“The body is just a vessel. It is the mind that can’t be destroyed,” Rudolf would remind him as the two stood in the courtyard at roll call before dawn with rain pouring down on them. “I want you to memorize these words, Aleandro, to say them as often as you can. I want you to repeat them in your dreams! Let’s say it together now! Come on, let’s say it now!”
Some mornings they were marched together through the main gates to a merry tune played by the camp orchestra, taken to the outskirts of the camp. Together they carried sandbags, broke concrete, dug ditches and tunnels. More often than not they had to use their bare hands, as tools were scarcely made available and sometimes held back on purpose by the guards. More than once they were harnessed to a massive roller, forced to push it across gravel roads, and they chanted Rudolf’s words, sang them in defiance of their pain.
Aleandro could have easily used whatever influence he had with the guards to get out of this harshest form of labor, but he feared that Rudolf, not fully recovered, would collapse. Many stronger than him died every day, and he felt fiercely protective of the man. He had never begged for anything, but he did beg for Rudolf’s life. On his knees he pleaded, and bargained, and offered anything at all that would be deemed as a payment. Only after accepting to produce a glorifying landscape of the camp and the surrounding grounds was Rudolf given all of two weeks to recuperate and prove himself fit for labor.
To the guards’ surprise and unrelenting mocking, Aleandro began accepting the extra food rations he’d earlier turned down, although he never consumed them on the spot. Rather, he found a way to smuggle them inside of his coat, which had once belonged to a guard, and hand them to Rudolf outside of the bunker at night, while the others slept. To him, it was no longer a betrayal. None of it was a betrayal if he could save just this one man.
“Do you ever make mistakes in your portraits?” Rudolf asked one such night, taking a small, spotted apple from Aleandro’s hand and polishing it fervently with his sleeve. “Do you, for instance, ever find yourself having to start over, to begin the whole thing from scratch on a clean sheet of paper?”
The question took Aleandro aback. “Why do you ask?”
“I’m just curious. Your pastels must run out much too often, do they not?”
“Well, truth is I try not to make mistakes. Mistakes in a place like this can be costly, you know that.”
“That’s just it. Only by making mistakes can you create something that truly counts, something of value.” As Aleandro tried to make sense of his words, Rudolf chewed with relish the last bit of the apple, ate the core, too, giving a great groan of appreciation as he licked the juice off his fingers. “All that discarded paper bearing your errors could be put to a different use. They could reveal a… different reality. Do you see what I am saying?”
He did not, not right away. It took him a few long minutes to understand that all that squandered paper was indeed a precious commodity, that he could use it to document what unfolded inside the camp. A moment longer, he vacillated. The idea was so outlandish. He would no doubt be shot right on the spot. If a breach of this kind was discovered, he would be dragged across the roll-call square, and the wall under the watchtower would be the last thing his eyes would fix on. But, then again, hadn’t he seen how cheap life was in a place like this, how easily crushed? And this, as Rudolf had said, was the one thing worth gambling one’s miserable life on.
“So, Aleandro, are we in agreement, then? The great camp portraitist must embrace his privileges and stop wasting his time with a scrawny little Jew. There are more crucial things to occupy him, yes?”
“I don’t know about this, Rudolf. I just don’t know. Those guards, they are beasts; they will work you into the ground and I cannot let them do that to you, I will not let them…” Aleandro kept rambling, but Rudolf gave him a hearty pat on the back and went inside the barrack, whistling serenely under his breath.
* * *
The first time Aleandro stuffed the scraps of paper and broken pastels in his pocket after a session with one of the guards, his knees shook with fear as he made his way across the campsite. Yet as the treasures under his mattress grew next to his sketchbook, he felt no fear any longer. He was alive, truly alive, in a way he’d never been before. He rose eager to see light budding in the narrow strip of glass across the barrack. While the others slept, he would take out his supplies, then draw in the near-dark, in the latrines, in any moment of solitude when the prisoners were out of the barrack. His agile hands moved with precision, each stroke redeeming him, each finished piece leaving him exhausted yet utterly exhilarated.
