Love and Treasure

by Waldman, Ayelet

  “That’ll do,” he said.

  He called the GIs in and ordered them to help the crippled man and the two small boys down the stairs. He took Maria by the arm and frogmarched her down ahead of him. She refused to unlock the door of her apartment, but he saw the key tied to a loop on the webbed military belt that she wore where her waist would have been, had she had one. With a snap of his wrist he yanked the key free and unlocked the door himself. This room, unlike any of the others, still had its hotel furniture. Two large beds made up with actual sheets, even pillows, a dresser missing only one drawer, a cupboard, a table and two chairs, even a scrap of carpet.

  By the time the GIs showed up with the crippled man and his nephews, Jack had tossed all of Maria’s belongings—her clothes and her stacks of linens and blankets, her extra boots and her packages of soaps and cans of kerosene, her sacks of potatoes and flour, her side of cured meat, her cooking pots and dishes—out into the hall. He left the beds, complete with their linens, the dresser and the cupboard, the table and the two chairs.

  “This is your room now,” he said, handing the key to the young man from Buchenwald. Jack slung the sack of C rations he carried onto the floor, opened it, pulled out half of what he’d brought, and dumped it on the bed. Maria stood in the hallway kneading her skirt in her hands, keening bitterly.

  The man hesitated, but the boys ran into the room. The smaller one threw himself onto the bed and rolled on it like it was the first fresh snowfall of the winter.

  “They will punish me,” the man said. “As soon as you leave.”

  Jack pointed at the GIs. “These men will protect you.” To the soldiers he said, “These three are now your responsibility. Anything happens to them, and you’ll have to answer to me. Got that?”

  “Yes, sir,” said the Southerner. He then winked solemnly at the older boy, who tried out a tentative smile.

  Out in the hall, Jack picked up the largest of Maria’s bundles.

  “Come,” he said to her, but she buried her face in her hands.

  “Help me carry her things up to her new room,” he told the GIs. Jack took the steps two at a time. When he reached the fourth floor he saw that the Ukrainians had closed and locked their door. Jack, his arms full, kicked at the door with his heavy boot. When they did not immediately open it, he kicked it again, and it splintered around the lock. He nudged it open the rest of the way, now with the toe of his boot, and handed Maria’s bundle to one of the startled Ukrainians. On his way back down the stairs, he passed the GIs each with a sack of potatoes over his shoulder.

  “Old Maria’s losing her mind down there,” the Southerner said.

  The redhead sat one step up from the bottom, chin in hands, watching with cool fascination as Maria muttered dark syllables in her sinuous mother tongue, weeping and furious.

  “She says she will go to the senior camp administrator,” the redhead said. “She will report you to the military police.”

  “Good,” Jack said. “Tell me. What’s your name?”

  “Ilona. Surname Jakab.” Ilona Jakab looked at the bundles of food and clothes piled on the floor around Maria and said, amused but without apparent rancor, “She has done well for herself.”

  “If you like,” Jack told Maria, in German, “I will post a guard outside the door to your new room, to protect your possessions until you return with the camp administrator and the military police. At that time, we can discuss in more detail your grievances and in particular your experiences as a forced laborer, which I have no doubt were terribly painful.”

  Maria howled something, scooped up a blanket and a basket of apples, and ran up the stairs, her U.S. Army leather and rubber shoepacs thudding on the slick wooden treads.

  Ilona glanced after her and nodded, a satisfied smile crossing her face for an instant. Jack flushed, gratified at the implied compliment.

  She stood up, brushed the grime of the step from the back of her skirt. She began to walk out the door, and as she passed him Jack reached out a hand, hesitating before he touched her arm. She looked back but did not stop, and he followed her out into the bustling hotel courtyard.

  “Wait,” he said. He pushed the sack in her direction. “I brought these for you.”

  “Why?”

  “Why?”

  “Yes, why. Why do you bring me a present?”

  “It’s not a present. It’s food.”

  “So why do you bring me food?”

  “Because you look hungry. Are you?”

  “Am I hungry?”

  “Yes.”

  She considered the question. “I am always hungry.”

  “I heard on Rot-Weiss-Rot this morning that the bakeries have started making rolls and croissants again. Would you like to go get some fresh bread?”

