Gratitude (38 page)

“Fifty-five,” Lili said, “but you have to throw in the information. And the garlic.”

“Sixty-five with the garlic.”

“Sixty.”

The woman paused. She looked healthy in these lean times and in the failing winter light, her cheeks plump and pink. What a cheerful wretchedness was here, thought Lili. If the woman didn’t manage to sell her peppers, she had them to eat that evening, and her children had the woollens to keep them warm.

“Sixty, then,” the woman said. She pulled a sheet of butcher paper from a backpack Lili hadn’t noticed and quickly wrapped up the peppers and garlic. Lili gave her the coins, and the woman eyed them as if they were jewels. Her lips moved as she counted. She pocketed the money in her apron.

“I need to get to the labour camp,” Lili said slowly, as if to a foreigner. “The place where they make munitions.”

The woman seemed to turn cold. At first, Lili thought she wouldn’t tell as promised. “It’s over there.” She pointed to the east of the station.

“Where?”

“You can walk through Szemzo’s fields back there and take the gravel path that winds to the left and then forks. Keep left. Up into the mountain on the left. Arpad. That’s its name, but it won’t be telling you that. Arpad. Five hours, maybe, in
summer
five hours.” Lili felt the darkness encroaching, felt the chill. The woman turned away. “Or,” she said over her shoulder.

“Or what?”

The woman stopped and turned. A shrewd look had come over her rosy face. “Ten pengos,” she said.

Lili wanted to be older than she was—with more authority—and bigger. She wanted to puff herself out. “All right. Ten more.”

The woman would not say anything until Lili had dug out the additional coin. “Just around the clump of trees,” she was pointing the same way, “on the way to Szemzo’s, there’s an army truck parked at the side of a large wooden place. They’ll take you, you can be sure.” The woman had a sly look now.

“An army truck?”

“Yup. Hungarians, don’t worry. Guards at the camp.” The woman winked.

Lili swallowed a cold lump of air. “I don’t know Szemzo’s.”

“Over there,” the woman said, pointing again, turning a corner with the crook of her finger. She pocketed the coin and hurried off.

Lili walked briskly around to where the woman had pointed, looking for Szemzo’s fields and wondering who he might be. She came to a line of trees between two corn fields but could not see an army truck or any building. She could see several mountains hulking in the distance. She walked the length of a field, still following the route she believed the woman had indicated. At the next line of trees she saw a path and took it.

The day was coming to the end of its light. Crows sat heavily in the branches above her head and called out like weathermen. Snow had begun to fall. It fell in clumps, which looked in the near-darkness like white blossoms. The last sight Lili could make out was a stable to her right—at the end of this field, most likely, but that would not have been the direction the woman had suggested. She walked along the path, feeling the stones beneath her pliant leather shoes. They were sensible, warm, flat shoes, but not boots, and now the snow drove into her face and she had to pull her scarf over her ears and around her mouth. The satisfied crows flew off to tell others.

The truck might have departed, and she could be stumbling through the cold, blindly searching for something that was not there. She could try to hold the path for the five hours the woman had suggested, but what if she made it to the gates of the labour camp after lights-out? She could be turned away, or worse. Daylight made more sense by foot, or by truck, if she were lucky enough to come upon it the next day. The barn looked like a good bet for the night, better than the fields and the rushing snow.

Lili groped around its walls, feeling for the door. The ground was hard, but then Lili’s feet encountered a soft patch. She couldn’t tell what it was. She couldn’t smell anything but the pummelling snow, fresh but fierce. She found a latch and it gave easily, and as she tugged on the door it squeaked and then groaned. Lili shot her hand to her mouth and froze, wondering if the farmer had heard.

She stepped into the building out of the snow and could smell the fresh dung. And then she could hear shuffling and clumping, some snorting and neighing, the sounds of horses. She was in a horse stable. She carefully closed the door, though it yelped again on its rusty hinges, and worked her way across the wall until she came to a stall and then a second one.

