by Edith Eger
Magda grows stronger as the days pass, but I am still weak. My upper back continues to ache, making it difficult to walk, and my chest is heavy with congestion. I rarely leave the house. Even if I weren’t sick, there is nowhere I want to go. When death is the answer to every question, why go walking? Why talk when any interaction with the living serves to prove that you move through the world in the company of an ever-growing congregation of ghosts? Why miss anyone in particular when everyone has so many to mourn?
I rely on my sisters: Klara, my devoted nurse; Magda, my source of news, my connection to the greater world. One day she comes home breathless. “The piano!” she says. “I found it. It’s in the coffeehouse. Our piano. We’ve got to get it back.”
The coffeehouse owner won’t believe that it’s ours. Klara and Magda take turns pleading. They describe the family chamber music concerts in our parlor, how János Starker, Klara’s cellist friend, another child prodigy from the conservatory, played a concert with Klara in our house the year of his professional debut. None of their words holds sway. Finally, Magda seeks out the piano tuner. He comes with her to the café and talks to the owner and then looks inside the piano lid to read the serial number. “Yes,” he says, nodding, “this is the Elefánt piano.” He gets together a crew of men to bring it back to our apartment.
Is there something inside me that can verify my identity, that can restore myself to myself? If such a thing existed, who would I seek out to lift the lid, read the code?
One day a package arrives from Aunt Matilda. Valentine Avenue, the Bronx, the return address reads. She sends tea, Crisco. We have never seen Crisco before and so have no idea that it’s a butter substitute to be used for cooking and baking. We eat it plain, we spread it on bread. We reuse the tea bags again and again. How many cups can we brew with the same leaves?
Occasionally, our doorbell rings, and I jolt up in bed. These are the best moments. Someone is waiting outside the door, and in the seconds before we open it, that person could be anyone. Sometimes I imagine it is our father. He survived the first selection after all. He found a way to work, to appear young throughout the rest of the war, and here he is, smoking a cigarette, holding a piece of chalk, a long measuring tape slung around his neck like a scarf. Sometimes it is Eric I imagine on the stoop. He holds a bouquet of roses.
My father never comes. That is how we know for sure that he is dead.
One day Lester Korda, one of the two brothers who rode with us on the train from Wels to Vienna, rings the bell. He has come to see how we are making out. “Call me Csicsi,” he says. He is like fresh air rushing into our stale rooms. We are in an ongoing limbo, my sisters and I, between looking back and moving on. So much of our energy is used just to restore things—our health, our belongings, what we can of life before loss and imprisonment. Csicsi’s warmth and interest in our welfare remind me that there is more to live for than that.
Klara is in the other room, practicing violin. Csicsi’s eyes light up when he hears the music. “May I meet the musician?” he asks, and Klara obliges. She plays a Hungarian czardas. Csicsi dances. Maybe it is time to build our lives—not back to what they were, but anew.
Throughout the summer of 1945, Csicsi becomes a regular visitor. When Klara has to travel to Prague for another concert, Csicsi offers to go with her.
“Shall I bake a wedding cake now?” Magda asks.
“Stop it,” Klara says. “He has a girlfriend. He’s just being polite.”
“Are you sure you’re not falling in love?” I ask.
“He remembers our parents,” she says, “and I remember his.”
When I have been home a few weeks, although I am barely strong enough, I make the journey on foot to Eric’s old apartment. No one from his family has returned. The apartment is empty. I vow to go back as often as I can. The pain of staying away is greater than the disappointment of vigilance. To mourn him is to mourn more than a person. In the camps I could long for his physical presence and hold on to the promise of our future. If I survive today, tomorrow I will be free. The irony of freedom is that it is harder to find hope and purpose. Now I must come to terms with the fact that anyone I marry won’t know my parents. If I ever have children, they won’t know their grandparents. It isn’t just my own loss that hurts. It’s the way it ripples out into the future. The way it perpetuates. My mother used to tell me to look for a man with a wide forehead because that means he’s intelligent. “Watch how he uses his handkerchief,” she would say. “Make sure he always carries a clean one. Make sure his shoes are polished.” She won’t be at my wedding. She won’t ever know who I become, whom I choose.
