She looked at her son and caressed his cheek. “Yes, I’ll come. Come, Lili.”
Vera said, “I’m sorry, ma’am. I meant no offence.”
Klari stood. “No, of course you didn’t.”
When her father died, it was as if the whole country mourned. The casket, loaded into a plain carriage, utterly without ornament, was drawn by white Arabian horses as Klari’s mother, Juliana, walked in front like a dowager queen. Her five daughters and five sons-in-law walked behind her, trailed by her eight grandchildren. The carriage was followed by Regent Horthy himself and members of the cabinet, and a thousand of Maximillian’s workers marched behind. Most stopped at the gates of Budapest’s Orthodox cemetery. It was not like the Kerepesi Cemetery, with its monuments and sculptures, nor like the grand synagogue on Dohany Street. Modesty and simplicity ruled here. How unlike every other thing in Maximillian’s life.
Lili and Simon escorted Klari into the living room, where the conversation was taking a turn.
Paul said, “What are we going to do?”
“Do?” Robert asked.
“Yes, do. We can’t stand by.”
“So far Great Britain, France, Russia and the United States have not been able to vanquish Hitler, but we will?”
“Please, Robertkam,” Klari said before sitting.
Paul stood to approach his uncle. “You can’t fight them, of course not: you have to undermine them instead.”
Robert stood up, too, and brushed an imaginary crumb from his shirt. “You’re just like your father,” he said. “Heinrich didn’t need to be strung up. What a waste—what a goddamn waste.” He pointed a finger at Paul. “You’re just like him. You always were—somehow bigger than events—needing to get in the way of them.”
Simon blushed. He took a seat on an ottoman beside Lili.
“Please, Uncle Robert,” Rozsi said. “Let’s not.”
“Trust me,” Paul said. He gave his uncle a wintry look. “If you need to, you can criticize my actions, but let me act first.” Paul didn’t want to argue. He knew that if he wanted to win an argument, he would win. That was what he did for a living: win arguments. But his uncle glared at him as if he were staring down his own brother.
Klari said, “To think we were planning to have a concert here tonight. That was how the day started.”
“A concert?” Lili asked.
Simon blushed again. He whispered, “Mother plays piano, and Tibor Novak, the violinist, was going to come over tonight to play a duet with her, but once Father called to say he was bringing you home, Mother cancelled the concert. She didn’t think it would suit the occasion.”
Klari didn’t want to add to what her son had said. She looked at the piano, with its gaping mouth. Rozsi still sat on its bench.
Lili reached over to take Klari’s hand, but they didn’t speak. Klari looked into the young woman’s sapphire eyes. Lili was old before her time.
And even when they moved to the dining room, the feelings that had been building did not abate, but little more was said. They ate dinner quietly, as if it were a last supper. They looked solemnly at the burning candles as they ate their sweet dumplings covered with walnuts and plum preserve.
Paul, in particular, held himself back. He wondered whether he would have stood in front of Mendelssohn’s statue, as his uncle had implied. He might have stood in front of Mendelssohn himself, but not his likeness. Defending symbols didn’t pay. The country was full of fallen statues, prized by one horde, despised by the next. And even when symbols were resurrected, they would fall again. And so it went.
Paul didn’t want the role of protector or saint. Saints were bores. Luckily, there were no Jewish saints, and if Jews were ever to get into the beatification business, they would have to make saints of the non-Jews who stepped in to help. It was hardly heroic to defend your own kind. Seeing over the heads of your own tribe was the mark of a saint.
Paul said finally that he wanted to take the young people out “on a matter of business.”
“What do you mean?” Robert said.
Klari said, “It’s too risky.”
“No, I know where to go. I need to get everyone’s picture taken, starting with Simon, Lili and Rozsi, and then I’d like to take you, Aunt Klari and Uncle Robert, tomorrow night.”
Robert said, “This young girl has just had surgery. It’s just not safe.”
“It’s not safe even if she hasn’t had surgery,” his wife put in.
“I need to make them safe. I have a photographer friend, and we have some papers to turn us into Swedes.”
“Zoli?” Rozsi asked excitedly.
