Gratitude (3 page)

Lili sent Tildy in after that, but Tildy reported that Aurel didn’t care for her. “He hardly notices me,” Tildy said.

“Does he give you anything?” Lili asked.

“Like what?”

“Nothing, never mind.”

And now at thirteen, Aurel was a giant beside his parents, powerful and grown up, his bar mitzvah under his belt.

But he was nowhere to be found at the bakery. Lili couldn’t help herself. She glanced at the cake display in search of
flodni
, but found none. She selected a few buns, ate one hurriedly, placed a coin on the counter and ran out.

And where was her friend Hilda? Lili couldn’t even fathom it, how anyone would have—
could
have—made off with her dearest friend. Lili’s father delivered Hilda as Lili, a one-month-old, cried in an adjoining bed. There had been no other way. Mrs. Blauman had showed up at the Bandels’ door already “flooding the stoop,” as David told it. Those waters were the elixir of life, he often said, where twenty digits sprouted out of hands and feet and where a warm and serene world made everything possible.

At school, Hilda often spoke to Lili about leaving Tolgy for the city and insisted Lili had to go with her. Even if Lili married and went away, Hilda would come with her and find someone to marry, too.

Lili approached Hilda’s house with the greatest of dread. She didn’t want to look in. She wanted to take away the faint hope that it was not empty. But she did. She walked in, called out Hilda’s name, saw an envelope and glasses on the table as well as a blue hair ribbon, but then left.

Lili wanted to search one final place. When she was younger, ten at most, her mother used to take her to a field cut sharply by a precipice in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains. It was a cool and even frightening place but the most beautiful Lili had ever seen. And it was the last place her mother might have tried to hide. In fact, in the two hours it took her to get there, the idea grew in Lili’s mind that it was precisely where they’d gone, so she walked quickly and eagerly. She felt foolish in her wedding gown, but who was there to see her? Tildy had wanted desperately to try on the gown that morning, so now she could. Lili would meet her in the field with their mother, and Lili could swap clothes with her sister for the walk home.

Lili raced the last couple of hundred steps. She was warm in her white dress and could hardly wait to trade with her sister. But Tildy was not in the field. No one was. Lili headed toward the solitary tree, a big oak, standing in the middle of the open expanse. She and her family had enjoyed more than one picnic in the shade of this tree, and the whole of Tolgy once held its Purim celebration in this field.

She arrived at the oak and sat in its cool shade, careful not to soil her dress. She opened her satchel, broke off an end of a roll and ate without enthusiasm, hardly chewing, letting the bread soak in her mouth. A breeze blew up from behind her and carried the scent of grass and buds.

A whole town—how was it possible? A whole town, except for one person? She hiccupped as the bread made its way down her throat. She hiccupped again as she began to cry.

But then she felt rumbling in the earth beneath her, a sound like distant thunder, but deeper than thunder and bigger, as Vesuvius might have felt as it shook. Lili felt thrilled and scared at once. The storm rose and swelled behind her. Ahead was the cliff. A dusty wind flapped her wedding gown, and she gathered it up and clasped it to her. She was scared as she peered around the oak.

A stampede of horses was coming toward her. She’d been told stories her grandfather had passed down to her mother about the wild Carpathian horses that roamed these woods and fields, but she had never seen them. Her mother had said that they were nobler than all other horses and bigger and purer. Helen had seen them once, when she was younger even than Lili was now. She’d seen them make a run through the streets of Tolgy. They were as quick as lightning, a blur as they traversed the town, and they did not disturb a single post nor upend a buggy or a pail. They whipped into town, then out the other end, as if the gods had sent them to sound an alarm. Many of the citizens had heard that alarm and woke, but few saw them. Helen was one. She’d been standing on her own veranda. Her father was another. He was at the window. Lili’s grandfather had said that they were like “the wild Olympians of our mountains.”

And here they were now, bearing down on Lili in a cannonade of hooves and dust. Lili tried to climb the old oak but couldn’t reach its branches. Still, she was safe behind the tree, surely. Surely, the horses wouldn’t crash into the tree. And even if they did, the oak could withstand the blow. And they had to slow down soon. There was a cliff ahead.

