The Plum Trees

by The Plum Trees (retail) (epub)

  WHETHER THIS COUSIN had room, whether anyone had room for such refugees, had by 1941 ceased to be a consideration. People took in whoever fled their way. Where or how any of them slept—a cot in the hall, a mat on the floor, no mat on the floor—no longer mattered. The alternative being a prison camp, or worse, if you could believe it.

  Because now the stories coming from both east and west mentioned not just mass graves but poison gas.

  “But who could believe them?” their cousin said. They were unbelievable, and once you started listening, there was no end to what people were saying. Mass shootings in Ukraine, tens of thousands into a pit, and giant death camps in Poland—impossible, even for the Nazis. If people were trying to scare them, said their cousin, real life, her own life, was already frightening enough, thank you.

  As were theirs, lived mostly in a half-dark corner of their cousin’s back room. They were, at least theoretically, still allowed in the streets here, not like at home, but they were still without papers, something they hadn’t considered. The first morning at her cousin’s, Magda had offered to go to the bakery, but her cousin said no, the baker knew everyone, and might inquire as to who the strange girl was.

  And the same was true at the butcher’s, and the dry-goods store. It was a small town, and hiding wasn’t easy. Still, after a week or so, Magda began walking out in the evening, just to the corner and back.

  Although one day she saw a police car pass slowly, with two people in the back, a man and a young girl, both tied up, with blood on their faces. There was blood running out of the girl’s right eye. In the front sat two others—one driving, and the other looking calmly out the window. His gaze took her in, but that wasn’t what scared her.

  What scared her was the satisfied look on his face. She walked quickly home and had a nightmare that night—that same man, that same smile, coming in there, for them. She watched the door open slowly, watched the stark, sharp shadow move across the room.

  She woke in a sweat before dawn, and didn’t dare close her eyes again. It was odd, but when they were hidden at Goodmann’s, she had been ready to die. Gloriously—she saw herself standing and fighting, or even facing a firing squad, “La Marseillaise,” for some reason, on her lips.

  But the more she ran and hid, the less she wanted to die. Later that day, as the light came into the room, she remembered the dream—the moving shadow, which reminded her of the work of an artist she’d seen once, on a trip to Venice.

  De Chirico—did they know him? she asked her cousins.

  “Italian, a fascist,” her cousin’s husband shrugged.

  “No, he couldn’t be, he’s an artist—”

  “If he lives in Italy, he’s a fascist.” End of discussion. No one here wanted to talk about art anymore. Her cousin’s husband had lived in Paris and worked in the theater there, contemporary theater, but then Jean Cocteau had turned out to be a Nazi.

  “Sympathizer,” put in her cousin.

  “Yes, but isn’t that enough? Doesn’t that mean that he wants me dead?”

  “Not dead!”

  “Just gone.”

  And so on. Even the safest subjects led to the same dark place. Magda’s stomach started hurting badly—“nerves,” said her cousin, and managed to get her some chamomile tea, which wasn’t easy. “Just stay calm,” her cousin said.

  Though she didn’t say how. On the one hand, time was standing still here, but meanwhile the leaves had fallen off the trees and the late-summer asters stood black in the frost. When Magda was a girl, she used to stand outside and watch the flocks of birds heading south, with longing in her own heart. But now what she longed for was not that schoolgirl’s dream of “South,” but the old places, wintry and bleak. Home. Her mother, her father. Life as a family, them.

  But then one day a cousin brought great good news to the girls—their parents were on their way to Hungary. They would arrive by train, with false papers, the cousin said. The girls would live as citizens again.

  ILLEGAL CITIZENS, GRANTED, which would have been an unthinkable status for Hermann as little as a year ago, six months even. Illegal papers were for crooks, for fugitives, for Russians maybe or even Poles, but not for Hermann the upright, Hermann the Czech, proud and free. He had never broken the law in his life, he told the man who forged their papers.

