Gratitude (13 page)

Eight

Budapest – June 6, 1944

PAUL LAY AWAKE
all night. What had bored into his mind like a worm was the fact that he didn’t know where his father was buried, that a green place had been waiting for Heinrich beside Mathilde and that now there would be no locus for their grief, his and Rozsi’s and Istvan’s, if his brother made it, if any of them made it, no place to stand and remember a family together. Was the good mayor left to hang until the buzzards got to him, a pocked and dangling warning to the citizens of Szeged? Was he carted away with the rest of the breed on wagons, a pile of one-time Hungarians with which to build a Jewish fire? Was he granted a state funeral, as befitted his station? Or would his mother lie alone?

Paul remembered how enthusiastic his mother had been when Heinrich was first elected. Paul was fifteen, Istvan not yet thirteen and Rozsi barely four. Heinrich had fought a fierce battle with a gentleman farmer, Janos Horvath, who had spoken of Hungary’s roots and of protecting the nation against what Horvath had called “external and internal enemies.” Heinrich Beck had won handily, and that night he had gathered his three children around him. Mathilde looked on from a settee nearby and took Rozsi in her lap. The two had lost some of their lustre over the course of a long day and looked very tired.

But not Heinrich. “Look at us,” he beamed. “Look at you. We Becks have been in Hungary for half a millennium, probably after we were expelled in the Inquisition, or maybe not. Maybe we came from the north somewhere—who knows?” Heinrich’s beard was already turning white, and as he spoke, he pulled the end of it into a point. “It hardly matters is my point. Look no further back beyond Hungary for our forebears. This country has given us more than life. I’ve been
elected
mayor,
selected
by the people, by Hungarians, all of us. It’s better than becoming king, believe me. If you are in line for the throne it’s because of some arbitrary royal lineage. Whether you like it or not, and whether the people like it or not, you most surely will be king, and they will have to suffer through your reign, for better or worse.

“Szeged is our Jerusalem. Even better, it’s where a majority
selects
a Jew to lead them. Here is the land where Jewish women bake strudel, where Jewish men bank in forints and Jewish children recite Petofi. Here’s the place where we can build architectural masterpieces to rival St. Peter’s Basilica—look at our temple in the centre of this city—look at the monument to our health and achievement, the monument to Judaism—and yet we can relax our hold on the old faith, as it relaxes its hold on us. You are the rightful heirs of this place. Never forget it.”

Even the little green rectangle of Hungary Heinrich had arranged for himself would now stay vacant, Paul thought bitterly. It was a sentimental concern, not a religious one—far from it, as his father had intimated. Paul was a proponent of the Neolog movement, the reform faction which led Jewry away from its Orthodox, and even Conservative, leanings, the ones which admonished Jews for driving a car on the Sabbath, or tearing paper, or lighting an oven, or smoking or shaving their heads—the women, at least—only to cover them with fashionable wigs, to satisfy God but fool dumb humanity. Or turning on a light. Or eating pork. Paul had wondered, as a child, what would happen if a pig ate a human. Would it be rebuked by the rest of piggery?

Was Sabbath meant to be a chore? Paul wondered. Live six days, spend the seventh showing contrition and gratitude? And if you are not naturally contrite or grateful, whom do you think you’re kidding? Do you think the Lord can’t see through the ruse?

And now the trains had begun to take away the undesirables on the Reich’s list—Hungary’s own trains, transporting Hungary’s citizens against their will to where Lili’s family awaited them, if the Bandels were still alert enough to wait—if the Bandels were alive. Was it conceivable that the list of undesirables could broaden and a whole country be emptied out—a vacant country for the taking, like the vacant town Lili left behind? They’d begun in Szeged and Debrecen and Miskolc and Komarom. How many had they already taken? How many would they succeed in taking?

Paul knew himself well enough to know that he was a poor candidate for a restricted life. He couldn’t remain for long the struggling man being jostled by the superior and the immortal. It was not vanity that made him feel this way, but the injustice, the unfairness—he, the advocate, unable to have his day in court to talk about the rightness of things, to put his faith in Justice with her blindfold—not sniffing out the impure, the striving Jew, the uncombed Gypsy, the homosexual on his way to the thermal baths.

