She nodded, picturing this American couple she didn’t know opening shoe boxes and examining shoes, trying to decide which pair would be suitable for a girl like her. A girl with nothing.
She got up and walked around, a little shocked at the sight of her stick-thin legs ending in these pretty shoes. “Thank you,” she managed to say. She took the shoes off and tried to give them back to him, but he wouldn’t take him, so she put them on again and walked out of the room, the old shoes in her arms.
* * *
“Natalia, you have to get out of that bed,” Anna said. “If you lie there one more day, your muscles will waste away. You have to learn to walk again, Natalia,” Anna said, “or you’ll be in a wheelchair or leaning on two canes, like an old woman.”
“Thank you for your candor, Anna,” Natalia said. She got her legs over the side of the bed and, with Anna holding her hands, stood up. “Well,” she said, after a moment. “How strange the world looks vertical.”
* * *
James Grant gave Anna another chocolate bar. Dark chocolate, with bits of some kind of nut in it. She shared it with Natalia, sitting on a bench in the sun. “Is that it?” Natalia said, shaking the empty foil wrapper. “Is it all gone?”
Nearby, a man played a violin, and when he took a break he came over to where Anna and Natalia were seated and said this was his farewell performance. He was leaving in the morning for a displaced persons camp. “Do I congratulate you?” Natalia said.
He laughed. His name was Zoltan; he was Hungarian. He was from Keszthely.
“Oh God, I know that town,” Natalia said, shading her eyes from the sun with her hand. “I met my husband there. Or near there.”
“I’m not going back,” said Zoltan. “Budapest is in ruins from the siege. What the Germans and Russians did to Budapest is an atrocity, I am told. I have friends who emigrated to Los Angeles years ago. They’re in the film industry, and they’re going to see what they can do for me.”
“You’re a filmmaker?”
“A playwright. That is, I’m an architect. I was an architect, and I got inspired to write one play, a smidgeon of a one-act play, two actors, lots of high-flown rhetoric, but eventually it got produced at a theater in Budapest.”
“My husband is a writer,” Natalia said.
“What is his name?”
Natalia told him her husband’s name.
“Are you kidding?” He held out his arms, the violin in his hand. “I knew him, for God’s sake. A long time ago, in Budapest. There was a group of writers, architects, musicians, composers, who called themselves the Elastics, and I hung around with them, and so did your husband, sometimes, occasionally, when he was in Budapest. By the way,” he said to Anna, “do you know why we called ourselves the Elastics?”
“The shoes,” Natalia said.
“Exactly. The shoes we wore, with elastic sides, no laces.” After a moment he said, “I want to ask, and I’m afraid to ask. Where is your husband? Is he well?”
“You mean is he alive? I don’t know. I’m going to find him.”
“Yes, of course you will. I wish you luck,” the man said.
Anna listened to Natalia and this man called Zoltan and leaned forward, her elbows on her knees, so that she could admire her shoes, which did not, thank goodness, have elastic sides. Every night she polished them with her skirt. She slept with them under the pillow.
A British soldier was playing soccer with some of the boys. They were all different ages and spoke many languages, but they all knew how to play soccer. People walked past where she and Natalia were sitting. Six weeks ago, they were in Hell and now they were strolling in the sun. How did it happen? People were remarkably durable and resilient. Maybe too resilient. It shocked her a little. She didn’t know what to make of it. Perhaps on the inside, in the soul, in the heart, it was a different matter. She felt happy, and yet she also felt angry, all the time.
Once, in a group of doctors walking past, Anna saw her mother. Her crown of braided hair shone in the sun. She was wearing a gray wool-flannel skirt, a blouse she liked, and over this a doctor’s white coat. Look, Anna nearly said to Natalia. Look, my mother is here. But she knew that her mother was not, in