She chose the second one, opened the gate and stepped in carefully. The warmth was welcoming despite the dung. A horse nickered as Lili’s hand found its rump. She felt more secure now. Lili removed her gloves and patted the great beast beside her, finding the horse’s flank, its mane and neck. The animal swung its head around toward the girl. Lili wished she could see it, to check what colour it was, what sex, what age. She guessed from her cursory feel that it was fairly young, well fed and exercised, with a good oil sheen on its back. She groped its tight shoulder, its chest, its thigh. A good animal.

Lili walked up and down in the space beside the horse to determine how much room she had and whether the area had enough clean straw. She found a place in the corner away from the animal’s front legs and put down her satchel. The horse gently nickered and grunted. Lili was well-prepared. After feeling with her hands to confirm she had chosen the right place, she took out her fur sleeping bag, unfolded it halfway and settled herself down on it. She felt for an egg in the handkerchief, imagined the red checks of the cloth. She loosened the collar of her coat and leaned back against the planks of the corner. She was comfortable, surprisingly comfortable. It occurred to her she could do with less, and she contemplated leaving the sleeping bag unopened and clean for Simon, but she reasoned that if it was just straw beneath her, she could brush it off easily in the morning. Knowing Simon, Lili also predicted he would tell her he preferred the luxurious bag with her warm scent in it anyway, or maybe he just said those things. And so she ate her egg and tidied up after herself, sprinkling the eggshell in the horse’s feed. The horse whinnied quietly, approvingly, it seemed to her. She prepared to go to sleep, using her coat rolled up in the satchel as a pillow and the fur sleeping bag as her bed. She lay back, took a deep and happy breath, satisfied she had made it this far, confident she could complete her mission and make Simon as happy as she was now. She could hear pigeons cooing in the rafters, and something whooshed by her head, a bat, possibly, as it surveyed the barn for insects to eat. She heard the snow brushing against the outside of the wall but could not feel a draft. The stable was well constructed and the horses as happy as she was.

Lili drifted away in the folds of the little fur pallet she’d fashioned for herself. The dung-laden air took on a hint of espresso, she was certain. And Budapest. Gerbeaud. With its glass cases laden with fancy cakes of all kinds. Goodness, Gerbeaud slices and Dobos torte. Hadn’t Gerbeaud once been turned into a stable for the cavalry in the Great War? Did the dung still infuse the chocolate air, beckoning the hardened and bitter and dour wanderers of Vorosmarty Square to step into its sugared walls to gladden their day?

How nice it would be down here in the dung with the espresso lava flowing over her—and him—if she and Simon could wait it out in the straw stable among the driftwood horses and the whirling bats as the war and the world went by. How simple it would be and nice, with all that had happened to her in her short life and to him in his, to sink and dissolve into the compost of this far-flung stable.

The Pompeians might never have been remembered if the warm lava had not made moulds out of them, and out of their tables and chairs, their dogs, their vases, their wine goblets, statues and toilets. Warm rock. Warm Italian rock. What a forger of memory. Cooled. Cold Aryan rock. Is the forger of human memory better cold and hurled than warm and flowing?

Who knew, and who would mind in the million-year-old field, except for the lecturer for the sake of her notes and for the photographs in a scrapbook of resurrected human bones, cool and catalogued and curated?

She remembered just then that Tolgy hadn’t even a sign to identify the town and no one there anymore to tell anyone who happened by. The town council had been talking about erecting a marker, but never got around to it. So now, newcomers could simply arrive, occupy the houses, and call the town whatever they chose. Or no one could come for a million years, until the lecturer came with her students and formulated a hypothesis as to what this was and where all the ancient people had gone to, all of a sudden.

Lili sank into a rapture as the neighing of her companion in the stall beckoned her upward again and outward. She felt the horses around her, felt them breathing and snorting, pictured them thundering within their stable, waiting to burst out upon the fields all the way to the end of their flat Earth.

Twenty-Five

Szeged – September 9, 1944

SOMEONE WAS TAPPING
on the door of the little house on Alma Street. In his cellar, Istvan waited for the visitor to go away. But the visitor’s tapping turned into an intruder’s banging, and the banging went on for several minutes. If Istvan waited long enough, the whole of Tower Town would descend on him and Smetana.

