“Do you know what we should all do?” Hermina said. “The cinemas are starting to open again. We should take Paul and Rozsi out to see a Laurel and Hardy picture, like Pack Up Your Troubles. Do you remember that one, dear?”
“How could I forget?”
“I love them with a passion. They get into all kinds of danger but never come to harm.” Then she said, “I wonder how our cousin, Sir Korda, is making out. Of course, only you would know, Klarikam. Has he written to you lately?”
“Not lately.”
“Oh, I wonder…” Hermina said.
The wedding party had begun to spread out, with Paul up ahead, Robert and Simon in the middle and the ladies well behind. The streets had certainly changed. Some buildings were bombed-out shells, some shaded dark with flame. The Erzsebet and Chain bridges were still out between Buda and Pest, though their reconstruction had begun.
Lili felt thrilled to have Hermina with them. She smiled at the ladies while Rozsi gazed straight ahead, following her brother in spirit if not in pace. Lili took Rozsi’s hand in hers. Rozsi tried a smile then.
“We need to find a candle,” Rozsi said suddenly. “Another one of those Jahrzeit candles in a glass for tonight.”
“We will, right after the wedding,” Lili said.
Rozsi had been burning a candle in the window of their bedroom almost every night, a waiting candle, shining out to the street like a beacon. Lili had made a point of procuring the candles as often as she could during her lunch hour, hoping that lighting the flame would keep Rozsi’s spirits up.
“And I need some more medicine,” Rozsi said. “I’m almost out. I need more pills to calm me.”
“I’ve already let the apothecary know, and they’ll be ready by tomorrow.”
Simon had a good look at each building as they passed, sizing up the damage, wondering whether he’d be involved in the repair. Robert was limping. His shoes were far too small, but they could find no other decent ones for the occasion. The pairs that had been in his closet at home were all gone when they returned to Jokai Street. His old friend Feher, the shoemaker, in Vorosmarty Square, had not returned from the war, and even Brun, from whom he’d bought fine handmade shoes in Vienna, had perished.
They passed a millinery, the old Lengyel family’s shop. It had been looted, the windows broken. What a fancy shop it had been, Simon thought. There were four Lengyels altogether, a son and daughter younger than he was—Simon, the boy was called, and Edit. Simon didn’t always remember, but this time he did. Not only were the hats all gone, the papier mâché heads they’d been displayed on had also been taken for good measure. Simon looked over his shoulder at the women, tried to get their attention, pointed to the store. He wondered where the Lengyels had ended up, where they were now lying.
Robert said, “The ghosts are all around us here. On every block. We’re practically trampling on their skulls as we walk. It’s a city with a brutal history, isn’t it? A country with a brutal history.”
The men had arrived at the intersection with Kaldy Gyula Street and had to turn left. They were gratified that a small café had opened here on the corner, the Lovas Café, a new café. They looked back at the women to make sure they knew they were turning. Paul up ahead was nowhere to be seen. He was surely at the Rumbach temple by now.
“I have to stop just a minute,” Robert said. “My feet. But I’m afraid to take my shoes off, because I’ll never get them back on. I wish I’d worn the other ones.” He was leaning back against the brick wall of an office building.
“Take mine,” Simon said. “They’re bigger.”
“But your feet are bigger, too. You’ll never walk again if you cram your feet into these.”
“Please, Father.”
“It’s your wedding day. If I switch with you now, you’ll spend the next sixty-five years telling people how you wore tiny, torturous shoes on your wedding day. No, I’ll suffer, and I’ll tell the story, but not for as long.”
They were nearly at the Rumbach temple, now, or the ruins of the temple, and looked back at the women. The streets were surprisingly quiet that morning. They had Budapest to themselves.
Paul had been looking at the temple, then at the battered Dohany Street temple around the corner. What had we been thinking when we built these piles? he asked himself. Was it the bigness of God we were trying to show off, or our own achievements? He saw the toppled temple more clearly now than when it had stood proud a year before. He’d hardly noticed it then.
