Love and Treasure

by Waldman, Ayelet

  All told, the visitors spent four hours in the warehouse, and by the time they were finished, Jack was exhausted. But he was also conscious of a huge weight being lifted from his shoulders. Finally, he would be rid of his nearly unbearable responsibility.

  He escorted them out to the two long black cars that waited in the street in front of the warehouse. He held the doors open, and one by one they piled inside. The leader of the delegation was the last of the Hungarians to enter the cars, and before he did so he motioned for Jack to bend over to him. He placed his gnarled hands on either side of Jack’s head and murmured a prayer. The tune was not one Jack recognized, but the words were the same as the prayer with which his mother’s father had blessed him and his younger brother over Shabbos dinner.

  “May God make you like Ephraim and Menashe,” the rabbi sang in Hebrew, blessing Jack as Joseph had blessed his grandsons, Jacob’s sons, two boys who grew up as Jack did, in the Diaspora, subject to the temptations and dangers of exile.

  In Yiddish, because German seemed at that moment a sacrilege, Jack thanked the rabbi, who pressed his lips to Jack’s forehead before getting into the car.

  As Jack closed the car door, Rabbi Bohnen, who had watched the exchange, said, “A blessing from such a rabbi is a very great thing. I’m proud of you, Jack.”

  What was there to be proud of? Jack thought. That he’d kept the warehouse well organized so the brass’s pillaging was easier to accomplish?

  “You’ve been a good guardian,” Bohnen said, as though reading his mind. “Their property has been safe with you.”

  And even Jack, so adept at self-criticism, had to admit that this was true. He’d done a fair job of limiting theft, as well as could be expected given the limited staff he’d been assigned. He’d kept careful track of every requisition. Bohnen was right. He had been a good guardian. And now the Hungarian property was going back where it belonged, to be dispersed among the surviving remnant of Budapest’s Jews. He allowed himself to experience a flush of contentment, a hint of hope.

  Within moments, it was gone.

  “I didn’t want to give you this while they were still here,” Price said.

  “Sir?”

  Price handed him a file of requisition orders. For Medical Corps officer General Edgar E. Hume: eighteen rugs, tableware and silverware, table linen, and glassware. For General Howard’s Vienna apartment: nine rugs, one silver set, and twelve silver plates. For Brigadier General Linden: ten rugs. For Major General McMahon: two hundred pieces of glass and porcelain tableware.

  Jack opened his mouth, but Price lifted his hand. “I don’t want to hear it, Lieutenant. Fill the orders.”

  And with that Jack’s sense of accomplishment and hope was gone. He was powerless against the military, like a polar bear standing on a melting ice floe, the sea lapping ever closer.

  • 7 •

  THE WOMEN WHO SHARED Ilona’s room knew him, and they smiled at his attempt to greet them in their own tongues. His “Jó napot” sounded pretty good, but at his polite and friendly “Achuj” the Polish women bent over at the waist, wiping the hilarious tears that streamed from their eyes. He wouldn’t know what it was about his accent that amused them so until many years later, when he’d try it out on a waitress in a bar in Little Poland in Greenpoint, who’d also bend over, clutching her belly and wheezing, until she wiped her merry eyes and told him that he hadn’t in fact wished her a good day but rather called her a prick.

  He was under the impression that Ilona’s roommates were a ribald bunch, and he was relieved, as ever, that he didn’t understand enough Hungarian to know what they were saying as they teased him.

  This afternoon, weeks and weeks after the visit from the delegation that Jack had foolishly imagined would signal the end of his job and the return of the contents of the Werfen train, he had left newly promoted Corporal Streeter in charge of the warehouse, unable to bear another moment there. He needed to see Ilona. He found her sitting on her bed, darning a sock. The sock was blue, but the thread was black. Jack wished he’d bought her a pile of spools in a rainbow of colors. Her skirt was rucked up above her knee. She was not wearing tights, and in the chill of the room the reddish-gold down on her legs stood erect. A considerable share of Jack’s nocturnal rumination was devoted to the as-yet-unanswered question of whether the color of her bush also ran to strawberry blond or something closer to the auburn of her head. She caught him staring at the heart of the mystery. He started to avert his gaze, then mastered the impulse and returned her fixed gaze.

