Gratitude (50 page)

He then gave the usual blessing as if they were standing in the usual place, on the blue-and-white mosaic floor, the congregation facing the glass Joseph in his colourful coat. Lili and Simon exchanged vows. And Simon slipped the ring, engraved with the name “
Ivan
” and the wrong date, “
13 Aprilis 1935
,” the ring they had got from the deportation train, onto his wife’s finger. He and Lili kissed.

Then Simon crunched the customary glass wrapped in cloth beneath his heel, except not a wine glass on this occasion—one couldn’t be spared—but a burnt-out light bulb.

Rabbi Langer stepped up to his old card partner and asked, almost under his breath, if there was to be a reception afterward.

“Yes,” Robert said, loudly enough for everyone to hear. “I have arranged a surprise for all of you at the Lovas Café. I’ve arranged a good lunch for us of herring followed by goose, courtesy of my colleagues at the hospital.”

Just before they left, Hermina talked to Rabbi Langer about the synagogue. “I know you’ll want to rebuild this place,” she said. He nodded solemnly. “But if you’re going to put Joseph back up in the window, I would drop the colourful coat,” she said. She was whispering. “It does nothing for him, if you want to know the truth. Something in green would be lovely with the light coming through, or a blue with a dark lapel. Royal blue would work quite nicely.”

The rabbi didn’t know what to say. Hermina patted him on the cheek with her warped hand. “You know what?” she said, with a shrug. “We’re here. Isn’t that what counts?”

He shrugged, too, and said, “We are here, it’s true. Here again.”

The reception was better than anyone could have imagined. It featured a Gypsy quintet that played as if they’d been trained in a Berlin symphony hall. Robert recognized one of them right away from the days of the Japan Café. He was a favourite there, Kosmo Romani, and there was someone else from the Japan, Arista Barany. So nice to have them resurface. Four gentlemen and a lady, for how else could you describe them when they played Schubert’s String Quintet in C Major the way it was intended. Their music transformed the room. Robert was whispering to his wife, but Lili approached her newly minted father-in-law and reminded him of what he’d once told her: “When you are in the presence of great music, it must occupy all your attention.” The room was quiet throughout, as if the group were attending a concert, not a party.

At the end, the violist, the quintet’s one woman, set down her instrument, stood and sang “Ombra mai fu” from Handel’s
Xerxes
. She sang not like an opera singer, because she certainly wasn’t one, but as if her heart were her instrument, sang like the naïve contralto she was, the amateur in love. Hermina sat with Paul and Rozsi at a round table in a corner of the small room, and she took Paul’s hand in hers. Her eyes filled with tears, and Paul squeezed her hand. “Did you hear those notes?” she said, after the aria was over.

“Those notes were the most natural procession of sound imaginable,” he said. “You’d never expect a lark to roar, so inevitable is its sound—obvious and inevitable. The art is to give those notes an inevitability, a forward tilt. It’s true of everything, all the arts. The art of the humorist is to tell the joke as if it were spontaneous, rather than rehearsed a thousand times.”

Robert approached Kosmo Romani and asked, “Where have you been?” Both were beaming. “I’ve missed seeing you.”

“Well, I’m here,” he answered. “The war kept us busy.
Now
what are we going to do?” He laughed heartily at his own joke, and Robert joined him.

As a single violinist played a Jewish hora, he was joined on the viola by the lady who’d sung Handel, and the revellers joined hands and danced. They swooped and kicked their feet and felt warm and happy. Simon and Lili were each placed on a chair and hoisted high above the other dancers. They were king and queen of the afternoon. And then they ate herring and challah and danced some more.

Lili could not consummate her marriage that night. She waited for Rozsi to fall asleep so she could sneak away, but Rozsi sat up over her candle in the window and waited until morning.

Thirty-Five

Szeged – June 16, 1945

ISTVAN ASKED FATHER SEBESTYEN
for two small favours: that he not be expected to renounce his original faith and that the conversion lessons be postponed until sometime after the ceremony. Going through with this wedding at the Church of Our Lady of the Snow, in King Mathias Square, was all his idea, not Marta’s. In fact, she was against the silliness. She felt, for one thing, that there was plenty of time, and for another, she was the one who’d first offered to convert.

