When the Summer Was Ours

by Roxanne Veletzos

Part of her wished she hadn’t left the shelter so soon. If at all possible, the chaos out here was even worse than what she witnessed inside the cave. Families stood on the bank amid bundles of clothing, hugging shell-shocked children, weeping. On the other side of the river, navigated with much difficulty among patches of ice, she walked through the charred streets riddled with burning cars, scraps of metal, piles of concrete. Some of the buildings had been stripped of their facades, exposing interiors of lives interrupted—dining tables strewn with plates, toys scattered on rugs. In a square, just four blocks from her own home on Andrássy, what looked to be a dozen dead German soldiers had been piled near the statue of Franz Liszt. Liszt looked down on them as if in judgment, his large hands splayed on the bronze chair shattered by bullets. Soviet tanks rumbled by like a swarm of ants, the soldiers singing victorious songs in a city of ruins.

  At the time, she had no way of knowing that while she’d been sheltering in the hospital, forty thousand civilians lost their lives in those ruins, that another thirty-five hundred men, women, and children had been shot on the banks of the Danube and dumped into the freezing water by the Arrow Cross militia. That within days their bloated bodies would begin clogging the riverbank, slowing the construction of pontoon bridges. She would have no way of knowing that Igor Georgy had been among them, or that every person inside the building on Vadász utca where she’d collected the packages was marched only seven days later to that same spot where the river would be stained red for years to come.

  Looking back on this, she would be glad that in that moment, she did not know any of these things. It would have been impossible for her to draw one more breath from the smoke-filled sky, to take another step into a world such as this. All she knew then was that to see her daughter again she would have to traverse this land of apocalypse, and so she kept her eyes downcast, willing her feet to move.

  21

  EVA NEARLY FAINTED WITH RELIEF at the sight of her home standing—marred by bullets, yes, but standing—and the Venus statues welcomed her solemnly through the entrance, unlocked, to her surprise. The phone line was dead. None of the three families on the lower level had answered their doors—not even when she pounded them with her fists—and then came nighttime, another night she would endure without knowing if Dora and her baby were safe.

  There was no electricity in the apartment, no heat, and all of the windows were either fractured or shattered. She tried every light switch, every furnace, then luckily in the kitchen she found a couple of utility candles and matches. She lit one, then ambled back through the vastness of the flat littered with glass and crumbled plaster, never having needed a shot of brandy more. The liquor cabinet was empty, but at least an old pack of Gauloises was there, in a gap underneath the glassware shelf where she’d made a habit of stashing them. Numb from cold, she extracted the matches from the filmy wrapper and sparked one, smoked it standing in the middle of what she realized now had been a looting. Above the mantel, in place of the Vermeer oil portrait that had been in her mother’s family for two generations, there was only a lightened patch in the layer of soot, and on the sofa table, the bronze centurion statuette had been replaced by an empty gin bottle next to an overstuffed ashtray.

  She locked the door twice, shuddering once more at the unnerving quietness of the hallways, and made her way to the bathroom, where she placed the candle on the ledge of the tub. The water spurted ice-cold and smelling of rust, killing any desire she might have had for a bath. Instead, she took her last shriveled cigarette to her room and smoked it in the window seat from which once, on a night like this, she used to watch the Champs-Élysées of Budapest come alive in an array of colorful umbrellas and fancy frocks, moving in a cluster of unsuspecting cheerfulness in the direction of the Operaház. Exhausted, she crawled onto her bed and fell asleep with her shoes and coat on.

  It was midday, perhaps early afternoon, when she woke with a searing headache, a queasiness swelling in the pit of her stomach. In the dressing mirror across the room, when she scooted herself up against the headboard, the face of a stranger looked back at her. The sharp, feral eyes, the plastered hair, the ghoulish twisted mouth couldn’t have belonged to her. She forced herself out of bed, went back into the hallway to see if the phone was working. This time she screamed, banged the useless receiver on the edge of the hallway table, not giving a damn that she was damaging a hundred-year-old antique. Then a sharp knock at the door cut through her frustration, and she let the receiver drop.

