Gratitude (15 page)

“I have a photographer,” Paul said. “A good one. He’s eager to help. He’s a young man named Zoltan Mak.”

“His parents were murdered, too,” Anger said in German.

Paul was impressed by what the two men knew. Imagine doing what the two Swedes were proposing. Who did such things? Angels, possibly, but angels were invulnerable. They were better than angels. Paul knew he was doing good work, but it was for his own people. Wallenberg had come back to Hungary, to someone else’s cause, to someone else’s misery, to stand in front of the most formidable army in the world, and with what? Papers. Common sense. Law. Civility.

And hope. Because that was the key. Hold papers up to barbarians, and what did they do with them? But the Germans believed themselves to be civilized. Hold papers up to them, and they’d know how to read them. They were educated. They had produced Goethe and Beethoven.

Paul stared at the two Swedes. Wallenberg had chosen to return and was determined to do some good work here. What drove the man? What possessed him? Do we open the doors of our homes to shelter the Jews fleeing their own houses? Do we, what’s more, venture out on a stormy night to look for people to whom we could give shelter? It took a special species of person, one for whom enjoying life was not enough—success was not enough.

Mr. Kedves came by to get the notes Paul was to give him, but Paul didn’t invite him to stay. He said they could talk later.

Then the diplomats and Paul got out maps. Per Anger had brought a topographical map of the city with him. They spent the morning planning their moves, anticipating the moves of the invaders. Paul told the Swedes more than they knew about the Hungarian Arrow Cross. They would not be quite as predictable as the Germans, and while their aim was similar, the Arrow Cross would want to be in charge. “Insecurity is a fact of life,” Wallenberg said.

Paul kept an ear open for Viktor, but Viktor didn’t come back to work.

Nine

Szeged – June 6, 1944

ISTVAN FELT
as if he’d had a feast. So did Smetana. The two sat glowing together on the floor, digesting their sardines. Then Istvan said, “Time for some Dvorak, my boy.”

He dug out
Rusalka
and selected his favourite aria, “Mesicku na nebi hlubokem.” He sat back down with Smetana, who stepped lightly into his lap and purred. Istvan closed his eyes and let the song fill his ears as full as the little meal had filled his stomach. The thorny cat made himself at home in the tangle of Istvan’s legs, and Istvan held his little neck. Istvan’s raw, crude voice rose to meet the singer’s. “Sing your song to the moon, my sweet Rusalka, sweet, plump angel. Beg the shining oaf for your lover’s return.” Istvan’s eyes were closed; his head swayed bonelessly; his fingers gripped the scrawny, purring neck. “It’s all your fault, isn’t it, my feline friend, my Smetana, with your Fatherland? Yes, it is. Switch off your purring motor, Bedrich; switch off your sentiment, my small companion.”

Are there ancient sounds, too, which we confuse with modern ones, sounds that drift down to us like the ancient light of the stars, some of them long gone? Time is really our only captor, isn’t it, Smetana? In the ice age before us and the ice age after, there is no trace of us. Time has no dominion over us. It has a beginning and an end only in a flat world. We don’t exist in this time any more than the dead or the yet unborn live in it. We are mere
examples
of the original design, nothing more—I, a dentist, a Hungarian, resident of Szeged, brother of Paul and Rozsi, now orphans, all of us, the lover of a Catholic girl, caged on this day in who I am in a house where, at one time, peppers were ground into sweet paprika—you, a scrawny grey cat, named after a Czech composer of the nationalist period, domesticated, beyond hunting for your meals, sharing sardines with the human example of humanity beside you. We are not individuals. We mock individuality, and we reprise the themes of intolerance and love. And then we join the dead, Smetana, with the leaves fluttering down on us and then the snow, leaving behind us, some of us, sometimes, other examples of the next epoch ambling about until they, too, join us. Let us charge forward to the end of the flat Earth, some of it in night, some in day, some summer, some winter, all at once, like a sphere. Spheres have no perspective, young Smetana. They are examples of balls. They join the hunks and colours of the universe, examples of red, examples of rock. It’s not the colours that pass on, merely the individuals sporting them. Creations outlive their creators.

Marta, the ancient light of extinguished stars shine down on our present love. It is our Marta we love—isn’t it, you and I—don’t we—little instance of cat? We yearn for her and her alone, no other example, no other time or season, just Marta. I, time’s minister, need a single moment more with her, before we are out of time.

Miklos, my friend, my poet—Radnoti—help me with these feelings:

For a long time only the burned wind spins

Above the houses at home.

Walls lie on their backs,

Plum trees are broken,

And the angry night is thick with fear.

If only I could believe that,

If the things of value are not inside me yet,

I could have a home to go back to.

