Unravelled

by Anna Scanlon

  "Hey," my mother smiled weakly, her face still puffy, the rash that looked like a butterfly still speckled over her nose. "It'll only be for a few more weeks. Just until the war is over. Then we'll all go home, and you'll go back to how everything was before. We can do it, just for a few weeks."

  Chaya Goldberg nodded and met my mother's eyes, her brown irises shining with gratitude.

  "Thank you," she nodded. She sighed and then took a deep breath, as if to try and gather all the strength she would need to survive the coming months. I did the same, hoping it would get me through until I could be back home and in my own bed again (sleeping next to Kiraly, preferably, even though it wasn't allowed), swimming in the Tisza and giving the beautiful report I had worked so hard on in front of my class.

  4 CHAPTER FOUR

  

  Life settled into a routine, the way it always must in order to survive. Humans, my father would say over our increasingly routine meal of stale bread and potatoes, can adapt quite easily to any situation. Father would tell us how lucky we were to have one another, to still be alive when so many in Germany and England and France were being killed by enemy bombs. I would nod as my little teeth chomped on the bread, as though I understood anything about loss, or bombs, or death.

  The two families made do with what we had, arranging and rearranging furniture like a never ending puzzle to make it fit just so. In the end, one of the beds was moved into the living room, which served as a cramped, but usable bed for Lujza, Hajna and me. Back in our old home, I had never shared a bed before, only on nights when storms shook the windows so hard that my heart leapt into my throat, forcing me into the comforting arms of my parents. Reasoning our situation would only be for a month, three or four at the most, my sisters and I resigned to sleeping in one, tiny bed. My mother made up the couch each night to sleep on and my father took a bedroll and laid it out each night after dinner.

  "I'm a war veteran," he exclaimed. "I can sleep on the floor if I have to."

  The Goldbergs occupied the small bedroom, where the only source of natural light was a tiny, dirty window placed directly over the one remaining bed. The room appeared dark and gloomy all of the time, as if the sun were on permanent vacation. Even on the hottest of days, one would look to that window and assume it was raining outside. Zvi and Chaya Goldberg shared the bed while their two sons slept on a goose feather mattress they had brought with them to The Ghetto. With their sparse collection of things, the Goldbergs tried to make their room feel like home by tacking up photographs of family members and hanging Chaya Goldberg's crotchet work anywhere there was an empty space.

  My family also attempted to decorate the living room to add our own flavor. Although he wasn't working, Papa nailed his framed diploma on the wall to admire. Mama, Lujza, Hajna and I decorated the bare baby yellow walls with photographs of Nagyapa and Nagymama, our aunts and uncles and cousins. There were a few pictures of the family as well, including my favorite one, the picture of me sitting proudly on my first bicycle while Papa stood behind me, steadying me by placing a firm grasp on the back of the bicycle seat. Papa. He was always the one to protect me from harm, an anchor for my sadness.

  Luckily, the living room had a large window that faced the street so that we could watch the comings and goings as much as we pleased. If we looked to the left, we could strain just hard enough to maybe trick ourselves into thinking we could see our old house. To the right stood a paved road leading to the barrier of The Ghetto: a wall made hastily out of wooden pieces nailed together with barbed wire on the top. Looking to the right made me shiver. It made me feel as though we were prisoners, confined because of some terrible crime. So I just didn't look that way. Instead, I amused myself by watching the old women with their kerchiefs scurrying back and forth, children playing with marbles or chalk in the middle of the street or men whispering about business, one eye always looking away wondering if they were being overheard. Any time there were shouts, gunshots or sounds that in any way seemed someone was being beaten or abused, Mama called me away from the window to do something else. Always frustrated, I would begrudgingly mind her, turning on my heel and opening a book I had brought with me or going over math problems or history questions Papa had circled.

