When Zindelo was finished, Simon insisted on giving the boy the coins he’d originally offered, but Zindelo held up his hand. “Please,” he said, “not this time,” and he bowed.
“Take half,” said Simon.
Zindelo looked him in the eye and accepted the smaller fee. Simon bowed, too, as he backed out.
Paul was the last to leave. He told Zindelo, “You should go. You won’t be safe here.”
Zindelo said, “I’m never safe anywhere. I’m used to it.”
“You might have more trouble than usual. Come see me. I have an office. I can get papers for you.”
Zindelo held up his hand. “Come see me in the square,” he said, “and I’ll play something for you.”
Paul tipped his hat and he bowed, too. He watched the boy as he climbed into the boat to retire his violin. When Zindelo had his back turned, Paul took a gold coin from his vest pocket and placed it on the wooden floor by the door before slipping out.
Seven
Szeged – June 6, 1944
ISTVAN’S BODY had begun to turn on him. He was sure he had developed a bladder infection, because he had crawled to his pail in the corner to urinate a dozen times in a single morning, only to find the passage too tight and painful to emit anything but a few drops. He wished he could tell whether the drops were tinged with blood, but he would have to drag his bucket out of the corner into the dim bars of light, and he could not bear to keep company with his toilet. That same night, his left eye developed an uncontrollable twitch, which spread eventually to the other eye. Then in the darkness, both sockets became sphincters, straining to eject their occupants. He was not without knowledge in medical matters, and when his straining detonated blinding flashes of pain in his skull, Istvan speculated about an aneurysm and awaited the call to judgment.
Where had Marta got to? Had she decided to make off with Dr. Cuckoo? Was the good doctor not infinitely preferable, after all, to Istvan? Was the sanctimonious doling out to Marta of the food he earned in place of wages not a ploy to make her smile while he spread her legs? What better game could there be, in the middle of this madness? Was there such a thing as morality left? Why should there be? Did Dr. Cuckoo know about Istvan? How could he blame the poor sod even if he did? Did it not make the game all the more wickedly delicious? What more successful devil was there than the one dressed as an angel?
But what about Marta? What about his raven-woman? Would she have abandoned him without at least leaving him provisions to prolong his foolish hope for a few days, stoke up his insanity? Never mind him, what about the silly cat? Clawing overhead, clawing at the floorboards, whining, scratching. Adorable little vampire. Who would devour whom in the coming days and sip dispassionately on the tepid blood?
Istvan thought frequently about Miklos Radnoti. He’d often sifted through his friend’s verse as he sat waiting for the world to settle down.
You see, now fear often fingers your heart,
and at times the world seems only distant news;
the old trees guard your childhood for you,
the memories turning ever more ancient.
Do the trees still stand guard over our childhood, my Miklos, my dear poet, or have they been deported too, their lush branches stripped and piled in the temple on Jozsika Street? And where are you, poor soul, poor songbird? Did you find cover for yourself?
Poor Rozsi, poor Paul. What fate awaited them? Was Istvan not better off in his den than they were? But surely they saw the writing on the wall—on the sky—if they cared to look. It was worse to believe yourself safe, as did his Budapest kin. Poor Aunt Klari, still thinking about him, her nephew Istvan, and not herself. Dark days lie ahead, dear sister of my mother. Get yourself to higher ground.
Morning came. Blessed morning. And it was quiet overhead but bright. No oil left for his lamp. Istvan could at least light the candle. He would treat himself to a little light, a small repast for his eyes. Should he read in the light, visit another country with the musketeers? Spend the light on reading rather than seeing? Was there a single particle of dust he’d not turned over and studied? What was there new to see? Where was Smetana? No hungry scampering above. No hungry floorboards. Was it over for Smetana?
Istvan thought he heard someone tapping at the door. He held his breath. In the darkness, all his senses rushed to his ears and huddled there. Nothing. Then, bang! bang! Now he heard the cat move after all. Could the visitor hear the cat? Bang! Possibly not. This tight, thick little cabin had withstood the centuries. Who was calling? Surely someone friendly. The first taps said it all. Istvan sat still as a portrait.