They were not slowing. They were upon her, now, upon her and the oak, hundreds of them, led by a beautiful black queen. The horses fanned out to the very hems of the wide field. They ran as one huddled mass, a single body, with a gleaming black majesty at the front.

Lili couldn’t stand to think what was coming. She wanted to cover her ears and close her eyes, but she did neither. Her back was to the horses, pressed hard against the tree. The queen flew by her, as did the brilliant black avalanche that followed. Lili couldn’t breathe. The air was filled with dust and wood, a black rain beating down on her. Her eyes were stinging, but she kept them open.

And the horses didn’t turn. The oiled beauties followed the queen straight off the cliff, ten at a time, or twenty, taking fatal flight. Each one soared for an instant, then plummeted—dashing itself on the rocks below. They could see where they were going, the ones in the front, and there was nothing to stop them. They ran as if the world had no end.

Lili watched in horror and amazement. She couldn’t bear to look anymore. She turned her head to one side, and then she saw something else through the black rain. The last of the horses on the outer flanks could see what was coming, two of them, three. On the other side, another horse halted. When the earth stopped thundering, and the black rain ceased to fall, these four horses remained. They stood alone in the field, snorting and neighing.

The horse on the left was as black and brilliant as the queen had been. She joined the others on the opposite side, and the four seemed to gaze at the cliff edge before turning and heading back to the dark grove they’d come from.

Lili would not go to the edge to see the shattered bones and ripped flesh. She had to leave, now, not just her field, but her town. Just for now, until she could get her family back.

BY LATE MORNING
, Lili had found her way by foot out of the mountains, through the outskirts of Tolgy and looked toward central Hungary. She reached the small railway station at Golya, and she felt relieved. There was no one there to buy a ticket from, but an idle train stood at a platform with “Budapest” marked on its engine. The big city was the only place to turn. Where else? She couldn’t cross the border into Romania. There would be someone in Budapest who could help her find her family. So Lili climbed aboard, though it might be some time before the train was to depart, and found a nearly empty car where she could make herself comfortable. She took a seat, and was instantly asleep.

She was rudely wakened by the slamming of a door, and realized the train was almost full. How ridiculous she must have looked in her wedding dress, its whiteness clouded over, and with her small satchel, her mother’s gold wedding band still on her finger. At least the dress was simple and could pass for something else.

She didn’t know how long she’d slept exactly, but the conductor was upon her. He had white, curly hair and reminded her of an uncle who lived in Prague. Lili offered him the remainder of her coins, and he took them but laughed outright before handing them back to her. She thought he’d put her off the train, remembered the Hungarian authorities back home who’d joined the invading Germans. But the man winked at her instead and carried on to check other people’s tickets.

Lili wanted to ask these passengers where they’d come from and how their town was doing. She wanted to tell them about Tolgy but feared what would become of her if she did. A large woman sat across from her, a great burlap sack of bulbs of some kind on the floor at her feet. They had an earthy smell. The woman wore a gold crucifix pendant, and she noticed that Lili had noticed, but Lili looked out the window right away.

Where were they taking people? Had they taken others in the same way, and Lili’s town was the last to know? Was
everyone
, finally, going to have to move to this other place, like some kind of cosmic musical chairs? And was someone
else
moving to Tolgy?

Lili squeezed her satchel under her arm and closed her eyes. She slept again all the way to the city. And then there it was, outside her window, the imposing buildings coming into sight, the tall shadows, the throngs of people. She’d forgotten quite how impressive and immense the capital city was.

SHE STEPPED OFF
the train and stood for a moment with her bag, watching the throngs of people walking this way and that, as if nothing else were going on in the world outside of this centre. She wandered down to the Danube to take in the air. The palatial parliament buildings rose like rounded and polished mountains. The bridges spanning the Danube, linking Buda to Pest, all differed in shape and colour, one iron and green, one grey and concrete, one black and ornate. They all carried buses and pedestrians back and forth going about their business.

Lili sat on a park bench and withdrew another of the rolls she’d taken from the bakery in Tolgy, this time with a bit of cheese. She felt safe at last amid the midday throngs doing their shopping and stopping for a meal or a sweet piece of cake.