  Two days after we moved in, Papa started us on schoolwork, making worksheets for us in the morning on math and history and science. He had made a point to lug our schoolbooks in his own personal parcel, lest we accidentally-on-purpose forget to bring them with us. He would mark pages for us to read each morning or give us math sheets to struggle with, his explanations of the fractions and quotients a little less clear and a little more awkward than our teacher's.

  "Aliz, you only got four problems correct out of all twenty I gave you," Papa told me on the third day of our confinement, shaking his head and adjusting his silver wire framed spectacles he sometimes wore to read. "What happened?"

  "I think it may have been more the teacher and less the pupil," my mother mused as she cut up some of the fruit she had brought with her. "I've already passed the level Aliz and Hajna are in, but the way you explained it made it seem more like organic chemistry and less like math for 8-year-olds."

  Hajna and I exchanged giggles and Lujza looked up from her own algebra problems she was struggling with to share a smile with her sisters and parents.

  For the first few weeks, Daniel and Samuel Goldberg, the nine-year-old twins with raven black curly hair and brown eyes so dark that they were almost black, spent their days on the opposite side of The Ghetto studying the Torah with a Rebbe from their village. The Goldbergs, who were devoutly religious (Zvi Goldberg spent several hours a day davening with his Bible while my father looked on uncomfortably) had decided that this situation could not prevent their children from "tasting the sweetness of the Torah." Besides, Zvi Goldberg had reasoned, his children were boys and we were girls, and it wasn't proper for us to be in the same room unsupervised. It was against their religion.

  Papa and Mama had raised our family with just a hint of religion. My grandparents on both sides went to temple each and every Friday night and Saturday morning. Each time we went to visit either set of grandparents during Shabbat, my Nagymama would light the candles at exactly sunset, her crooked and arthritic fingers gingerly setting the match to its spark before she would cover her eyes, rock back and forth and whisper the traditional Sabbath prayers. Although none of my grandparents were Orthodox, they still held Judaism close to their hearts. My Mama and Papa didn't see it as something so important, which caused many terse words to be exchanged during visits to grandparents' houses after they thought the children were out of earshot. My parents still loved Judaism, but they found some of the rules to be burdensome, outdated even. They took us to temple on the High Holy Days and celebrated sedars at home with the children. Each Sukkot, Papa would build a great big booth in the front yard that we children would decorate with our gentile and Jewish friends alike before eating a giant and fulfilling meal inside of it, usually prepared by Agata. I didn't know a whole lot about the religion besides the motions of major holidays and the big Bible stories like Noah and the Ark and Adam and Eve. I couldn't quote scripture, like Daniel and Samuel. I couldn't speak or read Hebrew. I lacked the knowledge and awareness to compare our situation to the plight of Job. Our family was Jewish, but Judaism did not define us.

  Zvi Goldberg used the religious differences as an opportunity to preach to my father. He would sit down with him, knit his brows so tightly that I thought he must get a headache, and adjust the cap that he always wore and talk to my father about how important it was for Jews, especially in pivotal times such as these, to turn to Orthodoxy. I don't remember much from their discussions, but I often overheard stray sentences and debates as Lujza, Hajna and I played checkers or cards in the corner on the opposite side of the room, our eyes turned away, but our ears were open.

  Our days passed uneventfully for a few weeks. We girls did our schoolwork, while Papa helped correct it each evening. Mama
and Chaya Goldberg entertained themselves teaching one another skills the other one possessed. My mother taught Chaya Goldberg how to set the table properly for a four-course meal and Chaya Goldberg taught my mother at least fifteen different ways to cook a potato.

  My mother was never very good at running a household, something my father's mother always criticized her for when she turned away. My mother was good at entertaining, however, keeping dozens of people talking and laughing during a party, making her rounds like a beautiful, in-demand movie star. But because of my mother's mysterious condition, she rarely ever cooked or cleaned. On those very few days a year that she felt like she had some energy, she would get up and clean the house alongside our maid, Agata, or help her peel onions or potatoes for the dish that night. Although my father's mother often whispered that she was just lazy, all of us knew better. Mama wasn't lazy, she was just always in pain, always sickly. She would complain of pain all over her body, or just start running a fever --sometimes so high that my father would push a doctor on duty to admit her to the hospital. So she cooked when she could. She cleaned when she could. And when she couldn't, instead she would invite over the entire neighborhood to share in the delights of what Agata had cooked, or just to socialize with the neighbors and catch up on the latest in everyone's lives.

