Gratitude (49 page)

She headed back to her room. Rozsi was still lying on the bed with her eyes wide open, but looking at nothing at all.

Lili said, “Uncle Robert brought us carnations—can you believe that? Some for you, too. They’re sweet.”

Rozsi sat up in the bed. “You’ve been crying,” she said.

“Just the sniffles.”

“I’m so tired, but I can hardly ever sleep,” said Rozsi.

“Have a nap this afternoon, then, when we come back from the temple.”

“Where will I sleep tonight?” Rozsi asked. Lili looked at her and realized what she was asking. “May I stay here in this room with you, just until Zoli gets back? I promise we’ll find another place then.”

“Of course you may,” Lili answered.

“What about your husband?” Rozsi asked, like a child.

“My husband and I, if we make it that far today, will find our moments together, don’t worry.”

“It’ll just be until Zoli gets back.”

Robert checked for Paul in his study. When he saw the younger man, he smiled and told him about Dezso and the corsages. Paul said how nice it was that people were reappearing, a few of them, and Robert went quiet for a moment before saying, “Did you know that Manfred Weiss, the industrialist, met with Eichmann?
Adolf Eichmann
. The butcher who would not condescend to release a single Jew except to ship them off. He
met
with Weiss. He had to cut a deal with Weiss—that’s how powerful the bastard was, powerful as Eichmann.”

Paul didn’t respond to his uncle. He’d behaved throughout the war like an agent for a secret service and had got out of the habit of talking about delicate matters. Robert never knew of Paul’s own visit with Wallenberg to Eichmann’s headquarters. Paul recalled the things he wanted to tell the little bastard, and he smiled now. Eichmann had still not been apprehended. He might have been in Germany still, somewhere, or he might have left the continent, for all anyone knew. Fleeing Nazis were turning up in Argentina, living and working side by side with Jews who had fled earlier.

“Weiss arranged for transport out of the country,” Robert went on, “a personal escort of Hungarian troops for him and his family in exchange for signing over his holdings to the Germans. They got out to Switzerland, and I heard today they might be heading to New York, those Weisses.” Robert relit a small cigar he’d been carrying in his jacket pocket and shook his head. He took his stethoscope out of the same pocket and tossed it on the desk. “Imagine. He met with Eichmann. As determined as Hitler. He might as well have met with Hitler.” Robert was still shaking his head as he blew smoke all around him. He was waiting for his nephew to react to the news, but Paul just continued to gaze at him, lacing his fingers together and blowing over them as if he, too, were smoking. “I wonder where Weiss is now, exactly, or if he’ll come back to Hungary in the end. I wonder where bloody Eichmann is now.”

Paul’s silence bewildered Robert. “Are you ready for today?”

“I don’t know,” Paul said without affect, and the two men looked at each other.

Robert punched out his cigar in the lid of a jar he was using lately for that purpose. His crystal ashtray had gone missing, as had the porcelain Herend one in the living room.

Robert felt uncomfortable in his own study. “Excuse me,” he said and departed.

Vera spoke to Klari in the kitchen about the wedding, because Klari had invited her and her family to attend. Vera said they’d feel too uncomfortable, but she offered Klari a braided egg bread she had baked and covered with a cloth. “For after the ceremony,” Vera said.

Hermina’s presence had emboldened Klari. She wanted everyone cheered and ready to go to the wedding of her son. So the sisters walked into Robert’s study just as Robert left it. “Look at you, sitting here in the dark,” Hermina said. Her presence caused Paul to smile again. Hermina went to open the curtains. “Look at you,” she said again. You’re like a bat.” And then she held up the fingers again. “And I’m a crow. Fine pair we make.”

Paul rose out of his chair. “You poor thing,” he said. “I’ve heard about your ordeal.”

“We’ve all been through a bad time,” she said. “But now that time is over.”

Paul hugged Hermina surprisingly hard. “Careful,” she said, pulling away. “My hair.”

“Paul, dear, you’re not ready for the wedding,” Klari said. “You were planning to come, I hope.”

He didn’t answer right away.

“He’s your cousin. We’re a badly reduced family as it is, and each one of us is important to this ceremony. Look, your aunt came all the way from Paris—dressed in curtains—can you imagine?”

