Gratitude

by Joseph Kertes

  “Oh, my Lord help us,” Rozsi said.

  “What about our brother?” Paul asked. He’d gone to the window to peek out, to check whether an invasion had begun.

  “I contacted a friend of a friend in Szeged, another newspaperman. Your brother appears to have gone into hiding.”

  “In Szeged?” Rozsi asked, turning to look at Zoli.

  “All I know is that he hasn’t left the country, but I also know he has not been killed and he has not yet been deported.”

  “Not yet,” Paul said, turning on Zoli. “How reliable is your source?”

  “He’s reliable. It’s better that no one knows where your Istvan is. He’s safer that way.”

  Rozsi fell back in her chair. “Oh, Father. Oh, my father, my father. Oh, my dear father.” She was sobbing. She waved off her brother, who had moved to comfort her.

  “I have to go to Szeged,” Paul said. “I have to do something.”

  “Don’t go to Szeged,” Zoli said. “What could you do there?”

  Paul reached into his jacket pocket and showed Zoli his papers. “I’ll go as a Swede,” he told him.

  Zoli looked at the papers, and Rozsi wiped away tears to look too. There seemed almost no time for grief. Urgency blew it away. Zoli said, “You’ll go as a Swede to search for your Hungarian Jewish brother?”

  “Please, Paul,” Rozsi said. “Let’s think things through.”

  She went to get the brandy and poured out some more for the men. She took a sip of her brother’s before passing it over. “Let’s go talk to Aunt Klari and Uncle Robert,” she said. “We have to work this out together. We have to tell Uncle Robert his brother is dead.” She put her hands to her face and sobbed again. “Oh, my God, our father is dead, Paul.” She ran to her brother and looked up into his dark face.

  Paul said, “I have to go. I can’t just stand by.”

  “And what will you do?” Rozsi asked. “Please, Paul, we’ve lost our father and possibly our brother. We may be all that’s left. It’s too much, all of a sudden. Please, we have to stick together.”

  “I can get Istvan out,” Paul said. “I can talk to someone, persuade someone.”

  “Out to where?” she asked. “Are we safe?”

  “Forgive me, Paul,” Zoli said, “but these are not civilized people and this is not the Cambridge Debating Society you’re visiting. Even if you prevail in an argument with someone, they’ll shoot you before you finish making your case. My parents were murdered because my father took good pictures and told revealing stories for the newspaper.”

  “I’m not going with Hungarian papers.”

  “Oh, please, Paul.” Rozsi gripped her brother’s shoulders. “Please. It doesn’t matter what you are. If you go as a Hungarian, some German will arrest you. If you go as a German even, a crazed Arrow Cross militiaman will assassinate you. It’s not good to be anything. What you’ll be is annoying, and if you’re a Swede, you’ll be an annoying Swede.”

  Zoli said, “It doesn’t take very much provocation to be eliminated these days. The laws are meaningless.”

  “But we have to be annoying,” Paul said. “Don’t you think the fun will come here to Budapest, too?”

  “I beg you,” Rozsi said. “Let’s see Uncle Robert and Aunt Klari before we do a thing.”

  Paul looked down at his feet and then up at the curtained windows. Paul knew that his sister and Zoli were right. His father was dead. If he hunted for his brother, he would be exposing him to great danger, uncovering him when the Nazis couldn’t. Istvan was better off hidden, and presumed gone or dead, than on the run and risking capture. “All right,” Paul said.

  “Promise me,” Rozsi said.

  “All right, I said.”

  Six

  Budapest – March 23, 1944

  WHEN ROBERT TELEPHONED AHEAD to say he was bringing home a girl to stay for a while, his son, Simon, thought he’d meant a girl, not a young woman. He’d got himself ready to play the big brother, the happy host who might take her out to see Snow White. When she walked through his door in her newly laundered wedding dress, he couldn’t take his eyes off her. She was blond and her eyes were blue as a mood. She was so fair she could pass for an Aryan, but an unsullied one, one who hadn’t heard the edicts from on high. And she had a wide warm smile that did not suit the story she came with.

  And Lili noticed him, too, even before she took in the surroundings, saw his black surprised eyes, his black shiny hair. Klari, his mother, said, “Simon, you haven’t asked Lili in.”