  She shook her head. “I think we have had enough excitement for today.”

  “How about I go get some for you?”

  “Another day, perhaps. I am tired now.”

  “Of course,” he said. Resilient as she seemed, she must tire easily. She had, after all, only just begun to recover from the hell of her life over the past months or years.

  She put out her hand, and he shook it. Her palm was cool and dry, despite the heat of the day, but it felt swollen, the knuckles red, the nail of her right thumb cracked down the middle.

  “Good-bye,” she said.

  “Wait,” he said, keeping hold of her hand. “Is there anything you need? Can I help you with anything?”

  She pondered this question for a moment. Then, instead of answering, she said, “You know my name, but I do not know yours.”

  “Wiseman Jack,” Jack said.

  She laughed. “You answer like a Hungarian.”

  “Yes.”

  “But you are not Hungarian. Your family, I mean.”

  “No. My mother’s parents came from Russia, my father’s great-grandparents from Germany.”

  “But Wiseman Jack, you are a Jew, no?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I am a Jew.”

  “So this is why you helped the Jewish man and his nephews.”

  “Yes. I mean, no. Anyone would have helped.”

  She laughed darkly. “You are a funny man.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  She sized him up with a single, raised brow. “Perhaps not. And yet you make jokes.”

  “I really don’t.”

  “To say anyone would help is a joke. No one helps. No one ever helped.”

  “No. I guess not.” He bit his lip. “Please.”

  “What?”

  “Please. Is there anything I can do for you?”

  “What is it you want to do?”

  He stared, flummoxed. He had no idea.

  She gave him a reprieve. “Thank you, Jack Wiseman. If ever I need anything, I will come to you.”

  • 4 •

  JACK SHARED HIS BILLET in an apartment house off the Hoftsallgasse with two other officers, Phillip Hoyle, a lieutenant fresh out of West Point, and another named David Ball, who did something in the OSS about which Jack was careful never to ask. Ball was from Philadelphia, a gawky man with beautiful hands and long, delicate fingers who planned after his service to disappoint his mother’s dreams of his career as a concert pianist and instead go to medical school. Ball’s brief was mysterious and his movements furtive, but part of his duties, Jack knew, included the pursuit and apprehension of former members of the local Nazi Party. One day about two weeks after the incident with Maria, Ball was sent to arrest the former mayor of a small village about twenty miles from Salzburg. The burgomaster’s wife, tipped off to the Americans’ arrival, had hung signs in English throughout her home that read WIPE YOUR FEET and NOT TO TOUCH.

  “I wouldn’t even have bothered with a search of the house,” Ball said, “if it weren’t for those damned signs.”

  It was beneath a floorboard in the kitchen that Ball’s soldiers found the steel box that now lay on the rickety table in the kitchen of their billet.

  “Jesus,�
� said Hoyle. Neither Ball nor Jack liked Hoyle, though Jack’s loathing was more pronounced, stemming as much from the fact that Hoyle had served in battle not a second longer than it took to earn a dubious Distinguished Service Cross before being pulled back to protect his valuable brass hide, as from the twenty-two-year-old West Pointer’s greedy and craven nature.

  “What are you going to do with it all?” Jack said.

  It was a record, written in food, of the advance of Hitler’s armies across Europe: tins of potted French foie gras, packets of Dutch chocolate, Spanish sardines canned in oil.

  “Eat it, of course, you fucking idiot,” Hoyle said. “Foie gras, Jesus Christ!” He took his knife from his pocket and picked up a can, but Ball lifted a restraining hand.

  “No. It’s evidence, Hoyle.”

  “Then what’d you bring it here for?”

  “It was a moment of weakness. But seeing you salivating over it has brought me to my senses.”

  “If you take it back, some corporal in the evidence room is just going to boost it.”

  “True enough,” Ball said, looking like he might be on the verge of another moment of weakness.

  “I know what to do with it,” Jack said.

  “He’s going to take it to that red Jewess of his,” Hoyle said.

  “I’ve seen the lady,” Ball said. “She could stand to put a little meat on her bones.”

