Gratitude

by Joseph Kertes

  “This huge pot?”

  “Yes, it’s wonderful soup. Look!” Lili reached into the steaming pot for the wooden spoon and offered Rozsi some to taste.

  “Oh, dear Lord,” she said, licking her lips, forgetting herself briefly, then covering her mouth. “We’ll try,” she said.

  The pot was heavier than even Lili had thought. It would be a feat to carry it back the five blocks to the safe house, particularly without arousing suspicion. But then it wasn’t only Jews who were hungry these days.

  “Maybe we should eat some,” Rozsi said, grunting as they transferred the pot to the table. “We’ll carry our dinner inside of us.”

  “We can make it back with the whole pot,” Lili said.

  They managed to get the soup all the way to the Ervin Szabo Library, where they set the pot down on the stone steps and paused to catch their breath. It was especially hot now. Lili’s back was drenched.

  “No one saw us,” Rozsi said.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “We’d be dead by now, wouldn’t we?”

  “Maybe not dead, but well on our way to it, I’m sure,” Lili said.

  “My shoulders are coming out of their sockets,” Rozsi said as she rubbed them.

  “I think I can manage the rest of the way now,” Lili said.

  Rozsi looked hurt. “Don’t be ridiculous. I’ve held up until now. I’ll survive another two blocks. If I don’t, you’ll never take me out with you again, and it’ll be me and the furniture and the nuns with their vow of silence.”

  They saw a man in uniform a couple of blocks behind them, hurrying in their direction. He hadn’t passed Maria Street yet, so if they rushed they could elude him.

  The women hopped to their feet, lifted their pot, and marched northwest on Ulloi Street even more briskly than before, the soup sloshing around in the pot. As they approached the last leg of the journey, Rozsi glanced behind her. The uniformed man had passed the steps of the library and turned, gaining on them.

  They were almost there. They were almost back at their building, soup and all, but they could live without the soup if they had to. They could heave it at their assailant.

  The thought shot through Rozsi’s mind like a bullet: “I want to see Zoli again, Lili,” she blurted out. “I live for him. I need to see him again.” Rozsi’s cheeks glistened with tears.

  Lili smiled in response. And then the man was upon them. They’d arrived at Number 2, the building Wallenberg had annexed for Sweden, but they still stood on the sidewalk in Hungary. It was like a child’s fierce game of hide-and-seek, and they were not home free just yet.

  They heard his voice as they turned, still gripping the great pot. “I have an envelope for Dr. Robert Beck,” the man said. He was a mailman.

  “An envelope?” both women said simultaneously, breathlessly. They set down the pot and broke into wild laughter.

  When they finished, the mailman, smiling now himself, said, “Yes, his neighbour on Jokai Street said I could find him here. It’s his last paycheque.”

  “His paycheque?” This one was even better. Now Rozsi and Lili were doubled over and howling.

  “Do you need help getting that inside?”

  “I don’t think so,” Rozsi said, “but we’ll give you some, if you’re hungry.”

  “No, thank you, ma’am,” he said soberly and handed over the envelope. “Have a good day.” The man moved along in the direction of Kalvin Square.

  Seventeen

  Budapest – August 9, 1944

  PAUL MET WITH RAOUL WALLENBERG in his office at the end of an exasperating day. At Nyugati Station that morning, Wallenberg and his team had managed to liberate one hundred and thirty newly minted Swedes from the transports, only to have them apprehended once again by the Arrow Cross, taken to a nearby brickyard and shot. The Arrow Cross didn’t like the Germans to take their Jews, didn’t accept the notion of Swedes with Hungarian names, and liked to carry out their own killings.

  That same day, an unscheduled deportation by the Nazis occurred on the other side of town, the east side, and the Swedes and their lieutenants couldn’t act quickly enough to save anyone.

  Paul and Raoul were talking excitedly in English. “So what do you propose?” the Swede asked.

  “Our agents need to communicate better with one another and with us. They’re running amok. We need better intelligence, coordinated intelligence.”

  Wallenberg was about to answer but didn’t. Paul thought for a moment that he’d missed something and moved in closer. Wallenberg looked awkwardly at his companion and the two found themselves blushing.

