Gratitude (25 page)

Marta could hear an orchestra playing in the distance, the notes riding on the foggy air toward them, and she knew what was coming—she’d heard, and she knew the drill: the executions up against a wall of the uncooperative and the “criminal,” the ones, for instance, who’d managed to trade a contraband British cigarette for an extra half bowl of soup. The ceremony was marked by a round of shots, puncturing the notes, followed by another round, the music—marching tunes, mostly—making the occasion festive.

Schlink worked her way back to Libuse, and the two attendant guards raised their rifles, expecting to lead the woman off for execution, but uncharacteristically Schlink said, “You will spend seventy-two hours in confinement block, and you will not eat or drink. Yom Kippah.” Libuse’s life was to be spared so Schlink could affirm her cleverness and reassert her authority, even without a truncheon, authority that had faltered in the hands of 241.

The officer then strolled over to gaze at Marta. She smiled at her eerily, as if the two were acquaintances meeting in a park. Marta shuddered. Schlink’s dark blond hair under her cap was tied in braids wound tightly around the sides of her head like rope, as if she were getting set to string herself up by the top of the head. Schlink said, “I understand you worked in a dental office, 818. You will not join the others for work detail. You will help out in the infirmary.”

Marta nodded. She felt the eyes of everyone upon her. She was a medical assistant all of a sudden. Rarely did anyone in the camp rise out of the dross of shorn prisoners in dingy uniforms. No one had a past or future. No one had been a florist, a professor of chemistry, a chambermaid. Curiosity faded rapidly when starvation and filth attended upon the women hourly and daily. Marta had learned a short, sharp lesson. She learned not to be amazed, not even surprised. Anything that was possible here was probable and even likely to come about.

Marta found herself feeling buoyant, grateful even. The sun still went on shining. And then she saw a pigeon land on a small flat stone in the mud, a white-grey stone the colour of 241’s skin. And another landed beside the first, crowding the other bird on the little platform. Here were animals who could fly over an electrified barbed-wire fence, and they flew
into
Auschwitz? But why not? They awaited scraps of food here as they did each day in the town, as they did in Oswiecim, in the square in front of the church. How were they to know that everyone who stood in the mud before them today awaited the same scraps, that the birds themselves were scraps if the inmates could snatch one without being seen? What a treat were these pigeons to the condemned and the not-yet-condemned: they reminded the assembled women of the miracle of flight; they reminded them of the statues in their own cities and of the fountains and squares, of a time when the birds seemed to live for their amusement. Marta thought of Mendelssohn Square, the pigeons, Istvan’s father, the horrible scene that was routine here.

Now, for the first time, they felt humbled by the pigeons as the grey birds sat on their royal rock and cooed. Here, nothing belonged to the many women stripped of their citizenship, not the sky, not the air, not the earth, not the cramped wooden shoes that kept their feet from sinking into the earth. The women who were to be exterminated this day were to pass their belongings to women who were yet to be exterminated, new arrivals. Everything belonged to the authorities, from the wooden shoes to the sky. Everything was for the authorities to lend to you and for you to receive. In that sense, the authorities displaced God. They could say when Yom Kippur was to occur and when Christmas came, if they so chose. It was a tidy ecosystem and hierarchy: Germans, pigeons, inmates to die later, inmates to die today.

The pigeons flew off when Schlink dismissed the women. They flew toward the sounds of the orchestra and firing squad to see if they might have better luck there.

MARTA SPENT HER DAYS
in a building along whose sides stood a row of cedars of Lebanon. They stood erect like green soldiers, as if to mimic their dark keepers. She was to assist Doctor Joachim Fischer, a veterinarian who’d succeeded another inmate, a French doctor named Marcel Levi. He had himself contracted
Korperschwache
, an organic decay which claimed the majority of its victims.

