When the Summer Was Ours

by Roxanne Veletzos

  Yet, just as on his first day here, the bullet didn’t come, and when all of his strength had left him, he lay down flat on the ground with his arms splayed out, as if on a cross. He was no longer there. He was in a field of flowers, he was dancing around a fire, he was lost in the sound of his fiddle. A cool spring air enfolded him, the moist grass tickling his bare skin. That sun, so bright, so bright. Perhaps this is how death comes, he thought then, not in darkness but in a funnel of light.

  Then something pulled him back, jolted him, forced him upright and to his feet. A roar coming from the courtyard, and another from the barracks, joining together, building. Voices everywhere, shouts, cries, banging on pipes, prisoners running past him, the sound of gunfire.

  And then the most astonishing thing, a thing he could not comprehend at first, a thing that he thought was a mere concoction of his failing mind until he rose to his feet and turned in a full circle: the sound of laughter, of singing. And someone shouting from the direction of the camp gates:

  “We are free! We are free!”

  23

  IT TOOK RUDOLF NEARLY THREE weeks to recover after the liberation, three long weeks of plasma transfusions and interminable nights in an old prison barrack that had been converted by the U.S. Army into a hospital ward. Aleandro never left his side during this time. Deloused now and vaccinated, his head shaven, and wearing some civilian clothing doled out from the back of a relief truck, Aleandro stood guard against the Four Horsemen much as Rudolf had stood guard for him once.

  Every day, hundreds still died, unable to recover from the ravages of illness or months of starvation, despite the medics’ relentless efforts to save anyone who could still be saved, and bodies were lined up outside of the ward to await the burials, which could not be carried out quickly enough. But not the man next to him. For Rudolf, Aleandro would beat back death with his own fists.

  Finally, when Rudolf opened his eyes and looked at him with that clear, penetrating gaze, Aleandro felt that he, too, had reopened his eyes, that he, too, took his first renewed breath, that he, too, had been reborn in a world in which change might be possible. And he wept, clutching Rudolf’s hands in his. Together they wept for all that was lost to them, they wept for all that they had seen and would never forget, they wept for their lost mates. But mostly, they wept with gratitude. And so it would seem they had been among the lucky ones.

  Slowly, as the color in Rudolf’s cheeks deepened and he was able to hold down solids, they began taking walks around the old campground. It seemed more or less a replica of its former state, soot-covered still from the constant crematorium fires, but now American flags flew on the guard towers, and the army officers regarded them not with hatred but rather solemn reverence, which unsettled them and made them, without meaning to, glance over their shoulders.

  Rudolf asked him about the liberation, when they stopped to sit outside the camp. Aleandro recounted the night the American soldiers stormed the camp gates and scaled the walls, and how the prisoners ran toward them, falling at their feet, begging to be rescued. He told him about the American commander putting a pistol to the forehead of that SS capo and pulling the trigger, the others following suit, machine-gunning the remaining SS guards who hadn’t already fled, there in the courtyard where they used to carry out their own executions. And of the boxcars that were found at the edge of the camp containing the bodies of thousands of men, women, and children in various stages of decomposition.

  “Have you ever seen a soldier cry, Rudolf? A man in uniform sobbing in his hands? Neither had I. Neither had I. But on that day, when the Americans stormed the gates and came in over the wall, when they stood in the midst of what you and I had come to regard as everyday life, I did see such a thing. Many of them were weeping, Rudolf, sobbing like little children.”

  “So it really is over,” said Rudolf in a bewildered whisper. “This is not just a pause in the war. The Allies have really won.”

  “It is over indeed. But in our hearts, will it ever be?”

  “No,” said Rudolf, his own voice breaking. “But I don’t suppose that a thing like this should be relegated to memory. What of your drawings?” he said after a silence. “Do you have them still?”

  “I do. And I still have my sketchbook. For whatever they might be worth now.”

