by Leif Nikunen
For years and years after, Marja-Loviisa Makinen would remember him as the man she might have married, with dark eyes, wet like wine, and ways sweet and dangerous as wine — that dark Bela, who worked for Anton Tiillikov as his rum-runner and foreman.
For the Tiillikovs — many still called them by their Russian name, though it had been chopped down to “Tilley” once they arrived in America — were expanding their business just then, the start of the 1920s, to meet the geographic demands of Prohibition. Which is why their farm foreman drove such a fast black car and seemed to work such odd hours, coming and going by dark of night. A Hungarian, the friend of a friend, he had come two years after the war and said, Bela is my name.
As in Bela Kun? Said Anton Tiillikov, who fancied himself a socialist.
God help us, yes, Bela said. God have pity on the Hungary he left behind, the worm. Of your courtesy, remember that I am named for King Bela the Third. A different sort of Bela altogether.
Listen, I might have a job for you. Can you drive a car? said Anton Tiillikov.
Can I drive a car? Ha.
He could drive. People said he had worked smuggling arms from Hungary to Czechoslovakia and silk and cigarettes and furniture from Vienna to Budapest. He was a nephew or maybe the cousin of someone named Janos whom Anton Tiillikov’s younger brother, Pavel, had worked with and went on strike with during the Mesabi Iron Range strike of 1907. Now Janos worked for a leftist Hungarian newspaper in New York City called Elore while in the faraway west, his old comrade, Pavel Tiillikov, helped put the moonshine in bottles in an old potato cellar half under the ground. And would say to Bela, while they packed the bottles in boxes and stacked them in the car, Now 1907, that was a strike. Red Finlanders and red Austrians shoulder to shoulder, the Minnesota newspapers all said. Well, I wasn’t a Finlander and Janos wasn’t an Austrian, but could you tell it to anyone? They had us pegged. But I always thought we made as much trouble as anyone, whatever we were. Man, that was a strike.
Bela only smiled. Words slumbered off the tip of his tongue. He made Marja feel a certain way. And gave her things: A music box from Switzerland, Turkish coins from Istanbul, postcards of bridges and cathedrals and parliament buildings in Budapest. And said to her sometimes, What about something in return, eh? Some bit of comfort and joy in return?
Showing his bright teeth.
But she did not know what he would have, what he had in mind, she was half afraid it might be marriage and half afraid it might not, and what would she do if he asked?
For the Hungarians were all some foreign faith that was not Lutheran and they had not even heard of Lars Laestadius, whose Voice Crying in the Wilderness Marja kept on the little table next to her bed next to her Bible, with a seashell and a silver spoon to hold the pages open.
Bela did not know the words to hymns or to Luther’s Small Catechism, either. Bela did not know about Lars Levi Laestadius and probably not about the stirring of the Holy Ghost that made the newly awakened ones shout aloud and speak unknown words and prophesy. But she had the feeling he knew other things. She was afraid of Bela; the way he looked at her with fine, private knowledge of mysteries she only suspected.
She liked his black beard. She liked the way his black hair pushed back from his widow’s peak hairline and the way his black car shone in the dark when it raced past the Makinen place under the arcs of falling stars, full clink of glass bottles in the back, rattling over the ancient lake plain to where those white lights of Edinburg washed and bobbed like foam against the south horizon.
Once he showed her his pistol. It was a Smith and Wesson, black and bright. He kept it strapped to his left leg above his boot. He said he wanted to be able to reach it when he was driving.
In his right boot he kept a knife. He had waved it in front of her eyes one time. It had a red wooden handle and a gash of steel for a blade.
It’s a good thing to have a knife even in church, he said. Solemnly, as one might speak an ancient creed while the witnesses of generations leaned over that one sentence, listening.
Marja said, Is it to church you’re always going late at night?
Church? No. But I pray. Sometimes when I’m driving and I pass automobiles parked by the side of the road or see them coming up behind me. God and I are close friends those times, believe me.
It was because of him, Bela, that A. Reinholt Strand and the other members of the James River Hunting Club put up a sign by the Jim River bridge where it crosses below what is now Sand Lake National Wildlife Refuge, up near the North Dakota state line:
This is God’s country. Don’t drive like hell going through it.
