Gratitude

by Joseph Kertes

  Lili waited through the day and another night behind the white wardrobe, waited for the muffled sound of gunfire in the distance to pass, for the bark of Hungarian and German soldiers to cease, the running feet to recede. Only once did Lili dart out to take a dress of her mother’s from the wardrobe, then rush back to relieve herself in the soft and generous cotton folds. She even imagined the trouble she’d be in when her mother returned, but would have given anything now for the trouble. The telephone didn’t ring again. The oven had consumed her cake and cooled. Her stomach gurgled and churned, but it, too, rested now.

  Lili thought of Mrs. Wasserstein, her teacher for the past three years. She wondered whether Mrs. Wasserstein, with all her knowledge of battles and strategies and the outcomes of war, had managed to elude these latest invaders.

  Lili recalled especially the discussion in school in the winter just past, about Pompeii, how captivated she’d become by it, how carried away by the photographs in a book that Mrs. Wasserstein had passed around the room. One was of a pregnant woman lying on her back, her knees up high against her chest as if she were about to give birth—the whole of her grey shape arrested, preserved in lava.

  Another was that of Venus in marble, bending over to tie her sandal. Lili finally drifted off to sleep behind the wardrobe with the images in front of her, the warm rock flowing over her.

  She awoke to the blue scent of stars, oblivious and comforted, unaware of where she was. It was not yet light, though she sensed the light was near, and to confirm the fact, their rooster, Erik, crowed on the white gatepost. Where had Erik been yesterday? Lost, too, no doubt. And who was there to wake up, now—his own brood, no doubt, sounding the alarm for his own kind, or were the chickens taken, too, for someone’s pot along the way?

  After two days, the only other sounds Lili could hear besides the crowing were the honking and gobbling of geese and the occasional bark of a dog in the distance. Hungry, no doubt. No one to feed them.

  It was strange that no one had come back in two days, no one in her family, no one she could hear in the town. She could have imagined the worst, just from what she had learned in school. Invading armies sometimes levelled everything in their path, anything breathing. But she had never heard of everyone disappearing. Could this have been a new miracle of God, a miracle of cleansing, an act of retribution, like the Flood? Had any of them made it to the ark?

  Lili thought of Ibi twenty doors down, the widow who had taken in Captain Dobo one evening for Sabbath dinner but threw him out in the rain when she discovered he had soiled her cot. She told him never to come back. Lili thought of Lajos Pentek, who cheated on his wife with Evi, the nymphomaniac, and, when he was found out, told everyone in a fit of rage at the temple after services that he wasn’t the first to cheat and began to rhyme off names, even the names of innocent men. Lili remembered Evi’s bottle-green eyeshadow—all the girls wanted to try some—but on this day, Evi cried black tears and left the town for good.

  Was this why the Lord had turned “brimstone and fire” on her town, the way He had with Sodom and Gomorrah? There were certainly other examples of wickedness and depravity for God to choose from, even Lili’s. When Helen’s brooch went missing, the beautiful jewel made of turquoise, coral and white gold, which Helen had inherited from her own great grandmother, Lili said it was Tildy who’d misplaced it, although all of the older children had been playing with it, even Ferenc, who’d held it high in the sky and said he’d bury it in the field unless someone cleaned up his side of the room for him. But then it went missing. Helen had scolded Tildy when Lili told her and said she’d have to stay in her room for two days until it was found. It was only then that Lili went on a hunt for the jewel and discovered it under the white wardrobe she now hid behind.

  Was this really Sodom and Gomorrah? There was much wickedness, now that Lili thought of it; the examples abounded. When Abraham pleaded with God to spare Sodom, God said He would do so if fifty righteous people could be found in the city. When fifty could not be named, He reduced the number to thirty, then twenty, then ten. The Lord’s angels found only one, Lot, Abraham’s own nephew, and his family. His daughter had been good, too. She gave bread to a beggar, and when the townspeople found out, they smeared her with honey and hanged her from the city wall until she was stung to death by bees. It was her screams that sounded the alarm for God to level the city.

  Could it be that Tolgy was this bad? Could it be that it was worse even than other places? Could this be as big as that? Were they entering a new day of miracles? What was God thinking now? Whose screams reached his heavenly ears?

