Gratitude (29 page)

He tried to control the speed at which he gulped down his stew. He was full in a minute, bursting, but he pressed on. “You’re starving,” she said, watching him. She got up to pour boiling water into a teapot and sat with him again as he ate. She took a small tin out of her jacket pocket and stuffed a little snuff into a nostril. “Didn’t anyone feed you in that big country?” He shook his head. “I heard it on the BBC.” He looked at her, puzzled. “The Russians.” She pulled a small radio set out from beneath her bed. What
else
did she keep down there? “I heard about the Russians on the BBC.” He looked at her. “I heard some other things, too.”

“You did?”

She adjusted the snuff in her nose, snorted, then nodded. “They tried to kill the man—the
big
shit.”

“Do you mean Germans—you mean the
Fuhrer?
”

She nodded. “They tried to blow him up, but they missed somehow, the dumb asses.” She chuckled at her own wit. “It’s not the first time people have tried. And they’ve paid. They got strung up themselves. I hear he even has a poison tester. Next thing you know, he’ll be wearing a suit of armour like an old knight.” Istvan nodded. “I guess he’d have to wear it even when it got hot in the summer,” she said. “It’d get just a tad sticky in there, I imagine.” She snorted again, attended to her snuff.

He had no comment. He was imagining how the Germans dealt with would-be assassins. Death would have been too simple.

“Do you have family?” she asked.

“Not here.”

“Where, then? Back in Russia?”

“No, Budapest. I have some in Budapest.”

“Look,” Anna said, excited. She was pointing to a shelf of knickknacks above the foot of her bed. She dashed over and fetched down a bowl to show him. It was a fruit bowl from Lake Balaton. It had “Memories of Lake Balaton” spelled out in seashells embedded in its blue ceramic base. “We were there,” she said as he held it, “Arpad and I. We visited the lake in 1933. It was not a good year, but Arpad needed to get away from some men here, so we went to visit a cousin of his, who’d married a nice fellow, and they took us to lovely Lake Balaton. Our only holiday in years, and so lovely. We were lucky. We could’ve had our only holiday somewhere crappy, but our Lake Balaton isn’t that at all.”

Istvan looked at the blue bowl with its loud shells and smiled. The bowl was hideous, but at this moment he sincerely felt it was the most pleasing object he’d held in years. “It’s very nice,” he said.

She took the bowl back from him and replaced it as though it were fine porcelain. “They’re coming into all the occupied countries,” she said. She was pointing to the radio this time.

“Who—the Russians?”

“The Russians on the one side, the Hitlers on the other. The Hitlers came in to clean out the Jews and Gypsies, and I hear they’ve done better than expected under the circumstances, working from the frontiers in toward the capital, like a vise.”

Istvan wanted to get to his feet, as if there were somewhere to go. He felt the stew in his stomach curdling. He excused himself, bolted back through the grey curtain to the water closet and vomited the good dinner into the toilet bowl.

“Are you all right in there?” she was asking.

When he didn’t answer right away, she came in after him. She prepared a wet cloth and, when he finished, when he’d stopped heaving and grunting, she wiped his face vigorously with the cloth as if he were a small boy who’d come in from the dirt. “I had a husband once,” she reminded him. She rinsed the cloth and wiped him over again, going all the way up to his hair and through it. “He threw up his guts in this very bowl, damn fool—turned himself inside out. ’Course, he was yellow by then, drank himself yellow. Then his insides revolted and burst out. Damn fool.”

Istvan felt much better. He’d got a brief taste of what it was like to be full, and now he felt better. She flushed the bowl and helped him to his feet, added a little grunt herself to the proceedings. “You’re lighter than I am. You’re a feather. When you feel better, I’m going to have to give you some more stew. I’m sure your family is all right back in Budapest. Marta’s all right, and your family’s all right, the same way you’re all right, or you will be soon. It’s a rough time for you people.”

