by Andrew Ervin
“You’re welcome,” the young man told him, leading him to the door. “Enjoy your holiday.”
The stairwell was frigid and he was ready, almost, to return to his hotel. Outside, the firemen were putting away their gear and the crowds had gone to bed. He stared in awe at the pristine roof, which he so recently saw destroyed before his very eyes. It was practically unscathed. He had witnessed a miracle. For a moment, only a flashing moment that he would promptly regret, he considered throwing his stone at one of the elaborate windows of the synagogue, simply because he expected it would bounce off. The stunning beauty of the building was made even more profound, to him, by its permanence, as ineradicable as the Earth itself.
Freezing halfway to his death, he allowed the stone to remain in his pocket while he walked slowly back to the körút, sustained only by the alcohol in his blood, to hail a cab. A gregarious and hirsute driver engaged him in a lengthy conversation he didn’t understand, or even hear above the Gypsy music rattling in the speakers behind his seat. “Igen,” Harkályi told him. “Tudom, tudom.” I know, I know.
9.
Even with the smoke and the grime scrubbed from his face and drained down into the belly of the city, sleep remained an impossibility. He lay down nevertheless to welcome the voices he knew to expect. He did not fear them now, in the gentle twilight of his unconsciousness. In a matter of hours, he would loosen on the world his new opera, The Golden Lotus. Again, he will take the songs of his family, of his people, of his fellow prisoners at Terezín, and share them with the fickle-minded public, who will purchase copies but, he knew, never really hear them.
He could already picture before him hundreds of thousands of shiny DVDs, and hear the corresponding number of dead souls calling, admonishing him, encouraging him. So much music had been lost, more notes than he could draw in this lifetime or in a hundred of them. The faces wanted Harkályi to speak for them, and it was a responsibility that weighed heavily, much too heavily, upon him. He must answer to them first, and only then to himself.
Harkályi had kept private, until then, only one final element of his being, but come the last measures of his new opera, even his parents’ lullaby will become another morsel for public consumption.
These half million compact discs were perfect reproductions of each other, but in the hands of his public they will reflect a half million different realities. Each will be unique, every spin through the home high-fidelity system a new event, a new experience for the listener. Recorded music changed over time, but nothing could exhume the spectral presence of a living performance. The concert hall had become a sacred place, as sacred in some ways as where he learned to compose music.
It had become impossible now to comprehend such a thing, but the hideous truth remained that it was Zoltán Kodály himself who suggested that Lajos, a thirteen-year-old violin prodigy, should wait out the remainder of the war in the Terezín ghetto. Better there, he had thought, than fending for scraps in the sub-basements of Budapest.
Almost 250 years earlier, Joseph II had ordered the construction of an outpost at the confluence of the Ohře and Labe rivers, the first line of defense protecting the Austrio-Hungarian Empire from the savage Germanic hordes. Across the Ohře from the small fortress, in which, more recently, the regicide Gavrilo Princip perished, stood the spa town of Terezín. The Nazis offered that village, Kodály had told him, to the Jewish population of Central Europe as a safe haven, sequestered from the general population. A former Liszt Academy colleague, immediately upon his arrival, had sent Kodály a postcard boasting of the vast and vibrant musical life that flourished under the protection of the administrative council of Jewish elders. Karel Ančerl himself conducted a resident orchestra. Wealthy Jews from all over Central Europe, denied their civil rights and freedom of movement at home, funneled toward Czechoslovakia.
Budapest was no longer safe. Lajos’s father had not been heard from since his departure for forced labor at a brick factory someplace beyond the city limits. With the blessings of their mother, Kodály made arrangements, at tremendous personal expense, to have Lajos and his brother, Tibor, smuggled safely to Vienna. One June evening, at dusk, they emerged from the cellar beneath Andrássy Boulevard, where they had been hiding from the Arrow Cross. His mother, always graceful, did not cry as they were hoisted into the bed of a horse-drawn wagon. She handed Lajos a sack of walnuts and a smooth, round stone he could use to break them open. He would not see her again, though her voice still rang in his ears. It would be her song that the world would hear decades later, in the afternoon. “Do not be afraid,” she had said. As they pulled away, she sang to them, and to herself, a gentle lullaby.
