Gratitude (23 page)

Zoli helped for the rest of the day and the next without a rest, and Paul was sorry he had to be the one to tell Zoli.

On this occasion, Lajos spent an hour searching for the duplicate papers for Paul’s family and for Lili but couldn’t find them. “It’s too late,” Lajos kept saying, as he shuffled through the files. “No matter what, it’s too late. The train is gone.”

Incredibly, Zoli arrived just then and told Paul that whatever duplicates they had were kept in the basement. The three men rushed down and found the papers in a hurry.

“It’s too late,” Paul said. “But I have to do something.”

“
What?
” Zoli said.

“
Something
.” Paul took the papers and ran out of the room.

He interrupted a meeting Wallenberg was having with Per Anger and a couple of other Jews, who, like Paul, were helping with the campaign. Wallenberg took Paul into an anteroom. “Raoul, I need to borrow the embassy’s Alfa Romeo. It’s more convincing.”

“Of course,” Wallenberg said. “Convincing to whom?”

“The authorities.”

“I can’t go with you,” Wallenberg said. “We have another transport to visit in a couple of hours.”

“I’ll go alone.” Paul was making up the plan as he stood there.

“And?”

“And I’ll try to stop a train that has already departed.”

“The one that wasn’t scheduled, the surprise one this morning?”

“Yes, that one.”

“Paul—”

“Please,” Paul said.

Wallenberg got the keys and handed them over without another word. Paul’s hand was shaking as he took them. “I’ll be back,” Paul said.

Paul raced toward Miskolc and, beyond it, the northeast border. It was a bright, warm day. Only once in a half-hour did the shoulders of a cloud obscure the sun.
What was he doing?
Was he really going to pull this off? Decisions had to be taken so quickly these days. Hesitation, equivocation and doubt brought death. Hamlet’s flaw brought about the prince’s own death and the death of others, innocent others. Paul wondered if he would be driving back this way in the hours to come, or if this was a one-way excursion. Exit ghost.

If Paul could not argue the law, did he have any business enforcing it? And what law? Moral law? Divine law? He took a peek again at the sunny heavens. He had already lost too many family members, and too many others were missing, in trains ahead of this one. His father gone now, he felt cheated, felt he’d been deprived even of the time to mourn, hold photographs in his hand and weigh what had been lost. One photograph in particular he’d been meaning to dig up featured the whole family when they were all young: on New Year’s Day, 1920. Mathilde and Heinrich had arranged a costume party, and Paul, Istvan and Rozsi were dressed as the Three Musketeers, Istvan’s favourite figures. In the picture, Istvan was staring straight into the camera, the honourable warrior holding his sword up flat against his heart. Mathilde and Heinrich had always blocked Paul’s view of mortality, and now he could see it clearly.

As he drove, a bird took flight behind Paul’s ribs.

He considered Zsuzsi. His Philadelphia Zsuzsi. Had she found someone else in the city of brotherly love? Did she and Mr. Philadelphia worry, now, as they sunned themselves on a porch and read the papers, about what had happened to her homeland, about how far the enemy had penetrated, how capable her people were to resist, how able
he
—Paul—was to survive? Did she look up from the paper once to wonder that, glance at her man and wonder? Did she look up once from her soft-boiled egg, which had been blessed by the American Rabbinical Society? Did she dress like a calla lily on this day, or was it too warm a morning in the northeastern United States of America? Did Mercury stand on his dog still, waiting to fly?

It wasn’t morning at all but night—wasn’t it?—night becoming morning in the northeastern United States, and Zsuzsi fast asleep still.

Paul knew the train would wait in Miskolc. He knew he had a little time to catch up to it and even overtake it at this speed. He knew they would take on whomever else they had smoked out, as well as other resisters, criminals. He raced to the train station to see, and, lucky him, he had calculated correctly. But Miskolc was too busy a place to stage a drama, too many variables. No, he had to do it out of town. He raced ahead, thought he might be sick, tasted something bitter rise from his gut.

Far out of town—as close to the frontier, in fact, as one could possibly get—Paul Beck parked the Alfa Romeo across the train tracks. It gleamed in the sun. Its little Swedish flag flapped from the radio antenna, the reclining yellow cross against a blue background. It reassured Paul a little, as it reassured Eric the Holy. Even the Swedes had once had a crusade and, at the moment when his confidence flickered, Eric had looked up and seen a yellow cross against the blue sky, urging him onward.