  “The law?” the man had laughed, the laugh a bark. He himself had been born a Russian, then became, without moving, a Pole, then Czech for a short time, and was now Hungarian. Or would be, once he got the baptismal certificate he was working on, which would be even better than forged papers, but he didn’t mention this to Hermann. It was a long shot anyway, and he could tell that Hermann didn’t have that kind of money anymore.

  “When was anything last legal?” the man asked.

  Hadn’t they seized Hermann’s house, his farm, his business? Had that been legal, or the fact that they’d turned solid, patriotic citizens, people who’d never so much as raised their voices after dark lest they disturb their neighbors, into some strange new category of criminal just by virtue of their breathing in and breathing out?

  Hermann had to agree. He was proud, even, of his new flexibility, this agility, proud that he’d managed to put aside, along with his love of his Czech homeland, his deep aversion to shady dealings. Prouder still that he was able to carry off a sketchy border crossing with his wife by train, and reunite with his three daughters in Debrecen, with false papers for them all.

  REALLY BEAUTIFUL PAPERS, in their own names and with their pictures steamed in properly. That meant the girls could go out a bit, though still with caution, could show their faces now and then in the light of day, and once in a while feel the wind in their hair, the sun on their faces. They were almost ridiculously happy. Happy, too, to move together into a dank, tiny apartment of their own. Hug their own mother, and even laugh a bit, see their mother laugh again.

  “If you’d shown this to us before!” they laughed, looking around at the poor furnished room, the sagging sofa propped up on bricks, the battered table, the mattresses on the floor.

  But “before,” their former life, was not to be dwelt on, said Hermann, not yet. The activity of the move had revived his spirits too. Hitler was proving himself the fool they always knew he was; he’d made Napoleon’s mistake, and invaded Russia. Funny, the way these madmen couldn’t resist it. It would prove fatal for him too in the end, Hermann was certain.

  And then the Japanese bombed America—“Insane!” he said.

  “Thank God!” his wife added.

  Yes, thank God. It was the end of 1941. America had come into the war at last. The whole thing would be over now shortly. All they had to do now was to keep their heads down and wait it out, and maybe by next summer surely, or at least by the fall, they would be back home, maybe even for the harvest. They would walk under their plum trees once more.

  7

  WITH HER PAPERS, Magda found work as a nursemaid. The people who hired her were pleased—a girl who couldn’t hide her culture, but didn’t mention it. Whom they didn’t have to pay a fillér more than they’d give a simple farm girl, but who could speak French to the children. Who uttered no complaint when given an airless room under the stairs with no bath.

  Hermann’s wife and the other two girls took in knitting. This, together with Magda’s meager earnings, was how the family ate. Hermann had had no source of income since they took his businesses toward the end of 1939.

  And he’d been forced to pay out large sums of money just to get them to those small rooms in Debrecen—first to Goodmann the farmer to keep the girls off the transport, and then to the boys who’d led them through the marshes. Even more for the false papers, which took much of his life’s savings. There was still, at least in theory, money in the bank, at least by the former rules, but who knew? He assumed that all that had, at least temporarily, gone the way of what had once been called his “real property,” the house, the grain storages, the farm, all of which, instead of being real, had proved t
o be dust.

  So the women were obliged to work for money, but while they sat and knitted scarves, lap robes, dainty mittens for their more fortunate Hungarian counterparts, what did Hermann do there in Debrecen? He was strong, and healthy, in his mid-forties, his prime. What did he do?

  “Not much,” Magda noted in her account, sadness creeping in. “Not much.”

  Meaning what? In the one picture that survived, Hermann looks strong, active, energetic. A man who would walk on the balls of his feet to get there faster, a man who would have played, in his enthusiasm, his joy for life, the clarinet or oboe, accompanying his daughters in little family concerts, after his work, work that felt productive, was productive, supporting not just his family but others in town, what with the plums and the grain they were exporting ever farther, into Ukraine even, he was just closing that deal when they shut him down—what would a man like that do in a room in Debrecen?

