Chapter3 - 6

Grace made a gesture at the four walls, Briarwood House around them. “All this?”

“It’s not enough,”

Reka cried out, knowing she sounded ungrateful. She was here, alive, when she could so easily be dead back in Berlin... But she still hurt. She hurt so much .

“What would be enough, Attila?”

Reka opened her mouth. Closed it. Opened it again, as the last thirty years flashed through her head. “Grace, I never thought I’d make it this far.”

They sat in silence as Bing Crosby gave way to Nat King Cole’s “Frosty the Snowman.”

“I think I hate Frosty,”

Reka said, mopping her eyes. “I always hope someone will start chasing him around with a hairdryer.”

“I think I hate pálinka ,”

Grace replied. “It tastes like rubbing alcohol with a touch of apricot.”

“It’s an acquired taste.”

“So is happiness, to some people.”

Grace tilted her head, her gaze assessing, and Reka’s fingers suddenly itched for a stick of charcoal. The eyes were the feature to bring out, if you were drawing Grace March: a smudge of a face, a tumble of indistinct curls, all focusing around that tiger-cool gaze. “Try it,”

she said at last.

Reka blinked. “Try what?”

“Happiness.”

Grace rose, smoothing her skirt. “It’s a choice as much as anything. Or you could choose to be angry, and if you stay angry long enough, it will become comfortable, like an old robe. But eventually you’ll realize that old robe is all you’ve got, and there isn’t anything else in the wardrobe that fits. And at that point, you’re just waiting to trade the robe for a shroud—or at least, that’s what I’ve always thought.”

Reka stayed where she was, staring at the sketches. She was, she thought, a little bit hungry after all.

“Merry Christmas,”

Grace said, and let herself out.

Reka’s Haluski

1 package egg noodles 8 strips thick-cut bacon 1 small green cabbage, sliced 1 medium onion, sliced 4 garlic cloves, minced Salt and freshly ground black pepper

Cook the egg noodles according to the package directions in salted boiling water until al dente. Drain and set aside, reserving 1cup of salty pasta water.

Set a large skillet over medium heat. Cook the bacon until crisp, then remove from the skillet and chop into 1 / 2 -inch pieces. Drain off a tablespoon of bacon fat if the skillet is very greasy.

Add the cabbage and onion to the skillet, and sauté for 5minutes. Add the garlic and sauté for another 5minutes. Once the cabbage is tender, add the cooked egg noodles and bacon to the skillet. Stir well, adding a dash of reserved pasta water to combine the flavors.

Season with salt and pepper, and eat on a cold winter day after the holidays, while listening to “Because of You”

by Tony Bennett and His Orchestra.

“Hey, Mrs.Muller,”

the tall Italian girl named Bea said as Reka came up to the fourth-floor landing. The usual Thursday-night noise spilled out of Grace’s apartment: Joe noodling at his guitar, Grace leaning out the window to call the stray cat named Red, Claire and Nora with their feet resting on the Great Dane as they debated whether Kirk Douglas or Stewart Granger was handsomer. “We didn’t think you were back from New York yet,”

Bea continued, ruffling her short black hair.

“Back this morning,”

Reka said, juggling a big steaming pot against her hip. “Is it brighter in here?”

The landing had always looked dark and unwelcoming, but Grace had strung the new hall lamp with Christmas holly, and the walls looked lighter...

“I volunteered to repaint the hall,”

Grace said, edging around Joe onto the landing behind Bea. “It turns out Doilies Nilsson doesn’t object to house improvements; she only objects to paying for them.”

“It’s pretty,”

Reka admitted. A soft buttercream instead of stained off-white, and the flowered wall vine had climbed out of Grace’s apartment and was now making its way clear across the landing. “How’d you get her to agree to the vine?”

“I pointed out the flowers hide the cracks in the wall. She’s keen to cover up the fact that the house needs a carpenter.”

Grace gave the wall a playful thump, and nodded to the pot on Reka’s hip. “What’s that?”

“Dinner.”

Reka handed the pot over. “My turn to cook for the Briar Club.”

“I believe this might be the first time you’ve cooked for us, Attila,”

Grace said, and Reka winced. It was, wasn’t it? Usually she just brought her one can of food in payment and ate as much as she could pack away.

Well, she was going to start taking her turn. Maybe even start adding her share of flowers to that vine, too. “I can’t stay tonight, but I thought I’d cook anyway. Haluski ,”

Reka added gruffly. “Not quite the version you’ll find in Budapest, but still a fine meal for a cold night.”

“Aren’t you a five-tool neighbor after all, Mrs.M.”

Bea beamed as Grace smiled and took the pot inside. Reka started to ask what on earth she meant, but Fliss squeezed into the doorway.

“Has anyone seen my pink scarf? I just put it down and now it’s disappeared— Oh!”

the Englishwoman exclaimed. “Reka, you cut your hair!”

“In New York.”

Reka smoothed the sharp-clipped ends of the bob swinging just below her ears.

“Well, it looks marvelous.”

Fliss had the baby in her arms as usual, rocking and joggling. It’s the baby that would be her feature in a portrait , Reka thought. Somehow Fliss herself—her blond flip, her fluffy pastel skirts—disappeared behind that bundle of blankets in a pretty smear of maternal anonymity.

“Thank you.”

Reka’s eyes landed on the smudgy yellow daisies someone—probably Bea, she always painted daisies—had dotted all over the wall vine in the hall. How was it that all those painted flowers, however badly daubed on by the Briar Club amateurs, seemed to harmonize somehow into the whole? Some magic there.

Maybe some of it would rub off on Reka.

Her room downstairs smelled of haluski , and it looked different. Every bit of furniture was shoved away from the windows, and she’d rolled the rug back. Reka had gone to New York with her three sketches, and they were still there, snugged up in a safe-deposit box taken out officially by Betty Parsons so nothing would show in her own name—and Reka had come back with something else. A few things, in fact: a low-slung easel, some artist’s pencils and chalk, some proper paper.

She stood looking at the easel. “This is a stupid idea, Otto.”

Maybe so , he agreed. Better than cocooning yourself in blankets and old bitter memories, édesem .

But bitterness, Reka thought, would be a hard habit to shed. She was still brimful of it, but she was feeling an itch as well—the itch to draw, to create, to make something even if it was only a badly sketched mess. She even knew what she wanted to draw: portraits, always her specialty. Start with her neighbors’ familiar visages, maybe linked by Grace’s wall vine... instead of blooming into flowers, it might bloom into abstract, color-blocked faces.

She stood there before the easel, sweating in the cold, terrified. Inspiration wasn’t enough; her painting muscles were old and atrophied. Useless, probably. She looked down at her newly sharpened pencils.

“Come on now,”

she grunted, and prayed for a little courage.