Gratitude (20 page)

“Goodness,” she said, gasping, covering her mouth with both hands. “Just what I need.” She giggled.

He withheld the ham, concealed it again in his coat.

“I didn’t mean anything,” she said. “I’m so sorry. This has all been a bit too trying for me, that’s all.”

He didn’t answer but stood stiffly in front of her.

“I know you’ve been through a lot, too, even more, but I’m no good at this,” she said. He started to turn away from her, but she stopped him, clutched his shoulders and aimed his gaze at her. “I don’t know how to do this,” she went on. “I’m not very good at starving or not having freshly laundered clothes and linens. I feel like a Gypsy.”

He shrugged out of her clutches and stepped back. “You’re not starving yet, and you’re not a Gypsy.”

“Well, if I were, I’d be happier. I’d know that I was indoors, at least. It would be home for a time, and then something else would be home.” She was crying now. “I need roots. I’m not a rootless type. I’m not saying I’m special—quite the contrary. I’m not daring. I’m not adventurous, except in my choice of men.”

“And you’re adventurous with me because of what I have chosen to do?”

“No, I guess it’s because I’ve chosen love over some other, tidier arrangement.”

They embraced, and she could feel the great ham hidden inside his coat. She laughed out loud.

ZOLTAN WAS EAGER
to get his lab to develop his film of the journalist and his boy on the bridge. He took Rozsi to a building that had already been cleared out by the Nazis, its residents deported by train. Zoltan had moved into the boiler room, which was next to a basement meat locker that served the kosher butcher on the ground floor, now gone. Few remnants of the meat remained, only scrapings in steel canisters. The day the Germans came, Zoli hid in this locker behind an empty
schmaltz
vat and narrowly eluded notice. When the Germans returned, Zoli was in the next room, inside the cold furnace. He worried as much about his camera equipment being discovered as he did about himself. He had heard gunfire upstairs on this second raid and wished he could somehow have captured it on film.

The building now seemed to Zoltan safer than most, safer than Rozsi’s own place, so he brought her there with less reluctance than he pretended to have. The only dangerous part was getting there. Zoli had strung together a clever route through a park overgrown with willows, followed by a stockyard, a cemetery, railway tracks, over which one night deportees were carried past him as he hid in some scrub brush, and a back alley where the week before he’d found a wheelbarrow full of ears of corn, their owner and destination unclear. He’d also found a rabbit, or one had found him, a plump one, and followed him home one night. Through a clever swing of a wooden gate, Zoli had managed to bash the creature dead. He skinned it and roasted it beneath an open window in his meat locker. He worried that the scent of the roasting flesh would give him away, but he’d tried stoves in apartments upstairs and found, of course, they were without gas. So he cooked it over a little fire downstairs, staying on the lookout throughout the process. Whenever he sensed danger, he fled to his alley or cemetery until he was certain he could return. And everywhere he went, Zoli carried his camera like a weapon of defence.

On this night, as he stole with his Rozsi back to his lair, he wanted to pause in the cemetery, aim his long lens over the headstones at a convoy of army trucks parked on the street. A man and woman lay across each other before them on the cobblestones as if they were huddling to conceal the wine-dark pool beneath them. But Rozsi pulled him along, whispering, “Are you insane? Do you want to join those two on the street?”

“Do you still not understand what I’m trying to do?” he said.

“
Come with me
,” she whispered again, hoarsely, but emphatically.

He was not insane, but he allowed himself to be led. He was strangely excited, creeping in the shadows within sight of the invaders and the fallen lovers. He yanked Rozsi behind a stone angel, pushed her up against the marble and kissed her, despite her struggles, languished in her anxious, humid breath. He felt she found him most exciting when he was bold, felt her push him away only momentarily before she pulled him to her. He felt her shudder against the cold stone. They were panting as they stopped themselves and continued on their way, scuttling from shadow to shadow.

They made it back to his basement quickly. He was so excited, he didn’t know what to do first. He asked her to sit while he prepared a nice place for them. “Where is your developing lab?” was the first thing she asked.

He pointed to a door at the corner. “It’s really just a big closet.”

