Music for Wartime (34 page)

Ten minutes before the picture, the air had grown so thick with humidity that my grandfather, his lungs worn and clogged, had to elevate his arms to get enough oxygen.

Four hundred and forty-three years before the photo was taken, Suleiman seized the city of Buda without firing a single shot. There are those who would pinpoint this moment as the beginning of the end of Hungarian autonomy—a trajectory that continued through entanglement in a pointless world war, a 1920 treaty that carved off 70 percent of the country’s land, and obeisance to increasingly dangerous German demands. But many would argue that the moment the country crossed from mere capitulation into actual complicity, the moment Hungary’s moral Rubicon was crossed, was with the writing and passing of its own Jewish laws in 1938, 1939, and 1941.

Two minutes before the photo was taken, I had unwrapped Kyle Davidoff’s present, a black plastic ball with a thick white string protruding, cartoon-style. “It’s a
real bomb
,” he said. “
Not
a toy. It’ll blow up in about, like, two minutes.” So we put it on the table and waited.

Twenty-five years later, a man in the audience will raise his hand and ask why all my stories are about guilt. I will say, “I hadn’t realized they were.”

Less than a second earlier, my sister had bounced up, impossibly high, from the neighbor’s trampoline, one backyard and a steep hill behind ours. Her arms stretched east, and her feet pointed west. She would belly-flop, but in the picture, it looks for all the world like she’s flying and won’t ever come down.

Seven years after the photograph, another call from Hawaii, my grandfather attempting his old joke: “Which happened first for you?” he almost shouted into the phone. “The sunrise or the sunset? It is very important that I know!” He sounded strangled.

Forty-five years before the photo, the Second Jewish Law, significantly harsher than the first, was introduced to the Hungarian legislative assembly. The law was penned, revised, introduced, and argued for by the man born Makkai János in Transylvania in 1905, the man who died John D. Makkay in Waianae, Hawaii, in 1994. There were several practical motivations, if one can use the word, having to do with intense German pressure, with the promise of regaining lands lost in the Treaty of Trianon, with the country’s overcrowding by a wave of Jewish refugees from Germany and Romania. But then there are also his words, entered in the public record: “Jews, wherever they are present, regularly bring forth anti-Semitism out of themselves.” Long after the bloodstains of the ensuing years have faded, those words are indelible.

Six years, forty-two weeks, and five days before the photo, I settled suspended in the amniotic pool. I would spend an extra half month there, breathing liquid and floating.

I have been assured, for what it’s worth, that he felt remorse. What that remorse entailed, how deeply it was felt, and whether his anti-Nazi stance represented any change of heart regarding the Jews or was simply a further expression of racial superiority, this time against the usurping Germans, I am unable to work out. And even if I could, the question would remain: Is chronology character?

In two seconds, my sister would hit the trampoline screaming. My father’s head would turn at the sound.

In the grips of dementia, he would call again. 1993. Little left to his eroding mind but quotation. “The time is out of joint. Oh, hateful—The time is out of joint. And how goes the rest? The time is out of joint. What country, friends, is this?”