Rozsi was blushing, as if Zoli were telling Paul one of their secrets. “So this is what it’s all about. This is what you want to do for a living, turn your camera into a spyglass; you want to follow lonely, unsuspecting fools as they step into brothels or pee in a bush?”
“You know that’s not what I’m doing.” He looked truly hurt. “I am not interested in recording people’s secrets.” He couldn’t look directly at her now. He regarded Paul instead. “Our time has eliminated the need for miniaturists. I am not interested in shooting weddings, or landscapes, nor will I record sittings.” Zoltan gestured to the walls around him. They were covered with photographs and paintings of Heinrich and Mathilde’s families. One portrait done in oils featured a family matriarch, some hundred and fifty years before, sitting erect in what looked like a throne, her purple dress resplendent, honey light pouring in from one side. Another canvas captured figures at a seaside who could easily have inspired Georges Seurat. A photograph in soft focus in a gilded frame showed Heinrich and Mathilde at the Taj Mahal with Klari and Robert, happy and carefree, if a little warm (as suggested by the fans the women held, caught in mid-flutter). Another gilded frame could barely contain the imposing figure of an army commander sporting a tall hat with a taller feather, not long before marching off somewhere—possibly to his doom? Grandest of all was a photograph, in an ornate cherry frame, of Heinrich as a young boy, gazing out of the heavy frame as if out of a casement window at the world below. He was adorned with a Victorian dress like a delicate young girl, his mother no doubt looking on with delight over the photographer’s shoulder.
Zoltan said to Rozsi, “I want to chronicle our time. There’s important work to be done. I want to bear witness. It’s not a profession I’m looking for now. It’s not about finding security.”
Rozsi knew she had misjudged him, and he was striking back. She had begun to cry, quietly, while her brother stood up tall. “You’re an inspiration to me, Zoli,” he said.
Zoli suddenly got to his feet, too, and said he had to go. “Thanks for the good brandy.”
He was half a block away when Rozsi caught up with him and grasped him to her.
“Please forgive me,” she said.
“It wasn’t you,” he said, though they both knew it was. “I had to get out of that staring gallery,” he said.
“Those are my ancestors.”
“Maybe I’m no good for you.”
She continued to hold on to Zoltan’s hands. “Please don’t say that. It’s nothing personal. I’m just jealous of your mechanical girlfriend, the one with the spyglass eye.”
Now he broke free of her. “Oh, it’s entirely personal,” he said. “If I’d been a junior solicitor in your brother’s firm, I wonder what you would have thought.”
“If you’d been junior solicitor in my brother’s firm, you’d be out of work now. It’s not your being a photographer that disturbs me. It’s that you’ve put yourself in the line of fire for some pictures.” Rozsi drew him close again and pressed her face against his chest. She could hear his heart beat.
He said, “It’s important to me.”
“If it’s important to you, then it’s important to me.”
He turned her face toward the lamplight and looked into her lakeland eyes. Zoltan reached into his jacket pocket. The jacket was charcoal grey, but in the light it looked brown. “I want to marry you,” he said, “if it’s possible.” He pressed a small black velvet pouch into her hands. Rozsi could feel the contours of the ring inside. “It was my mother’s. I want you to have it.” And he turned and ran off, leaving her standing there.
Rozsi rushed the little treasure inside her house and up to her room, clutching it in her fist. She sat on her bed beneath the canopy with its green fringe highlighted by drops of red silk rosebuds. Her heart beat frantically. She could feel something hard and square nestled with the ring inside the black pouch. It was a card, a note, muscularly folded a dozen times into a little square fortress of paper. The ring fell out and rolled against the white, curved Florentine leg of her settee. Rozsi rushed to retrieve it, then sat again on the bed.
It was a ruby ring set in a garland of gold filament leaves. Rozsi slipped it on her finger. It fit perfectly. It electrified her. She might just as well have stolen Zoltan himself into her room for the night, might as well, from that moment on, have been setting up house. The ruby radiated on her finger, warming the room.
