He describes the train journey that seemed to go on forever. ‘Some peoples they think we to Auschwitz going, but my mother say, Nagy Miklós, he not sending us to Auschwitz. Then we in Bergen-Belsen, waiting. Terrible camp. Peoples angry, why we here? We die here? But mother always say, trust Mr Nagy. He doing what he promise. And one day he fixing everything and we to Switzerland going,’ he says with a euphoric smile.
‘Do you remember any of the people on the train?’ she asks.
He spreads his hands. ‘So long time ago. How I can remembering? You say grandmother was on train. Grandmother name?’
‘Marika Horvath.’
He stares at her. ‘Horvath Marika?’
With growing excitement, she says, ‘So you remember her?’
His eyes light up. ‘All people knowing Horvath Marika. Special woman.’
Annika smiles at the compliment. She has seen the photograph, and knows how lovely her grandmother was in 1945.
‘What do you remember about her?’ she asks.
He rubs his stubbled chin, muttering to himself as he tries to recall details. After a long pause, he says, ‘Very kind lady, she with children playing. Also, she vomiting.’
‘So she was ill on the journey?’
‘Other womans talking about her. Not good things.’
‘Talking about her? Why? Do you know what they said?’
He pauses again. Then he says, ‘Horvath Marika not Horvath Marika.’
Was he having trouble expressing his thoughts, or was he being enigmatic? ‘I don’t understand what you mean.’
‘Before, not Horvath. Horvath name for train.’
She wonders if he has become confused and mixed her up with someone else. After all these years, it wouldn’t be surprising, but she can’t dismiss the disquieting impression that he sounds very sure of his facts. So why did the other women say nasty things about her? Was it because she was ill, or because she had changed her name?
‘Are you saying that she changed her name for the train journey?’
His eyes are boring into her face as if he is weighing something up, struggling with something, and even though she is still convinced that he has confused her with someone else, his silence unsettles her. ‘Do you know why she did that?’
Before replying, Shmuel exhales a thick column of dark smoke which makes her cough. ‘Sorry, I not speaking English good,’ he says,
She supposes that he is about to admit that he has made a mistake, but he says, ‘Nagy Miklós change Horvath Marika name for train.’
She knows that people often falsified details on documents during the war. He must have had a reason for changing her grandmother’s name, although she can’t imagine what it could have been. It was intriguing to discover that the grandmother she has always known as Marika Horvath might once have had a different name.
Shmuel is still looking at her with a peculiar expression, and in between puffs of his noxious cigarette, he is saying something that doesn’t make sense. Even when he repeats it, she still can’t grasp what he means. Perhaps it’s his accent, or his limited English. Then he says it again, very slowly and this time she gets it, and her heart is thumping so fast she feels it will jump out of her chest.
‘On train, Horvath Marika. In Budapest, Weisz Ilonka.’
CHAPTER FORTY
Tel Aviv, 2005
Weisz Ilonka.
Ilonka.
Where has she heard that name before?
Two blocks from Shmuel’s building, Annika leans against a wall whose crumbling plaster is covered by layers of torn posters and caricatures of politicians. A toothless man in a torn T-shirt is sitting on the pavement with a blank expression, a scrawled cardboard sign in front of him and a rib-skinny mongrel stretched out beside him. Sunk in his own world, he doesn’t look up when she bends down, places a few shekels in his empty bowl, and pats the dog.
Suddenly she straightens up. Eitan Nagy! That’s where she heard the name.
Ilonka. That’s the name Miklós Nagy uttered just before he died, according to Eitan. He said that had upset his grandmother. Ilonka. An unusual name. But could there have been two Ilonkas?
She stands still, struggling to figure this out. Shmuel insisted that Marika Horvath had once been Ilonka Weisz. So it was probably another Marika Horvath. But what if it wasn’t? She dismisses that thought. There was no reason to suspect that her grandmother had changed her name. Then who was Ilonka Weisz?