  He still had the “affidavit” from America in his pocket, which apparently took some of his time and energy. There seemed to be some possibility of parlaying it into a ticket out to somewhere. But what this mostly entailed was chasing down the various rumors—refuge in the Swedish embassy in Budapest, or the Belgian Congo. He was hearing now of people going east, not west, into Russia, into Siberia, cold yes, but supposedly safe. Relatively. He spent a few days trying to find the man who was said to be willing to serve as a guide.

  Which came to nothing, but at least it constituted action in that time and place. That and kicking himself for not having left when he could have, even with empty pockets and barely the clothes on his back. Their backs—and as 1941 turned to 1942, and the year wore on, with the Germans taking Sevastopol and Rommel winning in Egypt, the English, incredibly, floundering in France, and the Americans bogged down in Guadalcanal, Hermann’s initial optimism began to erode.

  BECAUSE THE TRUTH was that Hitler seemed to be winning—could Hitler win? Would God allow it? Was there a God?

  “How could I not have sold the house and left then?” he cried to his wife.

  “But you couldn’t have known!” she pleaded with him, tears in her eyes too.

  He tried to agree, how could he have known? He asked himself that all day, every day, while he paced back and forth, back and forth, since he went out always less now. They were hearing about men like him being picked up, even with papers.

  “We didn’t want to mingle with anyone,” explained Magda. “We lived doubly petrified now, because of the false papers.”

  Since they were strangers there, and impoverished to boot. It would have been hard enough to wash up destitute on foreign shores even under normal circumstances; if, say, Hermann had gambled or drunk his farms away.

  But now, as fugitives and outlaws both, hounded, despised, cast out, unpatriated, and all for nothing that had anything to do with anything they’d done or could control or change—it was becoming harder by the day for Hermann to keep the spring in his step. Harder even, increasingly, to say the normal daily prayers.

  Which till then had constituted for him mainly a form of thanksgiving, to a good and just God who had blessed his hard work, his fruit trees, his daughters. He had prayed formerly, morning and evening, that this God’s light may continue to shine upon them.

  But now, in a small bleak room in Debrecen—had he offended? Sinned? So much? All of them? Everyone he knew, from Warsaw to Paris?

  But not in America then, a much less godly place, surely?

  What did it mean? What could it mean? The old words had no answers. They were coming almost to constitute betrayal to him.

  He turned to the more obscure texts, prophecies, lamentations. “He read the Book of Job over and over,” said Magda.

  You will look for me, but I will be there no more.

  Who could be saying that, Hermann had always wondered, what kind of God? Now, with increasing horror, he began to understand. Job, too, had prayed to no avail, to an unfair God, a God who had allowed himself be tempted into a bet with the devil—at Job’s expense. A different God from the magisterial All-Wise One Hermann used to thank. The one he thought he knew, both from life and from the rest of the scriptures.

  But was Job’s version who God really was and had been all along? Could it be as simple as that? A cruel and vain God, willing to destroy Hermann’s family’s lives as wantonly as He had destroyed Job’s, just to beat the devil? To show that even as He threw them to the fire, they would die praising His name?

  Was that possible? He looked around the room at his beloved wife, his two younger daughters—in the end, after Job’s family were all killed, his reward was a new family. Hermann dropped the book.

  The women, his wife and daughters, looked up from their knitting. They used to knit at home, of an evening, but not like this. Then it was for fun, or charity, or something nice for one of them to wear. But this knitting was fast and hard, and it made their fingers red, their faces white, and as soon as they finished one item, they started on the next. Often the items were identical, the same vests, the same sweaters, over and over, as if they were machines, his lovely wife and daughters.

  And for whom were they knitting? Other women, Nazi women, or if not active haters, then at best silent women, like the ones living in their own house now.

  He had to go see someone, he told them, and walked out the door.

  “You won’t be long?”

  “No, no, it’s just to check on a visa,” but the truth was he needed a walk, he was used to walking, used to breathing God’s fresh air under God’s blue skies.

