Louisa Page 34

  “It wasn’t snow, it was ash, and coal-dust, and smoke, first all those trains, and then bombs, and then it was just filth. It got into my coat, my dress—I had to throw them away. There’s nothing clean—nothing. If I could have thrown away my skin, I would have. And my hair—I couldn’t get the smell out of my hair. But men like that hair, it’s so light. They’d always want the ones with hair like mine. Even later on, after I had no insides left, even when there was nothing there, they’d grab my hair and take me in. What choice did I have then?”

  “You’re here now. Don’t do this to yourself. You’re here with me now.”

  “Because I’ve got hair full of ash and a mouth full of grass,” Louisa said, and she drew a hand to her throat. “It can’t go down, but it has to because it’s all I have. The leavings of the field, what paupers gather. At least they leave a little for the poor. That’s what the rabbi said. You have to leave a little.”

  Neither could have said when they stopped the stream of words or when the words dissolved, and Jonah wasn’t sure when he started to hold her, but he no longer cared, and couldn’t remember why he hadn’t done it long ago.

  “I had to come to you,” Louisa said. “What if she left me? I don’t want to die alone.”

  “Hush,” Jonah said. Why shouldn’t he hold that girl? There were too many people in his life that he hadn’t held and hadn’t comforted because they’d died too far away, or because they had lived on but did not let him near them, or because he himself had been afraid. He was tired of being afraid. He said, “You won’t die alone.”

  When she was in his arms, the past spun around them, a blur of flesh and light, and not for the first or last time, he saw ghosts; his drowned father, his mother and sister, his wife, passing across a bridge to a kingdom of exile, burdened under their life’s belongings, slipping from his grasp. What could he hold? He could hold Louisa. And blinded by his own grief, as he held her, the light receded, dimming to irrelevance. Then it disappeared.

  SOME TIME LATER, they stood in the door of the gate-house with their arms still around each other. It was twilight now, though the moon was too bright for the stars. From far off drifted the sound of a mouth-organ and people singing.

  Louisa turned. “Where is that coming from?”

  “The Pioneers have made a camp,” said Jonah. “They’re dancing.”

  “Oh! Let’s join them!” Louisa said, and she already started towards the firelight, breaking away and walking with quick steps. Her arms were raised, and her sticky hair rose a little from her back.

  In his hand, Jonah held her sun hat. With a mournful smile, he put it on his head, and then he followed.

  7

  THEY DIDN’T MARRY for a year. First, Louisa had to complete her conversion. Rabbi Needleman found her easier to talk to now. She no longer struck him as uncanny or mysterious but as an ordinary young woman who served him tea Russian-style, in a glass, in the kitchen of a drum-shaped cement house in the company of her mother-in-law.

  “Naturally,” said Shmuel, “marriage isn’t a sound reason for conversion any more than wanting to convert to get Israeli citizenship.”

  “Naturally,” said Louisa. “Would you like some apple cake? It’s dry, but I’m just learning to bake. I think you’ll forgive me.”

  Easily now, Louisa could assume that people would forgive her. She gave a slice to Rabbi Needleman, who agreed that it was dry but washed it down with some of her good tea. That he ate in our home at all stunned me. Louisa kept strict kosher, but how could he know for sure?

  As for me, I said little. I refused the cake and tea and stuck to my own coffee, looking past them out the window at the laundry hanging from our neighbor’s line. In a few hours, Jonah would come over and the two of them would talk about the future.

  I always saw Jonah with Louisa. It stood to reason. After all, the two of them would soon be married, and to make a point of separating them from each other would have felt absurd. Besides: Louisa was the one who always arranged to bring the three of us together. She even organized our reunion. “He’d love to see you,” she said to me. “He asks about you all the time.” She said those things as though they were simple pleasantries.

  This was back when we still lived in the camp, and on the appointed day, after Louisa left for work, I paced and fretted, sweating through one blouse after another, wondering if I ought to cancel, though by now there was no way to get hold of them, and in the cool of the evening, I planted myself on a cinderblock in the parking lot to wait. The road beyond the gate saw little traffic. Every once in a great while, I’d see a pair of headlights and feel their approach like physical pressure.

