Upon the Head of the Goat

by Aranka Siegal

  “This kitchen is freezing,” Iboya exclaimed, and leaving Sandor’s side, she started to poke at the few sparking coals that remained in the ashes. After a while, Mother’s chest stopped heaving, and she half-dozed in her chair. Then she sat up, looked at us, and said, “Feed the little ones and all of you go to bed.”

  We stirred and finished cooking the forgotten mushrooms on the top of the stove. “It must have happened early in the day if the soup was only half-cooked,” Iboya observed.

  “How did it happen?” I asked Sandor.

  “There were two policemen. Lajos’ hands were tied.”

  “Handcuffed?”

  “Yes, I think so. Lilli and Manci went off with them. Manci was crying, and Lilli was fighting with Mother. Mother tried to take Manci from her.”

  We fed the children and cleaned up. Mother was still sitting in her chair half-asleep. Iboya locked the door and we lay down with the children, falling asleep ourselves.

  We did not go to school the next day. Iboya went out and came back with our family physician and friend, Dr. Feher. He gave Mother a powder and finally succeeded in getting her out of the chair and into bed.

  “What was the excuse they used?” he asked her as he helped her into the bedroom.

  “Two counts: political sabotage against the Hungarian army, and his citizenship was not in order. They said that he was not a good Hungarian. Can you believe it, Dr. Feher, calling Lajos disloyal and untrustworthy?”

  “What is he supposed to have done?”

  “They claimed that he said something against the Hungarian government. Someone made a report. Then when they went to check his papers, they found something wrong there, too.”

  Dr. Feher shook his head in sympathy and, after Mother was in bed, told us that she would be herself again, up and about, in a day or two. We knew that we would have to stay home from school and take care of the children until she was back to normal.

  The next morning I got up early, dressed, and went into the kitchen, and there was Mother, standing at the stove, attending to things in her usual way. She told me to wake Iboya and get ready for school, that she was feeling better. The tone of her voice, firm and quiet, both convinced and cheered me, and I did what I was told.

  The next day, at breakfast, she told us that she must go to Salánk to tell Lajos’ parents what had happened. “I don’t want to tell them in a letter, it’s not the kind of thing you write to people about. I must go myself, so you girls will have to stay home from school until I get back.” She made the fire and stirred up some corn mush for breakfast. Then she rushed into the bedroom, dressed, and came back. “The train leaves at 9 a.m. and I must not miss it.”

  “When will you be back?” Iboya asked.

  “Either tonight on the ten o’clock train, or tomorrow night at the same time. I want to try and go to Komjaty to see Babi and Rozsi.” She kissed us all, told Iboya and me to take good care of the children, and went out the kitchen door.

  Iboya and I prepared ourselves to manage without Mother for the next two days. The children made few demands for attention; on the contrary, they were subdued. They seemed to have understood that a radical change had taken place in our home. Lilli and Manci, both constant companions to them, were gone. Sandor withdrew into himself, seldom speaking to any of us. He played in silence, but occasionally I overheard him whispering to an imaginary playmate. Joli was just starting to pronounce words other than our names, but she did not receive from us the enthusiasm that Lilli had given to every new sound she uttered. She often called Lilli’s and Manci’s names, and kept looking for Mother, going to the door every so often and opening it as though she had heard someone knock. Joli’s expectations, though, were met by emptiness, and she went back to her solitary playing in disappointment. Sometimes she went over to Sandor and began to mimic his actions and follow him around the house. When the mood struck him, he stopped what he was doing and played with her. But most of the time he played alone.

  As the day progressed, I kept wishing for a visit from the Gerbers. But they did not come, nor did anyone else. Iboya and I spoke little to each other. We did the chores, watched the children, and when the day was over, went to bed ourselves. I fell asleep thinking about everything that had happened since my return from Komjaty more than a year ago. I woke to a rustling sound and saw Mother standing on the threshold of our bedroom. “It’s all right,” she whispered. “I’m home. Go back to sleep.”