  “Who’s there?”

  The rush of sudden adrenaline should have sent her reeling but instead she inched closer, splayed her hands on the bloodred, lacquered door. “Whoever you are, leave now! I have a gun and I swear I will use it. In three seconds, I will shoot it right through this door.”

  “Eva. Eva, let me in.”

  She leaned against the surface. Pressing her cheek to it, she listened for the voice again.

  “Eva, please. It’s all right. Please open up.”

  Shakily, she unlatched the bolt and pulled the door open to see the man standing before her. A faint chorus of voices trickled in and broke the heavy stillness between her and Eduard.

  “How did you know I was here?” Eva said when Eduard stepped inside and looked around gravely at the state of the place, then anchored his steel-blue gaze on her again.

  “I didn’t. I took a chance.”

  He was wearing a thin coat too flimsy for the weather, one she remembered vaguely from the spring prior, and in his hand, there was a brown paper bag from which he lifted a bottle of wine with a faded, silver label. “From before the siege,” he explained. “Well, it seems I got here just in time. Apparently, we could both do with a drink right now.”

  A few minutes later, Eduard made a fire with a few splinters of wood found in the hearth basket while she did her best to pull herself together, scouring for a clean dress inside her armoire, running a brush uselessly through the tangle of her hair, then eventually pulling it into a ponytail. The wine was slightly turned, but it hardly mattered. She was just happy to sit there with him, to feel, even if it was to pretend, that her life was the same as it had been two years ago. Just to pretend.

  “I heard about your father and wanted to say how sorry I am for your loss,” Eduard said from the opposite end of the sofa, his eyes intent on the wine, which he swirled in his glass. There was a formality in him, which seemed displaced given their time in the hospital, and Eva thought soberly that he wouldn’t stay long. “I came here to tell you that, because I behaved rather… gruffly in the past few weeks. It was just such a shock to see you, and I needed time to process it, if I have to be honest.”

  “Thank you, Eduard, that’s very kind. But my father and I… we had differences at the very end. We were never really close in the first place, as you know, although yes, losing a parent is never easy, is it? But you don’t owe me an apology of any kind. If anyone should apologize, it is me. You were right when you said that I treated you unfairly.”

  “Abhorrently, I think would be a better word,” he retorted. There was a trace of humor in his voice although none of it rose to his eyes, which remained pinned on the glass. A faint flush permeated his face. It had not occurred to her that he might be nervous as well, and a warmth inundated her.

  “Do you think you could ever forgive me, Eduard? Do you think now, at the end of this awful road, there is a chance that we might still be friends? Because I would like that. I would like it very much.”

  “I’ve already forgiven you, Eva. How could I not, after all that I saw you do in that hospital? I saw the goodness that has always been in you, the goodness and determination and courage that enchanted me when we first met. And I thought, because at least that still existed, maybe now, as you say, after all that we’ve been through, you might finally be able to confide in me what you couldn’t before. If it is friendship that you want, Eva, I’m here to give it. But some things must be settled before that. I’d like to trust you again.”

 
; “Oh, Eduard, does it really matter? Does any of it matter now?”

  “It will always matter to me, Eva. You see, despite everything, it seems that I still care for you deeply. And yes, I do need to know. For my own peace, I do.”

  She measured his expression as he refilled her glass, recalling Tamara’s words. What you still have is far more than dust. Yet he wasn’t hers to have any longer; she’d forgone that right long ago.

  “Tamara has said nothing to you? In all our time in the bunker?”

  “No, nothing pertaining to us. None that I recall.”

  “Tamara loves you, you know. She loves you, Eduard. And she would make you very happy.” They were beyond pretenses now, and she was rather glad for it.

  “I know,” he acknowledged, resigned. “And not long ago, I thought perhaps I could love her, too.” He searched Eva’s face, his eyes gleaming with renewed energy. “You see, Eva, unfortunately for me, it seems that nothing can change my feelings for you. Not her, not even this godforsaken war.”