The women caught up with the men, and the group was met at the temple by Lili’s friend Maria and her fiancé, Patrik, as well as a small group of Robert’s colleagues. The synagogue’s yellow-and-white minarets, like the towers of a mosque, still stood in the blue June sunlight. The door was gone and the upper windows blown out from within their casements, and the walls behind the front wall were collapsed, so the front held on precariously.
The congregation, what was left of it, had done a nice job carting away the broken stone and sweeping up the brick dust.
Rabbi Langer greeted them as Paul stood straight and tall by the chuppah. Klari spoke to the rabbi first. “There is nothing to be solemn about, not today, if you don’t mind.”
Robert added, “This is a very good day for us, good days ahead.”
The chuppah, under which the wedding party stood, must have come from quite a bed, because it sheltered all of them, including the rabbi and cantor. They were much diminished, Robert thought, but still—he looked up and was glad of the cool shelter from the sun.
At first the cantor sang as if he were performing a Kaddish, slow and doleful, a sound that came from somewhere deep in his chest. But he was just warming up.
The rabbi said to the small group, “I cannot talk today about ruling the planet or about being ruled, or about dying or surviving—listen to me, I sound like Ecclesiastes despite myself. To tell you the truth, I confess for the first time these are topics I can’t even fathom anymore. This was not the great Flood, and I am not Noah. I was barely able to retain my own faith, let alone preach it to others.” Lili glanced over her shoulder at Paul. “There is too much weight just behind us,” the rabbi said, “and too much just ahead.” Here, the rabbi paused.
He then gave the usual blessing as if they were standing in the usual place, on the blue-and-white mosaic floor, the congregation facing the glass Joseph in his colourful coat. Lili and Simon exchanged vows. And Simon slipped the ring, engraved with the name “Ivan” and the wrong date, “13 Aprilis 1935,” the ring they had got from the deportation train, onto his wife’s finger. He and Lili kissed.
Then Simon crunched the customary glass wrapped in cloth beneath his heel, except not a wine glass on this occasion—one couldn’t be spared—but a burnt-out light bulb.
Rabbi Langer stepped up to his old card partner and asked, almost under his breath, if there was to be a reception afterward.
“Yes,” Robert said, loudly enough for everyone to hear. “I have arranged a surprise for all of you at the Lovas Café. I’ve arranged a good lunch for us of herring followed by goose, courtesy of my colleagues at the hospital.”
Just before they left, Hermina talked to Rabbi Langer about the synagogue. “I know you’ll want to rebuild this place,” she said. He nodded solemnly. “But if you’re going to put Joseph back up in the window, I would drop the colourful coat,” she said. She was whispering. “It does nothing for him, if you want to know the truth. Something in green would be lovely with the light coming through, or a blue with a dark lapel. Royal blue would work quite nicely.”
The rabbi didn’t know what to say. Hermina patted him on the cheek with her warped hand. “You know what?” she said, with a shrug. “We’re here. Isn’t that what counts?”
He shrugged, too, and said, “We are here, it’s true. Here again.”
The reception was better than anyone could have imagined. It featured a Gypsy quintet that played as if they’d been trained in a Berlin symphony hall. Robert recognized on
e of them right away from the days of the Japan Café. He was a favourite there, Kosmo Romani, and there was someone else from the Japan, Arista Barany. So nice to have them resurface. Four gentlemen and a lady, for how else could you describe them when they played Schubert’s String Quintet in C Major the way it was intended. Their music transformed the room. Robert was whispering to his wife, but Lili approached her newly minted father-in-law and reminded him of what he’d once told her: “When you are in the presence of great music, it must occupy all your attention.” The room was quiet throughout, as if the group were attending a concert, not a party.
At the end, the violist, the quintet’s one woman, set down her instrument, stood and sang “Ombra mai fu” from Handel’s Xerxes. She sang not like an opera singer, because she certainly wasn’t one, but as if her heart were her instrument, sang like the naïve contralto she was, the amateur in love. Hermina sat with Paul and Rozsi at a round table in a corner of the small room, and she took Paul’s hand in hers. Her eyes filled with tears, and Paul squeezed her hand. “Did you hear those notes?” she said, after the aria was over.