  Lili remembered a passage she’d recited from Genesis. When people were united and spoke one language and began a tower in Babel to reach the Creator, why did He “confound the language of all the earth” and scatter his worshippers? Were we getting too close, Lili wondered, too perfect? And had this been part of the omniscient’s design, to show us how imperfect we really could be?

  Lili suddenly felt older, past needing a wedding dress, scared and excited, significant somehow, standing in the way of something, a force in history that had not yet swept her up. She felt for a giddy moment that she could face the Lord or the monsters of darkness, but she was afraid of the men who’d turned into monsters, because God was always great and the monsters always monsters, but these were men who had gone mad.

  Lili’s spirits crashed. She’d been the lark ascending and now she plummeted without a song. Could she be the last person standing in the gale of the oppressors? She could not resist the winds, she was sure. She could not stand up to history. She did not want her name recorded there, her form a curiosity to future students of volcanic eruptions.

  Or was Lili’s family all waiting for her? Was she the one whose fate they were talking about? Did Lili stay behind the wardrobe? Did she make it? Was she captured and taken, while we are hidden and safe? Were they all hidden? Gunfire would surely keep anyone at bay for an extra day or two. It had kept Lili at bay.

  Lili stepped out from her hiding place into the bright morning room, stood at the foot of the warm bed, longed to sit for a moment on the blanket box to see the room from another vantage point, but she changed her mind. She crept toward the window and peered out of the lower corner as she had at Dobo. There was no one in the street, no one in the windows of the neighbouring houses. The geese honked some more. Lili crept out of the room, stepping over clothing strewn down the stairs, checking the bowl of cream in the kitchen, peeking into the cold oven, avoiding the scattered silverware and broken dishes.

  She spied the outside world through the kitchen window, moved to the front door, then gently unfastened the latch and pulled open the door. She looked all around her as she stepped out, afraid of what she might see. She crept toward Tzipi’s house, looked in the window and saw no one. There was an empty carpetbag on the table and a pair of rolled-up socks beside it. A lamp lay shattered on the floor and a single chair upended, but no other evidence of violence or life.

  Out back, Lili saw dried blood spattered over the white fence. She gasped as she made out the huddled form of Captain Dobo, his body clumped at the foot of his tree like fallen fruit.

  She could not bear to look too closely, so she dashed past Dobo toward the fields behind the town. Whatever hope she had left carried her toward the almond trees. When she got there, a cool breeze sailed through the grasses and stirred the canopy of leaves.

  “Mendi?” Lili said weakly. “Hanna?” Her eyes darted after every sound coming from the grasses. Then she called out their names boldly.

  She continued farther toward the pond and found herself shouting even before she got there. “Tildy! Benjamin! Tildy! Ma!” A squirrel skittered by and startled her.

  There was no sign of human life anywhere—no sign that anyone had passed through here at all. At the edge of the pond, Lili gazed into the water, but she knew Tildy would never have allowed Benjamin in the water. Of all her brothers and sisters, Tildy was most like Lili. Tildy follo
wed her everywhere, wanted to walk with her to school, share her friends, lie awake at night together talking about boys. Most importantly, as Lili had done, Tildy would have obeyed her mother to the letter by staying away from the cold water. Lili walked around the edge of the pond, examining the mud for footprints. She found none. She circled the whole pond, looking in every direction, reacting to every twig snapping in the bushes, every bird taking flight. The place seemed cheerful. “Tildy!” she called out. “Benjamin! Mendi! Ma! Hanna!”

  She ran all the way from the pond to the Kleins’ house at the edge of town. She slowed to a walk as she headed down the town’s main street. Inside the Kleins’ house, a lamp still burned in the daylight, but the place was empty. Lili checked in the door of the Mandels’ poultry and egg store and found no one tending to the merchandise. Even Eva, who was always there with her hawk eyes when the doors were open, was missing. At the haberdashery, a hat still sat on the counter, its feathers combed back by the mountain breeze streaming in through the open window.