Klara is my mother now. She does it out of love and a natural competence. She also does it out of guilt. She wasn’t there to protect us at Auschwitz. She will protect us now. She does all the cooking. She feeds me with a spoon, like I’m a baby. I love her, I love her attention, I love being held and made to feel safe. But it is suffocating too. Her kindness leaves me no breathing room. And she seems to need something from me in return. Not gratitude or appreciation. Something deeper. I can feel that she relies on me for her own sense of purpose. For her reason for being. In taking care of me, she finds the reason why she was spared. My role is to be healthy enough to stay alive yet helpless enough to need her. That is my reason for having survived.
By the end of June, my back still isn’t healed. There is a constant crunching, piercing feeling between my shoulder blades. And my chest still hurts, even to breathe. Then I break out in a fever. Klara takes me to the hospital. She insists that I be given a private room, the very best care. I worry about the expense, but she says she will just play more concerts, she will find a way to cover it. When the doctor comes in to examine me, I recognize him. He’s the older brother of my former schoolmate. His name is Gaby. I remember that his sister called him the Angel Gabriel. She is dead now, I learn. She died at Auschwitz. He asks me if I ever saw her there. I wish I had a last image for him to remember her by, and I consider lying, telling him a story in which I witnessed her do something brave, speak of him lovingly. But I don’t lie. I would rather face the unknown void of my father and Eric’s last minutes than to be told something that, however comforting, isn’t true. The Angel Gabriel gives me my first medical attention since liberation. He diagnoses me with typhoid fever, pneumonia, pleurisy, a broken back. He makes a removable cast for me that covers my whole torso. I place it on the bed at night so that I can climb inside it, my plaster shell.
Gaby’s visits become more than just physically therapeutic. He doesn’t charge me for his medical care. We sit and reminisce. I can’t grieve with my sisters, not explicitly. It’s too raw, too present. And to grieve with them seems like a defilement of the miracle of our togetherness. We never hold one another and cry. But with Gaby I can allow myself to grieve. One day I ask Gaby about Eric. He remembers him but doesn’t know what became of him. Gaby has colleagues working at a repatriation center in the Tatra Mountains. He says he will ask them to see what they can learn about Eric.
One afternoon Gaby examines my back. He waits until I am lying down on my stomach to tell me what he has learned. “Eric was sent to Auschwitz,” he says. “He died in January. The day before liberation.”
I erupt in a wail. I think my chest will break. The blast of sorrow is so severe that tears won’t come—only a jagged moaning in my throat. I am not yet capable of clear thoughts or questions about my beloved’s last days, about his suffering, about the state of his mind and his spirit when his body gave out. I am consumed by the grief and injustice of losing him. If he could have held on for a few more hours, maybe even just a few more breaths, we could be together now. I moan into the table until my voice goes hoarse.
As the shock dissolves, I understand that in a strange way the pain of knowing is merciful. I have no such certainty about my own father’s death. To know for sure that Eric is gone is like receiving a diagnosis after a long ache. I can pinpoint the reason for the hurt. I can clarify what
has to heal.
But a diagnosis is not a cure. I don’t know what to do with Eric’s voice now, the remembered syllables, the hope.
