Love and Treasure

by Waldman, Ayelet

  “Gizella’s locket!” Nina said, rushing to my side.

  She smelled of citrus and verbena, sharp and tangy, fresh and clean.

  “Open it,” I said, pouring the locket and its chain into her hand.

  She slid her fingernail along the side of the pendant and activated the hidden spring. The secret locket popped open.

  “What is this?” she said, peering closely at the photograph. “It’s not the same photograph!”

  I handed her my magnifying glass, and she gazed for a long moment at the tiny picture of two young ladies, one small, one tall. One dark, one fair, in matching white gowns, behind them billowing the banners of the International Woman Suffrage Congress.

  “Gizella entrusted me with the locket, but I had no opportunity to give it to you until now. I feared to send it to your home.”

  “My father would have destroyed it. And the photograph?”

  “Don’t you remember? The photographer who took your picture that afternoon when I came to the congress? I took his card and found him. He printed a photograph for me small enough to fit in the locket.”

  I had also paid for a larger image, one that resided in my locked drawer, but which I would eventually slip between the pages of Gray’s Anatomy, where I would come upon it whenever I was troubled by a tricky diagnosis and required a reminder of the basics of my medical education, or whenever I wanted to see Nina’s face. Years later, after encountering Gizella at Bad Gastein, I had the photograph copied at not insubstantial expense, and sent to her, care of the manager of the Lilliput Guild. I was disappointed that she never wrote to thank me, but perhaps the photograph never reached her.

  “Will you wear it now?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Nina said. “And always.” She handed me the locket and I moved behind her and draped it around her fragrant neck, where it nestled in her powdered décolletage.

  As my thick fingers struggled with the clasp, I allowed myself to breathe in her scent, to feel her soft hair against my cheek. When it finally caught, I did not move, but instead remained close to her, feeling the length of her body against my own. I dreamed for a moment of slipping my hands around her waist, of cupping her breasts in my palms, of pressing my lips against her soft, white neck.

  My esteemed colleagues, readers of this case history, do not think I fail to appreciate your response to the paragraph above. I can hear the clucking tongues and feel the condemnatory glances as you dismiss my heartfelt words as failed countertransference. You think I have fallen into the dark hole of the unconscious that lies in wait for every psychoanalyst. You reprove me for projecting my own traumatic history on my patient. You insist that Nina is nothing more than an object for my distorted perceptions of previous relationships. You revile me with that most awful word: “inappropriate.” Even those of you who are disciples of my esteemed, my beloved, Sándor Ferenczi tar me with this brush. You might celebrate my “emotional reactivity.” You might praise me for creating a corrective emotional context awash in empathy in which my patient can be nurtured, even cured. But you would never recognize my feelings for Nina for what they are. You call it countertransference. But it is not.

  It is another thing. Unrequited. Never to be acted upon.

  Love.

  THOUGH THE ROOM WAS only half full, and the rows of crushed-velvet chairs closest to the podium nearly empty of occupants, Jack slipped into a chair in the back. Worried that he would feel self-conscious wearing his academic tweeds to the showroom of a prestigious auction house, he had chosen to dress, this morning, in a fashionable three-button suit with a notched lapel, worn with a boldly striped tie in a Windsor knot. Now he felt overdressed. The scene was not the frantic hive of natty gold dealers and dandyish antiques merchants that he had imagined. On the contrary. The auction was poorly attended, and the shabby dealers and buyers seated on the chairs looked bored rather than thrilled by the contents of the catalogue.

  If Jack’s train had not suffered an interruption of service yesterday between 7:12 a.m. and 7:57 a.m., if he had not forgotten his book on the kitchen counter when he’d rinsed out his coffee cup, then he would not have been compelled to read the New York Times with unusual thoroughness, from front to back, and would thus in all likelihood never have seen the advertisement in the Arts section announcing to the public that the Parke-Bernet Galleries would be holding an auction of gems, watches, silverware, china, and stamps. The items to be sold were, according to the ad, in a formulation that struck Jack as curious if not weaselly, “war victim assets,” and proceeds would go to the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees.

