“The murals had been there in that apartment for decades, derelict, rotting inside a kitchen cupboard.”
“They’d been found. They were being excavated.”
“That’s not how it happened.”
“Oh, really. And you know how it happened?”
“Yes, I do. This German filmmaker, of all people, got obsessed with Schulz and the nursery murals. He goes looking for them, they’re supposedly long lost, but they’re right there, in the cupboard of this miserable apartment, where they’d always been, because it turns out they weren’t lost, it’s just that no one had bothered to look for them. Not the Poles who made such a big deal out of Schulz being this great Polish genius and damn sure not the Ukrainians. They didn’t look, because they didn’t care. They only cared when we dared to take them.”
“We?”
“Okay, you. Israel. Yad Vashem. Whatever.”
“Not me. I am always careful to act within the law.”
“Whose law? The laws of the people who stole the property in the first place? Do you know what happened after the Schulz murals were taken? After everybody freaked out about those horrible Israelis, how dare they, destroying the sacred property of Poland and Ukraine? The parts of the murals that Yad Vashem left behind were vandalized. But I guess you’re saying, what, you’re saying it was their right to do that, because by law the murals were their property.”
“Thank you, Natalie, you just proved my point.”
She looked puzzled, going back over what she had said, looking for the flaw.
“The Poles and the Ukrainians never cared about Schulz’s murals until Yad Vashem took them. True. Absolutely correct. And, in just the very same way, the Hungarians and Romanians never cared about Vidor Komlós. I’ll go further: they never even heard of Vidor Komlós. But you can be damn sure they’re going to care now. Now that we’ve stolen the painting? Vidor Komlós will become a cause célèbre! You have guaranteed that. You have just fucking guaranteed that!”
The echo of his outcry rang against the surfaces of the hotel room, the pipes in the walls. Then silence.
Slowly, she rose from her chair. She walked silently to the bed. She lifted the painting, turned it over, and laid it faceup.
It was one of the most beautiful things he had ever seen, and one of the most terrible. The frank eroticism of the woman’s nude body, sensual and ripe. Her skin, alabaster pale in places, and then blushed a tender pink. The dense, brilliant color of the feathers on the peacock head, a dozen different iridescent blues, their intricate texture. The peacock’s demonic, piercing eye, not black but green, even hazel. The peacock’s head with its woman’s eye virtually burst from the canvas. The painting was at once opulent and unsettling, lush yet stark, sensual yet deeply disturbing, and Amitai was conscious suddenly of a painful, erotic longing. He ached to fall into the arms of this woman. He knew that in those arms a man who had always felt homeless could feel finally at home. He understood why Varga had kept it in the bathroom of all places. If it belonged to him he, too, would hang it in a private, intimate place, where he was the only one allowed to look at it.
Natalie stripped off her boots. She wriggled out of her dress, pulled her hair out of its tight bun, and lay down on the bed next to the painting. He sat down beside her and put his hand on her soft, warm belly, granting her absolution with his touch.
“No way am I giving it back to that motherfucker,” he said.
“Right?”
“You’re right. You did the right thing.”
“So what are we going to do with it?”
“We will bring it home.”
“How?”
The better question was, What home? Whose? Where would he take this painting he wanted more than he’d ever wanted anything in his life? Anything except, perhaps, the woman lying beside it.
“I’ll figure it out,” he said.
• 28 •
THE NEXT MORNING AMITAI received an e-mail from Mrs. Vázsonyi at the Jewish library. She was sorry, she wrote, to inform him that her research had turned up no surviving members of Ignác Einhorn’s family, though it appeared that there was a connection, albeit distant, to the family of Baron Móric Einhorn. The noble branch had survived the war but had not fared well under communism. There were rumors that some number of them might have escaped via Austria to America, where they were said to have shed the title and changed the name. Of Nina Einhorn’s family, named Schillinger, there was even worse news. Only one, a brother, had lived through the war. His wife and children had been killed by the Arrow Cross, and he had never remarried. He had died a bachelor in the early 1960s. There was, it seemed, no Einhorn or Schillinger on whom Natalie could foist the five-gram locket that dangled so heavily from her neck.