“Those notes were the most natural procession of sound imaginable,” he said. “You’d never expect a lark to roar, so inevitable is its sound—obvious and inevitable. The art is to give those notes an inevitability, a forward tilt. It’s true of everything, all the arts. The art of the humorist is to tell the joke as if it were spontaneous, rather than rehearsed a thousand times.”
Robert approached Kosmo Romani and asked, “Where have you been?” Both were beaming. “I’ve missed seeing you.”
“Well, I’m here,” he answered. “The war kept us busy. Now what are we going to do?” He laughed heartily at his own joke, and Robert joined him.
As a single violinist played a Jewish hora, he was joined on the viola by the lady who’d sung Handel, and the revellers joined hands and danced. They swooped and kicked their feet and felt warm and happy. Simon and Lili were each placed on a chair and hoisted high above the other dancers. They were king and queen of the afternoon. And then they ate herring and challah and danced some more.
Lili could not consummate her marriage that night. She waited for Rozsi to fall asleep so she could sneak away, but Rozsi sat up over her candle in the window and waited until morning.
Thirty-Five
Szeged – June 16, 1945
ISTVAN ASKED FATHER SEBESTYEN for two small favours: that he not be expected to renounce his original faith and that the conversion lessons be postponed until sometime after the ceremony. Going through with this wedding at the Church of Our Lady of the Snow, in King Mathias Square, was all his idea, not Marta’s. In fact, she was against the silliness. She felt, for one thing, that there was plenty of time, and for another, she was the one who’d first offered to convert.
The church was one Istvan had always admired for its simplicity. It was all white, had a modest steeple and was more welcoming inside than intimidating.
Father Sebestyen was looking at some notes beside the pulpit when they arrived. While they waited, Istvan and Marta looked up at the impressive star-vaulted ceiling with its stone ribs, then turned their attention to the pulpit, which was carved with four alluring cherubs, embodying faith, hope, love and justice. The Virgin Mary stood on the high altar. As Istvan looked up at her, Father Sebestyen said, “Apparently, this lovely Virgin lay at the bottom of Lake Csoporke, beside our church, until a century and a half ago, when a Turkish soldier whose horse needed a drink spotted her at the bottom. The Turk arranged to have her brought back in.”
“I wonder whether she was tossed into the lake in anger, or hidden there by worshippers,” Istvan said.
Father Sebestyen agreed happily to Istvan’s conditions for the wedding, just as long as the couple didn’t insist on the pomp of a customary Sunday Catholic service. Everyone opted for simplicity and quiet.
The priest took out a standard form and began to fill it out: first, the mother’s name, place of birth, date of birth. Marta said, “Marta Foldi, Szeged, June 16, 1917, and November 7, 1944.”
Father Sebestyen looked at the couple over the top of his reading glasses. He said, “I can’t put in your child’s birthday.” He coughed and added, barely audibly, “There’s no place on a Roman Catholic wedding form for a child, you understand, except in the case of widows who are marrying again, after their loss.”
“It’s not my child’s birthday,” Marta said. “It’s mine.” The priest looked at Istvan. Marta said, “I have two birthdays now: the day of my birth here and the day I stepped out of a gas chamber.”
Father Sebestyen looked at the resolve in Marta’s eyes and without another word squeezed the second date into the box along with the first one.
After the ceremony, Istvan and Marta and their two witnesses walked all the way back to her house. Istvan’s home, the one he’d shared with his father, had been taken over by the Russians as their headquarters for the city.
They had wanted to keep the ceremony quiet, even solemn, in deference to the memory of Anna Barta and Dr. Janos Benes. Marta had not even invited her brother, Frank, in Chicago, or Istvan his family in Budapest. They would explain later and apologize. Two guests did attend: Denes Cermak, who was back at his newsstand, selling news about the reconstruction of the world after the loss of fifty million souls, and Fifi Gyarmati, the widow of Miklos Radnoti.
