Though she had been going out with Daniel Friedman for years with marriage a frequently discussed, oft-deferred possibility, in the end they had married on an impulse, without advance notice or, as far as Jack could tell, any discussion at all. Daniel’s parents were on their way to a vacation in Nova Scotia; Jack had offered them his guest room and a chance to break the long trip from New York before they headed up to catch the ferry in St. John. Natalie and Daniel were already scheduled to spend the week with Jack, along with Neil. It was on realizing that what remained of their respective families was going imminently to assemble in the same house for a day and a night that Natalie had abruptly decided to get married. Jack thought it was a rotten idea, but he held his tongue, figuring that the young man would find a way to weasel out of it. But Daniel, true to his weasel soul, had allowed the ship to sail knowing that its hull was ruptured, and so Jack had found himself hosting a pretty little ceremony by the seaside, at which Natalie’s and Daniel’s immediate families were joined by a haphazard collection of acquaintances who happened to be in the vicinity of Red Hook, Maine, on the afternoon of June 20. When, a mere three months later, Daniel had stunned poor Natalie by confessing to having been, for the last two years, sleeping with a junior associate, Jack had not been surprised.
“You’re right,” Natalie said now. “I wouldn’t have listened, because I’m an ass.” She kept her gaze fixed on the seal, and Jack saw a worried look come into her eyes, familiar to him from the time she was a toddler. “If a shark comes up while he’s sleeping, does he wake up?”
The chills began a few miles from home, and by the time they reached the pair of whitewashed posts that marked the entrance to his long gravel drive, Jack’s whole body was shaking, legs shuddering, teeth clacking together. He grasped one hand with the other to keep them from flopping around in his lap like fish on a line. The car crunched through a blue-white canyon of banked snow up the drive. As Natalie pulled all the way to the front steps of the house, Jack closed his eyes. He did not have the strength even to open his door, let alone to get out of the car. He waited, listening to the creak and slam of the trunk lid, the banging of her bags against the steps of the porch.
“Grandpa?” Natalie said. She had opened his door and was hovering over him, a note of panic in her voice. “Are you okay?”
“Just tired,” he said.
“You’re sweating.”
He could feel sweat pouring down his forehead, pooling in his armpits and between his legs.
“I could use a nap,” he said.
He allowed her to hoist him out of the car and help him into the house, but when she tried to follow him into his bedroom, he drew the line. He closed the door and, after a feeble attempt at the buttons of his shirt, crawled under the comforter and let the fever overtake him. He slept for twelve hours and woke at six feeling better than he had in weeks, well enough even to load and light the woodstove. Well enough to put a pot of coffee on, if not to drink it.
Natalie came down soon after. In her flannel nightshirt, with her hair tousled, her eyes puffy with sleep, she was again the little girl with whom he had passed so many early mornings, telling stories of the sack of Troy, the Peloponnesian War, Antigone and Polynices, Odysseus and Penelope. Wildly inappropriate tales, some of them, for a small child, stories of slaughter and mayhem and betrayal. She had adored them.
“You hungry? Want me to make you a pancake in the shape of an N?” He meant it as a joke, but the offer came out sounding unexpectedly sincere.
She smiled. “It’s been a long time since I had one of those.”
“Oh!” he said, mildly panicked now that she seemed to be taking him up on his foolish offer, wondering if he had the wherewithal, either in his pantry or in his constitution. “I—I’m sure I could—”
“I’m not hungry,” she said.
“Ah,” he said, absurdly disappointed.
“How are you feeling, Grandpa?”
“I’m feeling much better.” He looked at her. “Did you sleep well?”
“Not really.”
“Was the bed—”
“The bed’s fine. I don’t sleep well in New York, either.” She went to the counter, poured herself a cup of coffee, splashed in a little milk from the refrigerator. When she turned back to him she was holding a slip of paper.
“This is for you,” she said. She handed him a check, folded in two. When he opened it, he saw that she had made it out to him in the amount of five hundred dollars.
“It’s what you gave me and Daniel. For our wedding. I’m returning it.”