If only I could hear again the quiet hum

Of bees on the veranda, the jar of preserved plums

Cooling with the summer, the gardens half asleep,

Voluptuous fruit lolling on branches dipping deep,

And she before the hedgerow standing with sunbleached hair,

The lazy morning scrawling vague shadows on the air…

Why not? The moon is full, her circle entire.

Don’t leave me, friend—shout out—I am still standing.

Istvan had begun to grip the cat’s neck too tightly, had not heard the squeak, felt the motor turn off before he gasped and let go. The cat looked meekly up at Istvan but stayed in his lap. Do the old trees guard your childhood, too, young Smetana? Look at us. We sit here like beautiful still lifes, the two of us, awaiting our Marta. Memory sits like a still life, safe and quiet.

We once had lead soldiers, Paul and I, when we were young. Our Uncle Bela surprised us with two regiments of soldiers, one in brilliant gold and white and the other in red and blue. Paul’s were cavalry, mine were infantry. My brother had an impressive clay mountain from which his general and mounted men could look down on my green field of fighters, not well disguised, on account of the red. It took hours to set them all up. They occupied the whole of the floor of our playroom. Little Rozsi was upset about it, so we let two of her smallest dolls join the men on the floor. One of the dolls had Shirley Temple curls, like Rozsi, and the doll even got to sit on one of Paul’s lead horses, but in the back, out of harm’s way, looking like a curly giant on a horse.

When we were done, making certain with a straight edge that our men formed perfect lines, which Rozsi’s dolls could admire, we both stood up finally like the Colossus Brothers of Rhodes and looked down on our work. The soldiers were sparkling, exquisite—fierce in what they were capable of—but we didn’t want to get them dirty. We didn’t want to see them piled like scrap metal in the middle of our green field, not that day, so we looked at them for some time more, let them stare one another down, and then turned off the lights on them and quietly exited the room, taking Rozsi with us, whispering to her that they needed some rest now.

The light was receding on the little cottage in Szeged, but Marta was not home. Istvan took Smetana down to the cellar with him, replaced the planks above them, and they waited.

Ten

Budapest – June 16, 1944

ROZSI WAS TO MEET ZOLTAN
promptly at 6
P.M
. in their favourite spot off Andrassy Street, in the Epreskert, the Strawberry Gardens, though of course it was already past strawberry season, and it had turned suddenly cold this late spring night. The Epreskert was located a stone’s throw from the State Puppet Theatre and the Academy of Fine Arts, sprawling out in its Neo-Renaissance splendour.

Meeting at all was becoming problematic, but at least Rozsi and Zoli did not wear cloth Stars of David. They carried their Swedish papers everywhere. It was in the Strawberry Gardens, especially, that they liked to take in the fragrant breeze and speak their hearts. Rozsi had insisted on meeting Zoltan at their favourite bench, even though the bench had been—how had he put it?—deboned or pitted or shelled, she couldn’t remember which. She would have wanted to meet at that spot even if the bench had been removed altogether; if a building had been erected in their favourite gardens, she would have arranged to meet in the room where their bench had stood.

How selfish she felt. How could she want just one thing, day and night, how could she care only that she saw her Zoli? Would
not
wanting to see him make things right? Would starving herself of him make her virtuous? Should she abstain until she went to her grave? She wished, in fact, she could take flight with him—land on top of the Matterhorn and wait until all the smoke beneath them cleared. Avalanches fell downward—that much she knew. They should have headed for the Alps when they were able and not come back. Rozsi would have traded all of Hungary for Zoli—all of Europe—as long as there was a single peak they could alight on together unharmed.

She would happily have answered for it all later. She had been placed in a difficult time and situation. Surely, allowances could be made when the time came to answer. How simple the choices were, ironically, in extreme times: survive or perish, do this job or none, be with Zoli or no one.

Rozsi’s father had once set her up with a young man, Lorant Cukor, treasurer of Szeged, who was elegant, if a little too stocky. He was ravenous for her, thought Heinrich was arranging their marriage, the way it had been for Heinrich and Mathilde and for his own parents. Wherever they went, Rozsi felt Lorant was ready to drop to one knee in front of her and present her with a ring as he wetly kissed her hands with altogether too much saliva and innumerable sucking sounds, as if he were going at a plate of chicken wings. Much as she would have liked to please her father, and much as she appreciated Lorant’s parents, who’d held a lavish dinner and dance party in her honour in their white chateau in Szeged, she couldn’t go through with the arrangement. Her friends were already picking out a gown for her and a tiara decorated with subtle pink pearls, but she called them off.

For his part, Zoli was on a mission. His parents’ death compelled him to do a job he believed no one else would do now, the job his father alone had been willing to do. His Hasselblad was his primary companion, and it took him away to document things Rozsi barely wanted to hear about, let alone witness what he witnessed. And it was the camera that often came between them.

