Gratitude (26 page)

Seventeen

Budapest – August 9, 1944

PAUL MET WITH RAOUL WALLENBERG
in his office at the end of an exasperating day. At Nyugati Station that morning, Wallenberg and his team had managed to liberate one hundred and thirty newly minted Swedes from the transports, only to have them apprehended once again by the Arrow Cross, taken to a nearby brickyard and shot. The Arrow Cross didn’t like the Germans to take their Jews, didn’t accept the notion of Swedes with Hungarian names, and liked to carry out their own killings.

That same day, an unscheduled deportation by the Nazis occurred on the other side of town, the east side, and the Swedes and their lieutenants couldn’t act quickly enough to save anyone.

Paul and Raoul were talking excitedly in English. “So what do you propose?” the Swede asked.

“Our agents need to communicate better with one another and with
us
. They’re running amok. We need better intelligence, coordinated intelligence.”

Wallenberg was about to answer but didn’t. Paul thought for a moment that he’d missed something and moved in closer. Wallenberg looked awkwardly at his companion and the two found themselves blushing.

After too long a pause, Wallenberg said, “No, we need to visit Eichmann.”

“
Visit
him?” Paul said. “
Adolf
Eichmann?”

“We can cut a special deal with him. The Germans need deals here. Hungarian Jews are still a powerful economic force.”

“Not anymore,” Paul said.

“They are—you are. Believe me.”

Paul looked into Wallenberg’s walnut-brown eyes. They were quiet eyes, calming.

“You’ve actually gone mad,” Paul said.

“Madder than someone standing in front of a transport train to stop it—not to mention parking
my
car across the tracks?”

“They needed to see me.”

“What, the hat and cape weren’t loud enough?”

“Mad like that, yes. The suit and cape were the maddest part.”

The Swede walked to the window. “Eichmann can help us, you see,” he said. “He
is
mad. But he needs things. War machinery, slave labour.”

Someone knocked at the door. Wallenberg was distracted. He was standing at the window, looking out into the rainy night. He looked down Gellert Hill toward the Danube. He could see someone in the wet light across Minerva Street, but whoever it was saw him, too, and ducked into a dark alleyway.

Paul opened the door. The man in the hallway wore a blue fedora and his ears were blazing red. Though the man was Hungarian, he said in German, for the benefit of Wallenberg, “Sir, there’s a pregnant woman downstairs.”

“Yes?” Paul said.

“She’s going to de-pregnate herself at any moment if the pool at her feet is any indication.”

“A Jew?” asked Paul.

“Yes, a Jew. No hospital will take her.”

Wallenberg turned from the window. “Bring her up,” said the Swede.

“Up? Bring her up where?” the man asked. The redness from his ears spread to his cheeks like electric bulbs. He took off his blue fedora and combed back his hair with his fingers.

“Yes, up. Bring her to my bedroom.” He turned to Paul and switched to English. “Let’s get Dr. Molnar up here again. He’s on the night shift downstairs.”

The man replaced his hat and said, “I’ll prepare your bed, sir.”

The woman said her name was Ilonka Nemet. She could barely make it up the stairs on her own, so Dr. Molnar and a strong woman who’d been helping with the
schutz-passes
all but carried the bursting woman up to Raoul’s bedroom.

Ilonka Nemet saw Wallenberg and, attempting to be mannerly, tried to say something but began to pant instead. She was pale and perspiring. The group, including the messenger in the blue hat, got her onto Wallenberg’s bed.

“The room is too crowded,” the doctor said, and Wallenberg and Paul awkwardly shuffled out. The man with the blue hat, who’d once been a printer, left, too, but continued all the way down to the first floor.

Back in Wallenberg’s office, Paul and the Swede listened to the rain pattering against the window and didn’t talk. They seemed to be expecting another cue, and they didn’t have to wait long.

They heard a wail above their heads, followed by moans. They both looked up at the ceiling. To the unwitting ear, Ilonka Nemet might have sounded as though she were alternating between pleasure and intense pain.

Wallenberg whispered, “I hope we’ve made ourselves useful.”

Paul nodded.

“Shouldn’t you call it a night?” Wallenberg asked.

Paul shook his head. “I’ll wait to see how she makes out.” Paul had his own room in a Swedish building adjoining this one.

