Gratitude

by Joseph Kertes

  Istvan didn’t dare answer. He felt utterly responsible for what had happened and for Marta’s state. But what could he have done? Would the pill have gone down any better if Istvan had appreciated Dr. Benes more? Maybe.

  He was responsible for all of it. He should never have let her hide him, risk her life and the lives of others. He had the right to risk only a single life. He thought of other people like him, successfully hidden, possibly with children. What a burden they’d all suddenly become, the bane of the world. The scapegoat as bane. How clever the evil design was, the forethought of it. How delicious to watch the dark fruit ripen.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said. “I couldn’t be sorrier. I don’t know what to say.” And then he found something. “My Marta.” He noticed now, as they moved further into the light, how hurt she was. The sight was frightening. One eye was scarlet with stormy swelling around it, her sable hair was wild, her skirt torn, the white collar of her black blouse hanging by a thread.

  “My Marta.” He tried gently to kiss her eyelid, but she winced and backed off. He still held her softly. Smetana purred and encircled their ankles.

  “Please tell me what happened.”

  “Not here. Downstairs.”

  “But let me help clean you up first.” He swept her hair away from her forehead where some of it had stuck. “What did they do to you?”

  A sob rose in her body like a current. He kissed her cheek and neck and ear. He took her by the hand and tried to move her to the little bathroom.

  “You’ll tell me in the cellar.”

  “I can’t make it to the cellar,” she said. “I can’t climb down tonight. My legs.”

  She was limping. He inspected her legs and found the knee and upper thigh of one leg bruised. “I will fix you up as well as I can, you will tell me what happened, I’ll go back down to the cellar, and you’ll get a good sleep in your bed.”

  He was fighting back the rage. He needed to be the nurse now and she the patient. Marta was here and alive.

  They took off her clothes, and he washed her gingerly with a linen cloth as she stood in the tub. Her skin bristled with gooseflesh. She looked as if a bear had mauled her. Istvan got some clean towels and patted dry her wounds.

  It was then, once the faucet had been turned off, that she began to tell him what had happened. “They killed Dr. Benes. They took us to some kind of stone meat room and hanged him from a hook.” A scene of horror filled Istvan’s head. He couldn’t ask her to tell him more. He took her into his arms again and she trembled against him.

  He led her by the hand to her room, lit a candle and helped her on with a flannel nightgown. He got her into her bed, covered her up to the chin and lay beside her, careful not to disturb the bed. Smetana leapt up, rubbed his soft ribs against Istvan’s arm, the one the cat had scratched earlier, and poked through the blanket at Marta’s feet, as if he were tenderizing her. Finally he curled up there to sleep. Istvan tried to stay as calm as the cat.

  “I was afraid I would never see you again,” Istvan said. He held back tears himself, now, flowing behind his eyes, as he stared out at the candle.

  She spoke quietly. “They saw that I knew something—looked for a glint of something in my eyes—and they saw—they’re like blood-hounds—they saw that I must have known something and that Dr. Benes must have known, too. When I saw that they saw, I said I’d wondered where you’d got to myself, following your father’s hanging. Would anyone stay in a place where the authorities had hanged his father? I asked them, ‘Is there something else I should know?’ ‘Just this,’ they said. ‘Problem Number One: Istvan Beck is a Jew. Problem Number Two: An awful lot of food flows through this office on its way to—where?’ They looked at Dr. Benes, waiting for an answer. And then they turned on me.” She pointed to her black eye. Istvan wanted to kiss her there, but couldn’t find a spot, so he kissed her on the forehead. She flinched. “They told Dr. Benes, ‘Maybe you don’t follow instructions so well, either. You’re turning out to be a disappointment to us.’ And then they hoisted him up onto that meathook and stepped aside to watch me as I watched him. They hanged him up just to test me.” A frightening sound came from Marta’s throat as she paused. “The life fluttered out of his eyes. There was not a note of vengeance in them, no war, not even irony. And yet…They watched to see if I would flinch, if I was upset, until finally I said, ‘What are you waiting for? What are you hoping to find? What kind of experiment is this? Most people are going to be disturbed by such a demonstration—aren’t you? I’d be disturbed if you did this to a plant, let alone a human being.’ And that was when they began to beat me.” She paused. “That was when they raped me. Two of them did it. It didn’t take them long.” She was whimpering, and Istvan tried to hold her. She looked up at the ceiling. Her eyes were filled with horror. He gently took her hand. “They thought they had destroyed me. But they were the ones who were scared. How could they not be? How could you do such things and not know somewhere in your heart that this is madness?”