When they returned to the warm kitchen-bedroom, Anna urged Istvan to lie down and rest. She took his slippers off for him, helped his head to the pillow. “I have some nightclothes for you if you want. They were my husband’s, but I washed them through, don’t worry.”

“I’m not worried,” Istvan said, “but I can’t stay.”

“Arpad—that was my husband—did me a big favour, damn fool. He died for me on a Sunday. We were getting all set to go to church, so he dolled himself up—as best you can when you’re yellow. He scrubbed himself top to bottom, shaved nicely, put some grease in his hair, shined his own shoes and got on his three-piece blue suit. Then his innards rebelled like always and, holding a towel to his front to save his suit, he ran to the toilet and let fly. He came out again, feeling relieved, sat on the bed right there where you are, closed his eyes a minute, and then he was gone. I called over the undertaker, and Arpad was all set to go into the box just as he was, poor darling. All I had to do was cover his yellow cheeks with a bit of rouge and away he went.”

Istvan was about to laugh when he saw that his hostess had begun to cry quietly and blow her nose. He buried his mirth along with the image of Arpad in his suit in his box, and told Anna he was sorry.

She sniffled before saying, “If you stay, I’ll keep you safe.” She was sitting down now on her bed.

“I’m sure you’d try, but
you
wouldn’t be safe.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“The lane’s too narrow; the place is too small. I’m sure there’s traffic, visitors, busybodies.”

“There are those,” she said, quick to chuckle again. He was sure she was familiar with the species.

Her offer was more than tempting. Here she’d been, all this time—the food-stamps lady—and all this time, he and Marta couldn’t be certain of
her
. He propped himself up on an elbow, his stomach still a little queasy, the pain in his rib sharp, and studied the floorboards.

She looked where he was looking. “Something wrong?”

“No,” he said. “I’ve been back a little time. I didn’t just get back. I’ve been at Marta’s.”

“Well of course you have,” she said without hesitation. “Where else would you go first? But she wasn’t there—am I right? You’ve been waiting for her.”

“Yes, and I have to go back and wait some more there.”

“You’ll be safer here, and you’ll get fed.”

“
You’ll
be safer if I’m there.” He was sitting up now.

She gave it some thought. “I’m sure we can manage it.”

“I’ll go back to Marta’s. It’s good to know you’re here.”

“Well, then, take some stew with you. You’ll need to eat some more, first thing tomorrow, when your stomach settles. And then I’ll bring you something else.”

The comment got him to his feet. “I’m worried that—”

“Don’t worry,” she said, interrupting. She got to her feet, too, and looked at the stew. “I’ll be careful. No one will know. It’ll be at night, like tonight.”

She went out back through the curtain and returned with a preserving jar. “Is there anything else I can give you for now?” she asked.

“Marta has a cat, too,” he said. “Smetana.”

Twenty-One

Budapest – October 9, 1944

PAUL WAS WONDERING ALOUD
how long the Swede planned to continue his campaign. “I’m not alone,” Raoul said. “There are others: Carl Lutz, the Swiss vice-consul, Per Anger, Angelo Rotta, the priest, Giorgio Perlasca, the businessman.”

Paul held up his hand. “Very few. You could probably name them all in a minute.”

Wallenberg took a sip of his espresso and frowned. The coffee was bitter. “How about you?” he said.

“I’m fighting for my own people. Because of the circumstance we’ve found ourselves in.”

“Would you have come to my country to do what Carl Lutz and I are doing?”

Paul thought about it for too long. Wallenberg reached out to pat Paul’s hand. “Possibly you would,” the Swede said.

What the two men no longer needed to discuss was the aim of the operation, merely the operation itself. Raoul Wallenberg and his half-dozen lieutenants were ferreting out as many Jews as they could and issuing them Swedish passports. Finding Jews was easy. Many were wearing the Star of David. They found them clustered in the ghettos or in the long lineups being loaded on trains for export to concentration camps.