The boys hid for hours beneath a bed of straw and manure, stopping finally, before dawn, in Vienna. They had already eaten all of the nuts, three days’ worth, yet Lajos held fast to the stone and would continue to do so for more than half a century. In Vienna, or near it, they waited in lines that extended to the very horizon, until a small pack of bored German officers chose which among them to herd aboard two vacant boxcars. A soldier pulled the paperwork from his hands, and Lajos and his brother were permitted to join 150 others on Transport No. IV/14I from Vienna; a far greater number, most of them elderly and infirm, remained behind. The endless clip-clop syncopation of the locomotive disgorged from the passengers a hideous music of moaning and sobbing, of death itself, that could not be notated by human hands. It was hours or days—perhaps a month, or ten years, or a thousand—before they reached Terezín, a town that he and Tibor and so many others would come to regard as the anteroom to hell itself.
Harkályi rose from his soft bed, entirely unrested, and closed the bathroom door behind him. The joints of his elbows and knees ached; there was pain in his lower back. The steam of the shower warmed his naked body, the skin that hung loosely from his arms and belly, while he scrubbed the debris from one eye and then the other. His wooly, normally wild hair was shorn close and tame for the events of the day about to unfold before him.
10.
The faint daylight oozing through the ceiling of clouds made the temperature even more jarring. It felt colder that morning than it had in the middle of the night, when he had been drenched in sweat. Harkályi avoided looking at the picture of himself staring out at him again from the window of the record shop, which was not yet open for business. Perhaps it was closed in honor of Independence Day; it was difficult to say—everything was different now in Hungary. It felt like snow might fall soon.
The sidewalks of the körút were full of people, many of them already intoxicated. He had by mistake left his wristwatch in the room. Over at the National Museum, they were already reenacting Petőfi’s speech of March 15, 1848, when the poet spoke out against the empire and instigated a revolt that failed to gain from Austria the independence that Hungary so desperately desired and would not earn until the end of the Soviet regime. If even then. There were speeches, nationalistic hymns, a brass band. Children waved flags while men passed bottles of pálinka through the smoking crowd. Harkályi had seen the ceremonies on satellite television and had no desire to witness them in the flesh.
In the underpass beneath the Nyugati train station, a band of South Americans in colorful attire performed cheerful, primitive music in a circle, to the delight of passersby. Waves of people spilled from the metro’s escalators. The woman from whom he bought the hóvirág was not present, but in her place others sold onions and roasted pumpkin seeds. A pretty young girl sold wrinkled clothes from a laundry hamper. A freshly shaven youth attempted to hand Harkályi a religious pamphlet, but he recoiled from the boy’s reach.
He had time to waste before meeting Magda and wanted to take a stroll, to clear his head before the concert, an event lingering ominously at the furthermost poles of his thoughts; he knew it was there, yet refused, still, to bring it into focus. It was embarrassing—the pageantry and applause, the idolatry that conflated him, this tired old man, with his compositions. He could not wait to see his niece; she alon
e would relieve the tedium of public appearance.
The flower shop was not open. He would have liked to buy a new bouquet for Magda. He scanned the headlines at the newsstand, but there was no front-page mention of the synagogue fire. Perhaps it was old news, as those neighbors said, that arson occurred every year at this time. It was unfathomable that fascism, even a sickening, modern parody of it, could continue to exist in the twenty-first century. No frame of reference existed any longer, except in the minds and art of his quickly deteriorating generation. People did not understand what had transpired.
