Lili awoke to a tangle of sunlight on her face. The train was stopped in a station, and the winter sun shone through the bare branches of a solitary tree, which huddled over the station roof.
Lili was alone in the car. Beside her on the seat, nestled in a clean, red-checked handkerchief, were three eggs. She pulled her satchel out from under her seat and packed away the eggs. Though her heart still thumped from the vision of Klari and Robert in the shower, she smiled.
Lili stood and stretched, but when a conductor on the platform walked by her window, she crumpled to the floor. Her heart raced, but she shut her eyes and breathed as deeply and steadily as she could. If she lived to tell the tale, she’d say it began on her sixteenth birthday, when she ceased to be a passenger and became a stow-away, moving furtively from place to place with a secret in her heart, a lie, the biggest lie going. Lili didn’t want to look over her shoulder or flinch at every slammed door. She didn’t want to worry at each stop about who’d be getting on and who’d be getting off. She didn’t want to keep smiling blondly at the world.
Lili waited until the train rolled out of the station before resuming her seat, never finding out, as a result, what town they’d stopped in. But possibly it was Szolnok, Mary’s stop. She watched the rolling hills turn into Hungary’s Great Plain, flat and fertile, below what should have been called the Great Sky.
This was the plain traversed by the conquering hordes who formed the nation Lili now herself traversed, travelling in the opposite direction. Lili remembered them from Mrs. Wasserstein’s class, had memorized their names. Two and a half millennia had passed since the Scythians had passed over the Carpathian Plain to discover this wild and rich country. They were followed by the Celts, the Romans, the Avars, by Charlemagne, and then, leaving their Volga and their Urals far behind them, the tribes that were to give their name to the nation, the Magyars, under the great Arpad. Many others romped over the fields in the coming centuries on the way to the throne, the Turks, notably, and now the Germans. But these Germans bore gifts. Just as Lili’s land had been returned by the Third Reich to Hungary, so had the lands up ahead, the Transylvanian Alps—Transylvania—where Simon was being held and where he slept in the night near Dracula.
Of course, one would need a horde to storm across a plain and conquer a nation. It would be difficult to storm on your own. What was it like to be part of a horde? Lili wondered. You would need to forget you were someone’s son or husband or father, a son who rode a horse well and excelled at mathematics, a husband who once rescued his dog from a roaring river. In the greater interest of the horde, you would need to be united and fierce. You couldn’t be dithering about your daughter’s limp or your wife’s philandering. If the parts of a horde dithered, they would become horde pie at the hands of their victims. Maybe this was the great advantage of belonging to a horde. You got to be fierce and united. Unquestioning of your aim and ideal. Even if the aim and ideal made you hack down everything in your path. Even if they took you bounding over a cliff. It was safer to be part of a horde even if your life was at risk. There was little to worry about and nothing to question.
Lili felt like a girl without a homeland. Even her homeland was not a homeland, only a place of temporary refuge. The Inquisition had chased the Bandels to the southern border with Romania and the Becks to the centre of Hungary some five centuries before. And they were the lucky ones, the ones who had been chased and scattered rather than squashed where they were. So where to next? Homelands were a fleeting thing, even for the original homeowners sometimes.
The train remained almost empty. Maybe there was not much call for this particular destination, or maybe the inhabitants of the region could not afford to leave or return to it.
Lili swooned back in her seat again like someone in love with the countryside. Finally, she could feel the air grow thinner and the compartment cooler as the train crossed the Tisza, “the blond river,” they called it, because it carried sand downstream to be blown into dunes. She looked out to see the houses of the plain. They were like wagons that had come to rest after a very long caravan—after a nomad had said, “Let’s nail our home down for once and have someplace to come back to.”
The squat houses looked like mud huts with roofs made of straw, but without chimneys, so that the smoke from the hearths streamed through the roof cracks. As they approached villages, the houses began to look prettier and sturdier, with whitewashed stone walls and slate roofs. Many of the homes exhibited cob-work construction as if another species with other plans had touched down in the region.
The train stopped in Vadas, her stop. A woman approached her window even before the train had come to a halt. She wore colours that defied the drab season: a festive kerchief embroidered with a garland of crocuses and poppies. She had strings of fresh, bright peppers slung around her neck and was offering them for sale—or if not those, what about garlic? She had garlic bracelets coiling up one arm and, up the other, children’s knitted woollen mitts strung together as if they were charms. She wore the colours of Christmas—red, green and gold—and then some, adding to them the snowy lace at her neck, the summer flowers of her bonnet, the autumn walnut-tree leaves on her collar and the summer peppers themselves. Where on Earth had she got her hands on freshly grown peppers this time of year? Had she grown them in her window the way Lili’s mother had, tending to the little nursery as if they were babies?
Behind the woman was a tableau of a bygone era. No motor vehicles drubbed along the stone roads; they were travelled instead by mule cart and driver, the drivers dressed in handmade coats, boots and flannels. There wasn’t an electric wire evident, nor a water source more sophisticated than a town pump being worked by two teenage girls with ruddy faces filling wooden buckets. Out in the fields beyond the buildings were some primitive barns, their roofs sagging, but few animals apparent this late in the day, just a couple of goats and some sheep. Were there more telephones here than in Tolgy, Lili wondered, more numbers than seven?
