Extraordinary Renditions (6 page)

The sidewalks of the körút were full of people, many of them already intoxicated. He had by mistake left his wristwatch in the room. Over at the National Museum, they were already reenacting Petőfi’s speech of March 15, 1848, when the poet spoke out against the empire and instigated a revolt that failed to gain from Austria the independence that Hungary so desperately desired and would not earn until the end of the Soviet regime. If even then. There were speeches, nationalistic hymns, a brass band. Children waved flags while men passed bottles of pálinka through
the smoking crowd. Harkályi had seen the ceremonies on satellite television and had no desire to witness them in the flesh.

In the underpass beneath the Nyugati train station, a band of South Americans in colorful attire performed cheerful, primitive music in a circle, to the delight of passersby. Waves of people spilled from the metro’s escalators. The woman from whom he bought the hóvirág was not present, but in her place others sold onions and roasted pumpkin seeds. A pretty young girl sold wrinkled clothes from a laundry hamper. A freshly shaven youth attempted to hand Harkályi a religious pamphlet, but he recoiled from the boy’s reach.

He had time to waste before meeting Magda and wanted to take a stroll, to clear his head before the concert, an event lingering ominously at the furthermost poles of his thoughts; he knew it was there, yet refused, still, to bring it into focus. It was embarrassing—the pageantry and applause, the idolatry that conflated him, this tired old man, with his compositions. He could not wait to see his niece; she alone would relieve the tedium of public appearance.

The flower shop was not open. He would have liked to buy a new bouquet for Magda. He scanned the headlines at the newsstand, but there was no front-page mention of the synagogue fire. Perhaps it was old news, as those neighbors said, that arson occurred every year at this time. It was unfathomable that fascism, even a sickening, modern parody of it, could continue to exist in the twenty-first century. No frame of reference existed any longer, except in the minds and art of his quickly deteriorating generation. People did not understand what had transpired.

Above the clapping and pan-fluting of the South Americans, he was able to discern some kind of commotion emanating from a hallway leading to the rear of the train station: the prolonged, rapid-fire clinking of a slot machine. There was cheering, a crowd forming. A shabby man, older in appearance than his age would dictate, with the gray pallor of lifelong
drunkenness, had won a small fortune in coins. His excitement infected all of those within the glass-enclosed pub, as well as those outside, their noses pressed against the filthy windows. The man bought three liters of wine, which the scantily clad server ladled from vats built into the surface of the bar. She handed unstemmed drinking glasses to all present, and more people crammed their way inside to partake of the free alcohol. It was a minor stampede of the borderline homeless. It looked like the greatest day in the entire life of the winning man; he would tell stories of this morning for the short remainder of his dull life. The scene sickened Harkályi, but fascinated him also. He envied the men’s easy camaraderie, so utterly free of pretense.

Farther down the hall, he happened upon a sight so foreign that he questioned if he had fallen asleep after all, if it were but a dream shaken loose from the recesses of his memory. No, it was real. A band of skinheads—true skinheads, in the flesh, six or seven of them—were attacking a Negro man without stop, without mercy. Blood drooled from the young man’s eyelids, from his lips. They kicked at him from all sides.

“Stop that!” Harkályi ordered them, before he could think better of it.

The smallest of the assailants, no more than sixteen years old, approached with the silver blade of a serrated knife drawn. He said something in Hungarian, his voice cracking. His armband did not feature a swastika but, instead, a green machinery cog. They stood toe-to-toe, but this boy was half a foot shorter. Harkályi craned his neck to look into the dusty-glass color of the child’s eyes. He could not find it in himself to be afraid. The noise of the gamblers behind him swelled, drew closer. The skinheads dropped their prey and shouted at the child, whose vodka breath polluted his own; the boy lifted Harkályi’s necktie and ran his knife through it, dragging it downward to split the silk into shreds. “Zsidó disznó,” he said—words Harkályi would look up two days later, when he arrived again in Philadelphia; he knew better than to ask Magda.
“Jewish pig.” The boy backed away, and stepped on the fallen man as the skinheads retreated into the depths of the train station.