It was nicer to work in the infirmary than in the workshop where she’d made crude spoons out of the iron sent to them from Berlin. The infirmary was warmer, the food was more plentiful, and Marta was treated respectfully by Dr. Fischer and by the patients, who thought that she had more influence with the authorities than they had. It was here the red triangle insignia, which marked her a political prisoner and distinguished her from the lower caste of inmate, made all the difference.

More importantly, the eyes of Auschwitz were not always on Marta, and she could work her magic here, dishing out extra half bowls of soup to patients who needed it most, not always reporting a patient’s temperature, because a fever sometimes condemned the patient to death in the gas chamber, reassuring inmates that their lives would get better even when she knew they couldn’t.

Dr. Fischer frequently asked Marta to supervise the doling out of scarce medication, telling her she was better at it than he could be. “I have to keep reminding myself it’s not a horse I’m injecting, and that takes more moderation than I am capable of.”

Libuse didn’t return to the
lager
as Marta had hoped, and Marta began to wonder if Schlink had had a change of heart and condemned her to death after all. Marta found herself telling a new woman from Hungary one night in German to “have a dreamy night.” But then a few weeks later, unaccountably, Marta was asked to change
lagers
. She was moved to a creaky wooden
lager
, one of a series which had once been used by the Polish cavalry as stables for its horses. The crowding here was worse. Over five hundred women were crammed into a building originally designed for forty or forty-five horses.

But here in this stable she met up with Libuse again. The Princess looked gaunter than ever and had lost some of her irrepressible lustre, but Marta was thrilled to see her again. Libuse had a streak of red across her right eye and halfway across her left. “What happened to you?” Marta asked her as the Princess lay in her bunk. The woman behind her snored. “Was it the clubbing a few weeks ago?” She was whispering now. “In the yard? Have you been hit again since?” She didn’t want to say the name of Schlink but pointed with her head to some indefinite place outside the horse
lager
.

“I don’t know. It’s been itching terribly.”

“It’s an infection, then, maybe.”

“I thought you were a dental assistant,” Libuse said.

Marta noticed a red blotch at the base of Libuse’s neck peeking out of her collar. She placed her hand on her forehead. The woman was on fire. Libuse’s eyes were closed. Marta unbuttoned the top buttons of her shirt and saw the blotches continue over her chest. Scarlet fever. She knew it instantly—she’d seen it in the clinic—but she didn’t say the words. “You have to come to the infirmary, immediately. I’ll speak to Dr. Fischer. You need to be treated.”

But Libuse was asleep already, taking in great ragged drafts of air. Marta stood by her for a minute, not knowing what to do. She decided she must tell someone. The
kapo
in this
lager
was a Hungarian woman named Manci. She was not mean to those who let her know she was in charge. Marta had heard the same observation from a number of the women in the stable. She found the
kapo
and told her Libuse had redness of the eye and wondered what to do. Manci rubbed her stern chin, as if there were numerous options, and then ran her hand through the bristle of her scalp. Manci must have thought she was Solomon when she declared that Libuse should be transferred to the infirmary to have her eyes attended to. “I’ll arrange it first thing in the morning.”

“Good idea, ma’am,” Marta said. “Thank you.”

The woman smiled tightly, then said, “Get to bed.”

In the infirmary the next day, Dr. Fischer examined Libuse’s whitish tongue and the red blotches all over her chest and back and concurred that she had contracted scarlet fever. But he said he didn’t have enough experience with human disease. He couldn’t make sense of the redness of the eyes. “She took a blow across the back of the head from an officer with her stick,” Marta said.

“Is that a complaint?” Dr. Fischer asked.

It was the first time the doctor had turned on her. She stepped back a bit, felt she’d taken a blow herself. “No, of course not,” Marta said.

It was not until she’d answered that the doctor continued his examination. He prescribed sulpha drugs and quarantined Libuse in a room with two other inmates with scarlet fever, a half-dozen cases of diphtheria, one of typhus and two of dysentery.

