Gratitude (11 page)

As Lili was about to go, Klari said, “Shall we sit in low chairs or on the floor?”

Before Lili could answer, Klari said, “Never mind. God will understand about my knees.”

The sight of the Becks’ kitchen made Lili think she’d stepped into yet another world, like Alice in Wonderland. “Oh,” she said, as Vera took a pot from the oven.

“Yes, oh,” Vera said. “It’s the Alhambra. Mr. and Mrs. visited Granada back in the twenties with that poor Lord Heinrich and his wife, Mathilde, the parents of the two out there. Dr. Robert wanted a taste of the place and kept talking about it, so he called in a Viennese designer, Mr. Albrecht Kuhn,” Vera spat out the words, “so he could give him a kitchen like one of the rooms of the Moorish kings of Granada. ‘I know I can’t have a citadel or a palace,’ Robert told the fellow, ‘but let me at least behave like the
Bourgeois Gentilhomme
when the fancy strikes me.’ That was exactly what he called it. The Mrs. rehearsed it with me so I could impress my friends.” And Vera showed off the French again. “
Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme
.”

Vera turned toward her casserole. “I have to tell you,” she said, “people didn’t go in much for design back then.”

“Do they now?” Lili wanted to know.

“Not much even now. So Mr. Kuhn and Dr. Robert were happy to lead the way.” Vera showed off the room’s features with sweeping hand gestures, like a magician. “They got this mosaic floor with the medallion pattern.” Vera closed her eyes. “It is warmed by the memory of the Hall of the Two Sisters, Dr. Robert kept saying. And out that back window looking onto the courtyard you could easily expect to see the Fountain of the Lions, though that might have been going too far. The fellow made the cabinets out of a lacquered white walnut—I’ve never seen anyone do that to good walnut. They were made to look like Moorish entranceways with crystal windows cut out with the arches at the corners and the horseshoe arches like the Alhambra’s southern and western walls.”

“It sounds as if you’ve been there yourself,” Lili said.

Vera poked Lili in the chest. “Well, that’s because I did what you did when I first saw the finished result. Only I squealed. I said, ‘Look, I’m standing in an Eastern palace. Which of my girlfriends gets to go to exotic places like me? Look, I’m standing in a great room of a palace!’

“The Dr. and Mrs. Robert felt embarrassed. ‘It’s really just a kitchen,’ Dr. Robert said to me.

“‘Ha!’ I said. ‘It’s more than a kitchen now. But you brought it here to me. I get to work in the Alhambra all day long.’” Vera stood too closely to Lili, as if they were conspiring. She was speaking of the room as if it were her own.

“And do you know what they did for me, the Mr. and Mrs.?” Lili shook her head. “The next Christmas, the Christmas of 1929, Dr. Robert and Mrs. Klari presented me with two return train tickets to Granada,
and
vouchers for a week’s stay in a beautiful hotel. So I got to go to Spain with my mother, the first time out of the country for both of us.”

And now Lili was impressed. She appreciated the distraction. The room was exotic, to be sure, but not overbearing. It was cheerful and inviting. But Lili was not entirely comfortable in this big and generous place. She didn’t feel right having this conversation. She felt guilty marvelling at the kitchen, just as she had felt a pang of guilt admiring the family portraits and the tabletop by Edvard Munch while her family was bound for…what? Not Spain. Not Granada.

Lili said, “We need some eggs boiled and we need some cloths to cover the mirrors.”

“Ah, yes, I remember. Like when Mrs. Mathilde went.” She sighed.

They heard someone coming toward the kitchen. “Well,” Vera said, “you’re safe here in the Alhambra, young miss.”

“
Safe?
” Klari said as she joined them.

“Yes, ma’am. You’re safe with me, safe in the city. It’s too big a place. We’re all mixed up here.
I’m
not Jewish.”

Klari said, “Safe with you?” She collapsed blackly into a kitchen chair. It hit her again—the full impact of what was happening: the abduction of Hermina and Ede—the murder of Heinrich—and what about Istvan?—where was he?—did anyone know?—had he been murdered?—and even the family of this girl who had come to stay with them in her wedding dress—what had happened to them? Klari’s grief was oceanic.

Simon arrived in the kitchen to get Lili and his mother. “Come, ladies, sit with us. Rozsi doesn’t look too good.” He read the despair on his mother’s face, so he crouched down to repeat the request, gently.

