determination. I don’t hide in the corners. I gain ĕy pounds, and
when I walk in the streets I push out my stomach and watch
reĘections of this new version of me glide by in shop windows. I don’t
immediately recognize this feeling. en I remember. is is what it
feels like to be happy.
* * *Klara and Csicsi marry in the spring of 1947, and Béla and I drive to
Košice in his green Opel Adam for the ceremony. It’s another
momentous occasion that our parents miss, another happy day made
less so by their absence. But I am pregnant and my life is full and I will
not let sorrow pull me down. Magda plays the family piano. She sings
the tunes our father used to sing. Béla struggles with competing
notions: to sweep me up in a dance or to make me sit and rest my feet.
My sisters lay their hands on my belly. is new life inside me belongs
to all of us. It’s our new beginning. A piece of our parents, and
grandparents, that will continue on and out into the future.
at is the topic of conversation as we take a break from the music,
as the men light up cigars. e future. Csicsi’s brother Imre will leave
soon for Sydney. Our family group is already so small. I don’t like the
thought of us dispersing. Prešov already feels so far away from my
sisters. Before the night is through, before Béla and I drive home,
Klara pulls me and Magda into the bedroom.
“I have to tell you something, little one,” she says.
I can tell from Magda’s frown that she already knows what Klara is
about to say.
“If Imre goes to Sydney,” Klara says, “we will go there too.”
Australia. Among our friends in Prešov, because of the Communist
takeover under way in Czechoslovakia, there is also talk of
immigrating, maybe to Israel, maybe to America, but the immigration
policies are looser in Australia. Ava and her husband have mentioned