Gratitude

by Joseph Kertes

  She heard a telephone ring. Lili thought it might have come from the hall or maybe the kitchen. She said, “Oh, you have a telephone.”

  “A telephone?” Simon said. “Didn’t you have a telephone?” He asked the question as if to say, “Do you know what a telephone is?” And both reddened again.

  “Yes, we had a telephone in Tolgy,” she said, “but most other people didn’t. Our phone number was 4.”

  “4?”

  She nodded.

  “Whose number was 1?”

  “The mayor’s.”

  “Whose was 2?—Don’t tell me—the mayor’s brother?”

  She smiled again as she sat on the edge of her ottoman. She thought of the phone back home, how it had rung while she was hiding behind the wardrobe. Who had it been? Where had that caller gone?

  Simon wondered about this girl’s town. His mother’s father, Maximillian, was the first to have a telephone in Kiskunhalas, at his summer house. No one understood the point at first, since there was no one to call. Simon pictured the beautiful grounds, the peacocks roaming freely, the swans in the pond. His grandfather had an unforgettable meerschaum pipe. It had a bowl with the face of Poseidon carved into it and was longer than his arm. It had to rest on a stand. His kulcsar, or key man, had to come in to light it for him, when he sat in the atrium. When Simon or other grandchildren were around, they got to do the honours. Over the years, Simon watched Poseidon’s face darken with the smoke and flame, until he looked like a Moor. He asked the key man how dark the bowl would get, and the key man shrugged his shoulders. “Pretty dark, I think.” Simon followed him around sometimes, studying his ring of keys: keys for the outer doors, of course, and the inner ones, too, the bedrooms and main floor rooms, keys for the wine cellar, keys for the gates, keys for the cabinets, keys for the piano, the boxes of silverware, and a small key even for the silver sugar box. The servants were not to steal the sugar cubes. Not even the grandchildren were allowed.

  Lili was almost writhing now in the Becks’ living room. She was not making the impression she wanted to make on these lovely people who’d taken her in. She felt weak, light-headed. She tried to concentrate on an unusual table beside her.

  It was Klari who saved her, arriving followed by Vera, the housekeeper, who was carrying a tray laden with espresso and biscuits. “Do you like it?” Klari asked, indicating the table.

  At first Lili thought she meant the Becks’ home and nodded as enthusiastically as before. Then she saw Klari was referring to the table. Its top was raspberry-coloured marble, supported by an impressive cast-iron pedestal, built to withstand the ages. “Do you like the painting on the surface?” Klari asked. “It’s by Edvard Munch.”

  Vera set down the tray on a side table. Lili stood to help, but everybody urged her to sit again. She crossed her arms and then sat. She realized that Klari was trying to distract her and reassure her, Simon too. They were all trying to please her, and she them, in the way that only strangers do.

  Simon positioned himself on the end of the nearest divan, so he could admire Lili. “Yes,” Lili said, “the table is quite lovely. It’s—” she wanted to say alluring but could think only of the Yiddish word and didn’t want to use it. Hungarian Jews who did not live on the border didn’t speak Yiddish and in fact frowned on it. It smacked of the lower classes.

  The setting in the painting was a dark blue churchyard cemetery at dusk. A crow sat on one of the gravestones, or was it a small imp, or a dark angel? Yet the picture seemed strangely hopeful and uplifting. Lili thought for no good reason of her field of wild horses and the cliff. “I like it very much,” she said again.

  “Do you know how we acquired it?” Klari asked. Lili watched as Klari reached across to a lamp table, took a silver cigarette case, pulled a cigarette from inside and lit it with a monogrammed silver lighter.

  “I can’t imagine,” Lili responded. “It’s so beautiful. Who’d have thought—a painting on a tabletop?” The place was not only rich with art, but the paintings all came with stories.

  “You know how it ended up here, don’t you, Vera?” Klari asked. Vera nodded. Klari looked at her son. “Simonkam?”

  He rolled his eyes. “Of course you do, dear,” she said.

  “I want to know,” Lili said.