Raoul and Paul wanted to talk some more but found themselves drawn to the drama of the primal sounds, muffled by the ceiling. The woman cursed and wailed again, a wild sound to add to the rainy night.

And then the noise stopped. Just the rain persisted. Both men looked at the ceiling, waited for the cry of a baby and, when it didn’t come, headed upstairs.

Dr. Molnar greeted the men as they arrived. The doctor was wiping his bloody hands in a towel. “Hope you don’t mind,” he said. “We raided your linen closet.”

The Swede shrugged his shoulders. “What about the baby, and the mama?”

“She’s fine,” the doctor said. “They both are. A little girl.”

“Thank you,” Paul said.

“Why would you thank me?” the doctor asked. “This is what I do.”

Three women were now attending to Ilonka Nemet, one from the embassy, the woman who had been working on the
schutz-passes
and another Jewish woman from the Swedish compound. They cleaned and freshened the bed as Ilonka and her baby lay in the middle of it. They worked with great skill, gently turning mother and child this way and that, cleaning and tidying them up, too, as if they were part of the bedding.

Finally everyone withdrew, except for Wallenberg, Paul, mother and child.

The men stood on either side of the bed. The Swede said, “She’s very pretty.”

Ilonka raised her head to look and then spat at the child. Paul burst out laughing.

Wallenberg said, “Have you picked out a name for the little girl?”

At first Ilonka didn’t answer. Wallenberg wondered if she’d understood his German. He glanced at Paul, who put the question in Hungarian.

“Yes,” the woman said in German, “but I don’t know what it is.”

Paul looked at the woman and asked the question again in Hungarian. She simply smiled.

“Are you the Sphinx?” he asked.

She shook her head and smiled again. The woman’s dark eyes, like Greek olives, glowed out of the half-darkness. She looked tired but very alive.

She turned to Wallenberg and asked, “What is your mother’s name? I want to give my daughter your mother’s name.”

Wallenberg took Ilonka’s warm hand. The child murmured. “She’s a good girl,” Wallenberg said. “I can tell already.”

Ilonka nodded.

He took the baby’s clutchy fingers. “But I won’t mention any of her other attributes,” he said. “I don’t want the spit to start flying again.”

Ilonka smiled.

“My mother’s name is Maj,” Wallenberg said.

“Maj Nemet,” the woman repeated at her little girl’s head. The baby had curly black hair. “Maj.”

The men stood tall beside the bed.

“Stay with me,” Ilonka said. Her voice was tired.

“Where is your husband?” Wallenberg asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Was he taken?”

She was crying. “I don’t know.”

“I’ll stay.”

“Just a short while.”

“No, a long while,” Wallenberg said. “I have nowhere to go. This is my bedroom.”

Ilonka laughed, a good throaty laugh she drew up from her belly. “Aah,” she said, remembering her recent pain, and she pressed her hand down on her abdomen. She repeated the name of the child, Maj Nemet, and drew the baby up to her breast, but the little girl slept on.

It was an impressive bed, with the three golden crowns of Sweden at its head bestowing a benediction on its occupants.

“I’ll go,” Paul said in English.

“Where will you go?” Wallenberg wanted to know.

“To my room.”

“You’ll have to go out to the street to get around to your room. It’s not a good idea at 2
A.M
. I know we’ve been reckless, but let’s not be reckless when we don’t need to. You heard the lady, stay.”

“Where?”

“The bed’s big enough for a family of six—eight during wartime. Stay. We’ll have breakfast together.”

The baby was suckling, now, with its eyes closed. Ilonka, too, had closed her eyes and seemed to be sleeping.

Paul marvelled at people’s ability to improvise and adapt. He marvelled at the world’s ability to reconfigure itself, like magic, taking on whatever shape it needed to in order to preserve life. Without being fully conscious of the thought, he sensed that he stood near the centre of the universe.

Paul took off his shoes, laid them neatly at the foot of the bed and made himself comfortable on one side of Ilonka and Maj. Wallenberg watched before removing his own jacket and shoes and carrying them to the closet. He then made himself comfortable on the other side of the woman and her baby. Soon, everyone was asleep.