Though to be quite honest, no one was ever sure afterward that it ever made a difference. Roads were a thing Hungarians used like horses, apparently, to get from one place to another as quickly as possible.
***
He used to stop by the place and give her chocolate in the evenings when she was milking cows.
Have a bite. It will bring out the savor and sweetness of life, he would say. Here, Marja, taste. I will put it in your mouth for you. On the tip of your tongue, like my Catholic grandmother used to take the Host when I went with her to St. Matthias Church.
Was she Catholic?
Oh, was she. She would tell me, Oh, I feel so sad for you, my child, growing up in a Calvinist home. Not to taste the sweetness and the life of God because you don’t have the Sacrament. One time I asked her, Is it chocolate? And she told me to shush, close my sinful mouth and go ask God and Mary for mercy.
Did you?
I think I might have talked to God about it, but not Mary. I don’t know Mary to speak to, we are not on those kinds of terms.
Well, you are right not to pray to Mary. But I’m afraid your grandmother is right, too, a little bit. You don’t have the Sacrament because you don’t have the Real Presence.
Ah, Marja, how do you know what I have and what I don’t? Christ said to eat and drink, he didn’t say to understand it. And I don’t. When I take the cup I think, Yes, He might be really present here, all right. Wine is such a thing, what is it, what is it up to? That is a very great mystery. And that’s one of the reasons I am thinking quite seriously of becoming Lutheran.
You aren’t either.
Well, maybe not at this moment, no. But I have thought about it. That’s a fact. Do you know what turns me against it? It’s that they make so much of it when it’s in the cup. Wine when it’s in the cup, Marja, is like music that hasn’t been played, written down on one of those books with lines they used to try to teach us music in grammar school. It’s like they don’t want you to play the music, they want to know what you think of it, and if you don’t think the right thing about it, they’ll take the score out of your hands — do you see? But music isn’t music on paper, it’s only black marks on a page — just like wine isn’t wine when it’s in the cup. Man is the proper thing to put wine into. Because when a man drinks it, then it becomes something else, right? Fellowship. And there you are: the body of Christ.
Yet you don’t really believe He’s present, Marja said sadly.
Oh, yes, I do, of course I do, He is. Only why must He be on the plate and in the cup? Why isn’t God beside me, slapping a hand on my shoulder, saying, Here, Bela, have a bite to eat, have a drink on me. The finest in the house, try it, Christ’s blood is better than bull’s blood. All sweetness and life, drink it, taste it, right here in my sorrow and dying.
Hush. I don’t like that talk of bulls.
Bull’s Blood, Marja, is a wine of Hungary.
Still I don’t like to hear you speak of the blood of Christ in that way.
Marja: No one is more serious about the Lord’s Table than I am. I have Catholic friends who have told me that. Bela, they say, you’re a man of sacramental vision, you’re almost a Catholic — let’s go drinking and then play cards.
Oh, yes, I believe it from what I’ve heard about Catholics, Marja said. They say they do many things that aren’t in the Bible.
I don’t know about it, you would have to ask one. But they tell some tales. They say the Virgin Mary appeared to a herdsman’s wife at Kula. It was in the top of a tree.
Jaha. Do you believe that?
Well, what is so odd? A woman appeared to me in a tree once. Her name was Janka. She was waiting for me, believe it, in a big oak tree in the park in Pest. Or wait — no, I think it was in the Farkasreti Cemetery. I’m sure it was so that I would notice her feet and ankles.
I suppose you did.
Marja. Everything is sweetness and life, all right? Here, have another bite.
That was when he took the shell comb from his pocket, bright as amber, smooth as horn.
Do you see this, Marja?
Oh my, she said.
Do you like it?
It’s very pretty.
Pretty. Yes, he said, and laughed shortly. Oh, yes, I think so. But let me tell you why I have this pretty comb: Because a woman would not take it from me, even though I had brought it for her all the way from Vienna. Her family wouldn’t have it. They wouldn’t let me marry her because I was poor and rough, always fighting. And she was rich.