Mrs. Vázsonyi also wrote that she had taken the liberty of searching for heirs of the other young woman in the photograph, the dwarf, Gizella Weisz. Here, she wrote, she had been more fortunate. In May of 1944, all seven Weisz siblings had been deported from the Dragomireşti ghetto to Auschwitz, caught up in the same genocidal wave that had sent Ignác and Nina Einhorn and their family to their deaths.
“I wonder if Nina and Gizella saw each other,” Amitai said. “At Auschwitz, I mean. If they ever met again.”
Natalie raised an eyebrow, surprised, he guessed, that he would express such a romantic, even optimistic, idea. He supposed that he was a little surprised himself.
“The Nazis deported half a million Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz in fifty-six days,” Natalie said. “The trains ran daily, and most people were taken from the ramp straight to the crematorium. Unless by some miracle they were on the same train, they wouldn’t have been alive in the camp at the same time.”
He had known this, of course. The image of two friends reunited however briefly for a final farewell had been in the nature of an offering, a gesture meant to cheer her in the wake of Mrs. Vázsonyi’s news about the Einhorns.
“Still,” he said, unwilling for some reason to relinquish the point. Perhaps the gesture was really meant to cheer himself. “You’re talking about what was typical. What happened to Gizella wasn’t typical.”
The Weisz family, it turned out, had been saved from immediate extermination at Auschwitz by Dr. Mengele himself. Consumed by a bitter rivalry with another German expert on dwarfism, and in the thrall of a bizarre sentimental attachment to the German folktale of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Mengele had taken on the seven Weiszes as experimental subjects, under his direct protection, and thus they had lived to be liberated by bemused soldiers of the Soviet army. After the war, Mrs. Vázsonyi wrote, the seven Weisz siblings had all immigrated to Israel.
“Gizella died in 1981,” Natalie read aloud from the e-mail. “She was eighty-eight years old.”
“A long and interesting life,” Amitai said. “A tragic life.”
“I wish my grandfather had just opened the damn locket and found the photograph thirty years ago. I feel like such a failure. It was the last thing he asked of me. Honestly, it was the only thing he ever asked of me.”
“But before 1989, he wouldn’t have been able to come to Hungary and would never have been able to discover who Gizella was or where she went.”
“That’s true, I suppose.”
“And if he had not sent you on this particular errand, you would not have met this particular fool.” She melted against him, and he drew her close. Then he turned her to face the painting. “I know it feels fruitless, like you failed. But if you hadn’t decided to start your search, then you never would have led me to this incredible work, this masterpiece. And then who would have stolen it?”
He kissed her, but she pulled away from him. She was still not ready or willing to be consoled.
“Look,” Amitai said, deciding to give it—to give them—one more chance. “Mrs. Vázsonyi writes that Gizella’s brothers both had children. So there are descendants. Not descendants of Nina’s, true, but blood relatives of Gizella. If you wanted, you could give the necklace to
Gizella’s nephews or nieces. Or if they aren’t alive anymore, then to their children. They probably still live in Israel. So how about this: I will take you to Israel, and we will find one of them and give her the necklace. How does that sound?”
“Really?” she said, brightening, then narrowing her eyes as if doubting him, his state of mind or sanity, knowing the way he felt about the place, the home that he had lost. “I don’t know. How does that sound to you?”
“It sounds like I must be very serious about you.”
“And?”
“And that worries me.”
“Yes,” she said, smiling. “It worries me, too.”
• 29 •
THOUGH NONE OF THE Lilliput sisters had themselves had children—in those days it was believed that a woman of their size could not survive a pregnancy or delivery—the brothers were fertile and prolific, and it had been a simple matter for a man used to tracking down the second cousins, once removed, of people who had vanished without a trace into pits in the Carpathian forest to find Dalia Gur, the living grandniece of Gizella Weisz.
