Gratitude (37 page)

Lili could barely breathe. “Excuse me,” she said, rising. “I wonder if there’s a water closet.” She needed to clean up, wash away the night and morning, return to her cabin, show her ticket to the conductor, then rest—nap if she could—shut out Mary, even if the woman meant no harm.

When she returned to her overly warm compartment, Lili felt refreshed but looked pale.

“Why don’t you eat something?” Mary asked her. “I have another egg.”

“No, I couldn’t.” Lili began to feel a little queasy.

“Don’t be silly—I brought four with me.”

“Thank you. I’m full. I ate plenty today.”

“You ate plenty. Look at you—you weigh less than my head.” Mary rummaged through her black bag and took out the remaining three eggs and offered them to the younger woman, all three smooth white eggs held out to her in a gnarled hand. “Take them. If you like them, I’ll lay some more.”

Lili studied Mary’s face to see if she’d really said what she’d said, as if to get permission to laugh. She received it from the woman’s eyes and burst out, as did Mary herself. Lili’s sides hurt as she doubled over with laughter, winced with guilt and then laughed some more. “You city people,” Mary said between bursts and shook her head, “refusing things. Full, proud, city people.”

Finally, the train grunted forward and pulled out of Keleti Station. Lili felt she couldn’t have spent much longer facing the cattle cars on one side and the place where she had stood illegally on the other.

Lili said, “I wish I could do something with my brain other than think.”

“Do what I do,” Mary said, as she patted the side of her head. “Use it to give shape to your bonnet.” Lili looked at her companion and smiled broadly. “Think with your heart,” Mary said. “It’s a little like breathing through your mouth.” And now Lili laughed again.

Mary said, “Not all old people are the same—you can count on that.” She made a sour face. Lili worried about what was coming next. “Some are nice, but some aren’t. Some are nasty. It’s like children. They might all be adorable, but some are sweet, and some aren’t. They grow up the way they started, and end up the way they started.”

“I know what you mean,” Lili responded. “Old people are who they are, I guess. That’s what you mean, isn’t it?”

“Except more so.”

Lili giggled.

“I don’t mind a little bit of shitting yourself,” Mary said. “That’s not what I mean. I don’t mean I mind that kind of thing. It’s just dirt, just shit. I can clean up a shit-ass like no one in the business. What I mean is the types who bark at you when you’re trying to help out, and you get the feeling it’s not because they’re hurting someplace that they’re barking, and it’s not because they’re ashamed. It’s because they’re barkers. They make
you
feel ashamed, even though it’s them that’s shitted themselves. I had this one fellow, Mr. Daranyi, who’s gone to his rest—Lord, soften his hardened soul to ease his passage.” Mary crossed herself here. “Mr. Daranyi said we used up all the water on ourselves and we used up the heat. He’d worked hard all his life for the water and the heat, and we young ones just wasted it on ourselves and had plenty of it because of all his hard work. The whole time Mr. Daranyi was talking, I’d be wiping him up and spending plenty of water and heat doing it, and I couldn’t shut him up for the life of me. That was what he went on about every time I checked in on him, poor bugger, poor shit-ass. You’d have thought he created the oceans and the sun, poor shit-ass.”

Lili was remembering someone, a Mr. Friedlander from Tolgy, who was like Mary’s Mr. Daranyi, a complainer, a blamer, when Mary added, “He was about as pleasant as a slap across the belly with a cold fish.” And here Lili was treated to yet another laugh. “Don’t you think?” Mary was asking, hardly laughing herself, but waiting for corroboration. “Why would you use up a perfectly good human being like myself to service a perfectly rotten one like old Mr. Daranyi? Does it make any sense to you? It wouldn’t happen with old bears or old trees, I can assure you. They don’t use up perfectly good ones to haul their old hides.”

Lili gave the idea some thought and shook her head in agreement.