She was, very rich. Well, her family was. They lived on Aranykez Street, Goldenhand Street. Doesn’t that just figure? And she loved me, even though her parents said she shouldn’t and even though they told her she must not accept gifts from me, a gentile with no family to speak of. A gentile with a knife in his boot. So she didn’t accept it, my gift. But how she wanted to, oh, yes. She wanted it bad that her hand was shaking. And she was so hurt about not being able to take it, that … well. How can I say it.
He looked at Marja sorrowfully and shook his head, pursing his lips.
She killed herself?
Who knows why women do what they do for love.
Oh, that is why. It’s red like blood, red-red, and that is why, Marja said. I could never take it.
What? Listen, of course you can take it. In fact, I think I am remembering it wrong — I believe she died of something else. Jewish girls, they’re not too healthy, not like Hungarian girls. They don’t get enough meat — no pork. I believe the influenza carried her off the end of 1918. Listen, she didn’t want the comb anyway. She said it reminded her of the blood of Christ and made her tremble. Here, have it. It’s yours.
***
It was that same comb that she pulled through hair like weary marsh grass years and weary long years later when she remembered; when Anastiina Saari came to visit, for example. She’d never told anyone where she’d got that comb. Anastiina Saari could not have imagined it was a gift from old Bela Ember, that man with the paunchy gut and the thick white hair who lived upstairs on the sixth floor of the Alonzo Ward Hotel in Edinburg and, as she told Marja, drank himself drunk every Friday and Saturday night in the first-floor pub called The Grain Exchange. So sad. And to think that they had both known him when he was young and handsome.
Yes, it was true, it was common knowledge now that Bela was a drunk. Always talking. Always saying over Johnny Walker Whiskey, She had black hair, my sweet, my girl, my precious stone. My God, she was lovely! And I would toast her on her birthday with Bikaver. Let me tell you, there is no drink in America like it for that holy sort of a time. Bull’s blood, by God! Now there is a drink for a drunken old wreck of a man to toast a beautiful woman. And my girl was beautiful.
Explaining in tones that became more and more slurred how he had tried to get vines started here – long before he had this job sweeping the shop floors at the 3M plant, before he worked at the print shop, before he’d met her, even, while he was still working for Anton Tilley and his son, Gregorius – but it hadn’t worked out very well. The Tilleys had no vision, for one thing. What could you expect of people who strained grain alcohol or that of potatoes through charcoal and called that a drink? They were not winemakers; they hadn’t the soul for it. They had no sacramental vision.
And then the vines had not done so well. Vines of Tokaj, Eger, Szekszard, Pozsony, poor, lonely immigrants to Dakota like himself. He covered them with a foot of cow manure and straw on top of that but the cold killed them anyway. Imagine, even the cow dung was not as good here in America, it lacked a certain soundness to keep out winter.
It makes Leander sad just to listen to him, Anastiina Saari said. But that’s what you get for looking at the bottom of a glass too often. Isn’t it just what the word of the Lord says? Wine is a mocker, strong drink is raging, and he who is deceived thereby is not wise. And to think, he wanted to marry you, Marja. Thank God you chose better.
***
Yes, she made her choice. Two men asked her, and she chose one. Under the elm trees that Midsummer’s Eve of 1922, next to the coffee urn with one bad leg that had been placed at one end of the deal table so the ash tree could brace it up.
Bela was the one she refused. Afterward he said, That’s fine, I’m glad for you, Marja, be happy. I’ve been disappointed in love before, it’s nothing new for me. That’s true. Listen, one day I nearly jumped off the chain bridge into the Danube, someone had rejected me, but who? Was it Fruzsina? Or Juliska or Janka? I think it was Juliska. Dear Liska, what a girl. I don’t think she knew what a beauty she was, I’m sure she didn’t, nor how deeply she had wounded me. I told my cousin Istvan, Listen, Istvan, take this note to Liska, tell her my last words were of her, and you yourself take these boots of mine and wear them to remember me by. You can keep them, why should I spoil them with water? Now go along home, I’ll jump in a while.
But do you know, I got cold standing there barefoot on the bridge, first on one foot and then on the other, and the Danube looked so gray. I think it was March. If a man is going to drown himself it should be in a blue river, not gray, don’t you agree? So by and by I hurried off home and there is Istvan, trying on my boots. I told him, Here, give them back, it’s all off. And give me that stupid note.