Today, Zoli was meeting with Gyula Halasz, a Hungarian photographer who’d made himself famous in Paris as Brassaï. It was Paul who’d told Zoli that Brassaï was briefly returning home. “I’ve seen his work. He’s very special,” Paul said, then sipped his drink. They were at Paul and Rozsi’s townhouse, polishing off what Paul had said was “the last bottle of brandy in the city.” “Brassaï’s work has begun to appear now in American magazines,” Paul said. “I came across Halasz in
Harper’s Bazaar
. The naïfs of the New World want to know what Decadent Old Bitch Europe looks like, and Brassaï gives it to them. I met him once, way back when.”

“I’ve seen some plates of his work,” Zoli said. “A friend of my father’s had a portfolio of Halasz’s photographs—
Brassaï’s
, excuse me. His ‘Lovers in a Café’ is masterful.”

Rozsi couldn’t understand how someone could be so captivated by a photographer. He was not a painter, not a musical composer. “How can a photograph be
masterful
?” she asked. “The work is all practically done for you by a machine.”

“Hardly,” Zoltan responded. He was sitting at the edge of a plush scarlet armchair, rolling his brandy glass between the tips of his fingers. “Photography is about vision; it’s never about a single moment but all such moments, if I can put it that way. The photographer composes with his eye the way a painter does.” Zoltan set his glass on the table beside him. “I know it sounds pretentious, but Brassaï’s photographs have illuminated not just a street corner or the shadowy room of a brothel. They have illuminated the whole world.” Zoli sounded to Rozsi like someone in love. “He caught the world of overheard conversations,” Zoli went on, “the world of spyglass intimacy. How else can I put it?” Zoltan was tensely rubbing his hands together now. “Brassaï had his own secrets within the dark chamber of his camera. He unearthed my own secrets, Paul’s—
yours
, possibly.”

Rozsi was blushing, as if Zoli were telling Paul one of
their
secrets. “So this is what it’s all about. This is what you want to do for a living, turn your camera into a spyglass; you want to follow lonely, unsuspecting fools as they step into brothels or pee in a bush?”

“You know that’s not what I’m doing.” He looked truly hurt. “I am not interested in recording people’s secrets.” He couldn’t look directly at her now. He regarded Paul instead. “Our time has eliminated the need for miniaturists. I am not interested in shooting weddings, or landscapes, nor will I record sittings.” Zoltan gestured to the walls around him. They were covered with photographs and paintings of Heinrich and Mathilde’s families. One portrait done in oils featured a family matriarch, some hundred and fifty years before, sitting erect in what looked like a throne, her purple dress resplendent, honey light pouring in from one side. Another canvas captured figures at a seaside who could easily have inspired Georges Seurat. A photograph in soft focus in a gilded frame showed Heinrich and Mathilde at the Taj Mahal with Klari and Robert, happy and carefree, if a little warm (as suggested by the fans the women held, caught in mid-flutter). Another gilded frame could barely contain the imposing figure of an army commander sporting a tall hat with a taller feather, not long before marching off somewhere—possibly to his doom? Grandest of all was a photograph, in an ornate cherry frame, of Heinrich as a young boy, gazing out of the heavy frame as if out of a casement window at the world below. He was adorned with a Victorian dress like a delicate young girl, his mother no doubt looking on with delight over the photographer’s shoulder.

Zoltan said to Rozsi, “I want to chronicle our time. There’s important work to be done. I want to bear witness. It’s not a
profession
I’m looking for now. It’s not about finding security.”

Rozsi knew she had misjudged him, and he was striking back. She had begun to cry, quietly, while her brother stood up tall. “You’re an inspiration to me, Zoli,” he said.

Zoli suddenly got to his feet, too, and said he had to go. “Thanks for the good brandy.”

He was half a block away when Rozsi caught up with him and grasped him to her.

“Please forgive me,” she said.

“It wasn’t you,” he said, though they both knew it was. “I had to get out of that staring gallery,” he said.

“Those are my ancestors.”

“Maybe I’m no good for you.”

She continued to hold on to Zoltan’s hands. “Please don’t say that. It’s nothing personal. I’m just jealous of your mechanical girlfriend, the one with the spyglass eye.”

Now he broke free of her. “Oh, it’s entirely personal,” he said. “If I’d been a junior solicitor in your brother’s firm, I wonder what you would have thought.”

“If you’d been junior solicitor in my brother’s firm, you’d be out of work now. It’s not your being a photographer that disturbs me. It’s that you’ve put yourself in the line of fire for some pictures.” Rozsi drew him close again and pressed her face against his chest. She could hear his heart beat.

He said, “It’s important to me.”

“If it’s important to you, then it’s important to me.”

He turned her face toward the lamplight and looked into her lakeland eyes. Zoltan reached into his jacket pocket. The jacket was charcoal grey, but in the light it looked brown. “I want to marry you,” he said, “if it’s possible.” He pressed a small black velvet pouch into her hands. Rozsi could feel the contours of the ring inside. “It was my mother’s. I want you to have it.” And he turned and ran off, leaving her standing there.