  What would happen when the truck appeared? Would it come straight through the gate and barrel towards me like a steam-roller? Would I let it pass over me? What seemed most likely was that the truck would not appear, that they would have the good sense not to force a meeting that either would have taken place last winter or shouldn’t take place at all.

  I had once believed that when I saw my cousin, I would know why I was here. Well, now I would see him, and what great change would it work in me? At the very least he could see for himself that I was still alive. I could say, “Jonah, here I am at last,” or would I say, “Bela, here I am at last.” What should I call him? Who was he to me now? These were mysterious questions, and my heart bent just a little at the thought of addressing my cousin by any name at all, because a new set of headlights had approached the gate, blinding me briefly. It was the green truck.

  The truck did not pull in, but idled, and a window cranked down. Louisa poked her head out and shouted: “Mutti! Over here!” She opened the passenger door from the inside.

  I walked across the lot, all the while looking past Louisa into the dark, expecting my cousin to leap out of the driver’s side and hoist me up into the cabin of the truck. But his door did not open, and when I was close enough to look through the windshield, I could make out no more than a shape behind the wheel. Then, Louisa yanked my arm and pulled me up beside her, and the space between us was so thoroughly filled with her that I would have had to climb across her to get a look at him at all.

  Thus we rode, all three pressed together, myself, Louisa, and my cousin, out of the camp for newcomers onto a dark road. Louisa leaned far into me whispering something about where we were going, some fish restaurant in Haifa that she and Jonah frequented. There was a pinch of silence, just long enough for me to steal a glance across Louisa and see his hands on the wheel, just a little too tight.

  They were the hands I knew, square, generous hands. Yet they held onto that wheel as though it were a life-preserver. Like a knife, it struck me. It wouldn’t matter what I called my cousin. He had become someone who would never be close enough to be addressed by name.

  OF COURSE, I SAW plenty of Jonah, but in the presence of Louisa, what we had to say was by its very nature limited to what she knew, or ought to know. For example, there was the matter of the letter Jonah wanted her to write her parents, letting them know she was alive. I said to him, “You have your own letters to write. It’s been—what—two years since you wrote to Dori Csengery?”

  Louisa laid a hand on Jonah’s arm and asked, “Who’s Dori Csengery?”

  I felt Jonah’s gaze on me then, hot and strong; he gave me those looks often when the three of us were together, and I knew what they meant. I had mercy on him. I answered as casually as I could. “She’s a doctor.”

  “Oh,” said Louisa. She touched Jonah’s chin intimately and said, “You think she could do something about your leg?”

  “Probably not,” said Jonah. He leaned back into the molded plastic kitchen chair, and the urgency in his expression dissolved into tentative contentment. He said, “It would take a surgeon.”

  “Then we’ll get a surgeon,” said Louisa.

  “I’ve lived with it for long enough.”

  “That doesn’t mean you have to go on living with it.” Louisa spoke with absolute conviction. “Why sho
uld you be kept up half the night because you’re too stubborn and lazy to help yourself? It’s a good thing I showed up to take care of you.”

  This was Louisa’s way of telling me that my part in her story was over.

  FOR THIS WAS Louisa’s story from the start; she was its heroine. It was Louisa who threw herself into forbidden love, who saved my life, and who saved my cousin’s life, I suspect. Yet what did she save us for? That question still remains; it has no simple answer. Now I will tell you what happened after I’d been liberated from the cellar, when I returned to Kisbarnahely.

  What motivated this decision, I cannot quite say. It might have been the shock of Budapest. I faced it when I at last emerged from the cellar into the February sunlight. I still wore a horsehair blanket, and my face peered out of the folds like a mushroom. Naturally, the air smarted, and I couldn’t take more than a step or two before sitting on a paving stone. Still, I hadn’t had a cigarette in five days; need overcame vertigo.

