Love and Treasure

by Waldman, Ayelet

  “Come with you where?”

  “Home. To New York.”

  “You want me to come live with you in New York City?”

  “Yes.”

  “Because in New York City they love so much the Jews?”

  “New York is full of Jews.”

  Tzipi and Micha swung up into their truck, slamming the doors. He had no time.

  Ilona said, “You know what the Hungarians called Budapest before the war?”

  “No.”

  “Jew-dapest.”

  “It’s different. Please, Ilona!”

  “In New York I will not be the dregs of Europe?”

  Jack tried to imagine his parents seeing Ilona for the first time. His fastidious father pursing his narrow lips at the sight of her crippled foot, his warm but neurotic mother reduced to tears by the crooked tattoo, the number A11436 etched in blue on the freckled skin of her arm, a few inches below the crease of her elbow. He thought of the girls he’d dated in college, the bookish ones in their headbands and plaid kilts, with whom he’d exchanged chaste kisses in the library stacks, the jolly AEPhi girls in their green-and-white sweaters, with their bouncing curls and their sturdy legs. The racy downtown girls, their mouths tasting of cigarettes and red wine, who’d occasionally let him slip his fingers beneath the elastic of their panties as they necked in the dark corners of bars and cafés. Would these girls be Ilona’s friends? What would all these cheerfully clueless people make of this dark and lonely girl with her bitter laugh?

  He said, “In New York you’ll be my wife. Ilona. Marry me.” He belatedly dropped to the ground, on one knee.

  “My God, Jack! Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You fell.”

  “I didn’t fall. I’m kneeling. Ilona. Please. Marry me.”

  “Oh, get up. For God’s sake, get up.”

  He scrambled to his feet, wiped the dirt from his knees. He felt ridiculous.

  “Jack,” Ilona said. “I am not a foolish girl.”

  “I know that,” he said.

  “I know what Yuval and the others are doing. I know they are fighting a battle for Palestine and that we are a weapon in this war. I know they look at us and think, Why are you alive when so many others are dead? I know they wonder, Did this one steal bread? Did that one betray his friends? Was this one a Kapo, is that why she is alive? I think the same. I ask the same questions. I know I’m not the best of my family. My sister, Etelka, she was much finer than I. She deserved more than me to live. So I am alive, and I am not the good one.”

  “That’s not true!”

  “No,” she agreed. “Or maybe yes. The others, maybe they’re not the good ones, either. Or maybe they are. I don’t know.”

  “I love you, Ilona. I love you, and I want to marry you.”

  “Once I was like you. I lived in a gossamer world, a tissue of lies, where things like love mattered. And that was all just blown away. Shredded and torn and destroyed. I don’t want to go with you to New York, where even you cannot promise me it is not the Jew-dapest of tomorrow. I want to go to Tel Aviv and live where everyone is Jewish, and if your neighbor steals your bicycle it is because he is a thief, not because he is an anti-Semite.”

  “The British will never let you get to Tel Aviv.”

  “Of course they will. You said so yourself. The world will not let them kill Hitler’s victims. They will not fire their guns on the few who survived.”

  “They will!”

  “Maybe once. Maybe they’ll kill one of us. Or two. Or ten. Maybe they will even kill me. But eventually we will win. Eventually they will have no choice but to give us the land.”

  “Okay, let’s say you’re right. You’re still risking your life for people who despise you.”

  “Everyone despises us. This maybe is the only lesson I have learned. Every single person despises the Jews, even the ones who say they don’t. Even the Jews themselves.” Again the bitter laugh. “Except Yuval and the others from Palestine. They despise us, but they don’t despise themselves. That is the miracle. A Jew who doesn’t hate himself.”

  “I don’t despise you. I love you. And you love me. I know you do.”

  “I don’t even know what that means anymore. How can I?”

  “Are you saying you never loved me? You lied to me? You really did come to the warehouse and take me back because Aba Yuval needed an American military truck to smuggle DPs across the border? You made love to me to get my truck?”