“Yes, Zoli. We have a meeting planned at a photography studio. We need to get this paperwork done before it’s too late.”
PAUL TOOK THE YOUNG PEOPLE by taxi to the Danube, just by the Chain Bridge, where Zoli was to meet them. A breeze blew off the river, and Simon took his cousin Rozsi under one arm and Lili under the other to warm them. The lights were strung out along the bridge like a necklace. Paul was on the lookout for Zoli. He said, “We’re early, quite early. And Zoli might have been delayed. He had something he needed to do first, some arrangements he had to make.”
Another gust brought with it a spray off the river. Then it began to drizzle. There was a boathouse just a few steps away, and they headed toward it. Lili looked back at the bridge, at the wet light. Simon said he knew the boathouse’s owner. “His name is Erno Halasz. He lets me take the boat out whenever I want. Father treated his wife for an abdominal complaint of some kind. Let’s go in there for a bit. It’ll be warmer.”
When they stepped in, a boy sprang out at them like a startled cat.
“What are you doing here?” the boy shouted. Even in the dim light, the visitors could see the whites of the boy’s eyes. He was no older than thirteen or fourteen and looked half-crazed, his hair matted down, the cuffs of his shirt frayed, the sole of one shoe separating from the upper so that it looked like a gaping mouth. Simon thought of Charlie Chaplin. Lili remembered the blind Gypsy girl and her trio. She remembered her saying, “Music makes you stupid.” This boy was dark, like the men.
“We’re the owner’s friends,” Simon said. “Mr. Halasz, the man who hires out his boat from here, do you know him?”
Rozsi said, “Let’s leave. Zoli will miss us if we’re hidden in here.”
Paul said, “It’s all right. He’ll figure out that we came in from the rain. It’s the only shelter close to the bridge.”
The boy stepped back further into the darkness of the boathouse. Simon wanted to follow, but Lili held him back. Rozsi didn’t want to touch anything or lean on anything. She kept checking her hands and rubbing them together, until Paul called her Lady Macbeth.
They listened to the little slapping sounds of the boat bobbing on the water. “I know the owner, too,” the boy said. “He lets me stay on the Petofi all the time.”
“What’s that?” asked Lili.
The boy lit a match, illuminating the brass letters on the bow of a boat. “The Petofi,” he repeated. The boat was named after the great Romantic poet, Sandor Petofi, one of the leaders of the Hungarian Revolution of 1848 against Habsburg rule. The name sent Paul back to the days when Istvan and he and the poet Miklos Radnoti, Istvan’s friend, used to debate the merits of Petofi’s work. Radnoti was a modernist down to the Bloomsday cards he sent to friends—he must have been the first Hungarian to have read Ulysses—but he admitted that Petofi had “qualities.”
“Oh, he had qualities,” Paul said. “He was the country’s greatest asset, and he acted on his principles.” They were having coffee at The Rose in Szeged. “‘You cannot forbid the flower,’ Petofi told his countrymen. ‘Let’s fight to the death for freedom.’ And death took him quickly,” Paul added dramatically. “He was only twenty-six years old.”
Radnoti said, “He was about as good a poet as he was a soldier.”
“He inspired the nation,” Paul said, pounding his fist on the table, rattling the dishes. “He led the coun
try to freedom.”
“That explains it,” Istvan said.
“It is true, he may not have succeeded, but he tried his best. It was the example he set that counted. Not everyone has done well here, but you two have it very bad,” Paul said. “Don’t forget to finish your chestnut purée, boys,” and he huffed off.
For a moment in the boathouse, while the match was lit, the intruders glimpsed a cloth bag on the floor of the boat. A grey shirt-sleeve hung out of the bag’s opening, and beside the bag lay a violin.
“Did you come to live on the boat, too?” asked the boy.
“What?” Rozsi said.
“No, of course not,” Simon said too sharply. He glanced at Lili and his voice softened. “We’ve just come in out of the rain.”
“Why don’t you sit down, then?” the boy said. He ran to get a burlap sack and laid it out on the wooden floor for Lili. It didn’t look clean enough, so Simon threw it back to the boy and spread his jacket down in its place. Again he looked at Lili to see if he’d done the right thing.