Wallenberg sometimes wondered aloud what would happen if the Jews simply hadn’t worn their cloth stars. What confusion! The news had filtered through to Hungary the previous year that when Danish Jews were asked to wear the star, most other Danes did so, too. In the midst of the chaos, Danes organized clandestine flotillas to transport their Jews to safety in Sweden.

Paul Beck never wore the star, not even in the beginning. He might as well have been asked to put on rabbit ears. Neither did Zoltan Mak. What Zoli always did wear was an ingenious cape, like Paul’s, given to him by Wallenberg. Zoli could not have taken photographs otherwise. The cape closed at his chest with a sturdy leather lace, and Zoltan could rest the chin of his lens directly on the lace itself. Sometimes he snapped photos just a stone’s throw from the SS or the dreaded Nyilas before they could notice him. When they did, Zoli nimbly yanked on the camera strap inside, thereby shifting the Hasselblad to the back.

On this day, as Zoli was getting his gear arranged and his cape on, Rozsi watched him. They’d had a rare night together away from the others. He’d moved her cot to the basement.

She followed him to the front door of the Dutch insurance company building. She didn’t want her relatives to hear. He said, “I’ll see you.”

She took his hand. She was wearing the ring he’d given her. She put her arms around him, around his ridiculous cape. “I’ll wait up for you,” she said, and he kissed her.

Today’s destination for Wallenberg and Paul was the Jozsefvaros train station, at the far end of Ulloi Street itself. Zoli had planned to meet up with Wallenberg’s group, but this day he was determined to photograph the herding of the Jewish deportees. Halfway up Ulloi Street, he hovered across the way from the Jews and their captors, acting uninterested, acting like a businessman on the way to work.

Some four or five hundred Jews had been rounded up on this fall day, and other than the shuffling of feet, the street was painfully silent, the march remarkably orderly. Except for a look of anxious apprehension on some of the faces, one might have thought the throng was off to the fair, complete with a military escort.

Zoltan realized, just as he managed a quick photo, that he was the only bystander, the solitary onlooker. When someone fell out of a tree and broke a leg, or was hauled drowned out of the sea or from under the wheels of a bus, broken and bleeding, a hungry crowd always gathered to feast on the spectacle. This time the reverse was true. He stood alone to watch as the hundreds marched.

But only for a moment. One of the Einsatzkommandos turned to look at Zoli, as did some of the Jews nearest the German officer. Zoli was glaringly out of place: a Jew with Swedish papers and a camera behind a conspicuous cape, gawking across the street at a lineup of Jews heading for deportation. The officer continued to watch him. Zoli felt sheets of sweat flowing down his back. The only way to become invisible was to fall into line. Zoli hesitantly crossed the street, merely as if curious to see what was going on. He wanted to be brushed aside, told to go about his business.

And then into the quiet of this quaint street with its elegant stone townhouses and apartments, their façades proudly recalling their allegiance to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Franz-Josef’s crown on one, the grey stone double-headed eagle, fierce and watchful, on another—into this setting was dropped the sound of soothing music. The notes fell from a window above the heads of the marchers.

Why did the officer at the front stop the line? Why was the scene so preposterous, this lovely adagio drizzling down on the walkers on their autumn march? Was there a place for music aboard a sinking ship, like the little orchestra that played on the deck of the
Titanic
as she slanted into the sea? Was there a place for an orchestra to play Mozart a hundred paces from the crematoria—or here, not three blocks from the Jozsefvaros train station, where all was ready to take these people out of the country of their birth to the country of their—
what
?

It seemed incongruous to the throng below, to Zoli, who fell in behind an elderly gentleman wearing a handsome grey herringbone suit, strange even to the German officer who halted the line.

The music was as sweet as pastry, but touching, the essence of sadness.

The officer who’d spotted Zoli across the street asked, in German, “Who is the composer of this music?”

