will be found out.
My transgression is life. And the beginnings of a cautious joy.
On the train home we have a private room. I prefer its spare
elegance to the hotel. I can imagine myself into a story. We are
explorers, settlers. e motion of the train unspools the apprehension
and turmoil of my brain and helps me focus on Béla’s body. Or maybe
it’s just the smallness of the bed. My body surprises me. Pleasure is an
elixir. A salve. We reach for each other again and again as the train
moves through the night.
I have to run for the bathroom when we return to Košice to visit my
sisters. I vomit over and over. It is good news, but I don’t know it yet.
All I know is that aer more than a year of slow recovery, I am sick
again.
“What have you done to my baby?” Klara screams.
Béla runs his handkerchief in cool water and wipes my face.
* * *While my sisters continue life in Košice, I begin an unexpected life of
luxury. I move into the Eger mansion in Prešov, a ĕve-hundred-year-
old monastery, wide and long, a block of a house, horses and carriages
lined up along the drive. Béla’s business is downstairs and we live
upstairs. Renters occupy other parts of the enormous house. A woman
does our laundry, boiling the sheets, ironing, everything white. We eat
off of china made for the family, their name—my new name—in gold.
In the dining room there is a button I can push that Mariska, the
housekeeper, hears in the kitchen. I can’t eat enough of her rye bread.
I push the button and request more bread.
“You’re eating like pigs,” she mutters to me.
She doesn’t disguise her unhappiness that I have joined the family.
I am a threat to her way of life, to the way she manages the house. It
pains me to see Béla hand her the money for groceries. I am his wife. I