Gratitude (7 page)

Zoli’s father had urged him that morning to rediscover that boyish wonder, relearn the simplicity he was now trying to bury under grand thoughts.

Now, as Zoli searched for another story in the paper, he realized it wasn’t there, either. And yet Zoli’s family owned the
Csillag
. Zoli’s mother, Adel, had inherited a profitable brickyard and used some of the proceeds to run two papers, the foremost being the
Csillag
. It was true they had appointed an editor, Odon Mihaly, and tried to give him free rein, but it was not like Mihaly to kill a story without notice, especially one from Peter Mak, Zoli’s father. Had his father submitted the piece under his alias, Peter Vas? What difference would that have made? Where was Mihaly? Had someone spoken to him?

Peter Mak was one of the most celebrated journalists and photographers in the city, regardless of the fact that his family owned the
Csillag
. His feature stories were legendary. In one case, he exposed the royal Eszterhazy family to shame when it became apparent they had mistreated the thousands of serfs who worked their lands. Peter Mak had unearthed documents suggesting that the family had opposed and even suppressed legislation that would have given the serfs education and a modicum of freedom, at least brought them into the twentieth century. Hungary was one of the last European countries to cling to its serfs. The highest highs and lowest lows in terms of economic and social class coexisted in Hungary, and the nobility was often callous in its insistence on keeping things that way.

Many blamed the imperious Austrians. Zoli had witnessed some of the best debates between his father and Heinrich Beck on the union past and present with Austria. The men argued bitterly. Paul’s aunt Klari and Zoli’s mother, Adel, broke it up by bringing out a fragrant
arany galuska
, a pastry made with walnuts and apricot preserve. “We gave this dessert to the Viennese,” Adel said, “and they gave us Sachertorte, a fair exchange. Look at the bright side, boys.”

Zoli gazed around the quiet parlour. His father, travelling as Peter Vas, had taken a daring trip to Gyor just the previous day. He’d received a tip from one of his underground sources that the Germans planned to evacuate a Jewish orphanage housing 320 children in the northwestern city, and Peter wanted to take photographs of the war crime. The purging operation turned out to be as mysterious as it was swift. Within an afternoon, the children were meant to disappear, as if the Pied Piper of Hamelin had lured them away, never to return.

The journalist had got quick shots of the children being stuffed into burlap sacks and loaded onto the back of a truck. He stood, helpless, and watched the wriggling sacks, until he felt something sharp from behind, a German brown shirt with a bayonet. The reporter furtively slid his Hasselblad under his arm, inside his jacket. He was experienced at concealing his camera.

“Enjoying the spectacle?” the soldier asked in German.

“I’m not sure. I’m here to adopt one of these boys,” Mak said. “I’ll take a couple if you can spare them.”

“You can adopt one or two when they come back.”

“That wasn’t my understanding with the authorities.”

“And who might they be?” the German asked. A Hungarian Arrow Cross guard approached, but the German held up his hand to stop the man.

Peter Mak could feel sheets of perspiration flowing under his jacket, especially where the camera hung, pressed against his ribs. The rivalry between the German and Hungarian was his ticket. “All right,” he said. “I’ll come back when the children do.” And he backed away.

That night at dinner, when he recounted the story, Adel cried. She begged her husband not to risk his life the way he so often did.

Zoltan went to the foot of the stairs and called from there. A dog barked in the neighbour’s yard. He took a peek out back and caught sight of his mother’s foot in her spring sandal. He’d pulled open the window wide before he saw the spot of blood on the outer sill. And then he saw all of her. She was lying on her back on the terrace, looking quite at peace. Under one arm was tucked the strap of his father’s famous Hasselblad, the camera itself resting languidly on her abdomen like a cat. From under her other breast, a great river of blood oozed out of the folds of her soft pink dress and onto the cobblestones of the terrace.

“Mother,” Zoli shrieked. He stood up. Before he could think to use the door, he had leapt through the open window. He put his hand on the wound to stanch the flow, but he could see she was not breathing. Her pink lips were parted, and he could see the tip of her dry tongue, as if it had tried to escape.

The dog next door answered with a bark. Zoli tried the back door, but his mother’s shoulder rested against it. He would have had to pull her away to open it.

Zoli got back in through the window and ran toward the darkroom, knocking over the piano bench and launching a sheaf of musical scores into the wind that followed him.