She looked at her son and caressed his cheek. “Yes, I’ll come. Come, Lili.”

Vera said, “I’m sorry, ma’am. I meant no offence.”

Klari stood. “No, of course you didn’t.”

When her father died, it was as if the whole country mourned. The casket, loaded into a plain carriage, utterly without ornament, was drawn by white Arabian horses as Klari’s mother, Juliana, walked in front like a dowager queen. Her five daughters and five sons-in-law walked behind her, trailed by her eight grandchildren. The carriage was followed by Regent Horthy himself and members of the cabinet, and a thousand of Maximillian’s workers marched behind. Most stopped at the gates of Budapest’s Orthodox cemetery. It was not like the Kerepesi Cemetery, with its monuments and sculptures, nor like the grand synagogue on Dohany Street. Modesty and simplicity ruled here. How unlike every other thing in Maximillian’s life.

Lili and Simon escorted Klari into the living room, where the conversation was taking a turn.

Paul said, “What are we going to do?”

“Do?” Robert asked.

“Yes,
do
. We can’t stand by.”

“So far Great Britain, France, Russia and the United States have not been able to vanquish Hitler, but
we
will?”

“Please, Robertkam,” Klari said before sitting.

Paul stood to approach his uncle. “You can’t fight them, of course not: you have to undermine them instead.”

Robert stood up, too, and brushed an imaginary crumb from his shirt. “You’re just like your father,” he said. “Heinrich didn’t need to be strung up. What a waste—what a goddamn waste.” He pointed a finger at Paul. “You’re just like him. You always were—somehow bigger than events—needing to get in the way of them.”

Simon blushed. He took a seat on an ottoman beside Lili.

“Please, Uncle Robert,” Rozsi said. “Let’s not.”

“
Trust
me,” Paul said. He gave his uncle a wintry look. “If you need to, you can criticize my actions, but let me act first.” Paul didn’t want to argue. He knew that if he wanted to win an argument, he would win. That was what he did for a living: win arguments. But his uncle glared at him as if he were staring down his own brother.

Klari said, “To think we were planning to have a concert here tonight. That was how the day started.”

“A
concert?
” Lili asked.

Simon blushed again. He whispered, “Mother plays piano, and Tibor Novak, the violinist, was going to come over tonight to play a duet with her, but once Father called to say he was bringing you home, Mother cancelled the concert. She didn’t think it would suit the occasion.”

Klari didn’t want to add to what her son had said. She looked at the piano, with its gaping mouth. Rozsi still sat on its bench.

Lili reached over to take Klari’s hand, but they didn’t speak. Klari looked into the young woman’s sapphire eyes. Lili was old before her time.

And even when they moved to the dining room, the feelings that had been building did not abate, but little more was said. They ate dinner quietly, as if it were a last supper. They looked solemnly at the burning candles as they ate their sweet dumplings covered with walnuts and plum preserve.

Paul, in particular, held himself back. He wondered whether he would have stood in front of Mendelssohn’s statue, as his uncle had implied. He might have stood in front of Mendelssohn himself, but not his likeness. Defending symbols didn’t pay. The country was full of fallen statues, prized by one horde, despised by the next. And even when symbols were resurrected, they would fall again. And so it went.

Paul didn’t want the role of protector or saint. Saints were bores. Luckily, there were no Jewish saints, and if Jews were ever to get into the beatification business, they would have to make saints of the non-Jews who stepped in to help. It was hardly heroic to defend your own kind. Seeing over the heads of your own tribe was the mark of a saint.

Paul said finally that he wanted to take the young people out “on a matter of business.”

“What do you mean?” Robert said.

Klari said, “It’s too risky.”

“No, I know where to go. I need to get everyone’s picture taken, starting with Simon, Lili and Rozsi, and then I’d like to take you, Aunt Klari and Uncle Robert, tomorrow night.”

Robert said, “This young girl has just had surgery. It’s just not safe.”

“It’s not safe even if she hasn’t had surgery,” his wife put in.

“I need to make them safe. I have a photographer friend, and we have some papers to turn us into Swedes.”

“Zoli?” Rozsi asked excitedly.

“Yes, Zoli. We have a meeting planned at a photography studio. We need to get this paperwork done before it’s too late.”

