Her grimace doesn’t hide a thing: who the hell is this handsome yet obviously non-Jewish boy nobody’s told me anything about? “Tell me,” she continues. “Can it wait till tomorrow? Is it urgent?”
Only a matter of life or death.
“It can wait,” I say, arranging something for the following day.
Sam is relieved. He doesn’t want to stay and catch something dull from the middle class.
I turn to leave, but am distracted by a guttural bark from the doctor’s now open doorway.
It’s her.
I freeze.
Not for fifteen or so years and then twice in one day!
I panic.
Should I say hello? Could I say hello?
Dr Horvath ambles out into the waiting room with her at his side. She has an unlit cigarette in one hand, a paper in the other.
Can I pretend not to have seen her? Will she notice me? I’m scared. I’m curious. I’m delighted. I’m frozen.
Sam nudges me. “Come on, Lily, let’s go. You’ll be back tomorrow.”
“It’s her,” I mouth. Why am I so nervous?
“What are you doing?” Now he is irritated. “Her who?”
“Her,” I whisper. The taboo. The unmentionable. Suddenly her name comes to me.
“It’s Eva,” I say.
He’s not interested but I can’t move.
Why does Eva get to see the doctor today and not me?
Dr Horvath smiles hello in my direction and lightly touches Eva’s shoulder. “See you next week,” he says. He says ve-ee-ek like it has three syllables.
Before I have a chance to think, she turns to me. She looks right at me.
“Jaj, Lily daahrlink, ugy nézel ki mint as apád a te korodba. Imagine!”
Sam screws up his face. Wogs have always embarrassed him.
I stare at her with a blank look.
“You don’t think?” she continues.
“Lily doesn’t speak Hungarian,” the doctor explains, almost apologetically. “Isn’t that right, Lily?”
I nod sheepishly. I feel like a child.
“Never mind.” Eva bends to rearrange the hem of her skirt. “Ne-v-er mi-nd,” she sings. Through gritted teeth, Sam mumbles something about having to leave.
“Good!” announces Eva. “Give me a lift to the pla-za will you, daahrlink? Come on, kids,” she continues, jabbing Sam lightly in the ribs, “let’s go.” It’s like she has been expecting us, like this is all so natural, as if we have done this a hundred times before.
I have no time to think. No time to plan. What will my grandmother say? It’s not my fault.
She winks at Sam as he helps her into the front seat of his Jeep. “Where are we going? Safari?” She laughs, followed by a coughing fit. “I was at the hospital the day you were born, you know,” she tells me. “We were all very tense and excited, especially your grandmother who is a nervous wreck at the best of times, imagine! And then your Papa came out all sweaty and fidgety. He didn’t have the stomach for this sort of thing, poor kid, but your mother. Jaj! Like an ox! ‘It’s a girl! It’s a girl! It’s a girl’ he kept saying over and over. Imagine, we were all very relieved, you know.”
I catch Sam’s expression in the rear view mirror. I know that look, the what-the-fuck-is-going-on look, the this-is-too-weird-for-me look. We stop at the traffic lights on the corner of Bondi Road. Two more blocks and we’ll be at the Junction. It’s almost over, but I don’t want the trip to end. I want to hear more.
Sam reaches over to light Eva’s cigarette, the same unlit cigarette she’s been waving around since she came out of the surgery.
“Don’t be ridiculous, daahrlink. What are you trying to do, kill me?”
I light myself a cigarette, take a deep drag, then speak.
“When was the last time you saw me, Eva? You know, the last time?”
“You were still very little, daahrlink.”
“How old?”
“How old? I don’t know, maybe four or five, I imagine, little.” She shrugs.
So Papa was still alive.
“What was I doing?”
“I remember it well. I was sitting at the Cosmopolitan and you ran across the road and jumped into my lap. I remember.”
“What did I say?”
“Your mother was very angry, daahrlink. You know how she gets. You asked me for some ice-cream. You loved it when I bought you ice-cream. Pink ice-cream, you asked for, always the same.”
Sam turns back towards me, confused, narrowly missing the mirror of a parked car.
“Ice-cream?” he asks.
I wave him away and continue my interrogation.
“Did you buy it for me? Did Mama let you?” Eva’s right, I do know how Mama gets.
“Your mother said something about being in a rush and you went away.”
“And that was the last time?”
“And that was the last time.”
Sam is right to be confused. The story can’t be true. I’ve never liked ice-cream.
I try to imagine what her story means, and whether it has anything to do with me. They say that you should never let the truth get in the way of a good story, but this one isn’t even good. Was our last meeting too meaningless to remember or was it too painful to recall?
Sam pulls up to the curb. I have to think fast. In a few seconds, Eva will be out of the car, out of my life again.
In my family, stories about Eva, like those about my father, always end badly, and never in English. They end in a language familiar yet completely incomprehensible.
Suddenly, I know what I have to do.
“Teach me Hungarian, Eva,” I say.
Chapter Three
It’s the following evening and I’m on my way to my grandmother’s house for dinner. I didn’t turn up to my appointment at Dr Horvath’s surgery this afternoon. After the excitement of yesterday,