A moment later, Paul thought he could hear them again, his sister and Zoli, the velvet banging, the gasps and sighs, down the hall in her room, the spectre of law removed for them, the restraints of civility, of the right and wrong time for things. What right time could there be when one hears of one’s father’s execution or comes upon one’s murdered parents? Anything was possible now.

Rozsi had moved from Szeged to Budapest ostensibly to look after her big brother, but the truth was she wanted to live in the exciting capital and felt safer in Paul’s company than in anyone else’s. He had always been her guide. He taught her the difference between what was right and what was legal, a difference that was especially important now. Once, when Rozsi was young, a housefly flew in through an open window, and she called for her brother Paul to please come in to kill it.

He found it resting on her blue curtain. “Why should I kill it?” he’d asked.

“Because I hate it.”

“Is that a good enough reason to end its life?”

She thought about it and said, “Because it might harm me.”

“
Might?
” he’d said.

“Because it’s
trespassing
in our
house
.”

“Oh, trespassing,” was Paul’s reply. “But the fly does not know property law. It might not even know national law or civil law. It could have flown in from Paraguay, for all we know. Laws are lines we draw for ourselves. They can’t involve the rest of nature.”

Rozsi groaned in frustration. “Well, we’re
bigger
than it is.” She ran at the insect like a mad warrior, and it flew out of her room into the corridor.

“Yes, but it’s faster than you.”

Later, when she started dating a young lawyer in Paul’s office, Aron Borbely, she confessed to her brother that she found the man boring and wanted to see someone else, Elek Beker, a piano teacher like her. Paul’s response was that she had to tell Aron first.

“But what if it doesn’t work out with Elek, either?”

“You shouldn’t deceive Aron. That’s all I’m saying. And don’t deceive Elek, should you ever feel the need.”

She didn’t question her feelings for Zoli, that was for sure. What little time and commitment Paul had given to love. As a boy, he had known Ruth a little, briefly, passionately but prematurely. His fancy and fantasy had fed on her into his adulthood.

But the memory he revisited even more often was the one of Zsuzsi. He had met her ten years before, in Komarom, a town near the Czech border. He was visiting his aunt Hermina and uncle Ede’s summer home, their sunny white palace, alight with glass on every side. He’d been reading there, relaxing, sleeping too much after his biggest case of 1934, when Paul was just thirty-one. It was a national case, involving Manfred Weiss, the country’s first and best-known billionaire, and a Jew. His empire was encroaching on Eszterhazy land, royal land, with Hungarian blood flowing through its brown roots, and the nation wanted him stopped, but Paul saw no good reason. Was it for the greater good that Manfred Weiss be stopped, merely because he was bumping up against Hungarian royals?

What disease had Paul, the advocate, come upon? Was the disease differentness, or was it blindness to sameness? That was the argument Paul wished to make in court in defence of Manfred Weiss, even though the argument could have been made against either side, since his Mr. Weiss thought no more highly of his adversaries than they did of him.

So Paul had to find a neutral beneficiary both could tolerate. Both sides believed they were specially selected by history and the forces of evolution and by the creator himself to inherit the world.

Leave the disputed land to nature, then. Let the disputing families see that true nobility is expressed in largesse. Let Hungarians see the generosity of both noble families. Manfred Weiss could live with that. His client could be made to live with that as could the Esterhazys. Let the Hungarian people enjoy the land. The judge agreed, and Manfred Weiss left the court beaming and shaking hands.

Now, victorious, Paul was unwinding in the summer home of his uncle and aunt. And today he was visiting Komarom’s famous stonework museum in the Igmandi Fortress.

He was studying an ancient Roman carving of the young Mercury, probably, standing on tiptoe on the back of his dog—Mercury looked ready to take flight—when Paul first heard her voice. “Why do you suppose he’s standing on his dog?” And he guffawed like a schoolboy before he could even take her in.

She was tall and elegant, her collar like a calla lily, the white flower offering itself up. She wore a brilliant cream silk dress that was almost too elegant for an afternoon at a museum. He said, “I guess standing on your dog places you closer to the sky.”

