Love and Treasure (48 page)

Endre and Miloš’s innocent roommates would be released after nearly a year in the purgatory of pretrial detention, and Endre, Miloš, and Gulya
would be liberated from prison with great fanfare in 1919, when Béla Kun and his dictatorship of the Proletariat took power over Hungary. Endre Bauer became a functionary in the Political Investigating Authority, where he made it his business to terrorize Ignác E. Had the regime lasted any longer than a few short weeks, he might have succeeded in engineering Ignác’s arrest, and perhaps even Nina’s. In the end it was he at the wrong end of the hangman’s noose. The White Terror that ended the transient Hungarian socialist utopia and saved Ignác proved a disaster for most of the Jews, inspiring as it did the
numerus clausus
and God only knows what else to come. Of the other conspirators less is known. Miloš left for Ruthenia and thereafter disappeared from view. Gulya returned to the circus, where I understand he remains to this day, the patriarch of a family of gifted acrobats.

“Poor Tanya,” Gizella said.

“Yes,” Nina said. “At least the old woman is safe.” And indeed the prostitute who’d acted as chaperone was never captured. Sometimes when I pass crowds of such ladies in which one strikes me as particularly elderly, I wonder if it is not she.

Gizella said, “They tell me it’s Ignác E. I have to thank for my release. And for yours, I presume?”

“Yes.”

“Will you marry him?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t.”

“I have no choice.”

“You always have a choice. Run, Nina. Go somewhere, study medicine. Be a doctor. It’s all you’ve ever wanted.”

“There’s nowhere to go.”

“Go to America!”

“I can’t.” But for a moment Nina indulged a fantasy of a new life in a new world. A small practice in an anonymous city. A settlement house, like the ones she’d read about in the feminist newspaper, where she could treat poor immigrant women and even perhaps inspire some to follow her into the field. And then she allowed the dream to dissolve, like powdered aspirin in a glass of water, leaving behind only a bitter residue.

Gizella said, “Did you promise to marry him in return for my release?”

“Not just yours. Mine too.”

“A bad bargain.”

“No.”

“One prison for another.”

“A gilded cage is hardly a prison.” As she said them, Nina knew that the words were at once true and false. The petty tediums of a Budapest matron, even those of a Transylvanian performing dwarf, could not be fairly compared with the torments of hard labor. And yet chains, no matter how delicate and finely wrought, still chafe.

With a great clanking and a rush of steam and smoke, the train lurched to life. Nina stripped off her glove, stood on her toes, and pressed her bare hand to the glass. It was gritty beneath her palm, and cold. Gizella glanced fearfully at her jailers, and then did the same. They remained this way, connected by a pane of glass warming ever so slightly beneath their touch, until the train began its slow, lurching motion out of the station.

“I haven’t seen her since,” Nina told me. “Nor heard from her. I don’t know if she writes and my father takes the letters. I telephoned Mrs. Schwimmer, but even that lady has had no word.”

“I have something for you,” I said.

I went to my desk, took the key from its hiding place, and opened the locked drawer to which none, not even my wife, has access. From the drawer, I removed a small package wrapped in oiled paper and tied tightly with string. With my paper knife I sliced open the string, opened the paper, and revealed a pouch sewn from rich, heavy velvet. Inside that lay an enameled pendant on which was painted a brilliant peacock decorated with gemstones in purple, green, and white.

“Gizella’s locket!” Nina said, rushing to my side.

She smelled of citrus and verbena, sharp and tangy, fresh and clean.

“Open it,” I said, pouring the locket and its chain into her hand.

She slid her fingernail along the side of the pendant and activated the hidden spring. The secret locket popped open.

“What is this?” she said, peering closely at the photograph. “It’s not the same photograph!”

I handed her my magnifying glass, and she gazed for a long moment at the tiny picture of two young ladies, one small, one tall. One dark, one fair, in matching white gowns, behind them billowing the banners of the International Woman Suffrage Congress.

“Gizella entrusted me with the locket, but I had no opportunity to give it to you until now. I feared to send it to your home.”

“My father would have destroyed it. And the photograph?”

“Don’t you remember? The photographer who took your picture that
afternoon when I came to the congress? I took his card and found him. He printed a photograph for me small enough to fit in the locket.”

I had also paid for a larger image, one that resided in my locked drawer, but which I would eventually slip between the pages of
Gray’s Anatomy
, where I would come upon it whenever I was troubled by a tricky diagnosis and required a reminder of the basics of my medical education, or whenever I wanted to see Nina’s face. Years later, after encountering Gizella at Bad Gastein, I had the photograph copied at not insubstantial expense, and sent to her, care of the manager of the Lilliput Guild. I was disappointed that she never wrote to thank me, but perhaps the photograph never reached her.

“Will you wear it now?” I asked.

“Yes,” Nina said. “And always.” She handed me the locket and I moved behind her and draped it around her fragrant neck, where it nestled in her powdered décolletage.

As my thick fingers struggled with the clasp, I allowed myself to breathe in her scent, to feel her soft hair against my cheek. When it finally caught, I did not move, but instead remained close to her, feeling the length of her body against my own. I dreamed for a moment of slipping my hands around her waist, of cupping her breasts in my palms, of pressing my lips against her soft, white neck.

My esteemed colleagues, readers of this case history, do not think I fail to appreciate your response to the paragraph above. I can hear the clucking tongues and feel the condemnatory glances as you dismiss my heartfelt words as failed countertransference. You think I have fallen into the dark hole of the unconscious that lies in wait for every psychoanalyst. You reprove me for projecting my own traumatic history on my patient. You insist that Nina is nothing more than an object for my distorted perceptions of previous relationships. You revile me with that most awful word: “inappropriate.” Even those of you who are disciples of my esteemed, my beloved, Sándor Ferenczi tar me with this brush. You might celebrate my “emotional reactivity.” You might praise me for creating a corrective emotional context awash in empathy in which my patient can be nurtured, even cured. But you would never recognize my feelings for Nina for what they are. You call it countertransference. But it is not.