The church was one Istvan had always admired for its simplicity. It was all white, had a modest steeple and was more welcoming inside than intimidating.

Father Sebestyen was looking at some notes beside the pulpit when they arrived. While they waited, Istvan and Marta looked up at the impressive star-vaulted ceiling with its stone ribs, then turned their attention to the pulpit, which was carved with four alluring cherubs, embodying faith, hope, love and justice. The Virgin Mary stood on the high altar. As Istvan looked up at her, Father Sebestyen said, “Apparently, this lovely Virgin lay at the bottom of Lake Csoporke, beside our church, until a century and a half ago, when a Turkish soldier whose horse needed a drink spotted her at the bottom. The Turk arranged to have her brought back in.”

“I wonder whether she was tossed into the lake in anger, or hidden there by worshippers,” Istvan said.

Father Sebestyen agreed happily to Istvan’s conditions for the wedding, just as long as the couple didn’t insist on the pomp of a customary Sunday Catholic service. Everyone opted for simplicity and quiet.

The priest took out a standard form and began to fill it out: first, the mother’s name, place of birth, date of birth. Marta said, “Marta Foldi, Szeged, June 16, 1917, and November 7, 1944.”

Father Sebestyen looked at the couple over the top of his reading glasses. He said, “I can’t put in your child’s birthday.” He coughed and added, barely audibly, “There’s no place on a Roman Catholic wedding form for a child, you understand, except in the case of widows who are marrying again, after their loss.”

“It’s not my child’s birthday,” Marta said. “It’s mine.” The priest looked at Istvan. Marta said, “I have two birthdays now: the day of my birth here and the day I stepped out of a gas chamber.”

Father Sebestyen looked at the resolve in Marta’s eyes and without another word squeezed the second date into the box along with the first one.

After the ceremony, Istvan and Marta and their two witnesses walked all the way back to her house. Istvan’s home, the one he’d shared with his father, had been taken over by the Russians as their headquarters for the city.

They had wanted to keep the ceremony quiet, even solemn, in deference to the memory of Anna Barta and Dr. Janos Benes. Marta had not even invited her brother, Frank, in Chicago, or Istvan his family in Budapest. They would explain later and apologize. Two guests did attend: Denes Cermak, who was back at his newsstand, selling news about the reconstruction of the world after the loss of fifty million souls, and Fifi Gyarmati, the widow of Miklos Radnoti.

The poet had taken his march back to Budapest from Bereck with a hundred other men, led by Sergeant Erdo, but only a handful had made it to the city. Fifi Gyarmati had hired an investigator and a lawyer to find out about her husband in his last days. They’d located one of the survivors, Denes Bekes, who told them that Erdo had become fed up with having to accommodate the men and drank a great deal along the way. “Mr. Radnoti was the most annoying to Erdo. He caught him scribbling in that notebook of his and beat him repeatedly. Finally, two nights before we got home, he shot the scribbler, along with a dozen other men, and we buried them in a shallow grave. I know where it is. Only sixteen of us made it all the way back.”

Fifi said she wanted her husband’s body found and exhumed; she wanted him buried at the Kerepesi Cemetery, as befitted an extraordinary artist; and she wanted Erdo prosecuted.

Commandant Fekete and his men, the ones who’d left Bereck and headed toward the Ukraine, had all perished.

MARTA HAD INVITED
one other person to the wedding, Alfred Paderewski, the Polish nobleman who’d taken her in after her escape from Auschwitz. She wrote him a card, saying how much his help had meant to her and inviting him as an “honoured guest” to their wedding.

Paderewski answered that he couldn’t attend, but he arranged to have a sumptuous feast sent to the little house on Alma Street. Marta and Istvan received goose and dumplings, trout, asparagus, sweet potatoes, cabbage, beets, rounded off with a chestnut torte. A dozen bottles of champagne came too. “Mr. Paderewski has clearly seen neither the size of this house,” Istvan said, “nor the size of the wedding party.”

