Gratitude (41 page)

It was only then that he noticed the swelling shine on one of her cheeks. “What happened to you?” he said. “Your cheek.”

The other men were filtering out to the mess hall. As the last ones were leaving and Lili was about to answer, Erdo walked in. He, too, had a bandage around his head. The young lovers released each other and leapt to their feet.

“Go eat,” Erdo said. Both Simon and Lili stepped forward. “Not
you
,” he said to Lili. “What do you think this is—the Mercure Hotel?”

Simon looked at her and said, “I’ll stay too.” His voice shook with rage and fear.

Erdo stepped right up to Simon. He loomed over them both. “Go eat,” Erdo said again and put the barrel of his revolver to the middle of Simon’s forehead. “You’re hungry.”

“Go,” Lili said, “
go
.”

Simon left her, and she stood rooted in her spot, as did Erdo. Simon took as long as he could to get out the door and then waited outside, his chest boiling. A moment later Erdo followed. Simon walked quickly now, expecting a bullet in his back at any moment. At each step he told himself, now, or now, or now—but his hand was on the door of the mess hall, finally, and he was in.

Simon was the first one back to the barracks. He’d left his soup half finished, afraid he would find her gone when he got back. He’d never done that before.

He went straight to her. When he told her about the soup, she offered an egg again. “It will fill you the rest of the way,” she said and cleaned the shell for him. “If only we had a little salt.” They hadn’t seen salt in months. She smiled and held out the egg in her palm, like a little white lamp in the dark room. Lili thought of Mary on the train, the wafers the previous morning at the church, the cabbage rolls, the horses, Erdo. Her mind raced.

Simon ate the egg with wolfish abandon, swallowing hard as she watched him. She thought she heard something and pulled her scarf up over her ears, covering her pretty Nordic features. “What a war,” Simon said through a bulge in one of his cheeks. “Think of how different life would be if not for this war. I wouldn’t have met you.”

“We would have met somehow,” she said. “What an awful way to bring about a fate, having to lose my family for you, much as I need you.” She took his hand. “What a cruel trick.”

They were sitting on his bed, the upper bunk, their legs dangling over the side. “Look how focused the war has made us—it’s given us that—the power to focus all our attention.” He swallowed the last of his egg with a good gulp. “Food, shelter, warmth, love, survival. Not parties, not ambling about the lake country, not cakes at Gerbeaud. Just survival. I’ve had so much time to think here, my God.”

“I wish we could walk in the countryside,” she said. “That’s what I want.”

He was happy to be speaking to her at all. He took both her hands in his.

“They brought new men today,” Simon told her, “from another labour camp. They look worse than we do.”

“Why did they come here?”

“Because theirs had been invaded by the Russians, and the Russians were brutal. They killed half the soldiers and half the inmates. The ones who made it here are the lucky ones.”

“What a world,” Lili said.

“And I know one of the men,” Simon said. “I recognized him right away. It’s Miklos Radnoti. He’s a writer and an old friend of my cousin Istvan’s.”

“Did you speak to him?”

“Just for a minute. I don’t know if he’s staying. There’s so much turmoil lately. Even the guards look worried.”

“Were you able to ask him about Istvan?”

“Yes, he told me he warned Istvan when the Germans were entering Szeged, but he doesn’t know what became of him. I’ll try to talk to him again. Radnoti said he married a Catholic, but it didn’t help him much.”

“Who? Istvan?”

“No, Radnoti. Radnoti converted and then married a Catholic woman, named Fifi Gyarmati. We should look her up in Budapest.”

“If only I could take you back with me right away.”

He asked about his parents and about Rozsi and Paul.

What was to happen now? Lili wondered as they talked, as darkness fell in the drafty building. Would she spend the night with her Simon in a room full of men? Could they make love—their first time—when the barracks was quiet? Would it be right? Shouldn’t they take whatever chances were handed to them—what if they could not again? Why should her true love not finish what the brute had begun back in the truck? She felt queasy again as Simon kissed her tenderly on the lips. His lips were cool and damp.

He looked at her close up. How was it possible she was sitting opposite him with her warm blue eyes looking back at him? “I began to tell you about Elemer,” he said, wiping his nose on his sleeve, “in the letter.” She dug out the handkerchief marked “F” for “Fekete.” How would Simon ever have come by it, she thought, if not for the circuitous route by which he now held it? He was wiping his nose with the commandant’s handkerchief.

