ALSO BY JULIE ORRINGER
How to Breathe Underwater
For the Zahav brothers
O tempora! O mores! O mekkora nagy coresz.
O the times! O the customs! O what tremendous tsuris.--from Marsh Marigold, a Hungarian Labor Service newspaper,
Banhida Labor Camp, 1939From Bulgaria thick wild cannon pounding rolls, It strikes the mountain ridge, then hesitates and falls.
A piled-up blockage of thoughts, animals, carts, and men;
whinnying, the road rears up; the sky runs with its mane.
In this chaos of movement you're in me, permanent,
deep in my consciousness you shine, motion forever spent
and mute, like an angel awed by death's great carnival,
or an insect in rotted tree pith, staging its funeral.--Miklos Radnoti, from "Picture Postcards,"
written to his wife during his death march from Heidenau, 1944It is as though I lay
under a low
sky and breathed
through a needle's eye.--W. G. Sebald
from Unrecounted
CONTENTS
PART ONE:The Street of Schools
1. A Letter
2. The Western Europe Express
3. The Quartier Latin
4. Ecole Speciale
5. Theatre Sarah-Bernhardt
6.
Work
7. A Luncheon
8. Gare d'Orsay
9. Bois de Vincennes
10. Rue de Sevigne
11.
Winter
Holiday
PART TWO:Broken Glass
12. What Happened at the Studio
13.
Visitor
14. A Haircut
15. In the Tuileries
16. The Stone Cottage
17. Synagogue de la Victoire
18. Cafe Bedouin
19. An Alley
20. A Dead Man
PART THREE:Departures and Arrivals
21. A Dinner Party
22. Signorina di Sabato
23. Sportsclub Saint-Germain
24. The S.S. Ile de France
25. The Hungarian Consulate
PART FOUR:The Invisible Bridge
26.
Subcarpathia
27.
The Snow Goose
28.
Furlough
29.
Banhida
Camp
30. Barna and the General
31. Tamas Levi
32. Szentendre Yard
33. Passage to the East
PART FIVE:By Fire
34.
Turka
35.
The Tatars in Hungary
36. A Fire in the Snow
37. An Escape
38.
Occupation
39.
Farewell
40.
Nightmare
41. The Dead
42. A NameEpilogue
PART ONE
The Street of Schools
CHAPTER ONE
A Letter
LATER HE WOULD TELL her that their story began at the Royal Hungarian Opera House, the night before he left for Paris on the Western Europe Express. The year was 1937; the month was September, the evening unseasonably cold. His brother had insisted on taking him to the opera as a parting gift. The show was Tosca and their seats were at the top of the house. Not for them the three marble-arched doorways, the facade with its Corinthian columns and heroic entablature. Theirs was a humble side entrance with a red-faced ticket taker, a floor of scuffed wood, walls plastered with crumbling opera posters. Girls in knee-length dresses climbed the stairs arm in arm with young men in threadbare suits; pensioners argued with their white-haired wives as they shuffled up the five narrow flights. At the top, a joyful din: a refreshment salon lined with mirrors and wooden benches, the air hazy with cigarette smoke. A doorway at its far end opened onto the concert hall itself, the great electric-lit cavern of it, with its ceiling fresco of Greek immortals and its gold-scrolled tiers. Andras had never expected to see an opera here, nor would he have if Tibor hadn't bought the tickets. But it was Tibor's opinion that residence in Budapest must include at least one evening of Puccini at the Operahaz. Now Tibor leaned over the rail to point out Admiral Horthy's box, empty that night except for an ancient general in a hussar's jacket. Far below, tuxedoed ushers led men and women to their seats, the men in evening dress, the women's hair glittering with jewels.
"If only Matyas could see this," Andras said.
"He'll see it, Andraska. He'll come to Budapest when he's got his baccalaureate, and in a year he'll be sick to death of this place."
Andras had to smile. He and Tibor had both moved to Budapest as soon as they graduated from gimnazium in Debrecen. They had all grown up in Konyar, a tiny village in the eastern flatlands, and to them, too, the capital city had once seemed like the center of the world. Now Tibor had plans to go to medical college in Italy, and Andras, who had lived here for only a year, was leaving for school in Paris. Until the news from the Ecole Speciale d'Architecture, they had all thought Tibor would be the first to go. For the past three years he'd been working as a salesclerk in a shoe store on Vaci utca, saving money for his tuition and poring over his medical textbooks at night as desperately as if he were trying to save his own life. When Andras had moved in with him a year earlier, Tibor's departure had seemed imminent. He had already passed his exams and submitted his application to the medical school at Modena. He thought it might take six months to get his acceptance and student visa. Instead the medical college had placed him on a waiting list for foreign students, and he'd been told it might be another year or two before he could matriculate.