“Where am I?” Libuse asked, “the Grand Hotel Europa?” Marta tucked in her ailing friend. There was only one person assigned to each bunk, the room was warm, there were extra rounds of soup, and Marta got to look in on Libuse several times a day. Marta even read to her from a book that was given to her by a male nurse from an adjoining infirmary when he had learned that Marta had come from Szeged. The book, by Mor Jokai, was in the original Hungarian and was called
Eyes Like the Sea
. Marta noticed the other quarantined patients listening to the sounds of the lively nineteenth-century prose, although no one else was from Hungary. So Marta read the novel with extra relish. Jokai was the grand Romantic in her homeland, after all, and she felt happy about giving him the extra push, even if no one understood a word. She felt like a singer with a lovely song.

While Libuse’s condition improved over the course of a week, her eyes had taken on a cloudy sheen. Once, when she lay in her bunk awaiting Marta, her eyes wide open, Libuse didn’t notice that Marta had arrived and didn’t smile until she greeted her. Marta took the single lamp in the room and held it up to Libuse’s face. “It’s warm,” Libuse said.

“Can you see its light?” Marta asked.

“Move it away,” Libuse said. Marta moved the lamp back and forth before Libuse’s face, but not close enough for her to feel its warmth. “I can see the light,” she said.

“How many fingers am I holding up?” Marta asked.

Libuse paused, groped with her eyes across the room. “Twelve,” she said.

“You’re going blind.” Marta dropped her hands to her sides. A couple of the other patients watched her. “You’ve got scarlet fever, you’re going blind, you’re in Auschwitz and you’re making jokes.”

“You’re in Auschwitz, too,” Libuse said.

Dr. Fischer came to examine Libuse and noted that her fever had broken. He saw the cloudy eyes and didn’t know what to say. He summoned a doctor from the adjoining clinic, a family physician from Lodz who spoke only a little German. A day later, the man arrived in the restricted room with his face covered. He watched Dr. Fischer tie up his own mask before proceeding. Marta joined them, holding a mask to her own face. She’d been careless about doing so until then, but she’d washed her hands as often as she could, particularly after cleaning up the dysentery patients. She’d used chloramines blended with water that the male nurse from next door had provided.

“What happened here?” the Polish doctor asked. Fischer shrugged his shoulders and turned to Marta. She didn’t dare mention the truncheon again. Even if she were right, they could only now speculate. The damage seemed profound, but she prayed it could be reversed. Perhaps the film over her eyes would lift of its own accord. The Polish doctor couldn’t help. He said in broken German, directly to Libuse, what Marta had hoped he would say: that maybe she would mend on her own when she got stronger. Libuse understood the gist of his words. She asked whether scarlet fever caused blindness. “Not that I know of,” he replied and patted her hand before withdrawing. “Deafness sometimes.”

Much depended on timing. Libuse would not survive outside the infirmary as a blind woman, not even for a day. If Fischer checked her out, she was doomed.

But the scarlet fever lifted a few days later, and Fischer had little choice. “I’ll suggest they give her light work for a short time. We can only hope.”

That night, with Libuse back in the
lager
, Marta couldn’t sleep. The moon was full, and she snuck over to Libuse’s bunk to see how she was doing. Libuse sensed her presence and groped for Marta’s hand. “It’ll be all right,” Libuse said when she found it.

On the way back to her bunk, Marta paused at the window to gaze at the big moon, wasting its glamour on the Auschwitz yard. She remembered Istvan. She couldn’t bear to think of him, shrivelled in the cellar, now gone possibly, waiting up ahead maybe.

Sixteen

Budapest – August 6, 1944

LILI AND ROZSI SHOT OUT
of the doors of the Dutch insurance company. They hustled along Ulloi Street, the rope of Lili’s blond braid gleaming in the bright morning sunlight, Rozsi’s dark hair tucked beneath a baby-blue bonnet, calculated to draw attention away from her hair and to her eyes. They carried with them their Swedish papers and worried less about the Germans, who would likely honour the papers, than the Hungarian Arrow Cross, who wouldn’t. They also had a bracelet and ring to barter with.

