Istvan shook his head and smiled with delight.
Smetana was purring militantly and weaving himself around the visitor’s ankles. Anna lifted the pot lid, poked around with a finger inside, pulled out a hunk of pork bone and gristle, found a plate to put it on, and set it on the floor for the cat.
She sucked her finger clean, said to Istvan, “Now you sit down, too,” and used the same finger to poke him in the chest. She set out a new plate for him, found a serving spoon and ladled out an ample portion of the stew. He sat on the floor out of sight of the window and ate as ravenously as Smetana. Anna got the hint, looked out the window and slid down to the floor herself. All one could hear was chomping and smacking. Anna watched them both, but then Istvan thought she was watching him too closely. She took hold of his ear and said, “You have a rash.” She was breathing down his collar now, then poking. “It goes all the way down here. What is it?”
“Who knows,” he said, with his mouth half full. “Scurvy, for all I know.”
“Drink the tea,” she said. She ran to get a glass. “Right away.” While she was on her feet, she said, “I have a skin cream,” and set to finding it in her big black leather purse. “It’s something a friend cooks up. It’s the best cream I’ve ever seen. I covered my husband’s whole back and front with it once when he had a burn in his factory. In two weeks, he was clean as a baby—and hairless as a baby’s ass.”
She was a walking hospital. She didn’t know which good medicine to administer first: nourishment for his stomach, drink for his ailment, balm for his rash, a story for his starved mind, company for his lonely heart.
“You’re an angel,” he said, as she slathered cream down his neck and behind his shirt.
“Hardly,” she said.
“There aren’t many angels in this time.”
“Achhh.” She waved him off.
“Trust me,” he said again, “you are an angel.”
“As long as you’re not the devil, we’ll be just fine,” she said.
“How do you know I’m not the devil?”
She pointed to her nose. “I suss these things out, and I’m never wrong.” She was shaking her head. “No, you’re just a dentist, a lonely dentist. In the wrong time. The wrong place.” She took a deep breath. “And where is your poor Marta, the poor dear?” She sniffled, and he was surprised to see she was crying. “I hope she comes back to us,” Anna said, “to her home. She’s not even a Jew, and they took her.” Anna sighed.
Istvan paused. He couldn’t take another bite, so Anna grabbed his spoon from him and began force-feeding him. “Please,” he said through a full mouth, “I’ll have some later. I’ll be so happy to know it’s here for later.”
“Oh, it’ll be here,” she said, “and I’ll bring you some more, too.”
Anna went to tidy up. She finished the last scraps from his plate herself. She turned on the faucet, but it was dry. “I stole a pot full of water last night from a neighbourhood well,” Istvan said. “I keep it covered with a lid under the sink.” He was pointing.
“Let me give a sip to the cat.” She looked for a saucer. “I’ll bring you more on my next visit.”
“You can’t come back here,” he said. “You’re endangering your own life.”
“What’s to endanger? I’ve lived a life. You still have some left in you.” She crossed herself. “Let’s hope and pray.”
She washed his dish, and she waited for him to finish his tea before taking the glass, too. He felt the honeyed liquid flowing to his very extremities, irrigating the crumbling channels of his body.
He wanted desperately to get to the Kafka, but what was a book, he asked himself, beside real human company? There would be plenty of time for the book. “Is there news of the world out there, the war?”
She thought he meant Marta. “I check for you every day. They post the names of the returnees at the post office. No. Not yet.”
“Anything else?”
“Yes, Eichmann is still in Budapest. The German army’s still there. They’re clearing out Hungary the way they cleared out Prague and Poland, too. On the transports. I don’t know it for sure, one hundred percent—it’s not the stuff you see in the papers, exactly—but Mr. Cermak told me he heard it from a reliable source. And it’s in the coffee houses, so he’s not the only one who says so. I heard they’ve taken a half-million. I heard it from Denes Cermak, the newsman, but off the record, of course. He has his sources. They moved from the outside in, clearing the countryside first—every last man, woman and child of Jewish blood—even old crows like me.” She brought her hands together like a vise. “And now they’ve moved in on the capital—they’re clearing out the big city, too.”
