“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, I wasn’t in the mood for news.
The smell hits me head-on as I enter her apartment building through the side door. Margo, her downstairs neighbour, must be cooking lamb again. I know what that means for my grandmother: another bad mood. Hungarians hate lamb.
It’s hot and dusty in the concrete stairwell. This two-storey red-brick eyesore from the fifties was built to make the winters colder and the summers hotter. Par for the course in this neighbourhood of run-down apartment buildings, old weatherboard semi-detached cottages and peeling pastel store fronts only three blocks from a beautiful sprawling ocean beach with powder-like white sand and blue-green surf. Side by side, the ugly, the uninteresting and the magnificent have made this place their home over the last hundred years. Impressive thirty-metre-high cliff faces define a coastline coated in graffiti and chewing gum. Bushy and vibrant banksias, bottlebrush trees and jacarandas overlook vast concrete schoolyards with wirenet fencing and rotten football poles. Newly renovated homes of glass and chrome sit above cracked footpaths with the fluorescent painted markings of half-finished utility work. This is North Bondi. This is home. I know my grandmother and I fit comfortably somewhere in the middle of this ragtag community, somewhere in there with the stoners and the supermodels, the Orthodox Jews in black coats and the young professionals in SUVs. The streets are full of stay-at-home mums with colourful prams, out-of work naturopaths with dirty bras, English tourists, Israeli backpackers, grumpy old men and hyperactive children.
For Sam, this place is a suburban hell, a bottomless pit of baggy tracksuit pants and unkempt hairdos that invariably smell of lavender oil and sweaty armpits. For Mama, this place is an urban nightmare, a concrete jungle with too much noise and too many accents, and she’d never set foot here again if it weren’t for the fact that all her friends and family still live here.
My grandmother always greets me at her apartment with a goulash and a Monologue. Both have a similar effect on me: they fill me immediately with that warm, familiar taste of family, then leave me feeling irritated and uncomfortable for the rest of the day. I never learn. I always enjoy them greedily, completely in denial of the heaviness that inevitably follows.
“Hi my Lily,” kiss kiss. She answers the door in a semi-transparent leopard print shirt, navy blue tracksuit pants and rollers in her hair. I can feel her crimson lipstick smear all over my cheeks. “Come in, daahrlink. You look terrible.”
This is what’s called a Jewish compliment.
“Thanks, Anyu,” I reply.
My grandmother’s name is Agi, but I’ve always called her Anyu, even though it means mother in Hungarian, not grandmother. Both my parents used that word when I was little. At first I thought it was her name, and later that it meant grandmother, and when I eventually learned the truth, it was too late. Anyu had stuck. It’s the only part of my father’s life that remains part of my every day. My mother, too, still calls her Anyu, though always through gritted teeth.
I head straight for the faux-wood table in the small dining area adjacent to the kitchen. The medium-brown shag-pile carpet makes the space seem even smaller than it is, its hairy fingers showing every wayward crumb and every granule of dust since the last half-hearted attempt at a vacuum by the “simple Filipino girl who hasn’t stolen anything yet”. That’s Anyu being compassionate and understanding.
By the wall opposite the kitchen, a dark, wooden sideboard holds a messy patchwork of everyday things and obscure bits and pieces