Gratitude

by Joseph Kertes

  And here they were now, bearing down on Lili in a cannonade of hooves and dust. Lili tried to climb the old oak but couldn’t reach its branches. Still, she was safe behind the tree, surely. Surely, the horses wouldn’t crash into the tree. And even if they did, the oak could withstand the blow. And they had to slow down soon. There was a cliff ahead.

  They were not slowing. They were upon her, now, upon her and the oak, hundreds of them, led by a beautiful black queen. The horses fanned out to the very hems of the wide field. They ran as one huddled mass, a single body, with a gleaming black majesty at the front.

  Lili couldn’t stand to think what was coming. She wanted to cover her ears and close her eyes, but she did neither. Her back was to the horses, pressed hard against the tree. The queen flew by her, as did the brilliant black avalanche that followed. Lili couldn’t breathe. The air was filled with dust and wood, a black rain beating down on her. Her eyes were stinging, but she kept them open.

  And the horses didn’t turn. The oiled beauties followed the queen straight off the cliff, ten at a time, or twenty, taking fatal flight. Each one soared for an instant, then plummeted—dashing itself on the rocks below. They could see where they were going, the ones in the front, and there was nothing to stop them. They ran as if the world had no end.

  Lili watched in horror and amazement. She couldn’t bear to look anymore. She turned her head to one side, and then she saw something else through the black rain. The last of the horses on the outer flanks could see what was coming, two of them, three. On the other side, another horse halted. When the earth stopped thundering, and the black rain ceased to fall, these four horses remained. They stood alone in the field, snorting and neighing.

  The horse on the left was as black and brilliant as the queen had been. She joined the others on the opposite side, and the four seemed to gaze at the cliff edge before turning and heading back to the dark grove they’d come from.

  Lili would not go to the edge to see the shattered bones and ripped flesh. She had to leave, now, not just her field, but her town. Just for now, until she could get her family back.

  BY LATE MORNING, Lili had found her way by foot out of the mountains, through the outskirts of Tolgy and looked toward central Hungary. She reached the small railway station at Golya, and she felt relieved. There was no one there to buy a ticket from, but an idle train stood at a platform with “Budapest” marked on its engine. The big city was the only place to turn. Where else? She couldn’t cross the border into Romania. There would be someone in Budapest who could help her find her family. So Lili climbed aboard, though it might be some time before the train was to depart, and found a nearly empty car where she could make herself comfortable. She took a seat, and was instantly asleep.

  She was rudely wakened by the slamming of a door, and realized the train was almost full. How ridiculous she must have looked in her wedding dress, its whiteness clouded over, and with her small satchel, her mother’s gold wedding band still on her finger. At least the dress was simple and could pass for something else.

  She didn’t know how long she’d slept exactly, but the conductor was upon her. He had white, curly hair and reminded her of an uncle who lived in Prague. Lili offered him the remainder of her coins, and he took them but laughed outright before handing them back to her. She thought he’d put her off the train, remembered the Hungarian authorities back home who’d joined the invading Germans. But the man winked at her instead and carried on to check other people’s tickets.

  Lili wanted to ask these passengers where they’d come from and how their town was doing. She wanted to tell them about Tolgy but feared what would become of her if she did. A large woman sat across from her, a great burlap sack of bulbs of some kind on the floor at her feet. They had an earthy smell. The woman wore a gold crucifix pendant, and she noticed that Lili had noticed, but Lili looked out the window right away.

  Where were they taking people? Had they taken others in the same way, and Lili’s town was the last to know? Was everyone, finally, going to have to move to this other place, like some kind of cosmic musical chairs? And was someone else moving to Tolgy?

  Lili squeezed her satchel under her arm and closed her eyes. She slept again all the way to the city. And then there it was, outside her window, the imposing buildings coming into sight, the tall shadows, the throngs of people. She’d forgotten quite how impressive and immense the capital city was.