Tibor hadn't said a word about his own situation since Andras had learned of his scholarship, nor had he shown a trace of envy. Instead he had bought these opera tickets and helped Andras make his plans. Now, as the lights dimmed and the orchestra began to tune, Andras was visited by a private shame: Though he knew he would have been happy for Tibor if their situations had been reversed, he suspected he would have done a poor job of hiding his jealousy.
From a door at the side of the orchestra pit, a tall spindling man with hair like white flames emerged and stepped into a spotlight. The audience shouted its approval as this man made his way to the podium. He had to take three bows and raise his hands in surrender before they went quiet; then he turned to the musicians and lifted his baton.
After a moment of quivering stillness, a storm of music rolled out of the brass and strings and entered Andras's chest, filling his ribcage until he could scarcely breathe. The velvet curtain rose to reveal the interior of an Italian cathedral, its minutiae rendered in perfect and intricate detail. Stained-glass windows radiated amber and azure light, and a half-completed fresco of Mary Magdalene showed ghostly against a plaster wall. A man in striped prison garb crept into the church to hide in one of the dark chapels. A painter came in to work on the fresco, followed by a sexton bent upon making the painter tidy up his brushes and dropcloths before the next service. Then came the opera diva Tosca, the model for Mary Magdalene, her carmine skirts swirling around her ankles. Song flew up and hovered in the painted dome of the Operahaz: the clarinetlike tenor of the painter Cavaradossi, the round basso of the fugitive Angelotti, the warm apricotty soprano of the fictional diva Tosca, played by the real Hungarian diva Zsuzsa Toronyi. The sound was so solid, so tangible, it seemed to Andras he could reach over the edge of the balcony and grab handfuls of it. The building itself had become an instrument, he thought: The architecture expanded the sound and completed it, amplified and contained it.
"I won't forget this," he whispered to his brother.
"You'd better not," Tibor whispered back. "I expect you to take me to the opera when I visit you in Paris."
At the intermission they drank small cups of black coffee in the refreshment salon and argued over what they'd seen. Was the painter's refusal to betray his friend an act of selfless loyalty or self-glorifying bravado? Was his endurance of the torture that followed meant to be read as a sublimation of his sexual love for Tosca? Would Tosca herself have stabbed Scarpia if her profession hadn't schooled her so thoroughly in the ways of melodrama? There was a bittersweet pleasure in the exchange; as a boy, Andras had spent hours listening to Tibor debate points of philosophy or sport or literature with his friends, and had pined for the day when he might say something Tibor would find witty or incisive. Now that he and Tibor had become equals, or something like equals, Andras was leaving, getting on a train to be carried hundreds of kilometers away.
"What is it?" Tibor said, his hand on Andras's sleeve.
"Too much smoke," Andras said, and coughed, averting his eyes from Tibor's. He was relieved when the lights flickered to signal the end of the intermission.
After the third act, when the innumerable curtain calls were over--the dead Tosca and Cavaradossi miraculously revived, the evil Scarpia smiling sweetly as he accepted an armload of red roses--Andras and Tibor pushed toward the exit and made their way down the crowded stairs. Outside, a faint scattering of stars showed above the wash of city light. Tibor took his arm and led him toward the Andrassy side of the building, where the dress-circle and orchestra-floor patrons were spilling through the three marble arches of the grand entrance.
"I want you to have a look at the main foyer," Tibor said. "We'll tell the usher we left something inside."
Andras followed him through the central doorway and into the chandelier-lit hall, where a marble stairway spread its wings toward a gallery. Men and women in evening dress descended, but Andras saw only architecture: the egg-and-dart molding along the stairway, the cross-barrel vault above, the pink Corinthian columns that supported the gallery. Miklos Ybl, a Hungarian from Szekesfehervar, had won an international competition to design the opera house; Andras's father had given him a book of Ybl's architectural drawings for his eighth birthday, and he had spent many long afternoons studying this space. As the departing audience flowed around him, he stared up into the vault of the ceiling, so intent upon reconciling this three-dimensional version with the line drawings in his memory that he scarcely noticed when someone paused before him and spoke. He had to blink and force himself to focus upon the person, a large dovelike woman in a sable coat, who appeared to be begging his pardon. He bowed and stepped aside to let her pass.
"No, no," she said. "You're just where I want you. What luck to run into you here!
I would never have known how to find you."
He struggled to recall when and where he might have met this woman. A diamond necklace glinted at her throat, and the skirt of a rose silk gown spilled from beneath her pelisse; her dark hair was arranged in a cap of close-set curls. She took his arm and led him out onto the front steps of the opera house.
"It was you at the bank the other day, wasn't it?" she said. "You were the one with the envelope of francs."
Now he knew her: It was Elza Hasz, the wife of the bank director. Andras had seen her a few times at the great synagogue on Dohany utca, where he and Tibor went for an occasional Friday night service. The other day at the bank he'd jostled her as she crossed the lobby; she'd dropped the striped hatbox she was carrying, and he'd lost his grip on his paper folder of francs. The folder had opened, discharging the pink-and-green bills, and the money had fluttered around their feet like confetti. He'd dusted off the hatbox and handed it back to her, then watched her disappear though a door marked PRIVATE.