Then I went off to Vienna and found work moving furniture, in a manner of speaking. I heard afterward that Liska discovered later how much she loved me, but of course it was too late by then, it always is. My heart had changed, you see. One time I saw her on the street and I could see her heart went out to me – I had just got off the white paddle steamer that makes the all-night trip from Vienna to Budapest, and I was wearing a new black suit – but I just lit my cigar with a match and then threw the match in the street and rubbed it underfoot. Ha! My old flame, you see. And she knew exactly what I was saying.
That’s how stupid I was earlier, to think of drowning for a woman. I wouldn’t do that now, a woman is not worth all that. But at the very least I will never marry. That’s the truth, that’s how much I care for you, Marja. I swear it on my mother’s grave.
Marja learned later from Pavel Tiillikov that Bela Ember’s mother had a grave, but she was not in it. She had bought it ahead of time beside his poor dead father. And probably that affected the seriousness of Bela’s oath.
***
For this was that same Bela Ember who, in 1949, married a displaced person from Lithuania who had been in a German camp. Her name was Petra. Her face was rather plain, her skin was very pale. He fell in love with her after hearing her weeping at a city picnic on the shoulder of the Catholic priest saying, Yes, on the gate, on the iron gate:
Arbeit macht frei!
He began to woo her that very afternoon by sitting down next to her on the grass and talking about the sweetness and the life of God, the very sensuousness of God, that he could taste in the Sacrament. How odd and beautiful that God should have made taste, he thought. In fact how strange that God should have made wine and bread and water men and women and children and all the other good things that are in the sacraments. Which was, by the way, why he was thinking of becoming a Catholic and why he was no longer a Marxist. Marxism was such a gray, gray religion, it could not understand beauty in a thing like marriage, it saw only a legal contract written on gray paper. Marxism could never flourish in a wine country, he thought, because the beauty and the sweetness and the life that was in the wine made such a mockery of Marxism.
That was God talking in the cup.
And he told how, while he was still nominally a Marxist, back in 1922, he had almost killed himself for love. A woman had rejected him, but who, what was her name? Maria Louisa or something. Just imagine, a servant girl, she smelled of fish and bacon grease, but beautiful, striking, hair blond like the River Tisza. And the funniest thing was, she didn’t even know how beautiful she was, he was sure she didn’t, nor how deeply she had wounded him. Ah, there could only be one like that in the world. And he was so cut up about losing her, he was going to row out into the James River and drown himself, or maybe shoot himself, or maybe both — that’s true, he could have sat on the edge of the boat and done it, and the Smith & Wesson was right here in his coat pocket if she didn’t believe it — but he didn’t know how to row. He’d never learned and that’s the truth, that’s the sort of thing you didn’t learn out on the Hortobagy, nor on the south side of Pest, either. And then the water was so gray and the boat had smelled of fish. If a man is going to drown himself, shouldn’t it be from a clean boat?
He told her the thought had come to him afterward that suicide would be foolish; he might be more useful if he would sign up to go to Soviet Karelia to live out the worker gospel among those ancient cousins of the Hungarians, the Finns. He was friends at that time with that old Communist recruiter, Kasimir Lahti, so he could have done it — invest your life in the workers, Kasimir was telling him, that’s the way to go. He had always been drawn to some Christlikeness within socialism, and he had noted that many intellectuals of saint-like character were also drawn to it; perhaps Petra had observed the same thing herself. But even as he harbored this thought he remembered that Bela Kun, that wastrel, that idiot, had also gone off to the Soviet Union — it couldn’t be much of a place if it welcomed the likes of him. And while he thought about it he saw something like a vision: men in a room discussing how to bring socialism to the earth, while the son of man, Christ, was nowhere to be found. He was outside under the trees, talking to women and children. Talking about birds and flowers and wine.
