Gratitude (22 page)

And now here they stood at the gates of hell, Simon thought, with Satan’s best gatekeepers. How vain—how idiotic he felt. He needed to wipe his nose and realized he hadn’t brought a handkerchief.

As Robert looked one last time out of the cramped car for his nephew, he remembered the jacket he’d left at Sacred Heart. Were they heading into the cold? Or would they stay long enough for it to turn cold? No one so far had come back from wherever they’d been taken. Not one person he’d known about. What would happen? Would his jacket hang from the back of his chair for a month? Would someone hang it up for him in the closet? Would his assistant try it on after a time, find the papers in the pocket, toss them out, find the jacket didn’t fit, give it away? What would Vera do with their things? Was she Queen of the Alhambra now? Would her mother move to Jokai Street? Would Vera try on Klari’s shoes, the navy ones she liked so much? Would she sell the silver eagle with the clock in its beak, or had she coveted the bird too much to part with it? Would she have her own tea party for the first time in her life, the poor thing, and invite the housekeepers from all of the abandoned homes? And was that what they’d be called, if the Becks and the others did not return: abandoned homes? Abandoned homes for sale. Abandoned homes: cheap but nice. What a foul organ the brain was. It couldn’t be turned off any more than the heart could. Robert had watched it pump its scarlet food to the far corners of the body, marvelled at its ingenuity. But each waited for the other, the heart and the brain. The two went down together. The moment they found the light, they found darkness.

Klari was thinking about her parents. Their lands were gone, now, sunk into another time. There were beautiful lush fields and farms where her parents had had their summer house, where Klari and her sisters had so many carefree hours in the warm Hungarian summers.

Klari’s mind returned to the train station where she stood. Her father had often met these cargo trains to sign the transit papers required whenever his goods were being sent off to Austria, Switzerland and France. And here they were now, Maximillian’s descendants, being herded onto the same cars, headed—where?—toward Buchenwald, Auschwitz and Treblinka, destinations whose meaning was not entirely clear. The men on the platform wearing the uniforms of the Third Reich knew, certainly, probably. Or the others: the small, eager army of Hungarian sympathizers. Or maybe even they didn’t know.

The Becks found it warmer in the car than outside. The soldiers, German and Hungarian alike, were trying to cram still more people in before sliding the door closed, seeing if a young woman could not be shoved into the space beside Klari, or a child into the spot below her elbow. But Klari’s bag on the floor was getting in the way, so she shoved it with her foot behind her.

The train’s whistle soon blew, and the doors were finally slammed and the journey begun. The engine steamed along out of the city, pulling the rickety cars. If this was the beginning, Klari thought, who knew what indignities lay ahead? It was dark, and she was glad not to have to see her husband’s face, or her son’s or Lili’s. She was anxious that their fear would exacerbate hers. She wanted to isolate her dread, drive it deeper somewhere where it couldn’t overwhelm her. She took her husband’s hand, felt the uncertainty there, heard the woman who’d asked them to shut up announce that she had to go to the toilet, and soon the people around the woman could smell the reason and tried to make way to let her pass. It was difficult to get out of someone’s way. She said it over and over. “I have to get to the toilet—
move!
” She scared people. Even in the midst of this terror, they feared her special breed of hysteria.

The girl at Klari’s elbow whimpered, and Lili got down to her knees to comfort her, but then the girl’s mother appeared. She said, “It’s all right. It’ll all be fine, I promise.” The girl said, “Why are we travelling like this? Where are the other trains?” “Don’t worry,” Lili said. “It’s an adventure in the dark.”

Klari closed her eyes. She allowed her mind to roam outward again, out of the train. It landed in a place she’d almost forgotten. Years before, early in their life together, Robert had taken her to a city on the Aegean in Turkey, called Kusadasi. Robert loved the luxuriant carpets they made there, painstakingly by hand, the little silk knots rich with the scarlet colours derived from the mulberry and other fruits.

It was May, and they were young and still childless. They travelled to the ancient town of Ephesus, a marble city inside Kusadasi, a city that must have been founded by the Greeks some twenty-five hundred years before and been conquered by the Romans and by others until the Turks grabbed it during the Ottoman Empire. The Turks snatched Hungary, too, along with other countries during the same grand, grasping enterprise.

