Gratitude (36 page)

Though she’d been there before, she’d forgotten quite how imposing Keleti Station was. She was sure the whole population of Tolgy could make itself comfortable strolling along its floors and lounging on its stone benches. From a block away, the building looked like a cathedral with an arched roof, a dome on each of its shoulders joined by an immense arch of window in the centre with more glass in it than in all the windows in all of the houses of her town combined. Who polished these windows and how?

She collected herself as she entered the echoing station. She stood in line for a ticket and withdrew her precious Swedish
schutz-pass
. The ample woman ahead of her at the lancet-topped window finished, signalled to a porter to come to get her small suitcase and moved along toward the trains.

When Lili stepped up timidly to the window and asked for a return ticket to Bereck in Transylvania, the ticket seller took a good look at her, an inquiring look rather than a suspicious one, a good-natured look. She handed the man the
schutz-pass
, together with some coins, and he looked her over again but didn’t say a word. In fact, not a word came out of his mouth the whole time. The man, with greying hair at his temples, wore a conductor’s cap. He wrote out and punched two tickets without another glance at her. “Track B,” he said. He was breathing heavily, panting, it seemed to Lili, as he went about his business and handed Lili her tickets. He looked wan, and hunched over his ink blotter, most of the day ahead of him still.

It took Lili only a moment to find Track B. Her train was not yet there. She set down her leather satchel containing the fur sleeping bag and looked up to see a sign in Hungarian: “NO JEWS PERMITTED ON THESE PLATFORMS.”

A set of doors in the distance swung open and several hundred people were herded in, testing Lili’s hypothesis about the people of her town fitting within the walls of the station. She recognized, even before she laid eyes on the guards, what the nature of this gathering was. She saw the yellow stars sewn to jackets and coats. There was little hullabaloo, just children whining now and again, and a particularly unhappy baby. They were being assembled, all of them, on a far platform, Track L, one of the three platforms for the freight trains which often stood outside the station in the yards.

When Lili strained she could read the sign now: “JEWS, GYPSIES AND FREIGHT—THESE TRACKS ONLY.”

Lili stood self-consciously on the safe platform with just a few others. There was still an hour to go before her train was supposed to leave. Most here looked indifferent to their surroundings. A man read a newspaper. A woman stood with a porter and her trunk, another with her grumpy little dog.

The dog yelped while the baby across the way wailed. Lili could see a guard hovering over its mother, who tried to muffle the baby’s cries, bobbed about with the child, covering its mouth with her hand. The guard moved on, but not far.

A fit of fear and anger boiled up within Lili, but she remained immobilized and helpless. A freight train pulled in behind the crowd at Track L, and many of the people were made to turn and face it. It seemed more orderly a gathering, from where Lili stood, than a meeting of townspeople in Tolgy might have been, or an assembly of farmers Lili had once seen. It was oddly subdued, in fact, except for a few children, and the baby.

It was not until the hovering guard returned to the woman’s side and seemed to be asking for the baby that the crowd stirred. The mother shook her head, and the guard pulled the child from the woman’s clutches with some force, cranking up the baby’s cry to a wail. The soldier walked calmly out with the baby toward the door they’d come in, and the woman hesitated but then followed. Another guard was calling after her, but she wouldn’t listen. Everyone turned toward the door to watch. The second guard joined the first with the baby and the woman outside the doors. No one inside could really see what was happening and no one dared follow.

And then all of them heard two sharp pops. The noise of the crowd turned into a rumble. A guard barked at his charges, and the little dog on Lili’s platform barked back, fiercely and sharply. The man near Lili with the newspaper peered over at the disturbance and then at the dog before hiding again behind his paper.

The dog wouldn’t stop its hysterical yelping. It might even have contributed to the rush with which the soldiers began to hustle their captives onto the freight train. The dog’s owner tried to quiet the dog by lifting it, but it wriggled out of her arms. Already, several cars were filled. Better inside these cars where it was safer, the people must have been thinking, than outside in the commotion.

