The Choice

near. I don’t even Ęirt—not in a romantic way. We are like two
shipwrecked people staring at the sea for signs of life. And in each
other we see a glimmer. I ĕnd that I am stepping into life again. I feel
that I am going to belong to someone. I know Béla is not the love of
my life, not the way Eric was. I’m not trying to replace Eric. But Béla
tells me jokes and writes me twenty-page letters, and I have a choice to
make.
When I tell Klara that I am going to marry Béla, she doesn’t
congratulate me. She turns to Magda. “Ah, two cripples getting
hitched,” she says. “How’s that going to work?” Later, at the table, she
speaks to me directly. “You’re a baby, Dicuka,” she says. “You can’t
make decisions like this. You’re not whole. And he isn’t either. He has
TB. He stutters. You can’t marry him.” Now I have a new motivation
for this marriage to work. I have to prove my sister wrong.
Klara’s objection isn’t the only impediment. ere is the fact that
Béla is still legally married to the gentile woman who protected his
family fortune from the Nazis, and she refuses to divorce him. ey
have never lived together, never had a relationship of any kind other
than that of convenience—for her, his money; for him, her gentile
status—but she won’t grant him the divorce, not at ĕrst, not until he
agrees to pay her a large sum of money.
And then there is his ĕancée in the Tatra Mountains, dying of TB.
He begs her friend Marianna, his cousin who had escaped to England
but returned aer the war, to deliver the news that he isn’t going to
marry her. Marianna is justiĕably furious. “You’re horrible!” she yells.
“You can’t do this to her. I won’t in a million years tell her you’re
breaking your promise.” Béla asks me to come with him back to the
hospital so he can tell her himself. She is gracious and kind to me, and
very, very ill. It rattles me to see someone so physically devastated. It is
too much like the recent past. I am afraid to stand so close to death’s
door. She tells me she is happy that Béla will marry someone like me,