Love and Treasure (12 page)

They left the room and walked down the stairs, Jack’s arm looped around Ilona’s shoulders, holding her close. They had been together nearly six months now, and he’d proven the seriousness of his commitment by extending his service for another six months in order to stay with her in Salzburg, but this—the bones of her shoulder, the brush of her lips across his, the flavor of her mouth—was the only access she allowed him to her body. The hours they spent together in the cinema or at the Marionetten Theater, in cafés, on blankets spread on the chilly banks of the Leopoldskorn before the snow began or, now that the ground was too wet, in darkened doorways, had become the venue of a single ongoing wrestling match, gentle and infuriating.

The rain was coming down in its perpetual Salzburg “strings,” the
schnurlregen
for which the city was so infamous, and they decided to ride the streetcar rather than walk. The military had lifted the ban on fraternization in September, and for the last few months they’d been allowed to walk freely through the city, to go to movies and frequent cafés, to ride the streetcar without worrying about being discovered by an MP in a bad mood. The car was half empty, and so they were able to sit together.

“What was it you wanted to tell me?” he asked, trying not to dread her response.

“I received today a letter from my aunt Firenze,” Ilona said, and showed him the thin blue envelope. “She is in Budapest, trying to arrange transport back to England. She says there is nothing left for us in Nagyvárad. She invites me to go with her to her old home. In Manchester.”

Jack felt his chest constrict with anxiety, with loss, as though he were already missing her, even as he felt her next to him, her thigh pressing against his. “Do you want to go to Manchester?”

“I don’t know. Before the war I never imagined living anywhere but Hungary. In the cemetery in Nagyvárad are the graves of my great-great-grandparents, maybe even further back than that. My grandfather said we could trace our family back a thousand years, all the way to the Khazars. But now Nagyvárad is gone.”

“So what will you tell her?” he said. “Your aunt Firenze.”

“I don’t know.” She slipped her hand into his. “Maybe we are not so different after all, you and I. Maybe I’m like you a soldier who can’t leave her post. I have to wait for Etelka, just like you have to stay and guard the train until it is returned to its rightful owners.”

He felt a stab of shame. If she knew what had happened today she would be horrified at the comparison.

Ilona folded the letter and put it back in its envelope. “After Etelka comes, and after your work is done, after that, we’ll see.”

They had arrived at their stop, and Jack jumped down from the streetcar and lifted his hands for her. Surprised, she leaped into them, and he spun her around, placing a kiss on her lips as he set her on the ground.

“You are so silly, Jack!” she said, laughing.

Together they crossed the road to the movie theater, where the marquee read
DR. EHRLICH
’
S MAGIC BULLET
.

“Are you sure we should see this?” he asked. He loved Edward G. Robinson, but he was less enthusiastic about the idea of passing an afternoon with his girl immersed in the biography of the man who had discovered the cure for syphilis. “Do you know what it’s about?”

“I know, yes. My sister, Etelka, I told you she was a medical student. This is exactly the kind of movie she would go to.”

The theater was dark and murky but, unlike the theaters of his childhood in Manhattan, was gloriously, impeccably clean. Though he enjoyed not having to wonder whether it was popcorn or something more disgusting that crunched beneath his shoes as he walked down the aisle, he
missed the smell of butter and the din of a few thousand children left to their own devices for an entire day’s worth of cartoons, newsreels, and features in the RKO Roxy or the Rivoli.

He maintained an impassive expression as Ilona scanned the crowd, looking as always for her sister’s face. She settled down only once the screen flickered to life. Halfway through the second reel, the lights, such as they were, came on, but the projectionist did not stop the film.

The crowd murmured in protest, and Jack amused himself imagining what the response would have been in New York. The shouts of disgust, the boxes of popcorn flung at the screen. Four Austrian policemen in their Wehrmacht uniforms, stripped of insignia and dyed a streaky blue, came down the dimly lit aisles and stood in front of the screen, the looming intent scowl of Robinson projected on their own pale faces.

“Out, out!” the officers shouted in German. “You lazy pigs. It’s time for work, not play!”