Smetana had leapt on the table so often during the robust meal that Istvan was ready to put him outside, but Fifi said that the scrawny cat was the third guest, and a blessing, and loaded a plate for him with goodies from the wedding feast. She set the plate beside them at their feet.

It was warm in the small house, even though the cast-iron stove was quiet. Flotow’s
Martha
played quietly on the phonograph. Denes Cermak was describing the destruction he’d heard about over to the west in Germany. He said he had seen a photo of the once proud German city of Dresden, and it was bad. “It wasn’t just destroyed,” he said. “Other cities were destroyed, but Dresden was pounded down, hammered. The Allies’ message to the German nation was, ‘Enough of you, enough of your evil empire. Down with you, into the ground.’”

Fifi reminded Denes that this was a happy occasion and they didn’t want to hear about destruction. She was holding up her champagne glass. “We have a new couple starting here this afternoon—a new trio, it looks like.” She pointed to Marta’s belly. She was showing now. Fifi smiled again and they all drank.

Later, Istvan got to his feet and raised his own glass. He studied the glass against the light. “Has there ever been a colour more reassuring than this golden wine?” He turned to his new wife. “Marta, my dear wife, you sacrificed yourself for me.” He waited, closed his eyes for a moment. “We’ll say, today, that we won’t ever forget these things, and we’ll instruct our children not to forget, but then…Today we step up to fill ourselves out the way we used to.” Istvan took another gulp of his champagne and set down his glass. “We have made it out the other end of a hallucination. And guess what has lain in wait for us? The music has lain in wait for us. The poetry. Love. Maybe not youth, maybe not much of our youth. I think we might have lost that while we were still young.” He took another drink. “But I drink, now, to you, my Marta—and I drink quite a bit, I might add.” Everyone got to their feet. “I will stand firm as a sentinel in this place and raise a family in the middle of this history, to
defy
the history.”

Istvan took his seat, and Fifi said, “What a speech,” and immediately stood to spoon out some more food before anyone else started to talk. Denes took a good thick goose neck into his hands and sucked at the bits of flesh fenced in by the bone.

A MONTH LATER
, Fifi Gyarmati succeeded in persuading the provisional government that a shallow grave outside Budapest contained the bodies of fallen heroes of the war. When her husband was exhumed, Istvan and Marta were present. Radnoti’s body was easy to spot. He still had on his trench coat. Inside the pocket was his notebook containing his last lines, written in pencil. The poem, entitled “Picture Postcard,” appeared on the penultimate page:

The oxen drool saliva mixed with blood.

Each one of us is urinating blood

The squad stands about in knots, stinking, mad.

Death, hideous death, is blowing overhead.

I fall beside him and his body turns over,

Taut already as a taut string.

Shot in the neck. “And that’s how you’ll end too,”

I whisper to myself. “Lie still—

Now patience flowers into death.” I hear,

“Er springt noch auf,” above, quite near.

Blood mixed with mud is drying in my ear.

Erdo was never found. A cousin of his said he’d moved to South America. Radnoti was buried with honours in the Kerepesi Cemetery, as his widow had requested.

Thirty-Six

Budapest – March 25, 1946

TWO SOVIET OFFICIALS
showed up at Robert’s clinic at Sacred Heart. He was performing surgery, so they waited in his office for two hours for him to finish. One of them wore a suit that was too big for him, a blue one, with sleeves too long. Maybe he’d taken it off a rack and walked out without trying it on. The one in the ill-fitting suit was the translator.

Robert hadn’t even sat down when the other one, in a nicer tan suit, said, “Dr. Beck, do you know of the whereabouts and activities of your nephew Paul Beck?” The translator translated.

Robert was hoping these men could help get Paul to resume his old productive life. “My nephew?” he said. “If you’re asking whether he’s been on work detail, the answer is no. I know about that. My son and daughter-in-law go every single day, and now she’s pregnant, so I’m quite concerned. I’m a physician, as you can see, so I’m concerned. Paul’s probably out hunting for Raoul Wallenberg as usual, if I know him.” And he smiled. “Why don’t you go ask him yourself? He lives with us.”