  Jack carried the strongbox down to the Hotel Europa, self-conscious at the value of his burden in a city undergoing ever-increasing food shortages. For weeks now, he had been bringing bread and C rations, cans of Spam, margarine, and other nutrient-dense items to Ilona and to the young man from Buchenwald, whose name was Rudolph Zweig. Jack sweetened his packages with chocolate and hard candies for Zweig’s nephews, Josef and Tomas. Rudolph expressed his gratitude so fervently that he made Jack uncomfortable. His eyes were often wet with tears when he opened the boxes and bags, and once he tried to kiss Jack’s hand. Ilona greeted his deliveries with reluctance and skepticism, even verging at times on an outright irritability (“You again?”) that he found amusing and much easier to tolerate than Rudolph’s damp hand-kissing.

  Today, Jack poked his head through the open door of the room Ilona shared with half a dozen other women, on the third floor of the wing of the building opposite from the one where Zweig was now comfortably and safely ensconced, Maria and the other two Ukrainians having disappeared within days of Jack’s first visit. Ilona was sitting on the edge of her cot while one of her roommates made up her face. The other woman wore a stained and baggy coverall. Her patchy hair was held back by a bright scrap of blue-dotted muslin, and her mouth was done up in the same garish maraschino red that she was now busy applying to Ilona’s lips.

  The woman scolded Ilona in Hungarian, rubbed away the smear she’d made when Ilona had smiled. Then she turned to the door to see what had inspired the grin. “Oh-ho.”

  “Hello,” Ilona said to Jack.

  Until that moment he had not noticed how she’d changed over the past couple of weeks. She had filled out. Her features had softened. And now two slashes of cherry red had transformed her abruptly from the object of his pity to a woman he might conceivably, indeed almost certainly, want to fuck. He thrust the box at her, tongue-tied, suddenly at a loss, no longer a benefactor with provisions but a suitor with a gift.

  The box was so heavy that the makeup artist had to help Ilona ease it to the ground. She lifted the steel lid. All the women in the room craned forward to look.

  “Foie gras!”

  “Caviar!”

  They cooed and sighed and exclaimed as Ilona pulled out tins and jars and packets. “My God, Jack,” she said. “Are you trying to give us gout?”

  He wondered if she was, in her own bitter and broken way, flirting with him.

  “I like your lipstick,” he said.

  “It’s Luba’s,” Ilona said. She switched to German. “Luba, this is Jack. Maybe if you harass his Hungarian POWs he’ll bring you some sardines, too.” Luba giggled.

  “You’ll never guess where Luba got the lipstick,” Ilona said.

  “Where?” he said.

  “Bergen-Belsen!”

  At the look on his face, all the girls in the room burst out laughing.

  Luba said, “After we were liberated, the British Red Cross came to inspect. We had nothing. People were still dying every minute. I remember seeing once a woman with a scrap of soap, washing herself from a cistern in which floated the body of a dead child. But the Red Cross came, and then, a few days later, ten crates of lipstick arrived, no one knows how or where from. We have no food, no bandages, but lipstick we have. And my God, so much! Boxes, boxes, boxes. We were so happy. All of us wore it all the time. Woman squatting in the corner, emptying her bowels from dysentery, but her lips! Perfect red. My friend she dies holding her lipstick in her hand. Most important thing she owned.”

  Ilona said, “In the camp everyone is just a bald head, a scrap of cloth, a number. But”—she smacked her lips together—“you put lipstick on and you are a person. A human.”

  “You look beautiful,” Jack said.

  “Maybe not beautiful,” Ilona said. “But I look a little more like myself.”

  “Come to dinner with me tonight,” he said.

  The women in the room clucked and cooed and made a great show of turning away to allow them a semblance of privacy.

  “Is that an order?” she asked, and he still couldn’t decide if she was flirting with him or not.

  He took Ilona to a place called the Salzburger Café, one of the few restaurants in the city whose menu could be relied on to feature meat. The menu offered reassuring promises of entrecôte de boeuf and lammkotelett, but Jack had been in the area for four months without seeing a cow or a lamb, and it was his view that the remnants of the once-splendid German cavalry brigades, now roaming freely through fields and forests outside the city, nightly met their fate in the kitchen of the Salzburger. He debated keeping his theory to himself, but in the end he guessed that Ilona would see the bitter humor in it.