  She didn’t tell us very much about her visit to Salánk, only that she had been unable to get to Komjaty to see Rozsi and Babi. Over the next weeks, though, I began to notice a change in her manner toward people. She seemed less generous, more suspicious. Our mailman, Mr. Lakatos, could always count on a hot cup of broth in the winter and on a cold drink in the summer. He came in one afternoon, a week after Mother had returned from Salánk; I was in the kitchen helping her as Lilli used to. He had come to tell Mother the latest news from the Russian front. Instead of the usual friendly greeting and steaming mug of broth, Mother gave him a curt “Good day, Mr. Lakatos, have you a letter for me?”

  “I wish I did,” he had answered, “especially since I’ve heard the bad news about poor Lilli and her—”

  “No need to be concerned,” Mother interrupted, “it was all a mistake and they soon will be home again.”

  Mr. Lakatos put his head down and began to fumble with his mailbag. He straightened up, gave the bag a pat, and headed toward the door. “Well, I better be on my way to tend to my job, Mrs. Davidowitz. Good day to you.”

  After he left, I looked at Mother in surprise.

  “If they aren’t willing to help, I’m certainly not going to let them gloat over my misery,” she said. And we continued our dinner preparations in silence. I remembered Babi’s words, “You are fooling yourself. They are neighbors, but only your own can feel your pain.” I felt sad to see Mother’s bitterness in accepting the final separation from former friends and neighbors. Mrs. Gerber came to visit on New Year’s Day and we all sat in the salon, listening to the conversation between her and Mother.

  Mother told Mrs. Gerber about Mr. Lakatos. “He heard about Lilli from the neighbors. They talked about it, but nobody came to answer my cries for help the day they took her, and nobody has come since,” she said.

  “They are all concerned for their own safety,” Mrs. Gerber replied. “They have no firewood and are short on rations. The men are away, and the Germans are running their country.”

  “Their country?” Mother exclaimed. “I used to think it was our country, too. And what about my Ignac and your Gabe? Aren’t they serving in the army?” Mother was angry.

  “Did you find out any more about Lilli and Lajos’ transport?”

  “No, I couldn’t.”

  Mrs. Gerber said, “I think you should stop worrying about them. They will be all right with the money and jewelry you gave them. Thank God you had the presence of mind to do what you did.”

  “I just grabbed everything I had and put it into Lilli’s coat pocket. I would gladly have given all of it to the police if Lajos had let me try to bribe them. Instead, he cried like a little boy and begged them to let both Lilli and Manci stay. And Lilli insisted that she would not be separated from Manci. ‘We’re staying together,’ she kept saying. I took the chance that the police would see what I was doing because they stood over us all the time even while Lilli stuffed a few things into a suitcase. I was very careful and waited until they turned to answer something Lajos said. Then with the coat and the money and jewelry in the wardrobe I threw what I could grab into the coat pocket, and when I helped Lilli on with her coat I whispered to her in Yiddish about the things in the pocket. Who knows if the police took it or if she got a chance to use it.”

  My mind wandered away from Mother’s description of the scene that by now I had heard several times. I began to think about the jewelry she had given to Lilli and wondered if the garnet earrings Babi had given me had gone into the coat pocket. But I didn’t dare
ask. I had visualized myself wearing those earrings with silk dresses when I grew up. Those dreams were beginning to seem foolish, and sometimes not being able to fantasize about growing up depressed me. Judi said that the war would be over by the time we grew up. But I was not sure that things in our house would ever be normal again.

  13

  ONE DAY in mid-January, Mother came to school with the little ones to get Iboya and me. That morning she had received a telegram from Lajos’ parents telling her to be at the telegraph office at 3 p.m. to receive their telephone call. Iboya went home with Sandor and Joli, and Mother took me with her to the telegraph office. The man behind the glass wall at the desk told us to sit down and wait until we were notified that the call had come. Mother kept biting the knuckle of her fourth finger in anticipation. “They would not be telephoning unless they had an urgent message. God only knows what I am about to hear,” she said to me. I looked at some of the other people seated around us, and they also seemed restless, frightened, and nervous.

