Love and Treasure by Waldman Ayelet

Author:Waldman, Ayelet [Waldman, Ayelet]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780385533553
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2014-04-01T00:00:00+00:00

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WITH A SECOND NIGHT TOGETHER, Amitai and Natalie turned a one-night stand into something else, something out of the ordinary in Amitai’s postdivorce life. He’d only rarely been with the same woman more than once, and never two nights in a row. But he had not wanted to let Natalie leave the hotel after they finished with Krisztián, had urged her to come upstairs to celebrate their successful day. She had been as eager as he, and in the morning he’d found himself for the first time not even craving the solitude of the swimming pool. In the elevator she looped her fingers through his. He used to hate it when Jessica did that. His hand had always immediately begun to twitch restlessly, eager to escape. But he found himself enjoying the feeling of Natalie’s cool, smooth fingers in his hand and did not let go until he had to open the taxicab door for her.

Krisztián had agreed to meet them at the library of the Department of Justice. Out of his waiter’s tuxedo he looked much younger, and he’d added to the impression by putting gel in his hair and fashioning it into something that looked more like a porcupine’s pelt than a hairstyle. At the library, a young female reference librarian, made cheerfully cooperative by the lucky coincidence of her sharing Natalie’s name, handed them a thick dossier, the official records of the trial of the opera house conspirators. The Hungarian Natalia helped Krisztián read through the documents, and it was she who discovered the letter from the Office of the Prosecutor to the judge, informing him that a decision had been made not to prosecute a “girl dwarf” by the name of Miss Gizella Weisz for her involvement in the affair.

Krisztián said, “It is because she was, how do you call it? Retard?”

The Hungarian Natalia corrected him, “A mental defect.”

Gizella Weisz, secretary to the most famous Hungarian feminist of the age, was described in the prosecutor’s letter as “defective of both body and mind,” a woman in possession of a “child’s shape and naïveté.”

“They actually said she was mentally retarded?” Natalie asked, aghast.

Natalia said, “Yes. The prosecutor says because Gizella is mentally retarded, she is not responsible. He says to release her, but on condition that she go to family in Transylvania. She becomes like a child, you know? She must live with her family, and if not with her family, in an institution.”

“So, basically they took away her right to self-determination?”

Krisztián and the librarian shared a glance, neither sure what Natalie meant, only that this information made her angry.

Amitai said, “Clearly she was not retarded, or she could not have become Mrs. Schwimmer’s secretary. Therefore the prosecutor did what needed to be done to justify her release. Actually, she was a very lucky woman. The others were sentenced to years of hard labor. With her physical limitations, she would have died. Mrs. Schwimmer must have intervened to save her life.”

“We should look for a connection, maybe, between the prosecutor and Mrs.

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