The drunken revelry spilled out of the pub and into the hallway. The bums laughed and cheered and ignored the unconscious black man. Harkályi knelt next to him, dirtying his own pants. The man’s jacket read U.S. ARMY and GIBSON over the left breast. There was not as much blood as he had thought, though his face had already started to mutate into some hideous mask: one eye had sealed entirely closed under the weight of a large lump on his brow, his nose appeared broken, and a safety pin affixed to a tiny Hungarian flag jutted out of his bottom lip. When Harkályi removed it, the man regained consciousness.

“The fuck happened?”

“You were attacked by skinheads,” Harkályi told him. “Wait here and I will get a doctor.”

“I don’t need a doctor. Help me up.”

Harkályi attempted to lift the man, but he was surprisingly heavy for his diminutive stature. He was solid muscle, but his neck could not fully support the weight of his own head. It was only with significant struggle that he was able to at last climb to his feet.

“You are an American?” Harkályi asked.

The man did not respond, except by way of a deep-bellied groan. Saliva and blood dripped freely from his mouth.

“You need medical help. Please.”

“I said I don’t want a doctor, old man. Did you say skinheads?”

“Yes. Today, apparently, is their big occasion to go wild, or even wilder than usual.”

“I guess so,” the man said. The pain must have been excruciating. It was a wonder that he had the strength to stand. “I need to go. Thanks for your help.”

“Of course. Are you certain you do not want me to find a doctor?”

“No, I’m good.”

The man carried himself toward the crowded underpass. Harkályi watched his slow, ambling progress. He still smelled the alcoholic stench of that murderous child; his was the very face of Harkályi’s own parents’ murderers, whom he had loathed since he hid in those underground passages so similar to this one. Only now Harkályi was not angry—his lifetime’s worth of fury had dried up, and he mustered only some sensation approaching pity for the boy. It was ignorance, as much as evil, that made him dangerous. And it was the joy in his own heart, and the forgiveness, that distinguished them. He removed his ruined tie and left it on the ground, in the small pool of spilled blood.

With an hour yet before he had to depart for Buda, he sat on the plush hotel sofa to watch television. There was no news, only reenactments of previous events, the cyclical return of war and famine and genocide, war and famine and genocide, interrupted by equally crude commercial advertisements. Only the longitudes changed, and now it was the Americans who put men in concentration camps. Harkályi, to his regret, will not live long enough to hear the music composed in Guantánamo, or in these secretive black sites speckled like cancerous moles on Europe’s backside.

Miraculously, the stories concerning the tremendous musical life of Terezín proved to be true, yet every other storied detail about that concentration camp—and it was most certainly a concentration camp—proved to be willfully exaggerated, if not criminally false. The Schutzstaffel used the site as a model facility, as the set of an elaborated staged drama demonstrating to the world their kindly treatment of Europe’s Jews who, in reality, were upon arrival stripped of their possessions, shaved and deloused, and forced to live no better than oxen in prison-like dormitories.

When Lajos and his brother arrived in June of 1943, preparations had already begun for an inspection of the facilities by the Red Cross. To prevent the appearance of overcrowding, additional labor engagement transports were loaded and quickly dispatched at all hours of the night and day, carrying up to a thousand people at a time to Poland and places unknown. Rumors filtered back, slightly less quickly, even among the children, and presumably to the entire world, about the nature of those steady departures. He and Tibor could have been condemned at any time. The kapo of their dormitory provided them with a postcard on which they were to inform their family about the comfortable conditions in which they found themselves. They did not use Kodály’s address, for fear of raising suspicion among the authorities about his activities on their behalf, and instead they had the card sent to their former neighbors, the ones who had alerted the Nazis to their whereabouts and had had their father arrested; the boys hoped that the Arrow Cross would deliver it personally and arrest them as Jewish sympathizers. Only years later, during his previous visit to Hungary, would Harkályi learn that Kodály and his wife had by that time already abandoned their home for the dank basement of a Budapest church, where he completed his
Missa Brevis.

The Red Cross arrived, and then departed again, and tens of thousands more souls continued to Poland.