Alone, on the screen of his imagination, his drawings of the camp were held in the hands of men in free lands, their eyes filling with knowledge, with truth, with his truth. If even one of his drawings could find their way to the other side of the barbed-wire wall, he would die a content death.
* * *
Sometimes after midnight, he and Rudolf would talk freely in Hungarian, but never about their lives from before. It had become a defense mechanism, a way to preserve. Here and now was all that mattered. Their joint reality grounded them to each other, and to depart from it, to revisit the past, seemed a minefield of its own.
That changed one night in late November. In the depth of a cold night, as the wind whipped so fiercely around the barrack that it threatened to pull it from its pivots, Aleandro finally extracted his sketchbook from under his mattress. As Rudolf flipped through the pages, Aleandro began to tell him about the woman in the portraits.
It was the first time he’d said her name since the fire. Eva, Eva. Her name was a destination across a vast sea he navigated without a compass, but saying her name out loud dispelled the fantasy of what he might still be to her. Yet he kept going anyway, knowing he couldn’t stop. Knowing he had to reach the end of the story, or he would never tell it again.
It was for her that he’d been keeping himself alive, he explained, for her that he’d accepted to do portraits for the guards and garlands in the margins of letters, and copy illustrations from photographs of people who did not know him and wished him dead. “Is it foolish?” he kept asking, breaking up the account. “Is it foolish to think it possible?” Foolish to think they could simply resume. The fire and the loss of his brothers had been punishment enough for the simple transgression of loving Eva.
He didn’t want to speak of his brothers now, drained of vigor; he couldn’t speak any further. Instead, he closed his eyes, needing, wanting, to shut out Rudolf’s sad, inquisitive stare.
“It’s all right,” Rudolf said. “It’s all right. It might help ease your burden if you tell me. It might even bring you some peace. So let it out, Aleandro. Get it off your chest. What happened with your brothers after the fire?”
“We were taken by the SS guards, just on the other side of the border, in Austria,” resumed Aleandro after a long silence. “We were on a train for days. It was dark, and there was no air, and my little brother kept asking for water. The stench in that wagon was too much to bear; there was only a common bucket in the corner, and we all had to relieve ourselves, even the women, all of us, in plain view of everyone. We were brought to a forest. I remember, Rudolf, those beautiful lean trees that reached to the sun, as if one still existed. We were forced to sleep there among those trees, in the open air, in mud, in the swarm of worms. Whips came down on our backs; it seemed the beatings kept coming for no reason. No reason. After a couple of weeks, they began selecting the men, separating them from the women and children. By then, there was no need to separate me from my brothers. Lukas… he was always fragile, he’d hardly been conscious since we were let off the train, and Tamás and Attia, too, had fallen ill with dysentery. They just all lay there, staring up at that dreadful sky beyond the peaks of the trees.
“The next day they came and took them, and I kept screaming until they beat me unconscious. Someone told me a few days later that anyone who couldn’t stand was tossed in a ditch at the edge of the forest. With
the other bodies.” Aleandro began weeping, raking his hand through his tangled curls as if to expel the horror of those visions. “And that, Rudolf, was the last time I saw my brothers. But above all, what I can’t forgive myself for, what torments me more than anything else, is that the fire, that awful fire had been set for me. It was because of my foolishness that we were forced to flee Sopron, because of my foolishness that my brothers died.”
“The most terrible thing we will ever endure as humans, Aleandro, is losing those we love,” said Rudolf after a long contemplation, “but you must see that you are not to blame for the fire, nor are you to blame for your brothers’ fates. You, just like me, just like everyone else in this godforsaken place, are the victims. Although, do you see? By doing what you’re doing now, you are seeing that they haven’t died in vain. You are honoring your brothers, and you are honoring Eva and what she meant to you. And that, my friend, is your comfort. It is your strength.”