  The Nazis’, now—even the sky and the air. They’d wrested it from his God, he understood that now. As a boy he’d read the myths, about the days when the storm god, Wotan, had thundered through the land. A cruel and harsh god who rode a horse with eight legs, a god of the wild woods, of ravens and wolves—the opposite of Hermann’s God, whose domain was the plum trees.

  Who, along with his son, had banished Wotan, but they’d been merciful, or maybe weak, and they hadn’t killed him, and now he was back, with his swastika rune, his one eye, and the shock of hair over his forehead—like Hitler’s hair, it came to Hermann.

  Which must be why he did it, why else? It was absurd, that hair, even ridiculous, except that it hit its mark. Hermann hadn’t understood it till now—all those upturned faces, all those arms raised in triumph. Wotan was riding through the land again, and though Hermann had expected every day that people would come to their senses, he saw now that there was nothing to wake them.

  Their church bells were too soft, and what had those bells done for them since the last war but offer consolation? And what was that to the call of Wotan’s deep horns, summoning them from their cold gray towns to the darkest parts of the woods?

  Which was where they went with Hitler, back to that place where they’d last been strong and brave, wild and free. Where they danced naked, even with their clothes on, around the ancient bonfire every time they marched with him, possessed, arms in the air like spears. “Heil Hitler!”

  And Hermann, the man of the other god, was their enemy.

  He sat down on a bench in a small park not far from the apartment. Forbidden to him, risky, but he had to sit down. It was true, he realized—the Nazis might be mad, but they were right, he was the enemy. He loved cultivation, he loved the sound of soft bells. True, his heart had leapt up too the first time he heard Wagner, but in the end it had repelled him, what he’d sensed lay beneath, the hatred.

  So yes, he was the enemy, part of the civilization that had sent Wotan to the mountains. He read books, sang complicated songs, and prayed not for purification, fire and war, but for peace and comfort. He accepted imperfection. He chose aged wine over water from a babbling brook. He didn’t like blond braids. He’d never worn lederhosen.

  But how did a man like him, with a pen and a gardening spade at best, stand up to men like them, armed with iron spears forged in caves by demons? How did anyone, who wasn’t seized with their madness? What defense was
there? To whom did he even pray? Next to Wotan, the other gods paled. Christ was an innocent child, and God the Father a very old man.

  A Hungarian policeman walked by. If he stopped, Hermann was dead. He’d spent long hours preparing answers should he someday be stopped and questioned, but he knew now that what they wanted from him weren’t answers but blood.

  Of course, this should have come as no surprise—it wasn’t as if they’d been hiding it from anyone. Hitler’s SS, with Wotan’s runes on their collars, wore the skull and crossbones for anyone to see. And of course he had seen it, but instead of facing it straight—“Death’s-head. They will kill us”—he’d approached it slant, through the lens of his own deep culture, and called it a child’s game of pirates. “Ridiculous,” he’d pronounced it, all the while handing in his bicycles, his radios, a yellow star blazing off his clothes.

  And he was right in a way, it was ridiculous, but that didn’t stop it from being deadly. That’s what he, a humanist, hadn’t understood. He had gone on about “the twentieth century,” but maybe this was the real twentieth century, this combination of absurdity and bloodshed, and he was a man of the past. And maybe this was precisely where all his philosophy, all his democracy and his modern painting, his freedom and theater and science of the mind had always been leading him.

  To a cold park bench, with false papers in his pocket, praying right then, with all the passion in his heart, to a God who couldn’t help him, that a young policeman without a thought in his head would pass him by. That this plain and simple youth who held his fate in his hands would have something else to do that evening besides drag this remnant of the Age of Enlightenment into the local police station and beat him to death.

  AND IN FACT, though the policeman glanced his way, he kept walking, so Hermann went home, and kissed his wife and daughters, as he always had, but that evening, as he tried to say grace over their hard bread, he started to cry.