And then, as the two guards returned to the platform through the fateful door, they were followed by two other men, dressed in suits, who waded in among the throngs. Both were thin, and one was quite tall. “
Achtung!
” the shorter one commanded. “Stop at once,” he said in German. “Many of these people are Swedish nationals, and we demand their release.”

Several of the guards kept herding people into the windowless cars of the freight train. And then one of the men in suits, the taller one, climbed the ladder affixed to the engine and blew a whistle that echoed around the halls of Keleti Station. The little dog was struck dumb. The newspaper man dropped his hands to his sides, his paper flopping to the stone platform.

The tall man stood erect on the roof of the train engine and blew his shrill whistle again. This second blast turned the tide on the proceedings. The hubbub in the station ceased altogether.

It was Paul. He was holding a fistful of papers. She watched him, held her breath. He looked taller than ever; perhaps it was the sun coming in through the enormous window and lighting his red hair as he stood high above the distraught throng. He looked as if he’d always performed this function, as if he were born to it and could not be stopped. When Lili made an effort she could act confident, but Paul exuded the trait with every step, every turn. Of course, he was supported by the man still down on the platform. The man announced who he was, Raoul Wallenberg, and said he was here with his assistant from the Swedish embassy. Wallenberg requested calmly in German that all Swedish nationals in the group be released into his care at once. “You have no right nor authority to be detaining—let alone deporting—Swedish citizens. My assistant has documents to prove that a good many of the people you have here today are Swedes.”

None of the brown-uniformed guards budged, but the one in grey, the commander with the jagged “SS” insignia on his lapel, approached Wallenberg and took a look up at Paul standing on the engine. The officer accepted some papers from Wallenberg and studied them, then studied the wallet proffered by the Swede, the only genuine Swede in the whole building.

Lili could see the commander gesturing for his men to release the Swedish nationals from among the Hungarians boarding the trains, and Paul began to call out names: “Almasi, Arpad,” and the summons went out among the soldiers down the line: “Almasi, Arpad; Almasi, Arpad,” until a small man in a salt-and-pepper suit and a grey fedora stepped out happily. They handed him his Swedish papers and sent him to stand by the door. “Apoli, Heinrich.” The call went out, the list went on, and one in every three Hungarians was converted into a Swede and plucked from the group at Track L. Some had already boarded the trains; the others stood in front of the cars, awaiting the lottery.

And then Paul lifted his gaze and saw Lili. She was so glad that he did. She wanted desperately to wave. She would have done so, frantically, if not for the others in the station—
all
the others. He did not acknowledge her with so much as a smile.

The train for Romania rumbled in before Lili, pulling a damp winter wind with it. The few others on Lili’s platform boarded impatiently. She did, too, and hurried to take a window seat looking toward Track L, but then another train pulled in and blocked her view. Lili wanted to dismount again, if only for a little while longer, to see how Paul made out.

What would Paul have done in Tolgy the day her family was taken? If only someone had interceded—there or along the way—in a station like this one—in a station in Miskolc, maybe, or anywhere.

Lili could see nothing, now, but the train that had pulled in between her and the miraculous activities at Track L. She felt restless but safe at the same time in this warm car. She felt a spell of fatigue as the night of sitting on the stairs looking out the window began to take its toll on her.

A woman dressed entirely in black boarded the train and chose the same compartment Lili sat in. Lili was worried about looking too eagerly out her window at events she could no longer see anyway, and she was sure, now, that leaving the train for another look would arouse suspicion.

The woman in black reminded Lili of women in her town who forever wore black after the death of a spouse or parent or child. When Lili was a child, she knew a woman of twenty who’d been widowed and put on black clothes. She remembered thinking the woman had entered a black tomb, never to re-emerge.

The woman in her compartment could not have been much older than forty, but she looked significantly older on account of her attire and her strangely proportioned shape. Her head seemed too small for her body, as if it had been plonked mistakenly onto the neck of the wrong woman.

As she settled opposite Lili, the woman withdrew a white egg from her ample black bag and set it in her lap as she adjusted her belongings. The egg looked odd there, starkly white in the black lap. It looked as though she’d set it there to hatch—to warm first in her black nest and then hatch into a little black chick, with an extra-small head, bursting out of its impossibly white tomb.

