The Choice

me like a tide. “Don’t laugh,” the doctors had warned me, as though
laughter was a constant temptation, as though I was in danger of
laughing to death. “If you laugh, you will have more pain.” ey were
right. It does hurt, but it also feels good.
I lie awake that night thinking of him in the bed just above mine,
thinking up things to impress him, things I studied in school. e next
day, when he visits my room, I tell him everything I have been able to
remember in the night about Greek myths, calling up the most obscure
gods and goddesses. I tell him about Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams,
the last book Eric and I read together. I perform for him, the way I
used to perform for my parents’ dinner guests, my turn in the spotlight
before Klara, the headlining act, took the stage. He looks at me the
way a teacher looks at a star pupil. He tells me very little about himself,
but I do learn that he studied violin when he was young and still loved
to play chamber music recordings and conduct in the air.
Béla is twenty-seven years old. I am only a child. He has other
women in his life. e woman he was kissing on the train platform
when I interrupted him. And, he tells me, another patient here at the
TB hospital, his cousin Marianna’s best friend, a girl he dated in high
school, before the war. She is very ill. She isn’t going to make it. He
calls himself her ĕancé, a gesture of hope for her on her deathbed, a
gesture of hope for her mother. Months later, I will learn that Béla also
has a wife—a near stranger, a woman with whom he was never
intimate, a gentile, with whom he made an arrangement on paper in
the early days of the war in an effort to protect his family and his
fortune.
It isn’t love. It’s that I am hungry, so very hungry, and I amuse him.
And he looks at me the way Eric did that long-ago day in the book
club, as though I am intelligent, as though I have worthwhile things to
say. For now, that’s enough.
On my last night in the TB hospital, I lie in my snug little room and