  The second truck started up, the engine gunning. She glanced over at it. In the faint moonlight her skin shone pale, and he imagined he could see the flutter of her pulse in her throat. He allowed himself to believe that she was fighting back tears, but when she looked up at him, her eyes were dry.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  He laughed then, a dark and bitter bark that he had learned from her. “Are you sad or apologetic?”

  He left her there, walked around his truck, and swung himself into the driver’s seat. He wanted to look away but couldn’t, and so he watched as she crossed to the second truck, pulled aside the canvas curtain, and climbed inside. He waited for her to look back, to acknowledge everything that had passed between them, but she never did. So much did he loathe the idea of spending even another minute in Yuval’s presence that he considered leaving him in the rutted field in northern Italy to make his own way back to Salzburg. But in the end Jack did, as always, the honorable thing.

  • 15 •

  IT WAS NOT UNTIL they were knee to knee at a small table in the Centrál Kávéház that Amitai asked her name.

  “Natalie,” she said, then hesitated. “Stein.”

  “You’re not sure?” he said.

  “It’s Natalie Stein.”

  “Because you sound like a woman who has given an alias.”

  She had hair the color of blood oranges, a head of coils and ringlets that shone bright amid the neobaroque splendor of the coffeehouse. She had bunched her curls up on top of her head as though to banish them for being so outrageous, affixing them with a cracked tortoiseshell clip. Her skin was pale and dappled with freckles that were the same color as her hair, like shoes dyed to match a dress. Amitai allowed his eyes to follow the trail of freckles to the point at which they disappeared into the deep V-neck of her shirt. Indeed he could not prevent them from doing so.

  “It’s just that I recently changed it. It was Friedman for a little while, but now it’s back to Stein.”

  “Divorce?” he asked. She looked barely thirty, at least a decade younger than he was. It surprised him that someone so young could have already made such a serious mistake.

  “Yes.”

  “So am I. Though my ex-wife is still Shasho. But then her maiden name is Cattan, which in Hebrew means ‘little,’ and she always resented the irony.”

  “She’s not little?”

  He smiled. “She is beautiful and shapely and thus, like all women who do not look like survivors of famine, despises herself.”

  “You think all women despise themselves?”

  “I think a woman who has the kind of body a man enjoys invariably hates it.”

  He thought it best not to mention that it was the surprise discovery of Natalie’s heart-shaped ass, admirably gadol, that had inspired his invitation to join him at the coffeehouse, rather than discuss their mutual business in the relatively more professional setting of Pétér Elek’s small shop off Váci Utca, on the Pest side of the Danube.

  “And what kind of body does a man enjoy?” Natalie asked.

  Though Amitai was not vain about his good looks, neither was he averse to taking advantage of the power conferred by them. He possessed a pair of electric blue eyes behind a tangle of long, dark lashes, lips so lush that they flirted with prettiness, and a square jaw with the barest hint of a cleft. Women always flirted with him, and so he was not surprised that Natalie’s words were flirtatious, as was the tip of her tongue as it delicately licked a bit of dobos torte from her for
k. Yet there was something halting about her tone as she flirted, as if she were attempting to converse in a foreign language. For a moment it seemed she was batting her eyes at him from behind the layers of sponge cake, chocolate buttercream, and caramel, but then she gave that up and, with a small sigh, shoved a huge forkful into her mouth.

  The waiter returned with two silver trays, each outfitted with a cup of coffee, a glass of water, and a cookie in a paper wrapping. He wore operetta livery, all brass buttons and gold frogging, but his cuffs were smeared with chocolate sauce. Amitai removed the cookie from the tray the waiter set before him and placed it on the edge of Natalie’s saucer.

  “You’re not hungry?” she said.

  “I don’t have much of a sweet tooth. How is your cake?”

  She licked caramel from the prongs of her fork. “Mm,” she said. “So? You were saying?”

  “What was I saying?”

  “You were telling me what kind of body men like.”

  “Was I? Actually I don’t think I was. There is not one kind of body all men like. Different men like different things. But most men, I think, prefer women who are shaped like women, not like small boys. We like hips and breasts.”

