Gratitude

by Joseph Kertes

  Paul raised his glass. Istvan said, “Another lady made this same meal for me when Marta was taken. Let’s drink to Anna Barta.”

  Later, though Marta and Istvan had asked Paul to stay, he said he wanted to get back to Budapest. He promised he would bring Rozsi and the others next time. The dark night sky was as calm as the afternoon blue had been, and the road and the air, the memory of the dinner, the cat, Marta and the little house, warmed his way home.

  Thirty-Four

  Budapest – June 16, 1945

  ONE OF THE STOUT SURVIVORS of the war was Lili’s white dress, the one her mother had made for her for her sixteenth birthday back in Tolgy. While the dress would serve perfectly on this day as a wedding gown, it was far too big now for Lili and had to be taken in in a hurry.

  Klari volunteered to help while Lili took Rozsi to the train station. Even on Lili’s wedding day, the girls could not skip this morning excursion to the station to meet the returning Hungarians.

  The train was delayed, but Lili didn’t want to let her anxiety about getting back show. She held Rozsi’s hand until the train pulled in and as Rozsi watched the faces of the people getting off. They didn’t look very healthy, many of them, but they were alive and home. Robert said these stragglers might have been people who had to be hospitalized before they could go home. Word was out about where people had been sent. Pictures were being published all over the world about the ghostly survivors. But people returning had already spread the news. Marta had told the Becks what the situation was.

  The station was not as crowded as it was the day before, but the waiting faces were just as eager, and then just as disappointed, once the cars had cleared and the whistle had blown. A few got lucky. One woman whooped and screamed and rolled around on the stone platform with her scrawny husband.

  The young women returned from the train station empty-handed again, and late. Simon had asked Lili not to take Rozsi out this once, but Rozsi would not rest otherwise and could not be calmed down.

  Simon met the women at the door and hardly waited for Rozsi to get out of earshot before saying, “It’s our wedding day. How could she cut into our day like this?”

  Lili was taken aback by Simon’s temper. “You’re not even supposed to see me today until we meet under the canopy.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said.

  “Don’t be ridiculous?” she repeated. “Think about it. Wouldn’t it have been an extraordinary day if our wedding day had also turned into a homecoming?” She smoothed down the sides of the loose green dress she was wearing before asking, “What would you have done? Why don’t you go tell Paul his sister is a nuisance?”

  When Simon heard Paul’s name spoken, he backed off. She was about to take him in her arms when he said, “Now, where is Paul this morning? Doesn’t anyone respect this day?”

  “I do,” she said.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s my wedding day.”

  “It’s my wedding day, too,” she said.

  Simon was about to say something else, but his mother stopped him. She was holding Lili’s white dress. “Is this the way to speak to your radiant bride?” Klari asked. “She’ll stop radiating for you if you keep it up. You’re not even married yet, and look how you’re behaving.” Klari put her arm around Lili’s shoulder and moved her along to her room.

  Cousins were missing and friends and acquaintances. Each day, the Becks would get word of people who had survived and those who hadn’t, people who had come home and people who hadn’t. Some kept visiting the cemetery as if to find news of loved ones there, but very few fresh graves had been dug since the war had come to Hungary. People died abroad or at the bottom of the blue Danube. Klari had news that a sister of hers, Hermina, and her husband, Ede, had both made it and turned up at the house they’d bought in Paris. Like so many others, they had a fantastic story to tell.

  After the telegram to Robert and Klari, announcing their return, Hermina wrote a twelve-page letter describing their ordeal.

  She and her husband, who was a prominent cardiologist, had been kidnapped in 1942 by German agents and taken to Munich to an officers’ hospital. The head of an important unit, a Colonel Munsinger, lay dying of a bullet wound near his heart, and they wanted Dr. Izsak to operate on him to save him. “Ede refused,” Hermina wrote in the letter. “You know how stubborn he can be, Klari. He said to the men that he could not, in good conscience, perform surgery on a killer. So they took me out to their courtyard. It was the dead of winter, January, colder than any on record in Munich. They made Ede watch, and they strung me out by my fingers on a steel cable, as if I were laundry, using steel clips for each of my fingers. They ran water along the line, so that my fingers stuck to the line and froze immediately. Ede begged them to let me back in—he would do the surgery—but they said they’d let me back only after he was done. It was a chance he would have to take.