  Vera gave each person a little cup of espresso and offered lumps of sugar and a biscuit. Klari settled back into a plush peach chair as smoke, thick as silk stockings, streamed upward from her mouth to her nostrils. She said, “My father owned quite a bit of land and had some good buildings here in Budapest, too. But he had one unusual practice. He didn’t care for the lovely cafés, like Gundel and Gerbeaud and New York, but preferred the Japan, which was a legendary bohemian hangout. He loved the talk there, the flavour of the place. It was frequented by poets and artists and philosophers. Some French artists passed through there—famous ones now: Claude Monet, Pissarro, a frail Austrian named Egon Schiele, a Spaniard living in Paris, Pablo Picasso, and Edvard Munch, who was a Norwegian, actually. Anyway, at the time many of these artists weren’t exactly well off, so one—I think the first was Matisse, if I’m not mistaken—painted his tabletop in payment for his meals. The owner laughed off the matter until a second artist offered to do the same. It soon became a tradition after that. Even if you were able to settle your account, the owner offered a week of free meals in exchange for table art. I myself remember—because I begged my father to take me there just as often as he would and could—seeing a beautiful tabletop done by our own Bela Ivanyi-Grunwald, the Naturalist, a luscious landscape which seemed to beckon like the pastries that often sat on the table’s top. When all the tabletops were done, guests of the café, unfortunately, did not prize what they themselves had created, and cigarettes would roll off the tray onto the table and burn little ditches into the work, or coffee cups left permanent rings, some of them—some of them deliberately—Picasso deliberately set his cup down on the wet surface he had just painted, and the ring remained in the work.

  “The place became so legendary that you’d go into the café and ask to sit at the Matisse or the Mondrian, or even wait for it if you had to. And you hoped to meet someone exciting, because anyone who was anyone in the arts or the world of ideas passed through the smoky chamber to sample the café’s strudel or chestnut palacsinta. My father went for his conversations with poets—arguments, more like. He heard about the state of the world, about the rich owning the world and not sharing. These were the first conversations, really, about communism, before the authorities cracked down on such people. My father was of two minds about these matters, because he felt all the liveliness of the world emanated from such rare places as the Japan, but he had done very well himself and enjoyed the good life, as did we all, we children.

  “After a time, the famous tabletops could no longer take the abuse without permanent damage, some beyond recognition, so the owner had round plates of glass cut to fit them. And then one day the owner of the Japan died, right on the job, hunched with chest pain right over the top of his Bela Ivanyi-Grunwald. His sons did not want to carry on the legacy of the establishment and sold off the building and its furnishings. When it came to the tables, the sons auctioned them off. My father tried to get several and, of course, did manage to get his favourite, the Munch. He couldn’t get any others. Another one he especially wanted was a table with musical bars painted on its top by Maurice Ravel, the French composer. They were notes to his symphonic rendering of Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. Do you know the piece? It’s lovely. Very mighty.” Lili shook her head, and Klari said, “Maybe we can listen to it sometime on the phonograph, when we get past this trouble.”

  Lili took “this trouble” to mean the German invasion, the abductions, the war. She blushed again and put her hands to her cheeks. She felt terribly tired, all of a sudden.

  “The table gives me comfort,” Klari said wistfully.

  “It does?”

  “Very much. I love that it said something to my fat
her and that the artist meant something by it. Though they never met, their medium was the table at the Japan Café. And now they’re both gone. The artist died just this past January—I saw it on the newsreels at the cinema—and my father died five years ago. Yet here it is, still speaking to us, having a word with everyone it encounters. And some day, when we ourselves have taken flight, it will speak to yet another little gathering over coffee and cakes—your children possibly. It will always bring forward another time—what was precious about it—and what’s precious remains.”

  Klari broke off speaking with her hand on her heart, and when she saw that Lili was crying, she cried too. The women stood up together and hugged.

  “Who was on the phone earlier?” Simon asked, but he had to wait through the hug to find out.

  “It was your cousin Paul,” his mother finally said. “He and Rozsi want to come by. They need to talk to us about something important.”

