Work-in-Progress…
Lotte became a refugee in 1947, and since the war had taken everything she had, she took the war with her, wherever she went, and continued to fight it for the rest of her life in exile. She would bring it up seemingly every other day, and she would pick at it, reminding her children of her former glory and her family’s status, which progressed from haute bourgeoisie to minor Austro-Hungarian nobility as she aged, until finally her youngest daughter Sissi started calling her the Countess of Budapest in her old age. She didn’t seem to mind. We thought that was hilarious.
Her husband Stefan did something similar, often boasting to his son Johnny about his family’s cars: Mercedes Benz, Alfa Romeo, Chevrolet. Chevys? Really?
Lotte never adjusted to her reduced circumstances; she became a perpetual malcontent. First, it was how low Brazilians were, then how low Americans were. While this was irritating to her children, it also piqued our curiosity, since it made us feel like we had some status, somewhere, even if it was just in her own mind.
She adored her father and their house in the center of Budapest, and she worshipped the photographs that she still had of him and their house. The house photos were slightly toned black and white, giving them a brownish tinge. They were pictures of rooms without people, staged, just furnishings. One of them, a dining room, had a large piece of china porcelain at the center of a dining table. This, we were told solemnly and repeatedly over the years, is a Meissen soup tureen. We became enthralled by this object. What’s a soup tureen? This, you ignorant children, is how soup is served in fine homes, like ours. We had no idea, since we only knew about heating up soup from a can on a stove top. We realized that this fine object in a fine home required servants to deliver it to the table, a datum that only made us more giddy with excitement. Yes, Lotte admitted, we had many servants in my father’s house. We gasped dutifully, thinking how cold the soup would be by the time it got to your plate..
The house was nationalized by the communist government, and some of the contents stored in a museum in Budapest. Sometime in the 1990s, Lotte was actually able to retrieve some of these furnishings, and had them shipped to the states. Lotte and her sister Katya*, who lived in the midwest, split up the loot: Katya got the soup tureen, Lotte got various items of furniture. Improbably, the tureen had survived; survived the war, the communists, the basement of the museum, and the trip by sea to the US.
The next part of the story concerns Lotte’s sister Katya and her death some three decades later. It also concerns Lotte’s youngest child, her daughter Sissi, and how the soup tureen came into her possession on Katya’s death.
Tragically, Sissi had remained Lotte’s acolyte over the years while her older brother and sister fled. Sissi eventually rejected them both for this betrayal. But aunt Katya’s estate was of great interest to her. Since Sissi had been palmed off by Lotte for years, every summer, on Katya and her husband, Sissi decided that she was entitled to Katya’s estate. This was fine with Johnny and ??, so they kept their distance, as getting in Sissi’s way by then was like stepping in front of a freight train.
Sissi would visit Katya around the time Katya was forced to go into an assisted living facility (her house had burned down, due to a faulty space heater). Sissi would visit, they would argue, then Sissi would make her go back to the nursing home, which Katya did not want to do. On one of these trips to visit Katya, she took a few things back home with her. Yes, the soup tureen. And half of a supposedly antique Bible in two volumes, Old and New Testament (Lotte had the other half). We don’t know who got which half. Nor do we know what else Sissi had managed to spirit away.
Katya was not happy about any of this. So she gets a visit from her lawyer, urging her to make a will. Sissi had previously alienated them both (Katya and lawyer), as well as Katya’s caretaker. Katya was longer her old self, already a little eccentric to begin with. The lawyer urges her to leave her estate to a bird sanctuary, since she was convinced by now that only the birds loved her. She had always fed them lavishly. Her nieces and nephews were, quite explicitly, to get nothing.
As it turned out, Katya was an investor, and loved receiving those periodic corporate dividends. She had positions in General Dynamics, Disney, BP, Chevron, etc., a portfolio that had appreciated to around 2 million dollars at the time of her death. She never knew.
If you ask us how much a Meissen soup tureen is worth, we would tell you, “About two million.” Sissi never knew either. Should we tell her?
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*See Katya’s obituary in Chapter …
thepoor pieces of royal copenhagen (with seagull motifs) that were endlessly glued together and filled with plaster
She worried it like a bone (Didion)
Alas, World War Two put an end to all that, sending most of our family into emigration, and what remained behind into communist bondage.