“Jesus,” Istvan said.
“They’d take him too,” she said. “Do you have many people there still? Family?”
“Yes. Maybe. My brother and sister, cousins, uncles, aunts.”
Her vise hands became praying ones and she tapped her lips with them as she looked ceilingward.
“But the Russians are not lying down, either,” she said. “I heard they’ve taken heavy losses, but losses don’t mean much to Josef Stalin. He has more losses to give. They’re driving toward Hungary and Poland and here. They’re not far off now. It’s only a matter of time. And I hear they’re twice as fierce as the Germans, what’s left of them.”
“What’s left of them?” Istvan asked.
“Oh, yes. They’re not on easy street anymore. They’re taking losses, too, and they’re not as content about it.”
“Content—ha.”
“I want to see the place you’ve been living, you poor dear. I want to see that hole in the floor.” She pointed. The planks were still laid to the side.
A chill rode down Istvan’s spine. No one other than Marta had ever seen his hiding place. He felt an element of his security slip away. Who else might soon know, even if the information were shared with the best of intentions? Anna liked the coffee houses, too, and she liked to tell stories.
His hesitation registered on her. “You won’t tell anyone, will you?”
She put her hand on her heart. “Who would I tell?”
“Anyone.”
“Do you think I brought you a pot of meat to fatten you up for slaughter, you and your little cat?”
“I don’t think you did, but you can understand.”
“It’s too late for that, to tell you the truth. I already know. Seeing it is just dressing. To me, if it’s a piss-hole or a shit-hole it hardly makes a difference.” So she had been shaping the story in her mind. She was a lovely, kind, innocent old blabbermouth. “You were at my place some time ago. I got the juice out of your life story then. You’d be dead by now if I’d run off at the mouth.”
“That’s true,” he said. She looked hurt. “I’m sorry.” She nodded her forgiveness. “I’m so sorry.”
“I never lived in a hole. I can imagine what it does to people. We’re not moles or badgets.” She pointed to her temple. “I’m amazed we’re still chatting, to tell you the truth. You’ve got a tough, stone head and a good beater. You Jews are tough bastards, I swear.” She crossed herself. “The ones who keep making it through the ages. You’re tough bastards and bitches, the lot of you.”
He was meant to feel flattered. Anna was beaming. “Well,” he said, “we’re being put to the test now, aren’t we.”
“You are,” she said quietly, sadly.
“And tough as I am, where would I be without Marta? And you.”
“Thank you, dear,” she said.
“You’re thanking me? Come, good lady, let me show you my lair.”
She grunted as he helped her down the wooden ladder to his dark cellar. He came up again to fetch the cat, who was happy to accompany them. He’d spent surprisingly little time down here with Istvan.
Anna was aghast at the pallet on the floor, the dusty blanket, the bucket in the corner, the mustiness, the dankness. She crossed herself yet again. “Oh, my Lord. Is this any way to tre
at a living thing—any living thing?”
“I don’t think I’m classified as a living thing,” Istvan said.
“Come, stay with me,” she said. “You’ll be safe, I swear. No one will suspect me of monkey business. I’m too old and foolish.”
“Foolish you’re not,” he said, “and not even terribly old.”
“You are a dear,” she said. “Worth saving. But you have to move to my place, I insist.”
“I wouldn’t dare. It’s not possible.” He had to wait for Marta to return.
Anna looked up out of the hole. They heard the distant buzz of an engine, a motorcycle. The sound intensified. It was approaching. Not many motorcycles came to Tower Town.
“Stay down,” Istvan said, “and absolutely quiet.” Anna crouched. “Not a sound.”
He dashed up the ladder with the agility of a trapeze artist to replace the planks. As he did so, the motorcycle stopped right outside the house. Istvan crept back down and put a hand on Anna’s mouth to remind her. Where was the cat? He couldn’t feel Smetana with them, and then the soft weaving through his ankles reassured him. He could feel the animal purr, his little engine running while the big one roared above them.