On an earlier foray through the building, Zoli had scrounged a small round table from an apartment upstairs as well as an embroidered linen tablecloth. He took dishes from the same home, two whole place settings of amber Herend porcelain, plus silver cutlery he was surprised had remained, a candelabra, a flat pan, a pot, a kettle, some tea and—impossibly—a small box of sugar cubes he’d found in a drawer. He’d hauled down a mattress from the fourth floor, clean sheets and pillows, even a plush chair—an assemblage as incriminating if discovered as he himself would be, standing before it.

Zoli now added candles to the tableau, and Rozsi smiled broadly and clapped her hands. They drank tea with sugar by candlelight, and he surprised her more by withdrawing a small amber bottle of
palinka
from beneath the tablecloth to top up their tea. He made her giggle as he poured the plum brandy. “Where on Earth did you manage to get that?” she asked.

“From one of the flats upstairs. I moved a small metal chimney panel in the kitchen for no good reason except that I was curious, and I found the bottle there. The poor bastard must have been hiding it from his wife.”

“Or she from him,” said Rozsi. “I wonder where they are now.”

“I wonder,” he echoed. “I wonder if she or he hopes to find that bottle again when they get back.”

They stared at each other. She looked sad, unwilling now to drink her tea with
palinka
. “Let that be the worst of their problems,” Zoltan said, and he raised his glass in a toast. She followed him, and they clinked.

“I’m afraid,” she said, setting down the cup. “Look where we’re sitting. Look what’s become of us. I don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow or the day after that. Your life scares me.”

“We’ve been fortunate until now,” Zoltan said. “The war passed us by for five years, and we went on practically as if it weren’t happening. But it’s here now. It’s caught up with us. The Russians will come for us one of these days, though, so we can’t despair. They’ll come free us, and the mighty Germans will have to retreat. They can’t hold off the whole world forever.”

“They have enough might yet to clear us out,” she said. “Paul told me they’re throwing everything they have left at us.”

They drank silently for several more minutes before Zoltan rose to lead Rozsi toward his makeshift bed. She seemed reluctant, but he urged her on and she succumbed without much resistance.

They’d begun to kiss again with abandon when they heard a noise, and she jumped. “It’s nothing,” Zoltan whispered into her mouth.

She pulled away. “It’s something—
someone
. I heard.”

“It’s an animal, a mouse, most likely.”

“Or a rat?” she asked. She sat up in his bed.

Then they heard something heavier, running feet, in the alley above the window on the far side of the room, the window Zoltan opened when he cooked. A gun went off. There was some scuffling, the sound of a woman’s voice, a yelp, the slamming of a door. Was it in his building? Were they in Zoltan’s building now?

“Oh, my God, Zolikam, they’ve found us.”

“Who has?” He was clutching her.

“They’re not
friends
,” she said. “That’s for sure.”

“They may be Hungarians. They may be like us. They may be Resistance fighters. I’ll find out,” he said, and he took his camera as if to defend both of them with it.

“Zoli, please.”

“It’ll be all right.”

“I’m going with you.”

He would have said no, but they heard another door slam. The intruders were in his building for sure. Zoltan was on his feet, staring at the ceiling, waiting. “The roof,” he said, quietly. “We’ll be safer on the roof than in the street.”

“Let’s go back to my place, please,” she said. She was crying.

“We will, but it’s not safe just yet. We’ll be safer on the roof than the street or here.” He pulled her gently forward, extinguished the candles. “I know the apartments we can stop at on the way if we have to.”

Zoltan took Rozsi by the hand, slung his camera over the other shoulder, and they took the stone steps one at a time, barely breathing. On the railing between the second and third floor, Zoltan’s hand swiped across something wet, but it was too dark to tell what. He smelled his fingers, thought he could smell blood. “What is it?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. But he did know that someone had come this way ahead of them and he contemplated turning around. The trouble was that the shots had come from just outside the building. They were better off inside somewhere. He knew the building as well as anyone by now.

Halfway up the next flight, they discovered a damp rag, and Rozsi knew it was blood. She stifled a squeal. “It’s all right. They’re running away themselves,” Zoli said. They could hear whoever it was up ahead, heard a door. “It’s the door upstairs to the roof.”

“Let’s turn around, then,” Rozsi said, pulling on his arm.