The poet had taken his march back to Budapest from Bereck with a hundred other men, led by Sergeant Erdo, but only a handful had made it to the city. Fifi Gyarmati had hired an investigator and a lawyer to find out about her husband in his last days. They’d located one of the survivors, Denes Bekes, who told them that Erdo had become fed up with having to accommodate the men and drank a great deal along the way. “Mr. Radnoti was the most annoying to Erdo. He caught him scribbling in that notebook of his and beat him repeatedly. Finally, two nights before we got home, he shot the scribbler, along with a dozen other men, and we buried them in a shallow grave. I know where it is. Only sixteen of us made it all the way back.”
Fifi said she wanted her husband’s body found and exhumed; she wanted him buried at the Kerepesi Cemetery, as befitted an extraordinary artist; and she wanted Erdo prosecuted.
Commandant Fekete and his men, the ones who’d left Bereck and headed toward the Ukraine, had all perished.
MARTA HAD INVITED one other person to the wedding, Alfred Paderewski, the Polish nobleman who’d taken her in after her escape from Auschwitz. She wrote him a card, saying how much his help had meant to her and inviting him as an “honoured guest” to their wedding.
Paderewski answered that he couldn’t attend, but he arranged to have a sumptuous feast sent to the little house on Alma Street. Marta and Istvan received goose and dumplings, trout, asparagus, sweet potatoes, cabbage, beets, rounded off with a chestnut torte. A dozen bottles of champagne came too. “Mr. Paderewski has clearly seen neither the size of this house,” Istvan said, “nor the size of the wedding party.”
Smetana had leapt on the table so often during the robust meal that Istvan was ready to put him outside, but Fifi said that the scrawny cat was the third guest, and a blessing, and loaded a plate for him with goodies from the wedding feast. She set the plate beside them at their feet.
It was warm in the small house, even though the cast-iron stove was quiet. Flotow’s Martha played quietly on the phonograph. Denes Cermak was describing the destruction he’d heard about over to the west in Germany. He said he had seen a photo of the once proud German city of Dresden, and it was bad. “It wasn’t just destroyed,” he said. “Other cities were destroyed, but Dresden was pounded down, hammered. The Allies’ message to the German nation was, ‘Enough of you, enough of your evil empire. Down with you, into the ground.’”
Fifi reminded Denes that this was a happy occasion and they didn’t want to hear about destruction. She was holding up her champagne glass. “We have a new couple starting here this afternoon—a new trio, it looks like.” She pointed to Marta’s bell
y. She was showing now. Fifi smiled again and they all drank.
Later, Istvan got to his feet and raised his own glass. He studied the glass against the light. “Has there ever been a colour more reassuring than this golden wine?” He turned to his new wife. “Marta, my dear wife, you sacrificed yourself for me.” He waited, closed his eyes for a moment. “We’ll say, today, that we won’t ever forget these things, and we’ll instruct our children not to forget, but then…Today we step up to fill ourselves out the way we used to.” Istvan took another gulp of his champagne and set down his glass. “We have made it out the other end of a hallucination. And guess what has lain in wait for us? The music has lain in wait for us. The poetry. Love. Maybe not youth, maybe not much of our youth. I think we might have lost that while we were still young.” He took another drink. “But I drink, now, to you, my Marta—and I drink quite a bit, I might add.” Everyone got to their feet. “I will stand firm as a sentinel in this place and raise a family in the middle of this history, to defy the history.”
Istvan took his seat, and Fifi said, “What a speech,” and immediately stood to spoon out some more food before anyone else started to talk. Denes took a good thick goose neck into his hands and sucked at the bits of flesh fenced in by the bone.
A MONTH LATER, Fifi Gyarmati succeeded in persuading the provisional government that a shallow grave outside Budapest contained the bodies of fallen heroes of the war. When her husband was exhumed, Istvan and Marta were present. Radnoti’s body was easy to spot. He still had on his trench coat. Inside the pocket was his notebook containing his last lines, written in pencil. The poem, entitled “Picture Postcard,” appeared on the penultimate page:
Gratitude Page 48