“We went by this morning. He wasn’t home.”

“Oh, you did?” Robert now realized he’d said too much. It was a childish thing to do, foolish even, possibly.

“Raoul Wallenberg has nothing to do with the Soviet regime,” the official told him. “We met with him, but we’re through with him. He had many enemies, and he was killed by one of them.”

“Of course.” Then he added, “Too bad.”

“Yes, too bad.” The man in the tan suit took out a card. “Would you please ask your nephew to come and see us tomorrow?”

“Yes, I will.” Robert was anxious now. He didn’t know what he’d done. Maybe nothing. Certainly nothing. The Russians wouldn’t have come looking for Paul if they didn’t have something on him already. Still, he should have kept Paul’s activities to himself.

LILI AND ROZSI
visited the apothecary that day to pick up another bottle of pills. The man behind the counter, dressed in a three-piece suit under a white lab coat with pens gleaming from the pocket, simply issued the medicine to Rozsi now without consultation with a doctor. Her Uncle Robert had refused to issue another prescription for the young woman. Rozsi stood in front of the pharmacist, unassuming, uncommunicative, and he counted out the hundred tranquilizers, the second batch since the beginning of February. Lili paid, and the young women left. They could easily have been foreigners, so few words had been exchanged.

Lili walked Rozsi home and headed back to the opera house, where she was helping to clean up still, assisting the plasterers and painters. Before that she’d been helping Simon and a crew of two hundred others on the damaged Liberty Bridge. Simon was working again as a tool and die maker and was now casting dies for iron rods required in the bridge’s reconstruction. The aim was to restore the old bridge exactly as it had been, complete with the two majestic
turul
birds on either side at its peaks and the royal crests of the Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz-Josef. From another time.

Simon and Lili didn’t mind the requirement that they be part of the reconstruction effort. In fact, it was oddly reassuring to be made to do such things, to be called upon again, pulled out into the sunlight. But at the bridge there was too much lifting involved for Lili, and Robert had forbidden her to work there any longer and written a letter to the authorities to that effect.

After a good long second visit to Budapest in the autumn, Hermina had returned to her home in Paris, a property she and Ede had bought back in the mid-thirties, when he’d been a visiting professor of medicine at the Sorbonne. It was in the 16th Arrondissement, she’d said, off the Avenue de Versailles, “where Victor Hugo, Honoré de Balzac and Claude Debussy used to muck about.” Her departure was hard on everyone, especially Klari and Lili, who found solace in her presence. Even Rozsi—who was saying less and less as a hard winter gripped Budapest with no regard for what it had just endured—could sometimes be coaxed into smiling when Hermina was present at their table. A friend of Hermina’s, Erzsi Balaban, who’d owed the Izsaks a small fortune before the war, returned from Buchenwald alive but alone and had opened a bakery specializing in wedding and other party cakes. It was what she’d always wanted to do, what she’d dreamed about every day in the camp, what she promised herself. So in this time of shortage—but also of celebration and marrying and starting over—Erzsi opened her cake shop. Some people could pay; others couldn’t. Hermina forgave the Balabans’ debt to her, but thereafter Hermina often showed up at the Becks’ place with great cakes, towering palaces of cream and marzipan, some of them reminiscent of classical architecture, complete with columns and caryatids and little triangular roofs. It was odd, having party cake so often, but Hermina was happy to share with her relatives because its cheer brightened their home. There was so much to go around, Klari shared some with Vera and her family, too, and with the Oszolis, the additional family.

After dropping Rozsi off, Lili calculated that if she rushed she could see Simon for a few minutes before they both had to get back to work. As Lili approached the Liberty Bridge, she began to feel dizzy and a little queasy. There was a bench within sight of the bridge, and she thought she would rest there just a minute. An older woman sat on the opposite end. She had a cast-iron sauce pot beside her.

The woman noticed Lili’s distress and asked, “Is there something I can do for you, young woman?”