  Even though he had not been able to determine that the property to be sold had in fact come from the doomed wagons of the Hungarian Gold Train, he was so eager to attend the auction that he had considered canceling his morning class. Most of the students taking Ancient Greek I in summer school had failed it the previous year, and he knew they’d be relieved to have a day’s break from second-declension omicron-stem nouns. He was too conscientious, however, to indulge either their indolence or his own anxiety. He waited until after class, though he skipped his usual hours in his carrel in Butler Library, where he was at work on his graduate thesis.

  He had missed the beginning of the auction and thus any announcement that might have been made about the source of the property to be sold. By the second lot, however, he was sure he was in the right place. Where else but the Gold Train would the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees have acquired this much Hungarian Herend porcelain? Though a few large pieces were auctioned individually, the rest was sold in bulk, hundreds of vases, figurines, bowls, pitchers, and sets of service at a time. The items went quickly, and the auctioneer did not seem displeased with the bidding. There was less interest, however, in lots 16 to 28: a dozen lots of watches, also sold in bulk. When the auctioneer brought his gavel down, confirming the sale of thousands of men’s gold watches for a meager two dollars apiece, Jack was so astonished that he nearly missed the crying of the next lot, number 29, “Enameled Jewelry.”

  As the bidding crept along, he slipped his hand into his pocket, as if to reassure himself that the pendant was still there. More than two years before, the morning he left Salzburg for Hamburg, where he was to board the first of three ships that would eventually deposit him in Hoboken, New Jersey, he had gone to the warehouse to hand over the keys to his replacement, a young property-control officer who would be present the following year when another young American, this one a lawyer working for the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees as a reparations officer, arrived with a team of four appraisers and an expert in jewelry to catalog and inventory the contents of the train. Over the course of ten days, these men would work their way swiftly through the warehouse, appraising the property in bulk rather than individually, a technique agreed upon after a representative from Gimbels department store had toured the warehouse and announced that it would take his complete staff, working full-time, not weeks or months but years to examine, itemize, and appraise even just the individual pieces of silver, let alone the rest of the train’s contents.

  On Jack’s last day in Salzburg, the fate of the contents of what people had only recently taken to calling the Hungarian Gold Train was yet to be decided. To Jack of course it had long since become clear that the property would never end up in the hands of the heirs of its former owners. As he watched the daily trainloads of Jewish refugees streaming into Salzburg, he believed that eventually the United States would take the easiest and most financially sensible route and hand over the property to the Jewish Agency to be sold, with the proceeds used to care for the DPs and to facilitate their resettlement as far as possible from the pale of American responsibility. As far away as Palestine, for example.

  And the truth was that by then Jack was not sure that this was not after all the best solution to the problem of the Hungarian Gold Train. The task of identifying individual owners of each piece of property was monumental. Moreover, hundreds of thousands of Hungary’s Jews were
dead and, of those who survived, thousands were leaving their homes and their country, escaping the Soviets as they should have escaped their own countrymen a decade before. Perhaps selling the contents of the train to benefit the DPs was the only solution that approximated justice. The argument made by the Hungarian Jewish remnant that the property should be given to them to sell, the money to be used toward rebuilding their community, was appealing, but only if one ignored the malign and burgeoning Soviet influence in Hungary. Was anyone so naïve as to believe that anything turned over to the Hungarians would eventually reach Jewish hands? Moreover, wasn’t the Jewish Agency’s solution the one that Ilona herself had supported, in that last grim conversation before she disappeared forever from his life?

  Jack would recall these considerations when, years later, he would read in the New York Times about the defection from Hungary of senior officials of the Finance Ministry, who subsequently provided information about the ultimate disposition of the most valuable of the Gold Train assets, the jewels and gold stolen by Árpád Toldi and confiscated by the French. Nearly two thousand kilograms of gold and precious gems had been promptly turned over by France to the Hungarian government, which had determined, with equal promptness, that there was no way to positively identify ownership of the gold and jewelry and thus no reason to assume it had belonged to Jews. The Jewish community of Budapest, which had petitioned the French government so long and so vociferously for the property’s return, recovered not a gram of gold, not a single diamond.