Robert and Klari found a lovely tour guide named Geneviève, she still remembered, a French woman who spoke German—a language Klari and Robert had both learned at school—and Geneviève took them by taxi to Ephesus, the ancient marble city, a white city that had been excavated since the beginning of the century. When they arrived, they were both drawn to the remains of a marble library, the Celsus Library, built by the Romans. Klari could vividly picture those columns again. At the entrance stood several arresting statues: she recalled the one of Sophia and another of Arete, wisdom and virtue—what better attributes were there to set before a library? And then along the marble walk between the library and the gates leading in were several other headless statues. Robert ran his hand along the smooth neck of one of them. “They are headless,” Geneviève told them, “because the few talented sculptors of the day capable of accomplishing such brilliant pieces took quite long to create each figure, and each depicted a great commander or noble. But so many commanders and nobles came and went over the life of the city that the sculptors found it easier simply to replace just the head of each statue with the new man’s likeness. Why worry about the body?” Klari ran her palm over the same spot her husband had. She looked at Geneviève, who kept freshening her poppy red lipstick. She matched the landscape, Klari remembered thinking. Red poppies nodded everywhere in the green grass and guarded the fallen marble apexes, columns and marble limbs. “So each statue had a weakness at the neck,” Geneviève continued, “where the head was removed to be replaced with the new one. Over time, they broke at those points of weakness, leaving the figures headless.”

“I wonder what they did with the discarded heads,” Robert said. Somewhere buried, there’s a warehouse of undesirable stone heads,” he said, smiling broadly.

Outside the gates of Ephesus, a woman sat on a child’s wooden chair crocheting tablecloths with hands as skilled as those of the ancient sculptors. Klari held Robert back, and Geneviève smiled and waited, too. Behind the miniature chair which could barely contain her, the poor old woman had spread tablecloths all over the ancient rocks, ready to sell them to people just like Klari who happened by or came expressly to marvel at Ephesus. “Look at me,” she seemed to be saying. “Marvel at me, too, just for a moment, please.” It was a breezy day, a beautiful spring day, and the woman, after draping her tablecloths over the great boulders, had weighed them down at the corners with small stones. Klari wanted to buy one, and Geneviève easily negotiated a price for her. It was a great, white, medallion spread—abandoned now in their dining room on Jokai Street—the centre medallion mimicking the brilliant carpet on the floor beneath it, which the young couple also purchased on that same day and arranged to have shipped home.

When they’d departed that day from Ephesus, Klari glanced back one last time at the ruins of the marble city and, before it, that old woman with the tablecloths spread out over the ancient dry rocks as if she were setting a table for the gods.

Had Robert noticed the tablecloth and carpet this very morning, Klari wondered, taken one last look around before leaving their place to the Germans or other Hungarians? She’d had no time. She wished she’d had another minute. Does one tidy up for invaders? Had Robert picked up the breakfast dishes? Of course he hadn’t. He’d seen what was there and come straight here, her sweet fool. He’d been spared by chance but had leapt after them into hell.

She wondered what the others around her were thinking. They weren’t speaking much, surprisingly, yet she could taste their fear, smell it—it was palpable. She felt foolishly, selfishly relieved to have Robert by her side.

Simon suddenly piped up. He said he’d barely had time to start breakfast this morning, let alone finish it. “Who knows where our next meal will come from, if there
is
a next meal.” He said it tragically, like an ancient Greek chorister, and he said it with a finality that infected Lili. She believed him utterly—he always had such a convincing way of speaking—so she began mentally to say goodbye to the world. She felt an Arctic wolfishness had come over Simon, something that drew him inward upon himself, especially when he was hungry. She’d seen it overtake him frequently lately, as supplies stopped flowing freely to Budapest. She wondered, here on the train, whether he would soon lose his capacity for kindness.

