feel useless.
“Please teach me to cook,” I ask Mariska one day.
“I don’t ever want you in this kitchen,” she says.
* * *To launch me on my new life, Béla introduces me to the Prešov elite,
the lawyers and doctors and businessmen and their wives, beside
whom I feel gangly and young and inexperienced. I meet two women
about my age. Ava Hartmann is a fashionable woman married to a
wealthy, older man. She wears her dark hair in a side part. Marta
Vadasz is married to Béla’s best friend, Bandi. She has reddish hair
and a kind, patient face. I watch Ava and Marta intently, trying to see
how I should behave and what I should say. Ava and Marta and the
other women drink cognac. I drink cognac. Ava and Marta and the
other women all smoke. One night aer a dinner party at Ava’s house
—she made the best chopped liver I have ever tasted, with green
pepper in addition to onions—I remark to Béla that I’m the only one
who doesn’t smoke, and the next day he brings me a silver cigarette
case and silver cigarette holder. I don’t know how to use it—how to
insert the cigarette into one end, how to inhale, how to blow the
smoke out through my lips. I try to mirror the other women. I feel like
an elegant parrot, nothing but an echo dolled up in nice clothes that
my father did not make for me.
Do they know where I’ve been? Sitting in parlors and around
ornate dining tables, I gaze at our friends and acquaintances and
wonder. Have they lost the same things Béla and I have lost? We don’t
talk about it. Denial is our shield. We don’t yet know the damage we
perpetuate by cutting ourselves off from the past, by maintaining our
conspiracy of silence. We are convinced that the more securely we lock
the past away, the safer and happier we will be.
I try to relax into my new privilege and wealth. ere will be no