  She laughed. “I hear rat is quite tender,” she said. “When the horses are gone.”

  She pored over the menu as if it were the Sunday Times, reading the name of each item aloud, regardless of whether it was available. When the food came, she dispatched it with a terrible ardor. She licked sauce from the tines of her fork, from the flat of her knife.

  “I have gained new respect for horses,” she said. “Also for Austrian chefs.”

  Jack was less enamored of the dark fist of horseflesh sitting clenched and bloody on his plate. He found it gamy and tough, ribboned with strings of fat, so at a certain point he just laid his fork down and got his pleasure from watching her go at it. After she had cleaned her plate she belched and then covered her mouth with her hand. It was the first time he’d seen her blush. Then her eyes drifted toward his plate, and he saw hunger fight its way through the embarrassment. He passed it across the table toward her, and she cleaned that, too, sopping up the gravy with a piece of the white bread that had suddenly become available in the city, the bakers catering to the tastes of their American occupiers. When there was nothing edible left anywhere in the vicinity of their table, Ilona pushed back her chair, settled her hands on her belly, and smiled sleepily, looking, with her yellow-green eyes and red hair, like a contented ginger cat.

  “You save any room for dessert?” he asked.

  She blushed again. “Maybe a little. Do they have coffee?”

  “They have something they call coffee. What it is, I don’t know.”

  When the waiter had served their strudel and the watery brown liquid he insisted, despite all evidence to the contrary, on calling coffee, Ilona managed to slow down, lingering over the dessert.

  “The Red Cross nurses who come to the DP camp keep saying be careful, be careful,” Ilona said. “They say our digestions are not used to protein, to fat. And it’s true; at first I got sick sometimes. But now?” she patted her
belly. “My stomach is like the horse I just ate. Maybe I’ll go home and eat your foie gras, too.”

  “My grandmother used to make strudel like this,” Jack said. “Actually, I think it was her cook. But she used to say it was her grandmother’s recipe.”

  “This is your German grandmother?”

  “Yes. I mean, generations back. But they’d been in America so long they weren’t really German. They were barely Jewish. They had a Christmas tree every year.”

  “My family is like your father’s, I think. Only just a little bit Jewish. We celebrate every year Christmas. In America, there are many Jewish army officers?”

  “Some,” he said. “I wouldn’t say many.”

  Jack had been one of only three Jews in his officer training course. Early on, the NCOs had targeted the Jewish officer candidates for special mistreatment, and their fellow OCs, relieved to find scapegoats for their misery, had eagerly joined in. Kleinbaum had washed out after only a few days of the abuse. Finkelman, a wiry little graduate of NYU law school, had responded to the attacks by growing steadily more belligerent. By the time he and Jack received their bars, Finkelman had been involved in at least a dozen scraps. He was saved from being shit-canned from the course only because his victims were too embarrassed to complain that a skinny, four-eyed, Jewboy shrimp had cleaned their clocks. Jack had never run from a fight, but he did not consider truculence to be a sustainable philosophical approach to life, and so he had chosen to survive officer training by keeping his mouth shut and his head down. He made no friends, but neither did he, unlike Finkelman, lose any teeth.

  “And it’s okay, life for a Jew in your army?” Ilona asked.

  “It’s fine,” he told her, and indeed things had improved once he joined the Rainbow Division and found himself in the company of a fair number of Jewish enlisted men and even a couple of other Jewish officers. Despite the ease with which many of his men and fellow officers tossed around words like “kike” and “sheeny,” he would not have described them as anti-Semites. True, the running joke about “Abie and Sadie,” who managed, despite rationing, to get tires for their car and sugar for their tea, depressed him, as did the fact that when conditions got particularly bad he frequently heard GIs complaining that the only reason they were being forced to endure the misery was because they were fighting Hitler for the sake of the Jews. But the men’s antagonism was born of ignorance—Jack and the others in the division were the first Jews many of them had ever met. So he was generous with his forgiveness of them and stingy in his praise of the Jewish enlisted men. He was harder on the Jews in his command than on the Gentiles, holding them to a higher standard of comportment and conduct in a way that was, he supposed, a kind of secret favoritism, as though he believed in his heart that more could be expected of a Jew than of his Gentile brother-in-arms.