The train ride to the border took hours, and they were long hours, each like a morning or afternoon itself. The air was thick with the stench of worry. People in Car 17 lost their propriety and removed their tops, even bottoms. Some stumbled all around in search of the pail in the corner to evacuate their bladders and bowels, but the pail was really more a token than anything else, because people missed most of the time anyway in the crowded darkness, and the pail filled quickly before sloshing and splashing its contents on the people standing closest to it. In the end, people emptied themselves where they stood. “It doesn’t take long to become what they already think we are,” Robert said aloud. “We’ll become beasts.”

The little girl said something in response, something anxious that no one could hear, and her mother comforted her again. “Please,” the woman said to Robert. And Robert apologized. Klari found herself envying the woman. It was better to have someone to comfort, because some of the comfort came back to you, preoccupied you in the right way. The children on board, though, imbibed their anxiety from the darkness and the air, from the stench, the huddled uncertainty. It was very basic, Klari thought. Robert was right. All of life’s dignity, painfully built up pebble by pebble with tiny accomplishments, could be stomped flat by a single, ingenious act of degradation.

We’re like insects, like beetles, an infestation of beetles, dark and shining, crushed together in a dark box, hoping to be released into a green field. How oppressive, Robert thought, to be cast so absolutely in the shadow world of this car. How cleverly the arrangement establishes the order of this world. There is the sun, the absolute ruler. There is the moon, which reflects the sun’s glorious light. And then there are the shadows, devoid of light and glory. There is only one sun—the Sun King, Louis XIV—
Louis le Grand—Le Roi Soleil
. He was the state—
L’État, c’est Moi
. One King, One Sun. But there can be many shadows, millions,
trillions
. So keep those shadows away from the glass. Keep them away from the lens. It can only be a shadow who one day peeks through the telescope to discover that there are a trillion suns out there just as radiant as ours.

Klari turned her mind to poor young Simon and Lili. They had their whole lives ahead of them. If Klari could lie down and die for them, she would. What use would Klari be if they didn’t go on? What use was she except as a reminder of the grim past?

No, they had to go on, her Simon and Lili—had to prevail. If Lili had been orphaned once in her own home town, and orphaned again in her adopted home, the burden would be heavy on the few left standing to survive and prevail, to fill her town and the emptied towns behind them with reminders of their ghostly inhabitants, reminders of their looks, their determination, their love of cake and living. What a burden it would be, too, poor things, and how presumptuous to think that Klari and Robert could have stood in, even temporarily, for the girl’s fallen parents. Or were they fallen? Were they labouring up ahead instead, awaiting their emancipation as Klari had already begun to?

Klari’s son put his familiar hand on her shoulder, and the hand was dry. She kissed the knuckles. With his other hand, Simon held onto the back of Lili’s neck. Klari could sense what he was doing, sense his mind racing.

Simon knew these railcars. As a child, when he and his cousins would visit their grandparents in their country house out in Kiskunhalas, they would climb into these cargo cars at night in the rail yard to talk about girls and to smoke. The cars were easy to open, from inside as well as outside. If he and Lili could get some men to help him force the door from the inside, Simon thought, they could all jump and make a run for it. But what would happen then, if the Nazis caught them? Would they shoot them instantly? If they got away, would they shoot everyone else on board? Lili wouldn’t let him do it. She would think of Simon’s parents and know they couldn’t make the jump. She’d think of Robert and Klari, and she’d want to hang on to them.

Klari found her husband’s hand again in the darkness. He pressed his face into her neck, taking in her fragrance, blotting out the stench of the car. But she was no flower that day, she knew, not anymore. No dignity. No flower. Just the memory of poppies.

PAUL SEARCHED
the Swedish embassy frantically for Zoli, but couldn’t find him. An office had been established in the building to manufacture false Swedish
schutz-passes
, and a dozen Jews turned Swedes helped to create the documents there. Zoli was the primary photographer, but when he was out, an older man, Lajos, seemed to know what he was doing. When the subject was not available to be photographed, Lajos was also adept at removing existing photos with a razor blade from older documents and attaching them convincingly to new ones. Zoli, of course, could not be reached by phone, so when he wasn’t at hand, there was no fast way to find him. A couple of times, when Zoli showed up with his Hasselblad too late, Paul had to tell him a train had already departed, carrying people they might have saved. Paul saw the horrified look in Zoli’s eyes and said, “But there’s no time to despair. Other lives are waiting.”