Love and Treasure (11 page)

Price took over at this point and instructed Jack to show the Hungarians through the warehouse. Before they set off, however, he pulled Jack aside.

“You got your wish, Wiseman. But … well. Discretion. The better part of valor and all that.”

“Yes, sir,” Jack said, understanding that he was to make no mention to the visitors of the items decorating the living quarters of the brass. He didn’t care. Now that these men had arrived, it would not be long before everything would have to be returned and sent on its way, back to Hungary where it belonged.

He led them to the first aisle. He pointed out the crates and boxes, and the Hungarians pressed forward, reading the tags and chalked markings, murmuring to one another. At one point one of them gasped and, with a shaking finger, traced a name scrawled on a leather suitcase. He was slightly younger than the rest, his bald pate covered with an ink-black velvet yarmulke. Rafael bent over the man, and they spoke together. Jack tried to grant them a modicum of privacy, but the quarters were close, and he could hear what they were saying.

“Not my own family,” the man told Rafael. “My son-in-law’s cousin. From Debrecen.”

Rabbi Bohnen, standing next to Jack, lifted a handkerchief to his eye and dabbed.

“Sir,” Jack said, softly, “should I open the case?”

Bohnen considered this for a moment. Then he asked the question of Rafael, who in turn asked the Hungarian.

“No,” the man said. “Not this one.”

The leader of the group of Hungarians, a small man with a neatly trimmed white beard and a pair of gold pince-nez perched in the crease above his nose, said, “But perhaps another box?”

Jack moved a few yards down the aisle. He stopped before a section in which he’d put crates of silver religious objects, chose one, and pried it open with his knife. He removed a silver goblet from the box. The cup was tarnished, and he wiped it clean on his handkerchief before handing
it to the leader of the Hungarians. The man held it reverently, his rheumy eyes filling with tears. He murmured something, and his bald colleague turned to Rafael. “Rabbi Mendlowitz asks where are the Torah scrolls.”

Before Rafael could translate, Jack replied in German, “I’m sorry, sir. We found dozens of breastplates and silver handle covers, but no actual Torah scrolls.”

At this news the elderly Hungarian shook his head, his wet eyes spilling over.

Rabbi Bohnen took his hand and patted it.

For a moment they all stood silently, honoring the elderly man’s grief. Then Rafael turned to Jack. “Where have you stored the more valuable items? Jewelry? Watches? That type of thing.”

Jack took them to the far corner, beneath the boarded-up windows, where he’d put the crates of jewelry and gold watches. He opened a casket of each. One of the Hungarians knelt down, sorted quickly through the watches, and then turned to the jewelry. He affixed a jeweler’s loupe to his eye and began picking pieces up one at a time, holding them close to his loupe and turning them over in his fingers. After a few moments he murmured something to the leader of the delegation. An intense conversation ensued in Hungarian. The members of the delegation seemed upset. The small white-haired man turned to Jack.

In German, he said, “These items are not as valuable as we expected. The watches are gold, yes, also some of the chains. But where are the gemstones?”

Rafael asked Jack, “Are they stored in another location?”

Jack left the men for a moment and returned with the casket of gold bullion, the briefcase of currency, and the small velvet bag of gems that Avar had turned over when first the Americans assumed control of the train. “This is what we have,” Jack said.

“This is all?” Rafael asked, weighing the pouch in his hand.

“Yes.”

“Are there other crates of jewelry?”

“Yes,” Jack said, “but most of what we have looks like it was dismantled, the stones pried out. Given how many chains and settings we’ve found, it’s clear there should be more. In fact, we found very little in the way of valuable jewelry, gold, or currency. The Hungarian in charge told us that the crates with the most valuable items were removed from the train by his superior officer Colonel Árpád Toldi during the final days of the war.”

Price interrupted. “The gems and gold stolen by Toldi were found in the French Zone. The French are in control of those items.”

“Yes,” the leader of the Hungarian delegation said. “Our government is in negotiations with them for the return of that property.”

Jack wondered if the Hungarians had heard what David Ball, his OSS-officer roommate, had told him, that the French had only discovered the valuables because the Austrian peasants whom Toldi had chosen to guard the caskets of loot instead turned up at their village markets with fistfuls of diamonds with which to barter for bread, their wives festooning themselves in gem-encrusted diadems and tiaras to milk their cows and pull turnips from their fields.