Paul was about to do the same for his sister, but she said no, she was all right. Paul wanted to keep his sister company, so he stayed standing, too. Leaning his back against the wall, the boy slid down to the floor. Simon joined Lili and the boy on the floor, but made it down only as far as his knees. Paul was as tall as a tree, his head lost in the shadows of the ceiling, beside the figures seated on the floor. They could hear the pattering of the rain on the roof.
A moment later, another match burst out of the darkness as the boy lit a cigarette and offered the pack to his guests.
Paul shook his head. Rozsi said, “I have my own, thank you.”
Simon looked at Lili and then took one. His face glowed amber as he drew in the first puff. Simon coughed and said it had gone down the wrong way. He took another drag and coughed again.
“What’s your name?” Lili asked.
“Zindelo.”
“You mean Zindel?” Lili asked. “It’s Jewish. Zindel. ‘Son,’ it means.”
“Zindelo is what my mother called me.”
Lili asked, “Where is she, and your father?”
“I don’t know.” He took a long, crackling puff of his cigarette. “I haven’t seen them for a couple of years. I play violin in the squares. That’s how I get by.” The boy said this cheerfully, and he smiled. “It’s the only thing I got from my mother: music—oh, and begging, two things—oh, and my name, Zindelo. Son. Big deal.” And the boy laughed a big, throaty laugh, like someone older.
“Your name’s all right,” Lili told him. “I like it.”
“Well, I guess it’s better than ‘daughter’ or ‘monkey.’” Zindelo let out another smoky laugh. The boat bobbed and slapped at the water. Simon threw his cigarette into the dark water and listened to it sizzle.
Paul was impressed by the boy’s charm. Clearly, charm was not restricted to the upper classes, not to the Hungarians nor the Jews, any more than any quality, any more than birth or death. It dawned on Paul, standing with his arms crossed in this dark little shelter with the rain sounding on the roof, with his uncomfortable sister by his side, this young couple already in love in a single evening and this charming Gypsy boy, that they might not make it out alive. It was not a profound truth, nor a brilliant observation, but it struck with the force of original thought. Paul remembered the day with Istvan out on Lake Balaton, an August day at their grandfather’s house. Istvan went under the water and didn’t come back up. Little Rozsi screamed from the strand that she could see only Paul’s head out there—“It’s just your head,” she screamed again. Paul put his hand on the back of his wet head as if to confirm what she’d said. A cold calm flowed down through his veins just then, Paul recalled, and he dipped under the surface the way a loon does, saw nothing all the way to the bottom, his eyes blazing open and scouring the rocks, greenery and sand. Then up again for a draft of air and down for even longer, until he felt a searing cramp on his left side, like a stroke. It coursed down his long, thin frame from shoulder to ankle, and it was in that very moment that he learned he would not live forever. He could see himself being lowered into a narrow bed in the earth, could see the end of things, the utter absence of things, the cool earth neutral against his numb skin. He knew in that airless moment that it would happen in a finite number of days, not infinite—finite. When Paul came up for air again, Istvan was screaming with Rozsi, both of them on the shore, and their father, grandfather and grandmother were pushing their way toward him like motorized swimmers. Death comes to all of us equally, whether we are cooked in oil or boiled in mother’s milk—death, the democrat—dimming all the animal sounds in this little hut, quieting this small, new alliance.
How vulnerable Paul felt after a single day of bad news. How much more could they endure—all of their family, all of their friends, all of them going down—or up, swinging from a lamppost like his father, a short clownish leap toward heaven, leaping after his wife, their mother, the day you feel your neck go numb, the day the cops and robbers are true, the day the bullet is true, the day the bullet breaks your true skin—you—the clipped advocate, ready to stand in the path of crazed hordes, knowing they need to devour you for their fuel, and for the first time you feel just a little afraid.
“My mother could read the stars,” Zindelo said. He pointed to the ceiling. “The stars spoke directly to her, like a telegraph.”
Lili was smiling. Zindelo said, “Do you know what my mother said?” Lili and Simon shook their heads. “Our sun is someone else’s star to wish on, someone living in another galaxy.”