  Eva bit her lip and looked into the embers in the fireplace as they petered out, leaving the room in its usual coldness. How easily it could have been once to marry him, to have this man at her side, this man she did not deserve nor love in the same way she’d loved Aleandro. How very awful, she thought, that the heart should so stubbornly attach to phantoms while everything real and true should subside under its tyranny.

  But she had seen him through Tamara’s eyes, and she couldn’t pretend now that the words he’d spoken meant nothing to her. After a moment, she concluded that she would do it. She owed him that much. And bravely, she said:

  “Let’s take a walk. Let’s see if we can find a bench in City Park, a place from our past that might still exist. Then I will tell you, Eduard. If you are willing to listen, I will tell you. Even though I fear you’ll despise me after the fact.”

  “I could never despise you, Eva. No matter what stands between us, the one thing I promise you now is that I could never despise you.”

  * * *

  There had not been a bench—not one that hadn’t been fully submerged in grime and ash—and they stopped on a bridge overlooking the pond. Eva kept her gaze on the glassy water as she spoke, unable to look at what might be in Eduard’s eyes, aware of this last bit of anguish that she was inflicting. His hands gripped the stone railing so tightly that his knuckles turned white, but otherwise he betrayed nothing. She knew there would be no friendship at the end, that there would be no concessions, no way to move forward into a future of any sort in which her betrayal would be a constant guest, yet she wanted the best for Eduard and did not intend to keep him hostage in his feelings for her. And so she held nothing back. She told him everything there was to tell, even about Bianca, and when she opened her eyes, she did not expect him to still be there.

  But he was. Motionless still, his face bent down toward the water, where an empty, flattened tin can floated underneath the bridge. “Did you love him?”

  “Truly, I don’t know. I thought I did. Or perhaps it was just the freedom that he represented that I loved. Perhaps it blinded me.”

  “And you didn’t think that you would have that with me.” It wasn’t a question but a statement accompanied by a reaffirming nod. “And is it over now, Eva?”

  She looked at him, at how stoic he was as he asked her these questions. The graciousness in Eduard’s heart made her ashamed, ashamed that while she had spoken the truth, there was one thing that she could not admit, would not admit even to herself: yes, she had loved him. She loved him still; she would always love Aleandro. But it was as though a chamber of her heart had detached from that love and was now reaching for what was here, still possible after this terrible war, precisely as Tamara had said.

  “It was over before I even knew I was to have her. Perhaps that’s why I think of her as singularly mine. So yes. Yes, that chapter of my life is fully closed now. It’s been for some time.”

  It startled her, the small cry from Eduard’s lips. He moved away from her, walked to the other end of the bridge, where he tilted his face to the flock of birds flying in formation through a gloomy early February sky, departing to warmer lands. And when he came back to her and reached for her hand, she felt herself detach even further from the impetuous girl she had once been and step fully into a life in which she became a woman. Into a life devoid of any ghosts.

  22

  Dachau

  Spring 1945

  MORE PRISONERS WERE BROUGHT TO Dachau by the thousands, crammed in airless boxcars from other camps, which had been evacuated as the Allies rolled steadily toward Berlin, or marched on foot through freezing snow. In Aleandro’s barrack, two or three prisoners shared a bed now or slept taking turns. They slept on the ground, slept standing up, slept in the latrines, which were overflowing with excrement. The first days of warmer weather had not brought any relief from the typhus fever that had spread through the camp since December, and all around him, men dropped in their walks like marionettes cut from their strings. He saw their bodies being tossed into the ravines at the edge of the campsite and other prisoners shoveling dirt over them, no more than corpses themselves, their eyes pinned on nothing present, only the afterlife. He saw children stoking the crematorium fires, and the stench of death clung to his skin, to his clothes, to the back of his skull.

  To draw such inhumanity seemed inhumane in itself, an aberration of life, and soon his drawings, which had been dwindling for weeks, stopped altogether. Now he counted his days just like the others, wondering if he was condemned to this pit of hell for all of eternity.