  “The clamps were so tight on my fingers, I was ready to faint from the pain of it. But the pain quickly and miraculously passed. The men tugged on the pulley. One of my bare feet clung to the platform while the other dangled above the stone yard. They tugged again. I said, ‘Ede,’ not loudly, but I could hear my voice careen around the courtyard. My clinging foot left the platform as they tugged again. Then, not looking at me, not even once, the soldiers heaved a last time. A strong pull. I was left hanging by my fingertips. I was frantic. I looked at the men who had turned away from me as I wriggled like a carp on a hook. I couldn’t see Ede in the dark window, or anyone. I felt a dark heaviness as if I were being asked to lift a mountain. This was the weight of hanging by my fingertips, the weight of life, I guess, until quickly, surprisingly quickly, the dark heaviness of my body lifted, Klari, light as an angel, and I flitted upward, a pinned angel fluttering up above the courtyard. I remember falling into a heavy darkness again underneath the weight of the mountain. I was half-conscious. I remember feeling myself waiting for the lighting of the sun.”

  Klari’s heart pounded. She turned to the next page of the letter. “And then they let me back in, if you can believe it. As soon as the surgery started. Ede succeeded, naturally, bless his heart, and we spent a year and a half in the place. In the months afterward, my Edward treated dozens and dozens of officers who filed through the place. They had any and every malady you can name. Ede was afraid of what they might do, mostly to me, if he didn’t. ‘Sick meat,’ he used to call them in Hungarian to me. ‘I am curing the sick meat, my girl, so it can carry on its ignoble task.’

  “But the incredible part of my story, if you ask me, is that that Colonel Munsinger, after he recovered, treated us like a prince and princess. Princess Hermina of the Hebrews. We had plenty to eat and a nice flat and our own maid, for heaven’s sake, and then finally they let us come home. They had someone take us by car all the way.

  “But, Klarikam, my fingers are still bent. I can’t straighten them. Can you believe it? I have partial use of them, but I’m not the same woman with the beautiful hands—remember? No one else had hands like mine, not Etel, not Anna, not Mathilde, and especially not you, dear. Remember? Now I have hands like a crow, like talons, always curled. Ede won’t forgive himself. Give my love to everyone. Come see us in Paris, darlings.”

  The return of Hermina and the reappearance of Istvan, especially, continued to fuel Rozsi’s hope. “I love,” Zoli’s note had said. She would often check that her note was still there, but no longer opened it. The paper was disintegrating. “I love,” it had said, hanging the words out there, the open-armed words that held her now, too, waiting. Was her Zoli at a hospital somewhere recuperating? She would rush to his side, gladly, and bring him back to health if she could only find out. Had he been taken by his Russian liberators out to the Urals somewhere? The Russians had taken Wallenberg, too, and would not release him. Maybe they were together again, Wallenberg and his photographer. They’d look after each other if they could. The Swede would look after her Zoli the way he looked after everyone else. Save yourself, Mr
. Wallenberg, as no one else can, and save my Zoli, too. “Physician, heal thyself”—isn’t that what your Luke once said?

  Lili and Simon’s wedding was to take place at the temple on Rumbach Street, or at least in the courtyard behind the temple. The building itself had been bombed, and a couple of its walls had tumbled in on the others, its Eastern motifs, its arabesques, toppled. At one end, its stained-glass window depicting Joseph, looking himself like a sultan, complete with Arab headdress and magic multicoloured coat, which had drawn the sun into the building and scattered its light in a bouquet of gold, red, blue, purple and green all over the temple’s walls, lay shattered and lightless on the floor and seats. The great temple on Dohany, around the corner, where the Becks had been members, Europe’s largest and most imposing synagogue, with its Moorish minarets and onion domes, was all but destroyed, the towers toppled, the walls buckled. None of the temples could be used by the Jews that remained—over a half-million were still unaccounted for—but the Rumbach Street temple was holding services out back already, whether or not the season allowed for them, and Robert had known the rabbi for years. They’d often played cards together at Gerbeaud Café, and each was delighted to find the other still walking. The rabbi knew of another player who had survived, over on Sip Street, Imre Kerekes, but the man was recuperating from the flu, and his wife was serving up quite a soup to anyone who visited.