  He chuckled and coughed before saying, “I’m so rude. Forgive me.”

  Lili blushed. She felt like an intruder, felt unworthy of this kindness.

  Klari said, “Let me ask Vera to get us coffee.” Klari gestured again to Lili to come in. “Look at you, dear,” she added. “We’ll have to get you a couple of things to wear.”

  “Please excuse me. I need a few minutes,” Robert said, as he pushed through to his study to set his briefcase down.

  When he got there, Robert slumped heavily in his chair. The story of the young girl out in the hall whose appendix he’d removed shook him profoundly. A colleague had told Robert that morning that the borders were under siege. How was it possible? He had heard the news from across Europe, of course, but the reality had somehow not visited him any more than it had his country. It was one thing to have his Simon barred from university. Hungarian Jews had experienced such periods of constraint before. There was a time when they couldn’t legally hold property. But generally they endured those times and even prospered. Then the girl had come from Tolgy. Before her, Klari’s sister Hermina and her husband, Ede, had been taken, kidnapped it seemed, the crime unsolved. One neighbour said she’d seen German soldiers. But how could it be? Hungary was allied with Germany. How could it possibly be? Robert had studied in Berlin, had written a medical textbook in German, which was studied by students in Germany. The copies of the book would make a magnificent bonfire now. They were entering a new age of darkness. The Germans had been the light bearers. The Hungarians had followed them into the light, and now they were following them back into the darkness.

  Robert dialed the operator for Szeged. He couldn’t get through to his brother Heinrich’s office. He dialed Istvan’s office. No one was there. How could Heinrich have been so naïve, a Jewish mayor in a country allied with Hitler? They were all surprised by the coming of the Nazis—Robert was surprised—but Robert did not hold political office. Where are you now, my brother? Are you standing guard over the city hall, or better still the temple? You foolish bastard. Are you crossing your arms on the steps in defiance, your public office your shield, your adoring citizens your armour? Let’s see how the good citizens of Szeged stand up to the enemy on your behalf. Their approval is love, isn’t it, my brother, the populace finally in love with the big Jew, the Lord Mayor, Lord Jew? Let me make it easy for you, invading hordes. Let the Jew mayor make a symbol of himself and stand on the steps of the temple, the beloved mayor, so you can make a public display of humiliating him. Being huge and powerful is not what brings the love, dearest brother. Quite the contrary. Oh, dear brother. It will be hard without you, a thick line of memory ending in this way.

  Robert had no need for a cause. He wanted to make people well when they were ill, and he wanted to see them happy again, or at least comfortable. Robert was a maintenance man. He was not interested in the world’s creation, except insofar as it required his maintenance work. He was not interested in the world’s destruction, either, except insofar as it disrupted his work. He was not a philosopher and didn’t aspire to greatness. But sometimes Robert knew—he knew today—that his aims were not enough. In these circumstances, maybe even simple ambitions had to be abandoned, and the exalted called in to defend what was right and restore order and dignity.

  And then what? What if there were none left among the exalted? What then? Could the maintenance people step in? Could he, Robert? If he had to, would he?

  Oh, my dear Heinrich, m
y dear brother, abandon your post, and come to us here. Come stand guard over our house, if it makes you happy. Come to where the Jews still roam, for today at least, for the time being. May we enjoy harmony and good cheer together again sometime. Klari and I can still make it all right for you, even if your Mathilde is no longer by your side.

  Robert drew the curtains and lay his head in his hands on his desk. He was hoping to dream of his only brother, held his image from an earlier time in front of him. He wanted to find a solution to their plight submerged in an ocean of sleep, but that’s not what came. It rained instead, under the surface, rained air, the bars of it drilling into the muck at the bottom—lightning striking like a god with a deep, reedy throat—striking a capsized tram which had drifted to the bottom, smashing its windows, releasing a murder of crows, fifty of them—one hundred—sloshing upward in full flight toward the wobbling stars, until they collided with an invisible wall, each crow dissolving as its beak clanged against the plate—Robert could see it now himself, read names there, inscribed on the transparent wall, in alphabetical order—K, he could make out—was it Klari?—or the shape of a chromosome—wondered now frantically if he himself could cross, rise past the plate toward the surface, opening his mouth toward the drilling air, lightning striking again—a great bomb of lightning—would it part the waters the way it had parted the Red Sea?

