Mrs. Tuesday's Departure: A Historical Novel of World War Two (5 page)

“She’s doesn’t understand,” Mila cried. “She insists that she’s going to the opera with De
sz
o. Is he really coming for her?”

“No, of course not.”

Deszo was a professor of economics at the university where Anna taught. He broke off their affair and returned to his wife when Anna’s behavior became embarrassing.

“How will we get her to the train station?”

“By entering the play where she is.” I said stepping over to relieve Mila. “Anna, there’s snow on the ground, you’ll have to wear your boots.”

Anna sniffed. “My boots will look ridiculous with my gown.”

“Carry your shoes and put them on once you’re inside the theater or they’ll be ruined.” I knelt in front of her and began replacing the blue silk shoes with leather boots.

Anna kicked me away. “Why are you hurrying me? I still have to do my face!”

“You don’t have time to do your face,” I sighed. “Deszo will be here any minute.”

Anna jumped up and raced to her vanity. “You should have told me he was going to be early!”

Staring at her reflection in the mirror she rubbed ugly slashes of rouge across her pale cheeks. She grabbed a lipstick and traced an uneven outline around her lips. Her hands raked through her knotted hair. “I always knew you were jealous of me, but I never thought you’d try to steal my lover! With your husband just down the hall, have you no decency?”

I bundled my sister’s coat around her shoulders and steered her towards the door. “Mila, can you grab the suitcase over there?”

“But where’re your things, Nana?”

“Packed with Anna’s,” I replied. “Can you manage our case with yours? Just until we get downstairs to the taxi.”

We stumbled down the hall, Mila clutching our suitcase, Anna fighting to free herself from my grasp. The front door stood open, the two suitcases next to it gone.

“They’ve left without us!” Mila ran out on to the stairway and leaned over the railing. The echo of the heavy steel front door closing two floors below rang through the stairwell and ended in silence.

What I kne
w
as soon as Mila uttered those words had come true. Now there was nothing to do but sweep up the broken remains of glass and plate and begin again.

“I need to go out for a while,” I said.

Anna grabbed her coat and headed toward the door to join me. “Where are we going?”

“Stay here with Mila. I’m just going to the grocer’s.” I took her coat and hung it on the hook near the door. “I won’t be long. We need food. There’s none left in the cupboard.”

“You’re coming back, aren’t you?” Anna’s face wrinkled with childish concern. I worried about leaving her alone, but I knew that the quick trip would take too long if she came with me. I hated that the simplest tasks had become a choice of loyalty over practicality.

“I’ll be back in a very short time.”

“How long?”

I looked at my watch and then at the one on her wrist, synchronizing the two. I tapped her wrist. “I’ll be back in thirty minutes.”

“When will you be back?” she asked again.

I sighed, “Soon.”

“Will Deszo be with you?”

“I don’t think so.”

“No, I guess he wouldn’t.” She shrugged her shoulders.

Anna decided to go to her room. In her usual war with lucidity, she voiced both a desire to make the final act at the opera and the need to rest. As I watched her walk down the hall in her filthy ball gown, I thanked God for the clear moments she still had left, and shook my head knowing those moments grew more infrequent as her insanity claimed a wider territory.

I grabbed my purse and shoved the money that I’d tied around my neck into it. As much as I needed to go to the grocer’s to replenish our supply of food, even more importantly I needed time away from Anna and Mila to sort out my thoughts.

Trudging downstairs, I wondered why I’d been so blind to Ilona’s ruse. Passing by the door of the other apartment in this building, I wondered if I would be able to turn to my neighbors for help. Or trust them to keep a secret.

I shook my head. Mourning the past or counting on the help of acquaintances would get me nowhere. I had one task: protect Mila. I leaned against the steel door and stepped back into the afternoon sun and fresh air.

As the laws against Jews and those associated with them grew more stringent, we’d decided it was best to dismiss our housekeeper. It wasn’t fair to expect that someone with no ties to our family should be trusted to keep secret our hiding of Jews in our home.

If it had been Marie, the devoted housekeeper we’d had during my years of marriage, she would still be with us, and trust would never have been an issue. As the war drew closer to our boarders, she returned to her village to help her brother’s family.

Since Marie’s departure, I’d hired and fired another four housekeepers, for incompetence or suspected thievery. In years past, I would have overlooked a housekeeper who took a few of our foodstuffs for her own kitchen. As supplies grew more difficult to purchase, I could no longer accept the loss of food that was becoming impossible to replace.

I made m
y
way down the street to the small shop owned by Mr. Nyugati. I was surprised to find the metal gate drawn down in front of the doorway leading to his shop. I knocked and called out his name.

“We’re closed,” answered his wife. “Go away.”

I yelled through the seams in the gate.
“
It’s
me, Natalie.
Let me in. I just need a few things.”

“We have no more food to sell.”

“Please,” I pleaded. “I’ll take whatever you have.”

I heard Mr. Nyugati arguing with his wife and then the gate rolled up half way and I quickly ducked under the door.

The air was dark and warm inside the shop. As my eyes adjusted, I saw that Mrs. Nyugati had spoken the truth. The shelves were barren of all but a few cans.

“What happened?” I asked.

“The Arrow Cross soldiers were here this morning. They came in and took everything we had and didn’t pay,” Mrs. Nyugati cried.

“How could they?”

“They said we were selling to Jews,” Mr. Nyugati replied. “So we were to be closed down. In the meantime, they would stop us by taking everything.”

“You must report them!”

Mrs. Nyugati scoffed, “To whom? The police? It’s your kind that are getting us into trouble in the first place!”

