László was fuming but quiet, drinking his water now like a shamed child, and Zsuzsi leaned close to Jed. “All my life I think, the gas will come back. And here we are almost to the grave until it does.”
Jed said, “But you got out safely. That was so long ago.” There was that empathy again, beaming from him like a light. Melanie wondered if this was how every day was for him, near-strangers confessing seventy-year-old secrets just because of those clear eyes, that forward hunch.
“In 1944, in October, I am standing in the line at the train station. They have in the lines families, and a line for the old men, and a line for the women with no rings, so here is me and here is my sister Kata who is seventeen, and I am twenty-four. Back when I am eighteen I am singing soprano at the state opera in Budapest, and I am called the ingenue. Many flowers, many men. But then 1939 I am no longer a star. I can sing at the Jewish music hall only. Five years pass, and I am in the line, and everywhere is crying and pushing, and László, he recognizes me. I have never seen him. He is only nineteen years old. Do you understand?”
Melanie shook her head, and was glad when Jed did too. “No.”
“He is a music lover. Every week he goes to the concert hall or the opera, and he remembers me from five years. I have at this time hair to my waist, all black. And he says to the other men, ‘We make a mistake. This woman is not a Jew, this woman is with me.’ So he takes me from the line, and the last time I see my sister is she is getting on the train.”
Zsuzsi put her face into her hands, almost an embarrassed gesture, and once Melanie reassured herself that Zsuzsi wasn’t crying, just bracing herself and collecting her breath, she tried to process the story. Jed had taken his hand off her knee and now it hovered over his own lap, as if he might need to catch something in a moment. László just sipped his water.
“Many years later, our old neighbor sends me this.” She meant the mouse. “It is my sister’s but she gave to the neighbor boy when he was crying. And they send it then back to me.”
Melanie was the one to talk. She worried that Jed, in all his patience, wouldn’t ask the question. And one more unanswered question would explode her. “Are you saying your husband was there in the… he was in the capacity of a soldier?”
Zsuzsi lifted her head. “He already loved me, from the opera. He knows my name, and he tells all the men this is his girlfriend. He does not save me just to save someone. He saves me because Cupid has hit.” She tapped her own rib cage. “He is musician too. At school he was studying the piano. Even now he plays. Frenkly, this is one blessing: The stroke takes from him the language of English, but leaves the language of piano.” She hit her palm on the table with conviction, as if this were the salient point of the story. “We spend three weeks together, and then he sends me to his cousin in Holland, and then I am on a boat to Norway, and he meets me in Toronto after the war and we are married.” She was talking again to Jed, and Melanie considered that she might need to readjust the look of horror on her own face. She settled for covering her mouth and nose with both hands. “He was Arrow Cross. Do you know what is Arrow Cross?” They both shook their heads. “I will put this way: They take it upon themselves. Without the Germans there yet, they take it upon themselves. But when the Germans come, Arrow Cross is still helping. This is when we meet.”
“And you stayed with him?” Melanie said. She couldn’t help it. “This is the same person? Him?” She refrained from gesturing, so that László could remain in the dark. He was contemplating his empty glass.
“I fell in love. Maybe it makes no sense.”
“Not really,” Melanie said, but only under her breath.
Zsuzsi said, “But I had no children with him. Is like the two of you. You are a beautiful couple, and you should not care what are the rules of married and not married and who is widow. You know: Not everyone survives.”
Melanie wasn’t following anymore. Was she the widow? Was Vanessa?
“And now you see: The gas comes back for us. We are gone in Cleveland and the gas comes back, and instead it finds other people. It finds your beautiful friend.” Zsuzsi began sobbing into her hands, and Jed found the right moment to touch her shoulder. Melanie, near panic herself, looked across at the old man, at the absent way he observed his crying wife. She wondered what Zsuzsi had told him to calm him down — if she’d lied to him about the mouse, or even about Jed and Melanie. Told him they were doctors, psychologists. She studied his face: his caved-in mouth, his long, unruly eyebrows. His blue eyes milky with cataracts.
Zsuzsi looked up at Melanie. “You forgive yourself now for moving on. It is good your affair has ended, yes? Those two go together to their grave, and you are here and finding love. But I know from the first time I see you that you worry you make this happen, that your sins made come the gas. And I tell you this story because you need to know it was not from you. It was from me.”
Melanie opened her mouth to say, “No, I never had an affair, I had an engagement and a betrayal and a collapsing of my universe, no, you’re very confused,” but Jed shot her a look — a gentle glare, a blaze of green — and it was like an emergency transfusion of clarity. This story is not about you, the look said. Shut up.
“You cannot help that you fall in love with that man,” Zsuzsi said.
“No. No, I couldn’t. We don’t choose, right?”
Zsuzsi nodded vigorously. “Who is ever to choose?”
László started coughing, a thick cough that rattled his whole body, his hands braced against the table, and Jed jumped up to get him more water. He put the glass in front of him, but the cough continued with such intensity that he couldn’t stop to drink. Zsuzsi rose and stood behind him, lifting the glass to his mouth, and he breathed some water in, then dribbled it out into his white stubble. Eventually, the coughs spread out and stopped. He said something to Zsuzsi and waved her away.
Jed said, “It’s late.” And it was. It was dark outside. (The band would have been starting to play right now. Melanie had almost forgotten.) The mouse was still nestled in Jed’s palm. He said, “Are you sure you want me to take this? I’ll show you the memorial when it’s done.” But László was coughing again, and Zsuzsi was back at his side. Jed and Melanie slipped out of the kitchen, out of the apartment, up to the second floor hall, where Vanessa Dillard’s door was still ajar from what Melanie had thought would be her quick farewell trip to Jed’s.
He was saying, “I can’t paint over the mouse. I couldn’t do it. But that’ll be cool, right? It can be the only unpainted thing, like it’s the rawest and it stands out.”
Melanie nodded and said, “I think I’m stopping here. I need to get off this ride now.”
“I mean, wow. It’s called Stockholm syndrome, right? Do you think she’s really loved him all this time?”
“I can’t imagine.”
“I mean, talk about compartmentalizing. Ha! Okay, so does that mean he was a Nazi? Is that the same thing? I mean it sounds, like, as bad or worse than Nazi.”
“I don’t know.”
“Oh, God. Oh. Why are you crying? Hey.”
She wiped at her nose and tried to unscramble her brain. “It was true down there, that look you gave me. What Zsuzsi said had nothing to do with me. We think we’re part of the story, but we’re just the tangents. It’s the same thing I’ve been — you know? In there.”
Jed looked horrified. “I don’t understand, but I know that’s not true!”