Love and Treasure

by Waldman, Ayelet

  “You can do what you want with it.”

  “Whatever I want? Even … sell it?”

  Natalie held the necklace in her hand for a moment longer, then she thrust it at Dalia. “Here. It’s yours. Sell it, keep it, I don’t care. I promised my grandfather I would give it to someone who had a more rightful claim to it than he did. What you do with it is none of my business.”

  Amitai tried to read Natalie’s expression, but all he could see was a show of encouragement, maybe even a touch of enthusiasm. Was this how she wanted it? To have the piece sold the way every piece of property he’d ever searched for had been sold? For an arbitrary price, devoid of pain and history, just the sum and product of the weight, condition, and market value of its constituent gems and gold?

  Dalia took the necklace from Natalie, and for a moment he thought she might put it on, let the weight and the story of it, of Lajos Kozma and Nina Schillinger Einhorn and Gizella the dwarf and Jack Wiseman and his granddaughter Natalie, hang beautifully from her throat. But instead she laid it with a click on the table in front of her and did not look at it again.

  “Can you help me get it appraised?” she said.

  • 30 •

  NATALIE HAD CROSSED THE WORLD as an act of contrition for a theft that had its origin in the Holocaust. Now that she had atoned for the meaningless crime that had nonetheless weighed so heavily on her grandfather, she wanted to visit Yad Vashem. She told Amitai he needn’t join her, and at first he considered depositing her in a taxi and spending the day visiting his parents or, better yet, alone in the hotel, staring at the painting. He had not gone to the memorial and museum since he was a boy, and then only because occasional pilgrimages to the site were required of all Israeli schoolchildren. But he suddenly knew that though he would visit his parents before leaving Israel, he wanted Natalie with him, so he could introduce her to them. He found himself unaccountably willing to join her at Yad Vashem, to see what she would see, having come so far.

  As they made their way through the crowds from the parking lot filled with tour buses to the entrance of the museum, he began to regret his decision, awash in a sudden preposterous anxiety that they might run into Dror Tamid. As if the man spent his days patrolling the museum, looking for art brokers to excoriate. And, well, what if he did spend his days that way and caught up to Amitai? What was Amitai afraid of? The painting was secure in the hotel safe, Elek having assisted Amitai in procuring almost legitimate exit permits for it. After the conversation with Tamid about the Herzog paintings, Amitai had wondered if Elek would decline his request for help, but his friend had said that while it was true that he had come to believe that the works of Hungarian artists should remain in Hungary, as the alternative in this particular case was not a museum gallery but a wall in the stinking toilet of a Romanian anti-Semite, he felt no qualms about engineering the painting’s export.

  Nothing in Yad Vashem was as Amitai remembered it from his childhood. The museum had been vastly expanded and improved. Before it had been stark and beautiful in its way, but nothing like this. They wandered along the prism walkway from gallery to gallery, past the multimedia displays, the cases of artifacts, the photographs enlarged to cover an entire wall, the meticulously restored carts and spinning wheels, suitcases and mangled pieces of industrial equipment. He assumed they would spend a few hours at the museum, but it was late afternoon before they finished moving slowly through the galleries and entered the Hall of Names.

  He stood in the circular hall, beneath the huge rotunda full of photographs. They rose up above his head, an immense dome of wedding pictures and identification pictures, formal studio photographs and candid snapshots. Sepia, and black and white, as recent as 1945, and decades older. He craned his neck and stared up, faces upon faces upon faces, higher and higher until they blurred and he could no longer make out their features, until he felt that he was staring up into the sky itself, a heaven of faces, infinite and gray. He closed his eyes, and behind his eyelids the faces swung in great slow arcs like constellations making their way across a year of nights. He had not eaten all day, which might have explained his light-headedness, but not the profound sense of loss and sorrow that he felt. He had spent his working life immersed in the Holocaust but never allowed himself to draw any nearer to it than the countless objects, the paintings and silver plate and sculpture and jewelry, that it had cut loose from their owners and set adrift. Before this moment he had thought of the victims only in terms of the things they owned, in terms of what could be claimed and what must be accounted forever lost.