Petra should not be surprised if he saw visions, Bela said. The fact was, though it was dim and hard to understand, the Virgin herself had also appeared to him once on a gravestone in Farkasreti Cemetery. Only he didn’t know it was the Virgin, she had clothed herself in appearance as a friend of his, a shopgirl named Janka who sold women’s hats and stockings, though he realized long afterward that there was a kind of icy purity in the yellow stockings she wore that day that was not quite earthly; and then she tapped her heel on the headstone. That’s how he knew she was the Virgin. Saying to him without words, Look here, life is fleeting; you’d better look to it. And that’s another part of the reason he was considering converting to Catholicism.
Are you really? she asked.
I think about it all the time, he said.
Petra was 20 years younger than Bela was. If she wasn’t beautiful, still there was something extraordinary in the contrast of her black hair and pale skin. She married Bela and in time had three daughters who looked all the same, only not plain like their mother, but as lovely as dark princesses.
As years went on it seemed as though Petra became, if not outright beautiful, at least some shade of pretty. For Bela found it necessary to grimace all around him in restaurants and say, By God, Petra, do you see the way every man here looks at you? Do they think I’m not a man, don’t they see me sitting here, don’t they know you’re with me?
Don’t they care that I carry a pistol in my pocket?
On one occasion he stood up and said, with cordial, contained wrath, Gentlemen, I appreciate the nature of your interest, being a man myself. But finders keepers. Hands off.
And he held up her hand so that all could see her wedding band.
Bela fretted openly about unscrupulous young men who might try tempt Petra to infidelity and she always giggled as though it were the funniest thing in the world. He would say to her, I trust you completely, my girl, it’s those young men in whom I place no confidence. For God’s sakes, Petra, have them use the front door if I’m out, they’re likely to break a leg or have a flowerpot fall on them trying to climb in at the windows to recite poems and then we’ve got the hospital bill to pay.
Or he would say to the men down at the pub on the first floor of the Alonzo Ward Hotel, It’s the saddest thing, gentlemen, I wake in the night and there is this racket on the roof and I think, Is it cats in love? Or more unscrupulous young men pining with love for my dear wife? And I am too tired to get up and go see. That’s how it is when you are past 60 and you are married to a beautiful woman. And I don’t know what she did with my pistol and how would I see to shoot them anyway, my eyes are so bad. Have you tried trifocals?
Oh, God, don’t. They’re an absolute joke.
He cried when she died of breast cancer in 1978 and he sold the bungalow and moved to an apartment on the sixth floor of the Alonzo Ward Hotel, the easier to make the trek on Fridays and Saturdays down to drink in the pub that is called now The Grain Exchange. On Saturdays he went first to Mass and prayed for her and wept.
He had never got around to converting to Catholicism, though in truth any number of things had pointed him that direction, and he would gladly sit and discuss these signs and tokens at length. The Catholics still would not let him dine at the Lord’s Table with them.
But he and the priest, McNenny, would go sometimes after Mass to The Grain Exchange and have one together.
McNenny, back from one of his trips to Rome, once met Bela at The Grain Exchange with a bottle of Sangiovese, a red wine of Aprilia, in the Pontine Marshes. The bartender was kind enough to bring them two glasses and the priest poured and said, Sangiovese, that word is what’s left over from the Latin words, sanguis Jovis, the blood of Jove. But it does not make me think of Jove.
No, Bela said. And hoisted one of the glasses and regarded it with his shining eye and said, Let us proclaim the mystery of faith.
And the priest, McNenny, said: Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again.
***
Marja learned this mainly from Anastiina Saari, whose husband, Leander, was in the tombstone trade, and, that being so, found it necessary to stop at the pub called The Grain Exchange on various Fridays and Saturdays on business. Just to look around to take stock of the ones who would be dying soon; for Leander, by observation, had discovered that old men were drawn to dark and respectable public houses the way dying animals were drawn to waterholes.
So it was that Anastiina Saari told her how Bela Ember with the paunchy gut and the thick black hair sat and grieved for his pale girl, his Precious Stone, his Petra, every Saturday evening and sometimes other evenings, too, at the polished mahogany bar of The Grain Exchange. He would sit there talking about her to that priest, McNenny. Positively weeping, Anastiina Saari said. So that the bartender had to come by every so often with a cloth and wiped the salt tears off the wood in front of him, if you can imagine a grown man blubbering like that over a dead wife.
Imagine, Marja said.