“Honey, that’s crazy. This is just five hundred bucks more you’ll have to pay inheritance tax on.” He crossed to the woodstove, opened the door, and tossed the check into the blaze.
“So much for that part of my plan,” she said, sounding so lost that he almost regretted his action.
“What plan is that?” he said. “Returning your gifts?”
“Don’t you think I should? Since the marriage lasted only three months?”
“You want to know what I think? I think that if your little shit of a husband leaves you for some dolly after you gave him twelve years of your life, you are entitled to enjoy the modest consolation of an automatic bread maker. Or a five-hundred-dollar check from your grandfather.”
She nodded, a small, childlike nod of submission that made his heart ache.
“I guess I need a new plan,” she said.
That was when she started to cry. Softly, for a long time, saying nothing about the grandfather she would soon be losing or the husband she had already lost. He patted her on the back and then, when she showed no sign of stopping, went to try to find her a box of Kleenex. He had forgotten to restock. He considered bringing her a roll of toilet paper, then remembered that in his bedroom he had a drawer full of old linen handkerchiefs, ironed flat. As he peeled one off the stack, he saw in the drawer a little pouch of worn black velvet. He hefted it, remembering with a faint pang the weight of it against his palm. At one time the contents of the pouch had been a kind of obsession. Now the velvet pouch was just one of the things stuffed into his dresser drawers. He wished there was a way to help Natalie understand the flimsiness, the feebleness, of objects, of memory, even of emotions, in the face of time with its annihilating power, greater than that of Darius of Persia or Hitler of Germany. But she would just have to live long and lose enough to find out for herself.
He feared what Natalie might do after he died, with no job to distract her. He imagined her sitting alone in the midst of a Maine winter, growing ever more depressed, losing the last of the spark that had made her the delight of his life. He weighed the cinched pouch of velvet in his hands for another moment, then took it with him back in the kitchen. He handed her a handkerchief and then, as she wiped her eyes and blew her nose, tipped the contents of the pouch into his palm. He caught hold of the gold chain. The gold-filigreed pendant dangled. It bore the image, in vitreous enamel, of a peacock, a perfect gemstone staring from the tip of each painted feather.
She flinched when she saw it, as if it were not a pretty little art nouveau bauble but something hideous to contemplate.
“Ugh,” she said.
“What’s wrong?”
“I wish I’d listened to you. You didn’t want me to wear it at the wedding, and I did anyway. And now I’ll think of him every time I look at it and feel ashamed.”
“That hardly seems fair. After all, I had this necklace long before you and Daniel were even born.”
“Did you buy it for Grandma, or did she inherit it?”
“Neither. It was mine.”
“It wasn’t Grandma’s?”
“No.”
“Are you serious? Why did you tell me it was hers? That’s the only reason I wore it!”
“I never told you it was hers. Why would I tell you that, when it wasn’t?”
She narrowed her eyes, trying to remember.
“Huh,” she said, as if to concede the point. “Well, whose
was it? Your mother’s?”
“No.”
“So whose?”
“Well, that’s the thing. I don’t know.” He could see the glimmer of interest in her eyes, a revival of the spark that had, until recently, always flickered in the eyes of Natalie Stein. He was going to feed that small fire with whatever tinder came to hand. “That’s why I need your help.”
• 1 •
THEY FOUND THE TRAIN PARKED on an open spur not far from the station at Werfen. When they pulled up to the siding in their jeeps, Captain Rigsdale jumped out with a show of alacrity, but Jack hung back, eyeing the train. More than forty wagons, both passenger and freight. The nature of the cargo was as yet undetermined, but in this green and mountainous corner of the American Zone, a string of boxcars was never something Jack felt eager to explore.
Fencing the train were enemy troops uniformed in ragged khaki. They carried FÉG 35M rifles, but they had flagged their right sleeves with strips torn from white bedsheets, and they displayed no apparent satisfaction with their prize. By the side of the rails, a woman crouched over a wooden bucket filled with soapy water, wringing out a length of white cotton shirting. Two small boys took turns leaping from the door of one of the passenger cars, marking the lengths of their jumps with pebbles and bickering over who had leaped farther. They spoke a language unknown to Jack, but he assumed, based on what Rigsdale had told him, that it was Hungarian.