The gentleman in the herringbone suit in front of Zoltan said, “It’s Dvorak. Antonin Dvorak.”

The officer’s gaze fell on Zoli’s face and detected something there. “We’ll see,” the officer said.

He parted the line with his rifle and strode up to the door below the musical window. He pushed open the door and stepped in. The heads craned from the bright street to look in to the shadows of the dark room. Those nearest could see on the ground floor an elegant red-plush Queen Anne chair and a baby grand piano. All they could hear, now, was the music, not another sound. Lovely music. As suited to the street as if it had been written in the very room from which it emanated.

A shot rang out, killing the music. Then the throng heard one syllable—“
De
”—Hungarian for “But”—before another shot cut the speaker short.

A moment later, the German officer rejoined the line where he’d left it and said to the gentleman in the herringbone suit, “What is your name?” The officer was reloading his rifle.

“I’m Laszlo Zene.”

“Mr. Zene, the composer of the piece we were just listening to was not Antonin Dvorak. It was Gustav Mahler. The adagietto from his Fifth Symphony.”

Laszlo Zene nodded his head and shrugged his shoulders.

“Gustav Mahler is forbidden,” the officer said. “
Verboten
.”

He set the warm muzzle of his rifle against Laszlo Zene’s chin and fired a third time, sending up a fountain of brain, blood and bone to drizzle down on Zene’s neighbours in line. No one dared make a sound.

The gentleman fell back against Zoli, a button on the back of his collar snagging on the lace closing Zoli’s cape. The lace snapped. As Zoli set the man down on the sidewalk, his cape pooled around him at his feet and his camera dangled free at the back.

The officer at the front had ordered the line to advance. As it began to move, the officer who’d shot Zene waited, his back to Zoli. Frantically, Zoli began to pull the dead man’s jacket over the wet stem of his head, struggling to free a lifeless arm. The officer was poised to turn back toward Zoli. He was half-turned, still watching the advancing head of the line. The column of Jews was filing past Zoli and the dead man, each one pausing in horror as he or she glanced down. A young girl came face to face with Zoli, still down on his haunches pulling at the jacket, glared at him and slapped him, then moved on. The officer turned forward, away from him again, though he still did not move ahead.

In a flash, Zoli had the dead man’s jacket on his back, one arm in one sleeve, the second tunnelling through the other, his camera buried in the heap of cape on the sidewalk. Beside it lay the gentleman in a stained but elegant shirt, his arms spread out to embrace the cool sun.

Would the officer look at Zoli as he marched forward with the throng? Did he have the composure to single out another Jew for execution, or had his point been made, the example set? Step by step, Zoli moved onward, unnoticed, from instantaneous death on the sidewalk to possible death in a train yard, or probable death down the line in the Polish countryside, where a tidy camp had been erected to receive visitors. Zoli’s Swedish papers were buttoned into an inner pocket of the cape. They were gone with the camera.

Glaciers of sweat and blood oozed down Zoltan’s back beneath the warm grey jacket, worn customarily for afternoon teas, no doubt, and Sunday walks. Proudly, shamefully, sewn to the expensive garment’s breast pocket was a yellow six-pointed star with “
Jude
” marked across it.

A few steps more, and the Jews, together with their captors, arrived at Jozsefvaros Station, where they were greeted by their own Nyilas, the Arrow Cross.

Zoli was forgotten, now, as he was hustled along with about fifty others toward a particular boxcar, usually employed for hauling bricks. And then out of the hubbub Zoli heard a whistle blow, and he was gazing at the familiar face of Raoul Wallenberg. Behind him, carrying a folding table and chair, was none other than Paul Beck. The duo waded right into the middle of the crowd, Paul unfolded the table and chair, and Wallenberg took a seat. The noise persisted for another minute until another whistle blew. It was Paul, now on top of a boxcar, pointing to the Swedish diplomat. The crowd quieted down.