Paul sat back down in a leather chair and covered his eyes with both hands. His aunts couldn’t tell if he was crying. Klari wanted to tell her sister that Paul had heard from Zsuzsi—they’d introduced the young pair, after all—but she decided to wait until later. She wasn’t even sure what Zsuzsi had said and wanted to find out first. Maybe Paul had left the letter in Robert’s desk drawer.

“Come, my dear,” Klari said more tenderly to her nephew. “The days of being locked up are over.” Paul didn’t budge.

“Why do you save people just to spook them with your moods?” Hermina asked. “We’re
allowed
to go out, without an armband, without a cloth star on our chests, and we’re allowed to head straight over to the site of a synagogue without being arrested. Time to get up.” She was ready to hook her warped hands under Paul’s arms and hoist the tall man to his feet.

Paul uncovered his damp face and said, “Of course, I’m coming.” He got up again. “Who said I wasn’t going to come?”

“And let’s walk down Andrassy, not Kiraly,” Hermina said. “Let’s get noticed.”

THE WEDDING PARTY
that moved down Andrassy toward Rumbach was just a vestige of the original family, more like a band of itinerant actors playing the Becks, Izsaks and Bandels, the cast too small, the costumes too big. But the sun shone, the ladies sported carnations, and a new household was about to be established.

Paul strode ahead like a scout. The ladies refused to march. They walked calmly up the avenue and would not be perturbed by Paul’s rush. “I don’t know what to make of that boy,” Hermina said. She stood out among the women in her bright gown—indeed stood out among all the people on the avenue—she was blue as the Danube once was, blue as the Danube of the waltz.

“I know what to make of him,” Klari said. She wore her famous forest-green gown with the wide white collar, although the dress had needed to be pinned and taken in every which way. “I know exactly what to make of him.”

“He needs to find someone,” Hermina said. “That’s all it is.” Then she added, “Thinking is an illness, more harmful even than remembering. Paul started mourning people even before they were being led off to die.”

“No,” Klari said. “Paul’s not like that. Some people were made for mourning. They mourn even before they have cause. They’re in mourning-readiness. Not Paul. He wanted to stave off the day of mourning, prevent it from ever having to occur. There’s a big difference. It’s just that he couldn’t win over followers. There were days, during the dark campaign, when Hungarians wouldn’t heed his warnings. This couldn’t happen to them, they believed, not here. They were Hungarian first and Jewish second—a distant second. Paul really is a Cassandra. He saw the future, but people didn’t believe him.”

And then they remembered they were walking with Rozsi, so Hermina said again, “He’ll find someone, I’m sure. Why shouldn’t he?
Everybody
will. And if not one person, then another. If not that nice Zsuzsi we once introduced him to, then someone. The world will remake itself. We’re here. We’re walking down the street, the sidewalks will refill and the coffee will pour again.” She leaned closer to Rozsi and said, as if in confidence, “All I can say is, don’t open a corset store in the near future,” and then she hooted up a storm.

“Do you know what we should all do?” Hermina said. “The cinemas are starting to open again. We should take Paul and Rozsi out to see a Laurel and Hardy picture, like
Pack Up Your Troubles
. Do you remember that one, dear?”

“How could I forget?”

“I love them with a passion. They get into all kinds of danger but never come to harm.” Then she said, “I wonder how our cousin, Sir Korda, is making out. Of course, only you would know, Klarikam. Has he written to you lately?”

“Not lately.”

“Oh, I wonder…” Hermina said.

The wedding party had begun to spread out, with Paul up ahead, Robert and Simon in the middle and the ladies well behind. The streets had certainly changed. Some buildings were bombed-out shells, some shaded dark with flame. The Erzsebet and Chain bridges were still out between Buda and Pest, though their reconstruction had begun.

Lili felt thrilled to have Hermina with them. She smiled at the ladies while Rozsi gazed straight ahead, following her brother in spirit if not in pace. Lili took Rozsi’s hand in hers. Rozsi tried a smile then.

“We need to find a candle,” Rozsi said suddenly. “Another one of those
Jahrzeit
candles in a glass for tonight.”

“We will, right after the wedding,” Lili said.