Price said, “We’ll make sure that you receive a copy of Lieutenant Wiseman’s inventory. But rest assured, everything we received when we seized the train is here in the warehouse.”

Everything but what’s in the homes of the brass, Jack thought, but didn’t say. Moreover, there did not exist a complete inventory of the contents of the train. Yes, he had inventoried and accounted for everything requisitioned by his superior officers, but the rest? There was just so much. There were at least five hundred crates full of silver bowls, dishes, and vases alone. The kind of inventory he would have liked to make would have itemized every item in every crate. But to do so would have taken far more manpower than he’d been allotted. It was all he could do to roughly organize the property.

All told, the visitors spent four hours in the warehouse, and by the time they were finished, Jack was exhausted. But he was also conscious of a huge weight being lifted from his shoulders. Finally, he would be rid of his nearly unbearable responsibility.

He escorted them out to the two long black cars that waited in the street in front of the warehouse. He held the doors open, and one by one they piled inside. The leader of the delegation was the last of the Hungarians to enter the cars, and before he did so he motioned for Jack to bend over to him. He placed his gnarled hands on either side of Jack’s head and murmured a prayer. The tune was not one Jack recognized, but the words were the same as the prayer with which his mother’s father had blessed him and his younger brother over Shabbos dinner.

“May God make you like Ephraim and Menashe,” the rabbi sang in Hebrew, blessing Jack as Joseph had blessed his grandsons, Jacob’s sons, two boys who grew up as Jack did, in the Diaspora, subject to the temptations and dangers of exile.

In Yiddish, because German seemed at that moment a sacrilege, Jack thanked the rabbi, who pressed his lips to Jack’s forehead before getting into the car.

As Jack closed the car door, Rabbi Bohnen, who had watched the exchange, said, “A blessing from such a rabbi is a very great thing. I’m proud of you, Jack.”

What was there to be proud of? Jack thought. That he’d kept the warehouse well organized so the brass’s pillaging was easier to accomplish?

“You’ve been a good guardian,” Bohnen said, as though reading his mind. “Their property has been safe with you.”

And even Jack, so adept at self-criticism, had to admit that this was true. He’d done a fair job of limiting theft, as well as could be expected given the limited staff he’d been assigned. He’d kept careful track of every requisition. Bohnen was right. He had been a good guardian. And now the Hungarian property was going back where it belonged, to be dispersed among the surviving remnant of Budapest’s Jews. He allowed himself to experience a flush of contentment, a hint of hope.

Within moments, it was gone.

“I didn’t want to give you this while they were still here,” Price said.

“Sir?”

Price handed him a file of requisition orders. For Medical Corps officer General Edgar E. Hume: eighteen rugs, tableware and silverware, table linen, and glassware. For General Howard’s Vienna apartment: nine rugs, one silver set, and twelve silver plates. For Brigadier General Linden: ten rugs. For Major General McMahon: two hundred pieces of glass and porcelain tableware.

Jack opened his mouth, but Price lifted his hand. “I don’t want to hear it, Lieutenant. Fill the orders.”

And with that Jack’s sense of accomplishment and hope was gone. He was powerless against the military, like a polar bear standing on a melting ice floe, the sea lapping ever closer.

•
7
•

THE WOMEN WHO SHARED
Ilona’s room knew him, and they smiled at his attempt to greet them in their own tongues. His “
Jó napot
” sounded pretty good, but at his polite and friendly “
Achuj
” the Polish women bent over at the waist, wiping the hilarious tears that streamed from their eyes. He wouldn’t know what it was about his accent that amused them so until many years later, when he’d try it out on a waitress in a bar in Little Poland in Greenpoint, who’d also bend over, clutching her belly and wheezing, until she wiped her merry eyes and told him that he hadn’t in fact wished her a good day but rather called her a prick.

He was under the impression that Ilona’s roommates were a ribald bunch, and he was relieved, as ever, that he didn’t understand enough Hungarian to know what they were saying as they teased him.