  After too long a pause, Wallenberg said, “No, we need to visit Eichmann.”

  “Visit him?” Paul said. “Adolf Eichmann?”

  “We can cut a special deal with him. The Germans need deals here. Hungarian Jews are still a powerful economic force.”

  “Not anymore,” Paul said.

  “They are—you are. Believe me.”

  Paul looked into Wallenberg’s walnut-brown eyes. They were quiet eyes, calming.

  “You’ve actually gone mad,” Paul said.

  “Madder than someone standing in front of a transport train to stop it—not to mention parking my car across the tracks?”

  “They needed to see me.”

  “What, the hat and cape weren’t loud enough?”

  “Mad like that, yes. The suit and cape were the maddest part.”

  The Swede walked to the window. “Eichmann can help us, you see,” he said. “He is mad. But he needs things. War machinery, slave labour.”

  Someone knocked at the door. Wallenberg was distracted. He was standing at the window, looking out into the rainy night. He looked down Gellert Hill toward the Danube. He could see someone in the wet light across Minerva Street, but whoever it was saw him, too, and ducked into a dark alleyway.

  Paul opened the door. The man in the hallway wore a blue fedora and his ears were blazing red. Though the man was Hungarian, he said in German, for the benefit of Wallenberg, “Sir, there’s a pregnant woman downstairs.”

  “Yes?” Paul said.

  “She’s going to de-pregnate herself at any moment if the pool at her feet is any indication.”

  “A Jew?” asked Paul.

  “Yes, a Jew. No hospital will take her.”

  Wallenberg turned from the window. “Bring her up,” said the Swede.

  “Up? Bring her up where?” the man asked. The redness from his ears spread to his cheeks like electric bulbs. He took off his blue fedora and combed back his hair with his fingers.

  “Yes, up. Bring her to my bedroom.” He turned to Paul and switched to English. “Let’s get Dr. Molnar up here again. He’s on the night shift downstairs.”

  The man replaced his hat and said, “I’ll prepare your bed, sir.”

  The woman said her name was Ilonka Nemet. She could barely make it up the stairs on her own, so Dr. Molnar and a strong woman who’d been helping with the schutz-passes all but carried the bursting woman up to Raoul’s bedroom.

  Ilonka Nemet saw Wallenberg and, attempting to be mannerly, tried to say something but began to pant instead. She was pale and perspiring. The group, including the messenger in the blue hat, got her onto Wallenberg’s bed.

  “The room is too crowded,” the doctor said, and Wallenberg and Paul awkwardly shuffled out. The man with the blue hat, who’d once been a printer, left, too, but continued all the way down to the first floor.

  Back in Wallenberg’s office, Paul and the Swede listened to the rain pattering against the window and didn’t talk. They seemed to be expecting another cue, and they didn’t have to wait long.

  They heard a wail above their heads, followed by moans. They both looked up at the ceiling. To the unwitting ear, Ilonka Nemet might have sounded as though she were alternating between pleasure and intense pain.

  Wallenberg whispered, “I hope we’ve made ourselves useful.”

  Paul nodded.

  “Shouldn’t yo
u call it a night?” Wallenberg asked.

  Paul shook his head. “I’ll wait to see how she makes out.” Paul had his own room in a Swedish building adjoining this one.

  Raoul and Paul wanted to talk some more but found themselves drawn to the drama of the primal sounds, muffled by the ceiling. The woman cursed and wailed again, a wild sound to add to the rainy night.

  And then the noise stopped. Just the rain persisted. Both men looked at the ceiling, waited for the cry of a baby and, when it didn’t come, headed upstairs.

  Dr. Molnar greeted the men as they arrived. The doctor was wiping his bloody hands in a towel. “Hope you don’t mind,” he said. “We raided your linen closet.”

  The Swede shrugged his shoulders. “What about the baby, and the mama?”

  “She’s fine,” the doctor said. “They both are. A little girl.”

  “Thank you,” Paul said.

  “Why would you thank me?” the doctor asked. “This is what I do.”