He found his father face down in a tray of developing chemicals. The picture he’d been developing was hanging above him from the line. It was an image of sacks in a truck, guarded by two German soldiers, with an Arrow Cross officer looking on. It was to go with the second instalment of their story about the rise of the Nyilas, as the Arrow Cross were known. The dim light was still on, and his father’s arm was extended along the counter, his fingers spread wide, as if he were reaching for something that wasn’t there. Was it the camera his mother had tried to rescue before making her escape? Had they drowned him first and shot her second?

Zoli stood for a moment, paralyzed. He was the Maks’ only child. The authorities would come looking for him, too, now. He felt himself trembling—unable to swallow. He pushed himself to move.

He went out again to the back, out through the window, got to his knees and kissed his mother on her cold pink cheek. He gently pried the camera from her and took a good look at it. He even looked through the lens. The light refracted through his tears.

His father would have been saddened but perversely proud of this horrific scene. Peter had once told his son, “If you don’t make yourself worthy of a bullet, you’re not a journalist.”

Zoli would have to take the camera now and keep it with him as he went underground.

Four

Szeged – March 20, 1944

MARTA FOLDI HID
Istvan Beck from the Nazis in the wine cellar of her cottage in Tower Town, near the outer boulevard of the city. The tiny, ancient house had belonged for generations to the Foldis. They could trace their lineage to a scullery maid and a stable hand who had worked in the castle of King Mathias in the fifteenth century. Marta’s own brother, Ferenc, now lived in Chicago, answered to “Frank” and worked as a dentist, like Istvan. Marta and Ferenc’s parents had died in a boating accident on the Tisza River when Marta was just fourteen and her brother seventeen. For generations, the cottages of Tower Town were inhabited by paprika growers and sausage makers. Marta’s parents had been both.

The house, on Alma Street, was one of the least likely places to find a hidden Jew. The little building, divided now into two bedrooms, a tiny toilet and a small central room, which doubled as a kitchen and parlour, had two loose planks in its creaky floor leading to the cellar. Here, Marta’s father, Jozsef, had stored some excellent vodka and several dozen dusty bottles of wine. Her mother, Maria, had kept her preserves, her pickled tomatoes and peppers, grown in the small, lush square of garden out back, together with some raspberry and apricot jam that her cousin had given her, on a shelf opposite her father’s bottles. A ladder led down to the cellar, the walls and floor were crumbling stone, and when the planks came down shut, slits of light cut in from above and drew lines across the dark room.

Here, in this least likely place, Marta would hide Istvan, feed him and keep him strong. She hadn’t given much thought to a plan or strategy before now, of course. Istvan had never even visited Marta at home, nor she him. But a line had been crossed—or rather they had been pushed over it—and now she was operating on instinct. Maybe this would all blow over. Surely it must. The Allies were at the gates.

At first Istvan felt protected, felt grateful to have a little time away from the world. He worried about Marta, the risk she was taking. As the hours became days, the challenge was to decide what to do to occupy his body and mind while Marta was away. Istvan measured his days by the rods of light coming through the floorboards, studying them as they travelled across his cell. As he lay on his back, he liked them crossing out his feet and crossing out his neck. He liked to shift himself from latitude to longitude to watch them divide his body straight up the middle, featuring his gonads on either side, lighting a highway between the telltale nose and penis that led him to this cell.

Who’d have thought? Must tell Marta when she gets back. Must tell Marta the line of destiny can be drawn between these two points.

Besides the movement of the lines of light, there was one other measure and one distraction from that measure: the clock and the cat, the latter called Smetana, after Marta’s favourite composer. The clock ticked tirelessly. How ridiculous we are, Istvan thought, counting out eternity in bits of light and sound. Smetana scampered and slept, scratched and slept.

When the sun switched off, and the lamp above followed, right at curfew, Marta could creak down at last to join Istvan in the palpable darkness, to feel one of his points of destiny gain prominence over the other.

In this blindness, they felt safe at last, their dark union lifting them up the tunnel, out of the cottage, over the city. After, she would creak back up to get them their meal: beans, mostly, sometimes leeks, often cabbage or peppers, a treat of carrots occasionally, a potato between them, and once a week a tin of sardines. Istvan suspected Marta might have done better with her food coupons. He suspected she
did
do better and that Smetana got a sardine a day—the other tin to which Marta’s rations entitled her. The authorities did not know she was feeding all of them. Two tins of protein were intended for her, not for all of them, not him, her, the cat and the clock. Then they brushed their teeth with salt, using a new shoe brush she’d managed to procure.

