neighborhood, where we had expected to ĕnd shelter but instead felt
exposed. In El Paso we were just part of the mix.
* * *One aernoon soon aer our move, I am at the neighborhood park
with Audrey when I hear a mother call to her kids in Hungarian. I
watch her, this other Hungarian mother, for a few minutes, expecting
to recognize her, but then I chide myself. What a naïve assumption,
that just because her voice is familiar, a mirror of my own, we might
have anything in common. Yet I can’t stop tracking her as she and her
children play, can’t let go of the feeling that I know her.
Suddenly, I remember something I haven’t thought of since the
night of Klara’s wedding: the postcard tucked into Magda’s mirror in
Košice. e cursive script across the picture of the bridge: El Paso.
How had I forgotten that ten years ago, Laci Gladstein moved here, to
this city? Laci, the young man who was liberated with us at
Gunskirchen, who was on the top of the train with Magda and me
from Vienna to Prague, who held our hands in comfort, who I
thought might marry Magda one day, who had come to El Paso to
work in his aunt and uncle’s furniture store to save for medical school.
El Paso, the place I thought looked in the postcard like the end of the
world, the place where I now live.
Audrey pulls me out of my reverie, demanding to get on the
swings. As I li her up, the Hungarian woman approaches the swing
set with her son. I speak quickly to her, in Hungarian, before I can
stop myself.
“You’re Hungarian,” I say. “Maybe you know an old friend of mine
who came to El Paso after the war.”
She looks at me in that amused way that adults look at children, as
though I am delightfully, impossibly naïve. “Who is your friend?” she
asks. She is playing along.