PAUL TOOK THE YOUNG PEOPLE
by taxi to the Danube, just by the Chain Bridge, where Zoli was to meet them. A breeze blew off the river, and Simon took his cousin Rozsi under one arm and Lili under the other to warm them. The lights were strung out along the bridge like a necklace. Paul was on the lookout for Zoli. He said, “We’re early, quite early. And Zoli might have been delayed. He had something he needed to do first, some arrangements he had to make.”

Another gust brought with it a spray off the river. Then it began to drizzle. There was a boathouse just a few steps away, and they headed toward it. Lili looked back at the bridge, at the wet light. Simon said he knew the boathouse’s owner. “His name is Erno Halasz. He lets me take the boat out whenever I want. Father treated his wife for an abdominal complaint of some kind. Let’s go in there for a bit. It’ll be warmer.”

When they stepped in, a boy sprang out at them like a startled cat.

“What are you doing here?” the boy shouted. Even in the dim light, the visitors could see the whites of the boy’s eyes. He was no older than thirteen or fourteen and looked half-crazed, his hair matted down, the cuffs of his shirt frayed, the sole of one shoe separating from the upper so that it looked like a gaping mouth. Simon thought of Charlie Chaplin. Lili remembered the blind Gypsy girl and her trio. She remembered her saying, “Music makes you stupid.” This boy was dark, like the men.

“We’re the owner’s friends,” Simon said. “Mr. Halasz, the man who hires out his boat from here, do you know him?”

Rozsi said, “Let’s leave. Zoli will miss us if we’re hidden in here.”

Paul said, “It’s all right. He’ll figure out that we came in from the rain. It’s the only shelter close to the bridge.”

The boy stepped back further into the darkness of the boathouse. Simon wanted to follow, but Lili held him back. Rozsi didn’t want to touch anything or lean on anything. She kept checking her hands and rubbing them together, until Paul called her Lady Macbeth.

They listened to the little slapping sounds of the boat bobbing on the water. “I know the owner, too,” the boy said. “He lets me stay on the
Petofi
all the time.”

“What’s that?” asked Lili.

The boy lit a match, illuminating the brass letters on the bow of a boat. “The
Petofi
,” he repeated. The boat was named after the great Romantic poet, Sandor Petofi, one of the leaders of the Hungarian Revolution of 1848 against Habsburg rule. The name sent Paul back to the days when Istvan and he and the poet Miklos Radnoti, Istvan’s friend, used to debate the merits of Petofi’s work. Radnoti was a modernist down to the Bloomsday cards he sent to friends—he must have been the first Hungarian to have read
Ulysses
—but he admitted that Petofi had “qualities.”

“Oh, he had qualities,” Paul said. “He was the country’s greatest asset, and he acted on his principles.” They were having coffee at The Rose in Szeged. “‘You cannot forbid the flower,’ Petofi told his countrymen. ‘Let’s fight to the death for freedom.’ And death took him quickly,” Paul added dramatically. “He was only twenty-six years old.”

Radnoti said, “He was about as good a poet as he was a soldier.”

“He inspired the nation,” Paul said, pounding his fist on the table, rattling the dishes. “He led the country to freedom.”

“That explains it,” Istvan said.

“It is true, he may not have succeeded, but he tried his best. It was the example he set that counted. Not everyone has done well here, but you two have it very bad,” Paul said. “Don’t forget to finish your chestnut purée, boys,” and he huffed off.

For a moment in the boathouse, while the match was lit, the intruders glimpsed a cloth bag on the floor of the boat. A grey shirt-sleeve hung out of the bag’s opening, and beside the bag lay a violin.

“Did you come to live on the boat, too?” asked the boy.

“What?” Rozsi said.

“No, of course not,” Simon said too sharply. He glanced at Lili and his voice softened. “We’ve just come in out of the rain.”

“Why don’t you sit down, then?” the boy said. He ran to get a burlap sack and laid it out on the wooden floor for Lili. It didn’t look clean enough, so Simon threw it back to the boy and spread his jacket down in its place. Again he looked at Lili to see if he’d done the right thing.

Paul was about to do the same for his sister, but she said no, she was all right. Paul wanted to keep his sister company, so he stayed standing, too. Leaning his back against the wall, the boy slid down to the floor. Simon joined Lili and the boy on the floor, but made it down only as far as his knees. Paul was as tall as a tree, his head lost in the shadows of the ceiling, beside the figures seated on the floor. They could hear the pattering of the rain on the roof.

A moment later, another match burst out of the darkness as the boy lit a cigarette and offered the pack to his guests.