Oh, how sweet she was with her tins and her warmed potato and her fragrant visits. They whispered together for hours at a time, lying on his mat, holding hands beneath the prickly warm blanket. He fed off her news or at least the distorted versions of news she carried with her and what they could really make of them.

Within two months, the Germans took authority over the city, and within three months cleansed it of most of its Jews and Gypsies. There was a blackout on news. Listening to the BBC broadcasts earned you the death penalty, often carried out on the spot. So the news they got was from Anna Barta, who used to be the local florist but now issued food coupons, and Denes Cermak, who used to sell the papers but told the news now instead, whatever he could garner from Berlin, from Warsaw, from Prague and from the riot of rumour in the streets of Szeged and Budapest. It was this news that Marta brought home to Istvan.

It was news about the French underground and the coming fall of London. Hitler was in Africa. He would take Europe, followed by Russia. He would take on all comers, vanquish all enemies, and he would rule the planet. King Adolf of Austria! King Adolf of Arya! The Aryan Eagle spreads his fists into wings!
Aquila non capit muscas!
An eagle does not catch flies! Whoever of us is left—whatever vermin Jews and communists and Gypsies and homosexuals—can fly into the bush and buzz around the turds so generously dropped by the noble Aryan Eagle.

What is the issue, after all? Istvan wondered. What is it
really
? Is it that we cover our heads, warm a small patch of our offensive pates? Is it our music? Our dentistry? Our thoughts? Our mathematics? Our mimicry of you in dress and talk and appetite? Do you despise the softness of our gold, thinking it brass impregnable like good King Richard’s? What exactly pings the chip that cracks the concord of your state? Is it that we flies make like eagles, aspire to be eagles, until, with battered impish little wings, we drone off to another dung heap—just as juicy, just as inviting? Is it that we never quite get that it is you who are King Richard, and we the antic, “grinning at his pomp”? You did a good job, now, a good job, finally: too much like you in walk and talk, we stand here caught in your midst, our wings atrophied, our grins gone. Let us say we’re your competitors—even if we’re not, but let us say we are. Don’t competitors have the same aim, to score enough goals to win, not too many, not so many as to humiliate, but enough to win? Survive. Eat. Breathe.

May we look at your moon? May we borrow it one night to compose a ditty by its light? May we gaze at your stars? What constellation might you not be using tonight?

Could you lend us your caves, so that we can draw images of the passing animals? And then, in the bottom corner, where the feet are, can we leave the imprint of our hand—not to say, “I was here.” Never that—that message is for you and you alone. But to say, “I was
also
here.” I was also here, and now I’ve moved on. I was also here, and some day it might be all right for me to return.

For you, Emperor, our good Lord Franz-Josef, for you we’ll conceal our past—we don’t know where we came from anyway. For you, Lord, we’ll take on good German names like yours: Klein if we’re small, Gross if we’re large, Roth if our hair is red, Beck if we bake a sweet cake, Tanz if we dance, Mondtanz if we dance by the light of the moon. For you, Herr Horthy, good Lord Regent, we’ll take Hungarian names to blend with the scenery: Nagy if we’re big, Kis if we’re little, Halasi if we fish, Kertesz if we keep a garden, Ordog if we’re devilish. We’ll put on a white shirt and white apron embroidered with folkland flowers and roll the strange sounds of the Huns and Magyars and Turks off our tongues and make them all ours, eat paprika and pork and horse, dance Gypsy and waltz—if only, in return, Herr Adolf, Herr Nicholas, Herr Franz-Josef, if only you promise not to point out our snouts, our bank accounts, our diplomas, our afternoons with the violin. Promise us, and you’ll stay our lords forever—promise us, and we’ll board airless cars with a bucket for relief and travel to holiday destinations of your choosing and devising.

When the rain fell, it fell like clocks clanging on the roof, and after the clouds chugged past, the sun beamed out its long hour. Istvan could smell the sun—could
hear
it—as the days grew longer. How he’d always craved the warmth, loved feeling the summer opening up its limbs to him. Istvan lived in chunks of air, cartons of his own dust and follicles, and when he stood, it was to visit a new hemisphere where exotic creatures flew and floated. He was a microscope, magnifying every jagged little black leg, extrapolating every eye and tail into a resident, granting it citizenship by its persistence in the neighbourhood, the toy world, flecks of civilization colliding like epochs. Boxes of darkness were piled in the corner, but sometimes their colours could be unpacked, and they were wild and vivid: jewel green, wet blue, fragrant red.