  “Did you ever talk on the telephone before?” I asked Mother.

  “I once did in Budapest,” she answered, “when I was a young woman. I called my brother at his office.”

  I was excited by the thought of speaking to someone who was two hours away by train from us. “Will you let me listen?” I asked.

  “Yes,” said Mother, “if it is possible. I don’t know how things will be arranged.”

  Then the voice from behind the glass wall called, “Mrs. Davidowitz, your call is ready in number 6.”

  Mother jumped up in confusion, not knowing where number 6 was. I pointed to a booth and followed her to it. She did not seem to remember how to hold the receiver, putting first one end, and then the other, to her ear. When she had it right she said, “Hello, hello,” into the strange-looking mouthpiece. “Yes, it is I.” Her face drained of color as she listened. “Yes, yes, I have it. I’ll leave tomorrow. Goodbye.” She replaced the receiver on its hook and then rummaged in her bag for a pencil, found one and took it out, pulled the telegram out of her pocket, and held it against the wall of the booth while she wrote on it. Then she replaced the telegram in her pocket.

  “You didn’t let me hear anything,” I said.

  “I’m sorry, I forgot, and then they called the time.”

  “What did they say?”

  “Let’s get outside, and I’ll tell you.”

  Once we were outside, the cold January air restored the color to Mother’s face. “Lajos sent them a letter from Poland. He wants somebody to come for Manci. She has the whooping cough.”

  “Are you going?” I asked her.

  “Tomorrow.”

  “How will you go? You can’t go by train.”

  “I’ll have to.”

  “What if…” I started to say, the fear beginning to thump in my chest.

  “I have to go.” Mother cut short my imaginings.

  On the way home, Mother stopped at the fur store where Lujza worked. “Go in and tell her to come out,” Mother said. “I don’t want to go in looking like this.”

  I walked in and Lujza saw me immediately. Excusing herself from a fashionably dressed woman who was trying on a gray Persian lamb coat, she came over, bent down to my level, and asked quietly, “Is anything wrong?”

  “Mother is outside,” I answered, “and wants to talk to you.”

  “I’ll have to ask my supervisor for permission to leave the store. You go back outside and wait with your mother.”

  She came out a few minutes later, wearing her pony coat unbuttoned. Mother whispered to her and showed her the telegram with the notes she had made. Lujza kissed Mother’s cheek and said, “I’ll be at your house between eight and eight-thirty this evening.” She went back inside, and Mother and I walked to the shoe store.

  “You stay here, outside; I’m going in to see Mr. Kovacs,” Mother said to me. I peered between the shoes in the window display as Mother followed Mr. Kovacs around, trying to talk to him. The two people in the store were staring at her. I saw her remove her headscarf and adjust her hair with her hand. She cornered him at the door to the stockroom. I could see his impatience as he listened to her; finally he went into the stockroom and came back a few minutes later with a piece of paper, which he handed to her. She stuffed it deep into her coat pocket and took her leave by nodding to the staring customers.

  Once outside, she took out the paper and carefully unfolded it. “Twenty pengö! He knows that I can’t even buy a one-way ticket with this.”

  Next we stopped at Dr. Feher’s office and sat down in the waiting room with his patients. One of them turned to Mother and asked what was the matter with her.

  “It is my little girl,” she said, indicating me with a nod of her head, “she has very bad cramps. I think it is her appendix.” I doubled over to illustrate the pain of the cramps.

  When Dr. Feher opened the door leading into his examining room, Mother jumped up. “It is an emergency! You must look at this child right away!” He led us into his examining room and closed the door. Mother pulled out the telegram and handed it to him. As he read it, she said over and over, “I must go. I must leave tomorrow.” When he finished, he looked over at her and she took out the twenty pengö. “This is what Mr. Kovacs gave me. I had to beg for our money. Can you imagine? What a world we are living in! I’m so ashamed that I had to come to you.”