  “More than enough,” said Rudolf, and his eyes drifted back toward the milky-blue sky, reaching over to pat Aleandro’s hand as his father had done once after a good violin play.

  * * *

  Slowly, they inched back toward what might be some sense of normality. By then, the recovered prisoners were being transferred in stages to displacement camps in Austria, and Aleandro and Rudolf found themselves among a diminishing population of survivors lingering with the army staff. In the canteen where the prisoners had once served the SS guards, American soldiers doled soup from steaming metal pots—real soup, filled with bits of carrots and rice—and the conversations echoed freely of things that came from a different world, from other families who had endured losses of their own an ocean away.

  Rudolf, fluent in English, had befriended a sturdy American rabbi with a healthy complexion and earnest brown eyes who had arrived at Dachau the day after the liberation to minister to the survivors and was compiling ledgers of names to distribute beyond Germany’s borders. He had also offered to send letters on the prisoners’ behalf to families or to friends from before the war—a fact that Rudolf delivered back to Aleandro in practically one breath, with great jubilation.

  “You should write to Eva! I know that you want to write to her, so why not do it now? Don’t you want to know if she is still out there waiting for you?” He kept shaking Aleandro’s shoulder in a way that jarred him. Lately, Aleandro was so tired that all he wanted to do was sleep. But there was no escaping Rudolf now, who had gripped his hands and refused to release them. “You’ve always told me that you lived to see her again. If I were you, I wouldn’t waste another day. Not when so many have been wasted.”

  “I’m not sure.” Aleandro swallowed, a heat crawling up his neck. “I’m not sure that I can do that yet. It’s been so long, so very long. What if she doesn’t answer? What if my letter doesn’t find her at all? What if she doesn’t want to hear from me? I don’t know if I could take it, Rudolf. Maybe some other time, maybe later, maybe…”

  In the silence, Rudolf regarded him. “You, Aleandro? Will you really give up so easily? Is it pain that you fear? Is it disappointment? Because if that’s what it is, I will stand right by your side come hell or high water. But don’t you want to know what is still out there for you? Besides, sooner or later, this camp will be dissolved and you will have to figure out where life will take you now, how it will resume. So you might as well start right now.”

  “Resume? What a strange concept that sounds.”

  “Yes, yes, Aleandro, resume. Resume life, of which there is still plenty. So, what will you do, maestro? Will you take this next step with me? Because, you see, heartbreak is quite ordinary. There are worse things in life to fear.”

  The shadow of a grin rose to Aleandro’s lips. “You sound just like her. She once said something to me, something very similar.”

  “That is a sign. You do believe in signs, don’t you? So come, Aleandro, let’s go see this rabbi friend of mine. You will like him. You will like him a lot.”

  * * *

  It took Aleandro three whole days to draft his letter. More than a dozen sheets he ripped up, and it was only when the administrative sergeant in the Red Cross office told him there would be no further paper for him that he settled on five measly lines. What to say? What to say after all this time? He felt ridiculous conveying that he was alive, that he never forgot her, that he hoped she managed well enough when he knew that no one had managed at all in the inferno that had engulfed an entire continent. The words sounded shallow and removed from his own ears, blocky simple sentences that a child might write, and in the end, he handed his letter to Rudolf in disgust. He wondered if t
he address he pulled from his dusty memory would be sufficient.

  “Ah, there it is! Courage, my friend! Courage.” Rudolf beamed, brandishing an envelope of his own and waving it in the air. “Caution to the wind! That’s what life is made of! This is not a time for regrets, it is a time for living!”

  “Thank you, Rudolf,” Aleandro uttered after Rudolf dashed off to deliver the letters into the hands of his friend.

  Alone, after Rudolf left, he sat on the edge of his bed, his hands dangling futilely between his knees, trying to imagine what his life could still be beyond these walls.

  * * *

  In late July, ten weeks after the liberation, Rudolf received the long-awaited reply and wept reading it, lifting Aleandro off his feet even though Aleandro towered over him by a whole head. Rudolf would go to America. His cousin, his only surviving relative and best childhood friend, would sponsor him to come to New York, and that night, they sang some Hungarian songs and danced in the barrack stripped of beds where they once shared their deepest secrets.