"You look to be my son's age," she said now. "And judging from your currency, I would guess you're off to school in Paris."
"Tomorrow
afternoon,"
he
said.
"You must do me a great favor. My son is studying at the Beaux-Arts, and I'd like you to take a package for him. Would it be a terrible inconvenience?"
A moment passed before he could respond. To agree to take a package to someone in Paris would mean that he was truly going, that he intended to leave his brothers and his parents and his country behind and step into the vast unknown of Western Europe.
"Where does your son live?" he asked.
"The Quartier Latin, of course," she said, and laughed. "In a painter's garret, not in a lovely villa like our Cavaradossi. Though he tells me he has hot water and a view of the Pantheon. Ah, there's the car!" A gray sedan pulled to the curb, and Mrs. Hasz lifted her arm and signaled to the driver. "Come tomorrow before noon. Twenty-six Benczur utca.
I'll have everything ready." She pulled the collar of her coat closer and ran down to the car, not pausing to look back at Andras.
"Well!" Tibor said, coming out to join him on the steps. "Suppose you tell me what that was all about."
"I'm to be an international courier. Madame Hasz wants me to take a box to her son in Paris. We met at the bank the other day when I went to exchange pengo for francs."
"And you agreed?"
"I
did."
Tibor sighed, glancing off toward the yellow streetcars passing along the boulevard. "It's going to be awfully dull around here without you, Andraska."
"Nonsense. I predict you'll have a girlfriend within a week."
"Oh, yes. Every girl goes mad for a penniless shoe clerk."
Andras smiled. "At last, a little self-pity! I was beginning to resent you for being so generous and coolheaded."
"Not at all. I could kill you for leaving. But what good would that do? Then neither of us would get to go abroad." He grinned, but his eyes were grave behind his silver-rimmed spectacles. He linked arms with Andras and pulled him down the steps, humming a few bars from the overture. It was only three blocks to their building on Harsfa utca; when they reached the entry they paused for a last breath of night air before going up to the apartment. The sky above the Operahaz was pale orange with reflected light, and the streetcar bells echoed from the boulevard. In the semidarkness Tibor seemed to Andras as handsome as a movie legend, his hat set at a daring angle, his white silk evening scarf thrown over one shoulder. He looked at that moment like a man ready to take up a thrilling and unconventional life, a man far better suited than Andras to step off a railway car in a foreign land and claim his place there. Then he winked and pulled the key from his pocket, and in another moment they were racing up the stairs like gimnazium boys.
Mrs. Hasz lived near the Varosliget, the city park with its storybook castle and its vast rococo outdoor baths. The house on Benczur utca was an Italianate villa of creamy yellow stucco, surrounded on three sides by hidden gardens; the tops of espaliered trees rose from behind a white stone wall. Andras could make out the faint splash of a fountain, the scratch of a gardener's rake. It struck him as an unlikely place for Jewish people to live, but at the entrance there was a mezuzah nailed to the doorframe--a silver cylinder wrapped in gold ivy. When he pressed the doorbell, a five-note chime sounded from inside. Then came the approaching click of heels on marble, and the throwing back of heavy bolts. A silver-haired housemaid opened the door and ushered him in. He stepped into a domed entrance hall with a floor of pink marble, an inlaid table, a sheaf of calla lilies in a Chinese vase.
"Madame Hasz is in the sitting room," the housemaid said.
He followed her across the entry hall and down a vaulted corridor, and they stopped just outside a doorway through which he could hear the crescendo and decrescendo of women's voices. He couldn't make out the words, but it was clear that there was an argument in progress: One voice climbed and peaked and dropped off; another, quieter than the first, rose and insisted and fell silent.
"Wait here a moment," the housemaid said, and went in to announce Andras's arrival. At the announcement the voices exchanged another brief vo
lley, as if the argument had something to do with Andras himself. Then the housemaid reappeared and ushered Andras into a large bright room that smelled of buttered toast and flowers. On the floor were pink-and-gold Persian rugs; white damask chairs stood in conversation with a pair of salmon-colored sofas, and a low table held a bowl of yellow roses. Mrs. Hasz had risen from her chair in the corner. At a writing desk near the window sat an older woman in widow's black, her hair covered with a lace shawl. She held a wax-sealed letter, which she set atop a pile of books and pinned beneath a glass paperweight. Mrs. Hasz crossed the room to meet Andras and pressed his hand in her large cold one.
"Thank you for coming," she said. "This is my mother-in-law, the elder Mrs.
Hasz." She nodded toward the woman in black. The woman was of delicate build, with a deep-lined face that Andras found lovely despite its aura of grief; her large gray eyes radiated quiet pain. He gave a bow and pronounced the formal greeting: Kezet csokolom, I kiss your hand.