The knocking stopped, but the hammering in Istvan’s chest persisted. The cat was silent again. The world was silent. Istvan could hear the velvet thud in his ears. Where had the caller gone?
The house waited. Istvan felt ready to expire. He wanted to expire, take a couple of days off from—what? He felt the first shiver of death course through him. Oh, God, if people weren’t faced with death, what would become of their faith? But You knew that all along—didn’t You—You Clever Little Omniscient? Otherwise, why would You have planted the Tree in the Garden? It was all part of the Grand Design. Fall and we shall Love You. Fall and we shall Worship You. Fall and we shall bring Burnt Offerings. What’s a Little Creation Party without Burnt Offerings? They were too easy for You, weren’t they, All-Knowing One? No sport in that. All part of the Plan. The honeymoon with Your creatures was over. They’d become dull. The Creation was a Bore. A Grand Bore, albeit—Spectacular in Spots—Thunder and Lightning, the Thunder and Lightning Polka—but it was Nothing beside the Floods, the Vermin, the Seas Opening, the Angel of Death passing through. Ah, the Angel of Death. Then what? Someone in a Whale. Someone on a Ladder. Someone in a Lion’s Den. Something in Leopard. Something in Herringbone. And then: Oh, my God. The Pièce de Résistance: The Crucifixion. How Delicious. Let’s hear it for The Father, The Son and The Holy Ghost. The Crucifixion. The Resurrection. The Salvation for All. Does It get any better than That? Oh, yes, oh, yes, the Honeymoon is over. And now we have the Marriage. Succulent Fruit. Fruit Verboten.
Oh, Forget Forgiving Them, Dear Lord God, Creator of the Universe. Baruch Ata Adonai. Forgive Me, Please, Dear Lord. You know Me. I have arguments with Myself and almost always Lose.
I have waited for you, oh, Paul, oh, my brother. Where have you got to? Have you no armies to send to me from Budapest? Can you not sway the courts to pass new laws, make outlaws of the invaders, not the invaded? Oh, what a coward am I—what a rogue and peasant slave. I have forsaken my Father, my brother, my sister, my mother’s grave. Oh, my father’s grave. Did anyone think to give you a proper burial after they let you down from the lamppost, you dear foolish man, standing up for—what? For the triumph of German education and culture, for Mendelssohn, for music, for sweetness and light, for reason, for sanity? Did they at least give you a place to lie, out of the way of traffic and buzzards, where peace resides, and civility?
How I loved my brother and my sister—worshipped Paul—who else could defend the most powerful Jew, the most powerful Manfred Weiss, against the powerful Hungarians who wanted to share his lands and wealth, wanted a small piece of the Big Jew’s dominion, and Paul defended him and won against the state, as only Paul could, and then Paul persuaded Monsieur Weiss, as only Paul could, to hand over some of what they were asking for. Weiss’s Hero, the People’s Hero, Our Hero, Our Paul. Even he could not unclench this cellar and liberate his lowly dental brother, shrinking each day, dissolving into a Jew.
Is it a symptom of the disease that we transfer our shortcomings to remote bystanders, hold them responsible for what ails us, find a locus outside of ourselves for our demons, fail to recognize that it’s neither their shortcomings nor ours that have altered grand social and economic forces which have darkened this century—any more than it’s their shortcomings or ours that fan a typhoon or crack the earth? It’s not personal, in short, not individual, not idiosyncratic to groups, not racial.
Imagine that moment—imagine the first glimmer of its possibility. Imagine the moment when the light of possibility gurgles out of the darkness of your nightmare, like the moment just before you hear your own neck snap and, while you can no longer breathe in air, you breathe in calm, your ears buzzing, your eyes bubbling over with remembered sight. You still feel your fears, faintly, but can spy the light burning through them. Yes, France can be yours, and Italy, and Poland, and Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, and, yes, your tormentors will be defanged, your hook-nosed Jews who deny you your genius, your beggar Gypsies who beckon at your hoary door, your Homo-Ss—can it be, Adolf, that you once desired a protrusion, not a recess, a rump, not a front, a m—, not a w—? Imagine. A moment as powerful as the splitting of the atom. A moment in which all other selves fuel the conflagration of the single self, the Only Self.