Lili had wanted Rozsi to stay put at the safe house, but she said she’d go utterly mad if she couldn’t have a break from staring at those godforsaken walls. “My best friends have become those stiff wooden chairs and desks.” They’d now lived in the Swedish house office together for almost three weeks.

“There are worse friends out there in the world these days, believe me.”

“I don’t mean to be ungrateful. But I can help you, Lili. I’m not Paul, but I am his sister.”

“All right, come with me. We’ll manage something, I’m sure.”

Rozsi had kissed her Uncle Robert while Lili hugged Klari, and then they switched. Simon looked guilty and anxious, but they all knew he could not leave. Simon could have posed for one of Josef Goebbels’s propaganda figures of Jews, whose cartoonish dark eyes and hooked noses looked down from posts and billboards around the city.

Arm in arm, the two women rushed eastward, past the sharp shadow of the Hungarian National Museum. “We can go to Baross Street,” Lili said. “If we make it to Jozsef Crescent along Baross, we can get food at the Madar Café. My friend Maria will give us some without question, just as long as no one’s watching her. If there’s a particular German officer there, the one I told you about, then we can’t go in—that’s the only thing.”

Rozsi was almost out of breath. “What would we do without you, my darling?” she asked. “What would
I
have done without you? How would we have eaten anything at all? Zoli has been gone so much since he took it upon himself to stand in the line of fire holding up a camera.” Rozsi’s eyes shifted left and right as she spoke. She was startled by every bird taking flight and every car zipping by behind them at Kalvin Square or up ahead on Jozsef.

Lili, the more experienced and daring adventurer, was much more accustomed to wading in among the crocodiles. Without her scavenging expeditions, the Becks and the group of mysterious nuns who’d just moved into the building annexed by Wallenberg would surely have starved. They’d been transferred from another building that had been raided by the Arrow Cross. As it was, even the portly Robert had become thin. Klari had skilfully pinned the shoulders and waists of the two suits of Robert’s that Paul had managed to rescue from their home, and Lili similarly had to alter the three dresses of Klari’s she had smuggled into the Swedish compound and which the two women were to share for however long they remained there, despite the billowy look they gave Lili. And the nuns, who’d kept to themselves to the point of seeming secretive, even arrogant, with their once-solid frames filling out their habits, all now stood shivering like thin winter branches as Lili brought back turnips one day, rice another, radishes a third.

Only yesterday, she had come back just before nightfall after a long, worrisome afternoon during which, repeatedly, Simon despaired of ever seeing her again, bearing a sack with two giant cans in it. Lili grunted as she set down her booty with a clump and smiled broadly. She scanned the faces, first Klari’s and Robert’s, then Rozsi’s, the nuns’ behind her, not wanting to appear too eager; finally, Simon’s. He had the look of a wolf again, and he frightened her. Had he been worried about her? Had he feared he might never eat again? If she had not returned, which alarm would have sounded first behind those fangs?

A chill juddered down her spine. She lost her smile. They were all waiting. She didn’t want to be cruel, so she opened her sack and withdrew the great cans with another grunt.

“Tomato paste,” she said. “Can you believe it? All this tomato paste. I found the cans in the larder of a badly damaged townhouse. Terribly damaged. And forgotten. Looted already. The paintings were gone as well as the porcelain and silver out of the china cabinet, the rugs off the floor, even the books from the shelf. But these cans were overlooked, somehow, in the dark. They looked like restaurant cans they were so big. Maybe someone had startled the looters or conquerors—whoever they were.”

Smiles lit up the room all around Lili now. Imagine. All that tomato paste. A nun said through a dry throat, “And the sack? You even managed a sack.” Lili did not even know the woman’s name, the nuns spoke so rarely, not even a greeting of good morning, not a thank you, not a “Bless the Lord.”

Lili handed the nuns one of the big cans. They all rushed forward to take it. Lili said, “From the brickyard a half block away. There were sacks at the abandoned brickyard. I just took one.”