“Be quiet woman,” Mr. Nyugati warned his wife.

“It’s true!” she cried.

“They’re getting worse,” he said. “Now anyone caught helping a Jew faces severe punishment.” He gave me a knowing look.

“One of the men said they will pay us to give them names,” Mrs. Nyugati leaned forward and smiled.

“It’s just me and Anna now. Ilona and her family are gone,” I replied.

“When?” she asked.

I looked at this small round woman who I’d know all my life and was surprised by the change in demeanor. When Mila was a child she would come to this store and Mrs. Nyugati would give her a handful of candy. “They left this morning.”

“Not likely,” Mrs. Nyugati sneered. “The borders are closed.”

“Enough,” Mr. Nyugati pushed his wife toward the back of the store. When she’d left, he turned to me. “If they are in hiding, make sure it’s not your apartment. They’ve begun to increase their searches.”

“No, they are gone. But what will you do now?” I knew the small income they made from this store was barely enough to support them.

“I’ve sent my son out to talk with their commander,” Mr. Nyugati sighed. His son had been denied service in the army as the result of a clubfoot. “I’ve given him the small amount of money I had and he will try to make a bribe that will allow us to re-open.”

“Is there anything left that I could buy?” I walked down the aisle picking up the cans of vegetables. “I’ll take whatever you have.”

“Here let me help you,” Mr. Nyugati took my basket and began to fill it. He carried it behind the counter and reaching beneath pulled out a loaf of bread, a short string of kielbasa, a wedge of cheese with bits of blue mold clinging to the edges, and a couple handfuls of potatoes.

“I greatly appreciate this,” I opened my purse to pay him. “Will you be able to get more?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Here, please go out the back way along the alley. It’s safer that way.”

I followed hi
m
down the long hall that bisected the storeroom and the stairway that lead to the small apartment where they lived with their son, Stephen, and his wife and child.

He opened the door for me and looked out to make sure the alleyway was clear before stepping aside to let me pass.

Pausing, I asked, “Can I come again?”

“It’s not safe,” he said. “I’ll send my son to your apartment in a few days.”

“Thank you Mr. Nyugati,” I pressed money into his hands.

I hurried into the alleyway and heard the door shut behind my back. The alley was nearly as dark as the store and stank of rubbish. I stepped gingerly around piles of rotting food and stifled a scream as a rat, shiny with filth, ran across my path. 

At the end of the building, I stepped onto the sidewalk just as a troop of Arrow Cross soldiers crossed on the other side of the street.

The leader of the group screamed, “Halt!”

I jumped backwards into the shadow of the alley my heart pounding as I pressed against the grimy brick wall. I held my breath and strained to hold the basket in my shaking hands.

I was not their prey.

An old woman wearing a faded yellow star on the breast of her coat stood three paces in front of them. She froze.

“Why are you on the street and not in the ghetto?”

I saw her flinch and offer her basket.

They laughed and knocked it out of her hands. “Show us your papers!”

She pointed to the star on her coat and then began to fumble with her purse, searching to produce the documents.

“Who are you buying food for? Where is the rest of your family hiding?”

Sobbing, she denied their charges. They screamed at her calling her a “filthy Jewish whore”. They surrounded her, pushing and shoving her against the building. A young
soldier
raised his fist and brought it down. Her head snapped back against the blow and she stumbled but remained upright.

Others passed by this scene with heads bowed, making a wide circle or crossing the street. Before the war, these thugs would have been banished like a pack of dogs.

Yet, no one uttered a word in protest as the soldiers joined their comrade in the beating. The woman slid to the pavement with her arms raised in futile defense against the rain of blows. Her pleas for mercy met with laughter and insults and steel-toed boots that punctured her stomach and broke her ribs.

My stomach churned in disgust. Dropping my basket of food, I pushed myself from the wall and ran across the street.

“Stop it! You’ll kill her!”

I threw myself on top of the woman, holding her bleeding head in my arms. Her hands grasped the back of my coat as if she were drowning. Strong arms grabbed me; I continued to scream as they threw me to the side.

My hands scraped against the concrete as I tried again to enfold her in my arms. I felt the skin of my knuckles tear. I held her. My face pushed into the collar of her coat. I smelled the sweat of her fear mingled with my own. When I raised my face to hers, our eyes met. I looked into weary brown eyes, creased with pain, of not this event, but the years that preceded it.

“No,” she whispered. “Go.”

A young brute pulled me away. He threw me onto the sidewalk and I grabbed his leg to regain my balance. Instinctively he swung the butt of his rifle, striking me in the face. As I slid into darkness, I heard someone calling my name.

They linked arm
s
and began a slow walk up Park Avenue toward St. Catherine’s, the little Catholic Church where Mrs. Tuesday attended the evening mass, daily, for the last fifty years, of her married, and now widowed life in New York. They bowed their heads against the cold and followed the fresh tracks in the snow-covered sidewalk. When she peered forward there was little to see, the apartment buildings formed an ochre-brown canyon of hunch-backed beasts with light-speckled hides. The falling snow dimmed the streetlights and cast a dull steel pall. Little had changed in this part of the city. The shops that occupied space at street level reflected the fashion and economy of the times. The grocer on the corner had changed its name three times over the years, but remained a place to buy eggs. The most disturbing change was the atmosphere. There was something uncomfortably metallic; an electric hum replaced the drone of air conditioners that years ago adorned every window in the city. There were more people now, there were always more. Though the storm had thinned vehicular and pedestrian traffic, quieting the neighborhood, Mrs. Tuesday still perceived the annoying grating the layers of snow muffled, but could not hide.