  They looked into each other’s eyes for a moment, and then she did something astonishing. Subtly, almost imperceptibly, she shifted her legs apart. It was no more than an inch or two, so little that one who was not obsessed might not even have noticed. Jack caught a glimpse of pink thigh and white panty, and then it was over. She put down her darning and stood up.

  “More presents!” she said when he handed her his daily offerings. “Soon I will be the richest Chocolate Girl in all of Land Salzburg.” Then as if she regretted the joke, she lifted her hand to his cheek. “Thank you,” she said sweetly. She was not often sweet, a sardonic smile more frequently on her lips than a gentle one, so when she allowed herself to be like this, it melted his heart.

  “Listen, Jack, I have something to tell you,” she began, but now the other girls had come over to see what he’d brought.

  “Later,” she told him, and unwrapped two chocolate bars and passed them around. When she pulled out the pairs of Gotham Gold Stripe nylon hose, one of the women said something in Polish, and the others burst out laughing. A Hungarian woman fingered the nylon and murmured something to Ilona, who pressed a pair into her hands.

  Ilona said, “She says she must have them to wear when she gets off the train in Budapest so she will be beautiful for her husband.” Though the woman spoke no English, Ilona lowered her voice. “Her husband is a Christian. They divorced in 1944, when the Jewish laws were passed, and she is worried that he won’t take her back. She heard that he and her son survived the war in Budapest, but they have not answered her letters.”

  Son of a bitch, Jack thought, cursing the man, though not aloud.

  From somewhere the Polish women had scrounged a bottle of nail polish, and they went back to painting one another’s nails. The Hungarian woman returned to her packing. Jack noticed that some of the other Hungarians were also collecting their bags.

  “Are they leaving?” Jack asked. He felt a sudden flash of anxiety. Were all the Hungarians leaving? Was Ilona leaving, too?

  “In three days there will be a train from Vienna to Budapest. Everyone must go to Vienna tomorrow morning to get travel permits to go home.”

  Jack’s heart sank. “Oh. I mean, well. Is this good-bye?”

  She frowned for a moment and then laughed. “No. You silly boy. I’m not leaving Salzburg. How could I leave without Etelka?”

  How long, he wondered, would she wait? Though he wished for the sake of the woman he loved that her fantasy were true, Jack was sure that if Etelka had survived, by now her name would have appeared on some list, somewhere. He had gone with Ilona again and again to the offices of the Red Cross and of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, searching through the lists of names for Etelka’s. Along the way Ilona had come across names of others of her acquaintance, mostly on lists of the dead, but once or twice on those of the living. But she had yet to find her sister’s name. Wherever they went in the city, Ilona scanned the crowd, peering at faces. She even chose activities based on the possibility that her sister might be there. As if Etelka would have come to Salzburg and gone for a hike up the Untersberg before searching for her sister or registering with the Red Cross. Your sister is dead, Jack wanted, and feared, to tell Ilona. She died on one of the forced marches with which the Nazis had tortured the last surviving prisoners. Almost everyone had, after all.

  Jack was stuck in the untenable position of both believing that it was best for Ilona that she acknowle
dge this truth, that she accept it and begin the unbearable task of moving on, and knowing that her fruitless search was what kept her here, with him. Otherwise she would leave, move on out of this graveyard back home to Hungary. To layer ambivalence upon ambivalence, he also feared that it was the search for Etelka, the inability to move on, that kept Ilona from being with him wholeheartedly. Ilona’s delusion about Etelka’s survival allowed them to be in each other’s company but kept her from falling in love with him as he had fallen in love with her.

