When the Summer Was Ours

by Roxanne Veletzos

  And it was then that Aleandro, her mother, Eduard, even her father and all the losses that weighted her heart lifted and became a faraway constellation from which she saw herself detach like a shooting star.

  This was hers, hers to keep, and she knew in that moment that she would not give up her baby. And she realized also, with some surprise, that she’d known this all along.

  After that day, she felt renewed with an unbound energy. While Dora worked her restaurant job, she reorganized Dora’s pantry, repainted the green kitchen cabinets, polished the pine floors, which sprang back to life under her fervent scrubbing into a surprising art deco motif. Dora had shown her how to knit, and after she was done with her chores she would sit out on the porch in the rocking chair with a blanket regardless of the weather, and watch tiny shapes emerge from the long silver needles: booties, socks no bigger than her thumb, a bonnet she’d embellished with a piping of silk threaded through the edges.

  When her fingers were numb from cold, she would retreat inside, make tea, and scour the newspaper headlines, inhaling the scent of press ink, which carried with it the latest from Budapest. Eduard this time, not Aleandro, was there, his attentive, good-natured face coming to her as she read of the escalating tension with Germany and the increasing speculation that it was only a matter of days before Hitler would march in his troops. She was in those moments reminded of their conversations, and the last one in particular before she left Budapest at the onset of summer.

  They’d drunk champagne bought from a corner store under the statues of Magyar rulers in City Park, spending what would be their last evening together before the wedding in the fall. How she missed those conversations now.

  Once she’d nearly written to him, then at the last moment, she ended up ripping up the letter. Everything between them had been cut clean like the snap of a bone. She could not interfere in his life now—and she chided herself for this selfish desire to vindicate herself even in this small way.

  After some time, even the memory of her time with Eduard retreated and became one with the dust of a life that she had, with the arrogance of youth, believed was irrevocably hers. As she’d done as a child, she shut her heart against all those memories, denied herself any tears. Snow fell silently against the windows and clustered in white kaleidoscopes on the panes, and she watched it come down from the milky sky. All she could do now was wait.

  * * *

  Her baby was born on an early May morning after a twelve-hour labor that Eva barely recalled. There had been a doctor, a thin, balding man carrying an enormous case, who arrived in a rush and whose hands as they prodded her belly and between her legs seemed uncommonly strong for such a frail composition. A moist gauze was placed on her mouth, something imbued with an astringent smell resembling turpentine. By then, her pain came in waves so powerful and frequent that she couldn’t draw a breath. She couldn’t bear to hear her own screams.

  “Breech,” she recalled the doctor saying to Dora. “I have to anesthetize now in case I may have to remove the child surgically. You understand that I will do what I can, but it may be the only way.”

  Still she held on, refusing to close her eyes, refusing to slide under. She held on, steadfast, even though she could barely make out the doctor’s words, or Dora’s pale face looming above her, tapping her cheek. Biding her time, waiting. Waiting to see the tiny face and the wide, startled eyes that rose up above her in hues of sunset-kissed rivers, the color of his and hers melted as one.

  “Bianca.” She uttered the name that had been her mother’s and would now be her daughter’s. Then she let go at last, letting herself sink into that dark, sweet abyss.

  15

  Dachau, Germany

  Spring 1944

  THAT YEAR, THE ONLY WAY to mark the time had been with the slant of the sun, the lengthening and shortening of days, the flock of sparrows flying against the gray clouds, the frozen snow, which seeped through the worn soles of Aleandro’s boots as he was marched through unknown lands. At each of the stops, time dissolved into the grim tasks he hoped would soon consume what remained of his withered body. He was forced to carry chopped trees, to carry sacks filled with concrete, to clear land mines, to bury dead bodies in ditches with bullets flying from both directions. He was forced to strip naked in the winter daybreak so that his upper arms and loins could be inspected and deemed fit for labor. He was forced to let his own urine flow inside his stiff canvas pants to warm his legs. He was forced to eat snow, while praying that his body would topple right there against the mud-splattered banks like so many others. He prayed for those bullets to find a way to his own heart. He prayed for the madness to come, to drown out whatever remained of his consciousness. And still he kept moving and waking and sleeping as a winter weakened and a new spring turned.