“In the bunk below me. Elemer. He’s very sick. He’s going to cough his brains out tonight. I don’t know how to help him. I found something out about him that nobody here knows.” He was whispering. “No one, not any of the other inmates.”

“Not the guards?”

“Especially not the guards. They don’t know why he’s here. They don’t care. They just want to lord it over people—the more the better.” They heard a sound, a knock, and he stopped talking. The men would be coming back from the mess hall soon. They waited but heard nothing more. The winter wind howled through the cracks in the walls. It was getting colder as darkness fell. “He’s not even Jewish,” Simon whispered. “Elemer’s Catholic, but not like Radnoti. He started out Catholic. He’s the one whose sister visited. I think someone did something awful to her here.” He looked directly at the swelling on Lili’s cheek. She thought he was going to ask again about it, but he didn’t. “He spent time in Poland when the war broke. He’s part Polish, from Warsaw. It was there—Warsaw—that the Germans erected a wall around a ghetto and sealed in the Jews. Some of his friends were sealed in, some people he worked with, maybe even a woman—he’s a widower—when he’s feverish at night he calls out the name of a woman named Delilah—that was not his wife’s name—his wife was Dora—but it’s
Delilah
, he moans. I asked him one afternoon at the factory when no one was in earshot who she was, and he turned red as an apple. You’d’ve thought I’d said I was sleeping with his daughter.” Simon paused. That was not the example he’d wanted, but he pressed on. “Anyway, he acquired a great conscience in Warsaw, Elemer did. He’s a physician. I didn’t know that until I learned this story.” He lowered his voice again. “No one knows that, either. He’s a doctor,
was
a doctor, and he met someone in Warsaw, another physician by the name of Dr. Feliks Kanabus, who figured out a way to sew foreskins back on—skin grafts, they are, I guess. He figured out a way to graft skin onto the penis so that its owner could deny he was Jewish and prove it. Some had it done and got away.” Lili could hardly hear Simon now, he was speaking so quietly. “Some went so far as to renounce their faith, start again, pretend they never were Jews. Dr. Kanabus was fearless. He performed the operation on hundreds of men. And apparently, when an old colleague from the university, another doctor, a Jew, got word to Dr. Kanabus that he—the Jewish doctor—and his wife were in the Warsaw ghetto and were doomed, Kanabus arranged to get some false papers issued for the Jewish fellow, marched into the ghetto himself under false pretences, and took the man and his wife out. He was like Wallenberg and Paul. So now they’re living in Kanabus’s house, for the remainder of the war, I guess, pretending to be a butler and a cook.” Simon and Lili heard voices, footsteps outside. “Elemer did it, too, the operation, on quite a few Jews—he worked with Dr. Kanabus—but Elemer was caught and sent here because his citizenship is Hungarian. But his papers forwarded here merely said ‘Resister,’ nothing more. A document must have got lost in transit. Can you believe it?” Simon slapped his knee and chuckled, just as the men began coming back into the barracks. “What luck,” he added quickly. “Fate—fate again.”

The inmates looked at her, one after another, as they entered, and they stopped talking to one another. She tightened the scarf around her head and cinched it at the neck. She pulled her legs up onto the bunk. No one asked her or Simon anything, except Elemer.

He was the last to stumble in, coughing. He dragged himself toward the young couple. He was a man of fifty who looked seventy-five, an ill and feeble seventy-five at that. “Goodness,” he said as he looked at her and coughed, doubled over, coughed again then pulled himself erect, as if it were an act of some kind. “You look a bit like my sister,” he said, momentarily pleased, but then the coughing reminded him of his state. He fought to stay up, look a little healthier. He said hoarsely, “What happened to your lovely face?” He pressed a cold hand against her warm cheek, then pulled it away to cough into it some more.

Simon looked at her face again, too. “I fell on the ice near the train,” she said. “There was a little patch of ice.” Simon touched her cheek now, too, and kissed it.

“Can you
be
here?” Elemer asked. “Did the authorities let you in?” She nodded yes. “My sister came here—do you know that?” She nodded again and smiled.

And then he barked out a rapid sequence of coughs. He gasped and collapsed on his bed. He waved an apology at her. “You need a doctor,” she said. “What can I do for you?”

