True Confections (26 page)

T
HE
M
ADAGASCAR THAT
Julius discovered was sparsely inhabited by a few Frenchmen here and there, but otherwise he was intrigued by the curious specimens of humanity he encountered everywhere he went. They didn’t look like any people he had ever seen before in his life. The Malagasy people had probably never seen anyone who looked like him, either. Julius had those piercing blue Czaplinsky eyes, that familial beak of a nose, and a gaunt but somehow forceful bearing, though he couldn’t have stood more than five foot eight. His wild hair was jet black, and it radiated out from his receding hairline, emphasizing his great domed forehead. Though clean-shaven in Budapest, Julius had a long dark beard by the time he arrived in Mahajanga on the Zanzibar ferry (or whatever). His skin was of such a pale, pink, nearly alabaster hue that he burned terribly after even a few minutes in direct sun. In Madagascar, as the weeks passed, his face and neck burned repeatedly and darkened to a leathery brown, but Julius’s body was otherwise still milky white, and any inadvertent exposure of his usually covered flesh was a fascination for the Malagasy who happened to catch such a glimpse. They called him
Vazaha
, white man, and they often gathered to watch him eat, wherever he went, laughing with glee each time he pulled his spoon out of his pocket to eat his
koba
, the pasty mash of rice, banana, and peanuts that he had decided he could live on safely (after a few disastrous encounters with wretched, gristly bits of meat prepared with a stewy rice mixture studded with muddy bits of vegetation). As he fed himself this mash each day with his daintily deployed spoon, instead of scooping it from the bowl with his fingers the way everyone else did, he would remind himself sometimes, to make his meal more palatable, that he was the same man who once sat in his high chair at the
table with his family, being a good little boy, spooning his mother’s Sunday goulash from his bowl.

J
ULIUS WAS CONFIDENT
that he could figure out the best of his options, and he felt the urgency of his situation, but time seemed to tick by very, very slowly on Madagascar, and soon Julius fell into the rhythms of the island. He found a little hut where he could stay, in a crooked lane at the edge of Antananarivo where goats were tethered, and he paid some men to guard him while he slept, and to guard his things whenever he went out. The first few nights, he was awakened continually by the sounds of geckos scrabbling across the earthen floor, and by the strange chirring sounds of the ring-tailed lemurs who swung from the trees and scampered about the underbrush with strangely graceful leaps, like a little troupe of two-toned, monkey-faced Cossacks.

Orb weaver spiders the size of grapefruits erected elaborate webs across his doorway while he slept, and he was unsettled each time he brushed into one of those webs inadvertently and made contact with the fuzzy scuttling body of its weaver. The hissing cockroaches startled him every time he disturbed one in the night when his bladder forced him to stir from his restless slumber. Julius was reluctant to leave his secret diamond hoard for more than short periods of time, and he knew he had to convert his stones to local currency, but the energies of living each day seemed to soak up all the hours of daylight, and each crimson sunset found him hunkering down for the night once more with nothing accomplished.

Time passed.

He found a woman who would wash his clothes and prepare his food for him in a way that he could eat it. (It helped that she
was very beautiful.) Mostly he lived on sweet potatoes, steamed manioc, and
mofo gasy
, a hearth-baked pancake made from sweetened rice flour. Night after night Julius dreamed of the sweet pastries he had served a thousand times in the coffeehouse, each one on a plate with the signature red-and-black-striped rim incorporating the beautiful streamlined logo for Fischer & Czaplinsky, plates they continued to use even after the Czaplinsky name was scraped from the red, black, and gold lettering on the windows and doors. He dreamed of the unsold, stale pastries he had thrown away or given to beggars at the back door of the bakery at closing time night after night.
Kürtöskalácus
unfurled in his dreams, flakey puffs of pastry unwinding from the baking cylinders, dropping in big, buttery curls that he couldn’t quite catch before they blackened to ash on the glowing coals.

Months passed before Julius was able to make an approach to a French banker he had been observing in a café, a lonely alcoholic whose misbehavior involving certain accounting irregularities at his previous bank in Paris had led to his exile in this remote French colony. The banker was charmed by Julius, who had the prescience at their first meeting to make a gift of the small bottle of good Slivovitz he had tucked into his baggage and carried all this way and hoarded all this time.

Malagasy wine, which Julius had sampled, tasted like horse piss mixed with vinegar. Perhaps he should start a distillery. Did sufficient sugarcane grow on this or any other near enough soil? Would grapes on vines rot and mold in the humidity or could a vineyard be established, perhaps on the windward side of the island? For modest kickbacks of which Julius was unaware, the banker made introductions for Julius to the right people, who would give him the best prices converting his diamonds to Malagasy francs.

People are people, business is business, money is money. By
the end of 1942, a land broker had secured Julius’s rights to some four thousand hectares in the central rain-forest region of the northern part of the island, in the Betsiboka region of the Mahajanga province, where the soil is rich and the humidity high. Half of his hilly lands were covered in a dense pine and eucalyptus forest, while the rest was a crazy quilt of nineteenth-century French plantations fallen into disuse, though they had once yielded rich annual harvests of cacao, coffee, banana, and vanilla.

In Budapest, Julius had struggled to achieve and maintain a modest, bourgeois status. In Madagascar, where the Malagasy people lived a subsistence life on the land, his diamonds had bought such an unimaginable number of Malagasy francs that even after investing in these holdings, he was still an immensely rich man, with more houses than he could count scattered across his four thousand hectares, with dozens of overseers on his various lands, and hundreds of employees grateful for the very small wage he would pay them in exchange for working his plantations or providing whatever services he could possibly want or need. Time slowed and stopped. Time stood still for Julius.