  “Your wife had hips and breasts?”

  “I think perhaps I have talked too much about my ex-wife. Tell me instead about the necklace. It belonged to your grandmother?”

  It was the necklace—an unusual pendant, decorated with an enamel painting of a peacock, the tips of its feathers set in alternating stones of amethyst and peridot—that had brought them, and their kneecaps, together. Two days earlier, Amitai had received an urgent e-mail from his friend Pétér Elek, a dealer in jewelry and art, informing him that he might have a lead on a painting that Amitai had been pursuing for the past few years. A young woman, Elek said, had visited his shop seeking information about the history of a pendant she had inherited. Elek had recognized the piece as similar, if not identical, to the one worn by the woman depicted in the painting. This was Amitai’s first break in the hunt for the Portrait of Frau E. Two days after Elek’s call, he was on a plane bound for Budapest.

  When Elek had buzzed Natalie into his tiny, poorly lit shop, hair ablaze, cheeks flushed from the river-bottom chill of the Budapest winter, Amitai was caught off guard. He had been so focused on the mysterious necklace that he had not bothered to try to imagine its owner. If he had, experience and a reflexive pessimism would have led him to expect a wealthy Upper West Side matron with a hint of a mustache and comfortable shoes, relieving her empty-nest tedium with the hobby of genealogy. Recovering from his initial shock, he had proposed to Natalie that they adjourn to the Centrál, to discuss their mutual interest over coffee and cake, so as to allow Elek privacy in which to haggle with the mistress of a minor Russian oligarch over the price of an emerald-encrusted diadem.

  Now Natalie said, “The necklace was my grandfather’s, not my grandmother’s.”

  Why, Amitai wondered, the distinction?

  “It is a family heirloom? From his mother, perhaps?”

  She busied herself with her cake. “He … got it during the war. He was an officer, a captain in the U.S. Army. He was in the infantry.”

  “But American forces never fought in Hungary.”

  “He served in France and then, after the war, in Salzburg. During the occupation. That’s where he … found the necklace.”

  Amitai took note of the difficulty she faced in coming up with the right verb to describe the means by which the necklace had come into her grandfather’s possession. He wondered how many synonyms and euphemisms for “looted” she might resort to before she would be willing to face the truth.

  “In Salzburg,” he said. “But you’re sure the piece is Hungarian?”

  “Yes. At least, I know that its owner must have been. She was from a place called Nagyvárad, which I guess is now called Oradea? It’s just over the border into Romania, but it was part of Hungary at the time.”

  An odd coincidence, he thought, that Natalie had told her story to one of the few people who might know how a Hungarian heirloom could end up in the possession of an American soldier serving in Salzburg in 1945. Amitai was disappointed by the admission, not because it revealed her grandfather’s criminality, though it likely did. He was disappointed because if the necklace could have been traced to a relative of Natalie’s in Hungary, he would have been that much closer to learning the identity of the Frau E. who had posed for the portrait and thus, perhaps, its current whereabouts. Now he feared he had come all the way from New York for nothing.

  “Mr. Elek told me that you’re an art dealer?” Natalie said.

  “Of sorts.”

  Amitai worked for his paternal great-uncle, Jacob Shasho, who had initially founded the firm of Shasho & Sons as a means of profitably disposing of the remnants of his collection of art and artifacts salvaged during his escape from Aleppo, Syria, in 1947. Shasho & Sons had expanded into a vast mercantile empire and now included real-estate holdings and various retail and wholesale businesses. Amitai had joined the firm after finishing his military service and emigrating from Israel to New York. Under his leadership, Shasho & Sons’ art and artifacts department had shifted away from the appraisal and sale of Middle Eastern art and decorative objects to their current specialty, the reclamation and sale of art lost in the Holocaust, and had consequently become substantially more profitable.

  Natalie said, “And so, what, a necklace like mine is in a painting that you own?”

  “A painting that I am searching for. The necklace in the painting is very much like yours. Identical, I think.”

  “How do you know, if you’ve never seen it?”

