Gratitude (8 page)

Had she destroyed the book? Mrs. Barta wanted to know. Had Marta read it and destroyed it as discussed?

She’d read it—yes—she’d read it, and—yes, no, she had destroyed it, of course.

Had she liked it? Smetana scratched. Marta’s eyes darted about the little room. Istvan sat like a statue directly below them, fearing his eyes made noise as they shifted in their sockets. Yes, of course she liked it.

But nightmarish—she remembered what Istvan had said, though she’d hardly listened at the time—nightmarish. “Awful.”

“I wouldn’t know,” the older woman said. “Who has time to read?”

Istvan wondered if good Anna had watched his father dangle in Mendelssohn Square, wondered if she’d made some sort of unconscious connection. He didn’t know anymore what he was talking about, thinking about.

He thought again of Paul and Rozsi. Where had the remains of his family got to? Would the line end here? Rozsi had often talked about becoming a mother just like their own, like Mathilde. They had been inseparable, mother and daughter. Every boy who wandered into Rozsi’s sphere had to be assessed by their mother, the supreme judge and the wisest counsel on all such matters. She possessed radar—she knew before anyone else which boy would be wayward and which one loyal. On her own, Rozsi was bereft, needing Paul, needing him, Istvan. He longed to introduce Marta to his brother and sister.

That evening down below, a warm evening in June, Marta sounded more cheerful than usual, almost careless, wanting to leave the planks up for a little air just a few minutes more, risking both their lives, the slits of light inadequate for their food and love. Blindness inadequate.

When they were finished, sitting naked on the warm blanket in the cool cellar, she said she wished they could throw aside the planks above them forever, but of course they didn’t. Then she said that Dr. Benes had been nice to her, given her more food lately because his patients had little else with which to pay him. Istvan had noticed: sausage twice that week, a half-dozen eggs, three tins of herring (who knows how many for the cat?), crusty German rye.

“Why not before?” Istvan asked. He was gnawing on a parsnip. He had grown to love them raw. “Why hasn’t he given us food before?”

“He has. You know he has—as far back as early April. Don’t you remember? The peppers in April? The radishes in May?”

“Yes, I remember.”

Her skin felt coarse in the darkness. Gooseflesh. She heard him crunch on the parsnip.

“Is he in love with you?”

She pulled away from him. “Of course he’s not in love with me.”

“He doesn’t know you have someone else. You’re not married.”

“
He
has someone else. He has a wife and two daughters.
I
have someone hidden in the cellar.”

“And you would die in an instant if they found out,” he said. “You’d be shot in the head where you stood.” He exhaled. “I’m sorry. I’m very sorry. It’s difficult being the invisible man.”

“It’s just as difficult being the visible woman.” She fumbled around beside her among the food things she had placed out of harm’s way and, in the darkness, put a book into his hand. “It’s Alexandre Dumas’s
The Three Musketeers
in the original French. A cousin of Dr. Benes had it. I asked to borrow it, and Janos visited his cousin on Sunday. I had it with me all day, and I was bursting to tell you I did.”

“You are precious,” he said, grinning. “Janos, is it now? You call him Janos?”

Marta went silent, then she left. The next morning, he heard her shuffling about as she got herself ready. She usually knocked three times gently with her heel to say goodbye, but this time she spoke only to Smetana before departing.

Istvan had waited all night to open the Dumas, but when morning came and he could light his lamp, he didn’t. He had badly wanted to gallop off with the musketeers. He had once fled Budapest for Paris for his own silly adventure, but now, instead of Athos, Porthos or Aramis, he had become Edmond Dantès, the Count of Monte Cristo—no, even better,
even worse
: Kafka’s Joseph K. It was a life-and-death adventure, after all, but not as he’d imagined it, not along the paths of glory. The paths of glory were illuminated by celestial beams, not thin filaments cut through floorboards.

The Three Musketeers
. Istvan laughed out loud and startled the cat—startled himself. Dumas in the original French. Tolstoy in Hungarian, Kafka in German, as written by the Czech author himself. Heavens above!