  When he opened his eyes, Natalie was gone, and he searched for her, circling the room with a mounting panic, a foolish dread. He found her sitting at a video kiosk. He rushed over, stood behind her, and put his hands on her shoulders. She leaned back against his belly. He buried his face in her hair, her glorious hair, and inhaled its smell of verbena and balsam.

  “Look,” she said. “Did you know about this? The Pages of Testimony?”

  “It’s a biographical database. A record of every person who was killed. I’ve used it a few times, to figure out if an heir is still alive. At the beginning it was just rows and rows of black binders. Then it was on microfilm. Now it’s all digitized. Sometimes there’s just a name. Sometimes you find everything. Date of birth, job. Where they lived. How they died. It depends on the memory of the person who filled out the form.” He realized what she must be contemplating, staring at the screen with her finger poised to touch it, held half an inch away. “Do you want to look for Nina?”

  “I’ve been trying to work up the nerve.”

  “What are you afraid to find?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It’s incomplete. Only two and a half million names. Are you afraid you’ll find nothing?”

  In good Jewish style, she responded with a question. “Did you ever search for Vidor Komlós’s name?”

  “Years ago, when I first started looking. It always lists the name of the person who originally filled out the form. I thought if there was a page for Komlós, perhaps it might have been filled out by a relative who knew what had become of the painting. But there was nothing.”

  Gently he shifted her aside and took her place at the keyboard. He brought up the search screen and put in the surname “Einhorn,” first name “Nina.” For place he typed “Hungary.” He hit enter, feeling Natalie stiffen beside him. A name appeared on the screen. Nina Einhorn, of Budapest.

  “Is it her, do you think?” Natalie asked. “It’s Budapest, not Nagyvárad.”

  He clicked on it. Nina Einhorn. Maiden name: Schillinger. Date of birth: December 7, 1893. Approx. age at death: 51. Place of birth: Budapest, Hungary. First name of victim’s father: Marcus. First name of victim’s mother: Irma. First name of victim’s spouse: Ignác. Permanent residence: Unknown. Victim’s profession: Unknown. Place and activities during the war: Unknown. Circumstances of death: Unknown. Place of death: Unknown. Date of death: Unknown.

  There was a separate section of the form for information about the submitter, a declaration in which the signatory swore that the information was correct to the best of his or her knowledge. The person to so affirm in the case of Nina Einhorn was Gizella Weisz. Under the line for relationship she had written “Friend.”

  Natalie pressed her fingers to the signature, which was in roman cursive, though the form itself had been filled out in Hebrew. “Gizella didn’t know anything about Nina, not even that she’d moved to Nagyvárad. They must have lost touch after Gizella was arrested, after Ignác saved her and she was sent away.”

  Amitai scrolled back to the top of the screen. There was a photograph scanned and appended to the entry, the image, by now so familiar to them, of Nina as a proud young suffragette in a white dress, with the banner of the congress rippling behind her. Someone, perhaps Gizella herself, had cropped the second young woman out of the photograph. All there was to see of Gizella was a bit of white sleeve at the corner of the frame.

  They r
ead and reread the Page of Testimony for Nina Schillinger Einhorn, though it conveyed so very little information.

  Natalie said, “Can anyone fill out a form? Or do you have to be a survivor?”

  “Anyone with information, I think.”

  “Why didn’t you ever fill one out for Komlós?”

  It had never even occurred to him. “I don’t know. It seemed presumptuous, I guess. Who am I to bear witness to his life?”

  “Who better?”

  There was in all likelihood no one now living, he thought, who had known Vidor Komlós. There was no family, beyond the single distant relative whom Amitai had unearthed, a person who had never even heard of Komlós, let alone met him. There were no surviving friends. Natalie was right. Komlós had no one better to remember him than the son of Syrian Jews, an art thief, heartbroken and, after a long day, dizzy with hunger.