  Lili wanted to say something, call out, but now she couldn’t find her voice. She ran around the familiar houses. She could not find her cousin Eszty, or Jancsi, the neighbourhood bully. He had knocked over Ferenc once and even punched Lili when she tried to intervene. An iron sat poised in the front room of the Weisels’ house, the freshly laundered white clothes piled beside it. In the Timors’ place, she saw a newspaper open on the kitchen table, reading glasses anchoring it; a boiled egg sat perched in its cup, the spoon beside it on the wooden counter. She ran several blocks to the temple, and from a couple of blocks away she could smell the smoke. The temple had been half-consumed by flame and was still smouldering. Splashes of blood marked the square out front and even the trunk of the elm at the far side. Lili held her hands up over her face but peeked through the cage of her fingers. She stepped inside the synagogue, over embers. The walls, which her mother had helped paint with blue arabesques, were scorched black halfway up to the arched ceiling. The Torah had been pulled from its housing in the tabernacle, its blue velvet dressing cast to one side and burned, the Torah itself unfurled across the dais. Lili crouched down, careful not to soil her white dress, rolled the scrolls together again like a precious rug, but then left the Torah where it lay.

  She walked around back to the graveyard, knowing she couldn’t go in. The Bandels were from the tribe of the Cohens, descendants of Aaron, descendants of David, like the coming Messiah, like Jesus, and were therefore never allowed to enter the graveyard, even when a member of the family was being buried there. So Lili could not enter. She stood on tiptoe to see the stones of her grandmothers. Her grandfathers lay elsewhere. Helen’s father went missing in action in the Great War, and David’s father fell off a cliff as a young man when he lost his footing on a mountain path. David, the eldest of four, was only seven at the time. His father was never found.

  Lili didn’t know what message to send to her grandmothers. She felt puny and defenceless. She would have given anything to find someone to comfort her—Uncle Mark, her mother’s brother; Mrs. Wasserstein, her teacher; her friends Hilda or Aurel; or even someone younger, someone whose hand she could hold. What was she to do now? She wanted her grandmothers to tell her. What could she possibly do? What would they tell her? Eat lunch? Go back to school? Wash some linens? Play a record? Observe the Sabbath? Light candles? Pray? Who else was there to speak to here but God? Or had God, too, forgotten Lili in Tolgy? Was she speaking now to no one?

  She turned away from the stones, looked around one last time and walked back to her house, hardly glancing at each door she passed. The buildings had turned cold for her and even frightening. She knew that they were empty or, worse, contained dead people—resisters—or dead soldiers.

  Lili paused only for a cat who called out to her from behind a door. She released the animal into the daylight. The cat followed for an instant, but thought better of it and watched as Lili continued toward home.

  When she arrived, Lili packed a satchel, took some of the money she found in her father’s desk drawer, leaving the rest for her family should they return. Beside the bowl of vanilla cream on the window sill, Lili found her mother’s wedding ring, which Helen had removed while she worked in the kitchen. She saw her father’s name inscribed on the ring’s inner surface. Lili fitted the ring on her index finger. She paused at the foot of the stairs, looked down at her simple, pretty white dress and wondered what she should change into—her green dress? The blue one, which brought out her eyes? She could leave her white dress for Tildy with a note. She took out paper and a pencil and wrote, “Tildy, if you get back before I do, you can try on the dress—” But Lili stopped herself. What if someone else got here before her family? Squatters. No, she would keep her white dress on. Her mother had made it.

  She took some cheese, placed it in the satchel, then walked to the bakery, just a couple of doors down from the haberdashery.

  One of the people Lili hoped might have escaped notice was Aurel Deutsch. When Lili was fourteen and Aurel twelve, Aurel had seemed to develop a crush on her. He was tall and strong for a young boy, likely from working in his parents’ bakery and from sampling its wares, but Aurel puffed himself up even more when he saw Lili come in. He would have a small square of her favourite pastry, flodni, wrapped and waiting for her, compliments of the proprietor. Flodni was a three-storey pastry, with a layer of grated apple on top, poppyseed in the middle and sweet ground walnuts on the bottom. She never once had to pay for this delicious morsel and always ate it before she got home so she wouldn’t have to explain or share. Even if she’d wanted to, how could Lili have hoped to share the little delicacy among eight Bandels?

  Besides, Aurel wanted to see her eat it and would follow her out to the stoop, holding the bread she’d come for in the first place so that he could watch her enjoy the sweet. Lili felt his eyes on her, worried he’d get carried away. He watched her as though she were the sweet and he the taster. She found herself sometimes having to gobble her flodni, saying, “Please don’t feel you have to do this for me. Please, it would be better if you didn’t.”