“What the hell?” Jack said. He looked around but realized that he was, as far as he could tell, the only American officer in the theater.

The policemen spread out through the theater. They walked slowly up the aisles, stopping periodically and hauling out a young man or woman, berating them as shirkers and layabouts and sending them out of the theater. The policeman closest to Jack and Ilona was rotund, with a face full of acne scars and a uniform slightly more official looking than the others’. He carried his nightstick in his hand, slapping it against his palm and using it to prod and push at his victims.

When he reached Ilona and Jack, he stopped. He jutted his chin at Ilona and said, “You! Why are you not at your job?”

“I am exempt,” she said.

“DPs are not exempt! Show me your papers!”

Ilona pulled a folded piece of paper out of the leather change purse Jack had bought her at the PX. It was her brand-new refugee permit, received only a few days ago from the UNRRA office in the Chiemseehof Palace.

“Put that away,” Jack said. “This isn’t Nazi Germany. You don’t need to show him your papers.”

She hesitated. “In the newspaper yesterday was an article complaining about how people are going to the cinema instead of working to clean up the city. Perhaps now they begin arresting people.”

“It’s their mess,” Jack said. “Let them clean it up.” To the police officer, in German, he said, “She’s with me.”

The officer hesitated a moment and then shrugged and joined his colleagues and the small, bedraggled group of frustrated cinephiles they had assembled at the back of the theater. Batons at the ready, the police herded their charges out the door.

The projectionist turned out the lights and Edward G. Robinson was denounced, exonerated, and ultimately died, but Jack had difficulty paying attention. When the lights went up, he led Ilona swiftly through the crowd, trying to get away as quickly as possible. When they reached the street, dark now, he said, “It’s cold. You want to get something to eat?”

She nodded and shrugged deeper into the warmth of the wool coat he had had his mother send from New York. It was one of the few things that he had given Ilona that she hadn’t passed on to another, ostensibly more needy, DP. They walked through the old city, bundled up against the biting wind and the flurries of snow. They walked into the Getreidegasse, and soon they were ensconced at a table in a corner of the gaily lit Café Mozart.

Though he didn’t usually, today he ordered a piece of cake for himself as well. The whipped cream tasted funny; it had, he thought, gone off. That the café had cream at all, not to mention flour and sugar, in a time of increasing food shortages, spoke to a great Austrian capacity for ingenuity, at least when it came to sweets. Ilona was either too polite or too hungry to complain. Only once she’d licked her finger and used it to blot up the last crumbs of cake did he say, “Listen, Ilona. I have something to tell you.”

“Today is a day of news, I guess.”

He took a deep breath, and told her the miserable thing he’d spent the day trying to forget, the thing he knew he owed it to her to say. “Price came into the warehouse with a memo. The stuff on the train isn’t going back to Hungary after all. Not anytime soon, anyway.” Jack bit his lip, waiting for her angry reply, but then suddenly conscious of a feeling of resentment. Why should he be afraid to tell her? It wasn’t her property. What right had she to make him feel bad about it? But at once he knew he was being irrational. She wasn’t making him feel bad. He was doing that all by himself. And he should feel bad. It was terrible what his army was doing. Criminal.

“What happened?” Ilona said, every bit as shocked as he expected her to be. Though not angry. Not yet. “Weeks ago you said the Hungarian delegation had come!”

“I don’t know,” Jack said. “There’s some debate going on between the Hungarians and the Jewish Agency. Price wouldn’t tell me much.”

“What is there to debate?” she said. “It is simple. The property belongs to Hungary. Give it back. End of story.”

He sighed and said, “Nothing’s ever that simple.”

“Of course it is.”

“Think about it, Ilona. Who are we going to turn over the property to? The Hungarian government? They’re a defeated enemy. We aren’t about to give them a huge pile of loot.”

“You give it to the people it belongs to.”

“How? You want the U.S. military to just roll into Budapest and set up a commissary? Give it out to people on the street?”

“There are receipts, Jack! Many people have receipts.”

“Most of the people who got those receipts are dead, you know that. And even the ones who aren’t, how many of them managed to keep hold of their receipts?”