Rozsi rushed the little treasure inside her house and up to her room, clutching it in her fist. She sat on her bed beneath the canopy with its green fringe highlighted by drops of red silk rosebuds. Her heart beat frantically. She could feel something hard and square nestled with the ring inside the black pouch. It was a card, a note, muscularly folded a dozen times into a little square fortress of paper. The ring fell out and rolled against the white, curved Florentine leg of her settee. Rozsi rushed to retrieve it, then sat again on the bed.

It was a ruby ring set in a garland of gold filament leaves. Rozsi slipped it on her finger. It fit perfectly. It electrified her. She might just as well have stolen Zoltan himself into her room for the night, might as well, from that moment on, have been setting up house. The ruby radiated on her finger, warming the room.

She turned to the tightly folded note and opened it like a Japanese paper puzzle. The note had been written too carefully—boyishly—in thick blue ink with the Waterman fountain pen he told her he’d taken from his father’s study. Her eyes fell on the words:

Dearest Rozsi,

I want to outwait this bad time, and then marry you, if you’ll have me. This ring was my mother’s. May its ruby heart stand up to your stout Beck heart. Please take it and accept it.

Zoltan
I love

He’d forgotten to finish the note.
I love
. Like someone opening his arms to love. Rozsi heard a door opening in the hall and slipped the note and the ring under her pillow. She darted over to her white settee and perched herself on the end of it, stiffening her back, making herself obvious. She waited a good long minute, took out the pins in her hair, then returned to her bed, took her treasures from their hiding place, put the ring on her ring finger, opened the note and gazed at her favourite words.
I love

ZOLI WAS NOW
a half-hour late for Rozsi in the Strawberry Gardens. She was frantic by the time he did come. “What
kept
you?” she said. “Do you know what I’ve been thinking, what I tried
not
to imagine in the past half-hour?”

“I’m so sorry,” he said. He saw that she was wearing his mother’s ruby ring.

“Where have you
been
? I thought you were seeing that photographer, Gyula Brassaï?”

“Just Brassaï,” he said. “I saw him, but then I heard they were taking Jews to the new ghetto, out behind the Dohany Street synagogue. I wanted to see the wall going up there, get some shots of it.”

“Oh, those poor people. We could be behind that wall before long. Are there whole families—children—
everyone?
”

Zoltan nodded.

“Did Brassaï encourage you to do this—take pictures, I mean?”

“On the contrary. Brassaï saw some of my work, and…”

“And what?”

“And he urged me to get out and save myself, ‘live to fight another day’ sort of thing.” Zoltan was looking down at the grass. “But I had to get the pictures.”

“You
had
to.”

“Yes.”

“Were the Germans there, and the Nyilas?”

“Yes, both, but so was the Swede, Wallenberg, and so was your brother.”

“
Paul?
”

Zoli nodded. “It’s hard to understand what’s going on,” he said, “hard to feel secure in the hands of our prime minister or regent. Hitler knows Horthy is not his pal. He thinks even less of Miklos Kallay. He’s not enamoured of either, because their secret is out. Kallay is well-known for his two-step: two to the left, two to the right, as the situation requires. He’s very adept at it, bless his heart. Horthy doesn’t want Hungary fighting alongside Germany. But it’s true he’s had to release Kallay from his post to appease the Reich. He’s had to appoint Dome Sztojay prime minister, and as you know he’s a pal of Ferenc Szalasi, the fascist. I saw them there today, Szalasi’s Arrow Cross goons, at the ghetto wall. They hate the Germans probably as much as they hate us, because they want to be boss, the thugs—bastards.”

Rozsi took Zoli’s hand. “What will happen,” she asked, “if Hungarians are drawn into the Russian campaign alongside the Germans? We’ll be crushed.”

Zoli said, “It’s very tricky. It’s more difficult to be Hitler’s enemy than his friend. As his friend, at least you know where you stand—
never
as his enemy. And we’re the pawns in the middle, waiting for the bullet in our heads. And we have no friends. There aren’t that many of us in this country, and yet we’re the professors, doctors and judges and at least one photographer. You need look no further than our circle. We’re terribly exposed. We’ve been called the Magyar Israel. So we’ll take the fall for failing our own nation. You can’t look out only for yourself when European Jews are disappearing all around us. You can’t be seeking land and knighthood from your leaders when a quarter of your own nation or more is hungry. Here we are, building baroque palaces and opera houses and banks while children in villages a few kilometres from the capital haven’t got shoes to wear to school.”

“You can’t be finding reasons to justify people’s hatred of us,” Rozsi said. “We are not to blame for all that.”

“No, but we’re fat scapegoats, we Hungarian Jews, easy targets for a madman with a cannon.”