By the end of July my fever is gone, but Gaby still isn’t satisfied with my progress. My lungs, compressed too long by my broken back, are full of fluid. He worries that I might have contracted tuberculosis and recommends that I go to a TB hospital in the Tatra Mountains, near the repatriation center where he learned of Eric’s death. Klara will accompany me on the train to the nearest village in the mountains. Magda will stay at the apartment. After the effort of reclaiming it, on the off-chance of an unexpected visitor, we can’t risk leaving it empty, even for a day. Klara tends me on the journey as if I am a child. “Look at my little one!” she exclaims to fellow passengers. I beam at them like a precocious toddler. I practically look like one. My hair has fallen out again from the typhoid and is just starting to grow back, baby soft. Klara helps me cover my head with a scarf. As we gain elevation, the dry alpine air feels clean in my chest, but it’s still hard to breathe. There is a constant sludge in my lungs. It’s as though all the tears I can’t allow myself to shed on the outside are draining into a pool inside. I can’t ignore the grief, but I can’t seem to expel it either.
Klara is due back in Košice for another radio performance—her concerts are our only source of income—and can’t accompany me to the TB hospital where I am to stay until I am well, but she refuses to let me go alone. We ask around at the repatriation center to see if anyone knows of someone going to the hospital, and I’m told that a young man staying in the nearby hotel is also going there to be treated. When I approach him in the lobby of the hotel, he is kissing a girl.
“Meet me at the train,” he growls.
When I approach him on the train platform he is still kissing the girl. He is gray haired, at least ten years older than I am. I will turn eighteen in September, but with my skinny limbs and flat chest and bald head I look more like twelve. I stand beside them awkwardly as they embrace, not sure how to get his attention. I’m annoyed. This is the man to whom I’m to be entrusted?
“Could you help me, sir?” I finally ask. “You are supposed to escort me to the hospital.”
“I’m busy,” he says. He barely breaks his kiss to respond to me. He is like an older sibling shaking away an annoying sister. “Meet me on the train.”
After Klara’s constant fawning and attention, his dismissiveness cuts. I don’t know why it bothers me so much. Is it that his girlfriend is alive while my boyfriend is dead? Or is it that I am already so diminished that without another person’s attention or approval I feel I am in danger of disappearing entirely?
He buys me a sandwich on the train and a newspaper for himself. We don’t talk, other than to exchange names and formalities. Béla is his name. To me he is just a rude person on a train, a person I must grudgingly ask for help, a person who only grudgingly gives it.
When we arrive at the station, we learn we have to walk to the TB hospital, and now there is no newspaper to distract him.
“What did you do before the war?” he asks. I notice what I didn’t hear before—he speaks with a stutter. When I tell him that I was a gymnast and I danced ballet, he says, “That reminds me of a joke.”
I look at him expectantly, ready for a dose of Hungarian humor, ready for the relief I felt at Auschwitz when Magda and I hosted the boob contest with our bunkmates, the lift of laughter in terrible times.
“There was a bird,” he says, “and the bird was about to die. A cow came and warmed him up a little—from his rear end, if you know what I mean—and the bird started to perk up. Then a truck came and finished off the bird. A wise old horse came by and saw the dead bird on the road. The horse said, ‘Didn’t I tell you if you have shit on your head, don’t dance?’” Béla laughs at his own joke.
But I feel insulted. He means to be funny, but I think he is trying to tell me, you have shit on your head. I think he means, you’re a real mess. I think he’s saying, you shouldn’t call yourself a dancer if you look like this. For a moment, before his insult, it had been such a relief to have his attention, such a relief to be asked who I was before the war. Such a relief to acknowledge the me who existed—who thrived—before the war. His joke reinforces how irreparably the war has changed and damaged me. It hurts for a stranger to cut me down. It hurts because he’s right. I am a mess. Still, I won’t let an insensitive man or his Hungarian sarcasm get the last word. I will show him that the buoyant dancer still lives in me, no matter how short my hair is, how thin my face, how thick the grief in my chest. I bound ahead of him and do the splits in the middle of the road.