  Dr. Feher took out a few bills from his pocket, then went over to the bookshelf behind his desk, took down a book, opened the front cover, and removed the bills that were there. He came back to Mother and handed her the money.

  “Here, you’ll give it back when you can.” Then he poured some medicine into a small bottle and wrapped it up. “One teaspoon every four hours. Good luck.” He opened the door and we went again through the waiting room, Mother holding the small bottle of medicine in her hand.

  Lujza arrived at eight-thirty accompanied by two strangers, a man about Father’s age and a younger woman about Lilli’s age. Lujza introduced them as “the artists.” “They will need a place to work,” she said to Mother, who led them into the salon. The young woman removed the plush table cover from the round table, folded it up, and carefully put it down on a nearby chair. Both of them took from their pockets an assortment of ink bottles, pens, papers, stamps, scissors, and erasers, which they placed in the center of the round table. Then they sat down, ready to work. Lujza rummaged through a box of old photographs that Mother had taken out of the wardrobe. They were still working when Iboya and I went to sleep.

  “What are they doing all this time?” I whispered to Iboya in the darkness.

  “Making Mother a passport. In case she is stopped.”

  “Why does it take so long?”

  “It has to be perfect. She will be passing through German-held territory.”

  “Do you think it will work?”

  “They do it all the time for the Zionists.”

  The next day I hardly recognized Mother when she left to take the afternoon train to Poland. With a heavy black shawl covering her head and shoulders, she looked like a peasant woman. Below the shawl hung a heavy cotton skirt, and on her feet were old leather boots like those the peasant women of Komjaty wore. Over her arm she carried a market basket. Iboya kept Sandor and Joli in the kitchen so that they would not see Mother leave. When I came back from bolting the gate after her, I asked Iboya where Mother had found the clothes she was wearing.

  “At Mrs. Silverman’s,” Iboya answered.

  “What did Mother put in the basket?”

  “Food. All trayf. She even had bacon-grease sandwiches. I wonder where she got them,” Iboya mused.

  “Will she eat them?” I asked in surprise.

  “I suppose she’ll do everything she has to do to be accepted as a peasant woman.”

  “If any of the neighbors saw her leaving the house, I’m sure they thought she was someone from Komjaty,” I said.

  That night before we went to bed, Iboya and I double-bolted the do
or. Once we were in bed, we talked late into the night. Lujza stopped by the next evening to see if we were all right. “If she does not come back by tomorrow afternoon, one of you come to the store and let me know,” she said. Iboya and I were prepared for a second long night of staying awake, when, a little before midnight, there was a tap on the window over our bed. We both jumped up in fright, not daring to pull up the shade. But then we heard Mother’s voice through the glass, “Iboya, Piri, open the door.”

  We ran out in our nightshirts and asked, “Who is it?” to be sure it really was Mother’s voice we had heard before we unbolted the door. She answered us in an impatient tone, and we quickly opened the door. We expected to see Manci, too, but the only thing Mother had with her was her empty market basket. Once we were all back in the kitchen, she collapsed into a kitchen chair, her body sagging in exhaustion. Iboya rekindled the dying fire in the kitchen stove and put up some tea. Mother kept rubbing her numbed fingers until they uncurled. Then, removing her boots, she went to work on her toes.

  “It was freezing on that train, and it is much colder in Poland than it is here. Nobody has any firewood. Everybody is freezing. They hardly have anything to eat and they can’t think about anything else—just firewood and food. My problem could soarcely interest them. Maybe if I had brought some extra food and firewood with me in a suitcase, they would have been more interested; my money couldn’t buy them what they needed.” She stopped rubbing her toes and sat up.

  Iboya handed her Father’s large mug filled with steaming tea into which she had poured a little rum from the special bottle kept for guests. Mother took a few quick sips and then rested the mug on her knees. Her face relaxed as the tea warmed her, and the heavy shawl slid from her shoulders as her chest heaved. “And nothing was accomplished!” she said.