  His answer was: “We should move to Budapest or Paris, you and I, and open a bakery, or a beautiful patisserie, and we could have you out front to draw in the patrons and me in the back up to my elbows in flour.” He was covered in flour now as he spoke to her, a boy of twelve, rushing ahead of his age.

  Lili sent Tildy in after that, but Tildy reported that Aurel didn’t care for her. “He hardly notices me,” Tildy said.

  “Does he give you anything?” Lili asked.

  “Like what?”

  “Nothing, never mind.”

  And now at thirteen, Aurel was a giant beside his parents, powerful and grown up, his bar mitzvah under his belt.

  But he was nowhere to be found at the bakery. Lili couldn’t help herself. She glanced at the cake display in search of flodni, but found none. She selected a few buns, ate one hurriedly, placed a coin on the counter and ran out.

  And where was her friend Hilda? Lili couldn’t even fathom it, how anyone would have—could have—made off with her dearest friend. Lili’s father delivered Hilda as Lili, a one-month-old, cried in an adjoining bed. There had been no other way. Mrs. Blauman had showed up at the Bandels’ door already “flooding the stoop,” as David told it. Those waters were the elixir of life, he often said, where twenty digits sprouted out of hands and feet and where a warm and serene world made everything possible.

  At school, Hilda often spoke to Lili about leaving Tolgy for the city and insisted Lili had to go with her. Even if Lili married and went away, Hilda would come with her and find someone to marry, too.

  Lili approached Hilda’s house with the greatest of dread. She didn’t want to look in. She wanted to take away the faint hope that it was not empty. But she did. She walked in, called out Hilda’s name, saw an envelope and glasses on the table as well as a blue hair ribbon, but then left.

  Lili wanted to search one final place. When she was
younger, ten at most, her mother used to take her to a field cut sharply by a precipice in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains. It was a cool and even frightening place but the most beautiful Lili had ever seen. And it was the last place her mother might have tried to hide. In fact, in the two hours it took her to get there, the idea grew in Lili’s mind that it was precisely where they’d gone, so she walked quickly and eagerly. She felt foolish in her wedding gown, but who was there to see her? Tildy had wanted desperately to try on the gown that morning, so now she could. Lili would meet her in the field with their mother, and Lili could swap clothes with her sister for the walk home.

  Lili raced the last couple of hundred steps. She was warm in her white dress and could hardly wait to trade with her sister. But Tildy was not in the field. No one was. Lili headed toward the solitary tree, a big oak, standing in the middle of the open expanse. She and her family had enjoyed more than one picnic in the shade of this tree, and the whole of Tolgy once held its Purim celebration in this field.

  She arrived at the oak and sat in its cool shade, careful not to soil her dress. She opened her satchel, broke off an end of a roll and ate without enthusiasm, hardly chewing, letting the bread soak in her mouth. A breeze blew up from behind her and carried the scent of grass and buds.

  A whole town—how was it possible? A whole town, except for one person? She hiccupped as the bread made its way down her throat. She hiccupped again as she began to cry.

  But then she felt rumbling in the earth beneath her, a sound like distant thunder, but deeper than thunder and bigger, as Vesuvius might have felt as it shook. Lili felt thrilled and scared at once. The storm rose and swelled behind her. Ahead was the cliff. A dusty wind flapped her wedding gown, and she gathered it up and clasped it to her. She was scared as she peered around the oak.

  A stampede of horses was coming toward her. She’d been told stories her grandfather had passed down to her mother about the wild Carpathian horses that roamed these woods and fields, but she had never seen them. Her mother had said that they were nobler than all other horses and bigger and purer. Helen had seen them once, when she was younger even than Lili was now. She’d seen them make a run through the streets of Tolgy. They were as quick as lightning, a blur as they traversed the town, and they did not disturb a single post nor upend a buggy or a pail. They whipped into town, then out the other end, as if the gods had sent them to sound an alarm. Many of the citizens had heard that alarm and woke, but few saw them. Helen was one. She’d been standing on her own veranda. Her father was another. He was at the window. Lili’s grandfather had said that they were like “the wild Olympians of our mountains.”