  Istvan lay back and looked at the dark ceiling. “Does everyone have such a place in his heart?” he asked.

  She raised a hand to her mouth and sobbed into it, waited to catch her breath. “Everyone has a place,” she said. “However small the place, it’s where the memory lives. Don’t you think so? Doesn’t everyone have at least one memory of a grandmother taking them into her lap and counting their fingers with them, or their mother stopping them before they pulled the wings off a butterfly?”

  “Maybe not everyone,” Istvan said. “Maybe only those who have known tenderness.”

  She looked at him in the candlelight. He placed his hand on her heart. “You have a place like that,” he said, “and it has filled your whole chest, this whole house. I’m so relieved and grateful and glad you are back with me, my Marta. For weeks now, especially the last few days, I didn’t know if I could hang on—if I could try even—if I wanted to hang on. But now I feel I can.”

  “Much as I love you,” she responded, “I know it is the circumstances talking, the time we live in—that much I know.”

  “Then you haven’t learned enough. You haven’t learned who I am, just as I hadn’t until now. It’s the terrible circumstances that have put us here, yes. But they’ve helped me to find out who you are. How could I have otherwise?” He managed to get his arm around her, and they rocked together so gently that the flame of the candle did not waver. And then she fell asleep.

  He blew out the candle and went downstairs again to his cellar and replaced the planks above him. He was shaken by what he’d seen and heard. He wished he could do something for Marta. He felt closer to her than ever, certain now that he could spend his life with her. They had never known love with abandon, love among the larks, only furtive love, yet it was as pure as any love could be.

  It was hours before he managed to get some sleep, and then minutes, it seemed, before someone banged hard on the door. “Frau Foldi,” Istvan heard them shouting, and they banged again.

  Istvan didn’t know what to do. He had to wait it through. Any other course of action was suicide, for both of them. Above him, he heard the cat jump down and then he heard Marta make her way to the door.

  The men spoke German. “Get dressed, get a few things. You’re coming with us.”

  “Where?”

  “Get dressed,” the man said again.

  Within two minutes she was gone.

  Fourteen

  Budapest – July 18, 1944

  ON A BALMY SUMMER DAY, Robert Beck left work early because he had no surgery and only one patient to look in on. Most often lately, Robert officially assisted in the surgery others conducted, though once the patient was under, he was frequently asked to take the lead. He decided to walk home and left his jacket at Sacred Heart. It dawned on him, halfway home, that his Swedish papers were in the jacket and he contemplated turning around. Moving about without papers these days was punishable sometimes by deportation, sometimes by execution on the spot. Paul had t
old his uncle about a whole family, including children and grandparents, who’d been shot merely because one of them couldn’t produce the required papers in the allotted time of one minute.

  But Robert had told his assistant he’d be back by the end of the day to check in on things, so he persuaded himself he’d be all right until then.

  He went straight home to Jokai Street. What he found was an empty apartment. The breakfast dishes were still on the table and the meal only half-eaten. He could see no disturbance whatever in the rooms, though some of Klari’s clothes were left out on the bed, and a pair of tan open-toed summer shoes lay on the floor, the ones she liked to wear on warm days. It was unlike her not to leave a note, at least. Similarly, there was little evidence to be found of his son’s or Lili’s whereabouts. Had they been called away somewhere?