  “I have seen a photograph of the painting. The artist was named Vidor Komlós. You have never heard of him, I am sure.”

  “No.”

  “His work has been lost since the war. Komlós was a friend of the great Bauhaus artist László Moholy-Nagy, who took a photograph of the painting.”

  Amitai scrolled through his phone until he found a black-and-white photograph. The vantage point was from above and at a distorted angle, but it was still easy to make out that it was of a young man with wild curly hair, wearing work clothes and holding a painting. The painting, though visible only in part, was of a woman, drawn from behind, nude on a wooden chair with a rattan seat. The woman was posed twisting at the waist to look over her shoulder, face and chest to the viewer, eyes downcast. Her head, however, was not human. It was the head of a peacock.

  Amitai showed the picture to Natalie, then had her zoom in on the pendant that dangled from the plumed throat of the peacock woman. Even in a blur of low-res pixels, it was unmistakably identical to the one Natalie wore.

  “It’s my necklace!” she exclaimed.

  “One of the things that’s exciting for me, seeing your necklace, is the color. The purple and green. Perhaps these give some indication or clue of the palette used by Komlós in the painting.”

  “Is it valuable, the painting? Is that why you’re looking for it?”

  “Possibly. The photo is fairly well known, and for many years people have wondered about this painting and the young man who was holding it. It was not in the style of Moholy-Nagy. It is reminiscent of Max Ernst’s work, so there was some speculation it might be his. But I have established with reasonable certainty that the man in the photo is Komlós. Correspondence between Moholy-Nagy and Komlós was discovered not long ago that makes it clear that this painting was Komlós’s Portrait of Frau E. And that makes it very interesting.”

  “Why is it more interesting if it was painted by someone unknown?”

  “Komlós’s peacock head is reminiscent of a character in the work of Max Ernst, Loplop, a bird. Loplop was in many ways Ernst’s alter ego. When he wrote of Loplop, Ernst said he first received visitations by the bird in 1930 and began after that to paint and draw him. But the Moholy-Nagy photograph was taken in Berlin early in 1929, before Loplop first appeared. Also the Komlós painting, a nude wit
h the head of the bird, shares something with Ernst’s The Robing of the Bride, which was painted many years later. I wonder, did Komlós know Ernst? Had they met before Ernst created Loplop? Who influenced whom?”

  “Do you own other Komlós paintings?”

  “No one does. The works of Komlós have been missing for nearly seventy years. But lately a mythology has grown up around Komlós because of the Moholy-Nagy photograph, because of the idea that he might have inspired Ernst.”

  “What happened to Komlós?” she asked. “Why were all his paintings lost?”

  “Unlike his friend Moholy-Nagy, Komlós did not escape to the United States at the outbreak of World War Two. He remained in Hungary, and like most Jewish men, he was conscripted into the labor service. He died on the Russian front.”

  “And his paintings?”

  “Lost during the war. However, in the letter to Moholy-Nagy, Komlós wrote that he made a gift of the bird painting to its muse. That is why, when Elek told me of you and your necklace, I had hoped that I might find this model, and that by finding her, I would find the painting.”

  Though he had refrained from allowing his voice to reveal the extent of his disappointment, the girl was more observant than he’d given her credit for, and she said, “You had hoped. You don’t anymore.”

  “You said your grandfather was in the American army in Salzburg.”

  “Yes.”

  “And that’s where he got the necklace.”

  “Yes.”

  “So then he took it from the Gold Train.”

  She lost her grip on her cup, splashing coffee into the saucer. He took hold of the saucer with one hand and with the other steadied her wrist. He tipped the spilled coffee back into the cup.

  “You know about the Hungarian Gold Train?” she asked.

  “I specialize in art and artifacts lost during the Holocaust,” he said. “So yes, I know about the train. If the necklace came from the train, then, unfortunately, its owner, this mysterious muse of Vidor Komlós, was a Jew. This suggests that the painting which Komlós presented to her was likely confiscated along with the rest of her property. In that case it, like every other painting on that train, is gone.”