Lili stepped down onto the winter platform and arranged her coat and bag. She checked to see if any of the travellers from Budapest had made it this far. She had not heard the yelping dog once. Where had it got off, and where was the man with the newspaper? While there were others who disembarked, Lili felt she’d travelled to the farthest remove from the city, as far as she’d been since she’d fled her town, and she felt strangely more at ease here than in Budapest. She felt a thrill, too, in the nearness of Simon, wherever he was.
The festive woman approached Lili with a smile and held out the mittens and rattled the string of peppers as if they were bells. She asked for whatever Lili could pay. Lili offered fifty pengos for the peppers, garlic and a little information. “Sixty pengos,” the woman said, “and I’ll give you the information free of charge, but no garlic.”
“Fifty-five,” Lili said, “but you have to throw in the information. And the garlic.”
“Sixty-five with the garlic.”
“Sixty.”
The woman paused. She looked healthy in these lean times and in the failing winter light, her cheeks plump and pink. What a cheerful wretchedness was here, thought Lili. If the woman didn’t manage to sell her peppers, she had them to eat that evening, and her children had the woollens to keep them warm.
“Sixty, then,” the woman said. She pulled a sheet of butcher paper from a backpack Lili hadn’t noticed and quickly wrapped up the peppers and garlic. Lili gave her the coins, and the woman eyed them as if they were jewels. Her lips moved as she counted. She pocketed the money in her apron.
“I need to get to the labour camp,” Lili said slowly, as if to a foreigner. “The place where they make munitions.”
The woman seemed to turn cold. At first, Lili thought she wouldn’t tell as promised. “It’s over there.” She pointed to the east of the station.
“Where?”
“You can walk through Szemzo’s fields back there and take the gravel path that winds to the left and then forks. Keep left. Up in
to the mountain on the left. Arpad. That’s its name, but it won’t be telling you that. Arpad. Five hours, maybe, in summer five hours.” Lili felt the darkness encroaching, felt the chill. The woman turned away. “Or,” she said over her shoulder.
“Or what?”
The woman stopped and turned. A shrewd look had come over her rosy face. “Ten pengos,” she said.
Lili wanted to be older than she was—with more authority—and bigger. She wanted to puff herself out. “All right. Ten more.”
The woman would not say anything until Lili had dug out the additional coin. “Just around the clump of trees,” she was pointing the same way, “on the way to Szemzo’s, there’s an army truck parked at the side of a large wooden place. They’ll take you, you can be sure.” The woman had a sly look now.
“An army truck?”
“Yup. Hungarians, don’t worry. Guards at the camp.” The woman winked.
Lili swallowed a cold lump of air. “I don’t know Szemzo’s.”
“Over there,” the woman said, pointing again, turning a corner with the crook of her finger. She pocketed the coin and hurried off.
Lili walked briskly around to where the woman had pointed, looking for Szemzo’s fields and wondering who he might be. She came to a line of trees between two corn fields but could not see an army truck or any building. She could see several mountains hulking in the distance. She walked the length of a field, still following the route she believed the woman had indicated. At the next line of trees she saw a path and took it.
The day was coming to the end of its light. Crows sat heavily in the branches above her head and called out like weathermen. Snow had begun to fall. It fell in clumps, which looked in the near-darkness like white blossoms. The last sight Lili could make out was a stable to her right—at the end of this field, most likely, but that would not have been the direction the woman had suggested. She walked along the path, feeling the stones beneath her pliant leather shoes. They were sensible, warm, flat shoes, but not boots, and now the snow drove into her face and she had to pull her scarf over her ears and around her mouth. The satisfied crows flew off to tell others.
The truck might have departed, and she could be stumbling through the cold, blindly searching for something that was not there. She could try to hold the path for the five hours the woman had suggested, but what if she made it to the gates of the labour camp after lights-out? She could be turned away, or worse. Daylight made more sense by foot, or by truck, if she were lucky enough to come upon it the next day. The barn looked like a good bet for the night, better than the fields and the rushing snow.
Lili groped around its walls, feeling for the door. The ground was hard, but then Lili’s feet encountered a soft patch. She couldn’t tell what it was. She couldn’t smell anything but the pummelling snow, fresh but fierce. She found a latch and it gave easily, and as she tugged on the door it squeaked and then groaned. Lili shot her hand to her mouth and froze, wondering if the farmer had heard.
She stepped into the building out of the snow and could smell the fresh dung. And then she could hear shuffling and clumping, some snorting and neighing, the sounds of horses. She was in a horse stable. She carefully closed the door, though it yelped again on its rusty hinges, and worked her way across the wall until she came to a stall and then a second one.
She chose the second one, opened the gate and stepped in carefully. The warmth was welcoming despite the dung. A horse nickered as Lili’s hand found its rump. She felt more secure now. Lili removed her gloves and patted the great beast beside her, finding the horse’s flank, its mane and neck. The animal swung its head around toward the girl. Lili wished she could see it, to check what colour it was, what sex, what age. She guessed from her cursory feel that it was fairly young, well fed and exercised, with a good oil sheen on its back. She groped its tight shoulder, its chest, its thigh. A good animal.