Lili wanted to say no but feared she might get worse. “Yes, please. My husband, Simon Beck, is working on the bridge just up ahead.”

“I’ll get him,” the woman said. “Can you watch my pot?”

Lili nodded and the woman hurried off.

Soon Lili was lying down on the bench, trying not to moan, careful not to kick the woman’s pot. Simon was by her side in a flash. “I’m taking you to the hospital,” he said, as he put his arm around her shoulder.

The woman who’d helped out said she’d call for an ambulance.

“No,” Lili said. “I’m better now. It was just a spell, nothing more.”

“Let’s be sure.”

“I am sure,” she said. “I wouldn’t want anything to harm this baby.” She was hardly showing, but she stroked her abdomen gently.

“It happens,” the woman said to Simon. “Raging hormones,” she added. “I’ve been through it, four times.” She rubbed her own stomach.

Unexpectedly, there arose the worst odour Lili and Simon had ever smelled, like fumes rising from the underworld. It was so thick it was palpable. The woman retrieved her sauce pot. “Well, the Danube Fat is here,” she said.

“What is it?” asked Simon.

“It’s a boat,” the woman said. “Really just a floating vat of fat from various animals.”

“Fat?”

“Bacon fat, goose fat,
fat
. Lard. I have no oil or butter, so I use this fat. It’s cheap, and if you heat it for a while, the stink cooks off it. Then you can throw in whatever you’ve got. I’m going to fill my pan right now. Can I get you some?”

“Not today,” Simon said. He still had his hand to his nose.

Lili was using a handkerchief, but with her other hand she still held her stomach. She wondered if a stink this foul could affect her baby.

“She pulls in every Tuesday around this time.”

“I’m amazed I missed her,” said Simon. “Thanks for helping us out.”

“It was nothing,” the woman said and walked off with her pan toward the river.

WHEN ROBERT
came home that night from the hospital, he almost fell again over the suitcase standing in the vestibule. He cursed once more, gave the leather case a good hoof. He’d had enough. It was over a year.

Simon and Lili lay on the big bed in his parents’ bedroom. She hadn’t gone back to the opera house, and his supervisor had given him the afternoon off, too. “It will happen soon,” Simon said. The federal government is going to release us from this duty, and I’ll be able to open my own shop.”

She smiled.

“Or we could try to get away,” Simon said, excitedly. He was holding his wife’s hand too tightly. “I told you, I know a man who can arrange exit visas for us to Canada or New York. Wouldn’t that be something?
Toronto
—can you say that?”

“And we’d just go?” Lili said.

“Don’t you think we’d be happier?”

“Yes, I do, but we can’t leave your parents and cousins just like that. What would become of them?”

“I don’t know,” he said and let the matter drop.

Rozsi sat in the kitchen, pretending to watch her aunt prepare dinner, but her eyes weren’t following Klari as she hustled about the room. Rozsi felt better here in the kitchen for two reasons. She was with her aunt, who reminded her of her own mother—Klari had the same auburn hair, the same caramel eyes as Mathilde, and there was the same warmth about her, maybe even more. The other reason was the room itself, the bright mosaic floor, the arabesques dancing across the walls, the crystal windows rising into exotic arches. This room took Rozsi out of the city, made her feel she had cast out beyond the horizon, possessed a telescope through which she could survey the continent in search of her Zoli, her wandering Odysseus, as he struggled back from the war, resisting the Sirens, eluding the Cyclops. Rozsi sometimes felt she was in another time, here, sat among the Moors, felt she could restart history, but this time govern its course.

Paul sat, as usual, in Robert’s study, the curtains drawn, the lights switched off, a book in his lap. He had spent some of the afternoon with a group working with the Americans to implement the Marshall Plan. The plan, intended to help rebuild Europe, including Germany, was revolutionary, ingenious, the thinking being that, if you let the defeated languish and suffer, they’ll rise up against you again.

When Lili heard her father-in-law fumbling at the door, she left her husband and rushed out to help her mother-in-law serve dinner and see whether Rozsi was coming to the table. Lili felt entirely recovered since the afternoon.