  They filled out the Page of Testimony together, using what they knew of Vidor Komlós, which was not, after all, so much less than Gizella Weisz had known about Nina Einhorn. They filled in Komlós’s name, his parents’ names, his date of birth, the address of his family home, his profession, and the approximate date of his death.

  Out in the parking lot, as Amitai unlocked the door of the car for Natalie, she said, “I started the whole thing because my grandfather felt that he had wronged someone, and to honor him, I had to honor that feeling. I accepted his idea that I could fix something for him if I found the woman whose necklace he had taken, or if I found someone related to her, and gave the necklace back. I imagined the scales balancing again.” She turned back to look at the museum. “But of course it hasn’t been about any of that, has it? My grandfather is dead; he’ll never know what I did with the necklace, or that I did anything at all. This obsession has just been a useful container for my grief for my grandfather. And I guess even my grief for my marriage.”

  “You’ve known that all along?”

  “Yes, I suppose so. But I think what I didn’t understand until now is that all my life, my experience of the Holocaust has been the very same thing: a useful container for feelings. Here was this colossal, unprecedented tragedy that, by virtue of my religion, I was free to adopt as my own. Because of the Holocaust, I was permitted—no, I was entitled—to feel all the pain that my blessed and comfortable life had spared me. But it was never my tragedy. Collectively, as a Jew, yes. But personally? No.”

  Amitai shook his head, almost smiling, because here he was, feeling for the first time that the tragedy of European Jewry did belong to him. Before today, his lack of personal connection to the Holocaust had made it a distant history, no more relevant to him than any other. But Natalie, the locket, the painting, the Hall of Names, taking responsibility for Komlós in the Pages of Testimony, these had brought him to the realization that, merely by virtue of being a Jew, even a Jew from another place and time, it was his history, too. Not personally, but collectively. It belonged to him, as he belonged to all those Jews rising up into the infinite ceiling in the Hall of Names. He and Natalie were in the same place, but they had come from different directions.

  • 31 •

  AMITAI AND NATALIE STOOD in a gracious gallery encircled by marble archways in the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest, Hungary, holding glasses of champagne, and listened to the long series of moderately dull speeches by the museum’s directors, its trustees, and various governmental officials. Elek stood with them, having, despite his protestations to the contrary, been widely credited in the Budapest newspapers with engineering the return of Vidor Komlós’s Portrait of Frau E. to its native land. He was in fact due today to receive a medal from the mayor himself. A medal, Elek assured Amitai, that he would just as soon sell in his shop as pin to his breast.

  The crowd was small; no more than two or three dozen Hungarian art lovers had chosen to celebrate the discovery and presentation of the lone extant painting, as far as anyone knew, by a great artist who had always been too unknown even to be forgotten. But this state of affairs would soon change, Amitai thought. Before bringing the painting back from Israel to Hungary, Amitai and Natalie had stopped in Paris and shown it to a few major art critics and museum curators, including Werner Spies, the world’s foremost expert on the work of Max Ernst. Spies had provided the critical link between Ernst and Komlós, recalling a conversation he had had with Dorothea Tanning, Ernst’s wife. She had not known Komlós, of course. She had met her husband in New York. But she remembered when Ernst first heard of Komlós’s death. It was Chagall who told him. He’d heard it from a Hungarian immigrant he’d met at a party. Dorothea told Spies that Ernst was very upset, that he’d told her that though they’d only met once or twice when Komlós visited Paris, they had had an intense friendship, the source of which was their mutual fascination with birds. There were so many artists who died during the war. Max Jacob, Ernst Kirchner, Otto Freundlich. Max Ernst himself was interned. But when he heard about Komlós, Dorothea said, it made him especially sad.

  “Did she tell you how Ernst met Komlós?” Amitai had asked Spies.

  “I think perhaps through Klee or Kandinsky? Someone at the Bauhaus.”

  “Moholy-Nagy?”

  “It could have been.”

  Thus, with Spies’s expert assistance, Amitai established Komlós’s presence in the web of important artists of the twentieth century, and though his threads were few, he was convinced that once Komlós became known he would be revered.

