Gratitude

by Joseph Kertes

  The truck grunted up the mountain, its gears shifting jaggedly and its engine protesting. She felt soothed by the vibration and the rumble, felt she needed the time to recover her balance and her spirit before seeing Simon. But it would not be a party, she knew that. She knew where she was headed and could only hope for the best.

  “The Russians are coming,” the commandant said across the darkness to no one in particular. “The Germans have taken over the reins now, and the Russians will come to try to drive them out. They will rampage over this land the way the Turks once did, and the Romans long before, and the Martians, for all we know. It’s a land of rampaging tribes, and it always will be. They all are.”

  No one answered. “I don’t know how long we can stay put,” he went on, “especially with the Russians. They won’t let us, not even if we made the munitions for them. They can’t afford to let us. It’s about saying who’s boss more than anything, now.”

  And then the commandant stopped speaking. Everyone waited patiently for the next instalment of his thoughts, but he kept them to himself, and so the others went on with their own. Lili shrank back to considerations of Simon. She didn’t want, just then, to think of anything else.

  After two and a half hours the truck ground to a halt. Lili remembered what the woman in town had said. How could she have walked this distance up into the mountains in just five hours? Bad information, and it cost her. Erdo was still out cold, and the commandant ordered the guards at the gate to come and help lift him off the truck.

  Lili didn’t know what she’d been expecting of the camp. The kindness of the commandant had lulled her into believing that it might be tolerable if not comfortable, even with Erdo looming over it. The inmates were housed in four barracks that were more ramshackle than the horse stable Lili had spent the night in, and they were colder. Each building had a single small wood-burning stove at the far end but no wood left to fuel it. Whatever wood remained had to be used to fire the smelters for the making of dies for weaponry and for ammunition. There was a barracks for the soldiers attached to the kitchen, so it was a little warmer, and a smaller cabin for officers: Fekete, Erdo, a corporal and also official visitors. The factory, which the inmates walked to each day, was three kilometres away over rock and ice.

  The inmates were off at the factory when Lili arrived. They wouldn’t be back until dinner. They were fed once in the morning and once in the early evening, bread and coffee first thing and later a broth made of potato peels, carrot tops and turnips and hunks of stale bread. Once a week they were treated to an apple and another day to some cheese. Twice a week for breakfast, they ate salty porridge, which warmed their bellies for the walk ahead and the work.

  Fekete told Lili when they arrived that, considering the hour, if she wanted to see Simon she could not get back to the train station until the next day. She of course had the option of leaving the package for Simon with a note and departing immediately. The commandant would see to it that Simon got the supplies. He looked upon her kindly—he was smiling—but he said, “If you decide to stay in the barracks tonight and cause a disturbance of any kind, I will have you both shot.” The smile continued as the message hung in the air between them. “You’ll spend the day working in the kitchen with Tildy, a local who works for us.”

  “Simon wrote that there was a man in the kitchen,” Lili said, “an inmate—”

  “He’s gone,” the commandant said as they walked. “He didn’t make it. We need all the able-bodied men for the war effort.”

  Lili looked down.

  “He didn’t make it,” Fekete said again without affect. She thought of Erdo, the cold.

  Tildy didn’t speak much to Lili as they got the food ready for the evening. Lili gazed into the cauldron of swill as it simmered on the biggest wood stove she had ever seen. Tildy didn’t ask if Lili was hungry or what she was doing there, but she seemed to be wondering all the same. Maybe she was thinking Lili had been brought in to replace her. It was Lili herself who finally spoke. “I’m here just for a day. They’ve let me in to see my Simon.”

  “I don’t know him,” Tildy said coldly. “I don’t know any of them. They’re mangy.” She looked straight at Lili with beady dark eyes, waiting to be challenged. Lili had a sister named Tildy. Nobody could have looked less like her sister than this woman. She was a big woman. Perhaps there was more to eat here in the kitchen than it appeared. She wore a tight hairnet to contain her short brown curls, giving her head the look of an animal caught in a trap. She had a scowl etched into her face, and she panted as she walked or spoke. “Set the tables,” Tildy told her. “Then mop the kitchen floor and sweep the mess hall.” Tildy pointed at each thing with her nose—the bowls, the dining room, the mop and the broom—and she snorted each time.