  SHE STEPPED OFF the train and stood for a moment with her bag, watching the throngs of people walking this way and that, as if nothing else were going on in the world outside of this centre. She wandered down to the Danube to take in the air. The palatial parliament buildings rose like rounded and polished mountains. The bridges spanning the Danube, linking Buda to Pest, all differed in shape and colour, one iron and green, one grey and concrete, one black and ornate. They all carried buses and pedestrians back and forth going about their business.

  Lili sat on a park bench and withdrew another of the rolls she’d taken from the bakery in Tolgy, this time with a bit of cheese. She felt safe at last amid the midday throngs doing their shopping and stopping for a meal or a sweet piece of cake.

  Lili remembered the cake her mother had baked for her but sent the thought away. She was practical. She could not weigh herself down with fears of what might have become of her family. She recalled the shots cracking in the streets of Tolgy and smothered their sound, too. Here she was, sitting on a bench in Budapest. Early spring in Budapest and unseasonably warm. She gazed at the people around her. Cheerful, most of them—all of them, actually. Had no one heard? “They are clearing out the towns,” she wanted to say but couldn’t find her voice. She sat on her bench as though she hadn’t a care in the world. Safe in Budapest. Springtime in Budapest.

  Lili got to her feet and made her way to a vegetable stand. She selected a carrot and a parsnip, offered a pengo.

  The woman sucked on her gold teeth as she examined the coin, front and back. Was it not enough? “Take the vegetables,” the woman told Lili as she slipped the coin into her apron pocket. “It’s all right. You take those. I’ll take this.”

  Lili wandered the streets for hours, past the vast Kerepesi Cemetery—more like a gallery of sculptures and shrines than a graveyard. Again, she looked over the wall but didn’t dare enter. Lili had heard that the country’s famous people lay in state here: Hungary’s first prime minister, Lajos Batthyany, and Ferenc Deak, the nineteenth-century statesman who brought Austria and Hungary together in his Grand Compromise, as Mrs. Wasserstein had described it. And there were poets there, too, she knew, like Attila Jozsef, who had taken his own life, and novelists like Kalman Mikszath. Stone upon stone, beautifully sculpted, glory upon glory, ending here.

  She passed theatres graced by classical columns and passed the impressive, broad-shouldered buildings of the technical university, then made her way along a winding street toward the centre of the city. There were florists on the street and tailors, cafés and beauty salons.

  Lili had been to Budapest once before, in 1938 when she was ten. She had come with her parents and Ferenc to visit an aging aunt. But she remembered only being struck by the lovely shop windows and the Goliath buildings, each of which, she was certain, could house the whole of her town under its roof.

  She’d been to the cinema on that occasion. It was the Tivoli, the cheerful theatre with its small curtained-off boxes and carvings of angels and sirens in gold on its walls and above the proscenium. As the newsreel played, Lili had asked her mother what those curtained-off booths were. “Nothing,” her mother had answered.

  But Ferenc said they were for lovers, “So they can hug and smooch when it’s a love story.”

  “Quiet, now,” Helen had said.

  But Lili and Ferenc were giggling, and as if on cue a couple did arrive, arm in arm, to occupy a paholy, as they were called. When they saw Ferenc and Lili watching, the woman released her boyfriend’s arm, until he roughly pulled the curtain shut.

&
nbsp; But after the grim newsreel about the depression, the lovers and the Bandels got A Day at the Races, with the Marx brothers and Margaret Dumont. The Marx brothers were David Bandel’s favourites, and if the lovers had come to find privacy, they had come to the wrong place. David laughed them out of their booth.

  In the vast Heroes’ Square, featuring statues of Hungary’s fiercest warriors, Lili heard what she thought was a concert. As she approached, she saw a Gypsy trio, a violin, mandolin and harmonica. With them was a fiery young girl who, oddly, sang a line here and there, but never a whole song. She was dressed in rustic reds and yellows, and she was bobbing like a flame, as if mesmerized, borne by the rhythm and sentiments. She bellowed out the words at everyone but looked at no one, not even Lili. In fact, her eyes were closed throughout. “Turn your troubles into song,” she was wailing. “Come hear our music. Music makes you dumb.” She dipped and spun. “Turn colour into sound. Let your heart fill your ears, not the buzz of your greed. Music makes you stupid. Come hear it play.”