“And someone who is not yet born,” Simon said. “I mean the sun may have extinguished itself by the time the light reaches someone else far away. It takes that long for the light to travel.”
They were looking at him intently, and Simon shrank into himself, not meaning to be giving a lesson. “I didn’t know that,” Lili said. “It’s very interesting.”
Rozsi said, “Why don’t I go check for Zoli?”
“I’ll go,” Paul said.
“But I want to go,” she said, already at the door.
“I have some kolbasz,” Zindelo said. “Do you people want some kolbasz?” He was pointing somewhere at the boat. Lili and Simon shook their heads. “It’s nice and spicy. Horse.”
“Horse?” Simon asked.
“No, thank you,” Lili said. “We just ate.”
Rozsi felt a twinge of sympathy. “No, thank you, Zindelo.” And she went out.
“Do you people beg?” the boy asked, then broke out laughing again in answer to his own question. “Are you related?”
Simon looked at Lili. She was blushing. “You two don’t look alike,” Zindelo said. “I was just asking.”
Zindelo’s dark eyes saddened in the dim glow of the single light bulb hanging down from above their heads. He looked like a miniature man rather than a boy.
“Why don’t you play something on your violin?” Simon asked. “I’ll pay you.” He reached into his pocket for some coins.
“I don’t want you to pay me,” the boy said solemnly. “You’re my guests here.”
Lili said, “We can’t have violin music today. Your uncle just passed away.”
“Of course we can,” Paul said. “These are not regular times.”
His sister came back in just then with Zoli. He looked wet and slightly alarmed, though he didn’t say why.
“We’re having some music,” Paul said.
“Oh,” Rozsi said. She took Zoli’s hand. “That’s all right.” Now she looked at the floor to check its suitability for sitting, and Zoli made the decision easy by spreading out his jacket. He had his camera with him, wrapped in a linen cloth.
Zindelo fetched his violin, the floorboards creaking where he stepped. As he came back, he held the instrument up to his ear and plucked the strings. “Would you have some kind of cloth with you by any chance?” Zindelo asked.
Simon reached into his pocket and pulled out a white handkerchief.
Zindelo seemed to be examining the handkerchief. “It’s clean,” Simon said, rolling his eyes.
“I wasn’t looking at that. I was looking at the letters.” The handkerchief was monogrammed. “These are nice letters,” Zindelo said.
The visitors realized the boy couldn’t read. “Yes, ‘SB,’” Simon said.
“Oh, ‘SB.’ Fancy.” He rubbed the handkerchief against his cheek and smelled it. Then he wiped the violin as if it were a small child’s body, folded the handkerchief and placed it on his shoulder against his neck. He set the violin under his chin and, like a sigh, drew the bow along the strings, the instrument humming dolefully in response.
Zindelo played “Brahms’s Lullaby” and then, his face brightening, his own rendition of “The Blue Danube”—“My own lullaby,” he said, laughing over the melody. He started with a single sustained note to draw in his audience, the note clear as sunlight beaming through the string. “The Danube rocks me to sleep like a mother,” he said.
He played for what seemed like an hour—Haydn, Sarasate, Irving Berlin—melodies Paul and the two couples recognized right away, songs the people would call out for in the squares around the city, tunes anyone could hum, helped along by the jingling of coins tossed into Zindelo’s upturned hat. The greatest miracle was that he could pull such sad old sounds out of the instrument with a child’s fingers. The boathouse was transformed into a dance hall and then concert hall and then saloon with the notes the young Gypsy drew out of his instrument. So the visitors had their concert after all. Simon took Lili’s hand and looked at his cousin Rozsi with Zoli. Lili squeezed his hand back. A warm current ran through him.
Zindelo finished with the famous waltz from The Merry Widow, and Simon whispered to Lili that it was his mother Klari’s favourite tune. “She hums it all the time but never plays it on the piano, for some reason.”
Lili shrugged and smiled. She tried to think what her mother’s favourite song was. There was a Czech song she sang to them—Helen’s own mother, Lili’s grandmother, was from Prague. It was about chocolate and cherries. And there was a Yiddish song that got her up on her feet, dancing and clapping, “Chiribim, Chiribom,” about the rabbi who finally took a wife.
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