Cafe Europa (8 page)

Infuriated, Harold stood up and addressed Cassandra. “Was that necessary?”

She drew in her lips, her eyes dark marbles. “How dare you? You gossipmonger.”

Harold glanced toward the kitchen. “He's a boy.”

“He's a servant.”

Mrs. Pelham bristled. “Cassandra, my dear…”

“Enough,” the girl snarled. “Drink your spilled tea and leave me alone.”

The room drifted into silence, heavy and uncomfortable, broken by Cassandra. “I cannot sleep in this country. I want to go home.”

Ms. Pelham ignored her.

Cassandra began to sob quietly.

Vladimir Markov was at a loss how to handle the woman, fidgeting, shifting his feet, watching her from across the room. Finally, with a shrug, he addressed Harold. “Sir, I told my wife her family should stay goat herders in the mountains. The goats…they do not care what you say to them.”

The preposterous lines enlivened Harold, who whooped and banged on the table.

Suddenly Cassandra stood up and pointed out onto the terrace. Everyone near her followed the gesture. Zsuzsa Kós was standing by an iron grill near the garden in conversation with another woman, both in flowery summer dresses. Zsuzsa wore a monstrous hat with ostrich feathers and paradise aigrettes, something that may have looked natural in one of her old musical reviews but now seemed tawdry, best left in an attic trunk.

“You,” Cassandra yelled. “You.”

Zsuzsa didn't realize she was being addressed until her companion, probably sensing every eye in the café riveted on the pair, nudged Zsuzsa.

Cassandra ignored pleas from Mrs. Pelham and headed toward the terrace. “You! You betrayed me. You made believe you were my friend. The afternoons in City Park. The picnics on Margaret Island. Suppers at the Green Band. And then you sold me out for a few pennies.”

Zsuzsa walked toward the opening but stopped, uncertain. “Cassandra, you foolish child.” She spoke in German, harsh, bitter. “Leave me alone.” Her friend pulled at her sleeve, but Zsuzsa shook her off.

Cassandra talked back at the tables in the café. “Everyone talks German. Whatever happened to English?”

Then Cassandra rushed at the older woman and slapped Zsuzsa in the face. It sounded like gunfire. Or the crack of thunder.

A horrible moment, raw, cruel, ugly. Cassandra faltered, overwhelmed by her own fury, opening her mouth to speak. Nothing came out. Rubbing her hand against her face, Zsuzsa let out a trapped animal's gravelly howl—I swear we all trembled—and then disappeared onto the quay. Her companion stood flabbergasted. Cassandra, penitent, waved sloppily at all of us, and then retreated to her table where she hung her head and sobbed.

I was surprised to see that Mrs. Pelham wore a tight-lipped, satisfied look that translated—
See, all of you. The American brat. See how my labors are rewarded. See what I have to deal with. Madness all around me.

Cassandra looked up and caught me looking at her. I shook my head slowly as I tried to convey—what? My concern, my
worry
about her. No mother to guide her, as they used to say in Victorian novels. And I thought of my own mother demanding that I obey, stay at her side, comfort her. I grew dizzy.

For a second Cassandra shut her eyes, as if debating something. Then, startling her chaperone, she jumped up and mumbled something about leaving. “Have to. Have to. This place…”

She headed toward the terrace but staggered, as though drunk, one hand grasping a chair rail. She swung around and headed toward the door into the hotel lobby. She stopped, her right hand fluttering in the air, finally touching one of the gaudy hairpins. It slipped out and fell to the floor. She ignored it. Then, nearing my table, she toppled into an empty chair next to me.

Winifred gasped, but I remained calm. I had become part of the drama in the old café, but I didn't know what that meant.

“You,” the girl got out. “The American writer. You write those short stories in the magazines. I've read…” She glanced at Winifred, but then turned her body so that she was facing me, leaning in confidentially. Close up, behind the sloppily applied powder and rouge, I saw a pale face, blotchy and streaked.

“What?”

“You. You watch me. You look at me as if I'm…” She stopped, at a loss for words. “Like I'm hurting. You see that. Your eyes. You are…”

“Edna Ferber, my dear.”

She swung her head back and forth. “I know—I read a story…You…I need to talk to an American. I need someone who doesn't
know
me…I need to ask you…”

I touched her hand, resting on the table. “Of course.”

“People say I'm a fool, but I'm not, really. You think I don't hear them talking here? A spoiled girl, just an empty…shell. But”—she glanced around the room, so many eyes on her—“I can't understand this world here, these people, these…My mother tells me…I can't make sense of things. I missed something. Maybe not. I don't know. I don't understand what Count Frederic says to me…his English is so bad…now Endre he…”

“Please,” I began, but she held up her hand.

“I…My German is so bad. My French…my Hungarian is ten words maybe…I just want to hear
everything
in English. Is that so bad? I don't understand things any more…” She mustered a gaze so intense I jerked back my head. “How do I know what's happening to me?”