So he rose from his cellar, heard the cat stir above him, pushed aside the planks and peered at the door. Anna Barta was gawking right at him through the window. He clapped a hand over his heart. She’d given it quite a workout.

“Let me in,” she mouthed, and she pointed at the door. “Let me in.”

He looked through the window beyond Anna and then rushed to open the door. She had brought a big pot of autumn cabbage, potato and pork. “Not kosher,” she said to him as she lifted it up from the front step with a grunt and carried it into the house. She had a small burlap sack with her, too, and from it she pulled six apples, two jars of apricot jam, a small loaf of bread and another book. “Kafka,” she said. “Your Kafka.
The Castle
. Maybe
your
castle, too.” And she laughed at her own wit.

“Probably,” Istvan said.

She wiped it across her chest to remove a smudge from the cover and showed the book to Istvan, but said right away, “Hide it—put it away—safe—quick.” He put the book down the front of his pants, behind the belt.

She looked back at the door. Then she pulled a big preserving jar from her purse and whispered, “Tea, with lemon and honey—
lemon
, can you believe it? If I had a mother to trade, it wouldn’t have been enough for this lemon. Maybe a mother plus a husband—when they still had a pulse. May God rest their blessed souls.”

Istvan shook his head and smiled with delight.

Smetana was purring militantly and weaving himself around the visitor’s ankles. Anna lifted the pot lid, poked around with a finger inside, pulled out a hunk of pork bone and gristle, found a plate to put it on, and set it on the floor for the cat.

She sucked her finger clean, said to Istvan, “Now you sit down, too,” and used the same finger to poke him in the chest. She set out a new plate for him, found a serving spoon and ladled out an ample portion of the stew. He sat on the floor out of sight of the window and ate as ravenously as Smetana. Anna got the hint, looked out the window and slid down to the floor herself. All one could hear was chomping and smacking. Anna watched them both, but then Istvan thought she was watching him too closely. She took hold of his ear and said, “You have a rash.” She was breathing down his collar now, then poking. “It goes all the way down here. What is it?”

“Who knows,” he said, with his mouth half full. “Scurvy, for all I know.”

“Drink the tea,” she said. She ran to get a glass. “Right away.” While she was on her feet, she said, “I have a skin cream,” and set to finding it in her big black leather purse. “It’s something a friend cooks up. It’s the best cream I’ve ever seen. I covered my husband’s whole back and front with it once when he had a burn in his factory. In two weeks, he was clean as a baby—and hairless as a baby’s ass.”

She was a walking hospital. She didn’t know which good medicine to administer first: nourishment for his stomach, drink for his ailment, balm for his rash, a story for his starved mind, company for his lonely heart.

“You’re an angel,” he said, as she slathered cream down his neck and behind his shirt.

“Hardly,” she said.

“There aren’t many angels in this time.”

“Achhh.” She waved him off.

“Trust me,” he said again, “you are an angel.”

“As long as you’re not the devil, we’ll be just fine,” she said.

“How do you know I’m not the devil?”

She pointed to her nose. “I suss these things out, and I’m never wrong.” She was shaking her head. “No, you’re just a dentist, a lonely dentist. In the wrong time. The wrong place.” She took a deep breath. “And where is your poor Marta, the poor dear?” She sniffled, and he was surprised to see she was crying. “I hope she comes back to us,” Anna said, “to her home. She’s not even a Jew, and they took her.” Anna sighed.

Istvan paused. He couldn’t take another bite, so Anna grabbed his spoon from him and began force-feeding him. “Please,” he said through a full mouth, “I’ll have some later. I’ll be so happy to know it’s here for later.”

“Oh, it’ll be here,” she said, “and I’ll bring you some more, too.”

Anna went to tidy up. She finished the last scraps from his plate herself. She turned on the faucet, but it was dry. “I stole a pot full of water last night from a neighbourhood well,” Istvan said. “I keep it covered with a lid under the sink.” He was pointing.

“Let me give a sip to the cat.” She looked for a saucer. “I’ll bring you more on my next visit.”

“You can’t come back here,” he said. “You’re endangering your own life.”