She turned to the tightly folded note and opened it like a Japanese paper puzzle. The note had been written too carefully—boyishly—in thick blue ink with the Waterman fountain pen he told her he’d taken from his father’s study. Her eyes fell on the words:
Dearest Rozsi,
I want to outwait this bad time, and then marry you, if you’ll have me. This ring was my mother’s. May its ruby heart stand up to your stout Beck heart. Please take it and accept it.
Zoltan
I love
He’d forgotten to finish the note. I love. Like someone opening his arms to love. Rozsi heard a door opening in the hall and slipped the note and the ring under her pillow. She darted over to her white settee and perched herself on the end of it, stiffening her back, making herself obvious. She waited a good long minute, took out the pins in her hair, then returned to her bed, took her treasures from their hiding place, put the ring on her ring finger, opened the note and gazed at her favourite words. I love
ZOLI WAS NOW a half-hour late for Rozsi in the Strawberry Gardens. She was frantic by the time he did come. “What kept you?” she said. “Do you know what I’ve been thinking, what I tried not to imagine in the past half-hour?”
“I’m so sorry,” he said. He saw that she was wearing his mother’s ruby ring.
“Where have you been? I thought you were seeing that photographer, Gyula Brassaï?”
“Just Brassaï,” he said. “I saw him, but then I heard they were taking Jews to the new ghetto, out behind the Dohany Street synagogue. I wanted to see the wall going up there, get some shots of it.”
“Oh, those poor people. We could be behind that wall before long. Are there whole families—children—everyone?”
Zoltan nodded.
“Did Brassaï encourage you to do this—take pictures, I mean?”
“On the contrary. Brassaï saw some of my work, and…”
“And what?”
“And he urged me to get out and save myself, ‘live to fight another day’ sort of thing.” Zoltan was looking down at the grass. “But I had to get the pictures.”
“You had to.”
“Yes.”
“Were the Germans there, and the Nyilas?”
“Yes, both, but so was the Swede, Wallenberg, and so was your brother.”
“Paul?”
Zoli nodded. “It’s hard to understand what’s going on,” he said, “hard to feel secure in the hands of our prime minister or regent. Hitler knows Horthy is not his pal. He thinks even less of Miklos Kallay. He’s not enamoured of either, because their secret is out. Kallay is well-known for his two-step: two to the left, two to the right, as the situation requires. He’s very adept at it, bless his heart. Horthy doesn’t want Hungary fighting alongside Germany. But it’s true he’s had to release Kallay from his post to appease the Reich. He’s had to appoint Dome Sztojay prime minister, and as you know he’s a pal of Ferenc Szalasi, the fascist. I saw them there today, Szalasi’s Arrow Cross goons, at the ghetto wall. They hate the Germans probably as much as they hate us, because they want to be boss, the thugs—bastards.”
Rozsi took Zoli’s hand. “What will happen,” she asked, “if Hungarians are drawn into the Russian campaign alongside the Germans? We’ll be crushed.”
Zoli said, “It’s very tricky. It’s more difficult to be Hitler’s enemy than his friend. As his friend, at least you know where you stand—never as his enemy. And we’re the pawns in the middle, waiting for the bullet in our heads. And we have no friends. There aren’t that many of us in this country, and yet we’re
the professors, doctors and judges and at least one photographer. You need look no further than our circle. We’re terribly exposed. We’ve been called the Magyar Israel. So we’ll take the fall for failing our own nation. You can’t look out only for yourself when European Jews are disappearing all around us. You can’t be seeking land and knighthood from your leaders when a quarter of your own nation or more is hungry. Here we are, building baroque palaces and opera houses and banks while children in villages a few kilometres from the capital haven’t got shoes to wear to school.”
“You can’t be finding reasons to justify people’s hatred of us,” Rozsi said. “We are not to blame for all that.”