“I had some others who were lovely, as I was saying. There’s a couple there, still are—Mr. and Mrs. Biro. They’ve been married sixty-eight years now—imagine that. He’s ninety-two, and she’s eighty-nine. You should see the two of them, two skinny little things.” Mary held up her pinky in the air. “He makes jokes about her,” Mary said. “I ask him, ‘What’s it like being married all these years?’—yelling mostly, because he can hardly hear. He pulls me by the collar to whisper into my ear. He says to me, ‘Honey, my wife and I have been together so long we’re starting to like each other again.’” Mary left room for another chuckle, which only she enjoyed this time, and then added, “But I don’t believe him. You should see the two of them. She feeds him and he tries to help clean her. I leave them to do it themselves, as much as I can, but you know…” Mary paused. “They’re such a tidy couple,” she went on, “and thin.” She held up the pinky again. “Mr. and Mrs. Biro. I can imagine the sparkle on the home they must have walked out of.” She stopped again before saying, “Anyways, all I mean is that, if people start out nice, the nice gets bigger, and if they start out nasty, the nasty gets bigger and fatter. Small,” Mary pinched her fingers together, “only gets big.” She held out her arms as if for a hug.

Lili and Mary sat quietly for a time and, to the younger woman’s surprise and relief, it was Mary who nodded off before she did. The conductor came by, looked in, but didn’t bother with the tickets. If Lili’s appearance was deceptive, Mary’s clinched it for the two of them, or maybe the conductor didn’t care, like the ticket seller. Lili let out a breath and let down her guard, relaxing, finally, at being in the countryside outside Budapest. And then she, too, fell asleep.

But she had a disturbing dream. She saw Klari and Robert step out from what Lili thought at first was a shower, and so the Becks were naked, but it wasn’t a shower; it was a gallows. They were grey and wan, although Klari had clownish circles of rouge in the centre of her light-blue cheeks. She was holding her arms out to Lili, and so was he, as the two approached, beckoning to her to embrace them but looking through her, the whites of their eyes as blue as their skin. Lili wanted to do something for the Becks, bring them back from the brink, so she cried for help, but not a sound came out of her throat. She tried again with greater force and out sprang a song, an aria from
Nabucco
, a beautiful song Dr. Beck had played for her one night after dinner. “My girl, be quiet,” Robert had said to his wife, who was talking to Lili about something or other. “Either we talk or we listen.” So they listened. Lili had loved the Verdi. She felt he was so much less taxing on the heart than Puccini, but still taxing in his own way—he was more composed. The dream music from her own throat calmed into a hum, allowing Lili to lie back in the dark place where the wall met the floor and where it was colder than before. Now Klari and Robert flung themselves upon Lili’s shivering form, her train-jiggling body crawling with fear but not revulsion—never revulsion.

Lili awoke to a tangle of sunlight on her face. The train was stopped in a station, and the winter sun shone through the bare branches of a solitary tree, which huddled over the station roof.

Lili was alone in the car. Beside her on the seat, nestled in a clean, red-checked handkerchief, were three eggs. She pulled her satchel out from under her seat and packed away the eggs. Though her heart still thumped from the vision of Klari and Robert in the shower, she smiled.

Lili stood and stretched, but when a conductor on the platform walked by her window, she crumpled to the floor. Her heart raced, but she shut her eyes and breathed as deeply and steadily as she could. If she lived to tell the tale, she’d say it began on her sixteenth birthday, when she ceased to be a passenger and became a stow-away, moving furtively from place to place with a secret in her heart, a lie, the biggest lie going. Lili didn’t want to look over her shoulder or flinch at every slammed door. She didn’t want to worry at each stop about who’d be getting on and who’d be getting off. She didn’t want to keep smiling blondly at the world.

Lili waited until the train rolled out of the station before resuming her seat, never finding out, as a result, what town they’d stopped in. But possibly it was Szolnok, Mary’s stop. She watched the rolling hills turn into Hungary’s Great Plain, flat and fertile, below what should have been called the Great Sky.

This was the plain traversed by the conquering hordes who formed the nation Lili now herself traversed, travelling in the opposite direction. Lili remembered them from Mrs. Wasserstein’s class, had memorized their names. Two and a half millennia had passed since the Scythians had passed over the Carpathian Plain to discover this wild and rich country. They were followed by the Celts, the Romans, the Avars, by Charlemagne, and then, leaving their Volga and their Urals far behind them, the tribes that were to give their name to the nation, the Magyars, under the great Arpad. Many others romped over the fields in the coming centuries on the way to the throne, the Turks, notably, and now the Germans. But these Germans bore gifts. Just as Lili’s land had been returned by the Third Reich to Hungary, so had the lands up ahead, the Transylvanian Alps—Transylvania—where Simon was being held and where he slept in the night near Dracula.