  Lili rushed the work in the kitchen so she wouldn’t have to spend more time than necessary with Tildy and drew out the work in the dining room, shining each spoon on the apron Tildy had provided. What kept her going was the thought of seeing Simon soon, in a matter of hours.

  When the men came shuffling back, finally, she was not prepared for her second shock, a line of scrags entering through the gate. Simon’s healthy, handsome face was drawn, his eyes were ringed with shadow, and his nose ran, a condition he shared with nearly everyone. He had lost all his youthful bulk, and he’d lost the lustre in his eyes. But then her eyes met his, and his face lit up. How was this miracle possible? his face seemed to be asking.

  The other inmates looked even worse. They must have been here much longer than Simon. They were ragged. Some wore bandages unaccountably around their heads, one had a bandaged hand; some limped; many stared blankly, even at her, not even curious about who she might be.

  As for the barracks, no one could care less that Lili was there. How could there be room for bawdiness in a place of such deprivation, so much dampening down of young men’s spirits, turning them old and haggard in a few short months?

  Lili kissed Simon in the dark barracks, and he held her as passionately as he was able. What was Lili doing here? Was she insane, risking her life this way? How could his parents have let her go? “It was my fault,” he said, his eyes running now with his nose. “I should never have sent you the letter.”

  Lili showed him the fur sleeping bag, and his tears continued to pour. He put his head on her shoulder, and she told him it would not be long now before he would come home. It could not be long. She showed him the peppers and garlic and eggs and wafers, too, and his eyes and nose ran freely. Then she gave him the tobacco and he smiled.

  It was only then that he noticed the swelling shine on one of her cheeks. “What happened to you?” he said. “Your cheek.”

  The other men were filtering out to the mess hall. As the last ones were leaving and Lili was about to answer, Erdo walked in. He, too, had a bandage around his head. The young lovers released each other and leapt to their feet.

  “Go eat,” Erdo said. Both Simon and Lili stepped forward. “Not you,” he said to Lili. “What do you think this is—the Mercure Hotel?”

  Simon looked at her and said, “I’ll stay too.” His voice shook with rage and fear.

  Erdo stepped right up to Simon. He loomed over them both. “Go eat,” Erdo said again and put the barrel of his revolver to the middle of Simon’s forehead. “You’re hungry.”

  “Go,” Lili said, “go.”

  Simon left her, and she stood rooted in her spot, as did Erdo. Simon took as long as he could to get out the door and then waited outside, his chest boiling. A moment later Erdo followed. Simon walked quickly now, expecting a bullet in his back at any moment. At each step he told himself, now, or now, or now—but his hand was on the door of the mess hall, finally, and he was in.

  Simon was the first one back to the barracks. He’d left his soup half finished, afraid he would find her gone when he got back. He’d never done that before.

  He went straight to her. When he told her about the soup, she offered an egg again. “It will fill you the res
t of the way,” she said and cleaned the shell for him. “If only we had a little salt.” They hadn’t seen salt in months. She smiled and held out the egg in her palm, like a little white lamp in the dark room. Lili thought of Mary on the train, the wafers the previous morning at the church, the cabbage rolls, the horses, Erdo. Her mind raced.

  Simon ate the egg with wolfish abandon, swallowing hard as she watched him. She thought she heard something and pulled her scarf up over her ears, covering her pretty Nordic features. “What a war,” Simon said through a bulge in one of his cheeks. “Think of how different life would be if not for this war. I wouldn’t have met you.”

  “We would have met somehow,” she said. “What an awful way to bring about a fate, having to lose my family for you, much as I need you.” She took his hand. “What a cruel trick.”

  They were sitting on his bed, the upper bunk, their legs dangling over the side. “Look how focused the war has made us—it’s given us that—the power to focus all our attention.” He swallowed the last of his egg with a good gulp. “Food, shelter, warmth, love, survival. Not parties, not ambling about the lake country, not cakes at Gerbeaud. Just survival. I’ve had so much time to think here, my God.”