The surname is familiar and Annika knows she has come across it before. It wasn’t Eitan, and it wasn’t Dov either, so who said it? Her heart is racing now as she sifts hurriedly through a tangle of memories. She hasn’t discussed the Nagy case with anyone else.
She walks on, aware that she has been muttering to herself, but in this neighbourhood that probably wasn’t unusual. Somewhere among the millions of neurons whirring inside her brain is the synapse that contains the vital connection but it eludes her. Where did she hear that name?
If she didn’t hear it, how else could she have come across it? Could she have read it somewhere? There was only one possibility. Her mind scrolls through the names of the witnesses who testified during the trial, the names that were mentioned in connection with Miklós Nagy.
Then she stops walking again. Gábor Weisz. Miklós Nagy’s colleague, the one who was sent on the doomed mission to Istanbul. Now it comes back to her. Didn’t he mention in his testimony that his wife was on the rescue train under a different name? That Miklós Nagy had obtained false papers for her? But Weisz probably wasn’t an unusual surname, so that didn’t prove anything.
Without making a conscious decision, she wheels around and retraces her steps. The beggar on the pavement glances up as she hurries past, and his dog wags its tail in joyful recognition, but this time she doesn’t stop to pat it.
Shmuel raises his bushy eyebrows when he sees her on his doorstep again. ‘You forget something?’
She shakes her head, panting, and he asks her to come inside. The radio is blaring but this time she hardly registers the noise, the smell of stale nicotine that emanates from the walls and the threadbare carpet, or the loud ticking of the clock on the mantelpiece. She gulps down a glass of water and tries to catch her breath as he switches off the radio.
‘I had to come back to ask you about this Ilonka Weisz because I don’t understand something you said, so I’m hoping you can remember a few more details.’
‘Again with the remembering. I say you I not remembering much.’
‘But you remembered that Marika Horvath was Ilonka Weisz, so perhaps you’ll remember other things too.’ She sits on the edge of the wooden chair. ‘I’m sorry to bother you about this, but it’s very important to me.’
‘So what thing you want to know?’
‘Tell me something about Ilonka Weisz. Anything.’
He scratches his bald head and runs his hand along the stubble on his jaw. She waits expectantly but from the way he is looking down and shaking his head from time to time without speaking, she begins to lose hope.
Then he looks up. ‘Ilonka Weisz wife of Gábor Weisz.’
From the little that Annika knows about Marika’s life, she recalls being told that Marika arrived in Australia with her baby girl, Annika’s mother Eva — and she had always assumed that they had migrated from Hungary. She was told that Marika was widowed soon after her arrival in Sydney. Marika never spoke about her husband, and Annika had assumed that the grief of losing him so soon after arriving in a new country must have been traumatic. But she had never said anything about being married before that, and she had never mentioned Gábor Weisz.
Ever since Annika was old enough to eavesdrop on adult conversations, she has overheard her mother gossiping with her friends about other women, their heads close together as they whispered about scandals involving lovers, affairs, mistresses and divorces. From these conversations, Annika gathered that men and women were often unfaithful to their spouses, and that affairs were common occurrences, whereas
divorces were something to be ashamed of, as if having a lover was exciting but divorcing a husband was a sign of failure. Knowing how carefully Marika had reinvented herself in Australia, Annika supposes that this first marriage was probably an inconvenient fact that cast a shadow over her otherwise perfectly reconstructed life.
Annika thinks back to the transcript, and recalls Gábor Weisz saying that while he was in Istanbul, his wife remained in Budapest as Eichmann’s hostage. Like a detective piecing clues together, she figures that this adds up: as Gábor was in Istanbul at the time Miklós Nagy was organising the departure of his train, it was natural to include his friend’s wife among the people he rescued. And that was probably why he changed her name, to prevent Eichmann from finding out that she’d escaped.
‘Now I understand.’ Annika smiles at Shmuel, pleased that she has been able to make sense of this puzzling information. ‘She was on the train under a different name because she was married to Gábor Weisz.’
