Extraordinary Renditions (5 page)

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.

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 furnished 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.”

“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.

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.

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.