Simon opened both cans as quickly as he could. The nuns sat on the floor all around their tomato paste each with a spoon, like young girls around a great Christmas pudding.

Today, Rozsi and Lili saw a convoy of German vehicles ahead. They could not make it all the way to the Madar Café. They’d have to take another route. Rozsi had just begun to loosen her grip on her companion’s arm. She said nervously, “You will be my cousin soon, Lili, and what a delightful cousin you will be, the best of an excellent lot. You’ll be like a sister to me.”

And then they heard a gunshot. The women ducked into the doorway of a courtyard on Baross Street. There appeared to be someone working inside, pounding leather, two people, a man and a woman at least. Could the workers see them lurking in the shadows?

“Maybe it was a car backfiring,” Lili whispered.

“Can these people be trusted?” Rozsi’s face blanched with panic.

“Quiet.”

Another shot rang out, causing the women to crouch lower. Rozsi covered her head with her hands and whimpered.

“Wait here,” Lili said. She dashed out and peered around the corner into the street. She could see clearly down Maria Street to Ulloi, where she spotted a line of people and a single SS officer. Even from a good block away, the yellow star was evident on the chests of those in line. A strange silence hung in the air. And then came a third shot.

Lili rushed back to her blue-bonneted “cousin,” now stricken with paralysis. She urged her out, and the two galloped off together in the opposite direction, northward toward Sandor Brody Street, ducked into another courtyard and shrank down again to the cobblestones.

They could hardly be detected from the street. They held still, panting, Rozsi’s arm painfully clamped in her companion’s. A wooden door clapped open against a wall. Rozsi squawked, then covered her mouth with her hand.

The women turned to find a quiet courtyard behind them, the floor covered by grey cobblestones, rounded and polished as if by the sea. They crept forward, and the door clattered again. They gazed up to discover that it was not a door at all but a wooden shutter. High above it was a skylight trimmed with purple bevelled glass.

More alluring than the scene, however, was the air itself, for it was filled with the smell of soup: onions, garlic, peppers, beans. Where had such riches come from? Lili signalled to Rozsi to hide in the shadows with her. She whispered, “Let’s offer them something for some of their soup. My bracelet—your ring.”

“No!” Rozsi said, too loudly.

“The bracelet then. They’ll take the bracelet.”

The two advanced across the smooth cobblestones, still in a half-crouch, like prowlers. They passed under a gothic doorway crowned with a stone garland of freshly painted white lilies on green leaves. The heavy door facing them was as shiny and white as the stone blossoms.

Rozsi knocked gently, and the visitors waited a long, respectful moment before Lili tried more forcefully. Still no answer. Above the women’s heads hung a cheerful old chandelier, with white glass stems supporting purple heads of hyacinth with green glass leaves. The light was switched off.

Lili tried the doorknob and, to her surprise, found that it yielded. The intruders thought they would find a genial, warm room, but it was virtually empty, except for a crocheted doily folded over on the floor, an overturned palm, a couple of small chairs and a walnut side table piled high with two towers of books.

And yet there was the robust smell of soup. Rozsi squeaked out a “Hello” in the direction of the kitchen at the back. As they skulked along the corridor covered by a soft Persian runner, they passed into the sphere of the soup and could hear it bubbling.

A corner of the burgundy rug just before the entrance to the kitchen was turned over, and glass crunched beneath the women’s feet. Both looked down, slightly alarmed, before taking the next bold step into the kitchen.

The larder was empty, the cupboards open and bare. A pine china cabinet stood bright with white plates printed with lilies. Three chairs sat around a blind table and a fourth was overturned. A pair of green tortoiseshell spectacles, its arms folded, lay on the tabletop by a linen tea towel. The thought of the empty house next door to Lili’s home in Tolgy glanced across her consciousness. On the floor lay a maid’s white cap, half encircling the hairpin which must have held it in place, and beside these, across the pine floorboards, was a dry maroon smear, which must almost certainly have been soup. A similar smear had dried beside the spoon rest on the stove, but no spoon.