Of course, one would need a horde to storm across a plain and conquer a nation. It would be difficult to storm on your own. What was it like to be part of a horde? Lili wondered. You would need to forget you were someone’s son or husband or father, a son who rode a horse well and excelled at mathematics, a husband who once rescued his dog from a roaring river. In the greater interest of the horde, you would need to be united and fierce. You couldn’t be dithering about your daughter’s limp or your wife’s philandering. If the parts of a horde dithered, they would become horde pie at the hands of their victims. Maybe this was the great advantage of belonging to a horde. You got to be fierce and united. Unquestioning of your aim and ideal. Even if the aim and ideal made you hack down everything in your path. Even if they took you bounding over a cliff. It was safer to be part of a horde even if your life was at risk. There was little to worry about and nothing to question.

Lili felt like a girl without a homeland. Even her homeland was not a homeland, only a place of temporary refuge. The Inquisition had chased the Bandels to the southern border with Romania and the Becks to the centre of Hungary some five centuries before. And they were the lucky ones, the ones who had been chased and scattered rather than squashed where they were. So where to next? Homelands were a fleeting thing, even for the original homeowners sometimes.

The train remained almost empty. Maybe there was not much call for this particular destination, or maybe the inhabitants of the region could not afford to leave or return to it.

Lili swooned back in her seat again like someone in love with the countryside. Finally, she could feel the air grow thinner and the compartment cooler as the train crossed the Tisza, “the blond river,” they called it, because it carried sand downstream to be blown into dunes. She looked out to see the houses of the plain. They were like wagons that had come to rest after a very long caravan—after a nomad had said, “Let’s nail our home down for once and have someplace to come back to.”

The squat houses looked like mud huts with roofs made of straw, but without chimneys, so that the smoke from the hearths streamed through the roof cracks. As they approached villages, the houses began to look prettier and sturdier, with whitewashed stone walls and slate roofs. Many of the homes exhibited cob-work construction as if another species with other plans had touched down in the region.

The train stopped in Vadas, her stop. A woman approached her window even before the train had come to a halt. She wore colours that defied the drab season: a festive kerchief embroidered with a garland of crocuses and poppies. She had strings of fresh, bright peppers slung around her neck and was offering them for sale—or if not those, what about garlic? She had garlic bracelets coiling up one arm and, up the other, children’s knitted woollen mitts strung together as if they were charms. She wore the colours of Christmas—red, green and gold—and then some, adding to them the snowy lace at her neck, the summer flowers of her bonnet, the autumn walnut-tree leaves on her collar and the summer peppers themselves. Where on Earth had she got her hands on freshly grown peppers this time of year? Had she grown them in her window the way Lili’s mother had, tending to the little nursery as if they were babies?

Behind the woman was a tableau of a bygone era. No motor vehicles drubbed along the stone roads; they were travelled instead by mule cart and driver, the drivers dressed in handmade coats, boots and flannels. There wasn’t an electric wire evident, nor a water source more sophisticated than a town pump being worked by two teenage girls with ruddy faces filling wooden buckets. Out in the fields beyond the buildings were some primitive barns, their roofs sagging, but few animals apparent this late in the day, just a couple of goats and some sheep. Were there more telephones here than in Tolgy, Lili wondered, more numbers than seven?

Lili stepped down onto the winter platform and arranged her coat and bag. She checked to see if any of the travellers from Budapest had made it this far. She had not heard the yelping dog once. Where had it got off, and where was the man with the newspaper? While there were others who disembarked, Lili felt she’d travelled to the farthest remove from the city, as far as she’d been since she’d fled her town, and she felt strangely more at ease here than in Budapest. She felt a thrill, too, in the nearness of Simon, wherever he was.

The festive woman approached Lili with a smile and held out the mittens and rattled the string of peppers as if they were bells. She asked for whatever Lili could pay. Lili offered fifty pengos for the peppers, garlic and a little information. “Sixty pengos,” the woman said, “and I’ll give you the information free of charge, but no garlic.”