This afternoon, weeks and weeks after the visit from the delegation that Jack had foolishly imagined would signal the end of his job and the return of the contents of the Werfen train, he had left newly promoted Corporal Streeter in charge of the warehouse, unable to bear another moment there. He needed to see Ilona. He found her sitting on her bed, darning a sock. The sock was blue, but the thread was black. Jack wished he’d bought her a pile of spools in a rainbow of colors. Her skirt was rucked up above her knee. She was not wearing tights, and in the chill of the room the reddish-gold down on her legs stood erect. A considerable share of Jack’s nocturnal rumination was devoted to the as-yet-unanswered question of whether the color of her bush also ran to strawberry blond or something closer to the auburn of her head. She caught him staring at the heart of the mystery. He started to avert his gaze, then mastered the impulse and returned her fixed gaze.

They looked into each other’s eyes for a moment, and then she did something astonishing. Subtly, almost imperceptibly, she shifted her legs apart. It was no more than an inch or two, so little that one who was not obsessed might not even have noticed. Jack caught a glimpse of pink thigh and white panty, and then it was over. She put down her darning and stood up.

“More presents!” she said when he handed her his daily offerings. “Soon I will be the richest Chocolate Girl in all of Land Salzburg.” Then as if she regretted the joke, she lifted her hand to his cheek. “Thank you,” she said sweetly. She was not often sweet, a sardonic smile more frequently on her lips than a gentle one, so when she allowed herself to be like this, it melted his heart.

“Listen, Jack, I have something to tell you,” she began, but now the other girls had come over to see what he’d brought.

“Later,” she told him, and unwrapped two chocolate bars and passed them around. When she pulled out the pairs of Gotham Gold Stripe nylon hose, one of the women said something in Polish, and the others burst out laughing. A Hungarian woman fingered the nylon and murmured something to Ilona, who pressed a pair into her hands.

Ilona said, “She says she must have them to wear when she gets off the train in Budapest so she will be beautiful for her husband.” Though the woman spoke no English, Ilona lowered her voice. “Her husband is a Christian. They divorced in 1944, when the Jewish laws were passed, and she is worried that he won’t take her back. She heard that he and her son survived the war in Budapest, but they have not answered her letters.”

Son of a bitch, Jack thought, cursing the man, though not aloud.

From somewhere the Polish women had scrounged a bottle of nail polish, and they went back to painting one another’s nails. The Hungarian woman returned to her packing. Jack noticed that some of the other Hungarians were also collecting their bags.

“Are they leaving?” Jack asked. He felt a sudden flash of anxiety. Were all the Hungarians leaving? Was Ilona leaving, too?

“In three days there will be a train from Vienna to Budapest. Everyone must go to Vienna tomorrow morning to get travel permits to go home.”

Jack’s heart sank. “Oh. I mean, well. Is this good-bye?”

She frowned for a moment and then laughed. “No. You silly boy. I’m not leaving Salzburg. How could I leave without Etelka?”

How long, he wondered, would she wait? Though he wished for the sake of the woman he loved that her fantasy were true, Jack was sure that if Etelka had survived, by now her name would have appeared on some list, somewhere. He had gone with Ilona again and again to the offices of the Red Cross and of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, searching through the lists of names for Etelka’s. Along the way Ilona had come across names of others of her acquaintance, mostly on lists of the dead, but once or twice on those of the living. But
she had yet to find her sister’s name. Wherever they went in the city, Ilona scanned the crowd, peering at faces. She even chose activities based on the possibility that her sister might be there. As if Etelka would have come to Salzburg and gone for a hike up the Untersberg before searching for her sister or registering with the Red Cross.
Your sister is dead
, Jack wanted, and feared, to tell Ilona. She died on one of the forced marches with which the Nazis had tortured the last surviving prisoners. Almost everyone had, after all.

Jack was stuck in the untenable position of both believing that it was best for Ilona that she acknowledge this truth, that she accept it and begin the unbearable task of moving on, and knowing that her fruitless search was what kept her here, with him. Otherwise she would leave, move on out of this graveyard back home to Hungary. To layer ambivalence upon ambivalence, he also feared that it was the search for Etelka, the inability to move on, that kept Ilona from being with him wholeheartedly. Ilona’s delusion about Etelka’s survival allowed them to be in each other’s company but kept her from falling in love with him as he had fallen in love with her.