“Every Jewish dwarf who comes to Israel calls me up and expects me to serve them coffee and cake,” said Dalia Gur, over the phone. “Enough already.”
But Amitai had promised that he and Natalie wanted nothing from her, not even cake. On the contrary, he told her, their visit concerned the return of an item of some value, one with a connection to her aunt Gizella.
And so they found themselves sitting at Dalia Gur’s kitchen table in Kfar Yakov, outside the port city of Haifa. It was a small moshav, a village of stuccoed houses with red-tile roofs, manicured gardens, and playgrounds, and reminded Amitai of Kibbutz Hakotzer, which, like Kfar Yakov, had once been a thriving communal agricultural settlement. Kfar Yakov was now a struggling bedroom community, its fields empty of crops, its barns shuttered, its fruit trees unpruned, its houses full not with farmers but commuters barely surviving in an economy so precarious that an increase in the price of cottage cheese caused them to take to the streets in protest. Dalia exemplified this transition. Her husband, she told them, was born on the moshav and had inherited his father’s cattle farm. The business had flourished for a brief and exciting period during the European mad-cow scare but afterward had floundered, a victim of EU subsidies and a problematic agricultural economy. The room they sat in was small and shabby, the plastic shutters snapped shut against the afternoon sun. It smelled faintly of grilled onions. Dalia Gur was in her early thirties, a woman who might have been pretty were it not for her furrowed brow and anxious, pursed lips. Her husband, she told them, eked out a living as a personal trainer at a local health club, and she at an Internet start-up, remotely managing a team of customer-support staff based in Bangalore.
“Who knows how long we can make this work,” she said. “Soon if we want to make a living we might have to move to India.” She turned to Natalie and switched to English. “So, you are, what? A graduate student? You came across something of my aunt’s in your research?”
“Not exactly,” Natalie said. “My grandfather served in the American military in Salzburg after the war.”
And then, with help from Amitai, Natalie told Dalia the pitiful tale of the Hungarian Gold Train, which had left a broken country carrying the looted treasure of a murdered people, headed for nowhere in particular, only to be looted all over again when it arrived.
“Was it really a train full of gold?” Dalia said.
“Not so much gold,” Amitai said, “as property. Furniture, dishes, furs. And some jewelry. Watches. Necklaces.”
“Nu,” Dalia said. “Show me.”
Natalie wasn’t wearing the locket. This morning she had wrapped it in tissue and placed it in her purse. She took it out and handed it to Dalia.
Dalia held it up to the light and studied it. Amitai looked at it as well, wondering about the intention of the craftsman Lajos Kozma who had made it, of the person who had bought it. How had it ended up around Nina Einhorn’s neck? Had Nina bought it for herself? Had Gizella bought it for her? Had someone else made the purchase? Had Nina been the first to wear it, or had someone passed it on to her? Each person who’d touched the locket—the craftsman, the unknown purchaser, the woman or women who had worn it—had imagined for it a destiny. But none could have imagined that the locket’s destiny would turn out to be bringing him and Natalie together. He smiled, amused at the romantic turns he seemed unable to prevent himself from taking.
Natalie raised a questioning eyebrow. He took her hand and squeezed it gently.
Dalia said, “It’s pretty. Old-fashioned.”
Natalie reached over and sprang the invisible catch. The locket opened, revealing the tiny photograph within.
Dalia bent over and peered at it, pinched the bridge of her nose, looked again.
“Is it Gizella? But she’s so young! So beautiful.” She cupped the locket in her palms, like a drop of precious water on a burning plain, staring at the photograph. “We have only a few photographs from this time, you know? Most were lost in the war. Oh, my God. My God.” She wiped tears from her eyes. “I wish my grandfather was alive to see this photograph. I wish Gizella was alive! Or Gitl, the youngest sister. Any one of them.”
“I’m so sorry,” Natalie said.
Dalia said, “Wait, I will show you more pictures. There is one where Gizella looks just a little older than this.”
