Hungary

“He met her on the Danube Corso, on the 29th of August, 1936.” The scene is Budapest before the horrors. He is Aladar, a 30-something businessman, divorced, seeking an escape from the oppressive heat. She is an attractive peroxide blonde (“a Jean Harlow type,” he thinks). Their cafe tables abut and their glances lead to a conversation. Her Hungarian is accented, sketchy. She is Lalla, an Italian, a nightclub singer and dancer, or so she claims. He doubts her words. There is a certain frailty about her and sense of unworldliness.

He invites her to dinner but she declines, saying she needs to get home. As he helps her onto the tram, he slips his business card into her hand.

And for weeks thereafter, he returns to the same cafe in hopes of seeing her again. “Like most solitary people,” Boros tells us, “he is a creature of habit.” His persistence doesn’t pay off.

Then one day, a letter arrives in his office. It’s from Lalla, who invites Aladar to visit. “I am laid up with a cold” at the Pannonia sanitorium on the outskirts of town. She is a tuberculosis patient, he realizes.

Boros, who grew up in Budapest and who was herself a patient in such a clinic, captures the safe but fraught atmosphere in which some stay for years and some hemorrhage and die overnight.

Hospitals, like prisons, create their own time. Weeks pass unnoticed, while minutes seem to last for hours and days. You are aware of this change in the rhythm of time as soon as you enter the place. It affects you unpleasantly, like the smell of disinfectants and drugs. It feels like anxiety. You glance at your watch, for instinctively you know that there is something wrong with the time; that you have to come too early or too late. And you begin to wonder how long your visit is supposed to last. You are already counting in minutes and in seconds; the afternoon is never going to end. . . .

Like us, Aladar is, at first, uncomfortable seeing Lalla in her bed, walking her along the ward, sitting her on the terrace. But the ease of her talk and the friendliness of the other patients she introduces him to — bright young Franciska, charming Kati, the unassuming Count, who has been in and out of the clinic (mostly in) for decades — soon overcomes his awkwardness.

He returns the next weekend, and the next, and the next after that (creature of habit, remember?). He takes Lalla out for rides in his car, proud to be seen with a young, beautiful woman. Aladar comes during the week to meet with Lalla’s doctor (days before healthcare privacy regulations), looking for assurance that she will eventually be cured. He wants to take her away, marry her, add her to his treasures. “Yes, she is improved,” the doctor responds, careful not to confuse improved with cured — though Aladar instantly does.

Gradually, we realize the meaning of Boros’s title. Aladar has no more chance of taking Lalla away from the sanatorium for good than the prince has of taking the mermaid from sea. She understands this. On a trip into Budapest, he urges her to spend the night in town. “But remember that no hotel would accept me,” she reminds him, “What with my sputum-mug and all that.”

When Aladar does finally come to some acceptance of the situation, it is almost wholly selfish. “She couldn’t exist without her illness… She was made by her illness, she was her illness.”

The Mermaids is, as one can predict from the moment Aladar reads Lalla’s letter in his office, a tragic romance. But not a melodrama, thank God. Eva Boros is far too skillful and subtle an artist for that.

In fact, the pleasure of The Mermaids is that of putting ourselves in the hands of a masterful minimalist. Reading this book is like taking a glass of wine in the sun-dappled shade of a continental cafe. The experience is one to be savored, not indulged in. We take one glass and sit for an hour or so. Not two, and never three.

The U.S. edition of The Mermaids came with a long — and rare — tribute from Eudora Welty. “Thank you for letting me read this beautiful novel,” she wrote, likely in response to an advance copy. The book, she wrote, was a “sensitive, haunting work of a quality distinctly its own. While it probes deeply for unsparing truth, it is delicate as a flower to the senses.”

Most critics shared this view. Elizabeth Bowen, reviewing the book in The Tatler and Bystander, remarked that Boros, although Hungarian, wrote “far better English than many of us command!” She applauded the descriptions of the sanatorium’s atmosphere and residents and found that the novel “has a beauty hard to pin down. This book, I can only say, haunts me: I must re-read it.” Her fellow novelist Antonia White was equally impressed: “It is exciting, if a little disconcerting, that a Hungarian, writing her first novel in a language not her own, should produce a small gem of English literature.”

In the U.S., Granville Hicks, always an insightful and supportive reviewer, found The Mermaids “is completely unified by the mood that the author creates, and the writing has a kind of purity that takes the breath away.” On the matter of the inevitable comparisons with Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, Hicks argued that “Miss Boros, of course, is trying to do something very different from Mann, something much smaller than he attempted, but on her own scale she has been quite as successful, and that is a great deal to say.”

Though she set The Mermaids in 1936, Eva Boros had left Hungary years before. In 1928, she moved to Vienna, where she met the young German-born British photographer Bill Brandt. Like Boros, Brandt had spent time in a T.B. clinic — in his case, in Davos, the setting of Mann’s novel. Brandt fell for Boros — 21, blonde (natural), beautiful — and the two married … eventually. Brandt’s love life was never less than complicated and Boros eventually lost her taste for competition.

Her life remained intertwined with Brandt’s, though. In the 1950s, he entered psychoanalysis with a therapist named Barbara Lantos and suggested that Boros, now divorced from him but living in London as well, become her patient as well. Later, when Lantos was dying of cancer, she told her husband, a Hungarian emigre named Sandor Rakos, that he should marry Boros after her death — which he did.

Paul Delany, Brandt’s biographer, speculates that psychoanalysis may have cured Boros of the compulsion to write. The Mermaids was her first and only novel. It has never been republished.

The Mermaids, by Eva Boros
New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1956