He is looking at her with that strange expression again. ‘But you not understanding.’
She taps her foot on the floor, and tries to speak calmly. ‘Then please explain what it is I don’t understand.’
He looks up at the ceiling, scratches his head again, and looks at his hands.
‘Ilonka Weisz wife of Gábor Weisz, but Miklós Nagy’s woman.’
A speeding train has just crashed inside her head, leaving smashed carriages and twisted metal in its wake. Is he saying that Marika was Nagy’s mistress? It’s not possible, surely it can’t be true. He must be mistaken. Or has she misunderstood?
A long silence stretches between them. Speaking very slowly, she says, ‘Do you mean that this Ilonka Weisz and Miklós Nagy were having an affair?’
He nods.
‘But how can you possibly know that?’
‘Everybody in Budapest knowing,’ he says. ‘Weisz Ilonka and Nagy Miklós lovers.’
She stares at him, too shocked to collect her thoughts. The clock on the mantelpiece seems to be ticking inside her head like a time bomb about to explode. Just a moment ago, she thought she had made sense of Marika’s marriage and her changed name, but now the world has turned upside down again, and nothing makes sense. It is impossible to entertain the idea that her controlled, restrained, elegant grandmother who had such uncompromising views on morality, had an affair with her husband’s closest friend and colleague. Not discreet tête-à-têtes and secret rendezvous, but a flagrant affair apparently conducted in the bright light of public scrutiny while her husband was on a tragic mission in Istanbul.
This Marika is a complete stranger. Not the cool paragon of virtue on a marble pedestal she has always known, the woman whose high standards always made her feel inadequate, but a fallible and impulsive woman who risked her reputation and her honour to surrender to a love that was so all-consuming that nothing else mattered. Annika is horrified, but at the same time she is intrigued, almost envious, of the passion that must have fuelled this illicit love affair. How astonishing — and how incredible — to learn that Miklós Nagy must have been the love of her life. This Marika is more human. Less perfect. More like her, really. How ironic, and how typical, that she has had to travel to the other side of the world to discover her grandmother’s secret life.
But there are still too many loose ends, and Annika has a nagging feeling that there are parts of this puzzle that don’t fit into her neat solution. If they really did have this reckless love affair, why did they separate? How come Miklós migrated to Israel while Marika ended up in Australia, adamant that she never wanted to hear his name again?
‘Did they part because she decided to stay with her husband?’ she asks.
Shmuel shakes his head. ‘Miklós Nagy married.’
‘Married when? In Israel?’
‘In Budapest. Before Germans occupating Hungary.’
So Marika not only betrayed her own husband, she had an affair with a married man.
Then she remembers Eitan saying that his grandmother never got over hearing Miklós utter Ilonka’s name on his deathbed, although she never told anyone why this upset her so much. She supposes that Eitan’s grandmother had found out about her husband’s past love affair, and had kept silent about it to avoid humiliation. So did Miklós divorce the woman he had married in Budapest, and did he remarry in Israel?
But Shmuel is shaking his head again. ‘Not second wife. Same wife,’ he says in a tone that leaves no room for doubt.
Once again the picture she has constructed is out of focus, like a photograph hurriedly snapped by a shaking hand. As she struggles to comprehend this information, she comforts herself with the thought that she doesn’t have to believe what he says, it could all be the result of conjecture, supposition and gossip, typical of the web of unsubstantiated rumours that people often weave around a famous person who can’t refute them.
But she can’t ignore the fact that Shmuel, who initially claimed to remember nothing, obviously knows a great deal about this affair, and in his awkward way he has been trying to be diplomatic.
She recalls the rancour with which Marika reacted to the mention of Miklós Nagy sixty years later, and once again the picture blurs. What became of their passion that flouted all the rules? There’s a question she needs to ask, but it takes her a few minutes to articulate it.
