The oxen drool saliva mixed with blood.
Each one of us is urinating blood
The squad stands about in knots, stinking, mad.
Death, hideous death, is blowing overhead.
I fall beside him and his body turns over,
Taut already as a taut string.
Shot in the neck. “And that’s how you’ll end too,”
I whisper to myself. “Lie still—
Now patience flowers into death.” I hear,
“Er springt noch auf,” above, quite near.
Blood mixed with mud is drying in my ear.
Erdo was never found. A cousin of his said he’d moved to South America. Radnoti was buried with honours in the Kerepesi Cemetery, as his widow had requested.
Thirty-Six
Budapest – March 25, 1946
TWO SOVIET OFFICIALS showed up at Robert’s clinic at Sacred Heart. He was performing surgery, so they waited in his office for two hours for him to finish. One of them wore a suit that was too big for him, a blue one, with sleeves too long. Maybe he’d taken it off a rack and walked out without trying it on. The one in the ill-fitting suit was the translator.
Robert hadn’t even sat down when the other one, in a nicer tan suit, said, “Dr. Beck, do you know of the whereabouts and activities of your nephew Paul Beck?” The translator translated.
Robert was hoping these men could help get Paul to resume his old productive life. “My nephew?” he said. “If you’re asking whether he’s been on work detail, the answer is no. I know about that. My son and daughter-in-law go every single day, and now she’s pregnant, so I’m quite concerned. I’m a physician, as you can see, so I’m concerned. Paul’s probably out hunting for Raoul Wallenberg as usual, if I know him.” And he smiled. “Why don’t you go ask him yourself? He lives with us.”
“We went by this morning. He wasn’t home.”
“Oh, you did?” Robert now realized he’d said too much. It was a childish thing to do, foolish even, possibly.
“Raoul Wallenberg has nothing to do with the Soviet regime,” the official told him. “We met with him, but we’re through with him. He had many enemies, and he was killed by one of them.”
“Of course.” Then he added, “Too bad.”
“Yes, too bad.” The man in the tan suit took out a card. “Would you please ask your nephew to come and see us tomorrow?”
“Yes, I will.” Robert was anxious now. He didn’t know what he’d done. Maybe nothing. Certainly nothing. The Russians wouldn’t have come looking for Paul if they didn’t have something on him already. Still, he should have kept Paul’s activities to himself.
LILI AND ROZSI visited the apothecary that day to pick up another bottle of pills. The man behind the counter, dressed in a three-piece suit under a white lab coat with pens gleaming from the pocket, simply issued the medicine to Rozsi now without consultation with a doctor. Her Uncle Robert had refused to issue another prescription for the young woman. Rozsi stood in front of the pharmacist, unassuming, uncommunicative, and he counted out the hundred tranquilizers, the second batch since the beginning of February. Lili paid, and the young women left. They could easily have been foreigners, so few words had been exchanged.
Lili walked Rozsi home and headed back to the opera house, where she was helping to clean up still, assisting the plasterers and painters. Before that she’d been helping Simon and a crew of two hundred others on the damaged Liberty Bridge. Simon was working again as a tool and die maker and was now casting dies for iron rods required in the bridge’s reconstruction. The aim was to restore the old bridge exactly as it had been, complete with the two majestic turul birds on either side at its peaks and the royal crests of the Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz-Josef. From another time.
Simon and Lili didn’t mind the requirement that they be part of the reconstruction effort. In fact, it was oddly reassuring to be made to do such things, to be called upon again, pulled out into the sunlight. But at the bridge there was too much lifting involved for Lili, and Robert had forbidden her to work there any longer and written a letter to the authorities to that effect.