Eighteen

Szeged – August 25, 1944

WATER NO LONGER POURED
from the tap. There was no wood for the stove. Istvan could collect rainwater in a pan, but only at night when no one would notice. He’d eaten the dozen tomatoes from the garden ten days before, shared three green ones with Smetana. He’d eaten the grass with Smetana, every blade, but he didn’t want to touch the blooms of the lush angelica in case they were poisonous. Smetana must have caught a mouse. The blood was still around his mouth, and he gloated unremittingly, purring his head off. And then Smetana had brought him a mouse, too, and deposited it on his threshold as an offering to him. Istvan took the little beast and cleaned it and roasted it over a tiny fire—a toy fire, it looked like—out back in the middle of the night.

Smetana knew, now, not to come home during the day, because Istvan could not let him in. The cat was probably arousing enough suspicion as it was, wandering the precincts, scrapping with the surviving stray cats who’d weathered these years when the humans hardly shared.

Istvan told Smetana one evening about another cat, named Tiresius, who lived in St. Agota Old Age Home, around the corner from his dental office. He was a special cat, a tuxedo cat, all black with an elegant white chest and paws, like spats. But what set him apart was his ability to foretell the demise of the residents at St. Agota. “The nuns at first thought Tiresias was the devil,” Istvan said, as he ran his hand through Smetana’s belly fur. “But Tiresias was too angelic to be the devil. You see, he performed a service for the elderly. He would make the final voyage as warm and comfortable as could be. If the patient’s door was closed, he would call out to the nuns to let him in, and then he would wind his warm body around the old person’s cold feet. If they hacked with a cough, he would stretch himself out by their side, soothing them with his soft purr, until the rumble in their chests softened, too, and their last breaths were calm ones. On one occasion, when old Mr. Farkas appeared to be going, Tiresias sat by his daughter’s side instead in the common room, never leaving her. The nuns opened Mr. Farkas’s door and beckoned to the cat, but Tiresias held his post. They believed his distinguished career was at an end. He had foretold the passing of some fifty people just hours before their passing and had not slipped up a single time. They were disappointed with him and turned their attention elsewhere. When they returned, Mr. Farkas sat crying by his daughter’s side in the common room. She had passed away, with Tiresias sitting in her lap.”

Smetana purred now, too, and curled himself up in Istvan’s lap. In a second, Smetana was asleep. “Tiresias himself never died,” Istvan whispered, “or at least no one saw him, confirming his status as a divine messenger. He simply walked out the front door of St. Agota one morning and never came back.”

Smetana woke up and looked at Istvan, his thorny paws making themselves known to his lap. He purred again. “Of course, you are not Tiresias reincarnated, are you, Smetana? You predict continuing life, not death—or is this Tiresias’s next task?”

The time had come for Istvan to get out, too, at night. He’d managed a couple of times, just to steal pears and apples from nearby trees. Could the authorities be watching the house, he asked himself, after they’d murdered his Marta or sent her away with the others? His heart pounded in his head. He pressed the ache in from his temples, tight as a vise. And then he took a deep breath and held it within him. The southern Hungarian air was still free for the taking and abundant and smelled the same to everyone.

His Marta had sacrificed herself with a look that said, “I am hiding something; I do have someone; I have swallowed the canary.” And in sacrificing herself, she drew the eyes away from the little house in the old paprika district. No one came around anymore. No one counted the tomatoes on the vine. They’d cut off the water, crossed the place off some list—one of many, no doubt. And now he could roam about in the dark. The time had come to travel farther afield, become Man the Forager. Better to die from a sudden blow than from endless starvation. He could no longer die quickly. He’d been doing it steadily and diligently for months. Better the blow—better the risk—the only thing at stake was what remained of his life. Life without Marta.

He’d abandoned the library of his mind, the books he’d been carrying around with him in his small dark circle, the individual volumes, the individual chapters he’d been mentally thumbing through, and the verses he recollected, especially the lines of his friend Miklos, the fictional characters Istvan had gathered around his fire, the characters he loved as well as the people he loved, some better. The wandering Odysseus sat there glowing, recalling the lure of the Sirens, the horror of the Cyclops—had Istvan become Penelope and Marta the unwilling and unwitting adventurer, Smetana their Telemachus? Or had he been the dupe, Docteur Bovary, turning away as Emma cast her eye abroad, now to Rodolphe, now to Léon, the solicitor, with “the ruins of a poet” in his heart? Or had he become the madwoman, howling down from the attic as Rochester courted Jane Eyre, except Istvan howled up through the floorboards—surely not as a spouse, surely not that secret, a secret inconceivable, no, just a lover, enough that he should be a lover, the howler with the prodigious profile calling up from the hole.