“I think we’ll be all right. I have an instinct for these things. I’ve been out in the jungle longer than you have.”

“I don’t want to be in the jungle. Let’s go home, please.”

“We can’t go out just yet,
trust
me.”

“It’s not about trusting you or not. You would risk your life for a photograph.”

“I wouldn’t risk yours, though,” he whispered.

Rozsi allowed herself to be led to the same door they’d heard the others go through. They paused and listened. Rozsi could hear the thrumming of her own heart. They heard agitated whispering on the other side, a man and a woman. They were Hungarian, for sure, as Zoltan had guessed, but spoke haltingly. The man grunted and whispered something inaudible.

Rozsi pulled hard on Zoli’s hand. He squeezed hers reassuringly in response, but in the calm coming through his hand, there was an alloy of fear and excitement in his eyes. And then he did the most surprising thing of all: he opened the door and said, “We’re friends.”

The woman asked, “Who are you?”

Zoli gestured for Rozsi to stay behind, but she wouldn’t let go of his hand. “We won’t harm you,” Zoli said. “We’re unarmed. We can help you.”

And then he opened the door wide to reveal a soldier on his knees on the gravel rooftop, bleeding from the shoulder. His rifle lay at his side. He didn’t reach for it. Rozsi gasped as her Zoli stepped boldly out.

Zoli had seen right away that the two people were as afraid as he and Rozsi were, that all four of them were caught in a circumstance not of their choosing. They were not SS, not Nyilas, not Russians, and consequently not a threat, probably.

But the man said something, took up his rifle and struggled to his feet. He was asking if Zoli and Rozsi lived in the building. Had they been overlooked? That’s what Zoli thought he was saying. Zoli said, “I know you’re not fighting with the Hungarian army, officially. It’s all right. We’re unarmed. We’re not your enemies.” Zoltan held up his camera, nothing more, and that was when the man raised his rifle. Rozsi thought her life was at an end.

Shots rang out from somewhere—another roof—and the man fell forward to the gravel. The woman gasped. “No,” she was saying, “oh, please, no.” She embraced the fallen man from behind. “Please, Bernat. Why did you have to stand up now? We can still get you help.”

Zoltan and Rozsi had hit the gravel, too, and he covered her body, but then lifted his camera and aimed at the couple. He snapped a picture. Now it was Rozsi pleading. “Zolikam, please, don’t, not now, show respect. Our heads will come off, too, in a minute.” Rozsi’s heart heaved against the shoals of her ribs. She could barely breathe.

Zoli refrained from taking more pictures. “There’s not enough light anyway,” he said. A raving summer wind blew across the gravel of the roof. The Hungarian woman was sobbing quietly against her man’s back. The clear sky arced sweetly above their heads, the stars dressing up the moon.

The unfortunate woman was sitting up now and rummaging through a small reticule. “Keep down,” Zoli whispered to her. “It’s better to keep down.” He was certain they were all in danger, was sure the shooters from the other roof would ferret them out before long, that he and Rozsi and the woman should crawl on their bellies off the roof and hurry down through safe apartments until they could get out.

The woman ignored him. She’d withdrawn lipstick and a compact. She was sitting up boldly, powdering her face. “Listen, please,” Rozsi said softly. And then they watched as she applied red lipstick expertly to her lips, puckering as she did, then tightening her lips into a grin as she gazed into her little mirror.

When she was done, the woman reached under her companion. At first it was difficult to see or even imagine what she was doing. She took some pains to pry the rifle out from under the dead man. She set her reticule on the gravel and got up on her knees.

“No,” they said, both of them, and then they shook their heads. Then Rozsi pressed her face into the gravel and covered the back of her head with her hands.

Zoltan told the woman, “Get down. They might not be gone yet. Please get down.”

But she didn’t get down. Instead, she rose to her feet, aimed the weapon out into the darkness at the roof from where she thought the bullets had come at them. And then she fired.

From quite another roof, to the south, a spray of bright bullets flew at her, and she glanced down before falling beside her man.

Zoltan and Rozsi didn’t move. Rozsi was still covering her head. She hadn’t watched. When she did look, she thought she saw the woman’s back lifting, but it was more likely her tan jacket billowing in the wind. Even the slightest movement was magnified.