  “I wish we could walk in the countryside,” she said. “That’s what I want.”

  He was happy to be speaking to her at all. He took both her hands in his.

  “They brought new men today,” Simon told her, “from another labour camp. They look worse than we do.”

  “Why did they come here?”

  “Because theirs had been invaded by the Russians, and the Russians were brutal. They killed half the soldiers and half the inmates. The ones who made it here are the lucky ones.”

  “What a world,” Lili said.

  “And I know one of the men,” Simon said. “I recognized him right away. It’s Miklos Radnoti. He’s a writer and an old friend of my cousin Istvan’s.”

  “Did you speak to him?”

  “Just for a minute. I don’t know if he’s staying. There’s so much turmoil lately. Even the guards look worried.”

  “Were you able to ask him about Istvan?”

  “Yes, he told me he warned Istvan when the Germans were entering Szeged, but he doesn’t know what became of him. I’ll try to talk to him again. Radnoti said he married a Catholic, but it didn’t help him much.”

  “Who? Istvan?”

  “No, Radnoti. Radnoti converted and then married a Catholic woman, named Fifi Gyarmati. We should look her up in Budapest.”

  “If only I could take you back with me right away.”

  He asked about his parents and about Rozsi and Paul.

  What was to happen now? Lili wondered as they talked, as darkness fell in the drafty building. Would she spend the night with her Simon in a room full of men? Could they make love—their first time—when the barracks was quiet? Would it be right? Shouldn’t they take whatever chances were handed to them—what if they could not again? Why should her true love not finish what the brute had begun back in the truck? She felt queasy again as Simon kissed her tenderly on the lips. His lips were cool and damp.

  He looked at her close up. How was it possible she was sitting opposite him with her warm blue eyes looking back at him? “I began to tell you about Elemer,” he said, wiping his nose on his sleeve, “in the letter.” She dug out the handkerchief marked “F” for “Fekete.” How would Simon ever have come by it, she thought, if not for the circuitous route by which he now held it? He was wiping his nose with the commandant’s handkerchief.

  “In the bunk below me. Elemer. He’s very sick. He’s going to cough his brains out tonight. I don’t know how to help him. I found something out about him that nobody here knows.” He was whispering. “No one, not any of the other inmates.”

  “Not the guards?”

  “Especially not the guards. They don’t know why he’s here. They don’t care. They just want to lord it over people—the more the better.” They heard a sound, a knock, and he stopped talking. The men would be coming back from the mess hall soon. They waited but heard nothing more. The winter wind howled through the cracks in the walls. It was getting colder as darkness fell. “He’s not even Jewish,” Simon whispered. “Elemer’s Catholic, but not like Radnoti. He started out Catholic. He’s the one whose sister visited. I think someone did something awful to her here.” He looked directly at the swelling on Lili’s cheek. She thought he was going to ask again about it, but he didn’t. “He spent time in Poland when the war broke. He’s part Polish, from Warsaw. It was there—Warsaw—that the Germans erected a wall around a ghetto and sealed in the Jews. Some of his friends were sealed in, some people he worked with, maybe even a woman—he’s a widower—when he’s feverish at night he calls out the name of a woman named Delilah—that was not his wife’s name—his wife was Dora—but it’s Delilah, he moans. I asked him one afternoon at the factory when no one was in earshot who she was, and he turned red as an apple. You’d’ve thought I’d said I was sleeping with his daughter.” Simon paused. That was not the example he’d wanted, but he pressed on. “Anyway, he acquired a great conscience in Warsaw, Elemer did. He’s a physician. I didn’t know that until I learned this story.” He lowered his voice again. “No one knows that, either. He’s a doctor, was a doctor, and he met someone in Warsaw, another physician by the name of Dr. Feliks Kanabus, who figured out a way to sew foreskins back on—skin grafts, they are, I guess. He figured out a way to graft skin onto the penis so that its owner could deny he was Jewish and prove it. Some had it done and got away.” Lili could hardly hear Simon now, he was speaking so quietly. “Some went so far as to renounce their faith, start again, pretend they never were Jews. Dr. Kanabus was fearless. He performed the operation on hundreds of men. And apparently, when an old colleague from the university, another doctor, a Jew, got word to Dr. Kanabus that he—the Jewish doctor—and his wife were in the Warsaw ghetto and were doomed, Kanabus arranged to get some false papers issued for the Jewish fellow, marched into the ghetto himself under false pretences, and took the man and his wife out. He was like Wallenberg and Paul. So now they’re living in Kanabus’s house, for the remainder of the war, I guess, pretending to be a butler and a cook.” Simon and Lili heard voices, footsteps outside. “Elemer did it, too, the operation, on quite a few Jews—he worked with Dr. Kanabus—but Elemer was caught and sent here because his citizenship is Hungarian. But his papers forwarded here merely said ‘Resister,’ nothing more. A document must have got lost in transit. Can you believe it?” Simon slapped his knee and chuckled, just as the men began coming back into the barracks. “What luck,” he added quickly. “Fate—fate again.”