Lili remembered the cake her mother had baked for her but sent the thought away. She was practical. She could not weigh herself down with fears of what might have become of her family. She recalled the shots cracking in the streets of Tolgy and smothered their sound, too. Here she was, sitting on a bench in Budapest. Early spring in Budapest and unseasonably warm. She gazed at the people around her. Cheerful, most of them—all of them, actually. Had no one heard? “They are clearing out the towns,” she wanted to say but couldn’t find her voice. She sat on her bench as though she hadn’t a care in the world. Safe in Budapest. Springtime in Budapest.

Lili got to her feet and made her way to a vegetable stand. She selected a carrot and a parsnip, offered a pengo.

The woman sucked on her gold teeth as she examined the coin, front and back. Was it not enough? “Take the vegetables,” the woman told Lili as she slipped the coin into her apron pocket. “It’s all right. You take those. I’ll take this.”

Lili wandered the streets for hours, past the vast Kerepesi Cemetery—more like a gallery of sculptures and shrines than a graveyard. Again, she looked over the wall but didn’t dare enter. Lili had heard that the country’s famous people lay in state here: Hungary’s first prime minister, Lajos Batthyany, and Ferenc Deak, the nineteenth-century statesman who brought Austria and Hungary together in his Grand Compromise, as Mrs. Wasserstein had described it. And there were poets there, too, she knew, like Attila Jozsef, who had taken his own life, and novelists like Kalman Mikszath. Stone upon stone, beautifully sculpted, glory upon glory, ending here.

She passed theatres graced by classical columns and passed the impressive, broad-shouldered buildings of the technical university, then made her way along a winding street toward the centre of the city. There were florists on the street and tailors, cafés and beauty salons.

Lili had been to Budapest once before, in 1938 when she was ten. She had come with her parents and Ferenc to visit an aging aunt. But she remembered only being struck by the lovely shop windows and the Goliath buildings, each of which, she was certain, could house the whole of her town under its roof.

She’d been to the cinema on that occasion. It was the Tivoli, the cheerful theatre with its small curtained-off boxes and carvings of angels and sirens in gold on its walls and above the proscenium. As the newsreel played, Lili had asked her mother what those curtained-off booths were. “Nothing,” her mother had answered.

But Ferenc said they were for lovers, “So they can hug and smooch when it’s a love story.”

“Quiet, now,” Helen had said.

But Lili and Ferenc were giggling, and as if on cue a couple did arrive, arm in arm, to occupy a
paholy
, as they were called. When they saw Ferenc and Lili watching, the woman released her boyfriend’s arm, until he roughly pulled the curtain shut.

But after the grim newsreel about the depression, the lovers and the Bandels got
A Day at the Races
, with the Marx brothers and Margaret Dumont. The Marx brothers were David Bandel’s favourites, and if the lovers had come to find privacy, they had come to the wrong place. David laughed them out of their booth.

In the vast Heroes’ Square, featuring statues of Hungary’s fiercest warriors, Lili heard what she thought was a concert. As she approached, she saw a Gypsy trio, a violin, mandolin and harmonica. With them was a fiery young girl who, oddly, sang a line here and there, but never a whole song. She was dressed in rustic reds and yellows, and she was bobbing like a flame, as if mesmerized, borne by the rhythm and sentiments. She bellowed out the words at everyone but looked at no one, not even Lili. In fact, her eyes were closed throughout. “
Turn your troubles into song
,” she was wailing. “
Come hear our music. Music makes you dumb
.” She dipped and spun. “
Turn colour into sound. Let your heart fill your ears, not the buzz of your greed. Music makes you stupid. Come hear it play
.”

Lili wanted to hold the girl still. When she looked closely at her, she realized the girl wasn’t just mesmerized, not just in a trance; she was blind. She had dried-up eyes behind those lids, but her whole being bobbed and floated aboard these songs. She was more like a missionary than a beggar, more like the music’s apologist, its philosopher. “
You can’t leave footprints on the river, even if you try
,” she chanted. “
Hear the music play. Hear it, hear it. The music is a secret that leaves no trace
.” The trio then played a very sad song, a heart-wrenching song, about a lover gone away to sea. “
And you know it is true
,” the flaming girl sang, “
since we’ve never seen the sea but can feel the land
.” The song came out more like a hymn than a love song, and Lili found herself holding back tears.