  Three women were now attending to Ilonka Nemet, one from the embassy, the woman who had been working on the schutz-passes and another Jewish woman from the Swedish compound. They cleaned and freshened the bed as Ilonka and her baby lay in the middle of it. They worked with great skill, gently turning mother and child this way and that, cleaning and tidying them up, too, as if they were part of the bedding.

  Finally everyone withdrew, except for Wallenberg, Paul, mother and child.

  The men stood on either side of the bed. The Swede said, “She’s very pretty.”

  Ilonka raised her head to look and then spat at the child. Paul burst out laughing.

  Wallenberg said, “Have you picked out a name for the little girl?”

  At first Ilonka didn’t answer. Wallenberg wondered if she’d understood his German. He glanced at Paul, who put the question in Hungarian.

  “Yes,” the woman said in German, “but I don’t know what it is.”

  Paul looked at the woman and asked the question again in Hungarian. She simply smiled.

  “Are you the Sphinx?” he asked.

  She shook her head and smiled again. The woman’s dark eyes, like Greek olives, glowed out of the half-darkness. She looked tired but very alive.

  She turned to Wallenberg and asked, “What is your mother’s name? I want to give my daughter your mother’s name.”

  Wallenberg took Ilonka’s warm hand. The child murmured. “She’s a good girl,” Wallenberg said. “I can tell already.”

  Ilonka nodded.

  He took the baby’s clutchy fingers. “But I won’t mention any of her other attributes,” he said. “I don’t want the spit to start flying again.”

  Ilonka smiled.

  “My mother’s name is Maj,” Wallenberg said.

  “Maj Nemet,” the woman repeated at her little girl’s head. The baby had curly black hair. “Maj.”

  The men stood tall beside the bed.

  “Stay with me,” Ilonka said. Her voice was tired.

  “Where is your husband?” Wallenberg asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Was he taken?”

  She was crying. “I don’t know.”

  “I’ll stay.”

  “Just a short while.”

  “No, a long while,” Wallenberg said. “I have nowhere to go. This is my bedroom.”

  Ilonka laughed, a good throaty laugh she drew up from her belly. “Aah,” she said, remembering her recent pain, and she pressed her hand down on her abdomen. She repeated the name of the child, Maj Nemet, and drew the baby up to her breast, but the little girl slept on.

  It was an impressive bed, with the three golden crowns of Sweden at its head bestowing a benediction on its occupants.

  “I’ll go,” Paul said in English.

  “Where will you go?” Wallenberg wanted to know.

  “To my room.”

  “You’ll have to go out to the street to get around to your room. It’s not a good idea at 2 A.M. I know we’ve been reckless, but let’s not be reckless when we don’t need to. You heard the lady, stay.”

  “Where?”

  “The bed’s big enough for a family of six—eight during wartime. Stay. We’ll have breakfast together.”

  The baby was suckling, now, with its eyes closed. Ilonka, too, had closed her eyes and seemed to be sleeping.

  Paul marvelled at people’s ability to improvise and adapt. He marvelled at the world’s ability to reconfigure itself, like magic, taking on whatever shape it needed to in order to preserve life. Without being fully conscious of the thought, he sensed that he stood near the centre of the universe.

  Paul took off his shoes, laid them neatly at the foot of the bed and made himself comfortable on one side of Ilonka and Maj. Wallenberg watched before removing his own jacket and shoes and carrying them to the closet. He then made himself comfortable on the other side of the woman and her baby. Soon, everyone was asleep.

  Eighteen

  Szeged – August 25, 1944

  WATER NO LONGER POURED from the tap. There was no wood for the stove. Istvan could collect rainwater in a pan, but only at night when no one would notice. He’d eaten the dozen tomatoes from the garden ten days before, shared three green ones with Smetana. He’d eaten the grass with Smetana, every blade, but he didn’t want to touch the blooms of the lush angelica in case they were poisonous. Smetana must have caught a mouse. The blood was still around his mouth, and he gloated unremittingly, purring his head off. And then Smetana had brought him a mouse, too, and deposited it on his threshold as an offering to him. Istvan took the little beast and cleaned it and roasted it over a tiny fire—a toy fire, it looked like—out back in the middle of the night.