  I could sense Chaya Goldberg was already growing annoyed with my mother on the second or third week. She would ask Mama to go buy vegetables for our communal meal, and mother would complain about her knees hurting or being too tired.

  "How can you be tired?" she would say, just a hint of anger in her voice. "You haven't done anything all day but sit around."

  Mama never argued or got angry about it. Instead, she would simply nod and then shrug as if to affirm that it was true that she hadn't really done much that day to warrant her exhaustion. But there it was, and she refused to make an excuse for it. I knew Chaya Goldberg felt even stronger about the situation one day as I stood in the living room rifling through our books for something I hadn't read before and heard the Goldbergs' hushed voices through the cracked door.

  "They're just so, so, rich!" Chaya Goldberg whined, her voice becoming high pitched at the end of her accusation.

  "Why is that such a big thing?" Zvi countered. I could hear him rustling with the clean laundry that Chaya Goldberg had just finished drying on the line outside.

  "Well, for one thing, the mother is spoiled rotten. She depends on those kids to do everything for her while she doesn't do anything but sit around, willing herself to look pale. Maybe I'm just jealous because we never had that luxury, but I find it awfully annoying to try and share a household with a woman who refuses to get up and do her part."

  Instead of saying something, I took a deep breath and let out a long sigh. How could they think such terrible things about my mother? My childish mind couldn't comprehend how one person suffering a disease could impact a total stranger so much. Instead of bursting in as an ambush on the Goldbergs and getting angry, the way Hajna would have done, I simply left the situation alone and went on to play with my sister and then read the old, but new for me, book I had picked out to read later on. My mother always told me that not everyone was nice, something I almost didn’t comprehend until arriving in The Ghetto. What a lucky, sheltered child I had been.

  After a few weeks of our living day-to-day without much responsibility in the way of work for adults, we were given a rude awakening: all Jews over a certain age must report for work. My parents and the Golderg adults would be working, taking them away from us children.

  "I'll tell them we have children at home and we just can't leave," Mama announced over her morning coffee. She stood nonchalantly leaning against the stove, dressed in her pink kimono and matching slippers as she lazily spit out the words.

  It wasn't that simple. Many people in The Ghetto had small children., By order of the supervisors in The Ghetto, the children were to stay home while their parents went off to work. Papa even tried to reason with the officials, asking if Lujza could stay home to watch us while the adults were gone, but it was to no avail. Lujza was old enough to work, even if my father insisted that she wasn't an adult quite yet.

  "Lujza, can't you just tell them you don't want to go?" Hajna asked, shoveling one of the last rations of oatmeal we had brought from home in her mouth. She chewed quietly on her oats, a habit that used to drive me crazy when we were children. Listening to the clicking sound as the slimy oats made their way through her teeth made my stomach turn.

  "Stop it, Hajna," I snapped, before Lujza even had time to answer Hajna's question. Hajna, in turn, rolled her eyes and stuck her pink and purple tongue out at me, which was covered in half-chewed oats.

  "Don't do that, again, Hajna," Mama warned, tugging on Hajna's right ear just hard enough to give her a warning about behaving properly at the breakfast table, especially in the presence of the Goldbergs.

  "I can't just tell them I don't want to go," Lujza answered the question as though Hajna and her oatmeal hadn't occurred between the question and the answer. I scrunched up my nose, angry that these people, the Hungarian soldiers, had so much power over my family. Didn't they have families, too?

  Two days later, my parents, the adult Goldbergs and Lujza were expected to leave for work. The five of them got through their morning rations by mumbling to one another that this would all be over soon. Someone had heard that Hitler was outnumbered, that the Germans were about to be defeated. There were grumblings that the Russians and the Americans would be here any day now.