After a good long second visit to Budapest in the autumn, Hermina had returned to her home in Paris, a property she and Ede had bought back in the mid-thirties, when he’d been a visiting professor of medicine at the Sorbonne. It was in the 16th Arrondissement, she’d said, off the Avenue de Versailles, “where Victor Hugo, Honoré de Balzac and Claude Debussy used to muck about.” Her departure was hard on everyone, especially Klari and Lili, who found solace in her presence. Even Rozsi—who was saying less and less as a hard winter gripped Budapest with no regard for what it had just endured—could sometimes be coaxed into smiling when Hermina was present at their table. A friend of Hermina’s, Erzsi Balaban, who’d owed the Izsaks a small fortune before the war, returned from Buchenwald alive but alone and had opened a bakery specializing in wedding and other party cakes. It was what she’d always wanted to do, what she’d dreamed about every day in the camp, what she promised herself. So in this time of shortage—but also of celebration and marrying and starting over—Erzsi opened her cake shop. Some people could pay; others couldn’t. Hermina forgave the Balabans’ debt to her, but thereafter Hermina often showed up at the Becks’ place with great cakes, towering palaces of cream and marzipan, some of them reminiscent of classical architecture, complete with columns and caryatids and little triangular roofs. It was odd, having party cake so often, but Hermina was happy to share with her relatives because its cheer brightened their home. There was so much to go around, Klari shared some with Vera and her family, too, and with the Oszolis, the additional family.
After dropping Rozsi off, Lili calculated that if she rushed she could see Simon for a few minutes before they both had to get back to work. As Lili approached the Liberty Bridge, she began to feel dizzy and a little queasy. There was a bench within sight of the bridge, and she thought she would rest there just a minute. An older woman sat on the opposite end. She had a cast-iron sauce pot beside her.
The woman noticed Lili’s distress and asked, “Is there something I can do for you, young woman?”
Lili wanted to say no but feared she might get worse. “Yes, please. My husband, Simon Beck, is working on the bridge just up ahead.”
“I’ll get him,” the woman said. “Can you watch my pot?”
Lili nodded and the woman hurried off.
Soon Lili was lying down on the bench, trying not to moan, careful not to kick the woman’s pot. Simon was by her side in a flash. “I’m taking you to the hospital,” he said, as he put his arm around her shoulder.
The woman who’d helped out said she’d call for an ambulance.
“No,” Lili said. “I’m better now. It was just a spell, nothing more.”
“Let’s be sure.”
“I am sure,” she said. “I wouldn’t want anything to harm this baby.” She was hardly showing, but she stroked her abdomen gently.
“It happens,” the woman said to Simon. “Raging hormones,” she added. “I’ve been through it, four times.” She rubbed her own stomach.
Unexpectedly, there arose the worst odour Lili and Simon had ever smelled, like fumes rising from the underworld. It was so thick it was palpable. The woman retrieved her sauce pot. “Well, the Danube Fat is here,” she said.
“What is it?” asked Simon.
“It’s a boat,” the woman said. “Really just a floating vat of fat from various animals.”
“Fat?”
“Bacon fat, goose fat, fat. Lard. I have no oil or butter, so I use this fat. It’s cheap, and if you heat it for a while, the stink cooks off it. Then you can throw in whatever you’ve got. I’m going to fill my pan right now. Can I get you some?”
“Not today,” Simon said. He still had his hand to his nose.
Lili was using a handkerchief, but with her other hand she still held her stomach. She wondered if a stink this foul could affect her baby.
“She pulls
in every Tuesday around this time.”
“I’m amazed I missed her,” said Simon. “Thanks for helping us out.”
“It was nothing,” the woman said and walked off with her pan toward the river.
WHEN ROBERT came home that night from the hospital, he almost fell again over the suitcase standing in the vestibule. He cursed once more, gave the leather case a good hoof. He’d had enough. It was over a year.
Simon and Lili lay on the big bed in his parents’ bedroom. She hadn’t gone back to the opera house, and his supervisor had given him the afternoon off, too. “It will happen soon,” Simon said. The federal government is going to release us from this duty, and I’ll be able to open my own shop.”
She smiled.