  On that spring morning in Salzburg in 1946, while he had waited for his replacement to show up, Jack had walked the aisles of the warehouse one last time, eventually reaching the stuffy corner where he had stored the most valuable items, the gold watches and jewelry, the small quantity of gems. He noticed the case of watches from Nagyvárad and took it down from where he’d hidden it months before. He opened the case and traced his fingers across the address stamped on the brittle pink silk. He wondered if he would ever again have cause to read the name “Nagyvárad.” And why would he? The city had vanished even more surely than the woman he loved. It was Oradea now, a Romanian town. Hungarian Nagyvárad and the Jews who inhabited it were gone.

  He was about to close the case and return it to the stack, when he noticed the black velvet pouch that contained the purple, green, and white enameled peacock pendant, that harbinger of ill fortune. He unwrapped the pendant and held it, feeling it once again grow warm in his hand, as it had the first time he’d touched it so long ago, when he’d been a different man, with a different idea of what bad luck meant. Without allowing himself to think about what he was doing, he wrapped the pendant in its velvet and placed it in his pocket. Then he walked back up the aisle, laid his keys on the makeshift desk he’d built for himself at the front of the warehouse, scribbled a note for the man who would take over his fruitless job, and bugged out.

  Jack had quickly grown ashamed of the lapse of character and judgment that had allowed him to steal the pendant, and had he not left Salzburg that very day, he might have rushed back to the warehouse and returned it to where it belonged. Now, two years and a lifetime later, he listened as the auctioneer settled on a price for the lot of thousands of pieces of enameled jewelry from the Hungarian Gold Train. One dollar and fifty cents per piece.

  One dollar and fifty cents.

  In the next day’s newspaper, Jack would read that the auction had netted not the hundreds of millions of dollars estimated beforehand but less than two million dollars, enough to feed and house the displaced Jews of Europe for approximately one week. His plan had been to turn the necklace over to the auction house so that it could be sold and the proceeds used for the benefit of the survivors of the camps, the displaced persons, children and men and women like Ilona. But in the end what he had stolen turned out to be all but worthless. One dollar and fifty cents. Enough to feed, what? A single person for a single day?

  In the end the real wealth of the Hungarian Jewish community had not been packed in crates and boxes and loaded onto that train. What is the value to a daughter of a single pair of Sabbath candlesticks passed down from her mother and grandmother before her, generation behind generation, for a hundred, even a thousand, years? Beyond price, beyond measure. And what of ten thousand pairs of similar candlesticks, when all the grandmothers, mothers, and daughters are dead? No more than the smelted weight of the silver. The wealth of the Jews of Hungary, of all of Europe, was to be found not in the laden boxcars of the Gold Train but in the grandmothers and mothers and daughters themselves, in the doctors and lawyers, the grain dealers and psychiatrists, the writers and artists who had created a culture of sophistication, of intellectual and artistic achievement. And that wealth, everything of real value, was all but extinguished.

  Jack left the auction house, the pendant still in his pocket. Later that night he would put it in his handkerchief drawer, where it would remain for years, like a bookmark between ironed white pages. Over the decades of his life, he would on occasion open up the small velvet parcel. In the years immediately after the war, holding the pendant would trigger a trace of longing, a remnant of regret. But eventually even that grew faint, its meaning lost in time and the accumulation of other memories and other loves. And then one day—the last day—he would pass the pendant and its complicated legacy of memory and forgetting on to his granddaughter Natalie, in the hope that in her hands it would become an agent of redemption that would allow her to move beyond the myopia of grief, that it would help her transform longing into purpose.