Above the clapping and pan-fluting of the South Americans, he was able to discern some kind of commotion emanating from a hallway leading to the rear of the train station: the prolonged, rapid-fire clinking of a slot machine. There was cheering, a crowd forming. A shabby man, older in appearance than his age would dictate, with the gray pallor of lifelong drunkenness, had won a small fortune in coins. His excitement infected all of those within the glass-enclosed pub, as well as those outside, their noses pressed against the filthy windows. The man bought three liters of wine, which the scantily clad server ladled from vats built into the surface of the bar. She handed unstemmed drinking glasses to all present, and more people crammed their way inside to partake of the free alcohol. It was a minor stampede of the borderline homeless. It looked like the greatest day in the entire life of the winning man; he would tell stories of this morning for the short remainder of his dull life. The scene sickened Harkályi, but fascinated him also. He envied the men’s easy camaraderie, so utterly free of pretense.
Farther down the hall, he happened upon a sight so foreign that he questioned if he had fallen asleep after all, if it were but a dream shaken loose from the recesses of his memory. No, it was real. A band of skinheads—true skinheads, in the flesh, six or seven of them—were attacking a Negro man without stop, without mercy. Blood drooled from the young man’s eyelids, from his lips. They kicked at him from all sides.
“Stop that!” Harkályi ordered them, before he could think better of it.
The smallest of the assailants, no more than sixteen years old, approached with the silver blade of a serrated knife drawn. He said something in Hungarian, his voice cracking. His armband did not feature a swastika but, instead, a green machinery cog. They stood toe-to-toe, but this boy was half a foot shorter. Harkályi craned his neck to look into the dusty-glass color of the child’s eyes. He could not find it in himself to be afraid. The noise of the gamblers behind him swelled, drew closer. The skinheads dropped their prey and shouted at the child, whose vodka breath polluted his own; the boy lifted Harkályi’s necktie and ran his knife through it, dragging it downward to split the silk into shreds. “Zsidó disznó,” he said—words Harkályi would look up two days later, when he arrived again in Philadelphia; he knew better than to ask Magda. “Jewish pig.” The boy backed away, and stepped on the fallen man as the skinheads retreated into the depths of the train station.
The drunken revelry spilled out of the pub and into the hallway. The bums laughed and cheered and ignored the unconscious black man. Harkályi knelt next to him, dirtying his own pants. The man’s jacket read U.S. ARMY and GIBSON over the left breast. There was not as much blood as he had thought, though his face had already started to mutate into some hideous mask: one eye had sealed entirely closed under the weight of a large lump on his brow, his nose appeared broken, and a safety pin affixed to a tiny Hungarian flag jutted out of his bottom lip. When Harkályi removed it, the man regained consciousness.
“The fuck happened?”
“You were attacked by skinheads,” Harkályi told him. “Wait here and I will get a doctor.”
“I don’t need a doctor. Help me up.”
Harkályi attempted to lift the man, but he was surprisingly heavy for his diminutive stature. He was solid muscle, but his neck could not fully support the weight of his own head. It was only with significant struggle that he was able to at last climb to his feet.
“You are an American?” Harkályi asked.
The man did not respond, except by way of a deep-bellied groan. Saliva and blood dripped freely from his mouth.
“You need medical help. Please.”
“I said I don’t want a doctor, old man. Did you say skinheads?”
“Yes. Today, apparently, is their big occasion to go wild, or even wilder than usual.”
“I guess so,” the man said. The pain must have been excruciating. It was a wonder that he had the strength to stand. “I need to go. Thanks for your help.”
“Of course. Are you certain you do not want me to find a doctor?”
“No, I’m good.”
The man carried himself toward the crowded underpass. Harkályi watched his slow, ambling progress. He still smelled the alcoholic stench of that murderous child; his was the very face of Harkályi’s own parents’ murderers, whom he had loathed since he hid in those underground passages so similar to this one. Only now Harkályi was not angry—his lifetime’s worth of fury had dried up, and he mustered only some sensation approaching pity for the boy. It was ignorance, as much as evil, that made him dangerous. And it was the joy in his own heart, and the forgiveness, that distinguished them. He removed his ruined tie and left it on the ground, in the small pool of spilled blood.
11.