Wallenberg unclasped his briefcase and declared, “You have a number of Swedish nationals here, and I’d like them released to my care immediately.”

“Like hell!” one of the Nyilas men shouted and, using his rifle, he bashed out a path toward the outrageous table. Switching to German, he said, “These are not Swedes! They’re not even Hungarians. They’re Jews! Get them on these trains.”

The German commander stood between the Hungarian and Wallenberg. “We do not deport Swedish nationals,” the German said.

“These ones you do!” the Nyilas barked.

Few could have imagined such a scene unfolding, though Zoli had heard of such confrontations. Two Einsatzkommandos quickly disarmed the big Hungarian officer and locked his hands in handcuffs before he had a chance to react. In response, the other Arrow Cross guards started shoving Jews onto the trains. It took several minutes before the whistle rang out once more.

It was Paul again. The noise died down. The Swede still sat at his table. Wallenberg said, “These are in no particular order: Kepes, Robert! Kepes, Klari! Felix, Dr. Janos! Zene, Laszlo! Enekes, Aniko!”

As individuals in the crowd jubilantly shouted out “Here!” they were plucked from the crowd and brought to stand behind Wallenberg. It was Zoli himself who had taken their pictures for the papers Wallenberg had brought. On this occasion, though, the Swede had no more than forty-five
schutz-passes
to distribute. It was difficult to keep up with the pace of Eichmann’s deportation machine. Sometimes, in just one afternoon, Wallenberg and his deputies forged and stamped papers complete with photos for a couple of hundred Jews. At other times, Eichmann’s people outfoxed their opponent and cleared out ghetto buildings not yet scheduled for evacuation, buildings the Arrow Cross had stocked with Jews. The makeshift ghettos themselves had been created as quickly as they’d been emptied of their original occupants and their possessions.

Just as the list ended out, Paul spotted Zoli. He regarded the younger man impassively, betraying no familiarity to the guards. But then the thought raced through Zoli’s mind that there was nothing whatever to be done. He was standing by a deportation train wearing a Star of David affixed to his chest. Paul’s darting eyes asked, “Where is your cape? Where are your papers?” And Zoli’s eyes reassured him: “It’s all right.” Paul tried to attract Wallenberg’s attention, but he was too distracted to pick up the signal. When Wallenberg did catch on, he stood up, as helpless in the circumstance as Paul, or Zoli himself.

“
Genug!
” the German commander barked. “Enough!”

His soldiers, eagerly assisted by the Nyilas, resumed hustling their captives onto the trains. Zoli found himself no more than an arm’s length from the young girl who’d slapped him, but a man stood between them. She was wearing a green velvet dress and clutching a small white patent-leather purse that perfectly matched her white socks and shiny white shoes. She looked terrified at first, but now for some reason, once she saw that Zoli was being hustled aboard a boxcar, too, she calmed down and even smiled as their eyes met.

Then Zoli looked back at Paul on the crowded platform. Wallenberg, standing beside Paul, had a pained, pale look on his face. He ran his fingers back through his thinning hair. Paul turned away from the sight, a first for him. Then the door of Zoli’s car was clamped shut.

Zoli lost his balance for a moment in the dark as the impact of what had just happened struck him. To steady himself, he grasped for the basic elements of his life, as if he were grasping for the fundamentals of earth, air, fire and water. These were his Rozsi, his camera and the image of his parents on their last morning, his father getting set to go into his darkroom, his mother asking Zoli to hurry, come see the oriole in the back garden. Someone behind Zoli spoke the name Rozsi, and he turned, his eyes groping in the dark for her, though he knew that it had to be another Rozsi.

Wallenberg turned boldly now on his heel and asked one of the brand new Swedes, Dr. Janos Felix, to help him with his folding table and chair. Dr. Felix happened to be staring proudly at his papers, his own photo looking confidently back at him, the words “
Schweden
” and “
Svedorszag
” below his description and photograph and a triangular arrangement of three crowns to protect him.