“Or we could try to get away,” Simon said, excitedly. He was holding his wife’s hand too tightly. “I told you, I know a man who can arrange exit visas for us to Canada or New York. Wouldn’t that be something? Toronto—can you say that?”
“And we’d just go?” Lili said.
“Don’t you think we’d be happier?”
“Yes, I do, but we can’t leave your parents and cousins just like that. What would become of them?”
“I don’t know,” he said and let the matter drop.
Rozsi sat in the kitchen, pretending to watch her aunt prepare dinner, but her eyes weren’t following Klari as she hustled about the room. Rozsi felt better here in the kitchen for two reasons. She was with her aunt, who reminded her of her own mother—Klari had the same auburn hair, the same caramel eyes as Mathilde, and there was the same warmth about her, maybe even more. The other reason was the room itself, the bright mosaic floor, the arabesques dancing across the walls, the crystal windows rising into exotic arches. This room took Rozsi out of the city, made her feel she had cast out beyond the horizon, possessed a telescope through which she could survey the continent in search of her Zoli, her wandering Odysseus, as he struggled back from the war, resisting the Sirens, eluding the Cyclops. Rozsi sometimes felt she was in another time, here, sat among the Moors, felt she could restart history, but this time govern its course.
Paul sat, as usual, in Robert’s study, the curtains drawn, the lights switched off, a book in his lap. He had spent some of the afternoon with a group working with the Americans to implement the Marshall Plan. The plan, intended to help rebuild Europe, including Germany, was revolutionary, ingenious, the thinking being that, if you let the defeated languish and suffer, they’ll rise up against you again.
When Lili heard her father-in-law fumbling at the door, she left her husband and rushed out to help her mother-in-law serve dinner and see whether Rozsi was coming to the table. Lili felt entirely recovered since the afternoon.
“You’re both here,” Lili said, smiling warmly. She liked being married. She had only to look ahead. “I’m so sorry, Mother,” she said.
“Don’t be silly,” Klari said. “You’ve worked hard enough, and my grandchild is far more important than a little dinner. Besides, Vera was in here, too, earlier, making her own family’s meal, so it would have been too crowded. Vera still loves this room.”
“I do, too,” Rozsi said. She watched as the two other women finished up, Lili running back and forth between the kitchen and the dining room.
Finally, Lili stopped by Rozsi, took her gently by the elbow and offered to help her freshen up.
Robert might have been the last one home, but he was the first at the dinner table, making himself comfortable at the head, asking Lili as she rushed about, “Where’s everyone?”
“I’ll get the others right away.”
“Where’s Paul?”
“He’s in your study.”
“Sitting in the dark?” Robert remembered the Russians. He wondered where it would all end.
Lili didn’t respond. Robert was gripping his knife and fork like an impatient boy. “Why would he do that? Why would he sit in my study like that, in the dark?”
“I don’t know, Father,” she said.
He smiled, happy to be called that by Lili. “Where’s everyone else?”
“Rozsi’s getting herself cleaned up for dinner. She wanted to do it alone this evening.”
“But where’s everyone else? I mean why aren’t they coming to dinner when dinner’s ready? I’m starving.”
“I’ll get them right away, Father.”
She saw him getting set to make a speech and didn’t know whether she should run off just then to carry out his first request. “We shouldn’t be asked to stay hungry one additional second after what we’ve been through,” he said loudly. “Have we spent so much time in our Swedish-Dutch insurance offices that we’ve altogether got out of the habit of eating?” Now he was yelling.
Lili brought in Rozsi first and set her down in the chair to her uncle’s left. Rozsi wore clunky heels she’d found somewhere. She didn’t acknowledge her uncle. Robert patted her hand. The blush on her cheeks looked like red mistakes she’d tried vigorously to erase.
Simon came next and sat opposite Rozsi, to his father’s right. “Hello, Father,” he said, but then noticed his cousin’s face, was stricken by how aged she seemed in the evening light.