She broke down, sobbing into a sleeve.

Mrs. Pelham had been standing next to the table, rumbling like a stockyard bull. In the most emphatic English accent I'd ever heard, she swelled up and roared, “Stuff and nonsense, young lady.” She pulled Cassandra's sleeve and hissed through clenched teeth. “Your mother will be horrified at this…this display of hysterics.”

Cassandra allowed herself to be pulled out of the chair. As she was led to the doorway, she glanced back before disappearing into the hallway.

“My Lord.” Winifred was bothered. “What was that all about?”

I was silent for a minute. “Something has happened to her.”

“But what?”

“A spoiled, indulged young girl has suddenly looked into a mirror and doesn't like what she sees.”

“She's just another vain, dreadful rich girl.”

I shook my head emphatically. “Oh no. I don't think so, dear Winifred. This time she saw darkness that scared her.”

“Her soul?” Winifred added, a remark that I didn't expect from her.

“No.” I struggled with the words. “Darkness coming at her.”

Winifred and I were two genial travel companions who'd come to Budapest to see the sights, but now, shaken, we sat wordless in that old café.

Our silence was broken by a loud voice. In a strained, phlegmatic voice, thick with bile, the poet István Nagy, his fingers idly twirling the fuchsia scarf that circled his neck, told the room in accented English, “Ah, the Americans. They continue to think that they discovered the Old World. We are their play toy to do with as they see fit.”

Chapter Six

Late that afternoon Winifred and I returned from sightseeing at St. Matthias Church in the Buda hills to find gifts waiting for us. Bertalan Pór had delivered two exquisite drawings—simple but delightful renderings of the Chain Bridge at the foot of Castle Hill. Not realistic depictions, for the bright colored pencil strokes exaggerated, but the opposite: a nighttime landscape captured through the prism of hot fever. Arc lights threw ghostly auras over the steel girders.

Winifred gushed her appreciation, muttered about Matisse's reinvention of color and the wild beasts that were defining the world of art. I simply appreciated the gesture, though I doubted I'd display the drawing prominently back in helter-skelter Chicago.

A note accompanying the drawings invited the two of us to join both men at five for coffee and pastry at the celebrated Gerbeaud's confectionary on Vörösmarty tér. Written in formal, respectful German, addressing us with the proper distance and etiquette, the note seemed a royal writ, so careful the penmanship, signed first by Bertalan Pór and then by Lajos Tihanyi.

“Of course we will,” Winifred told me.

“Isn't such an invitation a little awkward?” I asked. “I mean, two men we scarcely know. Unmarried women in Budapest do not go out unchaperoned with strange men.”

Winifred pointed to the drawings. “Of course we know them, Edna. And, yes, thankfully, they
are
strange men—otherwise I'd shun them.”

That made little sense, but I smiled. The confections at Gerbeaud's patisserie were legendary according to my Baedeker guide. I dressed in a navy blue Eton suit and a soft hat with a single rose pinned to the front. At five o'clock, promptly, Winifred and I strolled through two squares, past the Váci Utca, entered the eatery and were greeted in English by an effusive hostess.

“I thought we blended in,” Winifred said. “I'm trying to look Hungarian.”

I laughed. “It's the shoes, they tell me.”

“Mine are cracked and worn at the heel.”

“Exactly.”

Gerbeaud's thrived on its Old World ambience. Mottled marble-topped tables surrounded by dark red velvet-covered chairs. Gold-gilt woodwork, gleaming chandeliers, a long glass-fronted counter with a mouth-watering display of frosted cakes and tortes. The aroma was intoxicating, the rich chocolate and vanilla cream puffs, the baked pastry, the steaming coffee drinks with whipped cream fizzed on top, the whiff of coffee ice cream served in deep, slender glasses. Waiters sailed by us with trays covered in tempting treats. A crystal bowl held mounds of chocolate truffles wrapped in silver. Tables were pushed close to one another, the heat of the day making the air thick. At the back of the room, a chamber orchestra played waltzes, but quietly, as if from a gramophone hidden in a distant room.

Although I was absorbed in the utter sweetness of the room, Winifred was telling me that the Hungarian artists were already at a table, both standing, with Bertalan Pór waving and at his side Lajos Tihanyi, a grin on his face, his hand raised in the air. Two genteel souls—nothing like the shrimp seated with them. A man who remained seated, though his hands fluttered in the air like manic birds of prey. Harold Gibbon, always the unwanted guest.

We joined them, enduring the classic kissing of the hand, the bowing, the stylized European civility long disappeared from America. I was starting to enjoy its ritual, though a part of me craved down-home Chicago brashness and swagger, folks bumping you on Michigan Avenue without so much as a how-de-do.

“Harold, you surprise me,” I said to him.