And Marta was his light-bearing creature. He sucked the street out of her, the chlorophyll, the learning—let alone the love and nourishment.

Each day, Marta told Istvan as much as he could stand about the dental office, Istvan’s own practice, now occupied by a young dentist, Dr. Janos Benes, whom the Reich had assigned to his office. Istvan had fled the country, Marta had told them. The authorities confiscated Istvan’s deeds and his belongings, emptying out the house he shared with his father, piling up their household effects, together with the effects of other evacuated Jews, in the synagogue on Jozsika Street. Dr. Beck had said he was heading east through Russia, Marta told the Germans—and she had no way of knowing—but she guessed he would not be back. He knew what was good for him. They made a mark in their black hardcover notebooks, followed by a scratched out sentence, and then snapped them shut. They looked at Marta, looked her in the eye, and, predictably, marched out. A day later a letter came to her at her little house on Alma Street, ordering her back to work in her old office under Herr Dr. Janos Benes.

Little had changed in the office. It was as if Dr. Benes had been away on vacation and had now returned to his gleaming dentist’s chair and instruments he’d gathered from the Ritter Company of Rochester, New York, and Beethoven on his Graetz console specially selected in Berlin.

“Do you know about the cuckoo bird?” Istvan asked Marta one night.

“Yes.”

“Why don’t we call him Dr. Cuckoo?”

She suddenly found herself feeling defensive. “Did he have any more of a choice than you did or I did? It’s the cuckoo’s nature to occupy another’s nest. It is not Dr. Benes’s nature.”

In fact, Herr Dr. Benes, as he was called, had no ill will, certainly none that was evident. He had been summoned from a village near Debrecen and assigned to Istvan’s office just as surely as Marta had been ordered to return to it.

Days passed in this way, and the days became weeks and then months. Was it longer than that? He could have counted every second but had lost track. He listened to the ticking of the clock’s heart and the beating of the cat’s. Could he come out now, if only for an hour, to take in the sun? They could not take the chance. What if Frau Barta saw him, or Herr Newsman Cermak? Had Istvan not gone away, as reported, with the best of them, to hide his frozen carcass in Siberia? Wasn’t that the story?

Oh, frigid Siberia! Thank the heavens for the books. During the day, when Marta was gone, Istvan would light an oil lamp or a candle in his lair when it could not be detected through the sunlit planks above. Autumn would come. He could see it ahead. What would happen in the long darkness when he was not able to light a lamp at all?

He had read
Anna Karenina
in Hungarian translation four times, though he wished he could have tried his hand at the original Russian. He had managed it once before, when his friend Miklos had lent him the book in university. But the Hungarian translation was a good one. It was done by that sad poet Attila Jozsef, the son of Szeged, who’d been expelled for disparaging his native land. He’d written bold lines, Istvan remembered.

I have no brother

I have no father

I have no god

And I have no country.

With pure heart, I’ll burn and loot,

And if I have to, even shoot.

Attila had been branded a Marxist, an anarchist, a communist, but his translations of Tolstoy and Shakespeare could stand with the originals.

Marta had brought Istvan a weak translation of Victor Hugo, and to her amazement he’d stopped reading it the second time through. He told her that night, “Reading a bad translation is like listening to Beethoven played by a school band.” He chuckled, but she didn’t even smile. “I don’t mean to complain,” he told her. “I did read it once. More than once. It must be me. I’m sure it’s me.”

How could he complain to the woman who’d brought him sustenance, who’d provided the activities that would make the ceiling disappear?

Mrs. Anna Barta, bless her heart, had brought Marta a book published in German by a Czech writer,
Der Prozess
, “The Trial,” released not long before and already forbidden, Mrs. Anna had said. In fact, she had transported it to Marta’s house on Alma Street hidden in her ample brassiere and handed it to her, still warm from her breast. “Hide it, read it, then destroy it,” the good woman had said. Istvan listened to her voice above his head one Sunday afternoon, happy to hear another human. She’d brought some Havarti cheese, too, good Anna, with the little Franz Kafka treasure, which had surfaced from the underground somewhere and needed to return whence it came: the trash heap, the ash heap, whatever was easiest.

A couple of weeks passed. Istvan devoured the new book six times, seven times. He was pierced through the heart by it, ready to make it his own suicide note as he boldly marched out of his den wearing it nailed to his chest in place of the cloth star issued to the Jews still standing, miraculously still resident, in Szeged, when the good Mrs. Barta came again on a Sunday to call on Marta. Smetana scratched on the planks above Istvan.