“You’re both here,” Lili said, smiling warmly. She liked being married. She had only to look ahead. “I’m so sorry, Mother,” she said.

“Don’t be silly,” Klari said. “You’ve worked hard enough, and my grandchild is far more important than a little dinner. Besides, Vera was in here, too, earlier, making her own family’s meal, so it would have been too crowded. Vera still loves this room.”

“I do, too,” Rozsi said. She watched as the two other women finished up, Lili running back and forth between the kitchen and the dining room.

Finally, Lili stopped by Rozsi, took her gently by the elbow and offered to help her freshen up.

Robert might have been the last one home, but he was the first at the dinner table, making himself comfortable at the head, asking Lili as she rushed about, “Where’s everyone?”

“I’ll get the others right away.”

“Where’s Paul?”

“He’s in your study.”

“Sitting in the dark?” Robert remembered the Russians. He wondered where it would all end.

Lili didn’t respond. Robert was gripping his knife and fork like an impatient boy. “Why would he do that? Why would he sit in my study like that, in the dark?”

“I don’t know, Father,” she said.

He smiled, happy to be called that by Lili. “Where’s everyone else?”

“Rozsi’s getting herself cleaned up for dinner. She wanted to do it alone this evening.”

“But
where’s everyone else
? I mean why aren’t they coming to dinner when dinner’s ready? I’m starving.”

“I’ll get them right away, Father.”

She saw him getting set to make a speech and didn’t know whether she should run off just then to carry out his first request. “We shouldn’t be asked to stay hungry one additional second after what we’ve been through,” he said loudly. “Have we spent so much time in our Swedish-Dutch insurance offices that we’ve altogether got out of the habit of
eating
?” Now he was yelling.

Lili brought in Rozsi first and set her down in the chair to her uncle’s left. Rozsi wore clunky heels she’d found somewhere. She didn’t acknowledge her uncle. Robert patted her hand. The blush on her cheeks looked like red mistakes she’d tried vigorously to erase.

Simon came next and sat opposite Rozsi, to his father’s right. “Hello, Father,” he said, but then noticed his cousin’s face, was stricken by how aged she seemed in the evening light.

“Go get her brother, please,” Robert said, and Simon dashed off again. When he returned with Paul, everyone was present.

They’d managed goose again. A friend high up, as close to the prime minister as one could get, had brought Robert a whole goose the previous day after Robert had removed a cyst from the man’s neck. Maria, Lili’s friend from the Madar Café, had given her some fresh spinach and beets. It was all to be followed by cherry strudel, made with sour cherries Klari herself was able to procure from a stand around the corner. It was a feast, a rare feast.

Klari lit the silver candelabra, which had survived the looting. It held a dozen candles. She switched off the chandelier. The table was set with pink Herend china, a throwback to their pre-war splendour. The room looked festive in the evening light.

Robert said to Paul, “Thank you for gracing us with your company.”

Simon looked at his father, surprised. Klari said, “Robert, please.”

“I was reading,” Paul said.

“What, in the dark?”

Lili helped her mother-in-law cut up and dish out the servings. Lili was especially adept at carving up the gleaming goose. Simon passed around the plates. On the wall behind Lili and Rozsi hung a photograph of the Becks, which Klari had brought out from her bedroom to help fill the space on the wall where Rippl-Ronai’s
Summer Harvest
once hung. The photograph featured Heinrich, Robert, Klari, Mathilde, two other sisters, Anna and Etel, their husbands Imre and Bela, Hermina and Ede, Anna’s son Janos, together with Simon, Paul, Istvan and Rozsi, all daughters, daughters-and sons-in-law and grandchildren of proud Maximillian and Juliana Korda, who sat stiffly in the drawing room of their country home, the black lacquered grand piano lurking behind them. Anna had returned to Debrecen, but her son had not. Her husband was still unaccounted for. Etel and her husband, Bela, the man who’d introduced Paul and Istvan to sex, had both perished. They were childless, like Hermina.