I don’t have TB, as it turns out. They keep me for three weeks in the hospital all the same to treat the fluid building up in my lungs. I am so afraid of contracting TB that I open doors with my feet instead of my hands, even though I know the disease can’t be spread through touch, germs on doorknobs. It is a good thing that I don’t have TB, but I am still not well. I don’t have the vocabulary to explain the flooded feeling in my chest, the dark throb in my forehead. It’s like grit smeared across my vision. Later, this feeling will have a name. Later, I will know to call it depression. Now all I know is that it takes effort to get out of bed. There’s the effort of breath. And, worse, the existential effort. Why get up? What is there to get up for? I wasn’t suicidal at Auschwitz, when things were hopeless. Every day I was surrounded by people who said, “The only way you’ll get out of here is as a corpse.” But the dire prophecies gave me something to fight against. Now that I am recuperating, now that I am facing the irrevocable fact that my parents are never coming back, that Eric is never coming back, the only demons are within. I think of taking my own life. I want a way out of pain. Why not choose not to be?
Béla has been assigned the room right above mine. One day he stops by my room to check on me. “I’ll make you laugh,” he says, “and that will make you better. You’ll see.” He waggles his tongue, pulls on his ears, makes animal noises, the way you might entertain a baby. It’s absurd, maybe insulting, yet I can’t help myself. The laugh rises out of me like a tide. “Don’t laugh,” the doctors had warned me, as though laughter was a constant temptation, as though I was in danger of laughing to death. “If you laugh, you will have more pain.” They were right. It does hurt, but it also feels good.
I lie awake that night thinking of him in the bed just above mine, thinking up things to impress him, things I studied in school. The next day, when he visits my room, I tell him everything I have been able to remember in the night about Greek myths, calling up the most obscure gods and goddesses. I tell him about Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, the last book Eric and I read together. I perform for him, the way I used to perform for my parents’ dinner guests, my turn in the spotlight before Klara, the headlining act, took the stage. He looks at me the way a teacher looks at a star pupil. He tells me very little about himself, but I do learn that he studied violin when he was young and still loved to play chamber music recordings and conduct in the air.
Béla is twenty-seven years old. I am only a child. He has other women in his life. The woman he was kissing on the train platform when I interrupted him. And, he tells me, another patient here at the TB hospital, his cousin Marianna’s best friend, a girl he dated in high school, before the war. She is very ill. She isn’t going to make it. He calls himself her fiancé, a gesture of hope for her on her deathbed, a gesture of hope for her mother. Months later, I will learn that Béla also has a wife—a near stranger, a woman with whom he was never intimate, a gentile, with whom he made an arrangement on paper in the early days of the war in an effort to protect his family and his fortune.
It isn’t love. It’s that I am hungry, so very hungry, and I amuse him. And he looks at me the way Eric did that long-ago day in the book club, as though I am intelligent, as though I have worthwhile things to say. For now, that’s enough.
On my last night in the TB hospital, I lie in my snug little room and a voice co
mes to me, from the bottom of the mountains, from the very center of the Earth. Up through the floor and thin mattress, it envelops me, charges me. If you live, the voice says, you’ve got to stand for something.
“I’ll write to you,” Béla says in the morning, when we say goodbye. It’s not love. I don’t hold him to it.
When I return to Košice, Magda meets me at the train station. Klara has been so possessive of me since our reunion that I have forgotten what it is like to be alone with Magda. Her hair has grown. Waves frame her face. Her eyes are bright again. She looks well. She is bursting with gossip from the three weeks that I’ve been away. Csicsi has broken things off with his girlfriend and is now unabashedly courting Klara. The Košice survivors have formed an entertainment club, and she has already promised that I will perform. And Laci, the man from the top of the train, has written to tell us that he has received an affidavit of support from his relatives in Texas. Soon he will join them in a place called El Paso, she tells me, where he will work in their furniture store and save money for medical school.
“Klara better not humiliate me by marrying first,” Magda says.
This is how we will heal. Yesterday, cannibalism and murder. Yesterday, choosing blades of grass. Today, the antiquated customs and proprieties, the rules and roles that make us feel normal. We will minimize the loss and horror, the terrible interruption of life, by living as though none of it happened. We will not be a lost generation.