In the darkness and the silence that fell upon them, Aleandro nodded and smiled. It was his first smile in more than a year.
19
Budapest
Winter 1944
THE AIR—COLD, DRY, IMBUED WITH something medicinal—raised goose bumps on Eva’s skin. An electric white bulb dangling overhead kept winking in and out. She tried to anchor her eyes on it to keep the room from spinning, but couldn’t. She couldn’t even lift her hand to her temple, there, where it felt as if a blade sliced through the bone of her skull and into the pulp of her overwrought brain.
Something cool and moist landed on her forehead, and as it came away, a smearing of blood like a swipe of watercolor flashed in her vision, dark pink more than red. She shivered beneath a scratchy blanket, then another was placed on top, bringing the sensation of being bathed in warm water. She blinked, tilted her head, forcing her eyes to take in the surroundings: a sea of beds. She was in a sea of beds and dark green uniforms, bandaged limbs, festering wounds, naked torsos. She was in a sea of moans and curses and cries, and the smell of blood and sweat was too much to bear.
When she opened her eyes again, a person was there, bent in concentration over some part of her, her left forearm, she thought. The face lifted and came into view, and Eva saw it was a woman’s. Above the mask, deep brown eyes stared back at her. She seemed vaguely familiar. Why?
“Don’t try to talk,” the woman said, her voice clipped, her mask sliding down her longish chin to expose a beauty mark in the corner of her wide, pale lips. The voice, curiously, stirred recognition.
It was the woman she’d met earlier at the entrance of the bunker. Her dark locks had been chopped crudely, unevenly, to her chin, but it did not deter from her femininity, rather it accentuated the lines of her chiseled, heart-shaped face. With the efficiency of a warden, she was busying herself with a fluid bag next to the bed, pulling it off the pole, checking the connecting tube. There was something Eva meant to ask her but couldn’t keep her eyes open, and her thoughts scattered from her, spinning into a tangled web.
The next time she woke, it was in a full frenzy. No fog covering her eyes now, and the dull ache in her temple had mellowed, but it was as though her heart, remembering something that her brain could not, insisted that she get herself moving. The girl was no longer at her side but was tending to someone across the aisle, bending her slender figure over the bed to tuck the sheet under the mattress. Noticing Eva trying to get out of bed, she was back at her side in an instant.
“I have to go, miss, can you help me?” Eva used every ounce of strength to hold herself upright in the bed. “I have to go. There’s a train I must catch tonight. In the morning, at the very latest.”
“Eva. It’s Eva, right?” The voice held the same authoritarian note, but her eyes were kind and tolerant, reminding Eva of the Sisters of Mercy from her primary schooling days. “Please try to relax,” she said, as Eva swung her legs off the bed. “You are in no position to go anywhere. I’m afraid that if you don’t sit down, you are likely to faint. Please do us both a favor. Lie down,” she insisted.
She did as she was told and leaned against the raised pillow. The woman was right. A weakness was spreading through her, and she felt light-headed again.
“Which hospital am I in?”
“Don’t you remember? You delivered a package here. I met you at the door, brought you inside. As you were leaving, you were caught in a skirmish by the bridge. You suffered a head wound, and a pretty nasty one at that. Plus, some lacerations on your arm. You are very fortunate, considering the strength of the blast. You could have easily been killed.”
“Well, I do feel much better now. And I have to go… Tamara,” Eva added, struggling to read the name tag pinned to the white apron. “I have a train to get to tonight.”
“Eva, even if I could let you walk out of here, which I won’t, I’m afraid there won’t be a train for you to catch.”
Eva stared at her in disbelief, wondering if she’d heard her correctly. She couldn’t be kept here against her will. “Tamara, look,” she began again. “I appreciate your concern. But I have responsibilities at home. In Sopron. Responsibilities that cannot wait. Not for something as simple as a tiny head wound, a few scratches. I’m perfectly fine now. Surely your energy would be better spent elsewhere.”