Rozsi had been burning a candle in the window of their bedroom almost every night, a waiting candle, shining out to the street like a beacon. Lili had made a point of procuring the candles as often as she could during her lunch hour, hoping that lighting the flame would keep Rozsi’s spirits up.

“And I need some more medicine,” Rozsi said. “I’m almost out. I need more pills to calm me.”

“I’ve already let the apothecary know, and they’ll be ready by tomorrow.”

Simon had a good look at each building as they passed, sizing up the damage, wondering whether he’d be involved in the repair. Robert was limping. His shoes were far too small, but they could find no other decent ones for the occasion. The pairs that had been in his closet at home were all gone when they returned to Jokai Street. His old friend Feher, the shoemaker, in Vorosmarty Square, had not returned from the war, and even Brun, from whom he’d bought fine handmade shoes in Vienna, had perished.

They passed a millinery, the old Lengyel family’s shop. It had been looted, the windows broken. What a fancy shop it had been, Simon thought. There were four Lengyels altogether, a son and daughter younger than he was—Simon, the boy was called, and Edit. Simon didn’t always remember, but this time he did. Not only were the hats all gone, the papier mâché heads they’d been displayed on had also been taken for good measure. Simon looked over his shoulder at the women, tried to get their attention, pointed to the store. He wondered where the Lengyels had ended up, where they were now lying.

Robert said, “The ghosts are all around us here. On every block. We’re practically trampling on their skulls as we walk. It’s a city with a brutal history, isn’t it? A country with a brutal history.”

The men had arrived at the intersection with Kaldy Gyula Street and had to turn left. They were gratified that a small café had opened here on the corner, the Lovas Café, a
new
café. They looked back at the women to make sure they knew they were turning. Paul up ahead was nowhere to be seen. He was surely at the Rumbach temple by now.

“I have to stop just a minute,” Robert said. “My feet. But I’m afraid to take my shoes off, because I’ll never get them back on. I wish I’d worn the other ones.” He was leaning back against the brick wall of an office building.

“Take mine,” Simon said. “They’re bigger.”

“But your feet are bigger, too. You’ll never walk again if you cram your feet into these.”

“Please, Father.”

“It’s your wedding day. If I switch with you now, you’ll spend the next sixty-five years telling people how you wore tiny, torturous shoes on your wedding day. No, I’ll suffer, and I’ll tell the story, but not for as long.”

They were nearly at the Rumbach temple, now, or the ruins of the temple, and looked back at the women. The streets were surprisingly quiet that morning. They had Budapest to themselves.

Paul had been looking at the temple, then at the battered Dohany Street temple around the corner. What had we been thinking when we built these piles? he asked himself. Was it the bigness of God we were trying to show off, or our own achievements? He saw the toppled temple more clearly now than when it had stood proud a year before. He’d hardly noticed it then.

The women caught up with the men, and the group was met at the temple by Lili’s friend Maria and her fiancé, Patrik, as well as a small group of Robert’s colleagues. The synagogue’s yellow-and-white minarets, like the towers of a mosque, still stood in the blue June sunlight. The door was gone and the upper windows blown out from within their casements, and the walls behind the front wall were collapsed, so the front held on precariously.

The congregation, what was left of it, had done a nice job carting away the broken stone and sweeping up the brick dust.

Rabbi Langer greeted them as Paul stood straight and tall by the
chuppah
. Klari spoke to the rabbi first. “There is nothing to be solemn about, not today, if you don’t mind.”

Robert added, “This is a very good day for us, good days ahead.”

The
chuppah
, under which the wedding party stood, must have come from quite a bed, because it sheltered all of them, including the rabbi and cantor. They were much diminished, Robert thought, but still—he looked up and was glad of the cool shelter from the sun.

At first the cantor sang as if he were performing a Kaddish, slow and doleful, a sound that came from somewhere deep in his chest. But he was just warming up.

The rabbi said to the small group, “I cannot talk today about ruling the planet or about being ruled, or about dying or surviving—listen to me, I sound like Ecclesiastes despite myself. To tell you the truth, I confess for the first time these are topics I can’t even fathom anymore. This was not the great Flood, and I am not Noah. I was barely able to retain my own faith, let alone preach it to others.” Lili glanced over her shoulder at Paul. “There is too much weight just behind us,” the rabbi said, “and too much just ahead.” Here, the rabbi paused.