“Where are you going?” the woman asked Lili as she continued her settling and adjusting.

“I’m going all the way to the frontier. I’m going to meet someone. I need to see someone. How about you?”

The woman didn’t answer right away, but took out a handkerchief and cracked her egg on her knee, then began to peel it. Her hands were older even than the rest of her. They were hands that had worked hard in the fields, on a farm. When she’d finished peeling the egg, she held it up in front of Lili. “Share?”

“No, thank you.”

“Just a bite, a pretty girl like you on a cold day?”

“Thank you, no.”

For a moment, Lili thought the woman was looking suspiciously at her, maybe because of Lili’s slight accent, but the woman smiled. “What hair you have,” the woman said. “Gold. Nicer even.”

Lili was surprised as always that her light hair should spread such a halo of virtue over her. All that mattered was context. She would not have looked the same to any invader in the town of Tolgy. Her family was the proof of that, her golden-haired brothers and sisters, most of them. The key in this context was to remain composed, and this was Lili’s second virtue, after her sunny smile.

Her companion’s own hair, the jagged wisps that escaped from her black bonnet, looked like bleached straw.

“I’m going only as far as Szolnok,” the woman said. “I need to see my Uncle Attila in his bed with a fever. He’s had the fever too long, maybe two months. My mother’s there already—he’s her brother.”

Lili nodded. The woman’s accent was unlike any Lili had heard.

“What were you doing in Budapest?” Lili asked.

“I’m living there now, looking after some elderly people in a home out in Buda, on Toldy Street.”

Lili felt relieved. She was likely safe in the woman’s company. She leaned forward to offer her hand. “I’m Lili.” But the moment was awkward because the woman was working on her egg and had to finish the rest in a bite, wipe her hands on the handkerchief containing the shell and return the handshake while still munching on the egg.

“I’m Mary,” the woman said through a plugged mouth. “I’m very glad to make your acquaintance. Such a pretty girl. Lili. Pretty.”

Lili smiled and said it was nice Mary looked after old people. Mary nodded and turned toward the window as the train between their track and the far one, the one blocking their view of the terrible proceedings, rolled out. The Germans were loading the last of the people onto the cargo train. “Look at that,” she said, shaking her head.

Lili looked composed but lost her smile. Raoul Wallenberg and Paul were gone with their new Swedes, but the others were off to follow her parents. She took a deep breath. She imagined the people inside, remembered what it felt like, remembered what she was thinking that day. She developed goosebumps now, all over her body.

“Pity,” the woman said, giving Lili permission to sink a little further into her sadness. Budapest was just like Tolgy. The evacuation of its undesirables simply took longer and was more complicated. It was Tolgy a thousand times over, every building a Tolgy, every street in the ghetto. Lili didn’t know why this simple fact had taken so long to occur to her. She turned away from the window. She wanted Mary to say nothing more, good or bad, on the subject. “Poor sods,” Mary said. “I wonder where they’re taking them.” Lili didn’t answer, so Mary went on thinking aloud. “Germany?” Lili still wouldn’t fill in the gap Mary had left for her. “Poland, I heard. Camps. They say there are camps. Mary, same name as me, in the home I work in, Old Mary, everyone calls her, said they’re camps.”

Lili nodded. “Old people must be good to care for,” she remarked again.

“They’re like young people, really, just bigger, not as nice smelling, not as cute, but adorable in their own way.” Mary’s voice began to sound philosophical. “Old folks. Old Hungarians.” She gazed out the window. “And then there are the old Jews.”

Lili’s heart quickened. What did she mean? What kind of hierarchy was this? Old Hungarians.
And then there are the old Jews
. Could it be broken down further? There are the old Hungarians. And then there are the old Hungarian Lutherans. And then there are the old Hungarian Jews. And then there are the old border Jews who speak Yiddish. And then there are the old Yemeni Jews who speak God knows what. And then there are the old Gypsies. And then there are the old dogs. And then there’s the old luggage. And then there’s the old dirt.