He’d stopped playing the music, too, late in the night, almost inaudibly. It was too painful at first, but then he’d forgotten, the hole in his stomach that could not be filled drawing everything into it, the music, the love, the air, Budapest, Szeged, his dead parents, his living brother and sister, he hoped, or maybe not by now, drawing them in and grinding them up, unrelentingly, the new ruler, greater than the Germans, greater than the war, demanding more every day until one day, suddenly, and for a few days after, it settled down and accepted its state, revelled in it, found peace, and then forgot, until Smetana showed up with the mouse.

But it was not his stomach, briefly soothed, that had pulled him out of his despair. It was his heart, fuelled again by red blood. He’d felt ashamed of himself that his love had been blurred by his need, his egotistical need at first, then his animal need. Against the woman who never spoke his name outside these walls, at pain of death, not to anyone, not to the Cyclops who did not blink even as Dr. Janos Benes dangled from a meathook before them.

And now, damaged, knowing more than he needed to know, knowing as much as those who got to visit the edge of the Earth to peer into the chasm, did he even want to be found? Whatever would happen if he were found? Would he have that look in his eye of the touched, the traveller returned from the East, the visionary down from Mount Sinai, having stared too long at the Burning Bush? Did he
want
to be found? Had he wanted to be saved? Not by his brother, certainly, not by Marta. Especially not by Marta. It would strain his capacity for gratitude, imperil his ability to love. The cat gives back only as much affection as will earn him his next meal. How much better could he be at the end of these years? How much better had his species proven to be?

But then there was Marta. How does one repay a sacrifice so great? Whether Marta was dead now, or forever gone, or back home for the holidays, he would not be free of his debt even unto his own grave. At best, he would be married to the debt and to her, a bigamist—at worst, a celibate but for the debt.

Celibate but for the bars of light, parallel and perfect, never to meet, travelling someday soon over his recumbent bones, by day the children of the sun, thin but still glowing, by night the children of the moon at full blast, skiing across the fleshless bones, the grinning skull, adventurers like the Musketeers, voyagers that light their own path, the glowing needles of Madame LaFarge, weaving out destiny, wasting destiny on grey limbs.

And yet Istvan would go out. Give the world another chance, if only for her, for the sacrifice she made, a destiny not to be wasted—the ultimate sin: an ultimate sacrifice wasted, a destiny discarded.

Istvan waited until nightfall, but only just. He took what seemed at the time a terrible risk. He carried his pan of water, now just a third full, to Marta’s little bathroom, lit the second-last of his candles, stood before her mirror, gazed at the skeleton jailed within his skin, found a bar of soap by the sink, stared at the single strand of black hair embedded within it, brought the bar to his nose to smell the hair but detected only the perfume of the soap, took off his shirt and pants, dunked the soap in the last of his drinking water and washed himself, top to bottom.

He could not wear this dingy shirt anymore—not out. But why not out? Was he going dancing? Was he going to take in a sumptuous meal at the Rosenkavalier? He was going out.
Out
. He had not been out for months, out on the street, out where other humans roamed. Should he dress for them, dress his body? It was the same body he’d dressed in the morning and undressed at night, the body that had receded from its clothing, receding to the time before its lungs had formed and its limbs could carry it, before it slipped into the world and had to learn for itself how to breathe, walk and dress itself. And now unexpectedly he got to revisit that time, recede until he dissolved into the genetic materials that met in him and which he could share with the planet that conjured him up.

But he didn’t want to arouse suspicion. As it was, the curfew was upon him. The streets were to be cleared. He wanted to be someone just blundering along, running late in getting home.

Marta had a big Alpine sweater she’d worn on a cold night walk not long after they’d met. It was the biggest of her sweaters and the least feminine until she put it on. He found it in her closet in no time. In the heart of this generous sweater, where two white Alps formed a valley, he was sure he could make out her scent. He hesitated a moment, considered preserving her fragrance in the garment but quickly saw the other garments hanging there. He had plenty from which to sip her memory, if ever he made it back to this sweet jail and sanctuary.

