene elegance of, say, John Singer Sargent. Elongated figures, garish misshapen heads, bulging eyes, splashes of vibrant color so bold they seemed blood-letting and barbaric, geometric angles passing for nudes, landscapes filtered through a drunken eye or a hashish-smoker's delirium.

Dazzled, Winifred and I hesitated in the doorway. This was a brave new world. Bertalan Pór, amused, nudged us in.

Winifred sucked in her breath, a smile on her face.

But our stillness was shattered by a lusty yell—Harold, out of breath, pushing behind us. “I saw you headed here and rushed…”

Winifred grumbled. “No one invited you, Mr. Gibbon.”

He grinned. “But I'm expected everywhere.”

Harold galloped past us, taking charge, and stood in the middle of the gallery, face to face with the young woman who'd switched on the lights. “What the hell is this? Someone's idea of a nightmare?” But he was laughing out loud. He swirled around, taking in the unorthodox paintings.

Lajos Tihanyi, puzzled by Harold's gesturing and strutting and the outburst in loud English, turned to Bertalan Pór for an explanation, but his friend looked to me.

Harold stamped his foot. “What in tarnation?”

Tihanyi's face tightened, a flash of anger in his eyes, a vein on his neck throbbing.

I smiled bravely. “Keep in mind that Mr. Gibbon is not an art critic. He knows little of culture. After all, he does work for William Randolph Hearst.”

Bertalan Pór laughed and nodded at Tihanyi—a look that begged him to relax. Tihanyi breathed in. In careful, spaced-out English, Bertalan Pór said, “Then he is like most of Budapest—frightened of the new art, condemning this…new
vision
.” He lingered on the last word, as if uncertain he used it correctly.

Stepping close to a huge canvas, Harold peered at a painting, which, I noted nervously, was signed by Tihanyi, and blurted out, “You know, before the coming of war there are always fireworks—flashes of anger and decay and smoke signals in the sky. The workers' protests. Breaking down the old guard. A slap in the face of tradition.”

Harold, fingers tapping his chin, suddenly faced us. He pointed to Tihanyi's brilliant purples and reds. A portrait of a man whose wide-open eyes suggested astonishment at the world he found himself a part of. An emaciated man in what looked like a bolero hat, but the cubist angles reinforced the subject's smugness, his venality. “The end of the Habsburgs is
here
.” He bowed to Tihanyi and Pór. “You, sirs, are the true revolution.”