  A law was passed that, each day, every family was to send a couple of its able-bodied young people—if the family still had any—to help in the reconstruction of the city, and the Beck household invariably sent Lili and Simon, while Paul and Rozsi stayed back. It was never much of a question. Rozsi didn’t get out of bed in the morning, unless someone was going to take her to the train station, and Paul was occupied with the missing, especially Raoul. He didn’t feel he could even start the reconstruction Wallenberg had described without him at the helm.

  Paul travelled to Debrecen twice to inquire about Wallenberg’s visit there. Very few people seemed to know much about it. One couple living on a potato farm just outside the city said the Swede’s driver had been killed and his body dumped in a ditch just outside their place. “It was a mess,” the woman said. She had leathery skin, but her face shone red in the light of a single naked light bulb that hung from the ceiling. They were sitting in the boot room. Paul had got no farther in.

  “Did you see anyone else?”

  The woman shook her head.

  “How did you know it was the driver and not the diplomat?”

  “It was the driver,” her husband said. The man’s face was a darker leather. “People said it was Vilmos Langfelder. They came in a Studebaker.” The man rubbed the side of his nose.

  “Are you sure there was just the one man?” Paul asked.

  The two looked at each other. “We’re sure,” the man said. “We have his gold teeth.”

  “Almos,” the woman yelled, and she smacked his shoulder good and hard.

  “If you’d like to have them, you can have them,” the man said.

  “No,” Paul said.

  “The same night, a cart came with hay and stopped at the ditch by our place,” the man said. “The next day, the body was gone, and no one talks about it. The Russians are not that nice. They call us Nazi traitors—in their own language, naturally—but I know a couple of words. Predaatyel—traitor, collaborator.” He smiled, proud of his achievement.

  Paul even took a trip, using the Swedish embassy’s Alfa Romeo, to Tolgy, on behalf of Lili, to see if anyone had returned. He had found half the houses of the town occupied and the synagogue burned. Paul drew out almost all of the occupants merely by driving up and down the main street with his bright car, but no one had heard of any Jews living there. He told a friendly man who’d insisted on this fact that there was a synagogue on Fischer Street. “Really?” the man said. “I never go that far.”

  “I guess you don’t get out much, then.”

  “I have a bad back,” the man said, and rubbed a kidney to prove it. “I have a deed to our place, too,” he said.

  Paul lobbied the Hungarian and Swedish governments to press for the release of Wallenberg but was astonished to find that neither would help. The Russians had, after all, been on the side of the Allies and had been his country’s liberators, even if they had now become its occupiers.

  Paul had talked Per Anger and Lars Berg of the embassy into letting him travel with them to Moscow, but at the last minute Anger backed out unaccountably. Paul then got a letter from Anger, saying that it was hopeless. Anger and Berg had met the Swedish ambassador to Moscow, and he took them into his room to tell them to stop their efforts. He was shaking when he spoke to them. “They don’t have Wallenberg,” he told Anger. “The Gestapo blew up his car before he ever left Hungary.”

  Per Anger had heard the same report on the newsreel at the cinema, and Paul had heard this news over Hungarian radio. But the newsreels had to be approved by the Russians before they were released.

  “Stay away,” the ambassador said, “or they’ll send you to Siberia, and me.”

  “So he’s in Siberia,” Anger said. The ambassador looked as if Anger had struck him. He left the room and would have nothing to do with Anger from then on.

