by Andrew Ervin
Harkályi did not encounter another pedestrian until he reached the embankment, although several taxi cabs passed him, slowly, attempting to entice him out of the winter air. The taste of paprika remained on his tongue, warmed him, until he emerged at the left bank of the Duna. He was farther upstream than he had anticipated, just below the Chain Bridge. Directly opposite him was Castle Hill, its dome aglow in buttery lights. To the left of it stood Gellért Hill, adorned by a statue of a woman who once held up a cog seemingly taken from some monstrous machine. When communism fell, she exchanged it for a leaf of some variety, clearly plucked from an equally monstrous tree.
He had spent many similar nights, at this very hour, walking along this river in Vienna, yet here it both was and was not the same river. To him it will always be the Duna, not the Donau or even the Danube. The Duna. All Hungarian history was steeped in it, as was that of his own family. The wind was harsh, but also comfortingly recognizable and sonorous. The river smelled of rust and, he had to admit, familiarly, faintly, of urine. There was also blood in the air. Somewhere around here, likely over on the Buda side, in front of the Gellért Hotel, his grandparents, unfit to travel, were gunned down, their bodies left to the vagaries of the tide while, in the hotel, men and women, naked and segregated, took the waters of the mineral-rich thermal springs seeping from the fault lines at the foot of the Buda Hills. His family tried to assimilate—they changed their name from Specht to Harkály, and, soon thereafter, at the advice of some kindhearted neighbors, to the more grammatically plausible Harkályi. His father left for a forced-labor camp convinced that those same neighbors were responsible for turning him over to the authorities.
For all of these many years, Harkályi longed to stand again at this river, to feel in his chest its peculiar, bitter stench. He breathed heartily, and was comforted. He owned nothing belonging to his grandparents except for this stone, which he considered throwing in after them, returning it to them here at their grave. From his parents, he possessed only a simple melody, which they often hummed and half-sang to him and his brother, and to each other. The next day, in the final measures of his new opera, he would share that song with the entire world.
6.
The only people fit to wander the embankment at that hour were lonely, world-weary old men and the prostitutes who preyed upon them. Harkályi walked slowly north, against the tide, along the wide promenade and past a pack of hyenic street hustlers who eyed him hungrily but maintained a distance. The fading red embers of an unfiltered cigarette landed in his path, and there was giggling. He extinguished it in stride and with satisfaction. Experience told him that there existed many ways to prostitute oneself, and he had reason to suspect that the bartering of one’s physical self was the least spiritually demanding of them. He pitied these shivering, desperate boys, but also envied them.
He passed a series of luxury hotels, their riverfront patios closed for the night, if not for the season. Budapest had grown wealthy. The stone lions at the base of the Chain Bridge greeted him like old friends. As a boy, he named them Scylla and Charybdis; between them, on the other side, a traffic tunnel led beneath the castle and toward the promised freedom of Western Europe. Sadly, these were not the same lions from his childhood, but reproductions, their offspring. As the Red Army wrested control of Budapest, the Nazis destroyed all of the bridges over the Duna, waiting until rush hour to do so. By that time, Harkályi was already convalescing in a Vienna hospital, awaiting, per Kodály’s arrangement, a personal visit from Anton von Webern himself. There was talk of a temporary post at Radio Vienna. When neither the visit nor the position materialized, the latter of which he did not particularly covet, he left for America without telling his mentor and continued his studies at a conservatory in Philadelphia. For years thereafter, his letters to Kodály were returned to him unread, except, he suspected, by the Soviet censors.
Farther along, a two-lane road ran between the parliament building and the river, but there was no sidewalk, so Harkályi stayed close to the small, stone ledge along which a guardrail prevented him from falling into the river. Three feet below him, driftwood and dead birds populated the crevasses of jagged boulders. Sentries in formal uniforms stood outside a pair of outhouse-like structures at either end of the white parliament building. They held machine guns, and eyed him even more ferociously than had the hustlers. The massive structure itself was difficult to see from this angle, but Harkályi remembered that it was every bit as spectacular as Notre Dame or the British parliament building, which was to say that it appeared simultaneously majestic and artificial, more a sculpture than a building that might be occupied. He could not comprehend the immensity of the detail; it was too much to look at, and he discovered that it could best be seen only peripherally, from the corner of his eye, in small chunks that, were they placed together, would dizzy him even further. “Frozen music,” as Goethe called architecture, was not quite the correct term. Music represented—it could be about something; architecture just was, and this building was even more so. The distinction embarrassed Harkályi in some way. He did not want to look at it; it was too beautiful, a monument to itself alone.
A flat transport ship appeared from beneath the Margit Bridge ahead of him, and he stopped to watch it pass. The sound of the engines was incredible, like an entire factory dedicated to the production of ball-peen hammers and garbage-can lids. It was lovely, really. Only a single, faint lightbulb illuminated the cabin, making the vessel all but invisible. The noise conquered everything around it, the city and its entire history; when it receded, he heard one of the parliament guards yelling at him. The young man approached, his machine gun drawn, and Harkályi pictured his own swollen body floating downstream, in the wake of this ship, to the grave of his grandparents. He did not understand what the soldier said, but interpreted the message, delivered by the angry motion of the gun’s barrel, and continued his walk upstream, more briskly this time. Half-expecting the sound of gunfire, he did not turn around.