  They left the room and walked down the stairs, Jack’s arm looped around Ilona’s shoulders, holding her close. They had been together nearly six months now, and he’d proven the seriousness of his commitment by extending his service for another six months in order to stay with her in Salzburg, but this—the bones of her shoulder, the brush of her lips across his, the flavor of her mouth—was the only access she allowed him to her body. The hours they spent together in the cinema or at the Marionetten Theater, in cafés, on blankets spread on the chilly banks of the Leopoldskorn before the snow began or, now that the ground was too wet, in darkened doorways, had become the venue of a single ongoing wrestling match, gentle and infuriating.

  The rain was coming down in its perpetual Salzburg “strings,” the schnurlregen for which the city was so infamous, and they decided to ride the streetcar rather than walk. The military had lifted the ban on fraternization in September, and for the last few months they’d been allowed to walk freely through the city, to go to movies and frequent cafés, to ride the streetcar without worrying about being discovered by an MP in a bad mood. The car was half empty, and so they were able to sit together.

  “What was it you wanted to tell me?” he asked, trying not to dread her response.

  “I received today a letter from my aunt Firenze,” Ilona said, and showed him the thin blue envelope. “She is in Budapest, trying to arrange transport back to England. She says there is nothing left for us in Nagyvárad. She invites me to go with her to her old home. In Manchester.”

  Jack felt his chest constrict with anxiety, with loss, as though he were already missing her, even as he felt her next to him, her thigh pressing against his. “Do you want to go to Manchester?”

  “I don’t know. Before the war I never imagined living anywhere but Hungary. In the cemetery in Nagyvárad are the graves of my great-great-grandparents, maybe even further back than that. My grandfather said we could trace our family back a thousand years, all the way to the Khazars. But now Nagyvárad is gone.”

  “So what will you tell her?” he said. “Your aunt Firenze.”

  “I don’t know.” She slipped her hand into his. “Maybe we are not so different after all, you and I. Maybe I’m like you a soldier who can’t leave her post. I have to wait for Etelka, just like you have to stay and guard the train until it is returned to its rightful owners.”

  He felt a stab of shame. If she knew what had happened today she would be horrified at the comparison.

  Ilona folded the letter and put it back in its envelope. “After Etelka comes, and after your work is done, after that, we’ll see.”

  They had arrived at their stop, and Jack jumped down from the streetcar and lifted his hands for her. Surprised, she leaped into them, and he spun her around, placing a kiss on her lips as he set her on the ground.

  “You are so silly, Jack!” she said, laughing.

  Together they crossed the road to the movie theater, where the marquee read DR. EHRLICH’S MAGIC BULLET.

  “Are you sure we should see this?” he asked. He loved Edward G. Robinson, but he was less enthusiastic about the idea of passing an afternoon with his girl immersed in the biography of the man who had discovered the cure for syphilis. “Do you know what it’s about?”

  “I know, yes. My sister, Etelka, I told you she was a medical student. This is exactly the kind of movie she would go to.”

  The theater was dark and murky but, unlike the theaters of his childhood in Manhattan, was gloriously, impeccably clean. Though he enjoyed not having to wonder whether it was popcorn or something more disgusting that crunched beneath his shoes as he walked down the aisle, he missed the smell of butter and the din of a few thousand children left to their own devices for an entire day’s worth of cartoons, newsreels, and features in the RKO Roxy or the Rivoli.

  He maintained an impassive expression as Ilona scanned the crowd, looking as always for her sister’s face. She settled down only once the screen flickered to life. Halfway through the second reel, the lights, such as they were, came on, but the projectionist did not stop the film.

  The crowd murmured in protest, and Jack amused himself imagining what the response would have been in New York. The shouts of disgust, the boxes of popcorn flung at the screen. Four Austrian policemen in their Wehrmacht uniforms, stripped of insignia and dyed a streaky blue, came down the dimly lit aisles and stood in front of the screen, the looming intent scowl of Robinson projected on their own pale faces.

  “Out, out!” the officers shouted in German. “You lazy pigs. It’s time for work, not play!”