It is another thing. Unrequited. Never to be acted upon.

Love.

THOUGH THE ROOM WAS
only half full, and the rows of crushed-velvet chairs closest to the podium nearly empty of occupants, Jack slipped into a chair in the back. Worried that he would feel self-conscious wearing his academic tweeds to the showroom of a prestigious auction house, he had chosen to dress, this morning, in a fashionable three-button suit with a notched lapel, worn with a boldly striped tie in a Windsor knot. Now he felt overdressed. The scene was not the frantic hive of natty gold dealers and dandyish antiques merchants that he had imagined. On the contrary. The auction was poorly attended, and the shabby dealers and buyers seated on the chairs looked bored rather than thrilled by the contents of the catalogue.

If Jack’s train had not suffered an interruption of service yesterday between 7:12 a.m. and 7:57 a.m., if he had not forgotten his book on the kitchen counter when he’d rinsed out his coffee cup, then he would not have been compelled to read the
New York Times
with unusual thoroughness, from front to back, and would thus in all likelihood never have seen the advertisement in the Arts section announcing to the public that the Parke-Bernet Galleries would be holding an auction of gems, watches, silverware, china, and stamps. The items to be sold were, according to the ad, in a formulation that struck Jack as curious if not weaselly, “war victim assets,” and proceeds would go to the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees.

Even though he had not been able to determine that the property to be sold had in fact come from the doomed wagons of the Hungarian Gold Train, he was so eager to attend the auction that he had considered canceling his morning class. Most of the students taking Ancient Greek I in summer school had failed it the previous year, and he knew they’d be relieved to have a day’s break from second-declension omicron-stem nouns. He was too conscientious, however, to indulge either their indolence or his own anxiety. He waited until after class, though he skipped his usual hours in his carrel in Butler Library, where he was at work on his graduate thesis.

He had missed the beginning of the auction and thus any announcement that might have been made about the source of the property to be sold. By the second lot, however, he was sure he was in the right place. Where else but the Gold Train would the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees have acquired this much Hungarian Herend porcelain? Though a few large pieces were auctioned individually, the rest was sold in bulk, hundreds of vases, figurines, bowls, pitchers, and sets of service at a time. The items went quickly, and the auctioneer did not seem displeased with the bidding. There was less interest, however, in lots 16 to 28: a dozen lots of watches, also sold in bulk. When the auctioneer brought his gavel down, confirming the sale of thousands of men’s gold watches for a meager two dollars apiece, Jack was so astonished that he nearly missed the crying of the next lot, number 29, “Enameled Jewelry.”

As the bidding crept along, he slipped his hand into his pocket, as if to reassure himself that the pendant was still there. More than two years before, the morning he left Salzburg for Hamburg, where he was to board the first of three ships that would eventually deposit him in Hoboken, New Jersey, he had gone to the warehouse to hand over the keys to his replacement, a young property-control officer who would be present the following year when another young American, this one a lawyer working for the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees as a reparations officer, arrived with a team of four appraisers and an expert in jewelry to catalog and inventory the contents of the train. Over the course of ten days, these men would work their way swiftly through the warehouse, appraising the property in bulk rather than individually, a technique agreed upon after a representative from Gimbels department store had toured the warehouse and announced that it would take his complete staff, working full-time, not weeks or months but years to examine, itemize, and appraise even just the individual pieces of silver, let alone the rest of the train’s contents.

On Jack’s last day in Salzburg, the fate of the contents of what people had only recently taken to calling the Hungarian Gold Train was yet to be decided. To Jack of course it had long since become clear that the property would never end up in the hands of the heirs of its former owners. As he watched the daily trainloads of Jewish refugees streaming into Salzburg, he believed that eventually the United States would take the easiest and most financially sensible route and hand over the property to the Jewish Agency to be sold, with the proceeds used to care for the
DPs and to facilitate their resettlement as far as possible from the pale of American responsibility. As far away as Palestine, for example.

And the truth was that by then Jack was not sure that this was not after all the best solution to the problem of the Hungarian Gold Train. The task of identifying individual owners of each piece of property was monumental. Moreover, hundreds of thousands of Hungary’s Jews were dead and, of those who survived, thousands were leaving their homes and their country, escaping the Soviets as they should have escaped their own countrymen a decade before. Perhaps selling the contents of the train to benefit the DPs was the only solution that approximated justice. The argument made by the Hungarian Jewish remnant that the property should be given to them to sell, the money to be used toward rebuilding their community, was appealing, but only if one ignored the malign and burgeoning Soviet influence in Hungary. Was anyone so naïve as to believe that anything turned over to the Hungarians would eventually reach Jewish hands? Moreover, wasn’t the Jewish Agency’s solution the one that Ilona herself had supported, in that last grim conversation before she disappeared forever from his life?

Jack would recall these considerations when, years later, he would read in the
New York Times
about the defection from Hungary of senior officials of the Finance Ministry, who subsequently provided information about the ultimate disposition of the most valuable of the Gold Train assets, the jewels and gold stolen by Árpád Toldi and confiscated by the French. Nearly two thousand kilograms of gold and precious gems had been promptly turned over by France to the Hungarian government, which had determined, with equal promptness, that there was no way to positively identify ownership of the gold and jewelry and thus no reason to assume it had belonged to Jews. The Jewish community of Budapest, which had petitioned the French government so long and so vociferously for the property’s return, recovered not a gram of gold, not a single diamond.