With an hour yet before he had to depart for Buda, he sat on the plush hotel sofa to watch television. There was no news, only reenactments of previous events, the cyclical return of war and famine and genocide, war and famine and genocide, interrupted by equally crude commercial advertisements. Only the longitudes changed, and now it was the Americans who put men in concentration camps. Harkályi, to his regret, will not live long enough to hear the music composed in Guantánamo, or in these secretive black sites speckled like cancerous moles on Europe’s backside.
Miraculously, the stories concerning the tremendous musical life of Terezín proved to be true, yet every other storied detail about that concentration camp—and it was most certainly a concentration camp—proved to be willfully exaggerated, if not criminally false. The Schutzstaffel used the site as a model facility, as the set of an elaborated staged drama demonstrating to the world their kindly treatment of Europe’s Jews who, in reality, were upon arrival stripped of their possessions, shaved and deloused, and forced to live no better than oxen in prison-like dormitories.
When Lajos and his brother arrived in June of 1943, preparations had already begun for an inspection of the facilities by the Red Cross. To prevent the appearance of overcrowding, additional labor engagement transports were loaded and quickly dispatched at all hours of the night and day, carrying up to a thousand people at a time to Poland and places unknown. Rumors filtered back, slightly less quickly, even among the children, and presumably to the entire world, about the nature of those steady departures. He and Tibor could have been condemned at any time. The kapo of their dormitory provided them with a postcard on which they were to inform their family about the comfortable conditions in which they found themselves. They did not use Kodály’s address, for fear of raising suspicion among the authorities about his activities on their behalf, and instead they had the card sent to their former neighbors, the ones who had alerted the Nazis to their whereabouts and had had their father arrested; the boys hoped that the Arrow Cross would deliver it personally and arrest them as Jewish sympathizers. Only years later, during his previous visit to Hungary, would Harkályi learn that Kodály and his wife had by that time already abandoned their home for the dank basement of a Budapest church, where he completed his Missa Brevis.
The Red Cross arrived, and then departed again, and tens of thousands more souls continued to Poland.
There existed in Terezín any number of ensembles, tolerated by the Nazis and consisting of rotating rosters of musicians, who performed everything from complete operas—almost exclusively German and Italian—to decadent, American-style jazz. A small town square contained a wooden riser, upon which they performed public
concerts on weekends. There was even a baby grand piano, albeit a crippled one, its legs shorn off as if it had stepped on a landmine. Most of the serious musical activities occurred in secret, however. As a “millionaire,” camp slang for a new prisoner, and at his age, Lajos was not at first provided access to one of the many violins circulating through the town, some of them carried to Czechoslovakia unassembled and glued roughly back together. He and Tibor were assigned to the Halfsdienst, a work detail for young people, but were also permitted to participate in a children’s chorus. The boys learned to speak some Czech despite the proclamation that all public utterances were to be in German. In his precious free time, late in the night, Lajos transcribed for violin, from memory, Bartók’s Fourteen Bagatelles and performed them on a borrowed instrument, eventually allowed him, for a small but enthusiastic audience in the attic of the dormitory in which he lived.
When word of his musical prowess spread, as it was bound to do in such a setting, he was given the regular use of a too-small, half-sized violin, on which he was able to practice for the occasional private violin lesson. He also found himself relieved of his work duties and, to the ire of his jealous brother, assigned to the exclusive group of Notenschreiber who reproduced by hand the rare, precious scores that arrived at Terezín, or were composed there amidst the chaos and horror. Every so often, Lajos would change a note or two, such as those at the very center of the violin part of Gideon Klein’s Trio, and await with great joy his surreptitious contribution to the public performances. Many of those scores were lost, and little by little Harkályi had, in the intervening years, attempted to resurrect them in his own compositions.
12.
His mother sat alone, a porcelain cup of weak tea held on a saucer in her lap. The room was strangely bright, bleached by a sun that had drawn inexplicably closer. He approached her, as if dreaming, finally asleep, and as she stood, her smile grew bountiful enough to rid Lajos of all that plagued him. The porcelain made no sound as she returned it to the table.