It was a clear night when he slipped out of the front door. The sky was crisp, the moon half full, the air cool. He thought right away of the water he’d used up to wash, wanted clouds, wanted to smell moisture. Smetana was nowhere to be seen.

Three doors down, a light was on in the window. He ducked the second he saw it. He had neighbours. No one next door, a poor old woman in the next, he knew from Marta, possibly even gone by now, passed or departed to a friendlier place, but here were neighbours he didn’t know about. Who were they? Would they turn him in? Had Marta mentioned them? Why had they kept to themselves? Were they squatters from the city?

He found himself huddling close to the ground, next to a dense bush, more suspicious than if he’d stood upright on the sidewalk and casually smoked. What was he to do out here? The open air and the bright half-moon didn’t buoy him up, they shut him down, turned him into a criminal, a paranoid. Who lived here? Who stood there in the shadows? Who made that noise?

He should have been a bat, he thought, vacuuming the air of its bloody-minded insects, quieting the buzz, peering in with blind eyes at the menacing forms in the light, the evil designs plotted out in their warm and quivering glow.

Could he do just that—go blind?—go nearly blind?—shut one eye and close down half his brain? He could not bear his thoughts anymore. Five months of thoughts, an over-exercised brain within the ruins of his body. Or cut the wires between his senses and his mind. Use them to alert, use them to attract, use them to sense surfaces, but not to feed his battered mind.

Istvan wasn’t sure where he wanted to go. He was sure he knew of a few farms on the road into Szeged. If he could make it there, he could help himself in the dark to some pears, this time of year, possibly, or peppers, or corn. But it would take him much too long to get there by foot, and he was sure to be detected by someone during so long a trip. How would he explain his wanderings then? What was worse, he was not very good at being furtive. He knew he didn’t want to galumph through the bushes and up walks like the mad marauder of the night, so he would try to be subtle, do the very best he could.

He also remembered the address of Mrs. Ella Brunsvik, his very last patient, remembered it from the card he himself had drawn up when she first became a patient, before Marta, before the fancy equipment from Rochester, when Mr. and Mrs. Brunsvik were still able to pay a little something for Istvan’s work, not just chicken and dumplings. He’d made his notes about their mouths on that card a couple of dozen times, knew their addresses and their mouths better than he could know them. But how kind Mrs. Brunsvik had turned out to be the last time Istvan had seen her in his office. She’d pushed him to flee almost as urgently as Marta had, just before the goons had arrived.

He thought often in his warren of Mrs. Brunsvik, not only because of her kindness, but also because she lived in the same district as Marta, Tower Town, in a little cottage on the other side, at 17 Lovas Street, not that far from the impressive twin towers of the Votive Church. Istvan used to love the concerts in the square in front of the church, and the ancient Greek plays. He saw
Lysistrata
just the summer before, it seemed a century before. Inside, the Madonna stood near the altar, dressed in a fur coat and wearing red slippers she could have got only in Szeged.

Istvan wondered what the Brunsviks were doing now in their little house, why they hadn’t visited Marta in all these months, whether they’d continued with Dr. Janos Benes in Istvan’s absence, or if the war had come between the Brunsviks and the new doctor. He would find out now. He’d visit them, though it was late, and ask them for a little help.

But what lured him first was this light coming from the cottage three doors down. He had to peek, just to know who shared the shadows that fell on his house and the sounds all these months.

He crept toward the cottage. The honey light poured out unabashed through the window, beckoning. He found he could not take another step, turned away, and instead looked up at the sky. He was gawking at Venus, nestled brightly among the stars, impersonating the stars. He remembered once, many years before, lying in a field by Lake Balaton with his brother and sister. It was very late at night, or it might merely have seemed that way to him as a child. Istvan lay in the middle as befitted his years. He was fourteen, Paul, to his right, was almost three years older, and Rozsi, to his left, nine years younger. She’d been having lessons at home with a private tutor and was about to begin school. Paul pointed straight up at Venus, and Rozsi asked why it was so bright. Paul said it was a star with special powers. “She’s so greedy she has the power to swallow the light all around her, causing her to reign alone in the dark bed she makes for herself.”