Gratitude (5 page)

Three

Budapest – March 20, 1944

THAT SAME AFTERNOON
,
Istvan’s brother and sister met for coffee at the Gerbeaud Café in Vorosmarty Square. Paul had already had a difficult morning. He’d found out in the middle of a case—in the middle of a proceeding before the court—that his right to practise law had been revoked. He was on a break, sipping hot espresso when his private secretary, Viktor, came in to tell Paul the news. Paul was distracted by the case. He tried to brush off the silly man, but Viktor wouldn’t leave. A letter had been brought to the court, and Viktor handed it to Paul.

The regent, Miklos Horthy, was quickly losing his authority. How could Hungary be allied with Germany and at the same time allow Jewish attorneys to plead before the courts?

“But my father—”

“I believe your father has lost his authority, too,” Viktor said. The man’s voice was quiet and respectful. He handed Paul the nearby phone.

Paul dialed the operator. He told the man his father’s office number in Szeged. Heinrich Beck’s secretary answered. Paul asked to speak to his father, and far too many minutes passed before Heinrich’s secretary—or someone—hung up the phone at the other end. Szeged was three hours away by train. Paul, Rozsi and Istvan were all born and raised there, but when Paul set up his practice in Budapest, Rozsi came too to the exciting city to supervise his household.

When Paul asked the operator to try the number again, no one answered.

An hour later, Paul sat with Rozsi. He watched the café manager, Ervin Gaal, as he struggled to communicate with an elegantly dressed younger man with receding hair who had just entered. The manager seemed to be nodding at Paul.

Rozsi said, “Do I look presentable?” She was pinching her thick black curls to check for herself. Some said Rozsi reminded them of Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O’Hara in
Gone with the Wind
. Rozsi had the same rich hair, the same sparkling green-blue eyes which turned violet in a certain light. She also had a quality of helplessness, which, while annoying in some, was charming in her. It made people want to look after her, especially people like Paul. But she sometimes tired Paul out.

“Are you
listening
to me?” Rozsi asked.

“Yes and no,” Paul said.

“Yes and no?”

“Yes I am. And no I’m not,” he said.

“Well, thank you very much,” she said and looked genuinely hurt.

“I’m sorry, Rozsi. You can understand I have other things on my mind today, can’t you?”

Rozsi nodded and sighed. Paul watched his sister. Maybe she wasn’t as certain of her beauty since their mother died. If she was, she didn’t know how to wield it and often gave men the wrong impression. She unsnapped her small reticule, took out a patch box, removed a beauty spot and placed it at the left side of her lip. She then took out a slim mother-of-pearl case, pulled out a cigarette from behind its thin garter and leaned forward to accept a light from her brother.

She was wearing a cartwheel hat with a great brim, but now flung it down on the empty chair beside her. “Do I have hat ghost?” she asked.

“
What?
” Paul said.

“The
ghost
of the
hat
in my
hair
.”

“I’ve lost my job,” he repeated. “And I can’t find Father. Have you heard from him this morning?”

“No, I haven’t heard from him in days.” She looked her brother in the eyes. “How will we live?” she asked. Rozsi looked mildly concerned. She bit her lower lip and then detected a bit of tobacco there. She gently hunted around for it with her tongue.

“Did you hear from Istvan?” Paul asked. “Did he call the house?”

She shook her head. “Why?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I’m just asking,” he said. “Things are happening.”

Paul gazed into the heart of the café. The long display cases in the centre of the room were overflowing with pastries that would sweeten Iago: marzipan goblins and chestnut purées crowned by whipped cream; strudel of all kinds—walnut, apple, cherry and poppyseed; hazelnut cream torte; vanilla cream cake; custard cake; Gundel
palacsinta
and milk chocolate cake with almond cream filling; Dobos torte; Linzer pastries; Napoleons; walnut crescents.

“Do you know what sets us apart from the animals, my darling sister?”

“What, my darling brother?” She aimed a stream of smoke at the chandelier.

“Dessert, that’s what. Do you think a lion polishing off a zebra turns to his partner and says, ‘That calls for a bit of Sachertorte’?”