  But on that early summer’s day in 1948, standing in his handsome suit on the corner of East Fifty-Seventh Street, Jack took the pendant from his pocket and held it up so that the gems at the tips of the peacock feathers glinted in the sun. His treasure amounted to little more than fool’s gold, worthless in his pocket. And yet he felt curiously untroubled by this depreciation. He had stolen the necklace because, though it had never belonged to anyone she knew, though she herself had rejected it, it reminded him of Ilona. But the thing that glittered now in the New York City sun was not a souvenir of the woman he loved and whom he would never see again. It was nothing more than a talisman of the irrevocable fracture of their relationship and of the incalculable loss of her entire world. A more impulsive man might have flung the pendant into the briny filth of the East River. Jack returned it to his pocket and walked home.

  Acknowledgments

  WERE IT NOT FOR the invitation of the lovely and generous Eleni Tsakopoulos Kounalakis to visit her in Budapest, this book would not exist. She provided invaluable assistance, both inspirational and editorial. She’s a marvelously loyal friend.

  Others in Hungary eased my way, including Judit Acsady and the indomitable Lena Csóti, without whose research assistance I would have been lost. Thanks, too, to Judith Friedrich, John Cillag, Marsha L. Rozenblit, and András Gerő. I could not have written this novel without the guidance of Ronald Zweig, whose book The Gold Train is a phenomenal piece of research. I’m grateful, too, to Gábor Kádár, author along with Zoltán Vági of another helpful volume, Self-Financing Genocide: The Gold Train, the Becher Case and the Wealth of Hungarian Jews, and to his generous wife, Christine Schmidt. Anna Kluth provided research assistance in Salzburg. Chris Doyle, Matthew Ritchie, Gwenessa Lam, and Diana Shpungin did their very best to correct my egregious ignorance about art. Dean Schillinger helped with medical facts. Julie Orringer and Andrew Sean Greer gave thorough reads at critical times. Michael Sheahan, with the guidance of Chris Doyle and the help of Tristan Salman, built me the world’s most beautiful studio, where I wrote much of this book. The wonderful editor Lisa Highton gave final and invaluable advice.

  I am truly lucky to be in the hands of two of the most generous and supportive women in the publishing business, Mary Evans and Jenny Jackson. Thanks, too, to Rachel Vogel and Sarah Lutyens for their unceasing efforts on the book’s (and my) behalf, to Lydia Buechler and all the terrific people at Knopf, and to Kaela Noel and Jennifer Kurdyla.
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  I am blessed with the unflinching support and love of my mother, Ricki Waldman, and with her meticulous copy editor’s eye.

  Two weeks at the MacDowell Colony is worth six months of creativity and productivity in real life, and I am stunned that such a place exists and lets me visit.

  The home-front help of Rachel Lemus, Brandy Muñiz, and Xiomara Batin made my work possible.

  Without the unstinting support, calm intelligence, and unending good cheer of Amy Cray, I wouldn’t be able to tie my own shoes, let alone write a novel.

  Sophie Chabon, Zeke Chabon, Rosie Chabon, and Abe Chabon tolerated long absences and foul tempers with grace that should not be expected of children, and had Sophie not accompanied me to Dachau, and buoyed me along with her inexhaustible curiosity and wellspring of empathy, I would not have had the courage even to go.

  Finally, my husband, Michael Chabon, makes every day, every thought, every word, finer than I have any right to deserve them to be.

  A Note About the Author

  AYELET WALDMAN is the author of the novels Red Hook Road, Love and Other Impossible Pursuits, and Daughter’s Keeper, as well as of the essay collection Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace, and the Mommy-Track Mystery series. She lives in Berkeley, California, with her husband and four children.

  Love and Treasure

  Ayelet Waldman

  Reading Group Guide

  ABOUT THIS READING GROUP GUIDE

  The questions, discussion topics, and reading list that follow are intended to enhance your reading group’s discussion of Love and Treasure, Ayelet Waldman’s ambitious and mesmerizing novel that weaves love, intrigue, and politics against the true story of the Hungarian Gold Train.