  Klari was saying to Lili, “I was sorry to hear about your family, you poor dear. My sister was taken,” she added. “Hermina and her husband, Ede, were taken two years ago from their home on Andrassy. Kidnapped.” Klari looked ready to cry. “We haven’t heard from her since. We have no idea where she got to, or whether they’re even alive.” And now she was crying. “What’s happening to all of us? What’s happened to Europe?”

  “Europe should be paved over,” said Simon abruptly. “It’s a failed experiment.”

  Klari sniffed and said, “Europe produced Faust and Hamlet and The Marriage of Figaro, the Parthenon, The Merry Widow, the Sistine Chapel.” Lili could tell they’d had this discussion before. Klari took a breath here and wiped her nose and eyes with her handkerchief.

  Lili thought of Pompeii, what Vesuvius had done to everything.

  “Europe should be turned into a parking lot,” Simon said again. “We should start from scratch. We don’t get along—or hasn’t anyone noticed?”

  Lili wanted to say, “How will that help us? My family is somewhere they shouldn’t be. I need to find them and get them back home.” But she kept her thoughts to herself.

  Klari put her arm around the young woman and said it for her. “Let’s get this young woman’s family out first.”

  “Of course,” he said. “That was insensitive of me. Please forgive me. It is Europa, the old witch, who offends me, that’s all.”

  “But we are European,” Lili said. “What good does it do to scorn Europa?”

  “It makes us feel better, that’s all,” Simon said. He felt utterly foolish now. “You, Lili, are definitely a good European, whereas I…I don’t know.”

  “You are a silly one,” Klari said, “a young man trying to show off with his cleverness at an inappropriate time, and failing at that.” Simon dropped his hands to his sides. “Oh, look at us here,” Klari said. They’d moved toward the living room but were still standing outside. “This unfortunate girl has had surgery, and we haven’t even invited her to sit down yet.”

  Lili turned toward Klari. “How can I be called unfortunate when I am the one who landed here for whatever reason, by whoever’s grace?” Lili blushed. She was surprised by her own forwardness.

  Klari said, “This girl will put us all to shame before long. I’m so glad Paul found you.”

  She watched her son trying, in his clumsy way, to impress Lili, saw him gawking at her. She couldn’t blame him. It was easy to see how he might be attracted to her warmth and charm.

  Was chance any better, Klari sometimes wondered, than planning and deliberation? She and Robert had had an arranged marriage, as had her sister Mathilde and Robert’s brother, Heinrich. It was a deliberate bringing together of two families. Their fathers had put the deal together and came home with the news. The young people didn’t meet until just before their wedding.

  The two couples married in her parents’ grand summer house in Kiskunhalas, and her father, Maximillian, and her mother, Juliana, were as happy as they would have been had it all come of a happy accident.

  Yet the arrangement was successful, certainly more so than many a match arrived at by lovers. Still, there was something alluring about chance, something romantic, electrifying. It would have been nice to have been attracted to someone by accident, as happened sometimes on a stroll or in a shop or café.

  Klari had to learn to love her Robert, but she was successful at it, as was he, she believed—as were Heinrich and his unfortunate Mathilde. It was simply the order of their lives together that was reversed. As far as she could tell, they grew from friend to darling and were now finding their way back to friend again, while her son and Lili might start out as darlings and end up friends. One thing for sure: she and Robert were very attached, indeed inseparable. She would wish no less for her son.

  WHAT FIRST CAUGHT LILI’S EYE in the living room was its centre-piece: a lacquered cream grand piano, like an albino alligator with its great jaws open. Did Simon play? Lili wondered.

  Portraits in oils adorned the blushing peach walls. One was clearly of a young Klari sitting calmly the way Mona Lisa must have sat, with the beginning of a smile. How Lili had admired the image of the da Vinci portrait when her father one day brought home the book about the Louvre. In her portrait, Klari seemed serene and confident, sitting darkly in the middle of the bright wall.