  Smetana knew, now, not to come home during the day, because Istvan could not let him in. The cat was probably arousing enough suspicion as it was, wandering the precincts, scrapping with the surviving stray cats who’d weathered these years when the humans hardly shared.

  Istvan told Smetana one evening about another cat, named Tiresius, who lived in St. Agota Old Age Home, around the corner from his dental office. He was a special cat, a tuxedo cat, all black with an elegant white chest and paws, like spats. But what set him apart was his ability to foretell the demise of the residents at St. Agota. “The nuns at first thought Tiresias was the devil,” Istvan said, as he ran his hand through Smetana’s belly fur. “But Tiresias was too angelic to be the devil. You see, he performed a service for the elderly. He would make the final voyage as warm and comfortable as could be. If the patient’s door was closed, he would call out to the nuns to let him in, and then he would wind his warm body around the old person’s cold feet. If they hacked with a cough, he would stretch himself out by their side, soothing them with his soft purr, until the rumble in their chests softened, too, and their last breaths were calm ones. On one occasion, when old Mr. Farkas appeared to be going, Tiresias sat by his daughter’s side instead in the common room, never leaving her. The nuns opened Mr. Farkas’s door and beckoned to the cat, but Tiresias held his post. They believed his distinguished career was at an end. He had foretold the passing of some fifty people just hours before their passing and had not slipped up a single time. They were disappointed with him and turned their attention elsewhere. When they returned, Mr. Farkas sat crying by his daughter’s side in the common room. She had passed away, with Tiresias sitting in her lap.”

  Smetana purred now, too, and curled himself up in Istvan’s lap. In a second, Smetana was asleep. “Tiresias himself never died,” Istvan whispered, “or at least no one saw him, confirming his status as a divine messenger. He simply walked out the front door of St. Agota one morning and never came back.”

  Smetana woke up and looked at Istvan, his thorny paws making themselves known to his lap. He purred again. “Of course, you are not Tiresias reincarnated, are you, Smetana? You predict continuing life, not death—or is this Tiresias’s next task?”

  The time had come for Istvan to get out, too, at night. He’d managed a couple of
times, just to steal pears and apples from nearby trees. Could the authorities be watching the house, he asked himself, after they’d murdered his Marta or sent her away with the others? His heart pounded in his head. He pressed the ache in from his temples, tight as a vise. And then he took a deep breath and held it within him. The southern Hungarian air was still free for the taking and abundant and smelled the same to everyone.

  His Marta had sacrificed herself with a look that said, “I am hiding something; I do have someone; I have swallowed the canary.” And in sacrificing herself, she drew the eyes away from the little house in the old paprika district. No one came around anymore. No one counted the tomatoes on the vine. They’d cut off the water, crossed the place off some list—one of many, no doubt. And now he could roam about in the dark. The time had come to travel farther afield, become Man the Forager. Better to die from a sudden blow than from endless starvation. He could no longer die quickly. He’d been doing it steadily and diligently for months. Better the blow—better the risk—the only thing at stake was what remained of his life. Life without Marta.

  He’d abandoned the library of his mind, the books he’d been carrying around with him in his small dark circle, the individual volumes, the individual chapters he’d been mentally thumbing through, and the verses he recollected, especially the lines of his friend Miklos, the fictional characters Istvan had gathered around his fire, the characters he loved as well as the people he loved, some better. The wandering Odysseus sat there glowing, recalling the lure of the Sirens, the horror of the Cyclops—had Istvan become Penelope and Marta the unwilling and unwitting adventurer, Smetana their Telemachus? Or had he been the dupe, Docteur Bovary, turning away as Emma cast her eye abroad, now to Rodolphe, now to Léon, the solicitor, with “the ruins of a poet” in his heart? Or had he become the madwoman, howling down from the attic as Rochester courted Jane Eyre, except Istvan howled up through the floorboards—surely not as a spouse, surely not that secret, a secret inconceivable, no, just a lover, enough that he should be a lover, the howler with the prodigious profile calling up from the hole.