  “New York, Rudolf!” Aleandro kept saying, shaking his head in disbelief. “I can’t believe it. You will live in the city of skyscrapers! You will stroll through Central Park, you will… you will wear a proper suit! You will take it by storm. I’m quite sure of it. How wonderful, Rudolf, how wonderful this is.”

  “We should not lose faith,” said Rudolf, who could read Aleandro like a book. “Your letter will come, too. I know it in my heart, Aleandro. Just be patient. And I’m not going anywhere in the meantime. I will stay here and wait with you. However long it takes, I will wait with you.”

  It seemed almost fated that the next day, the chaplain delivered Aleandro’s envelope while he and Rudolf were eating supper in the canteen. He ripped it open in one swift move but couldn’t bring himself to read it. He was shaking like a leaf, and it was only when Rudolf unfolded it and placed it on the table in front of him, slamming his hand down on it, that Aleandro let his eyes travel over the lines. And read it again as he held it up against the light.

  Dear Aleandro,

  To say that news of your survival was met, at least on my part, with absolute joy would be an understatement. I cannot imagine what life has been for you in these two long years since you and Eva, believing perhaps rather innocently in a world in which you could be together, were forced to part. But as you said so eloquently in your own letter, war is war, and victims are not only to be found on the battleground.

  I know what my dear Eva felt for you. She whispered it in my ear through some very tough moments of her own, moments when I thought that her singular happiness rested solely on your return.

  I assume you already know who I am, but in case you do not, let me say that I have cared for Eva and have loved her ever since she was a child. And as much as my heart is filled with compassion for you, Aleandro, it is Eva’s best interests that I must protect now. Simply put, she is happy. Happy now, at last, after so many losses of her own, eager to reconstruct a life that had almost slipped through her fingers.

  And so I ask you not to disturb that happiness won at great personal cost. Nothing has been fair in this terrible world and much has been sacrificed for those we love with no more than a wish that they should live now in peace. And so I ask you, Aleandro, I beg you for one final sacrifice. Do not write to her again.

  Yours,

  Dora

  * * *

  It was Rudolf’s turn to keep vigil over Aleandro that night. Rudolf made no effort to stop his weeping, until he freed one of his hands from Aleandro’s grasp and rested it upon his head like a priest offering a blessing, or, in this case, a prayer.

  “Aleandro, come with me to New York.”

  “How can I, Rudolf? How could I come with you, even if I wanted to?”

  “Well, that’s just it. You can. I didn’t tell you this earlier—I didn’t because I knew you would object or think me mad—but, well… I took it upon myself to tell my cousin about you, about all that you’ve done for me, and she agreed that if you, too, should find yourself without a home, she would be happy to take you under her wing, to sponsor you as she has me. Only if you should desire it, that is.”

  “What? Do you mean, to come with you? To come with you to America?”

  Rudolf nodded. “Yes, Aleandro. So come with me! Come with me to that city of skyscrapers; come and walk with me in Central Park! Let’s see where this new path will lead us. Because I know that your best days, despite what you might think right now, are still ahead of you. Don’t say anything yet—just sleep on it, Aleandro.”

  It took Aleandro only half the night to figure out that Rudolf was right. Rudolf was the only person he had now, the only person he could trust in the world. Their journey was not over, it could never be over, and there was nothing for him in Hungary anymore. Not without his brothers and not without the possibility of her.

  He should have been desolate, but in the course of the night a bubble of hope rose up in him again, a full wave now for what might still be within his grasp. And so he delivered his answer without delay the next morning as he and Rudolf took their usual stroll under a starkly clear sky.