  Up until that fateful day, Daniel, Samuel and Hajna and I were forbidden to talk to one another unless a parent was in the room. And really, what fun is it to talk to your friends while your parents look on? Zvi Goldberg told his boys that they should stay in their rooms and play checkers and chess and only come out when they needed to use the toilet or eat lunch. They were supposed to avoid us at all costs.

  The morning our parents were to report for duty, my mother blubbered. Blubbered. That was the only way I could think of describing her reaction. It was worse than the first day she dropped us off to school by ourselves, her face hidden under an oversized straw hat and a pink handkerchief. She waved goodbye to us, probably even after we had already gathered the strength to clasp each other's hands and make our way into the classroom. My father took her by the shoulders and held her tightly in his arms. I caught a glimpse of them turning to leave as I happened to look out of the window while we were introducing ourselves to our new classmates.

  But this was different. Papa ate his mushy porridge silently, stopping only to lick any excess off his lips or wipe his moustache. Mama sat, her hand once again holding the same pink handkerchief she had held three years earlier, her mascara running down her face. Chaya Goldberg had whispered in hushed tones to her husband how absurd it was that Mama even wore make-up in The Ghetto in the first place, but Mama continued to take pride in her looks, putting her make-up on in the mirror each morning.

  "They'll be fine," Papa mumbled between chews. Tears poured from my mother's eyes and slight bubbles formed at the corners of her red-painted lips. "They're big girls. They can take care of themselves."

  He must have forgotten that we "big girls" had forgotten to feed the dog two days in a row the first week we had him. We had also neglected to help Agata make dinner on a brisk day in February when we said we would learn how to make Polish pierogis. Learning to cook was all part of our mother's grand scheme to help us become "good wives one day", but that one day seemed so far away that we spent the afternoon making snowmen in Zsolt's front yard, leaving Agata alone with disassembled ingredients for pierogis.

  "What do you do if someone knocks at the door?" Papa quizzed us in a rapid-fire manner, his right index finger extended to Hajna the way he used to ask us about Hungarian history or English conjugation.

  "We pretend we're not home."

  Papa nodded satisfactorily, as though Hajna had successfully conjugated one of the more impossible English verbs.


  The night before, Chaya Goldberg and Mama spent several hours rearranging the dishes and moving them from the cabinets and clearing out the closets so the children would have somewhere to hide in the event that a Hungarian soldier barged in without warning. Rumors had been buzzing for the past few days that the Hungarian soldiers were collaborating with the Germans and making long lists of names for "resettlement" in the East.

  "I heard they take kids away when their parents are gone, put them on the transport and then throw them in a fire!" Daniel had said, his almost-black eyes ablaze with the excitement little boys often had when discussing war or violence.

  "Don't say things like that," his mother had chastised him, giving him a small slap on the wrist. She put a hand to her chest and inhaled, perhaps speaking a silent prayer between herself and her God, hoping it wasn't true.

  "But that’s what Avram said on our way back from the Rebbe's apartment," Daniel protested, stepping one dirty foot into the cabinet to test out the new hiding place. "And Avram's dad is from Poland. They took him away a long time ago and when he came back, he said that stuff."

  Daniel's words continued, even after his mother had shut the light blue cabinet door to make sure he wouldn't be visible. A diatribe about horrible tales of Jews being slaughtered came from the interior of the cabinet, while the rest of us listened, our feet glued to the floor. We did not want to hear it, but we couldn't help but listen.

  "That's enough," Zvi Goldberg finally spoke when Daniel got to the part about naked bodies piled up all around the camp where this Avram's father had supposedly been sent. "We don't even know if it's true. And there's no need to worry about something that might not even happen."

  Even though my parents dismissed these words as malicious rumors meant to scare the Jews, I could see in their eyes that they still feared them, still worried they would come back from work detail to find their children had been snatched away, their bodies turned to dust.