She sets down her drink and blinks at me. I can see her eyes are wet. She wants me to come with her, maybe for only a little while, but maybe forever. And she’s cool with that. She and Amber and the good rabbi are cool with that. I marvel at how big their hearts must be.
We finish and go to a movie. A comedy. Part two to a part one neither of us saw, but it was just about to start and there were tickets available, and who are we kidding that it was really about the movie in the first place. The popcorn is warm and the crowd not too talky. We laugh a little, and I even manage to get lost in the story for a few seconds now and then. The ugly girl isn’t ugly after all. See what a new wardrobe and a sassy gay friend can do? This time, she’ll get the promotion and the man. I just know it.
By ten, we’re back in the apartment, and Georgina drinks a glass of white wine and reads the New York Post, clucking her tongue and shaking her head at things she says never, ever happen in Texas.
I tell her I’m going to read in my room and kiss her on the cheek as I leave. She jumps a little at the kiss, and then smiles. I close the door to my bedroom behind me, bury my face in the pillow. Fuck you, Dad. Fuck you for doing this to me. Fuck you for taking a job that can get you kidnapped. Fuck you for keeping the only other family I have from me so that they’re nothing but strangers and photographs. Fuck you for making me choose.
But he had his reasons. Must have. Right, Dad? I look for a photograph that I always kept on my dresser—of my dad, mom, and me sometime around when I was five. We were on vacation somewhere, Crete maybe, just before we left for the post in Algeria. My mom is in a bikini and wide-brimmed straw hat. My dad is in a pair of baggy swim trunks, and his skin is red from the sun. But this, too, is missing, another item seized in Carlisle’s raid. Where are you, you asshole?
Six
Bela greets me at the door with a finger held to his lips. “Lili is asleep,” he whispers as he shows me inside. The apartment is too warm, and I can still smell whatever spices they’d used in their dinner hanging in the air. “Does your aunt Georgina know you’re here?” Bela asks.
“In bed,” I say. “Maybe too much to drink.”
Bela turns to a brass cart parked against the wall where he pours from a bottle into two glasses. “Your turn, then,” he says. “And don’t tell me you’re too young. I started drinking palinka when I was nine.”
I take a glass from him, and he clinks them together. “To your father,” Bela says.
“To my father,” I say, and take a little sip. Rancid fruit burns a trail down my throat to my stomach, and I nearly choke.
Bela sits in his armchair. “So?”
I look at him. “So?”
“You are disturbed tonight. More so. Tell.”
I settle into the couch, fold my legs up against my chest. “They’ve stopped looking for him, Bela. Officially, at least. They say he just—walked away. Abandoned everything and walked away.”
Bela takes a drink and contemplates this for a moment. “This is the bullshit I promised your father I’d protect you from.”
“No clues. No chatter. That’s what they say.”
Bela leans forward, touches my knee. “And do you believe it?”
It is a harder question than I want to admit. “No,” I say.
“And I agree,” Bela says. “It is they who walked away from him, Red Shoes. The CIA is coldhearted, to its own most of all. I have worked with them and I have worked against them, so I’ve seen their cruelty. With my own eyes, I’ve seen it.”
My throat is thick. “Why? Why would they do that?”
“No idea,” he says. “But abandoning their own when an operation turns bad is what they’re known for. I’m sorry, but that is the truth.”
I stand and walk around the room, looking at all the little knickknacks on shelves, lace doilies, the little treasures from the world Bela and Lili used to live in but left behind.
I take a second sip of palinka. It goes down easier. “Chase Carlisle, he got a court order. Georgina has custody until I’m eighteen.”
“So? You will like Texas,” Bela says. “You can listen to the rap music, go to school. Get a nice boyfriend from the football team.”
I manage to give him a little laugh.
“Or whatever teenagers do,” Bela says, smiling at me and refilling his glass. “I know nothing of such a life. When I was your age, there was a war on.”
“I feel like I’m at war now.”
Bela nods. “So you are. And I suppose you are full of fear and think you have no power to do anything.”
“What can I do? I’m seventeen, Bela. A child. Technically.”
He comes over to me, places a grandfatherly hand on my shoulder. “I know this, how your heart hurts. How afraid you are. I felt it, too. My own war started when I was thirteen.”
“Thirteen?”
“You want to know about it, my war, my tiny part of it?” His expression—raised eyebrows, slight smile—something here he wants to tell me, something he wants me to learn.
“I do,” I say.
He walks back to his chair and motions toward the couch. I follow and sit across from him.
“My brother and I, we were in the forest, gathering firewood,” he says. “From there we could see the little shack where our family was hiding. My parents, two sisters, they were outside, in the garden we’d made. Carrots. Potatoes. Fall, it must have been.”
Bela swallows, lets out a long breath, the memory hard to look at. I give him his space by staring down into the palinka left in my glass. The smell of it rises to my nose, sweet and toxic.
“That’s when the German truck arrived. Eight soldiers. No, six. And an officer in a fine leather coat, handsome like a movie star.” He stops again, looks away for a moment before continuing. “My parents and sisters ran, but—this officer, he was a real marksman. Four bullets from his pistol. That’s all it took.”
I feel the tears coming, for him instead of me this time. I blink them away. “I’m sorry, Bela. I had no idea,” I say. “What happened to you?”
He gives me a smile, thin as a wire, sadness and regret and pride all at once. “To me? What choice did I have, Red Shoes? My brother and I, we got guns and went to war.”
“You were just a kid,” I say.
“Not after that,” he says, then points to his stomach. “That fear you have, just here, in your belly?”
“Yes?”
“It is just a feeling. Only that. Ignoring that feeling, that’s all it means to have courage.” He swallows the rest of his palinka and stands. “Come.”
I follow him over to a cabinet with glass doors filled with dusty old books, most of them in Hebrew, some in what I suppose is Hungarian.
“Your father, he gave something to me,” Bela says, opening the cabinet wide. “The morning he left for Paris. Told me to hang on to it until he comes back.”
“Why?”
“In the event his apartment was searched, I suppose.” He pulls a single book off the shelf and hands it to me.
It’s the copy of 1984 my dad had shown me the night of his birthday. I turn it over in my hands. “Why didn’t you tell me about this before?”
“Oh, it would certainly not be for you, Red Shoes.”
“Who else?”