  He was relieved to find Vera outside, but she didn’t want to speak to him. When he asked if she knew anything, she merely shook her head, but he could see she was distressed. “Are you all right?” he asked, placing a gentle hand on her shoulder. The question set off the woman’s tears. “Do you know what has happened to my family,” he asked, “where they’ve gone?”

  “They’ve cleared out half the building,” Vera said. “They took Mrs. Beck and young Mr. Beck and that nice girl of his.”

  Robert tried to steady his voice, but it quavered as he said, “Do you know who took them, exactly, and where?”

  Vera held a red-checked handkerchief up to her nose and spoke into it. “They were taken to the railway station, to Nyugati Station. Germans took them.”

  “Are you sure it was Nyugati?”

  She nodded and took a deep breath through the handkerchief. Robert laid a comforting hand on her shoulder again, but she shrugged free of it. She took a step back. The friendly woman had turned cold. Did she have him confused with the authorities? Had she hustled his family along in the courtyard before they were herded away? He understood she was afraid. He understood she was alone and could have been banished herself or shot for harbouring or even colluding with “cosmopolitans,” but as she turned her back to him after all these years, venom flashed through him. He forgot for a second that he was a physician. He wanted just then to snuff her out as she stood on the cobblestones with the privilege of her culture.

  She was just scared. Fear was enough. Why should she be braver than he’d been?

  He asked her, “Did they not have their papers?”

  Vera nodded yes, but she still wouldn’t face Robert. “Vera, I don’t want to play guessing games. Did my family not show their Swedish papers?”

  Finally, she turned toward him. She was crying. “Yes, sir, they showed their papers,” she said. “Mrs. Beck even said, ‘We’re Swedish.’ But the officer said, ‘Not today.’”

  “And that was a German officer?”

  Vera shook her head.

  “What was he?”

  “He was one of us.”

  “Us?”

  “He was a Hungarian.”

  Now Robert turned from her, ran upstairs and dialed Paul at the Swedish embassy. He told his nephew what had happened. Paul asked what station they had been taken to.

  “Nyugati. I’ll meet you there.”

  “No, don’t meet me there.”

  “It’s not safe where I am, either.”

  “So go back to the hospital.”

  “I can’t,” Robert said. “My family—”

  “Uncle Robert, don’t go to the station.”

  Robert was nodding but he said nothing. He found he was shaking. “I have to go,” he said. “Please, Paul, I—”

  “Uncle Robert, do you have your papers? Do the others?”

  “I don’t know. I—”

  Suddenly Paul was speaking slowly, as if to a child. “Because if you don’t, I’ll have to find Zoli. He’ll have the negatives.”

  “I don’t know,” Robert said. “Mine are at the hospital. I’m a fool.”

  “Of course you’re not a fool, Uncle Robert, but please go back to the hospital. I’ll get new papers made for all of you, just in case.” Paul knew his uncle would not do what he told him. He was restless, like his brother, like him, Paul, and he followed his own mind.

  Robert hung up the receiver. He ran outside and stopped again. He was alone. Suddenly, the place as familiar as air had turned noxious. He couldn’t see Vera anywhere now. He was panting, bracing himself against the cold brick of his building. He looked up at his own windows, at the stone balcony wrapped warmly around the corner like Buddha’s arms.

  How Robert loved this place, this building, this city, felt steady here. He knew others didn’t feel the same way, didn’t agree. Simon hadn’t had the same chances. The country had taken a turn. But how easy just to write off a home, he thought. Without another thought the young are ready to bury the Motherland, which sheltered us, suckled us, fattened us, educated us, enriched us, sang to us from its concert halls. Why be so hasty? Are other places better? Are people superior in other lands? Do we have to tear down the institutions founded on industry, good sense and good will, even if bad will preceded their establishment, or prevails today? Bad will comes and goes here. Bad will comes and goes everywhere. Let’s outwait the bad, let good sense prevail.

  They may take us away today, but we can outlast them. Our diminished numbers will rise again. It is called flux; it is called mood; it is called the temper of our times. And all moods change, all tempers subside. History is patient. Nature is patient. She has seen it all, and she’ll see it all again. Let’s wait patiently by her side.