“Go get her brother, please,” Robert said, and Simon dashed off again. When he returned with Paul, everyone was present.
They’d managed goose again. A friend high up, as close to the prime minister as one could get, had brought Robert a whole goose the previous day after Robert had removed a cyst from the man’s neck. Maria, Lili’s friend from the Madar Café, had given her some fresh spinach and beets. It was all to be followed by cherry strudel, made with sour cherries Klari herself was able to procure from a stand around the corner. It was a feast, a rare feast.
Klari lit the silver candelabra, which had survived the looting. It held a dozen candles. She switched off the chandelier. The table was set with pink Herend china, a throwback to their pre-war splendour. The room looked festive in the evening light.
Robert said to Paul, “Thank you for gracing us with your company.”
Simon looked at his father, surprised. Klari said, “Robert, please.”
“I was reading,” Paul said.
“What, in the dark?”
Lili helped her mother-in-law cut up and dish out the servings. Lili was especially adept at carving up the gleaming goose. Simon passed around the plates. On the wall behind Lili and Rozsi hung a photograph of the Becks, which Klari had brought out from her bedroom to help fill the space on the wall where Rippl-Ronai’s Summer Harvest once hung. The photograph featured Heinrich, Robert, Klari, Mathilde, two other sisters, Anna and Etel, their husbands Imre and Bela, Hermina and Ede, Anna’s son Janos, together with Simon, Paul, Istvan and Rozsi, all daughters, daughters-and sons-in-law and grandchildren of proud Maximillian and Juliana Korda, who sat stiffly in the drawing room of their country home, the black lacquered grand piano lurking behind them. Anna had returned to Debrecen, but her son had not. Her husband was still unaccounted for. Etel and her husband, Bela, the man who’d introduced Paul and Istvan to sex, had both perished. They were childless, like Hermina.
“I saw a nightingale outside the window this afternoon,” Paul said. “Heard it, and then saw it in the elm when I stepped out on that grand balcony of yours.”
“I’m delighted for you,” his Uncle Robert said.
“Yes, the song was unmistakable. I was treated to a full concert before the little soprano flew off. It was a bird not made for our time and place, it seems—like something out of time. I remembered the poem by John Keats, his ‘Ode to a Nightingale,’ and I was thrilled to find it on your shelf, Uncle Robert. You didn’t have the Hungarian edition, but I found the original English. Do you remember it, all of you?—any of you? Do you remember the stanza late in the poem?” Lili stopped what she was doing but stayed on her feet. Paul recited the lines:
Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this pas
sing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that oft-times hath
Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
No one spoke at first. Paul said quietly, “The gramophone is gone. Poetry is the next best thing.”
Robert said, “Do you think it appropriate to recite English poetry in this company at this moment?”
Simon was mortified. He found himself pausing even in his chewing. Lili sat down beside him. Klari said, “I think the words sounded lovely, like music—just as you said. The poem has the lilt of our own Petofi.”
Robert began to say, “We’ve been through a bad time, but—”
“We’re not through the bad time quite yet,” Paul said. “The Soviets took Raoul Wallenberg and never returned him to us or to Sweden. Raoul Wallenberg.”
“I know they did,” Robert said. “He was the greatest of men. I’ve met no one greater, and it’s a terrible shame. But the rest of the world and you have not been able to ascertain what happened to him.”
“No, I haven’t, but his driver, Vilmos Langfelder, was found dead. What does that tell you about the Soviets?”
“It tells me we have lives to get back to. The Russians are not sending us off to gas chambers and camps.”
“Not yet.”
“What do you mean not yet? No, not yet, correct. And we’re getting things back together again. We’re starting.”
“Uncle Robert, the Soviets liberated Hungary and never left. Hitler put in a puppet government here, and now that government is controlled by our liberators. Does that sit right with you?”
“They’re not killing us, most of us.”
Gratitude Page 49