He snickered. “I wasn't following you.”

“No,” Bertalan Pór said resignedly, “he was following us.”

Lajos Tihanyi attempted some incoherent sentence, looked frustrated, and then scribbled in Hungarian on the small notebook he obviously always had at his disposal. Bertalan Pór took the torn slip from him and smiled. “My friend insists that Mr. Gibbon has a coterie of spies relaying the whereabouts of anyone he wants to visit.”

Tihanyi guffawed. In his rumpled light tan summer suit with the oversized brown buttons and the white linen shirt, a size too large, he appeared a boy jester. But perhaps I was being unfair: Tihanyi, despite those intense but droopy eyes, so direct and deep under arched brows, had been born with the gargoyle face so that he'd always appear the buffoon. But no simpleton, he—truly the man defied his appearance. Those eyes told you he was seeing everything, analyzing, digesting, loving, celebrating. Nothing got past the man whose penetrating stare read someone's character in a heartbeat. It was easy to miss his intensity.

Bertalan Pór was dressed smartly in a Norfolk gray flannel jacket buttoned up to the neck. With his regal good looks and tiny Ben Franklin spectacles, he could also be dismissed as a Beau Brummell playboy, some wrecker of a fickle young girl's heart. But he, too, I realized, possessed fire in the gut.

And then there was small ferret-like Harold, head bobbing like a baby bird in a nest, happy to be noticed.

“I do have spies,” Harold insisted. “You are all my spies. I watch all of you, and I'll learn the secret.”

“What secret?” Winifred wasn't happy that Harold had intruded on this little visit. Since meeting the two artists, she'd brightened—and I was thrilled. Perhaps her horrors of London could be forgotten, at least for now. Her escape, I realized, was to lose herself in the echoey halls of an art museum. I knew she wanted to talk Art, capital A, hungry to discuss Gertrude Stein and Matisse and Expressionists…and nightmarish abstractions cavalierly plastered onto canvas. Selfishly, I was relieved to see the pesky reporter because he would save the afternoon from the all-consuming specter of Pablo Picasso.

Bertalan Pór ordered for all of us, and I marveled at the smooth, lyrical Magyar language. It seemed a gentle hiccough, the rhythmic emphasis of words like a ripple on still waters that drew you along. Words piled on—attached—willy nilly, it seemed, until you lost your breath. Impossible to learn, I'd been told, but I wondered. My German, fluent since a child, paled beside it. The Magyar tongue was the language of a Gypsy camp, the fierce horsemen gathered around a fire on the plains, the wild dancing of the
czárdás
, earthenware jugs of water, the violinist on the street corner…or had I simply appropriated such romantic imagery from the pages of my Baedeker and my sentimental imagination? No matter. That was why I'd come to Budapest—to sit in this splendid, expensive café and imagine myself in a lyrical Léhar operetta.

“What do you think of Café Europa?” Bertalan Pór asked us, speaking in stilted English.

“They like it,” Harold answered for us, speaking in German.

“I can speak for myself,” I said sternly. I deliberated. “It has the hominess of an old coat.”

“Meaning?” The artist looked puzzled, but Lajos Tihanyi had read my lips, and scribbled on a pad. “She means,” his friend read to us, “that you always know when you put it on how it will fit. And where the seams are giving out.”

I laughed. “Exactly. It's the place Americans go to hear others talking American.”

Harold added, “And to watch the Americans make fools of themselves.”

“Cassandra?” Winifred asked.

“Not only her.” Harold went on. “Even the British”—he glared at London-born Winifred—“speak more pompously to show the Americans how English is supposed to sound. The King's English.”

“That's why there are folks like Mrs. Pelham in the world,” I said. “The angrier she gets with her recalcitrant charge, the more British she becomes.”

“Cassandra shames us all,” Winifred remarked.

I took some issue with that. “She does like her hair-raising scenes in public places. But something else is going on, I'm afraid. Yes, she's a spoiled American brat—very much as that judgmental poet”—I hesitated and Bertalan Pór grumbled “István Nagy”—“so rudely proclaimed, a girl born to wealth but also to loneliness. An only child, sold like a carpet in the marketplace to the highest bidder. What we're seeing in the café is a young woman who doesn't know how to handle the world she is tossed into.”

Winifred fretted. “She could say no.”

I shook my head. “She doesn't have the vocabulary to say no. What she has is frustration and sobbing and hysteria and acting bratty…annoying those around her. A dutiful daughter who suddenly fears her parents. And probably the count. But I tell you—when I caught her eye this morning, I spotted something else there. Yesterday she was vain and silly. Today she was vain and silly, but now she's also frightened. That is one scared child.”

Harold added, “You see things that no one else sees. Yet it doesn't help that she had this wild love affair with the dashing Endre, some cowboy hero out of a melodrama who swept her off her feet and took her horseback riding through fields of sunflowers at sunset. That's hard to leave behind for a stiff-backed aristocrat from a crumbling regime.”