Rozsi drew her companion’s attention to an imposing photograph in an ornately carved wooden frame hanging next to the china cabinet. It was of a clutch of four proud hunters, two with handlebar moustaches, one with his foot resting on a vanquished wild boar.

Lili took the linen towel and lifted the lid of the fragrant pot. Rozsi turned off the gentle flame beneath it.

“Let’s take the pot with us,” Lili said.

“The pot?”

“We’ll manage.”

“Let’s check first—”

“No,” Lili said. “They’re gone. Recently.
Very
recently. But gone.”

Rozsi looked back at the picture of the hunters. Which one belonged to this household? “Let’s leave the bracelet for them,” she said.

Lili took her companion’s face in her hands, tucking the ends of her fingers inside the blue bonnet. “Rozsi, that bracelet is currency for another meal. These people won’t be back. I don’t know who took them. The Germans. The Arrow Cross. Help me with this.”

“This huge pot?”

“Yes, it’s wonderful soup. Look!” Lili reached into the steaming pot for the wooden spoon and offered Rozsi some to taste.

“Oh, dear Lord,” she said, licking her lips, forgetting herself briefly, then covering her mouth. “We’ll try,” she said.

The pot was heavier than even Lili had thought. It would be a feat to carry it back the five blocks to the safe house, particularly without arousing suspicion. But then it wasn’t only Jews who were hungry these days.

“Maybe we should eat some,” Rozsi said, grunting as they transferred the pot to the table. “We’ll carry our dinner inside of us.”

“We can make it back with the whole pot,” Lili said.

They managed to get the soup all the way to the Ervin Szabo Library, where they set the pot down on the stone steps and paused to catch their breath. It was especially hot now. Lili’s back was drenched.

“No one saw us,” Rozsi said.

“I don’t think so.”

“We’d be dead by now, wouldn’t we?”

“Maybe not dead, but well on our way to it, I’m sure,” Lili said.

“My shoulders are coming out of their sockets,” Rozsi said as she rubbed them.

“I think I can manage the rest of the way now,” Lili said.

Rozsi looked hurt. “Don’t be ridiculous. I’ve held up until now. I’ll survive another two blocks. If I don’t, you’ll never take me out with you again, and it’ll be me and the furniture and the nuns with their vow of silence.”

They saw a man in uniform a couple of blocks behind them, hurrying in their direction. He hadn’t passed Maria Street yet, so if they rushed they could elude him.

The women hopped to their feet, lifted their pot, and marched northwest on Ulloi Street even more briskly than before, the soup sloshing around in the pot. As they approached the last leg of the journey, Rozsi glanced behind her. The uniformed man had passed the steps of the library and turned, gaining on them.

They were almost there. They were almost back at their building, soup and all, but they could live without the soup if they had to. They could heave it at their assailant.

The thought shot through Rozsi’s mind like a bullet: “I want to see Zoli again, Lili,” she blurted out. “I live for him. I need to see him again.” Rozsi’s cheeks glistened with tears.

Lili smiled in response. And then the man was upon them. They’d arrived at Number 2, the building Wallenberg had annexed for Sweden, but they still stood on the sidewalk in Hungary. It was like a child’s fierce game of hide-and-seek, and they were not home free just yet.

They heard his voice as they turned, still gripping the great pot. “I have an envelope for Dr. Robert Beck,” the man said. He was a mailman.

“An envelope?” both women said simultaneously, breathlessly. They set down the pot and broke into wild laughter.

When they finished, the mailman, smiling now himself, said, “Yes, his neighbour on Jokai Street said I could find him here. It’s his last paycheque.”

“His
paycheque?
” This one was even better. Now Rozsi and Lili were doubled over and howling.

“Do you need help getting that inside?”

“I don’t think so,” Rozsi said, “but we’ll give you some, if you’re hungry.”

“No, thank you, ma’am,” he said soberly and handed over the envelope. “Have a good day.” The man moved along in the direction of Kalvin Square.