That night Marta was agitated when she arrived home. He could hear her banging about, not tiptoeing and shuffling as usual. Smetana meowed, and Marta, usually so protective, let him out of the house. “Go,” she told him, “go,” and he went.

An hour later, she came down to him. She was not wearing her night things, nothing comfortable or loose, and he got the message. She brought a cabbage roll—what next!—a rich, beefy cabbage roll and, as he ate alone (she had not brought one for herself), she said loudly, carelessly, “They came by today unannounced as usual. They searched the office, then cross-examined Dr. Benes. They wanted to know about me. They didn’t ask me, just him. Did she live alone? Did she have a lover? Where was her original Jew boss? What did she do with her nights? Had she read one Franz Kafka, or did she listen to Mendelssohn?”

“What did he say?” Istvan asked.

“He said nothing. What could he say? He
knows
nothing. He told them that he really didn’t know anything and minded his own business. I’m like that, too. People keep mostly to themselves. They trust no one. The Jews are being transported away from here somewhere—Poland, they’re saying, Oswiecim—Auschwitz, they’re calling it. The temple on Jozsika is filled with their belongings. That’s where your own books are, I suspect, with everything else from your father’s house.” She looked down. “When Janos asked me this morning if I’d started the Dumas, I simply smiled, and that was the end of it.”

Istvan gulped down hard. “Then what?” he asked.

“Then he left it alone.”

“No, I meant the visitors, the SS.”

“Then nothing. Then the bastards turned and walked out.” Marta’s voice was agitated. “Europe’s gone mad. What happens when the world is mad?”

He took her hand and squeezed it. The hand was limp, lifeless. It did not correspond with her voice.

“Another letter came from your Aunt Klari,” she said.

“No wonder they’re suspicious. They must be watching everything. Klari must still be hoping we’re here somewhere and the letter will find us.” Istvan looked across the dark at Marta, measuring her shape with his eyes. “I have to go,” he said. “I have to locate Radnoti. He’s a Catholic now. He’ll get word out to my family. Then these visits will stop.”

Istvan could feel Marta glaring back at him in the dark. The two of them were like bats. “Are you mad, Istvan?” she said. “You want to leave this perfect hideout—perfect for all of us—and risk whatever future we may have just to get word out? Your uncle and aunt are smart, and so are your brother and sister, from what I’ve heard about them. After a while they’ll stop writing.”

Istvan thought of his family. He was surprised especially that Paul had not managed something. Paul was the capable brother, but it was not so much that Paul
could
do things—Istvan
could
too. It was that Paul
would
when others wouldn’t. Istvan didn’t know if he’d stand in the storm the way his brother would, but how hard it must be, how absolute the Aryan Eagle’s hold, if Paul had not managed to free his only brother.

“We’re at greater risk this way,” Istvan said to Marta. “And who’s
all
of us? Do you mean you, me and Dr. Benes?”

“No, actually.” She went silent, then said, “I meant you, me and Smetana.”

“Well, Smetana we can risk,” he said and chuckled.

She neither responded nor laughed with him. “It’s been tough in this dark hole for you,” she finally said, “but my freedom is as much a prison as yours, only bigger.”

“I’m sorry,” he said to Marta, and then she left him without saying good night.

The next evening it turned dark while Istvan read
The Three Musketeers
. He felt his own helplessness battering at his chest as he waited for Marta, his one ear cocked always for Marta, but she did not return home.

Five

Budapest – March 22, 1944

PAUL BECK COULD NOT REACH
his father or brother in Szeged, nor could he learn anything of what might have befallen them. The news services had gone silent, and Paul could not even find reliable sources, like his friend Zoltan Mak. Where had he got to, all of a sudden? Rozsi seemed as worried about the young man she’d just met as she was about their own family. She called the
Csillag
and asked where Zoli had got to and learned he had not been in for a couple of days.

The authorities couldn’t be trusted. They had deprived him of his career and rights and could no longer be depended upon for answers, let alone help. But Paul clung to hope. He thought often of Wallenberg, how confident the man had seemed. He decided to visit the Swedish embassy on the other side of the river in Buda. He took a taxi to Minerva Street on Gellert Hill and asked the driver to wait. He climbed the stairs toward the three gold crowns of Sweden, which graced the arched white entrance.