Winifred opened her eyes wide. “My, my, Mr. Gibbon. Once again—twice now—I do believe we're seeing a romantic under that lizard skin.”

He frowned at her.

I raised my voice. “I insist Cassandra is a victim here.”

Tihanyi had trouble following my impassioned speech, but he was nodding furiously, perhaps catching some of it. He spoke a garbled sentence that left his friend puzzled. Quickly he jotted something down on his pad and handed it to Bertalan Pór. His friend contemplated it but seemed hesitant about his translation.

“What?” I demanded, smiling. “Is your friend taking issue with me?”

He laughed. “To the contrary, Miss Ferber. He says this…this spirit in your face confirms his desire to paint you. In red.”

“Stop. Really. A painting of me?”

“He insists your…passion demands it.”

“He'll have me fragmented, one eye elevated above the other, my one hand in the air holding a hyacinth and the other in…in a buckled shoe.”

Tihanyi obviously caught the tenor of my remarks because he laughed. He struggled to utter something, but I caught none of it. This poor deaf and dumb soul—no, I stopped myself. Not poor. Lamentable, really. For, in truth, here was a man who accommodated what he lacked with a grace and a power that overwhelmed.

His friend caught me watching Tihanyi's moving lips. “My friend lost his hearing and speech when he was eleven. Meningitis, I think you call it. He always drew, largely self-taught, and his father, a wonderful man, asked me, five years older than the boy, to tutor him. I'd been wandering in the cafés, selling my drawings to make money. I gave him Nietzsche to read.” He winked. “Subversive. We both come from old Jewish families in the city. But his father fears his son will become Catholic—to convert. It's common among artists here.”

He glanced at his friend. “And today we are the artists that so many in Budapest despise. The avant-garde. In 1910 an exhibition in Berlin was mocked and censured. Abused. Lajos' daring depiction of wrestlers—figures unlike any other on canvas—was seen as the end of life as we know it.”

Tihanyi scribbled on his pad. Bertalan Pór read to us: “He says that was how we knew we were a success. The critics damned us.”

Winifred was delighted by the conversation. “Freedom of the artist suggests freedom for the masses. Finally, for women. In England I founded the Artists' Suffrage League in 1907. Last year I was in Budapest at the International Woman's Suffrage Alliance Congress.”

Bertalan was nodding. “Yes, suffrage for all.” He pointed at Lajos. “We are members of the National Reform Club, dedicated to universal suffrage.”

Winifred's mouth fell open. “Yes, I know them, I…”

She stopped because Harold groaned out loud. He had been following the conversation, but looked unhappy. Finally, he withdrew his pad from a vest pocket and jotted down some notes.

“Are we being immortalized?” I asked him.

“I was just reminded of something. Nothing to do with this…this art. I'm thinking of something Franz Ferdinand said to his friend, Kaiser Wilhelm. About the bond of the Aryan races.”

“Not now,” Winifred insisted, her voice hard. “We're having coffee and delicious pastry.”

“There is only one topic in this part of the world. The Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Serbian Question. The anger of the Serbs. The Black Hand. Terrorists…”

I groaned. “For Lord's sake, Harold, a respite, please. Your book will wait. Your boss Hearst will dream up another war—let's say in Mexico. Sip your coffee. Listen to the music. Try the coffee ice cream with whipped cream. It's singular…”

A bell sounded. Conversation ceased.

Everything in the café stopped. Total silence. Even the waiters stopped moving and put down their trays. Two red-faced boys in Fauntleroy suits rushed to lay out a red carpet in the entrance, straightening the edges and then backing away out of sight. One solitary last tinkle of a spoon against the side of a cup. Then silence. Suddenly everyone stood up, at attention. The two artists nodded at us, compelling us to rise. So I stood there, a little foolish, anticipating some oom-pah-pah band to break into a brassy rendition of the national Austrian anthem, if such a patriotic song existed.

But quiet, eerie, certainly uncomfortable.

Though no trumpets blared, the effect of a royal entrance was evident. Harold quietly whispered that the Countess Carolina, mother of Count Frederic, had arrived in a carriage. Accompanying her was a bewhiskered old gentleman in a starched black cutaway suit, striped trousers, and a black vest. A carnation in his buttonhole. A military sash over his chest. A derby on his head.

The imperious woman paused at the threshold, surveyed the room of standing subjects, and then walked to a table at the back, partitioned off from the rest of the hoi polloi. She wore an elaborate crepe de chine dress trimmed with sable. The crowd sat down, though the silence persisted for a moment. The countess, sitting with her back to the room, was immediately waited on, bowed to, whispered to, hummed to—a circle of waiters colliding like sun-drenched houseflies. The orchestra resumed playing.