  When Amitai had called to inform his great-uncle first of how he’d acquired the painting and then of his decision not to offer it for sale but to donate it to the Hungarian museum, Uncle Jacob had been furious. He had threatened Amitai with everything up to and including not simply termination of employment but of his relationship to the New York branch of the Shasho family and to the Syrian-American Jewish community as a whole.

  “You cross me like this, Nephew, and no Shasho will speak to you ever again,” Jacob Shasho had said.

  Amitai might have been more troubled by this prospect were he not already guaranteed to lose both his job and his family in America by virtue of an item that he had in his pocket at this very moment. He had taken delivery of it early this morning while Natalie thought he was busy soaking on the men’s side of the Gellért Baths. Elek had sent him dozens of images of diamond rings in the style of Hungarian art nouveau, from among which he had chosen a large round stone set in a platinum filigree. Elek had replaced the small blue sapphires in the circle surrounding the diamond with alternating amethysts and peridots.

  “You know, sapphire or amethyst, I charge you the same,” Elek had said, his business acumen not at all dulled by his gratitude for Amitai’s decision to return the Komlós to Hungary.

  “I wouldn’t expect anything else,” Amitai had replied.

  The moment he put the ring on Natalie’s finger, his family in New York would be lost to him. The red hair she had inherited from her grandmother had its origins, some generations back, in a tiny village along the River Barrow in County Kilkenny and the edict decreed that once Amitai married this granddaughter of a convert, no Syrian-American Jew could see him again. Though he cared little about his uncle’s, Amitai had been concerned about his parents’ reaction, and when he had brought Natalie to meet them in Israel, he had taken his father aside to ask not permission, but rather his blessing, no matter that the woman Amitai intended to marry was not, by the standards of the Shasho family patriarch, a Jew.

  His father had voiced no objection, and Amitai had left it at that, though he would, over the years, sometimes wonder what his parents’ answer would have been had they not been put as children in the care of Youth Aliyah and sent to a kibbutz in Israel but had instead ended up in Brooklyn like so many of their cousins.

  By now Elek had enjoyed more than a few glasses of champagne, and he was uncharacteristically giddy as he raised his glass. “Another toast,” Elek said. “To Amitai Shasho, for standing up to the formidable Dror Tamid and insisting that the painting be returned to Hungar
y.”

  Tamid had done his furious, spitting best to convince Amitai, with threats and vilification, with pleading and guilt-trippery, that the painting of Komlós belonged, by right, to Israel, and in Israel. “Komlós was a Jew, tortured by Nazis and murdered by Hungarians,” Tamid had said. “Only in Israel can his work be seen in the proper moral context.”

  Amitai had been tempted to retort by asking Tamid who would put Israel in its proper moral context, but in fact he had found himself unable to completely dismiss Tamid. After all, everything the man said was true. If Hungary had viewed Komlós as a true citizen, equal to any other, then he would not have ended his life in the misery of the Jewish labor brigades. But had Komlós been a Gentile, or had the anti-Semitism of Hungary and its German ally not prevailed, Komlós might have been drafted into the Hungarian army and died on the Russian front. He might have met any number of other fates no better than the death that had found him. In the end, Amitai opted to attempt the impossible. Though it was a presumption of terrible magnitude, he had allowed himself to imagine what Komlós would have wanted.

  And that, Amitai decided, was what every artist wants: for his work to be recognized as important and influential, as historically relevant. To that end, Elek had convinced the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest to loan the painting both to the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and to the Neue Galerie in New York, for exhibits on the influences of the surrealists.

  But in choosing a permanent home for the painting, Amitai felt less confident. There was no record of what Komlós felt about his native land, whether he considered himself a Hungarian or, as an artist, a citizen of the world. In the end, this donation, inspired in no small part by the defense of his friend Elek for Hungary’s right to maintain control of its artistic patrimony, had been the clearest way Amitai could find to honor Komlós. The presence of his painting in Hungary, and the international excitement that Amitai hoped would result as its story was told and the painting admired, would serve as a reminder that this great Hungarian artist, this elemental part of Hungary’s cultural legacy, was a Jew.