Rozsi giggled and looked at the cases of cake. Kaiser Laszlo, Gerbeaud’s popular monkey, screeched, grinned and yanked gleefully at the bars of his golden cage. The small monkey was dressed as a bellhop, complete with a pillbox hat. Rozsi was relieved to see that the Kaiser was as chipper as ever, chattering with the regulars of Gerbeaud, working on a crust of cake someone must have handed him through the bars. She thought she might say hello to the Kaiser, as she often did, but satisfied herself for the time being by staring at him until he met her gaze with his small, sharp eyes, like human eyes. A young girl, wearing a royal blue jacket-and-skirt ensemble, complemented by a blue derby hat, approached the cage and fed the Kaiser a marzipan monkey wearing a bellhop suit, fashioned after the original one.

“He’s like a little cannibal,” Rozsi said to Paul. “I wish I could speak to the Kaiser—learn his language and speak to him.”

“As long as you don’t make him learn yours. That’s what we usually expect, isn’t it? How many of us speak dog or cat?”

“You really are very silly, do you know that?” Rozsi said.

“Oh,” he said. What would the mornings look like for him now, the long afternoons? “I don’t know what I’m going to do with myself.”

“You’ll find something,” Rozsi said and took her brother’s hand. “We’ll be all right. You can do almost anything you set your mind to, and I can help. I can take on more piano students. Father will help us. We’ll figure something out.” She patted his hand.

Ervin was coming toward Paul and Rozsi with the gentleman. “Paul, I’d like you to meet someone,” Ervin said in German. He looked at Rozsi and kept up the German. “Excuse me, ma’am.”

Paul got to his feet and Rozsi offered her hand, which the elegant stranger took warmly in his.

Ervin said, “This gentleman’s from Sweden. I told him you speak English, so he wanted to say hello.”

Ervin bowed and backed away. Paul then took the Swede’s hand and introduced himself and his sister; his eyes never left the Swede’s. The young man’s eyes were dark, and searching. He was balding and had a slim but solid build. The bones in his hands were long and slender, yet his grip was firm. For a giddy moment it looked to Rozsi as though the two might embrace. Paul felt himself blush, felt his wit ebbing out of him.

“Please sit,” he said in English.

The man offered Rozsi her hat and took the seat beside her. “Why are you called Paul? Isn’t there a Hungarian version of that name?”

Paul found himself stumbling. “I—well—um—I studied at Cambridge.
Pal
didn’t go over well there, so I guess I translated it.” He paused. He pronounced it again. “Paul. I studied law,” he added.

“I studied in Ann Arbor, Michigan. My grandfather sent me there to become an architect. He was an ambassador.”

“And so you became an architect?” Paul asked.

“No, I work in financial services. I’m a banker. I’m here now only to visit someone I know, someone I met, but I’d like to come back in a more serious capacity sometime soon.”

“Is banking not serious enough?” Paul said. Rozsi lit another cigarette and sipped her espresso. “You said your name was…”

“Raoul Wallenberg. I’m here to visit a friend, as I said. I was in South Africa and in Haifa. I—” Wallenberg stopped himself when he heard the shriek of Kaiser Laszlo. He turned around in his chair so he could see the monkey. “This place is extraordinary, this Gerbeaud. It’s like the witch’s candy house in Hansel and Gretel.”

“Yes, the witch’s house,” Paul said. “Europe is burning, but here you can get its leaders fashioned out of marzipan. People can’t find cornmeal or a horse shank for sausage. But in this place you can get anything you want.”

“You Hungarians have been allied with the Germans,” Wallenberg said, “so they’ve left you alone.”

“They won’t be leaving us alone much longer,” Paul said. “Hungarians always complain that world history is what happens somewhere else. The world is coming to us now, so maybe the complaints will stop.”

“Don’t be too enthusiastic,” Wallenberg said.

“Oh, I’m not being enthusiastic.”

“Then don’t be romantic.”

There was something oddly familiar about Wallenberg’s reproach, as if the two men were reuniting after an absence of some years. Yet there was something reassuring about his tone.

Paul looked outside the window as if to check for Germans, but instead he saw a young woman in a wilted white dress gazing in from the cobblestones. Wallenberg looked, too, as did Rozsi. The girl walked away quickly.

“I’m a Hungarian, and
I
haven’t been allied with the Germans,” Paul said. “I’m barely allied with my own country anymore. I can no longer practise law. As of this morning, I’ve been stripped of my rights. And yet here we sit,” Paul said, holding up his hands, “in the witch’s candy house.” He smiled.