“Not much,” she said and giggled herself. He could feel himself suddenly, urgently, wanting to taste her lipstick. Then she ran her fingers, light as feathers, over the soft marble back of the carved Mercury, barely touching the mythic figure, possibly not at all. Paul felt his ears burning, big as conches.

Paul and Zsuzsi Rosenthal exchanged names only as they were departing. He said he knew some Rosenthals in Budapest: Leopold, the lawyer. “No connection,” she said, and she waved, looked down at her feet and slipped away. That was the whole of their encounter.

And when Paul told his devilish Aunt Hermina about it, she said no more than “Oh,” but then he heard her speaking on the telephone to her sister Klari in Budapest, and the following morning Klari arrived to take in the country air and to ask about flightless Mercury.

“I don’t know how long he’s been like that,” Paul mused. “Two thousand years, possibly, and he will never fly. He’s like the lovers on Keats’s Grecian urn. ‘
Never, never canst thou kiss, though winning near the goal
,’” he said in English. How pretentious I am, he thought, but the feeling was nevertheless real and pure. “For millennia they have been about to kiss,” he said, “waiting for it, hoping for it, their warm marble hearts alight, but they never quite make it.”

“Hmm,” Hermina said, and Klari smiled. Ede headed back to Budapest to perform an operation, and the ladies and Paul saw him off, Paul helping his uncle with his bag.

And just then Zsuzsi walked up the path. “Oh,” Paul said. “How…” and he turned to look at his aunts, hovering by the door.

“Oh,” Zsuzsi said too. “Nice to see you again.” Neither was expecting the other—Hermina had called Zsuzsi simply to invite her for a meal—and now Zsuzsi, too, looked at Hermina and Klari.

In Hermina’s billowy parlour, after a lunch of pheasant with summer squash and bell peppers, followed by cool cherry soup, Zsuzsi was to play piano and he was to accompany her on cello. Schubert. Well of course Schubert. Paul could still picture Zsuzsi, still taste her image, as she sat poised, her pink fingers resting on the ivory keys of that silly creamy grand piano, exactly the same as her sister’s in Budapest, both of them bought on the same day, from the same instrument maker, in Vienna. And so they played Schubert. The composer was to be the translator of their feelings—and just in the nick of time—for in the past hour Paul had found himself stumbling over every subject that arose. He found himself trying to impress Zsuzsi but frightening her instead. Anyone would have run from him. He would have run from himself.

Klari had said over lunch that Komarom was paradise on Earth. Through the wide-open windows, you could hear birds chirping outside and smell the lush greenery, so he could certainly see why she would say it.

But Paul couldn’t hold his tongue. He found himself saying, “Paradise for everyone, or paradise for the four of us and Uncle Edward and whoever else we condescend to invite?”

“Why are you being rude, Palikam?” Hermina said. “All my sister meant was it felt good to be alive today, nothing more.”

The comment prompted Zsuzsi to ask, “Are you a socialist, Mr. Beck?” She was holding a spoon of creamy pink cherry soup to her lips.

“No,” Hermina said on behalf of her nephew. “He’s showing off. He wants to let you know how clever he is.”

Paul blushed. “I’m not a socialist, not an
-ist
of any kind. I just want to do some good things, as I’m sure you do.”

She was still holding up the spoon in front of her. “Does this soup not have cream in it?” she asked. “We’ve just had pheasant—meat, I mean, followed by milk.”

“Oh,” Paul said, looking at his own spoon. He filled it, drained it again, licked it clean.

Zsuzsi gently put down her spoon. Zsuzsi’s pale slim face gleamed in the light reflected off the silver. Her eyes were brown, almost black, yet they shone as if they gave off light rather than took it in.

“You’re still a Jew, aren’t you, Mr. Beck?”

Klari said, “Yes, a Jewish child, sometimes.”

Paul uncrossed his arms. “Thank you, Aunt Klari. I am a Jew, Miss Rosenthal, but not
just
a Jew.”

“Is that what you think I am?”

“It’s the last thing I think you are.”

“Meaning what?” she asked.

He blushed again.

She said, “When your Jewish resolve weakens, aren’t you falling prey to the people who dislike us?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say my
Jewish
resolve has weakened. My resolve is not determined by the degree of my observance but by the degree of my sympathy.”

“But if I feel very much sympathy, it is nourished by our particular history.”