“No, but we’re fat scapegoats, we Hungarian Jews, easy targets for a madman with a cannon.”
Rozsi said, “It’s hard to believe that what happens to the unfortunate of this country is of concern to Hitler.”
“No, it’s of no concern to that prick, but it is of concern to them, to the unfortunate themselves, and when they have their day, they will not be kind to us, many of them. How long could this country’s feudal system survive? We’ve turned farmers into paupers. Do you remember the journalist Gyorgy Olah? He called them the ‘three million beggars.’”
“How sad, in a country so rich,” Rozsi said. “And then the rumours start that we’re to blame. How terribly sad, for everyone.”
“Yes,” Zoli said, taking her face in his hands. “But saddest of all, rumours are truer than truth, because people want to believe them.”
A cool breeze blew up, and she put her arms around Zoli again. “I just got engaged. Most of the people I love are falling all around me. Zolikam, I need you—do you understand that?” It was the one thing she had to hope for, look forward to. She didn’t want to stand alone—couldn’t—she knew that.
“I need you, too,” he said.
“Then please don’t go everywhere that there’s trouble. I won’t get another wink of sleep until this war’s over.”
“I’ll do my best,” he said. They had to leave the Strawberry Gardens now, before curfew.
Eleven
Budapest – June 21, 1944
BEFORE LONG, there was almost no food left in Budapest. The supply lines seemed to dry up. As money became worthless, farmers were hoarding food for themselves and their families. The trains had been taken over by the military and were being used to deport Jews. The Becks had gone from eating cakes and marzipan squares, veal shank and sauerkraut, and drinking brandy and teas, to scrounging for sacks of beans or rice in outposts around the city and hoping that Robert’s patients who needed to come in from outlying hamlets would bring him food, prepared or not. But Robert’s patients avoided him as much as they could. They assumed he might not be there when they came back to have him check on their recovery after surgery. And he was losing cases to other physicians, who quietly took them without a word to Robert.
Simon went out with Lili to scrounge for food, but he’d been stopped twice, once by a squad of Germans, who looked over his Swedish papers, then at him, then back at the papers, while hardly glancing at Lili’s documents; and once by the Nyilas, who didn’t care about his papers and took him to the outskirts of the city, broke his nose and two of his ribs and threw him in a dump. He managed to make it home on foot by night, to the relief of his horrified parents and Lili, who had sat by the window, waiting and crying, and holding Klari’s hand when the older woman joined her.
Robert bandaged his son’s side and his nose, and with Klari and Lili’s help gently put him to bed. Lili sat by his side through the night, experiencing for the first time since she’d left Tolgy what it would feel like to lose someone close. Simon’s eyes were closed, but he put his warm hand out from under the duvet to hold hers. She cried again and kissed his knuckles.
From that day on, Lili went out on her own, insisting that the Becks stay put. She found all kinds of food. She brought home dandelion leaves, which her hosts had never eaten. She found tins of Spanish anchovies, a crate of them, for which she traded an ice-blue satin dress Klari had given Lili for the purpose of bartering. And she took a trip to a farmer’s field with another girl she met, a Catholic girl, Maria Nap, and together they harvested a sack of potatoes.
The scarcest commodity was meat. Chicken or goose had become a delicacy. One night, Klari said she was so hungry for meat she would eat a bat if it flew through her window. She’d clamp it into a pot and get it cooking before it had even calmed down. She said she’d eat a crow, if she had to, as soon as she had torn off its feathers. Robert said he felt like a wolf, and would eat a wolf, if it happened his way, even if he’d be branded a cannibal for his efforts.