  It was impossible to get my bearings. The shape of a hill was visible under rocks and fallen beams, all black and white with frost, but the landscape didn’t correspond with anything human; there was nothing to hang a gaze on, nowhere to go. All the while, I didn’t know it, but parts of Buda were still under siege. In spite of this, I wasn’t the only soul foolish enough to be out in the open. The Soviets had set up a communal kitchen and they doled out pea soup. How I managed to find a bowl and spoon, and how I managed to get even bread and cigarettes, is another story. Let me say only that by the time I’d found all of those things, I’d also been volunteered for a work crew.

  Those crews were put together by the Soviets. A soldier in a white windbreaker directed me to a wheelbarrow and gestured towards a cluster of old women. I think that’s when I realized how I looked.

  We were supposed to gather bricks and wheel them to a pit. It wasn’t easy work, and without gloves, our fingers found it hard to close around the bricks, let alone pry them from the frozen mud. Each of those bricks had once been part of one of the houses that lay in ruins, and as we pulled them up, it was like emptying the ocean a drop at a time. We dragged the wheelbarrows through the icy slush. We’d been promised warm shelter for the night, but none of us believed it. Bundled, steaming with exertion, I lapsed into a stupor.

  I did manage to light a cigarette. That kept me warm and got my mind working, but it also meant I had to pass it around, and by the time it got back to me, it was pretty much gone. I knew I had to get to Pest, where conditions were far less grim, or at least the dead had been buried. But that was a matter of getting permission and the proper papers.

  I exchanged a few words with a wry little granny in a woolly sweater. She had more strength than I did and managed to keep up a steady stream of conversation, at the same time finding out my name, age, and hometown.

  She’d come to the capital from a village near Sarospatak to stay with her daughter, and she’d been trapped in Buda all winter. Now her daughter was pulling every possible string to get them back home again.

  “You think it’s better there?” I asked her.

  “There, at least, you can grow a little something,” she answered. Abruptly, she asked, “Are you a Jew?”

  She asked it in the same high, grating voice she’d used when she asked me the name of my hometown. I really had no choice but to admit it. She had already asked me about my son.

  She pulled a bread and lard sandwich from her pocket and offered me half. She said, “You’re lucky. Your people will own this country now.”

  TWO MONTHS LATER, I’d found space on a train east. The cars were filled with Soviet soldiers who were all drunk before we even left the station. By then, I had crossed into Pest, seen what the bombs had left of my old flat on Prater Street, and served enough time in labor crews to get a small bag’s worth of winter clothes. I even had a new coat with most of the lining intact. This, I wore, leaning on my elbows out the train corridor window, thinking how bare and blasted everything looked, even here. Then I remembered: I was on the Great Plains, where it had always looked bare and blasted in early April.

  How strange it was, though, watching the towns pass, Cegled, Szolnok, Tiszaföldvar, some blown into gray rubble and some already half-reconstructed, with the mortar between the bricks sparkling. I disembarked, along with around two hundred soldiers, just outside of Szarvas. The sight of the suburban railway station brightened with a fresh coat of paint brought forth complex emotions. So did the mud. I hadn’t tramped through this mud since I was a girl.

  Kisbarnahely was some distance west. The convoys of soldiers passed me on the road without taking note of me. I don’t know what I expected, perhaps some gentleman with a horse and cart who’d see me slogging along and insist I climb on board. I didn’t give up hope until sunset, when I had yet to see so much as a tree, let alone a place to spend the night. Then I managed to wave a tin of beef to flag down a Red Army soldier on a motorbike.

  He spoke no Hungarian, but the bike made so much noise that it didn’t matter. With my arms gripping his waist, I hadn’t time to wonder, yet again, why I was returning to my hometown. He shouted a lot of things in Russian, every once in a while shifting his weight so that the motorbike buckled like a horse, and I had to plaster myself against him to keep from flying off the seat.

  “Staraja babas!” he called out: “Okay?”

  Faintly, I said, “Okay.” I arrived at an army base half a kilometer from Kisbarnahely not so long after dark, with a crick in my back, a ringing headache, and no idea what I ought to do next.