Someone slapped the door rather than knocked. Then a voice, not speaking to the door, but to someone else. Then a reply. Two men speaking German. They slapped the door again and said something, but the motorcycle made it impossible to understand.
Then the engine was switched off. Istvan gripped Anna’s hand in the dark. She was trembling. The quiet was more menacing than the roar of the motorcycle. There was some fidgeting at the door, and Istvan believed finally that his hour had come. Would they look through the window? Would they see the pot and dishes—the bowl on the floor? The wait was over. And this unfortunate woman had been caught with him.
He wondered about his Marta, home at last when this was all over, tired, hurt but not beaten. She would find three dead creatures in her small house, stiff and decaying, the stink long vanished, the ghosts flown, ready for burial in a single small plot in the back among the weeds and angelica. Home at last, his Marta, her Odysseus to his Penelope, home to her little place with the tiny garden and the prodigious memory, the curled-up ghosts hovering above the diminutive house like a Chagall, the suitors awaiting her, ready in a moment to start anew, unfettered, with his raven-haired beauty.
The fidgeting at the door ceased. Surely these men were capable of blowing off the lock. What were they waiting for? The motorcycle started up again. Istvan and Anna could smell the diesel exhaust seeping in from above. The men said something more in German and then one of them chuckled. The machine growled once and then bellowed as it left the house, transforming itself into a drone and then a buzz before vanishing. The silence burned.
A minute passed. Two. “Let’s get up,” Anna whispered. She grunted as she prepared to stand.
“No.” Istvan held her down forcefully. “We have to stay where we are.” They thought they heard a sound—they froze—but it might have been the cat. “One of them might have stayed.” She could barely hear him. He put his lips to her ear. “They might suspect something, and one of them might have stayed behind. He might be watching the house.”
“Why?” she whispered.
“He might be waiting for us to come out, or for someone to come in.”
The two of them listened. Smetana made himself comfortable in Anna’s generous lap. “We can’t talk anymore,” Istvan said, barely audibly. “Let’s not take a chance. You’ll spend the night.”
He urged her back on his pallet. She wasn’t sure what he meant at first. He gave her shoulder a firm push, but she resisted. Then she relented and eased back, clutching the cat against her bosom.
They lay together until their breathing was steady. He felt grateful, suddenly, to have been given a reason to extend Anna’s visit. She couldn’t leave now, no matter what. She was another human being from the world outside, with the world’s fragrance and with its provisions. He was someone to care for when no one else needed or appreciated her efforts. Soon her warm shoulder and arm rested against his taut and bony one. The touch unlocked other times in their lives, better ones. He took her hand in his. Anna made a sound that he thought, at first, came from the cat, but it was closer to the burbling of a pigeon than a purr. He was feeling better than he had in weeks, and he was drifting. Come back to me, Marta, if you can. Come back to me is all I ask. Forgive me for the anguish I’ve caused and come back.
He awoke to her laughing and to the thorny cat using his chest as a pad to launch himself to the darkest corner of the room. “Look at these bars of light,” she was saying. They’d spent the whole night together.
“Sshhh,” he said.
“Look at them,” she whispered.
The celestial beams were making their journey across the two of them on the floor, crossing both of them out, one each. She put her hand under the light to study it more closely and giggled again as quietly as she could. He took the hand and kissed it. She giggled again. “Thank you,” she whispered.
She sat up. “I need to go to the toilet.”
He pointed to the bucket in the corner.
“Not for me,” she said. “What am I going to sit on and wipe myself with, my dress?”
“The toilet upstairs has no running water, and you can’t go up there anyway.”
“What—forever?”
“No, just for now.”
“And what if they find me? What then? I’ll say I was scavenging for food and picked the lock. Do you think I’m the first who’s done that since the war started? I’ll make like a lunatic. They want nothing from me, Dr. Beck, believe me. They wouldn’t even waste a bullet. I’m going up to piss. Then I’m going to use some of your water to flush. Don’t worry, I’ll bring you more.”