  “What the hell?” Jack said. He looked around but realized that he was, as far as he could tell, the only American officer in the theater.

  The policemen spread out through the theater. They walked slowly up the aisles, stopping periodically and hauling out a young man or woman, berating them as shirkers and layabouts and sending them out of the theater. The policeman closest to Jack and Ilona was rotund, with a face full of acne scars and a uniform slightly more official looking than the others’. He carried his nightstick in his hand, slapping it against his palm and using it to prod and push at his victims.

  When he reached Ilona and Jack, he stopped. He jutted his chin at Ilona and said, “You! Why are you not at your job?”

  “I am exempt,” she said.

  “DPs are not exempt! Show me your papers!”

  Ilona pulled a folded piece of paper out of the leather change purse Jack had bought her at the PX. It was her brand-new refugee permit, received only a few days ago from the UNRRA office in the Chiemseehof Palace.

  “Put that away,” Jack said. “This isn’t Nazi Germany. You don’t need to show him your papers.”

  She hesitated. “In the newspaper yesterday was an article complaining about how people are going to the cinema instead of working to clean up the city. Perhaps now they begin arresting people.”

  “It’s their mess,” Jack said. “Let them clean it up.” To the police officer, in German, he said, “She’s with me.”

  The officer hesitated a moment and then shrugged and joined his colleagues and the small, bedraggled group of frustrated cinephiles they had assembled at the back of the theater. Batons at the ready, the police herded their charges out the door.

  The projectionist turned out the lights and Edward G. Robinson was denounced, exonerated, and ultimately died, but Jack had difficulty paying attention. When the lights went up, he led Ilona swiftly through the crowd, trying to get away as quickly as possible. When they reached the street, dark now, he said, “It’s cold. You want to get something to eat?”

  She nodded and shrugged deeper into the warmth of the wool coat he had had his mother send from New York. It was one of the few things that he had given Ilona that she hadn’t passed on to another, ostensibly more needy, DP. They walked through the old city, bundled up against the biting wind and the flurries of snow. They walked into the Getreidegasse, and soon they were ensconced at a table in a corner of the gaily lit Café Mozart.

  Though he didn’t usually, today he ordered a piece of cake for himself as well. The whipped cream tasted funny; it had, he thought, gone off. That the café had cream at all, not to mention flour and sugar, in a time of increasing food shortages, spoke to a great Austrian capacity for ingenuity, at least when it came to sweets. Ilona was either too polite or too hungry to complain. Only once she’d licked her finger and used it to blot up the last crumbs of cake did he say, “Listen, Ilona. I have something to
tell you.”

  “Today is a day of news, I guess.”

  He took a deep breath, and told her the miserable thing he’d spent the day trying to forget, the thing he knew he owed it to her to say. “Price came into the warehouse with a memo. The stuff on the train isn’t going back to Hungary after all. Not anytime soon, anyway.” Jack bit his lip, waiting for her angry reply, but then suddenly conscious of a feeling of resentment. Why should he be afraid to tell her? It wasn’t her property. What right had she to make him feel bad about it? But at once he knew he was being irrational. She wasn’t making him feel bad. He was doing that all by himself. And he should feel bad. It was terrible what his army was doing. Criminal.

  “What happened?” Ilona said, every bit as shocked as he expected her to be. Though not angry. Not yet. “Weeks ago you said the Hungarian delegation had come!”

  “I don’t know,” Jack said. “There’s some debate going on between the Hungarians and the Jewish Agency. Price wouldn’t tell me much.”

  “What is there to debate?” she said. “It is simple. The property belongs to Hungary. Give it back. End of story.”

  He sighed and said, “Nothing’s ever that simple.”

  “Of course it is.”

  “Think about it, Ilona. Who are we going to turn over the property to? The Hungarian government? They’re a defeated enemy. We aren’t about to give them a huge pile of loot.”

  “You give it to the people it belongs to.”

  “How? You want the U.S. military to just roll into Budapest and set up a commissary? Give it out to people on the street?”