A hallway connected the kitchen to the living room, and from the wall of this hallway, where it hung surrounded by dozens of others, Dalia removed a photograph. It was the five Weisz sisters, posed in two rows, the three in front on diminutive stools, the two in the rear on regular chairs.
“Okay, so this”—Dalia pointed to one of the sisters in the back—“she is Bluma, the eldest. And next to her is Frieda. On the bottom is Judit, in the middle Gitl, and next to her, see? Gizella!”
It was unmistakably the same woman. The five sisters were dressed in identical light-colored gowns. Judit wore a choker of pearls, Bluma’s hands and arms were decorated with rings and bracelets, and Frieda and Gitl wore necklaces of dark beads. Gizella, alone among them, wore no jewelry, and she alone had short hair, bobbed to her chin.
“This other woman in your picture,” Dalia said. “Who is she?”
“A friend of Gizella’s. It’s her locket, we think.”
Across Dalia’s face passed the look of a woman mentally crumpling a lottery ticket and tossing it aside. “So not my aunt’s. That’s too bad.”
Amitai asked, “Did Gizella talk about any special friends from her youth? This young woman, her name was Nina Einhorn. Nina Schillinger, before she married.”
“I don’t remember Gizella mentioning any special friend. But she was a very social person, you know? She went with a lot of clubs. Socialist club, bridge club, singing club. Always with the clubs.” She peered again at the photograph in the locket. “What is written here? On the posters?”
Natalie said, “They’re standing in front of the main hall of a big international women’s suffrage congress that was taking place in Budapest. Gizella was the private secretary of a woman named Rózsa Schwimmer, a famous Hungarian suffragette and feminist, one of the organizers of the congress.”
Dalia smiled. “Yes! Yes, I remember my grandfather told me a story about this. Gizella moved by herself to Budapest. You understand, this was a big scandal. For a young woman, a dwarf, to leave home like this? Shocking, you know? But when she was young, Gizella was a feminist, very independent. In Budapest she got in some trouble, maybe a man, I don’t know, and she came back in disgrace.”
Amitai and Natalie exchanged a glance. He nodded, and Natalie told Dalia what they had discovered about the events at the opera house, the banner and the pamphlets, and even about the tabloid report of Gizella using her sexual perversions to distract the guard.
At this, Dalia laughed. “You know what?” she said. “Maybe you won’t believe me, you don’t want to hear it, but those little old ladies? They were very
sexy! You know, like …” She wiggled her shoulders and batted her eyelashes. “Ay, Gitl, I’m telling you. Always with the boyfriends. And Gizella, too. Men loved her. She married three times. At least three, maybe four. Regular-size men, you know? Not dwarfs. She outlived every one of them.”
And then Dalia’s expression hardened. She handed the necklace back to Natalie. “Okay, so, now what?”
“Excuse me?”
“Yes, fine, it’s Gizella in the picture, but you say the necklace belonged to the other girl, Nina. So what do you want from me?”
The chain trailed over Natalie’s wrist, the locket swinging. Amitai waited for her answer, but she said nothing.
“Is it valuable?” Dalia asked.
Natalie did not answer, so he did. “It depends. The gemstones are real, but they’re semiprecious. The piece might be interesting to a collector of suffragette memorabilia because of the colors, which are the colors of the movement, and because of the photograph.”
Dalia switched to Hebrew. “Look, I don’t want to be pushy, but like I told you, my husband lost the family business, and I have no guarantee that I’m not going to lose my job tomorrow to some Indian in Bangalore. We have three kids. We could use the money. Are you one hundred percent certain it wasn’t Gizella’s?”
He answered her in English, “Ninety-five percent certain. Maybe ninety-eight.”
Still in Hebrew, Dalia said, “So just because I’m curious, how much is it worth?”
He continued to speak English. “I doubt we could get more than a couple thousand for it. Maximum.”
“Dollars or shekels?”
“Dollars.”
“Well,” Dalia said. “That’s not nothing.”
Natalie said, “You can have it.”
Dalia was caught off guard. “You will give it to me?”
“Yes.”
“For me to keep? For myself?”
Love and Treasure Page 25