  “I wonder what,” said Simon.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, it can’t be good news.”

  Vera came to ask about dinner, and Klari excused herself and followed her back into the kitchen.

  Lili said, “I don’t want to take up your whole day.”

  “My whole day,” Simon said.

  “I don’t know how long I can stay. It would be too much—”

  “What would?” Simon felt he wanted to sit beside her but didn’t want to seem too forward. “You’re doing us a favour. We’ll be helping each other. My parents wouldn’t hear of your leaving. Nor would I. Please.”

  A knock came at the door. Robert emerged from his study, looking groggy and puzzled. “It’s Paul and Rozsi,” said Simon.

  “Thank goodness,” his father said. Simon and Lili followed Robert to the front, where Klari, too, had just arrived.

  They quickly lost their moment’s respite. Even before Robert had managed to close the door behind his nephew and niece, Rozsi burst out with the news about Heinrich. “Oh, Aunt Klari, Uncle Robert, Father’s dead.”

  Klari froze. The blood seemed to drain from her face. Lili thought the older woman would faint. But Robert stepped in to hold her, then her niece, her nephew and her son. The whole family stood this way, in a kind of huddle, swaying slightly.

  Simon saw that Lili was standing alone, but it was Klari who broke away from the group. She took Lili by the hand. “Come on,” she said, sniffling. The two women immediately set to turning the place into a house of mourning. Rozsi felt she couldn’t, felt she needed to stay with her brother and followed the men into the living room and sat on the piano bench. She stared blankly at the piano as the men poured brandy. Rozsi played a single high note.

  “No music,” Robert snapped. So she closed the lid on the keys.

  He’d said no music, but Robert immediately regretted his own edict. He couldn’t imagine anything that would have given them more comfort. Why was it they could not have music in the hours after a death? Maybe it was the pleasure they were not to indulge in, the beauty. Unless it was the beauty that most resembled death, the kind of beauty that beckons us, like death, to a place of peace, away from pain and old age and memory. That kind of music might have been all right.

  Lili followed Klari into her bedroom, where Klari immediately set to rummaging through her closet. She found a black dress that she held up to the light. It had a silk carnation in the lapel, and Klari pulled it off and threw the flower onto the floor of her ample closet. She then strained to tear the lapel on the left, the one that was to go over her heart. She dug deeper and found another dress and held it up too. “Is this navy or black?” she asked Lili as she took another look at Lili’s white dress.

  “It’s black,” Lili said.

  “Isn’t it charcoal?”

  “It’s night black.”

  “Night or late evening?” asked Klari, but she was already tearing at the collar of this dress, too, and she grunted as she did so. “It will be a little big,” Klari said, “but it will have to do.” She held it up against Lili. She then raised her index finger. “But don’t—and I mean don’t ever—think of this dress as a memorial to your own family. It is for Robert’s brother, my brother-in-law, and for him alone. No one else is dead,” she said with a rasp.

  She took out a shirt for Robert and tore the smallest tear at the collar. “For a brother,” she said again.

  Lili was putting on the dress. Klari watched and said, “It’s very bosomy.” Then she hugged the young woman. “Never mind,” she whispered. “It will be this once and once alone. May you never grow into this dress.” And she spat dryly into the air behind Lili. “To ward off evil spirits,” Klari said.

  “I know,” Lili said. “My mother used to spit a lot. She didn’t want us to be too beautiful.”

  “I see she didn’t get her wish,” Klari said, cupping Lili’s face in her hands. “Lili, please ask Vera if we have any eggs to add to the dinner. They need to be boiled.” As Lili turned, Klari added, “And ask her to get out some tea towels to cover the mirrors and a big linen bath towel for the hall mirror.”

  As Lili was about to go, Klari said, “Shall we sit in low chairs or on the floor?”

  Before Lili could answer, Klari said, “Never mind. God will understand about my knees.”

  The sight of the Becks’ kitchen made Lili think she’d stepped into yet another world, like Alice in Wonderland. “Oh,” she said, as Vera took a pot from the oven.