Above the building on the northeast slope of the hill stood the bronze statue of Saint Gellert flanked by Grecian columns. Paul paused to take a look in the evening light. Gellert had brought Christianity to Hungary from Venice in the eleventh century at the behest of Hungary’s King Stephen, but when Stephen died, some Hungarians, who still preferred their pagan gods to the solitary one, stuffed Gellert into a spiked barrel and rolled him down the hill into the Danube.

The embassy was still open, but a couple of secretaries and assistants were leaving just as Paul walked in. He made his way along the pink marble floor toward the receptionist’s desk. It was a good minute before the woman looked up at Paul.

“I’d like to see the ambassador, if I may,” Paul said in German.

“The ambassador is not here,” the woman said. She spoke German, too, but not comfortably. She had dark features and looked more like a Gypsy than a Swede. In fact, Paul looked more like a Swede than she did, with her red curly hair and dark green eyes.

Paul asked in Hungarian, “Is the chargé here, then?” She didn’t respond, so he added, “I’m a lawyer. My father is the mayor of Szeged. Is he here, the chargé?”

She nodded yes, but said in an accented Hungarian, “He’s busy at the moment. If you take a seat, I’ll tell him you’re here to see him.”

The woman looked familiar to Paul somehow. She reminded him of someone from his youth. The woman went into an inner office but soon returned, and now it seemed she recognized something about Paul, too. She looked too long at him before turning away. He kept staring.

Paul had once met a young Gypsy woman who’d haunted his dreams for years. Ruth, she was called. She’d had the same green eyes. Exactly. When Paul was fourteen and his brother not yet twelve, their uncle Bela, Aunt Etel’s husband, whom they were visiting in the big city, one summer evening made off with the boys to a place on Aldas Street out in Rozsadomb. It was a dingy building he took them to, at the end of a narrow lane. Paul asked where they were going, and Bela told him, “Never mind,” as he paid the cab driver and then winked at him. Bela pushed the boys in through an unpromising door to a colourful entranceway. There was a girl just inside, not much older than Paul, with stark green eyes, like beads of olive oil on a white dish. She wore a feathery head scarf, a pearl necklace and a revealing black silky top held up by thin straps. She drew on a cigarette, let its smoke stream up through her hair and wreathe the colourful scarf. A small silver crucifix, suspended from the pearls, rode the valley between her breasts.

“Welcome to the Gypsy palace of love, boys.” Both boys looked around again, as if they’d missed something. “How many girls this evening, gentlemen?” she asked. The cigarette bobbed on the girl’s red lips. She pronounced the Hungarian words too fully, the words lush and robust, like her outfit. She pulled up Istvan’s chin with a finger as if she were twice his age.

“Give us just two juicy ones, this evening, my dear,” Uncle Bela said. “I’ll just have a dancer out here, maybe. My dinner isn’t agreeing with me.” He patted his stomach. Istvan looked at Paul with frantic twelve-year-old eyes. Paul tried to look cooler, ever the older brother. He patted Istvan on the shoulder. There was no escape.

“And make them as lovely as you’ve got,” Bela said.

“All we got is lovely.”

“Lovely like you?” Istvan blurted out, not knowing what he was asking.

Uncle Bela laughed hard, sat down behind the boys, slapped Paul’s bottom and lit a cigar, still laughing as he coughed.

“Yes, like me,” the girl said, “but I will go with this one,” indicating Paul, “the stick with the gorgeous red hair.” She stood and ran her fingers through it, tugging. Paul pulled back. “I’ll get you Maria,” she said to Istvan. “Younger.” Then she turned to Paul and took his hand. “I’m Ruth.”

Bela laughed again. “Give them whatever they need.”