  Lili wanted to hold the girl still. When she looked closely at her, she realized the girl wasn’t just mesmerized, not just in a trance; she was blind. She had dried-up eyes behind those lids, but her whole being bobbed and floated aboard these songs. She was more like a missionary than a beggar, more like the music’s apologist, its philosopher. “You can’t leave footprints on the river, even if you try,” she chanted. “Hear the music play. Hear it, hear it. The music is a secret that leaves no trace.” The trio then played a very sad song, a heart-wrenching song, about a lover gone away to sea. “And you know it is true,” the flaming girl sang, “since we’ve never seen the sea but can feel the land.” The song came out more like a hymn than a love song, and Lili found herself holding back tears.

  People passed by as if the musicians were not there. Lili had never witnessed such a thing—people ignoring the lovely music as if they were strolling through a park and it was the birds that were singing. How could they not be drawn to it all, the girl possessed by the music, the wonder of it—reminding us that we’re still here and it’s a sunny day, and we’re in love and the baby is coming and we’re all going home to supper. Lili smiled brightly now at the group, and the lights of her charm came on. The men smiled back at her, and then, miraculously, the girl smiled, too. The players switched to a Gypsy dance. It sounded cheerful and exotic—Spanish, possibly, or farther even, African, Moroccan, Middle Eastern. Lili stood too long to watch these nice, sun-darkened men play here with their spinning blind girl, especially with people scattering to avoid them.

  Had she landed on the moon? No, the moon was not far enough. Another galaxy? People were being taken—whole towns full of people—and here the music played, and people ran to avoid it as if it were going to detonate.

  It was enough, too much. Lili curtseyed in her dress, and the three men bowed. It only then occurred to her she could give them a coin, and she tried, but the men wouldn’t take it. Lili tried the girl, though she was still in her hypnotic state, no longer smiling, somewhere above the ground. And then the girl took the coin and clutched it hard in her hand, as if the hand were disembodied from the mesmerized girl. With more bowing and curtseying, Lili backed away.

  Lili came eventually upon the famous synagogue on Dohany Street, an immense Moorish structure, with a multitude of towers rocketing toward heaven. Her skin bristled. She looked left and right and turned around, not wanting to show people what she was seeing, not wanting to be identified with it. When a woman and boy stopped beside her to see if something had happened, Lili fled.

  On a corner leading toward Vorosmarty Square, she stumbled into Paris Yard. She felt again as though she’d stepped into another world, another century, stepped into a film. Arabesque arches welcomed her into the arcade and drew her toward beautiful wrought iron, like lace-work crocheted by some mythic grandmother working in the heart of an iron mountain. A handsome young man in a tan spring suit stood in the doorway of a bookshop, flipping through the pages of a book. He noticed Lili and smiled, but she clamped her silly dress to her sides and fled toward Vaci Street and all the way out to the grand cobblestone square before Gerbeaud, a pretty patisserie bustling with business. She wished she could enter. People were eating pastries perched royally on Herend dishes. They dabbed their mouths with linen napkins, checked their makeup in mirrors.

  Two women, one with a floppy black hat, hustled past Lili along the cobblestones. Lili felt a stabbing pain at her side, a pain so sharp she thought she would collapse. She ran, gasping, a limping run, now, as she made her way around another corner. An older gentleman with his wife on his arm stopped to point with his cane, but Lili continued on her way, found another small park—thank heaven for the small park—and dashed inside like a rabbit that had found its warren.