Lili saw the desire in their eyes. They had never known hunger. Neither had she. Lili imagined if she had stayed in Tolgy, or could return to it, she’d find plenty to eat. She wondered what they were feeding her family, if her mother’s milk had dried up for little Hanna, if the baby was still enjoying the sensations of the world. Lili didn’t mind the world’s disintegration, in itself. She could hunt for food. She didn’t care about buildings, bridges, temples and cafés. She remembered the tales of Babel and Sodom and Gomorrah. It was only a matter of time before most civilizations were razed in favour of new and cleaner ones, until they too became tarnished. Lili didn’t need buildings. She could manage in a cave. But the thought of losing people—her people—anyone’s people—was abhorrent to her. And to what end? Knock down a building to show how mighty you are, but why would you have to make it impossible for a baby to drink her mother’s milk?
Sometimes, before sleeping, Lili imagined talking with her mother. She imagined sitting with her, once Helen had put Hanna down, and telling her how she was getting on, what had happened since the last time they’d seen each other, how she’d lost her appendix, how she’d travelled in the wedding dress Helen had made, how these nice people had taken her in without question, insisting that she stay, be a member of their family until hers returned. What would her mother do when that day came? Would she present the Becks with something, her thanks at the very least, invite them for a country holiday, thank God for the goodness of strangers, thank God for the good that these bad times brought out in people?
Lili tried to imagine the man who had caused all this to happen to her and to everyone she knew. The conditions had to be right, for sure, for such a man to succeed, but it also took a certain kind of daring, like madness, surely, like Captain Dobo throwing the leaves back up to the branches that had dropped them. A certain kind of daring in dark times, so that everyone behind you said yes, this will surely set us free, and they all took flight behind you without once checking your wings.
Hitler was so powerful, he had turned the dial on every personality within his range, so that cheerful people turned melancholy, mad people turned criminal, melancholy people became suicidal, courageous people turned heroic, charming people became irritable and dark—all so that the maddest hatter at the front could turn himself into something mythic.
Lili saw this change in herself, saw her own optimism flicker, and she saw it in Simon. When she’d first known him, she’d thought he looked a little hungry around the eyes, but now he looked ravenous, like a stray dog. And once, he found her sitting alone in the corridor beside the hall table with its silver eagle carrying a clock in its beak, flanked by silver griffin candlesticks. She was wiping her nose and eyes. He asked what was wrong, and she said she thought she might be getting a cold. He said, “If I hold you a little, you might feel a little less rheumy.”
Still, people were not fundamentally changed, not changed at the core. Klari and Robert, for instance, happily stood in as her parents, treating her with as much love and respect as they did their son. She felt herself clinging to the Becks every bit as much as they clung to her.
Lili even got to learn the tallest of the family tales. One evening, after eating a good plate of salami and beets, which a colleague of Robert’s had given him, Lili asked about Klari’s younger days and about some of the
people in Klari’s family.
Klari said, “Let’s start with my cousin Sandor, who’s one of my favourites.” Klari took Lili into the parlour and brought out a bundle of letters and photographs tied with a red ribbon. Simon, who, after his beating, had two black eyes to go with his swollen, broken nose, sat with his favourite women.
“Who are those from?” Lili asked excitedly.
“They’re from Sandor Korda—Alexander Korda, the film producer,” Simon said.
Klari looked annoyed, as if her son had spoiled a surprise.
He said, “Mother was a little in love with Alexander—with Sanyi, as she used to call him.”
“Oh, be quiet,” Klari said, and swatted at her son. “And don’t be impertinent.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be,” he said, and appeared to fold up his limbs where he sat.
Simon seemed extra sensitive these days, and Klari saw it right away. “Go ahead, tell Lili more, then,” she said.
He sat up straighter. “They’re cousins, all of them—my mother, Aunt Hermina, Aunt Mathilde and Alexander Korda. My mother’s father, Maximillian, and Alexander Korda’s mother were brother and sister, except they all had an unfortunate falling out.” Simon looked directly at Lili. She couldn’t fathom what she was hearing. The movies were so otherworldly to her, so magical. She hadn’t thought that anyone made them.
“Alexander Korda founded London Films,” Simon went on. “He was really the father of the British film industry. He’s still there, and he still writes to Mother.”
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