Paul was soon alone with Ruth in a curtainy boudoir, a room from straight out of
One Thousand and One Arabian Nights
. He forced a cool stare as Ruth removed her blouse and red-and-green striped skirt. When she was down to her underwear, with reptilian green frills at the thighs and the sides of her breasts, Paul was breathless. She slithered onto the bed and opened herself up. Paul could see the small, plump divide behind the panties and the creamy abdomen above. He tried to drop to his knees on the bed but missed altogether and ended up on the floor, peering over the mattress. Ruth giggled and turned on her side toward him, awaiting another antic. Paul pulled himself up to a worn armchair by the bed which was so soft, he sank deeply into it such that his knees loomed above his hips, giving him the aspect of a grasshopper, a nice snack for a reptile.

When the girl noticed Paul’s arousal, she cackled and caused Paul to wag his knees open and closed as if he had to pee.

Paul tried to laugh with the girl, but the laugh erupted from his throat like a cough. He couldn’t think what to say. He told Ruth, “I have some dreams for us, all of us.”

“What kinds of dreams?”

“For all of us. For the human race.”

She was still on her side, propped on an elbow. “That’s strange,” she said, clutching at her pearls and crucifix. “Why do you have dreams for me? Just dream for yourself.”

“That’s not it. That’s not what I mean.” Paul had been reading Voltaire and Jean Jacques Rousseau and the poet Sandor Petofi, memorizing verses to impress his friends. He was on the verge of reciting a stanza.

But she spoke first. “Oh no, you want to fix me.” She sat up abruptly. “You’re one of those.”

“No, I’m not,” he said, and it was true. He did not want to reform her. On the contrary, he wanted her to corrupt him. He didn’t want to hold a single thing back, yet he was letting loose in just the wrong way. Paul said, “You are just so right for me, but not just now. You are better than right for me. You make me feel as if I could take us to a place like Byzantium in its golden days.”

“Where is that?” she asked. She was looking less amused.

“It’s—I’m not—it’s not anywhere anymore. It’s like Jerusalem. I want to take you to a new Jerusalem, Ruth. I am baring my soul to you, my nakedness speaking to your nakedness.”

“I want your
actual
nakedness,” she said. She looked at Paul’s hair. “You got a thick red bush down there, too, or haven’t you begun sprouting yet?’ She giggled as she sat up, took Paul’s hands and pulled him by her side on the bed. She flung herself back. Paul was terribly aroused now and kissed her deeply. Her lively tongue snaked its way into his mouth. Her waxy red lips greased his mouth and chin. She placed his hand on one of her plump breasts, beneath the loosened brassiere. Her eyes were closed. He separated himself from her. His hand was memorizing her breast for future reference, and he was overcome with excitement and suddenly embarrassed himself—he could feel it. He could feel his hot cheeks, and she felt them, too. He pulled away from her and lay on his back. She hovered over him, sensing what had happened, sparing him by not laughing anymore.

“I can do it. I feel I can,” he said.

“What do you feel you can do?” She was serious, not mocking.

“You know.”

“What?” she asked.

He didn’t know how to say it. “I feel I can stand on my head.”

She brightened up considerably and she sat up and clapped her hands. “Show me.”

Paul bounded out of bed, shoved the armchair aside and reversed himself, unfurling his frame into a headstand in a single move. He had got a nine out of ten for the procedure in gymnastics, losing a point for excessive reddening of his face.

Ruth laughed again. Then she pointed and her laughing continued. “You’re all wet down in front. You’ve spilled all your long, thin children into your pants.”

Paul collapsed and climbed back into the chair, folding up, locking his elbows into his knees and staring into the shadows at his crotch.

Ruth scuttled on the bed toward him. “What is Jerusalem?” she asked softly. The crucifix swung now in the heaving valley of her breasts, bare now, pert and perfect.

“It’s where Jesus walked,” he said. He was breathless nearly. “It’s where he died.”

“Why would I want to go there? I like it here.” She pulled Paul by the hands onto the bed again and encouraged him to stretch out. She then ran her hand down his abdomen and paused as she kissed him tenderly. She looked into his eyes. “You think. That’s what you do. People who are good at thinking think. What else would they do?” She was staring at his red locks now, running her fingers through them. “I don’t want to think. I want to be with you just now. Why aren’t you wild like your hair?”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t tonight. I’m so sorry.” He was a little in love with her, would have run off with her through the back door if she’d asked him.