  It was here, in a corner of the park, that she felt another stab of pain at her side, and she slumped to the ground, curled up and writhed in agony. She remembered for a moment even in her pain that she was now almost certainly adding green streaks to her grey-white dress, remembered even as the stabbing radiated over her abdomen that the humiliation of expiring here in this spot after her ordeal would be at least as sharp as the pain itself.

  A shadow passed over Lili’s racked face. She clutched her satchel, felt for the ring on her finger. She opened her eyes and thought she saw someone quite tall, asking her something.

  Two

  Szeged, Hungary – March 20, 1944

  IN HIS SUNNY OFFICE overlooking Klauzal Square in Szeged, Istvan Beck was drilling a molar. He pumped the drill’s motor vigorously by stepping down on a steel button beside his dentist’s chair. He’d begun to wonder whether he could save the tooth at all.

  Marta Foldi, his assistant, came in. “Dr. Beck,” she said, “your friend Miklos Radnoti is on the phone. He says it’s important.” Istvan kept working on Ella Brunsvik’s mouth. “It’s important,” Marta said again. “It’s about your father.”

  “My father? What about my father?”

  “Come,” Marta said, indicating the phone.

  Miklos Radnoti sounded out of breath on the phone, as if he’d been running. He was a calm man usually, a poet. Istvan had known him since his student days at the University of Szeged. They’d been in a philosophy class together and become fast friends. Miklos Radnoti had never known his mother. He was the twin that had survived, while the other one took his mother down with him. Radnoti had married Fifi Gyarmati, a Catholic woman who was charmed by his poetry and by his wit. He’d converted to Catholicism, but he’d still been taken away to a labour camp near the Ukraine to work with explosives.

  What a time Radnoti had spent. These labour camps were not as bad as the concentration camps they’d heard rumours about, but the inmates were worked like slaves nevertheless. Many died. Others survived and came home. Heinrich Beck, Istvan’s father, had used his influence as mayor of Szeged to persuade the authorities to get the poet out and back to Budapest. Radnoti had written to his friend Istvan to tell him that that experience made him appreciate life for the first time. Istvan still remembered some of the lines his friend had sent him:

  To forget would be best, but I have

  Never forgotten anything yet.

  Foam pours over the moon and the poison

  Draws a dark green line on the horizon.

  I roll myself a cigarette

  Slowly, carefully. I live.

  Now Radnoti had returned to Szeged, briefly, to visit an ailing aunt. The poet told Istvan, “My aunt’s housekeeper saw your father a few minutes ago at Mendelssohn Square. There’s trouble, and you have to save yourself, Istvan. Get out, fast, save yourself.”

  Istvan was still picturing Mendelssohn Square, the bronze statue of the composer, the little park. “What are you talking about?” he began to say, but there was static on the line and then the phone went dead. Istvan tried to call his father’s office, but couldn’t get through.

  Ella Brunsvik was now standing beside the dentist’s chair with a
ll the gear still in her mouth and the apron hanging from her neck. Istvan told Marta and Mrs. Brunsvik what Radnoti had said. “The Germans must be here,” he said. “They’re right here in Szeged.” He rubbed his face and ran his fingers back through his hair.

  Marta said, “We should leave right away, Istvan. I know where we can go.”

  “We can’t avoid the Germans,” he said, “even when we’re allied with them. How can you invade an ally?”

  The siren had begun to sound in the square below. Marta said, “Please, Istvan.” She took both his hands and tugged as if he were a child. His eyes rested on hers. Never was there a more perfect specimen of a Jew than Marta, with her coal-black hair and eyes, yet she was Catholic. It must have been the Roman invasion, thought Istvan. Her devotion to him was striking, touching.

  Istvan had felt close to Marta from the day he interviewed her. For her part, she looked after him as few assistants had, and while an electric current flowed between the two of them, they had always tried to keep their relationship professional.

  Over the siren, Istvan could still hear the music in the outer room, coming from the Graetz console he himself had picked out with such care in Berlin—and at such expense. And now his patients—if they’d stayed—would have been treated to the Enigma Variations by Elgar.