“Your legal wings have been clipped.”

Paul shrugged.

“What will you do when they invade,” Wallenberg asked, “throw cakes at them?”

“I don’t know,” Paul said. “Cakes and Jews, more likely.”

Wallenberg smiled but didn’t laugh. Rozsi did laugh good-naturedly, not sure whether she’d understood what the two men had said. Paul had tried to teach her some English, but she said she was full up.

“I’m afraid I have to go,” Wallenberg said, getting to his feet and offering his hand again. “I’ll look you up when I get back.”

“Please do.” Paul, too, rose. He took out a case and gave the visitor a card. “But why would you come back? You’ll be safer staying in Sweden.”

“Ah, safety,” the Swede said, looking all around him.

“Why would you risk your neck?” Paul asked.

“It’s just a neck. It holds up a head.”

“
Really
, though. I don’t understand. Why would you come back?”

“To help you throw pastries and Jews at the hating hordes.
May
I try to help you?”

Paul was stunned by the stranger’s generosity and forthrightness. He said, “I’ve heard they can, and do, do terrible things to people—to Jews, Gypsies—whoever—homosexuals, communists.”

“I’ve heard that too,” Wallenberg said. “But they won’t do anything to Swedes. Germans follow rules, even in butchery.”

“But there aren’t many Swedes here. Only Hungarians, Jews, Gypsies.”

“So we’ll convert some.” He took a slim silver case with a tortoiseshell face out of his breast pocket, snapped it open and gave Paul a card too. He then offered his hand again. Rozsi said goodbye in German but hardly looked up. Paul stayed on his feet until the visitor had gone.

Gerbeaud’s pianist was playing Schubert. The Sonata in B-flat Major. Schubert was Paul’s favourite composer. Little Schubert. Short-lived Schubert. Standing in the valley between Mount Ludwig and Mount Wolfgang. Little, perfect Schubert. His music gave Paul a feeling of fulfilment and sadness both, and always an undefined longing.

“What did he say?” Rozsi asked.

“Nothing, really.”

“He said
something
.”

“He said he was a banker.”

“Is the trouble coming here?” she said.

“The trouble?” She made it sound like a dust storm. She’d paid no attention to world events outside their townhouse, outside this café. “Yes, the trouble’s coming,” he said.

“So what will we do, take another holiday in the Italian Alps until it passes?”

Even though the Hungarians had not participated in the war, they’d felt imprisoned by it. In times of trouble or tension, the Becks had taken flight to the French Riviera or to Majorca or to Santorini. How Rozsi had loved those trips. She remembered coming upon Michelangelo’s
David
in Florence with her father and brothers, soon after her mother had died. “So there he is in marble,” Paul had said at the time.

“Oh,” she said, as she circled the sculpture.

She looked far too long. “He’s too heavy,” Istvan said.

“What?” She put her hand up to her mouth. She was blushing.

“He’s too heavy. You can’t take him home with you.”

But now Europe was closing in on them. While Rozsi was not aware of daily events and tuned out when the subject of the war came up, she knew that her own question was not a serious one.

Still, she thought, surely all those nice people who ran those quaint lodges and chalets in the Swiss and Italian Alps, whose relatives made cuckoo clocks and glockenspiels and creamy chocolate and precision watches and music boxes that played the
whole
of Mozart’s
Jupiter
Symphony, had not turned criminal, turned their white-capped green slopes into impenetrable fortresses.

A young man entered and came straight to Paul and Rozsi’s table. He wore a tan herringbone spring suit—too cool for the weather yet, Rozsi thought, but he was handsome and confident. Though he wanted to speak to Paul, the young man kept staring at Rozsi. He seemed disarmed by her, unsure of how to greet her, even.

Paul rose and said, “Rozsi, this is my friend Zoltan Mak.”

“The journalist?” she asked. She felt she wanted to stand, too, to get a closer look, but it would have been awkward.

“Yes,” Zoltan answered for himself. She offered her hand and he took it. “Your brother has mentioned you sometimes—frequently, actually—even just a couple of days ago—and now, here we are. But he didn’t say much more. I didn’t know.”

“What?”

He shrugged.

She said, “Your father is the famous—”

“Yes, photographer,” he interrupted. “Or photojournalist, as they’re called these days. He’s the one who inspired me to go into journalism.”