  Then one day, he sensed a change in the air. The sharp odor of burning paper drifted over the campsite that entire day and continued well into the night. There was something about the guards, too, who seemed agitated, ill at ease, moving about the camp. As Aleandro ambled about the grounds the next afternoon, he caught sight of three guards he knew well, hauling stacks of files from the gatehouse and tossing them into a large metal bin, dousing them in kerosene. A few minutes later, the commandant emerged with another stack under his arm, which he threw not in the bin but in the back of a jeep. He got in the front seat, yelling something in German to the driver. The jeep then sped away through the gates, leaving Aleandro in a swirl of dust.

  Back inside the barrack, Aleandro sat on the edge of Rudolf’s bed and gently shook his shoulder. “Something is going on. The guards are burning documents. Rudolf, what do you think it means?”

  When Rudolf turned to him, his face beaded with sweat, Aleandro was struck all at once by the stench wafting from his body as much as the realization that Rudolf—his Rudolf, who’d been his pillar, whose optimism had pulled him from the edge of his own abyss—was crying.

  “I shat myself, Aleandro. I shat myself. Please go away from me.”

  “Rudolf, it’s all right, it’s nothing. We’ll get you cleaned up. I’ll help you, come now,” Aleandro said, but Rudolf didn’t budge. For three days now, Rudolf’s fever had been rising. His breath came in shallow gasps and that ghastly pallor had become more than alarming—it had become a new horror that Aleandro would not acknowledge, refused to acknowledge. Rudolf’s life was his last string to anything human. He could not, would not, accept the loss of Rudolf.

  “You do not have typhus, Rudolf. Do you hear me? You do not. It’s just a stomach virus. You must believe me. That’s all it is.”

  There was no reply.

  “You are strong, Rudolf. You are strong, and you will get better. You must, because without you, I don’t think I can make it. Do you hear me? I don’t think that I can.”

  Still silence.

  “Fight with me, Rudolf, fight!” Aleandro shouted now. “Goddamn you, get up to your feet! Stand up now!” But Rudolf just regarded him with a blank stare he might give to a stranger on the street asking for directions. Then he launched serenely into an old Hungarian folk song, his eyes too radiant in the light of the ghastly moon.

  * * *

  That night, Ale
andro bid his good-byes, knowing that in the morning the guards would come and haul Rudolf away. There would be no way to stop it now, nothing at all he could do to delay it; there would only be an empty void where Rudolf had lain, an empty void in Aleandro’s heart, which could not withstand the loss of another brother, another love.

  “I love you, Rudolf,” he whispered, holding his limp, waxy hand in his, brushing it endlessly with his fingers. “You’ve given me a reason to keep living, you’ve given me a purpose, and I will always love you.” Then, because there was no more to say, he lay down on his own cot and wept.

  To his surprise, in the morning and as the hours wore on, the guards had not shown at all. He went outside, desperate for some air, and found that there were in fact no guards in sight. Not near their barrack, at any rate, or anywhere in his immediate line of vision.

  He stumbled through the barracks, noticing a pile of discarded prisoner uniforms. He picked one up, staring at the tiny, limp shape, at the gaping holes in the armpits, realizing it belonged to a child. Belonged. So many men and children had perished while he’d managed to live, and Rudolf would now die, too. His uniform would be stripped from his body, it would join the ragged piles scattered among the grounds, and no one other than Aleandro would even remember his name by week’s end. No one would remember this man who had been his brother in this place where no brotherhood, no humanity, existed.

  It was perhaps this realization that shattered whatever composure he still possessed. A blinding rage pulsed through him, paralyzing his senses, making his legs give out like snapped twigs. He heard himself howling. Howling like an animal, his eyes closed against that indifferent blue sky, his hands balled into fists, drawing blood from his palms. Another wail came, then another, and he scrunched his eyes, bracing for the bullet that would pierce his chest, make everything go black. Maybe in this very moment, he and Rudolf would take their last breaths together. What a relief it would be.