He coughed out the word “nothing” and shook his head. “Nothing can be done,” he said between bouts, and then he turned toward the wall and was asleep, coughing, spitting small coughs he could not swallow.

A corporal stepped into the barracks with a bang. He was the one officer Lili had not seen, and she felt caught in the act, worried her presence hadn’t been explained. He looked directly at her, then down at Elemer, the only one fully recumbent already.

The corporal didn’t say anything. People seemed to save their energy here or had nothing left to say. He didn’t seem to care what he saw. In his gloved hand he held up a bright oil lantern, and the inmates all knew what that meant. They scurried into their bunks. No one in the room changed for bed. If anything, they bundled up with whatever warm layers they had for the cold night.

It was very dark with the lights out and very quiet, except for Elemer’s cough, which hammered away at the dark and the silence like a lone protestor. Lili got down and laid out the fur sleeping bag for Simon, packed the few other things into the satchel and stuffed the bag under Elemer’s bunk. She removed her coat to add to their bedding, then changed her mind. She covered Elemer with the coat, up to the chin, and he tapped her fingers in thanks. She took Simon’s hand as she climbed back up to the upper bunk, stepping lightly on Elemer’s bed to do so.

Simon whispered, “Let’s get into the fur bag together—my mother’s coat, goodness—you dears—what you cooked up for me.” She felt his moist lips on her ears as he spoke and she trembled.

“We won’t fit,” she said. “How can we fit together?” She was afraid now and unsure.

“We wouldn’t have a year ago, but now we will—for a single glorious night.”

He removed his shirt and trousers, and she helped him slip her serge dress over her head, the chill bristling their young flesh. He breathed damp kisses into her mouth as he unsnapped her brassiere, and she pretended to remove underwear she no longer had on while he took off his.

They made love under cover of Elemer’s coughs, Simon timing his movements to coincide with the poor man’s bouts of hacking, all ears in the dark room alive to every errant squeak or grunt the lovers couldn’t muffle. The inmates filled their final waking moments with thoughts of love and lust and, for the first time in some time, hope.

As the wind howled through the building’s cracks, the whole place creaked and groaned. The lovers, the men, the coughing Elemer were sailing aboard an old galleon as it crossed a northern sea.

And then someone slammed into the darkness, a bright lantern preceding him. The dark figure was immense. Even though Lili didn’t know who it was, she could guess it was Erdo. Lili closed like a flower, and Simon pulled away.

Erdo had come for them, she was sure, come for her, to settle a score. But Elemer stood in their way, Elemer’s coughing, the wrenching of his battered frame, the beating of his chest and throat, an alarm that could not be quieted.

Erdo held up the lamp as he looked at the lovers in their fur bag, then down at the coughing lout, then up again at the lovers. He hooked the lantern to the post at the head of Simon and Lili’s bed. Lili thought he was going to pounce. She felt Simon coil up, ready to spring at the man’s throat. But it was Elemer that Erdo grabbed. He clutched the man’s throat with his great, gloved hand, trying to choke off the convulsions, pulling the doctor to his rickety feet. All Elemer could do was rattle as he hung before the beast, rattle and cough, all the power of his being flying out through the cough. His eyes were closed as he dangled. He didn’t have the energy left even to see.

Erdo left the lantern where it was on the bunk post, clamped the tiresome man’s head under his arm and dragged him out into the blowing darkness. Everyone in the barracks could hear him cough, even after Erdo had stepped out and slammed the door shut behind him. The coughing continued, relentless, and then one shot sounded, and another, and the night fell quiet, except for the wind and the creak of the building.

Lili wept now, as did Simon. The lovers shone in the light, but no one dared look. Simon slid off the soft body that had held him, warm and perspiring—perspiring for the first time in two months. He turned away from Lili and cried, his body wrenching and choking, catching itself as they heard a sound outside, shuffling, the clomp of footsteps, a dragging sound. Soon, all fell quiet again, and the tears poured out, silently, cooling their faces in the cold room. Lili hugged Simon from behind, and they waited in the halo of light for Erdo to return, but he didn’t.

In the morning, before the others were up, Simon turned to Lili and whispered that he didn’t know what was to become of their lives. “What if we never see each other again?” he asked. His eyes were red and tearful again.