  THE LOGIC OF THE journey was as follows: I’d heard that the new authorities were returning confiscated property, and assuming that my mother hadn’t survived the war, I was the heir to half of my uncle Oszkar’s shop, as well as the house with the apricot tree. The brief, moonlit walk to the town center took longer than it should have because with every step, I grew closer to knowing the town held neither shop nor house nor tree.

  Yet there it was: The steeple of the church. There was the town hall. They were intact and golden! As I walked on, the mud gave way to gravel, and I realized that the whole town square was brilliant with electric light. How could that be? More, from a distance, a breeze carried a sour smell, smoke from the brickworks. It was functioning as though the war had never been.

  Even though the air was bitter-cold, I sweated through my coat now, needled with anxiety. Familiar house after familiar house gave way to familiar shop after familiar shop, Gyongyos Stationery, Sunshine Bread, the ice-cream stand. At the Kismacska, the windows were open. I heard mingled voices so close at hand, they might have been just at my back, and turning, I blinked wildly. Someone was beaming a flashlight in my eyes. It was a cocked-cap Soviet soldier who asked, in Russian, for my papers.

  He was with another soldier who had his hand on a pistol. My documents were in order, but after the past year, who could help but feel a little rattled when you were asked to show them? I pulled everything out and they scanned it with an interest that made me feel even more uncomfortable. Then, one of them looked back up at me and burst out laughing.

  “Gratz! Gratz!” he shouted. “Nora Gratz!”

  The other pulled the papers from his hands and made him shine the flashlight on them. Then, he had him turn the beam, again, on me. He gave a long whistle. He did know some Hungarian, because he said, “Gyere, gyere,” and took my little suitcase from me.

  By now, I was too scared to move. The soldier’s whistle, the serene square, and the lazy voices emerging from the Kismacska, all blended together to give the encounter the feel of a dream that would lead somewhere I didn’t want to go. The soldiers took me under the arm, and my heart pounded like mad as they frog-walked me beyond the shopping district, through the little green park, towards the brickyard. All the while, I had the least logical train of thought in the world. My name is on some list from thirty years ago. Somebody in that cukrászda spotted me and it’s all over now.

  I wondered if they could be bribed, an
d I called out: “Cigarette?”

  The offer took them by surprise. The one who knew Hungarian said, “Köszi, nem. We have enough. You want?”

  By then, we’d reached the brickyard. The town lay behind us like a fairy tale, and I didn’t have a clue what I’d do next. A chimney nearby spouted occasional fire. The two soldiers were in high spirits now, and they took out their cigarettes and lit up, offered me one, and laughed because the thing snapped in half in my fingers. They conversed, smiling side-long at me and eyeing the railroad tracks. I heard the train approach, the rhythm unmistakable.

  The soldier who spoke Hungarian said, “Many Jews here. Many, many. Now none.”

  The headlamp fell on the bricks scattered around a loading dock and shone against high weeds and the rails, as it had always done from the days of my girlhood, and in the days since when I wasn’t there to see it. As it approached the yard, the train slowed and sighed, and then it stopped in a cloud of gritty steam.

  Without warning, I was pushed forward, and I found myself standing in the open, not far from the tracks. A few men had emerged from the drying shed, and they opened the boxcars. They took no note of me. I rubbed my eyes, which smarted with dust and ash, and I didn’t know whether to turn right or left, conscious of the soldiers still behind me.

  Then, someone stepped off the engine-car, a stooped man in leather overalls. He was rubbing his whole face with a dirty rag, and he staggered off the train with a familiarity that meant he could have found his way with his eyes closed. Still wiping, he removed his hat with his free hand. Stiff, gray hair rose in a crest. It came on me at that moment.

  I said nothing until he showed his face, and he almost walked past without seeing me. Then I called out, “Janos!”

  8

  HE HAD BEEN stationed in that district since the fall. Later, he would admit to requesting it, but at first he was still reticent, not certain if I wanted to hear that sort of thing.