“I understand. But there’s no point in trying to catch a train, because the fact is, there are no trains departing Budapest at the moment.”
“That can’t be true. I checked the schedule just this afternoon, before coming here. They are running as usual, and I intend to be on one.”
“This afternoon?” Tamara regarded her, one shapely, raised eyebrow forming a crease in an otherwise perfectly smooth forehead. She shook her head. “Let us start again. My dear, you’ve been here for three weeks.”
* * *
The shelling targeted Castle Hill, where the Nazis had concentrated their forces and fortified the hillside with cannons and artillery posts. Fortunately, it had not hit the Royal Palace but had created a gaping hole in the middle of Castle District, where Eva was. Ever since the bombings had intensified, the underground hospital nestled under the hillside had become overrun. Aboveground, in a city that was a battlefield on both sides of the river, the air sirens sounded day and night, forcing the vast majority of Budapest citizens to live in their basements. The city had begun to starve, all hope that Budapest would be declared an open city dashed. Hitler would not relinquish the Pearl of the Danube to the encircling Russian army at any cost, and was willing to fight for it to the last man.
“So, Eva,” Tamara concluded as she updated her on these grim events, “you are safest here. The passages I walked you through, if you remember, connect to Saint John’s Hospital aboveground, and we are still able to get supplies and food, not to mention that we are in a safe place that’s practically bombproof. Some of the patients are begging to have their families stay here, too. Believe me, if you saw what is out there, you would be begging to stay as well. To consider walking out right now would be sheer madness.”
It was then that everything poured out of Eva like water gushing through a fissured dam. She confessed to this girl whom she barely knew and wasn’t sure at all if she could trust the one thing she hadn’t been able to tell a soul. She had a child, a baby, just seven months old. A dear friend was taking care of her in her absence, a most beloved friend who was mourning her perhaps in this very moment, thinking her dead. It didn’t matter in the moment if Tamara kept her confidence or if she didn’t. All that mattered was that she had to reach Dora somehow, to let her know that she was alive.
“A telegram. I have to send a telegram. Please, Tamara, I must get word to my friend that I’m all right. I would be indebted to you for the rest of my life. I will do anything to repay you. Anything at all. Just ask.”
“I will see what I can do, Eva. Just promise you won’t do something so foolish as trying to get out of here, or Budapest, for that matter. It’s entirely surrounded by Stalin’s men. The roads to Vienna have been
seized anyway; you wouldn’t be able to make it to Sopron. Not outside of a casket.”
* * *
Another week passed before Tamara told her that a medic who had gone to the Pest side for penicillin managed to send the telegram to the address that Eva had given, with only three words: I am safe.
There was no time to feel relieved or thank Tamara or wonder if the telegram had reached Dora. Every hour of the day, every minute, brought a new crisis. More stretchers arrived, hundreds, thousands, overflowing the hallways and corridors. Some of the beds were pushed together so that the wounded could be stacked lengthwise to maximize the available space. As Eva ambled through the rows, she found it impossible to distinguish the soldiers from the civilians, the Germans from the Hungarians, the adolescents from the men. Those who didn’t last the night were taken outside and left in the bomb trenches or on the sidewalk in front of the hospital entrance. The ground had frozen, making burials an impossibility, so they were just left there, where a layer of snow could preserve them for the time being. No one had any idea how much longer it would continue, when the nightmare would end.
The whole time, Eva rarely saw Eduard. Once in a while, he passed through the ward, wan and exhausted, a shadow of a man drifting through the landscape of ruin. He checked on the severely wounded, shouted a few orders, doled out a few words of comfort, held a few hands, checked charts, then he would leave. He looked like a shelling victim himself, his fatigues covered perpetually in blood, his hair mashed with dirt and sweat, his eyeglasses fissured. One day, as he was tending to a soldier in a nearby bed, she noticed a deep cut on his right hand, spanning from his fourth finger down to his thumb. It had been stitched crudely and looked to be infected, the wound shining an angry purple beyond the tiny metal teeth.
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