Lili walked up and down in the space beside the horse to determine how much room she had and whether the area had enough clean straw. She found a place in the corner away from the animal’s front legs and put down her satchel. The horse gently nickered and grunted. Lili was well-prepared. After feeling with her hands to confirm she had chosen the right place, she took out her fur sleeping bag, unfolded it halfway and settled herself down on it. She felt for an egg in the handkerchief, imagined the red checks of the cloth. She loosened the collar of her coat and leaned back against the planks of the corner. She was comfortable, surprisingly comfortable. It occurred to her she could do with less, and she contemplated leaving the sleeping bag unopened and clean for Simon, but she reasoned that if it was just straw beneath her, she could brush it off easily in the morning. Knowing Simon, Lili also predicted he would tell her he preferred the luxurious bag with her warm scent in it anyway, or maybe he just said those things. And so she ate her egg and tidied up after herself, sprinkling the eggshell in the horse’s feed. The horse whinnied quietly, approvingly, it seemed to her. She prepared to go to sleep, using her coat rolled up in the satchel as a pillow and the fur sleeping bag as her bed. She lay back, took a deep and happy breath, satisfied she had made it this far, confident she could complete her mission and make Simon as happy as she was now. She could hear pigeons cooing in the rafters, and something whooshed by her head, a bat, possibly, as it surveyed the barn for insects to eat. She heard the snow brushing against the outside of the wall but could not feel a draft. The stable was well constructed and the horses as happy as she was.
Lili drifted away in the folds of the little fur pallet she’d fashioned for herself. The dung-laden air took on a hint of espresso, she was certain. And Budapest. Gerbeaud. With its glass cases laden with fancy cakes of all kinds. Goodness, Gerbeaud slices and Dobos torte. Hadn’t Gerbeaud once been turned into a stable for the cavalry in the Great War? Did the dung still infuse the chocolate air, beckoning the hardened and bitter and dour wanderers of Vorosmarty Square to step into its sugared walls to gladden their day?
How nice it would be down here in the dung with the espresso lava flowing over her—and him—if she and Simon could wait it out in the straw stable among the driftwood horses and the whirling bats as the war and the world went by. How simple it would be and nice, with all that had happened to her in her short life and to him in his, to sink and dissolve into the compost of this far-flung stable.
The Pompeians might never have been remembered if the warm lava had not made moulds out of them, and out of their tables and chairs, their dogs, their vases, their wine goblets, statues and toilets. Warm rock. Warm Italian rock. What a forger of memory. Cooled. Cold Aryan rock. Is the forger of human memory better cold and hurled than warm and flowing?
Who knew, and who would mind in the million-year-old field, except for the lecturer for the sake of her notes and for the photographs in a scrapbook of resurrected human bones, cool and catalogued and curated?
She remembered just then that Tolgy hadn’t even a sign to identify the town and no one there anymore to tell anyone who happened by. The town council had been talking about erecting a marker, but never got around to it. So now, newcomers could simply arrive, occupy the houses, and call the town whatever they chose. Or no one could come for a million years, until the lecturer came with her students and formulated a hypothesis as to what this was and where all the ancient people had gone to, all of a sudden.
Lili sank into a rapture as the neighing of her companion in the stall beckoned her upward again and outward. She felt the horses around her, felt them breathing and snorting, pictured them thundering within their stable, waiting to burst out upon the fields all the way to the end of their flat Earth.
Twenty-Five
Szeged – September 9, 1944
SOMEONE WAS TAPPING on the door of the little house on Alma Street. In his cellar, Istvan waited for the visitor to go away. But the visitor’s tapping turned into an intruder’s banging, and the banging went on for several minutes. If Istvan waited long enough, the whole of Tower Town would descend on hi
m and Smetana.
So he rose from his cellar, heard the cat stir above him, pushed aside the planks and peered at the door. Anna Barta was gawking right at him through the window. He clapped a hand over his heart. She’d given it quite a workout.
“Let me in,” she mouthed, and she pointed at the door. “Let me in.”
He looked through the window beyond Anna and then rushed to open the door. She had brought a big pot of autumn cabbage, potato and pork. “Not kosher,” she said to him as she lifted it up from the front step with a grunt and carried it into the house. She had a small burlap sack with her, too, and from it she pulled six apples, two jars of apricot jam, a small loaf of bread and another book. “Kafka,” she said. “Your Kafka. The Castle. Maybe your castle, too.” And she laughed at her own wit.
“Probably,” Istvan said.
She wiped it across her chest to remove a smudge from the cover and showed the book to Istvan, but said right away, “Hide it—put it away—safe—quick.” He put the book down the front of his pants, behind the belt.
She looked back at the door. Then she pulled a big preserving jar from her purse and whispered, “Tea, with lemon and honey—lemon, can you believe it? If I had a mother to trade, it wouldn’t have been enough for this lemon. Maybe a mother plus a husband—when they still had a pulse. May God rest their blessed souls.”
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