“Come on, Wiseman,” Rigsdale called over his shoulder. “You’re supposed to be fluent in gibberish.”
“Yes, sir.”
Jack climbed down from the jeep and followed Rigsdale toward the train. He had never worked for this particular captain before, but by now he was used to receiving sudden assignments to the command of senior officers tasked with undertaking excursions into obscure and doubtful backwaters of the Occupied Zone. Jack had a gift for topography and a photographic memory for maps. He had a feel for landscape and a true inner compass, and in his imagination the most cursory and vague of descriptions, a two-dimensional scrawl on a scrap of paper, took on depth and accuracy. This aptitude, which in civilian life had meant little more than always knowing whether he was facing uptown or downtown when he came up out of the subway, had found its perfect application in the war. Even during the confusion of battle, command had always been able to rely on Wiseman’s company to be where it was supposed to be and, even more important, to be moving in the right direction, something not always true of the rest of the division. This spatial acuity, along with his fluency in German, French, Italian, and (less usefully) Latin and ancient Greek, kept him in demand with the brass, who contended among themselves to have him attached to their commands.
“What’re they saying?” Rigsdale said.
“I don’t know, sir.”
“Well, figure it out, goddamn it.”
“Yes, sir.”
One of the enemy soldiers ducked back into the passenger car from which the boys were leaping. Jack lifted his rifle. A moment later, a portly little man in a gray suit, complete with vest and watch fob, emerged from the same carriage and stepped down, wiping his mouth with a handkerchief, still chewing a mouthful of something. Like the guards, he had tied a scrap of white fabric around his upper arm.
The man hurried over to the half-dozen American soldiers standing by their two jeeps, his expression at once servile and calculating, as if they were potential customers of undetermined means. He extended his hand to shake Captain Rigsdale’s, seemed to think the better of it, and instead gave him a crisp, theatrical salute.
Rigsdale kept his own hands tucked by the thumbs into the webbed belt at his hips.
“Captain John F. Rigsdale, U.S. Army, Forty-Second Division. You the conductor of this choo-choo?”
The man shook his head, frowning. “No English. Deutsch? Français?”
“Go ahead, Lieutenant,” Rigsdale said, motioning Jack forward.
“Deutsch,” Jack said.
The man’s German was fluent, although the Hungarian accent made the language sound softer, mellifluous, the r’s rolled on the tongue rather than the back of the throat, the emphasis placed on the beginning of the words. Jack’s accent had its own peculiarities. Beneath the elegant High German cultivated by the Berliner refugee who had taught his German classes at Columbia University, Jack spoke with a touch of the Galicianer Yiddish of his maternal grandparents. His father’s parents, of authentic German Jewish stock, had never to his knowledge uttered a word in that language.
“His name is Avar László,” Jack told Rigsdale. “He’s in charge of the train.”
“Ask him if he’s a military officer, and if so why he’s not in uniform.”
He was, Avar said, a civil servant, the former mayor of the town of Zenta, currently working for something he called the Property Office.
“Ask Mr. László why the hell his men haven’t turned their arms over to the U.S. government,” Rigsdale said.
“Avar,” the Hungarian said in German. “My surname is Avar. Dr. Avar. László is my first name.”
Jack asked Dr. Avar if he was aware that the terms of surrender required that enemy soldiers turn over their weapons.
Avar said that he was aware of the order, but regrettably the guns were necessary to protect the train’s cargo. He said his men had been fighting off looters since the train’s departure from Hungary. In May they’d been in a shoot-out with a group of German soldiers, and recently they’d been dealing with increasing problems from the local population, whose greed was inflamed by rumors of what was held in the wagons.
“Tell him I’m deeply sorry to hear how hard his life has been lately and that the U.S. Army is here to unburden him of all his sorrows,” Captain Rigsdale said. “And his guns, too.”