  Then Paul withdrew, to his uncle’s study, mostly. He stared into space or put his head down on the desk. Where could Wallenberg have got to? How could this have happened to him, of all people? Could he not talk his way out of this one? Could he not pull whatever documentation he needed out of thin air? Why had Paul not insisted on going with him to Debrecen? They could have stood up to Malinovsky together, or they could have gone down together. Three men in a ditch, and gold watches to add to Langfelder’s gold teeth. Or was Raoul’s watch already gone by then? Did the Russians raiding the embassy take it, or did Malinovsky? Worker of miracles, could he not work a miracle now? If not for him, then for them. They had work to do, still, much work, as he himself had pointed out. Survival was not enough, survival without dignity. But how could he do it alone? How could any of them?

  And where were his Hungarians? Where was his army? Where the Jews, pulled from the transports and ghettos, their babies born on his bed? They were free, now, free to be an army of the righteous. Where were they, his witnesses? Their saviour was at the gallows awaiting punishment for his good deed. What must he be thinking now? From here to there. Awaiting the testimony that would set him free. Where were you all? And where, he was surely thinking, was Paul?

  As the days passed, Paul paid less and less attention to the wheeling of the sun and moon. He was becoming more like his sister. When he broke into a rant at the dinner table, he was thinking less of what to put in the way of evil, and less about how to get out of the way of evil, and more about what gave rise to it.

  The trouble was the thinking itself. His thinking was crowding out experience, crowding out his life. Making sense of the world was no longer the point. What Paul tried to make sense of was hatred fuelled by feeling alone, by impulse, not thought, a hatred so pure and unblemished it banished thought. More importantly, it banished the countervailing signals of conscience, rose out of the natural plane to where the air was thin but pure and gave life to creatures who were untroubled by the world below. Plans, yes. These creatures hatched plans. Excellent, elaborate plans. A special kind of genius. How to round up the vermin, how to dehumanize them, how to develop Zyklon B and dispense it cheaply and efficiently for the eradication of all communists, homosexuals, Gypsies and Jews. But not if a Jew is Jesus? Not if a homosexual’s wife bears a child? Not if a Gypsy violinist plays Wagner? Not if a communist turns nationalist-socialist? No. The plan does not allow for complications. The plan is not excellent; it is perfect. Complications admit thought, awaken conscience. Oh, how we complicate the world for you, we human pulp, you unthinking genius of evil; you cannot have second thoughts if you haven’t had first ones. Just a plan. A good plan, carried out by loyal, thoughtless ministers.

  Dare we feel it? Dare we utte
r the words? They become giddy with the weight of it, weightless, and the weightlessness buoys fearlessness. They are what have hurt us. They are what have hampered us. They are the ones who have stood in the way of our achievement. They are what we hate. He pounds his fist, and we pound ours. Die Juden—ja, ja, ja—die Juden! So pure. So simple. Beautiful as Bach. Pure as mathematics. The word clean as a bell. They. So simple and tidy. What a tidy little place to locate our hatred, roll it into a ball and fire it at them. They are the ones. Do you hear it? You.

  Where, then, will the criminals’ trials lead us, we nations united against you? Are you all to be found guilty? Were we all innocent? In the pure, untroubled air of certainty, yes. In the earthbound world languishing among the ruins of thought, no.

  What would it have been like, this thoughtless, forbidden place? Paul asked himself. A place without consequences. And how must it feel to be dragged down now by your repressors into sullied consequence and thought? Imagine those unfettered days—off with his head, off with hers—anyone who offends you, anyone who might offend you, strangers from a group you’ve decided will certainly offend you. Off with their heads! How glorious! How free!—Headless Nation!

  Only now, today, to be hauled back down into thought. God must be so weary. Dear God, if our Adolf stands before You, in that thin air, on that special plane, don’t let him evade You. Seat him before his handiwork. Seat him at the gates of Auschwitz, his legs crossed, his soldier’s back straight, his mouth stilled, and let him stare until the key to the vault of his conscience slips in through his eyes or his ears, slips in on the wings of a grey bird, or until the Polish winter buries him, scentless like a gas.

  A LETTER CAME for Paul from Philadelphia. His former assistant, Viktor, had tracked him down and brought it to him. It was two days before he opened it. It was from Zsuzsi Rosenthal in Philadelphia, and it was dated April 19. Almost two months had passed since she’d mailed it.