  One day, he was loaded onto a new train and there was nothing but the darkness again and the rumble of wheels, the human stench that had become so familiar to him that he hardly noticed it anymore. All he could grasp from snippets of dialogue delivered by a front soldier was that Hungary had fallen under German occupation, and now the future of his country would mirror the rest of Europe’s. Here in this boxcar, they were still able to work, to keep themselves alive, unlike the rest of the undesirables of Europe. They were fortunate not to be herded into ghettos, to see their loved ones shot in the streets, to see their babies die of starvation in their arms.

  His country had not been the whole of Hungary. It had consisted of a small patch of land, a land of beauty and peace, that had burned down right before him. His country had been made up of three small children and one woman, and a future that had been stolen from him in the blink of an eye. His country had already perished long ago.

  At one point, his exhausted mind could no longer take it all in, so he fell asleep scrunched between two other laborers and dreamed for the first time in months. In his dreams, his brothers were still with him. They were still in the forest at Komárom, where they were taken by the SS guards after being captured just three kilometers past the Austrian border. His little brother Lukas had found mushrooms in the ground and held them up in his tiny palms, his eyes wide with glee. Eat them, Aleandro told him in his dream, and Tamás and Attia. Eat. Then they were all eating, but as Aleandro chewed the mushrooms, they turned into stones. They shattered his teeth, and he looked at his brothers for an explanation, but their mouths were too full. They were choking on the stones, and they couldn’t speak. They wanted to speak to him and couldn’t.

  * * *

  He woke drenched in cold sweat as light flooded his eyes. Shouts in German came from the tracks below the open boxcar: “Schnell! Raus! Schnell! Get out! Schnell!” Two seconds later, he was outside in a sun so bright that it burned through his skull. There was shouting and dogs barking, guns drawn against the glare, a spray of blood across the gravel, already darkened, abuzz with flies at his feet. “Drop your possessions in front of the wagon!” came another order through a bullhorn. “Leave all your possessions and gather at the line! Schnell!”

  From up ahead, someone kept shouting amid the chaos, and an old man appeared in one of the wagon doors, clutching a paper bag. “Where have you taken my son? Please, let me find my son!” he kept shrieking as guards pulled him down from the train.

  Aleandro wanted to reach for him through the crush of bodies, but before he could push his way through, a baton came down on the man’s shoulder, knocking him to the ground. Aleandro turned his head in revulsion. He couldn’t look, had to place his hands on his ears as the baton hit the man’s flesh in a sickening rhythm that slowed and eventually stopped. Then there was only silence, and Aleandro had to fight the bile in his throat.

  Flanked by soldiers in black uniforms, they were marched through a massive iron gate, which clanged shut behind them, trapping them inside a large concrete courtyard surrounded by a wall topped with barbed wire. More orders came: Stop, turn, file into a single line. Stop. A guard came forward and began counting the men, calling out numbers.
Another man scribbled them down in a ledger, asking for verification. When the task was finished, another figure materialized from the shadow of a building—a stocky, shortish officer with a slight limp, bearing several golden medallions at his breast. He paused halfway down the line, and before he uttered a word, his arm opened up in an almost ceremonious way in the general direction of the barracks.

  “Your new home. Welcome to Dachau. Quite grand for the Roma people, wouldn’t you say? Far cry from the caravan tents, am I right?” He beamed as though impressed by his own wit, exposing a row of tiny teeth and prominent gums the color of skinned salmon.

  Just then, near the strip of shade where more guards congregated with bored expressions, a door swung open and a diminished shape like that of a child was dragged through it. Not a child, Aleandro realized, but a man, who was hauled across the courtyard, his bludgeoned feet dragging behind him at unnatural angles. Beneath the watchtower, the guards dropped him to his knees and took four precise steps back. A crackle echoed like a stone dropped in a lake. The whole thing was over in less than ten seconds.