Past the parliament building, an electric tram line followed the bank of the river. From the platform, a sidewalk continued to the Margit Bridge. On it, above his head, two underdressed ladies noisily made their way back toward Pest. They were on the körút, the very same road on which his hotel was located, only a few blocks away. He crossed through a small park situated under the base of the bridge, up a ramp to the road. The women had disappeared, mere ghosts. Sleep will not come tonight, he knew, not restful sleep at any rate, so instead he awaited the next passing taxi, which would take him to Dohány Street, to the synagogue.
7.
The synagogue was on fire. The realization descended upon him slowly, like an illness. The streets were emptied, the windows of the nearby apartments darkened. He assumed at first that the smoke rising from the triangular roof, between the Moorish domes, emanated from a chimney. He pictured a servant inside polishing the silver, mopping the floors, perhaps a zealous rabbinical student pouring through the library for the single arcane utterance, marginalized to some forgotten, dust-strewn alcove, that will help him make sense of his life, still so very young. Even when the first yellow flames danced into view, they appeared as an apparition, a flashback to the final days of his childhood in Budapest. Only the sound roused him: a violent crack like the report of a Luger aimed just centimeters above his head.
His shock—and it was shock now, not precisely fear just yet—found expression in a throaty scream, one unburdened by the demands of meaning. It was the sound, not entirely foreign to Harkályi, of pure terror. The noise carried through the expanse of buildings, down Dohány Street.
He did not know the Hungarian word for fire, so he yelled, “Fire!”
No reaction came from the blank wall of concrete and glass opposite the synagogue. It was the largest in Europe and occupied a parcel of land on which Herzl himself once lived. Flames climbed higher, fueled by the fierce March wind, and they chewed up a tile roof that one would not have expected to burn so readily.
; Harkályi shuffled to the doorways across the street, pressed all of the intercom buttons at once, producing a melody of electronic burps and bleeps. “Fire!” he yelled. Surely those on the third and fourth floors could see that the roof was on fire, that fire was consuming the synagogue. The sound of it grew louder, steadily more vicious. He ran to the next doorway and pressed all of the buttons on the metallic interface until he found the word: “Tz!”
“Tz! Tz!”
He entered a glass Matáv booth, but the phone would not function without a pre-paid calling card and he was ignorant of the local version of 911. He smashed the receiver with all of his strength against the glass shell of the booth, but it refused to break. A pain carried through his arm and landed in his shoulder. Outside again, he removed the stone from his pocket and hurled it at the phone booth. The sound was amazing, like a crystal chandelier plunging, mid-performance, into an open concert-grand piano. He carefully rescued the stone from the rubble, wiped it off with his gloves, and returned to pressing random codes into the communication and locking mechanisms of the nearby apartment buildings. “Fire! Help!”
Lights finally blinked on in the windows above. Angry oaths landed on him as if from overturned chamber pots, until the fire became blindingly obvious. A chorus picked up the refrain of “Tz! Tz!” until the entire block was alight. Men streamed from the buildings in their blue-and-white MTK Budapest sweatpants. A groggy crowd formed. The sidewalk itself opened to reveal a storage cellar. The smell of the basement, identical to those in which he had once hid, caused Harkályi’s racing heart to stop for an instant. A ladder flew out, then was raced across the street and pressed against the façade of the synagogue, where the flames had spread to the columns supporting the domes.
With practiced efficiency, two dozen men got to synchronous work. One of them climbed the ladder, next to which five more men erected a scaffold with a pulley system to lift pails of water. A line formed across the street, into the foyer of one of the apartment buildings. Harkályi joined their ranks, dead in the center of Dohány Street. Heavy buckets of water came one after the other out of the building and were passed along the line. He took them in his right hand and twisted to deliver them to the next man, who rewarded him with an empty one traveling the opposite direction, slightly less fast, away from the burning building. Harkályi could not keep up. He could no longer breathe, and he slowed the entire chain, further endangering the synagogue he had traveled so far to visit. The air would not leave his chest; it expanded into a painful knot beneath his ribcage and he grew faint, staggered on his feet. The young man next to him said something he couldn’t understand. A woman appeared, took him by the arm, and led him to the curb, where he sat. The rescue operation continued seamlessly in his absence. The cold winter air found the perspiration that glued his clothes to his body and he started to shiver. The woman returned after a moment and handed him a tiny cup made of green ceramic. “Tessék,” she said, and he smelled the pálinka before she even poured it from a plastic bottle, its Coca-Cola label still intact.
“Thank you,” Harkályi answered, breathless. “Köszönöm szépen.”
“Nem Magyar?”
“Amerikai vagyok.”
“Igen, amerikai?”
“Igen.”