And your tormentors will be stilled forever, the nightmares washed over with celestial light—oh, come to me, Jesus, come, Sweet Jew Jesus, and throw your good dry kindling onto the pyre, with you still nailed to it. Fan the flame with your heavenly Jew wind to confound hell and outwit Lucifer. You are our King now, the Jewblood boiling out of your nail holes into the flame, the blue Aryan rain soothing, feeding the rivulets of your resurrection.
SUDDENLY SOMETHING SLAMMED above Istvan. The cat cawed like a crow. And it began. A record. The cat had set off the gramophone! The last record Istvan had asked Marta to play. Still on the turntable. Friedrich Flotow’s Martha, of course. Why not drama to accompany death? The opera was in English as befitted the words of Thomas Moore. Lady Harriet Durham singing “The Last Rose of Summer” from Act II. Now here was the voice, sweet as heaven, sweet as Mother. He wished he could know all the English, strained to recall the Hungarian lyrics. But the music was enough. The music told him what he needed to know.
’Tis the last rose of summer, left blooming alone;
All her lovely companions are faded and gone;
No flow’r of her kindred, no rosebud is nigh,
To reflect back her blushes, to give sigh for sigh.
I’ll not leave thee, thou lone one, to pine on the stem;
Since the lovely are sleeping, go sleep thou with them.
Thus kindly I scatter thy leaves o’er the bed,
Where thy mates of the garden lie scentless and dead.
So soon may I follow, when friendships decay,
And from love’s shining circle the gems drop away!
When true hearts lie wither’d, and fond ones are flown,
Oh! who would inhabit this bleak world alone?
Now he knew—even a sleeping bird has a song waiting within its breast. Istvan reached through the floorboards for the beautiful voice, reached for the verse, and sobbed. It was the first time. It came now from the great gulch within him, wrenching him. The tight little house shuddered from roof to root. Act II whirled on at seventy-eight rotations per minute, but Istvan could no longer grasp it nor even hear it. Where was his lovely Marta? What bleak world would he re-enter—could he re-enter—alone? Was she dead now and gone forever? Had they tortured her, then killed her? Had she suffered long? For what? For him—for Istvan? Oh, misguided, misspent beauty—how could he have allowed it—his raven rosebud dashed by this German summer? Oh, please do not suffer—lie sleeping—lie dead.
Istvan rose in his dark cellar. He boldly mounted the creaky ladder for the first time in two months, slapped open the boards above and emerged into the afternoon house. The scrawny cat’s paw was still jammed in the controls of the gramophone. Istvan approached calmly, switched off the power and liberated Smetana, who looked meekly up at his champion and emitted a vowel. The cat rubbed itself against his hand. Istvan stroked the bony creature and glanced up above the console to behold himself in the mirror, withered as the cat, his cheekbones pushing their way through the skin, his shirt dingy, grey and rumpled, its glorious old white ghost fled.
The sky grumbled with rain, which pattered now on the sturdy roof. Istvan stepped intrepidly to the window and looked out onto the day—the sky’s laundry line hung out with grey. And right by his hand on the kitchen’s wooden counter was the tin of sardines.
His hands trembled as he found the opener and summoned his strength to cut the tin’s silver lid. The cat dropped down to the floor and whirled around Istvan’s ankles like a furry snake. The cat choreographed Istvan’s life now, whatever life remained in his spindly bones. Istvan’s days danced around him where he stood. Let all the linens and cakes and goblets, let all the newspapers and arguments, let the surf of the fields and lakeland pontoons of his youth rejoice and dance around this tin! No silver was ever so dear as the supple, silver-coated flesh of these four small fish in their silver coffin. Baruch Ata Adonai.
Into Smetana’s grey, polished dish on the floor, Istvan placed two of the fish, slid to the floor beside the cat and ate his share, morsel by morsel.