  On Aleandro’s right, a boy of about eighteen, who had shared his boxcar, began sobbing, and Aleandro, recalling the earlier scene at the train, put his hand down on his shoulder. “You have to be strong,” he whispered. “You can’t let them see you weep, do you hear me? If they see it, it will only make things worse.”

  The boy nodded, swiped his flat palms over his bleary eyes, but the disruption caught the attention of the officer, who began limping toward them with hands at his back.

  “Don’t worry, my friend,” he began, halting in front of them and addressing the boy as if all he intended was polite conversation. “We’re not going to shoot you all. That Jew, that slime, deserved to die. But for you and your lot, the free-spirited Romani”—this pronounced with equal revulsion—“we have other plans.”

  His eyes snapped to Aleandro. “You, for example. You, with such strong bones, such impressive stature. Such… bravado. How long, I wonder, would someone like you cling to life in the medic’s chamber when they put the needle into your arm? I do question which disease would be the first to triumph over such youthful vitality. Malaria? Typhus?” Leaning closer, the officer dropped his voice to a jovial whisper. “We won’t know, will we, not until our esteemed doctor decides how to carry out his… experiment. And in your case, I may want to witness it in person. What do you say to that?”

  What would he say? What Aleandro wanted to say, to spit in the face of this cowardly man, was that he didn’t care. He didn’t care how many poisons they injected him with. He didn’t care if they dissected his frontal lobe to study his genetic differences. Everything he loved had been ripped out of his hands, and he did not care if they bled the life out of his veins or fed his flesh to the German shepherds guarding the fence. But he said nothing.

  The lack of reaction caused the officer to come even closer, so close that Aleandro could smell the tinge of pine in his aftershave. In the cool Aryan gaze he detected no humor now, nor anger, only a feral, overt cruelty. He held the gaze nonetheless, not looking away. Then, as the officer laughed and pulled a whip from his belt, he realized his mistake. He lowered his eyes, lowered them to those perfectly shined boots, but it was already too late.

  “A demonstration!” announced the officer to the rest of the line. “You are about to witness the consequence of defiance.” The tip of his whip came up to Aleandro’s cheek and gave it a sharp, stinging slap. “Take off your jacket and shirt. Step forward and kneel.”

  There was nothing for Aleandro to do but obey. He began unfastening the buttons on his coat slowly, feeling the battered lapel. The sketchbook that had carried him through the horrors of winter, through the rains and sweltering sun, was there at his breast, where he’d placed it out of some strange premonition when he was still on the train. Not in his duffel, which he’d been ordered to leave at the tracks.

  After he extracted it and placed it gingerly on top of his folded coat, Aleandro straightened up and closed his eyes. He forced his thoughts back to what had become less flesh and blood and more of an ethereal thing. Somewhere between the loss of his brothers at Komárom and now, she had faded from him piece by piece, become just an image in pencil, an icon to pray to. Yet now she came to him so vividly, so clearly, that he let out a cry through his mashed lips. It seemed right that this last vision of her should bring him the end he had prayed for. The end that was now unavoidable.

  But the bullet he braced for did not pierce his chest, and when he opened his eyes again, he saw that the officer was holding the sketchbook. There was a new look on his face now as he flipped through the pages, no longer that sinister smile but a stern concentration.

  “Are you the one who drew these?”

  Aleandro nodded numbly.

  “A man of arts, then, are you? Funny, I didn’t think your lot were even taught to read.”

  For a moment longer, the officer seemed to ponder, scratching his smooth-shaven chin with a manicured finger. A moment later, he slammed the sketchbook shut and barked to the group of guards under the awning: “Bring him to me at once.”

  Then he tucked the whip back in his belt and he limped away in the direction of the gatehouse with the sketchbook tucked under his arm, muttering something that sounded to Aleandro like expletives in German.