‘It doesn’t make sense to me that as soon as she had escaped from Hungary, and they could finally be together, they went their separate ways and settled on different continents. Do you know why they parted?’
Now it’s his turn to remain silent, and she waits, aware that the clock on the mantelpiece is ticking more insistently than ever. From the way he avoids her eyes, she suspects he knows the answer. She takes deep breaths to slow the beating of her heart.
‘In camp, Weisz Ilonka vomiting.’
‘You said that before. So she was ill. That’s not surprising given the conditions in the camp. But that doesn’t explain why they separated.’
‘Other womans saying baby coming.’
Annika tries to control her impatience. ‘What baby?’
Shmuel is looking at her meaningfully as he pats his stomach.
‘Are you saying she was pregnant, that she was expecting a baby?’
‘Yes, baby.’
Now she knows he’s just repeating rumours. Marika only had one child and that was her mother Eva. Either way, being pregnant was no reason to break up and run away to a country on the other end of the earth where she didn’t know anyone.
He was obviously repeating malicious gossip that must have circulated around the camp, where boredom and close proximity would probably have provided a fertile ground for rumours.
‘That doesn’t make sense,’ she says. ‘Why would they have parted if she was pregnant?’
He ignores her comment. ‘Nagy Miklós’s wife, she also,’ and he pats his stomach again. ‘Two womans, two babies, one man.’
Once again, her carefully constructed scenario collapses. She is riding a rollercoaster that’s out of control. If Miklós Nagy was in love with Ilonka, how come his wife was also pregnant?
‘What happened to his wife?’
He looks puzzled. ‘Nothing happening. She having baby, and she having husband also.’
Annika swallows. ‘And Marika. What happened to her?’
This time he looks straight into her eyes. ‘Train arriving in Switzerland. Nagy Miklós to station coming. He kissing wife. This I see. Madame Marika, she sees also. She saying something to Nagy, and she walking away. I not see her again, never.’
‘Do you have any idea what she said?’
Shmuel spreads his hands. ‘I not hearing, but she looking angry and he looking sad.’
*
That night Annika can’t sleep. Shmuel’s words keep running through her head like a continuous newsreel she can’t switch off. She would like to believe that this is just a fantastic story created by rumour, malice and exaggeration, but she knows she is merely trying to avoid confro
nting the truth.
As she goes over the facts yet again, it reminds her of her attempts to solve maths equations at high school, where she was given all the necessary information but the correct solution always eluded her.
She is about to drop off to sleep when she sits bolt upright, her heart hammering in her ears. Before her is the scene at the railway station in Switzerland. She can see her grandmother climbing down from the train, looking eagerly for Miklós Nagy. She can feel Marika’s excitement throbbing in her veins. Now she catches sight of him, and hurries towards him. She can’t wait to tell him the news. But suddenly she sees something that makes her freeze. He is embracing his wife, who is obviously pregnant. She strides towards him and, with the implacable fury of a woman betrayed, spits out that she never wants to see him again as long as she lives.
Annika sinks back onto the bed, convinced of the truth of her vision. A feeling of sadness wraps itself around her. It feels as if she has lived through this herself. She can almost feel it in her bones. She feels it in her heart. And she is certain that Miklós Nagy never knew that Ilonka was pregnant. Perhaps after all, love wasn’t enough.
Annika makes a rapid calculation. She doesn’t know the exact date when her grandmother arrived in Sydney but she thinks it was some time in 1946 when her mother Eva was about a year old. Marika had told Eva that her father was a Hungarian called Sándor Horvath who had died when she was a baby. Annika knows now that there was no Sándor Horvath.
It’s about three o’clock in the morning when Annika makes the connection that has been circling over her all day like a bird of prey, its flapping wings swooping ever closer until at last they brush her face and can no longer be ignored.
It catapults her out of bed and makes her pace up and down the hotel room, talking to herself, feverishly checking and rechecking dates to make sure she hasn’t made a mistake. She can’t keep still, and if she doesn’t tell someone, her head will split open.
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