Another woman appeared with a blanket, which she wrapped over his shoulders. The liquor, a kind of homemade slivovitz, tasted surprisingly delicious; it prickled the lining of his chest, his stomach. He regained control of his breathing, and either from the booze or the embarrassment at his age and physical ineptitude, he felt his face glowing bright red. The women had further work to do and left him alone to watch the spectacle. The full buckets appeared from the foyer of a house and passed through the hands of twenty men, many of them half Harkályi’s age, and then were attached by their handles to a large hook and hoisted up using the pulley; the empty ones were tossed down to a man on the ground and fed back into the line. It was beautiful. Harkályi expected the men to break out in song. Every so often, the man closest to the roof would climb down and allow another to take over, to plunge his face into the smoke and to throw water at the flames, which neither subsided nor spread. A small carload of reporters and photographers arrived to document the men working in unison like an efficient, steaming machine. Harkályi made a mental note of the rhythm.
Sirens nipped at the edges of his hearing, still excellent despite the years, and soon some small degree of relief washed over the crowd. Exhaustion by then slowed even the younger men, yet they continued to pass the metal buckets back and forth. The sound of the fire brigade, which grew steadily louder, reminded him of the wartime air raid sirens, sounds once heard so frequently that they eventually lost all currency. The real danger came not from falling bombs or the buildings that collapsed under the weight of fire, but rather from the bitter Gentiles those bombs sent scurrying to join him underground. The mobs of desperate, anti-Semitic citizens were all-too-ready to denounce lifelong friends of the family, for only a tin of sardines as the reward. One ill-timed sneeze and young Lajos would have found himself unearthed and exiled—or worse.
There were fates more capricious and incomprehensible than exile.
The stone in his pocket, now collecting the sweat of his labors, was the only remaining totem of his childhood. Even Tibor had passed on; his brother, by some series of miracles, survived the war and the camps, but succumbed to a drunken gambler, newly destitute, swerving his way back to the city on the Atlantic City Expressway, and left Magda to Harkályi’s absentee care. The stone survived when everything else around him withered, and it traveled with him from Hungary to Czechoslovakia, Czechoslovakia to the U.S. Army hospital in Vienna, and then to London and, eventually, Philadelphia.
He will leave the stone here at the Tabac-Schul, where it can, like him, complete its journey. It had never, in all of these many years, felt so unbearably heavy.
8.
The sirens grew louder until three red trucks arrived, followed closely by a black sport utility vehicle full of rabbis and their bodyguards. Blue and red lights spun and danced around Harkályi, reflecting in the windows of the synagogue and the buildings facing it. What a scene! As the firemen emerged, the neighborhood men scurried to the safety of the sidewalk, where Harkályi climbed to his feet. Bottles of fresh wine appeared, and he drank heartily from every one that was passed. Photographers clamored for the attention of the sweating men. They did not recognize Harkályi, for which he was grateful. The crude, homemade alcohol burned his stomach, but helped to calm his nerves. The fire, although seemingly contained, continued to destroy the synagogue roof. The firemen uncoiled their hoses and dragged them toward the burning building. Reporters with television cameras positioned the rabbis with their backs to the synagogue and interviewed them with smoke rising behind them. One of them wept openly and the cameraman handed him a handkerchief.
The apartment doors remained open so that the men could go upstairs to see the effects of their labors from the upper floors. Harkályi followed them through the cramped foyer and up a series of stone steps. The climb was not difficult, now that he had regained his breath and found strength in the fresh Bikavér wine—the so-called bull’s blood—still being passed freely around. A woman stood in the threshold, the one who had brought him the blanket, which he handed back in return. “Csókolom,” he said to his hostess—I kiss your hand—and she giggled at the formality. The men did not remove their shoes, and they splashed mud across the wooden floors.
“You are an American, yes?” someone asked. It was the man who was next to him in line, the woman’s husband.
“Yes,” Harkályi said. “Do you speak English?”
“No, a little. But my wife.”
“Your Hungarian is very good,” she said. She was perhaps thirty years old, wearing a morning jacket over her long nightdress. She placed the blanket over her own shoulders.
“Look at the roof,” she said, taking him by the hand. The apartment was small, but beautifully furnish
ed with antiques apparently inherited from several generations of ancestry, if such a thing were possible. A child slept on a divan, impervious to the commotion and conversation in the room, a corner of which served as their dining area. Books covered an entire wall and neighbors congregated in the tall windows, which opened to a balcony overlooking the synagogue. The firemen sprayed a material the color and consistency of fake snow.
To his surprise, the damage to the roof was minimal, perhaps only cosmetic.
“I don’t understand,” Harkályi said. The neighbors, less impressed, trickled slowly back to their own homes. “I saw the flames. It’s a miracle.”
The firemen now used water, at very high pressure, to wash away the foam. It looked as if it were raining, but only on one small parcel of one street.
“They do this every holiday and every election,” her husband said.
“You mean it was arson?” Harkályi asked. They looked at him blankly. “Someone did this on purpose, set the synagogue on fire?”
They smiled, almost amused, as if at a precocious child. “Of course,” the man said. “The skinheads.”
“This is how they celebrate Independence Day in Hungary,” his wife said.
The pálinka and wine began to make Harkályi dizzy. His knees shook. He wanted very much to sit down, but the man’s wife yawned and pulled the blanket more closely around herself.
“It’s late—I must go,” Harkályi said. “Thank you for the wine.”