  “The thing is, Rudolf, maybe in America, just maybe, I might still be able to apply myself, to see if I can do something meaningful, something of which she might take notice. To become not the penniless fiddler that she remembers, but someone whom she might admire someday. Don’t say anything, because I know what you are thinking. I know that you think I should forget her now. But we all need our reasons, do we not? Much as we have in the past. We all need reasons to move forward, even if those reasons are illusions. So, for that alone, Rudolf, I will come with you. I will come with you, my brother, and with God’s good grace, we will become better men.”

  Rudolf tilted his face to the passing clouds, and when his eyes set back on Aleandro, that mischievous light, that light that had become Aleandro’s sustainment, was there again. A whole galaxy was contained within it, an infinite blank page upon which love and loss and victory could still be rewritten.

  He, too, would rewrite his own blank page, and he would find his way back to her again. He believed it then, believed it with the same intensity he once felt when, in the light of a bonfire under a star-studded sky, they were falling in love.

  Part III RESTORATIONS

  24

  New York

  Summer 1955

  THE SHRILL OF THE ALARM bore through Aleandro’s skull like a pickaxe. Pulling a pillow over his ear with one hand, groping for the clock on the nightstand with the other, he managed to crack open an eye, and sat up with great effort. Last night he’d forgotten to draw the curtains, and his room was flooded with light.

  He groaned as he got out of bed and staggered to the window to yank the curtains shut. Rubbing his temples, he sat on the windowsill. His head felt as if it would split open like an overripe melon, and the recollection of yesterday night began to seep in.

  “Urgh.” He groaned again, this time into his hands. The wall to the right of his massive oak bed was stained with red wine, rivulets trailing down to a pile of shards that had been one of his best wine goblets. Lord, it looked like a murder scene. Well, he thought, lesson to be learned here. That was the last time he would break things off with a woman—even though he thought he’d done it so gently, so reasonably—in his own apartment, much less in his bedroom. He checked his watch. Eleven fifteen. The cleanup effort would have to wait if he were to do anything at all with this day. Hoping Estella hadn’t sprinkled some shards in her furious wake, he made his way barefoot to the shower and flicked on the silvery knobs.

  An hour later, jostled in the back of a checkered cab, which navigated through the quiet Sunday of the Upper West Side toward the livelier downtown, Aleandro finally felt a little bit better, but now a terrible remorse filtered through in place of his nausea. He shouldn’t have had so much to drink at dinner, shouldn’t have brought her to his apartment, shouldn’t have, especially, gone to his room to lie down for
a bit, only to open his eyes and find her sitting at the foot of his bed, in a negligée, sipping her wine seductively. The timing, oh Lord, the timing had been terrible. He would have to call her, try to make some reparations, but damn it, it wasn’t like he hadn’t been honest with her from the get-go. He’d been honest with all of them.

  Sooner or later, he explained on each occasion as earnestly as he could, they would tire of his schedule, his frequent absences, his moods, his bouts of isolation. Sooner or later, he would let them down because the truth was (this part he didn’t particularly convey but used it more for his own justification) his heart was simply unavailable. His art was the only thing that moved him, the only thing that made him feel alive. Love was never part of the bargain. And yet more often than not it ended much the same way.

  At the corner of East Second Street and First Avenue, he took a much-welcome breath through the window, feeling the knot in his stomach loosen a little as he tapped on the glass:

  “This is good. You can leave me here, my good man.”

  He counted a few wrinkled bills from the pocket of last night’s pants, thanking God there was enough to pay for the fare, then crawled out of the seat with his sketch paper and tin case, heading to the usual spot, where he hoped to take advantage of a few hours of the spectacular sunlight.

  On his short trek, trash bins were lined up curbside and in gangways, overflowing, ready for Monday morning’s pickup, and he inhaled deeply, inhaled the scent of tossed leftovers and rotten flowers and cigarette butts with satisfaction. In the posh West Side neighborhood where he’d moved three years prior, there were never any trash bins—not for long, at any rate—and, as much as he knew it wasn’t normal, he missed this smell. Then again, he’d long stopped believing that anything about him was normal.