Paul stood on the tracks in front of the car and crossed his arms. He could feel in his breast pocket the papers he’d forged for his relatives. He wore a white Panama hat and a camel hair cape, as befitted the driver of an Alfa Romeo limousine. It was his own outfit, but he didn’t wear it often. He looked himself over in the mirror when he did, as he’d done that morning. He wondered whether it looked like a costume of some kind. From not too great a distance, he could have passed for Jay Gatsby.

Paul heard rumbling, felt it through his feet and up his legs, his blood shivering through his veins, the bird’s beak stabbing out from between his ribs. From where he stood, he could not tell if the train was slowing, but the Czech border was not far behind him, so the engineer would know that he had to slow down soon, would be on the lookout. The train came booming toward him. Paul’s heart roared. Some finches and at least one cardinal that had perched on a nearby line flapped off toward the distant poplars. The wind from the train whipped up the leaves in the nearby fields and parted the grass by the tracks, like the Red Sea. Paul held onto his hat.

And now it was in close view, hurtling toward him. His breath caught. There was too much air to breathe. He heard the welcome screech. The locomotive could have crushed him like an insect, could have crushed the car behind him, but it clutched the rails, lurched, shot sparks and stopped in front of him. He could almost have reached out to touch it.

Three German officers of the Einsatzkommando were upon him in an instant. Paul held up his own forged papers and declared in German that he was a Swedish diplomat, and then he offered the other papers. “You are deporting Swedish nationals,” he said, “and I demand their release.”

Paul appeared impatient, annoyed even.

The commanding officer looked through the cut of his eye at the tall man in the cape and took the papers, studied each of the four photographs, read out the names: “Simon Beck, Klari Beck, Robert Beck, Lili Beck.” The officer’s eyes, Paul noticed, were surprisingly soft and brown, like the eyes of a deer, yet what lurked behind them was a deer hunter.

“Get them,” he said to the soldier on his right. “The Becks. Four of them.”

The officers, followed by Paul, walked down the line of closed cars, unlatching and throwing open each of the doors. The sun fell like a searchlight on the captives in each car. “Beck,” the officer shouted, and again, “Beck.” The people in the cars did not know whether it was good to be a Beck or not, whether the Becks were being singled out for release or for slaughter. The odds were not good.

As each sliding door was slammed shut, the soldiers, followed by Paul, moved to the next, and the same routine was enacted. “Beck,” and again, “Beck. Simon, Klari, Robert, Lili.”

In each car the people looked at one another, waiting for someone to croak out, “Here.” When no one did, they waited for the officers’ next move. The next move was to clamp the captives back into the security of darkness and the warmth of one another’s huddled bodies.

Car 17 was in the middle. The door flew open. The same frightened looks as the light fell upon the Jews. A child called out from the back. Paul’s gaze ranged across the faces. And then his eyes met his Uncle Robert’s. Paul caught his Aunt Klari’s eyes. He could tell his aunt and uncle wanted to smile, but they didn’t, they mustn’t. He saw his cousin Simon next. Simon seemed to be having the hardest time restraining his youthful glee at seeing Paul. And Lili, not a Beck at all, but a Beck for the purposes of this day, Simon’s wife.

The officers ordered the Becks out. “
Achtung! Raus!
” Paul helped his Aunt Klari down, and Simon helped Lili. When the Becks stood on the gravel beside the train, the officer studied their faces and photos. He looked extra long at Lili, her golden hair, her blue eyes. He handed back the photos to Paul.

“What about their valuables?” Paul asked in German.

Klari Beck flinched, and one of the Germans saw. He glanced at the others. His eyes were periwinkle blue, but he all but closed them as he squinted in the sun.

“Did you take their jewellery?” Paul asked again. As the wind picked up, his auburn curls rustled and whipped against the brim of the Panama. In the midst of this madness, Klari thought her nephew could use a haircut and was conscious she was thinking it just then. She felt faint. She had to resist falling over. “Watches? Rings? Bracelets? Necklaces?” Paul said.