“It’s all right.” She kissed Paul on the cheek. “I like you.” She gripped his hair again and tugged. “I get the feeling that, if I pulled hard, cords of this stuff would come out of that long body of yours. Like you’re a bell tower.” She laughed a throaty laugh and sat up to get a cigarette. She applied her sultry red lipstick flawlessly without a mirror and hung the cigarette from the fresh paste on her lips. Paul sat up to light it, taking her tarnished silver lighter from her. It was monogrammed “MM.”

“I thought your name was Ruth,” he said.

“It is. Someone left that here. A gentleman—Miksa somebody—I can’t remember. He left it for me, on purpose, I think, to light my cigarettes with and think of him when I do.”

Paul felt tears welling up in his eyes.

Ruth saw and ran her fingers through his hair again, gently this time. She blew smoke to the side, away from him. “When I was a little girl, I used to think that the thing that stood out about a person came from something inside.” She patted her own white abdomen. “I used to think a big tubby man would have a balloon maker inside of him, waiting to float him away somewhere.”

“Like Jerusalem?”

“Like that, maybe. I used to think a very hairy uncle of mine—hair all over his body—big tufts of it—and down his neck—you couldn’t even tell where his head ended and his neck started—and it went all the way down his back—I used to think about this Uncle Sebastian that he had a weaver living inside him.”

“I must have the same,” Paul said, holding onto his own hair now.

She laughed. “Yes, tall boy, you must have that, too, but maybe only up in your head, since you’re hairless everywhere else.” He was smiling. “And his wife,” she went on, “my uncle’s wife had purple eyes and purple makeup she spread over her eyelids—I used to believe she had a mulberry bush growing inside.”

“And what do you have inside?” Paul asked, poking at her abdomen and gulping. She blushed for the first time and didn’t giggle. She stubbed out her cigarette, kissed him warmly on the lips, a moist, tobacco-waxy kiss, and then pulled him to his feet. He helped her on with her gown, and she stood and stared at him for a moment.

Out front afterward, Paul learned that his kid brother had acted like someone about to sire a new race. He had managed every exercise known to the bedroom in just the couple of hours allotted to him. He’d climaxed six times. A second girl had to be brought in to lend a hand. Ruth told their uncle, “Tall boy is on the house. No charge for Jerusalem.” Both Istvan and Bela looked at Paul. Had she meant he was so good she’d fallen for him, or had she meant he was a flop? Paul remained mute for a week. His uncle Robert had to be called in to examine his throat and ears.

That was Paul’s Big Night. His first and last.

This woman in the Swedish embassy, who tried not to look at Paul, had Ruth’s green eyes, but she had Ruth’s youth, too, and Paul had met Ruth years before.

“Is the chargé really here?” Paul finally said. His voice bounced off the marble floor and walls.

“Yes, he’s here.”

“I need to speak to him.”

“I told him,” the young woman said, but she didn’t sound annoyed. She added, “I’ll be leaving in a few minutes.”

“I won’t,” Paul said. “Not until I’ve spoken to someone.”

“All right,” she said and stood again. “I’ll go see.”

“Please say it’s important.”

She wanted to say, “I will,” but her Hungarian was not perfect, and instead she said, “I have,” then went away again through the white door behind them.

Paul waited far too long this time. He felt under suspicion, disrespected. Was this his new lot? Was he to be among the dispossessed? His blood clanged against his neck. Soon he would have his right to vote revoked, too, and his property confiscated. Here he sat, in a Swedish chair in the heart of Budapest, for no good reason. He was not a lawyer anymore, not a complete Hungarian, not even a man, as Ruth’s youthful incarnation reminded him. All that time he’d spent becoming what he’d become, all that strain, that single-mindedness, neglecting even romance to avoid distraction. Many thought him the best in the whole country at casting doubt on evidence, a genius at calling into question what at first seemed self-evident. He could send the first autumn cloud over a summer sun, and then, subtly, the second and third, until the whole courtroom believed the sky was overcast. Truth was grey with intermittent sun, small sudden bursts of it.