  The inmates looked at her, one after another, as they entered, and they stopped talking to one another. She tightened the scarf around her head and cinched it at the neck. She pulled her legs up onto the bunk. No one asked her or Simon anything, except Elemer.

  He was the last to stumble in, coughing. He dragged himself toward the young couple. He was a man of fifty who looked seventy-five, an ill and feeble seventy-five at that. “Goodness,” he said as he looked at her and coughed, doubled over, coughed again then pulled himself erect, as if it were an act of some kind. “You look a bit like my sister,” he said, momentarily pleased, but then the coughing reminded him of his state. He fought to stay up, look a little healthier. He said hoarsely, “What happened to your lovely face?” He pressed a cold hand against her warm cheek, then pulled it away to cough into it some more.

  Simon looked at her face again, too. “I fell on the ice near the train,” she said. “There was a little patch of ice.” Simon touched her cheek now, too, and kissed it.

  “Can you be here?” Elemer asked. “Did the authorities let you in?” She nodded yes. “My sister came here—do you know that?” She nodded again and smiled.

  And then he barked out a rapid sequence of coughs. He gasped and collapsed on his bed. He waved an apology at her. “You need a doctor,” she said. “What can I do f
or you?”

  He coughed out the word “nothing” and shook his head. “Nothing can be done,” he said between bouts, and then he turned toward the wall and was asleep, coughing, spitting small coughs he could not swallow.

  A corporal stepped into the barracks with a bang. He was the one officer Lili had not seen, and she felt caught in the act, worried her presence hadn’t been explained. He looked directly at her, then down at Elemer, the only one fully recumbent already.

  The corporal didn’t say anything. People seemed to save their energy here or had nothing left to say. He didn’t seem to care what he saw. In his gloved hand he held up a bright oil lantern, and the inmates all knew what that meant. They scurried into their bunks. No one in the room changed for bed. If anything, they bundled up with whatever warm layers they had for the cold night.

  It was very dark with the lights out and very quiet, except for Elemer’s cough, which hammered away at the dark and the silence like a lone protestor. Lili got down and laid out the fur sleeping bag for Simon, packed the few other things into the satchel and stuffed the bag under Elemer’s bunk. She removed her coat to add to their bedding, then changed her mind. She covered Elemer with the coat, up to the chin, and he tapped her fingers in thanks. She took Simon’s hand as she climbed back up to the upper bunk, stepping lightly on Elemer’s bed to do so.

  Simon whispered, “Let’s get into the fur bag together—my mother’s coat, goodness—you dears—what you cooked up for me.” She felt his moist lips on her ears as he spoke and she trembled.

  “We won’t fit,” she said. “How can we fit together?” She was afraid now and unsure.

  “We wouldn’t have a year ago, but now we will—for a single glorious night.”

  He removed his shirt and trousers, and she helped him slip her serge dress over her head, the chill bristling their young flesh. He breathed damp kisses into her mouth as he unsnapped her brassiere, and she pretended to remove underwear she no longer had on while he took off his.