So she did, taking care to replace the planks after she’d climbed out. He waited, listened attentively. She did her business and then she crossed the floor. She was making herself far too busy up there.
A minute later, she said to him, not whispering, “It’s safe, come up.” She’d lifted a plank and was talking into the hole.
He gathered up Smetana and climbed the ladder. He stole to the window, peered out in every direction until he saw something fluttering from his doorknob, a white tag. It had been tied to the door. “Look,” he said.
She joined him at the window. “What is it?” She stood at the window in full view of the world. “It’s a piece of cardboard. White. It has something written on it.”
She opened the door, took the tag off the knob and read, “Verlassenen Besitz”—“Abandoned Property.” And now he could laugh, too, with some relish.
Twenty-Six
Transylvania – December 8, 1944
LILI HEARD A CRACKING SOUND, which echoed through the fields against the mountains. A second shot and she was fully awake. The horses were bucking furiously. Their neighing had turned into shrieks. Lili opened her eyes to see the whites of her companion’s eyes in the stall and to see him rear against the wooden constraints. He was a stallion. The horses had spooked the pigeons, who shot into the air and flapped up against the rafters—up but not out, frantically trying to comprehend the new, low, unyielding sky. Lili jumped to her feet, too, and yanked up her sleeping bag to protect it. All the horses were whinnying, bucking and shrieking as they tried to vault over their troughs and smash their stalls. Something whirred by her face like a shot—a sparrow or starling—and spun past a post in a flurry of feathers.
Lili could detect in the dust and smoke the beginnings of morning as its light cut through the far boards. She must have been asleep for hours. She braced herself against the boards of the stall. Her horse saw her now, she was sure, her own boy. He was a noble Arab, smoky white with black tips and black eyes.
Who had fired the gun? The farmer? No, not the farmer. And not the Germans. They wouldn’t waste the bullets. Not the Arrow Cross. Who was out there to frighten? The men in the truck? Goodness. The men in the t
ruck.
They fired again and Lili could hear voices whooping. Her Arab kicked and bucked, as did the others, the Lipizzaner in the neighbouring stall, and another Arab, a smaller one. There was nothing to calm them down. They wouldn’t hear calm talk, nor receive pats and caresses, even if she could get to each one of them. But she found herself unafraid of the horses. She would brace herself, hold tightly to her small corner and wait out the storm. She couldn’t pass by her Arab’s bucking hooves in any case. She would wait out the beasts of the barn and the beasts of the field.
It was an hour at least before the stable settled again into snorts and whinnies and some chomping of hay and slurping of water. Lili watched her horse drink with his sloppy tongue. Nothing like fear and hysteria to work up an appetite. Daylight had come and, while the barn was still dark, Lili could make out the sheen on the horses’ backs and bellies. How far was the farmer that he had not heard his animals’ cries? What if there had been a fire? How far was the truck with the soldiers? Had they collapsed in a heap somewhere or were they waiting for some more fun? Or had they departed? She would not have heard over the shrieking horses. She needed to see, to get out quietly, if she could pass undetected through the squealing door.
Lili straightened herself out, brushed the fur of her sleeping bag, packed it away, buttoned herself into her coat and combed her fingers through her hair. What a sight she must be. How could she make herself presentable for her prospective drivers? How could she make herself pretty for Simon? It had been too long since she’d seen him, and she hadn’t eaten well. What a sight she must be, what a surprise.
She patted her horse, and he whinnied for her. She made her way out of the stall and to the door and found a crack she could peer through. She could see little at first but the white field laid out like linen over a grand supper table. She took in a whiff of the horse-fresh morning. The field was abutted by a row of birch trees, which, with their white bark, stood like a line of naked girls caught by the cold. And then her eye took in with a thrill the blue mountains looming to her right. The partial view barely allowed her to ascertain their dimensions, so she had to step out, had to find her way on this last leg of her journey.
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