Eight
Budapest – June 6, 1944
PAUL LAY AWAKE all night. What had bored into his mind like a worm was the fact that he didn’t know where his father was buried, that a green place had been waiting for Heinrich beside Mathilde and that now there would be no locus for their grief, his and Rozsi’s and Istvan’s, if his brother made it, if any of them made it, no place to stand and remember a family together. Was the good mayor left to hang until the buzzards got to him, a pocked and dangling warning to the citizens of Szeged? Was he carted away with the rest of the breed on wagons, a pile of one-time Hungarians with which to build a Jewish fire? Was he granted a state funeral, as befitted his station? Or would his mother lie alone?
Paul remembered how enthusiastic his mother had been when Heinrich was first elected. Paul was fifteen, Istvan not yet thirteen and Rozsi barely four. Heinrich had fought a fierce battle with a gentleman farmer, Janos Horvath, who had spoken of Hungary’s roots and of protecting the nation against what Horvath had called “external and internal enemies.” Heinrich Beck had won handily, and that night he had gathered his three children around him. Mathilde looked on from a settee nearby and took Rozsi in her lap. The two had lost some of their lustre over the course of a long day and looked very tired.
But not Heinrich. “Look at us,” he beamed. “Look at you. We Becks have been in Hungary for half a millennium, probably after we were expelled in the Inquisition, or maybe not. Maybe we came from the north somewhere—who knows?” Heinrich’s beard was already turning white, and as he spoke, he pulled the end of it into a point. “It hardly matters is my point. Look no further back beyond Hungary for our forebears. This country has given us more than life. I’ve been elected mayor, selected by the people, by Hungarians, all of us. It’s better than becoming king, believe me. If you are in line for the throne it’s because of some arbitrary royal lineage. Whether you like it or not, and whether the people like it or not, you most surely will be king, and they will have to suffer through your reign, for better or worse.
“Szeged is our Jerusalem. Even better, it’s where a majority selects a Jew to lead them. Here is the land where Jewish women bake strudel, where Jewish men bank in forints and Jewish children recite Petofi. Here’s the place where we can build architectural masterpieces to rival St. Peter’s Basilica—look at our temple in the centre of this city—look at the monument to our health and achievement, the monument to Judaism—and yet we can relax our hold on the old faith, as it relaxes its hold on us. You are the rightful heirs of this place. Never forget it.”
Even the little green rectangle of Hungary Heinrich had arran
ged for himself would now stay vacant, Paul thought bitterly. It was a sentimental concern, not a religious one—far from it, as his father had intimated. Paul was a proponent of the Neolog movement, the reform faction which led Jewry away from its Orthodox, and even Conservative, leanings, the ones which admonished Jews for driving a car on the Sabbath, or tearing paper, or lighting an oven, or smoking or shaving their heads—the women, at least—only to cover them with fashionable wigs, to satisfy God but fool dumb humanity. Or turning on a light. Or eating pork. Paul had wondered, as a child, what would happen if a pig ate a human. Would it be rebuked by the rest of piggery?
Was Sabbath meant to be a chore? Paul wondered. Live six days, spend the seventh showing contrition and gratitude? And if you are not naturally contrite or grateful, whom do you think you’re kidding? Do you think the Lord can’t see through the ruse?
And now the trains had begun to take away the undesirables on the Reich’s list—Hungary’s own trains, transporting Hungary’s citizens against their will to where Lili’s family awaited them, if the Bandels were still alert enough to wait—if the Bandels were alive. Was it conceivable that the list of undesirables could broaden and a whole country be emptied out—a vacant country for the taking, like the vacant town Lili left behind? They’d begun in Szeged and Debrecen and Miskolc and Komarom. How many had they already taken? How many would they succeed in taking?
Paul knew himself well enough to know that he was a poor candidate for a restricted life. He couldn’t remain for long the struggling man being jostled by the superior and the immortal. It was not vanity that made him feel this way, but the injustice, the unfairness—he, the advocate, unable to have his day in court to talk about the rightness of things, to put his faith in Justice with her blindfold—not sniffing out the impure, the striving Jew, the uncombed Gypsy, the homosexual on his way to the thermal baths.
Gratitude Page 12