  16

  Sopron

  Autumn 1944

  BIANCA WAS SO BEAUTIFUL.

  The first few months, Eva couldn’t get her fill of her daughter’s perfect, heart-shaped face, the pink, oval fingernails that were so much like her own, the way her flower-bud mouth moved around tiny, almost imperceptible sounds while she slept. On the bed she shared with Dora, Eva would curl herself around the tiny shape and press her lips to her smooth, velvet head, inhaling her scent. And her smile! For that smile, she would keep herself awake for hours, for days. She’d heard of mothers being plagued with a crushing fatigue in the weeks after giving birth, but all Eva wanted to do was to bask in that smile. Only her eyes she couldn’t glance at for long. Those keen, elongated eyes with thick dark lashes, despite their warm hazel color, were still undeniably his.

  The only time Eva slept was when Dora brought Bianca into town, tucked neatly inside the blue buggy she’d insisted on buying, along with the rocking bassinet they kept by the bed. It was both delightful and astounding to see the way Dora cared for the baby, the way she scrubbed every fold of her pudgy, compact body while managing not to get her head wet, or the way she changed her with the efficiency of a maternity-ward nurse. Often, Eva saw herself as an infant in the care of those sturdy, dependable hands and she would hug the life out of Dora, misty-eyed, overcome with love.

  “Such demonstration of affection!” Dora would tease. “Don’t tell me, Eva, that motherhood has made you all soft and mushy. Frankly, I never thought I’d see this side of you. Although I like it. I think it rather suits you.”

  “I’m just saying thank you, that’s all, Dora. There’s no sentimentality about it whatsoever. I’m just so happy to be here with you.”

  They would hold each other’s gaze, both knowing what the other was thinking. Knowing that for a few brief moments the world outside, and the war that had shredded its heart, could be sealed off, and it was just the three of them, safe still, alive still, inside this cocoon of a home they’d built together.

  Soon the news, growing more alarming by the day, could not be kept entirely at bay. Sometimes Dora recounted what she’d overheard in town, or at the restaurant where she still worked six days a week. Rumor was that the Red Army had penetrated the Carpathian Mountains and were now at the Hungarian border. The Allied bombings were no longer contained to petrol fields and factories outside Budapest, but were targeting government buildings in the center of town. More dismal even was what was happening with Budapest’s Jews, who had since early spring been forced out of their homes and into yellow-star houses—five, six families sharing a room without electricity or running water. All of t
hem had been forced to turn in their telephones, bicycles, radios, and jewelry, their homes raided by the SS guards at whim.

  Even here in Sopron, things had unraveled with dizzying speed. One day when Dora wasn’t feeling well, Eva had gone into town for groceries (her first outing since Bianca was born) and had been stunned to see that there was a Nazi flag on practically every building. There were few people wearing the yellow star in town now—most of them had already been taken away on trains to so-called relocation camps—and the ones remaining lived in hiding, sheltered in the basements and attics of the few friends who hadn’t turned their backs on them. On her way home that very same afternoon, Eva witnessed rocks and bits of garbage being thrown from windows at a young family. The father had enfolded his toddler boy inside his coat to protect him from the assault. Eva had stood there in the middle of the street, glaring at the shivering curtains, until a wad of spit landed on her own arm. It was the father (shockingly enough) who resurfaced from the end of the block to pull her away by the elbow, telling her that she needed to go home.

  “I can’t believe it, Dora. Look,” Eva said now, lifting the newspaper from the burlap bag as Dora stored the groceries in the pantry and placed a pot of water on the stove. “It says here that in Budapest, those Arrow Cross beasts are killing innocent people in the street, raiding the yellow-star houses and putting them on trains—not just the men, but the women and children now, too. How can this happen? How, when Horthy has promised not to deport? Paris was liberated weeks ago, and it’s been just as long since Romania, our neighbor, for God’s sake, extricated itself from the war! How can this happen so late in the war when everyone knows that Germany will fold?