  “Yes, oh,” Vera said. “It’s the Alhambra. Mr. and Mrs. visited Granada back in the twenties with that poor Lord Heinrich and his wife, Mathilde, the parents of the two out there. Dr. Robert wanted a taste of the place and kept talking about it, so he called in a Viennese designer, Mr. Albrecht Kuhn,” Vera spat out the words, “so he could give him a kitchen like one of the rooms of the Moorish kings of Granada. ‘I know I can’t have a citadel or a palace,’ Robert told the fellow, ‘but let me at least behave like the Bourgeois Gentilhomme when the fancy strikes me.’ That was exactly what he called it. The Mrs. rehearsed it with me so I could impress my friends.” And Vera showed off the French again. “Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme.”

  Vera turned toward her casserole. “I have to tell you,” she said, “people didn’t go in much for design back then.”

  “Do they now?” Lili wanted to know.

  “Not much even now. So Mr. Kuhn and Dr. Robert were happy to lead the way.” Vera showed off the room’s features with sweeping hand gestures, like a magician. “They got this mosaic floor with the medallion pattern.” Vera closed her eyes. “It is warmed by the memory of the Hall of the Two Sisters, Dr. Robert kept saying. And out that back window looking onto the courtyard you could easily expect to see the Fountain of the Lions, though that might have been going too far. The fellow made the cabinets out of a lacquered white walnut—I’ve never seen anyone do that to good walnut. They were made to look like Moorish entranceways with crystal windows cut out with the arches at the corners and the horseshoe arches like the Alhambra’s southern and western walls.”

  “It sounds as if you’ve been there yourself,” Lili said.

  Vera poked Lili in the chest. “Well, that’s because I did what you did when I first saw the finished result. Only I squealed. I said, ‘Look, I’m standing in an Eastern palace. Which of my girlfriends gets to go to exotic places like me? Look, I’m standing in a great room of a palace!’

  “The Dr. and Mrs. Robert felt embarrassed. ‘It’s really just a kitchen,’ Dr. Robert said to me.

  “‘Ha!’ I said. ‘It’s more than a kitchen now. But you brought it here to me. I get to work in the Alhambra all day long.’” Vera stood too closely to Lili, as if they were conspiring. She was speaking of the room as if it were her own.

  “And do you know what they did for me, the Mr. and Mrs.?” Lili shook her head. “The next Christmas, the Christmas of 1929, Dr. Robert and Mrs. Klari presented me with two return train tickets to Granada, and vouchers for a week’s stay in a beautiful hotel. So I got to go t
o Spain with my mother, the first time out of the country for both of us.”

  And now Lili was impressed. She appreciated the distraction. The room was exotic, to be sure, but not overbearing. It was cheerful and inviting. But Lili was not entirely comfortable in this big and generous place. She didn’t feel right having this conversation. She felt guilty marvelling at the kitchen, just as she had felt a pang of guilt admiring the family portraits and the tabletop by Edvard Munch while her family was bound for…what? Not Spain. Not Granada.

  Lili said, “We need some eggs boiled and we need some cloths to cover the mirrors.”

  “Ah, yes, I remember. Like when Mrs. Mathilde went.” She sighed.

  They heard someone coming toward the kitchen. “Well,” Vera said, “you’re safe here in the Alhambra, young miss.”

  “Safe?” Klari said as she joined them.

  “Yes, ma’am. You’re safe with me, safe in the city. It’s too big a place. We’re all mixed up here. I’m not Jewish.”

  Klari said, “Safe with you?” She collapsed blackly into a kitchen chair. It hit her again—the full impact of what was happening: the abduction of Hermina and Ede—the murder of Heinrich—and what about Istvan?—where was he?—did anyone know?—had he been murdered?—and even the family of this girl who had come to stay with them in her wedding dress—what had happened to them? Klari’s grief was oceanic.

  Simon arrived in the kitchen to get Lili and his mother. “Come, ladies, sit with us. Rozsi doesn’t look too good.” He read the despair on his mother’s face, so he crouched down to repeat the request, gently.