  “What do you do?” Lili asked Simon. She didn’t want to sit in a chair that might have been Dr. or Mrs. Beck’s customary place, or even Simon’s, so she took a seat on an ottoman.

  “You’ll never guess.” She smiled and shook her head. His voice was quiet now, barely audible. “I’m a tool and die maker,” he said. “I was going to go to university like my father and my cousins. I wanted to become a lawyer, like Paul, but they closed the universities to us, so my father hustled me off to get a trade. Being a tool and die maker is not so bad. I might even be useful in the war effort. Who wants to be a lawyer anyway in a place where the laws are meaningless?”

  “Yes, who wants to?” Lili squirmed slightly in her chair. She didn’t know what to say. She felt stunned, felt pinned to a board. She felt guilty, unnatural, admiring art and talking about university when, not two hours away, whole populations were being snatched and—and what? She felt she’d been transported to another time, felt she was sitting in a pretty room about to be preserved forever by a river of hot lava, right in the middle of her chat with this sweet young man.

  For his part, Simon felt he was struggling hopelessly. He’d lost much of his confidence in recent years, was early to believe the world was going down, possibly because it was his generation that had been stopped short, his peers who either had to go to war now, if they were purebred Hungarians, or were barred at the Jewish Gymnazium from further advancement. He’d tried to follow in his father’s footsteps, had always admired his cousins, particularly Paul, eighteen years his senior—why had Simon’s parents waited so long to have children when the difference in age was so crucial? But they couldn’t have been blamed—how could they have seen what was coming? What then were all the swimming ribbons for? Why had he memorized Homer in Greek and Ovid and Petofi, and aspired some day to owning a summer home a tenth the size of his grandfather’s? Why did meeting a girl mean he would have to take her off somewhere to a cave to avoid a hail of bullets? Or was it better, if they survived—half a millennium of achievement destroyed, the family’s money and possessions all gone—to start again from the ground, or beneath the ground, even, proving your own mettle, not relying on history, the tall shadows of success to dwarf you? However it came out, Simon’s was the generation caught out and b
ereft. Their lives were defined for them as surely as this lovely Lili’s was, and she was even younger and more vulnerable. Was it possible, though, that all of this would be gone? Simon wondered. Could it happen, after all these centuries?

  Lili looked at another wall, another striking painting. “It’s called Yard with Trees,” Simon told her. It featured a country house, lush greenery and, mysteriously, two faceless children in the foreground.

  “Do you like the picture?” Simon asked, unsure of how to speak to this girl.

  “Yes, very much.”

  “It’s by a painter named Sandor Ziffer,” he said. “He was a patient of my father’s. I remember he came to the clinic one day when I was quite young, saying he’d been experiencing terrible pains in his abdomen. He said he wouldn’t be able to pay his bill, but could my father please help him. My father hesitated but then said, ‘It depends on how good an artist you are.’ Ziffer looked stricken, not the effect my father had wanted—or not for long, at least. ‘Of course I’ll help,’ my father told the man, ‘regardless.’ I inherited my way with the bad joke from my father, as you can see. Anyway, it turned out the guy had a twisted bowel, and my father was able to take care of it. A week later the man presented my father with this painting.”

  “It’s very gloomy and mysterious,” Lili said, “but lovely.”

  “Do you like this place?” Simon asked.

  Lili said, “Oh, yes, I do,” and she smiled warmly.

  Lili wanted to say something more. She wanted to impress Simon with something. She wanted to tell him she saw wild horses fly off a cliff to their deaths, except for four of them. Four of them that veered off. But who would believe her? What if she was the only person in the world to have seen such a thing? She was not sure, now, that she believed it herself, believed she ever saw it, as she sat in this room with its cream-coloured grand piano.

  Why had she been spared? Surely, she must have got away for a reason. If she’d been taken on the march with her family and everyone else in their town, and her appendix had flared up as it had here in Budapest, would someone have helped her, one of the authorities, the invaders, the kidnappers? Or would she have been shot to death with her father as he tried to help—and her mother and siblings as they tried to shield him as he helped. The offending appendix would have put everyone at risk, a Jewish organ standing out in a population of Aryan ones, the dark organ. The Jewish appendix.