“What’s to endanger? I’ve lived a life. You still have some left in you.” She crossed herself. “Let’s hope and pray.”

She washed his dish, and she waited for him to finish his tea before taking the glass, too. He felt the honeyed liquid flowing to his very extremities, irrigating the crumbling channels of his body.

He wanted desperately to get to the Kafka, but what was a book, he asked himself, beside real human company? There would be plenty of time for the book. “Is there news of the world out there, the war?”

She thought he meant Marta. “I check for you every day. They post the names of the returnees at the post office. No. Not
yet
.”

“Anything else?”

“Yes, Eichmann is still in Budapest. The German army’s still there. They’re clearing out Hungary the way they cleared out Prague and Poland, too. On the transports. I don’t know it for sure, one hundred percent—it’s not the stuff you see in the papers, exactly—but Mr. Cermak told me he heard it from a reliable source. And it’s in the coffee houses, so he’s not the only one who says so. I heard they’ve taken a half-million. I heard it from Denes Cermak, the newsman, but off the record, of course. He has his sources. They moved from the outside in, clearing the countryside first—every last man, woman and child of Jewish blood—even old crows like me.” She brought her hands together like a vise. “And now they’ve moved in on the capital—they’re clearing out the big city, too.”

“Jesus,” Istvan said.

“They’d take him too,” she said. “Do you have many people there still? Family?”

“Yes. Maybe. My brother and sister, cousins, uncles, aunts.”

Her vise hands became praying ones and she tapped her lips with them as she looked ceilingward.

“But the Russians are not lying down, either,” she said. “I heard they’ve taken heavy losses, but losses don’t mean much to Josef Stalin. He has more losses to give. They’re driving toward Hungary and Poland and here. They’re not far off now. It’s only a matter of time. And I hear they’re twice as fierce as the Germans, what’s left of them.”

“What’s left of them?” Istvan asked.

“Oh, yes. They’re not on easy street anymore. They’re taking losses, too, and they’re not as content about it.”

“Content—ha.”

“I want to see the place you’ve been living, you poor dear. I want to see that hole in the floor.” She pointed. The planks were still laid to the side.

A chill rode down Istvan’s spine. No one other than Marta had ever seen his hiding place. He felt an element of his security slip away. Who else might soon know, even if the information were shared with the best of intentions? Anna liked the coffee houses, too, and she liked to tell stories.

His hesitation registered on her. “You won’t tell anyone, will you?”

She put her hand on her heart. “Who would I tell?”

“Anyone.”

“Do you think I brought you a pot of meat to fatten you up for slaughter, you and your little cat?”

“I don’t think you did, but you can understand.”

“It’s too late for that, to tell you the truth. I already know. Seeing it is just dressing. To me, if it’s a piss-hole or a shit-hole it hardly makes a difference.” So she
had
been shaping the story in her mind. She was a lovely, kind, innocent old blabbermouth. “You were at my place some time ago. I got the juice out of your life story then. You’d be
dead
by now if I’d run off at the mouth.”

“That’s true,” he said. She looked hurt. “I’m sorry.” She nodded her forgiveness. “I’m so sorry.”

“I never lived in a hole. I can imagine what it does to people. We’re not moles or badgets.” She pointed to her temple. “I’m amazed we’re still chatting, to tell you the truth. You’ve got a tough, stone head and a good beater. You Jews are tough bastards, I swear.” She crossed herself. “The ones who keep making it through the ages. You’re tough bastards and bitches, the lot of you.”

He was meant to feel flattered. Anna was beaming. “Well,” he said, “we’re being put to the test now, aren’t we.”

“You are,” she said quietly, sadly.

“And tough as I am, where would I be without Marta? And
you
.”

“Thank you, dear,” she said.

“You’re thanking me? Come, good lady, let me show you my lair.”

She grunted as he helped her down the wooden ladder to his dark cellar. He came up again to fetch the cat, who was happy to accompany them. He’d spent surprisingly little time down here with Istvan.

Anna was aghast at the pallet on the floor, the dusty blanket, the bucket in the corner, the mustiness, the dankness. She crossed herself yet again. “Oh, my Lord. Is this any way to treat a living thing—
any
living thing?”