By now a small group of civilians had descended from the passenger carriages. One of them stepped forward and conferred with Avar, who nodded vigorously.
Jack translated. “They want us to know that nobody’s given them any provisions. Avar says they’ve been starving.” Jack looked doubtfully at the vigorous guards, the men in their neat suits, the plump-cheeked children. “Starving,” he supposed, was a relative term.
The captain said, “Tell him they’ll all be fed once they get to the DP camps. Now I want to have a look inside the cars. See what all the fuss is about.”
Avar led them to the first of the cargo wagons, its doors officially sealed with bureaucratic wallpaper bearing an elaborate pattern of stamps and insignia. Jack looked down the row of boxcars. Some of the seals along the train remained intact. Others looked tattered, torn away. What that proved or didn’t prove, he wasn’t sure. There was no way of knowing whether the seals had been put there six months or six hours before.
At the door of the first cargo wagon, Avar hesitated. He conferred in Hungarian with one of his colleagues, a lanky, elderly gentleman with an extravagant mustache waxed to points, before making his wishes known to Jack.
“What now?” Rigsdale said.
“He’s asking for a receipt.”
“The fuck he is.”
“To show that we assume protection of this property on behalf of the Hungarian government.”
Avar didn’t need Jack to translate the look on the captain’s face. Puffing up his chest, the little man asked Jack to remind his commanding officer that the cargo of the train was Hungarian state property, and therefore he, Avar, with all due respect, could only turn over the custody of said cargo if assurances were made that it would, in due time, be returned to the government of Hungary.
“Lieutenant, please remind Mr. Avar that the government of Hungary just got its ass handed to it, and suggest to him, if you would be so kind, that he, his men, and his whole damn country are now under the authority of the Allied forces. I am not going to give him a goddamn receipt, and he should please open this motherfucking door now, before I use his fat head as a battering ram.”
In as formal a German as he could muster, Jack said, “Captain Rigsdale reminds you that he
speaks with the full authority of the United States Army, and requests that you delay opening the boxcar no longer.”
Avar glanced at his guards, and Jack silently cursed the military command that had sent six men to disarm sixty. Though he never made vocal his disapproval, he had learned by hard experience that a soldier rarely lost money betting against the wisdom of the brass. The institutionalized idiocy was one of the many reasons that for nearly all of the past year and a half since his enlistment Jack had hated the war, hated the army, hated even the civilians who all too often seemed to despise their American liberators far more than they had their German conquerors. The only people he didn’t hate were the men with whom he served in the 222nd Battalion of the 42nd Infantry, the Rainbow Division, none of whom he’d known for longer than a year and all of whom he loved with a devotion he had never felt before for anyone, not even the girlfriend who had predictably broken his heart in a letter a mere three weeks after he received his commission. He was especially fond of the men of H Company, whose dwindling ranks he had led on a relentless slog through the torn-up landscape, through France and across the Siegfried line until they reached Fürth, where the battalion commanding officer, after a grueling exchange with a recalcitrant local farmer, had decided that he needed the assistance of an aide conversant in German and transferred Jack away from the men who were all that he cared about in this miserable war. His many attempts to return to his company defeated, Jack was left stewing in his loathing and waiting to earn enough points for a discharge. Even considering the battle decorations he’d received at a recent cluster muster, he was three points shy of the eighty-five he needed to be sent home. Best possible outcome, eighty-two points put him in Salzburg for three more months. Worst possible, he was heading to the Pacific.
The Hungarian having failed to respond to his order, Jack repeated, “Please open the boxcars.”
Across Avar’s face seemed to pass the entire history of his benighted people in this interminable war: pride, belligerence, bravado, defensiveness, anxiety, despair. And, finally, resignation. He removed a large iron key from the inside breast pocket of his suit jacket, inserted it into the heavy padlock, and, with a grunt, sprung the lock. When he pushed the door back, the seals tore with a pop like the bursting of an inflated paper bag. The door rumbled open on its runners.
Love and Treasure Page 2