By the spring of 1943, Julius had become the monarch of a small kingdom. The rest of the world seemed very far away. His brilliant strategy had proven to be far more successful than he could have possibly imagined. He was the Founding Jew, the First Jew, the Only Jew of Madagascar! Julius was impatient for the first signs that the transports had begun. Each day he scanned the horizon. The unbroken sea was empty of ships, dotted only by a few of the small square-sailed primitive fishing vessels that went out early every morning to check their crayfish pots along the coastline. Surely they would arrive today, or tomorrow?

Julius didn’t consider that in faraway Budapest, time had not
stood still. On Kazinczy Street, time had marched along quite briskly.

E
VERY DAY
J
ULIUS
envisioned himself in his new role as the wise pioneer whose helpful advice would be eagerly sought by his people. He could see himself greeting and providing comfort and wisdom to as many of the newcomers as he could accommodate as they tumbled off the ships by the thousands, day after day, week after week, sailing into every port on the island, from Toliara to Antsiranana, each of them dazed, frightened, staggering under the weight of the few precious worldly goods they would have managed to bring along on the voyage from the Old World to this very New World.

We will begin again! Julius insisted to himself as he sipped the muddy coffee made from his own Caturra beans prepared for him each morning now by his housemaid, and served to him on the veranda of his headquarters, a plantation house that overlooked five hundred acres planted in Trinitario and Criollo and Porcelana cacao. The openwork lace of the early morning mist floated through the tops of the banana canopy that soared over the hodge podge of the cacao trees. He longed for Szilvia, Matild, and Geza. And of course, Ágnes too. He would welcome with open arms any of the Weisz family who wanted to come live on his plantations.

He was deeply moved by his own anticipated generosity as he envisaged himself presiding over his grateful family, perhaps dozens of them, all thankful that he had given them such a wonderful fresh start. He would be the patriarch, providing plenty for all. They would all be safe. They would all be prosperous. They would all be together again.

But the horizon remained empty. The ships filled with the Jews of Europe eager to begin their new lives did not arrive.

Julius had written to Szilvia steadily since his arrival, though the centralized postal service from Antananarivo was erratic at best and a complete disaster at worst, so he hadn’t been overly worried not to have heard back from her in the beginning. But now when his letters continued to go unanswered, he began to fret. One morning as he sipped his coffee and gazed out over the treetops of his plantation it suddenly dawned on him with horror that while time stood still in Madagascar, it rushed ahead furiously and tumultuously and disastrously in the wider world.

That day he sent a long letter to the alcoholic banker in Antananarivo by messenger, with specific and urgent instructions for a wire to a correspondent bank in Budapest where the banker had told him long ago he might still have a contact who might be willing to deliver the message to Szilvia, or if that was risky, then to Péter, at the coffeehouse, who would surely be willing to pass a message to Szilvia. Wouldn’t any banker in Budapest know Fischer’s bakery and coffeehouse, on Kazinczy Street?

The wire Julius sent was three pages of dense advice about obtaining a visa for Zanzibar, traveling on the same route he had followed (whatever that was, let’s agree that it’s unimportant to the story), using the same sympathetic official as before, Ágnes’s supervisor, the man who had approved his traveling documents. Julius’s wire enumerated all the contact information he had for every leg of the journey, concluding with the name of the shipping clerk to see at the harbor in Stone Town once they arrived on Zanzibar.

T
HE ENSUING SILENCE
was ominous. Julius had heard nothing for too long. He felt a sudden spasm of terror, and he realized
that he had been insanely complacent. Anything could have happened in all this time. He had to do something more, take some kind of action. He could no longer just sit and wait. He set out with one of his plantation managers in the most functional of his three rusting, patched-together Ford Model A trucks, but a summer monsoon had drenched the highlands for days, and after a day of fighting the mud that filled the narrow, winding track that led to his aerie, the truck was hopelessly mired, and they had gone only ten dozen kilometers. Julius had to make the journey to Antananarivo in the back of a zebu cart. The jolting, slow-motion trip took many days, and he arrived feeling quite sick from the rocking of the cart and from the fear that now clutched his heart. How could he have been so blithely unconcerned all these months, months that had turned to years? It was now July 1944.

The dissipated and habitually hungover banker arranged for Julius to use one of the few telephones on Madagascar that could connect him to Budapest, in the central government office across from the bank. Julius had developed a fluent Malagasy-inflected French, and he was able to make his needs understood well enough. It took nearly an hour to make the connection, but finally, miraculously, the series of operators was able to hold all the necessary connections to patch him through to Budapest.

He gave the number to the local operator there in Hungarian, his eyes filling with tears as he spoke the familiar numbers to another Hungarian speaker, but a moment later her faint voice in his ear told him through the echoing static that the number was no longer in service.

Ah, of course, Szilvia was economizing. He begged the operators not to disconnect the line and then he gave the next number that came into his head, for Fischer’s. Surely Péter would be willing to relay his message to Szilvia. The call went through
more quickly this time, and he could hear the familiar ringing tones echoing faintly down the line.

“Bitte?”

An unfamiliar voice, with the clatter of the coffeehouse in the background. Why answer the phone at Fischer’s in German? A wrong number? A bad joke? Julius’s mind was racing in slow motion, every thought slippery and ungraspable. In carefully enunciated Hungarian he asked if this was Fischer’s and the man said,
“Ja, ja,”
impatiently, before demanding,
“Wen wollen Sie sprechen? Was wollen Sie?”

Julius switched to his rudimentary German and asked for Péter. The German laughed, a short mirthless bark, and said Péter had gone for a little swim in the Danube, and then he hung up.