The commanding officer removed his cap and ran his fingers through his light brown hair. He rolled his deer eyes. He half-turned toward the caboose. He said nothing, but merely pointed until one of his soldiers ran to fetch a burlap bag.

When he returned, Paul and his relatives could hear the bag jangling. Paul said to his family, again in German, “Find your things.”

The locomotive’s engine rumbled, the cars stood windowless and shut, their human cargo waiting to hear a sound, waiting to proceed. Robert sifted through the jewels quickly until he found his watch, a gold Omega. He slipped it into his vest pocket. He handed the bag to his wife, but Klari passed it immediately to Lili.

Paul intercepted. “What about your wedding ring?” Paul asked again in German, taking the bag and handing it back to his aunt. Either the Becks were Swedes and had been wrongly taken and then robbed, or they were not. They couldn’t be
somewhat
Swedish. “Were you wearing a necklace? A brooch?” he asked.

Klari trembled as she tried on one ring after another. She found her emerald pin, the one Robert had bought for her in India on their twentieth wedding anniversary. She tried on two more rings, but they didn’t fit, and she wasn’t wearing her reading glasses to check each name engraved on the inner surface. She looked pleadingly at her nephew before passing the bag to Lili.

This time Paul let her. Lili had put her mother’s ring in the bag, but there was no time to read inscriptions—imagine—and as Paul held the bag for her, she reached in and tried on several rings without looking. She quickly found one that fit perfectly and took her hands out. She pulled the ring from her finger, held it up and said, “
Mein
.” She glimpsed the inscription: “
Ivan. 13 Aprilis 1935.
” Whose ring could this be? Who was Ivan’s wife? Lili took a look at the train. She slipped the ring on again and clasped her hands together. She smiled. She wore a look of satisfaction, though she felt a thief herself now, the way the Germans were.

Simon pushed out a breath. He claimed he had nothing and shrugged. Paul handed the bag back to the commanding officer. “
Danke
,” he said and steered the Becks toward his car. The Alfa Romeo, more yellow now in the sun than cream, had an absurdly long snout, longer than the cabin and trunk combined. The officers watched them, waited until they got in before boarding the train again.

Paul reversed the car off the tracks and crunched over the gravel. No one dared speak until he had found the road back to Budapest. Paul ground his teeth. He looked in the rearview mirror and saw his Aunt Klari, sitting between Simon and Lili, looking straight ahead, her hand on her heart. He could feel his right knee trembling, the leg he’d need for the gas pedal just as soon as they made it out to the open road.

Paul finally said to his uncle, “So you came to the train after all.”

Robert felt humbled, ashamed. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what to say.” He felt like Lazarus, looking at his saviour behind the wheel. What could he say? What could anyone say?

Paul took his family to an old Dutch insurance company at Number 2, Ulloi Street, in Budapest. “It’s been annexed by the Swedish embassy,” he told them, as they pulled up.

They looked at the plain grey four-storey building. “What are we doing here?” Klari asked.

“This is your new home for the time being.”

“We’re staying here?” Lili asked, smiling. The place looked like a fortress. She put a warm hand on Klari’s shoulder. “We’ll be safe,” Lili said. “It will be fine. We’ll make it a home.”

“I have a surprise for you inside,” Paul added.

“Oh,” Klari said, placing a hand on her heart. “I don’t know how many surprises a girl can take in a single day. I’ll never forget today. Never.”

“Wait,” Paul said. He had his hand on the car door handle, but didn’t move. Two off-duty German soldiers walked by the car and looked but did not linger. When the soldiers had turned a corner, Paul opened his door and hustled his relatives out of the car. The grey building flew the blue Swedish flag with its reclining yellow cross.

As they stepped inside, Klari asked her nephew, “Do you live here, too?”

“I do sometimes, but I move about. I have work to do.”

They stood in a marble hall with banks of offices on either side and took in a cool deep breath. “Well, I enjoyed our little country excursion,” Robert said. “Did you, my dears?”

Simon said, “Quite,” and the new Swedish men laughed the grim laugh of victors. They felt they’d pulled off a great heist of some kind—or at least Paul had—the heist of their lives.

Paul sighed. “This way,” he said, and he led them to an office on the far side. Inside the door was the surprise. Rozsi was now living there, too.

Rozsi squealed when she saw her uncle and aunt and rushed at them.