  Tear down the palaces, storm the Bastille. Off with their heads. I have seen marble generals awaiting new heads, and palaces can make very nice schools and museums. Let it all come around again. It will all come around. But spare the Motherland, my son. See it for what it has been and can become, not just for what it is in a bad hour. Our ties to this country can withstand single assaults, regardless of how deplorable. Great Britain introduced slavery, and the United States adopted it freely and enthusiastically. Stalin’s Soviet Union watched as millions of his Ukrainians died of starvation in the Holodomor, the Grand Famine, because their own wheat had been taken from their fields, their own bread from their tables. Yet these are the countries now taking on Hitler.

  Hungary is as good a place as any, better than most. Can you blame an apricot tree or a lake for being situated here, for standing within the boundaries we’ve drawn around them, for bearing the names we’ve given them: fa, to; Baum, See; arbre, lac; tree, lake? Take what we have—eat the fruit, swim in the lake—it is our lake you’re swimming in, where your cousins swam, where your grandparents had a summer home—it is our fruit you’re eating, rolled with our walnuts in a palacsinta and served up at our Gerbeaud with cream and espresso.

  Robert struggled to the corner of Jokai Street and rushed a half-block up, then the same half-block back. He couldn’t get a cab to Nyugati Station, but he managed to get aboard the subway on Andrassy, and then he took a bus.

  He couldn’t think through what he was doing. He just kept remembering his own parents and the world he grew up in, how they’d urged him toward success. He thought of his brother, Heinrich, who’d pushed Robert into medical research and surgery. He had told Robert he was far too brilliant just to sit in an office and prescribe headache pills. And Robert had believed him and had taken his advice. Yet it was not in his nature to dazzle the world. His brother would have done what Robert was now doing. Heinrich would have been surprised and proud to see Robert jumping in this way.

  When Robert disembarked, he could not recognize his beloved Nyugati Station. What awaited him were not passenger cars but cargo cars, windowless and unadorned. And they were not passengers assembled there but a frightened herd being pushed by soldiers up ramps and through the railway-car doors. Robert felt he couldn’t breathe as he hunted for his family. “Klari,” he was thinking, “Klari.” And the sound rose to his lips. “Klari,” he said, and the people around him could hear.

/>   And then he saw the blond head of hair bobbing on the dark sea. It was Lili’s head, surely, not far away, in front of Car 17. “Lili,” he said, and then shouted. “Lili!”

  She turned to see him, raised a hand to her mouth, got Simon’s attention, then Klari’s. Klari cried out when she saw her husband. Why had he come? What was the matter with him? Was he insane? Had he been dragged along, too? She was shaking her head, using her hand to shoo him away. Get away. Get away.

  He began pushing to get through. He didn’t know what he was going to do, but he felt he had to be here with Klari. No one knew what to make of him, but they let him pass. No one was pressing to get ahead. Of the hundreds of people assembled on the platform, everyone was waiting to be told to get aboard. Robert could smell fear around him, like perfume turning bad. He could see it in people’s eyes. He knew the look from his patients.

  In a moment, he was by his wife’s side. “You’re a fool,” she whispered to him. “Where do you think we’re going?” she asked. He gripped her hand. The fool, she kept thinking, but she felt a little better now, despite herself. “Look at these trains,” she said, whispering.

  “Why don’t you shut the hell up?” a small woman beside them said too loudly. “Give me some room here. Don’t crowd me.”

  “Shh,” Klari told her.

  “Just shut the hell up, especially you lot,” she said, pointing to Klari and Robert.

  Simon said, “What’s it to you?”

  “I’m sick of you, all of you. Just shut the hell up.”

  Robert said, surprisingly gently, “Keep your voice down, or you won’t be going much farther. I don’t think our captors care for troublemakers.”

  She shot him a murderous look. The woman then shoved aside another woman and her child in order to stand farther away.