“You could do what you said you were going to do! Give the property to the Hungarian delegation, the representatives of the Hungarian Jewish community.”

“There’s some kind of problem with them. Some kind of dispute between them and the Jewish Agency. It could take years to resolve.” And by then, he knew, it would all be gone, chipped away, looted in spoonfuls and by the yard.

He waved his empty coffee cup at the waitress, whose frown was as starched as her crimped apron.

Ilona said, “It is not simple. I know that. It is all very complicated. But this is not complicated: my parents are dead. Don’t you think the U.S. Army should give me back my bicycle?” Her face was pale, and she was trembling. With anger or sadness he couldn’t tell. Both, he thought.

“I swear to God, Ilona. If I could find your family’s things in that mess, I would give them back to you. I would give it all back to you, whatever my bosses say.”

“I know,” Ilona said.

He imagined bringing her back to the warehouse and searching together through the crates and boxes until they found her parents’ wedding rings, her father’s watch, her bicycle.

Ridiculous. Even if by some miracle her family’s property was there, and even if it was possible to search through crate after crate of identical gold bands and identify two among tens of thousands, most of his time
nowadays was spent keeping people out of the warehouse to protect its contents from pilfering. He could hardly hand anything over to her when he’d threatened his own men with court-martial for the same.

“I’ll get you a bicycle,” he said.

“I didn’t mean it about the bicycle. It was symbolic.”

“I know. But still. You could, you know, ride around the city looking for Etelka.” And just like that he handed to her another helping of the false hope he knew it was so bad for her to indulge in.

Her pallor lifted, and she shifted her chair closer to his. She rested her head on his shoulder. He put his arm around her and pulled her close.

“I know it’s not your fault,” she said.

He kissed her there, in the middle of the café, under the furious eye of the prim and bitter waitress. She not only let him but kissed him back, harder and more urgently than ever before, and he was conscious of having won something from her and ashamed at what it had taken to do so.

•
8
•

HE ORGANIZED HER A BICYCLE
. Ball’s promotion to captain had come with access to a jeep and driver. It was a small matter to convince David not to turn in the bicycle he’d been using but to hand it over.

“I should tell you,” Jack said. “I’m not planning to use it for military purposes.”

David laughed. “Honestly, Jack, I couldn’t care less. I’m just glad not to have to ride that thing anymore. A bicycle is a ridiculous means of transport in a city where it is always either raining or snowing. I’m surprised you want it.”

“I’m going to give it to someone,” Jack said.

“Your girl?”

“Yes.”

“Good for you.”

“I’m taking a piece of military equipment and giving it to her.”

“Oh, for God’s sake. Half of Salzburg lives on American rations. Pry off the damn USAF tag, paint the bicycle pink. No one will notice or care.”

So that’s what Jack did, quashing his too-easily-agitated conscience. It was a Westfield Columbia, with heavy-duty rims and spokes. He painted it bright red, a color more suited to his girlfriend’s fiery nature, adjusted the brakes, oiled the chain, clamped a tire pump to the frame, and wrapped a chain and lock around the seat. He rode it to the Hotel Europa, then carried it up the three flights of stairs to her room. He knew the moment he walked in that something was wrong; the room was silent. One of Ilona’s roommates, the only other Hungarian to have remained with Ilona in Salzburg when the others left, rushed up to him, took his arm, and, whispering incomprehensibly in his ear, pointed to where Ilona lay on her iron cot, curled up in a ball, her knees tight to her chest and her arms folded at her belly. She clutched each arm with the hand of the other so tightly that the tips of her fingers were white and her nails left angry red slivers of moon in the flesh that had all too recently grown plump and healthy.

He set the bicycle against the wall and allowed himself to be led to her bedside.

“What happened?” he asked the other woman.

She answered in Hungarian, and he cursed that impossible language with its
cs
’s and its
sz
’s, devoid of cognates to any language he knew.

“Ilona,” he said, kneeling at her side. “Ilona?”

She opened her eyes.

“Ilona, what happened?”

She looked at him, but without interest or recognition, like you might glance at a crack in the sidewalk as you stepped over it. She closed her eyes again.