There existed in Terezín any number of ensembles, tolerated by the Nazis and consisting of rotating rosters of musicians, who performed everything from complete operas—almost exclusively German and Italian—to decadent, American-style jazz. A small town square contained a wooden riser, upon which they performed public concerts on weekends. There was even a baby grand piano, albeit a crippled one, its legs shorn off as if it had stepped on a landmine. Most of the serious musical activities occurred in secret, however. As a “millionaire,” camp slang for a new prisoner, and at his age, Lajos was not at first provided access to one of
the many violins circulating through the town, some of them carried to Czechoslovakia unassembled and glued roughly back together. He and Tibor were assigned to the Halfsdienst, a work detail for young people, but were also permitted to participate in a children’s chorus. The boys learned to speak some Czech despite the proclamation that all public utterances were to be in German. In his precious free time, late in the night, Lajos transcribed for violin, from memory, Bartók’s
Fourteen Bagatelles
and performed them on a borrowed instrument, eventually allowed him, for a small but enthusiastic audience in the attic of the dormitory in which he lived.

When word of his musical prowess spread, as it was bound to do in such a setting, he was given the regular use of a too-small, half-sized violin, on which he was able to practice for the occasional private violin lesson. He also found himself relieved of his work duties and, to the ire of his jealous brother, assigned to the exclusive group of Notenschreiber who reproduced by hand the rare, precious scores that arrived at Terezín, or were composed there amidst the chaos and horror. Every so often, Lajos would change a note or two, such as those at the very center of the violin part of Gideon Klein’s
Trio,
and await with great joy his surreptitious contribution to the public performances. Many of those scores were lost, and little by little Harkályi had, in the intervening years, attempted to resurrect them in his own compositions.

His mother sat alone, a porcelain cup of weak tea held on a saucer in her lap. The room was strangely bright, bleached by a sun that had drawn inexplicably closer. He approached her, as if dreaming, finally asleep, and as she stood, her smile grew bountiful enough to rid Lajos of all that plagued him. The porcelain made no sound as she returned it to the table.

“You made it,” she said.

“Yes. Yes—I have made it.”

“Let me look at you.”

She took his shoulders in her hands and could tell how thin he had grown, that the meat had atrophied and shriveled from his bones. But her arms around him—this was why he had come. The tears swelled in his eyes. “I am so happy. So happy to see you.” He held onto her so that she could absorb all of his suffering and sleeplessness, as if her youthfulness and beauty would make it dissipate like smoke.

“You are so thin,” Magda said, “but you look healthy.”

Neatly attired strangers murmured around her in countless languages about the current state of Europe, about these awful, dreadful times, about what new travesties today would bring. They stirred cubes of refined sugar into their teacups and stabbed tiny forks at their plates. A young girl, not yet a teenager, wound her way through the labyrinth of tables, collecting soiled dishes.

“It’s unbelievable. Have I told you that you look exactly like your grandmother?”

“Only every time I see you.” “She was—”

“—the most beautiful woman in Budapest.”

“Are you mocking me, Magda?”

“Only a little, bácsi.” She was his same height, if not slightly taller, and she kissed him on both cheeks. “How is your room?”

“Fine, fine. Very comfortable.”

“Két cappuccino,” she told a passing and disinterested waitress, and they sat. “The coffee here’s great, ten times better than what we get down at the base. Are you hungry?”

“No, I had room service deliver some things. You should eat, however. Oh, and I’m terribly sorry. I bought you some hóvirág but, foolishly, I left them on the metro.”

The resemblance was impossible to fathom. She was the same age, or very close to the same age, that his mother was when he and Tibor saw her for the last time. Even her voice carried a distinct and soothing similarity.

The cukrászda doubled in the morning as a dining room for guests of the hotel, and the characteristic odors of baking sugar and of stale coffee lingered in the atmosphere. The pastry chefs arrived with regularity behind the counter to load the glass display cases with decorative cakes and tortes and every manner of creamy, rich dessert. The array of treats fascinated and repelled him; that people would consume such junk was an outrage, but that such an ocean of options existed, and in Budapest, was cause for celebration.