“I don’t think I’m classified as a living thing,” Istvan said.

“Come, stay with me,” she said. “You’ll be safe, I swear. No one will suspect me of monkey business. I’m too old and foolish.”

“Foolish you’re not,” he said, “and not even terribly old.”

“You are a dear,” she said. “Worth saving. But you have to move to my place, I insist.”

“I wouldn’t dare. It’s not possible.” He had to wait for Marta to return.

Anna looked up out of the hole. They heard the distant buzz of an engine, a motorcycle. The sound intensified. It was approaching. Not many motorcycles came to Tower Town.

“Stay down,” Istvan said, “and absolutely quiet.” Anna crouched. “Not a sound.”

He dashed up the ladder with the agility of a trapeze artist to replace the planks. As he did so, the motorcycle stopped right outside the house. Istvan crept back down and put a hand on Anna’s mouth to remind her. Where was the cat? He couldn’t feel Smetana with them, and then the soft weaving through his ankles reassured him. He could feel the animal purr, his little engine running while the big one roared above them.

Someone slapped the door rather than knocked. Then a voice, not speaking to the door, but to someone else. Then a reply. Two men speaking German. They slapped the door again and said something, but the motorcycle made it impossible to understand.

Then the engine was switched off. Istvan gripped Anna’s hand in the dark. She was trembling. The quiet was more menacing than the roar of the motorcycle. There was some fidgeting at the door, and Istvan believed finally that his hour had come. Would they look through the window? Would they see the pot and dishes—the bowl on the floor? The wait was over. And this unfortunate woman had been caught with him.

He wondered about his Marta, home at last when this was all over, tired, hurt but not beaten. She would find three dead creatures in her small house, stiff and decaying, the stink long vanished, the ghosts flown, ready for burial in a single small plot in the back among the weeds and angelica. Home at last, his Marta, her Odysseus to his Penelope, home to her little place with the tiny garden and the prodigious memory, the curled-up ghosts hovering above the diminutive house like a Chagall, the suitors awaiting her, ready in a moment to start anew, unfettered, with his raven-haired beauty.

The fidgeting at the door ceased. Surely these men were capable of blowing off the lock. What were they waiting for? The motorcycle started up again. Istvan and Anna could smell the diesel exhaust seeping in from above. The men said something more in German and then one of them chuckled. The machine growled once and then bellowed as it left the house, transforming itself into a drone and then a buzz before vanishing. The silence burned.

A minute passed. Two. “Let’s get up,” Anna whispered. She grunted as she prepared to stand.

“No.” Istvan held her down forcefully. “We have to stay where we are.” They thought they heard a sound—they froze—but it might have been the cat. “One of them might have stayed.” She could barely hear him. He put his lips to her ear. “They might suspect something, and one of them might have stayed behind. He might be watching the house.”

“Why?” she whispered.

“He might be waiting for us to come out, or for someone to come in.”

The two of them listened. Smetana made himself comfortable in Anna’s generous lap. “We can’t talk anymore,” Istvan said, barely audibly. “Let’s not take a chance. You’ll spend the night.”

He urged her back on his pallet. She wasn’t sure what he meant at first. He gave her shoulder a firm push, but she resisted. Then she relented and eased back, clutching the cat against her bosom.

They lay together until their breathing was steady. He felt grateful, suddenly, to have been given a reason to extend Anna’s visit. She couldn’t leave now, no matter what. She was another human being from the world outside, with the world’s fragrance and with its provisions. He was someone to care for when no one else needed or appreciated her efforts. Soon her warm shoulder and arm rested against his taut and bony one. The touch unlocked other times in their lives, better ones. He took her hand in his. Anna made a sound that he thought, at first, came from the cat, but it was closer to the burbling of a pigeon than a purr. He was feeling better than he had in weeks, and he was drifting. Come back to me, Marta, if you can. Come back to me is all I ask. Forgive me for the anguish I’ve caused and come back.

He awoke to her laughing and to the thorny cat using his chest as a pad to launch himself to the darkest corner of the room. “Look at these bars of light,” she was saying. They’d spent the whole night together.