“Iboya, make the fire. Piri, get the brandy,” Mother snapped, her voice almost normal again. She sat Sanyi down and brought a blanket from the bedroom to wrap around his shoulders.
“You are staying here till morning,” she told Sanyi. “You have seen enough for one night.”
“I can’t. I must go back to help,” he protested.
“There is nothing you can do. You are lucky you were not picked up coming here. We are not allowed to walk the streets at this hour. When it gets light, you and I will go together. Do you have your papers on you?”
Sanyi looked at his coat. “I’m wearing Father’s coat. I thought it was mine.” He reached into the breast pocket and pulled out a black folder. “I have Father’s papers.”
“You are lucky; they have been picking more people up at night than they used to. We’ll wait until morning. There is nothing to be done now and your parents know where you are.”
Mother poured out some pear brandy and handed the glass to Sanyi. His hands shook as he brought the glass to his lips and drank. After he handed the empty glass back to Mother, Iboya and I sat down on either side of him and held on to his arms. Sanyi did not push us away.
Sanyi left our house with Mother the next morning. When Mother returned in the afternoon, she told us that Lujza’s funeral would take place the following morning and that Iboya would go with her while I remained at home with Sandor and Joli. In a way, I was glad that I did not have to go to the funeral or to the cemetery afterward. I suddenly remembered that Lujza was only a little older than Lilli.
After they returned from the funeral, Iboya told me that hardly anyone had come to see Lujza buried. No one from the Zionist organization had appeared. Mother said they probably hadn’t come because they were afraid. Nobody believed the story about Lujza’s stealing the money. The police had found out about her Zionist work, and she was aware of it. Her suicide was her way to save her family. Iboya said that Mother was the only one who didn’t cry. Grandma Davidowitz kept fainting and they had to hold her up.
“She was a brave girl,” Mother repeated over and over. I kept picturing Lujza standing in her pony coat alone in the cold night waiting for that train. And then the harsh metallic sound filling her ears just before. I had to agree with Mother. Lujza was a brave girl. Thinking back about her, I realized that she was always very serious. At the Zionist meeting she didn’t get caught up in the songs and the dancing as the other young women had. Instead, she kept busy with her papers and watched the others participate in the social part of the meetings.
After Lujza’s funeral, Mother clamped down on our activities. “No more trips to Mrs. Silverman’s. No more meeting the train from Komjaty. And no more going to Porta with Mr. Schwartz. I have to keep whatever is left of my family intact. The Germans are infuriated with their losses on the Russian front, and they will take that anger out on us!” She remained firm with Mr. Schwartz when again he tried to convince her to allow Iboya to continue with trips to Porta, and she even questioned letting Iboya remain as cashier in the fish store. But she finally yielded to necessity on that matter, and Iboya went on working at the cash register in the fish store Thursdays and Fridays, bringing home fish for our supper.
Shafar appeared at our house one snowy evening a few weeks later. He had just received papers to report immediately for work in one of Budapest’s new ammunition factories, and he wanted to say goodbye to Iboya. Knowing that Iboya had been going to Zionist Club meetings, Mother accepted Shafar as Iboya’s comrade. In fact, she seemed to like him. As we all talked about Budapest, she mentioned Etu, and he promised to look her up and to see what he could do to help her. Iboya walked out to the gate with him when he left, then came back into the house. She avoided Mother’s questioning eyes, and said that she had a headache and was going to bed. I could tell from Mother’s knowing look that she realized there was more between them than cameraderie.
* * *
Mother started scraping the bottom of her flour sacks. No food came from Komjaty that winter. A letter from Molcha explained why. The already meager harvest of 1943 had been confiscated for the war effort, leaving the farmers themselves only a tiny allotment. Babi’s livestock, including the chickens, had been taken away from her. Even her plum trees and grapevines had been picked bare.
Rozsi’s letters, however, were protective; she did not want Mother to worry. “We are managing very well,” she wrote in all of them. She had stopped asking if there were any news about Lajos, Lilli, and Manci or any mail from Father. Mother had stopped sending us to meet the mailman at the gate and no longer waited anxiously on the porch every day at mail time. It wasn’t that she thought they were lost. I often heard her discuss their whereabouts with Mrs. Gerber; together they speculated that Father, a war prisoner in Russia, had probably managed to contact his brother Srul, who, by now, had some political influence, having been such a devout Communist all these years. Mrs. Gerber kept assuring Mother that the money she had left with the Polish people must have been delivered to Lilli. Lilli couldn’t take a chance on writing, she reasoned, because any mail coming to us from Poland would provoke suspicion.
I could not tell if either of them really believed what they were saying or if these conversations had become a ritual of their visits. Mrs. Gerber usually arrived at our house feeling very depressed.
“I just had to come today,” she invariably said. “I could not contain my thoughts. My mind is going to finish me off; I can’t deal with it all. And the children wanted to come.”
Mother always found something to entertain them with, a quick vegetable soup or potato pancakes, or boiled noodles sprinkled with our home-grown chopped walnuts and a pinch of sugar. To Mrs. Gerber’s constant amazement at her ingenuity, Mother replied, “I am a farm girl at heart.” Our own vegetable garden provided many of these meals and supplemented our dwindling rations. Mother not only canned the vegetables, but also replanted the carrots and parsnips into boxes of moist sand and brought them into the house. This method kept them fresh and furnished new growths of tops to pinch for soup greens all winter long. Mother had also stored up sauerkraut, pickled cucumbers, and tomato puree, as well as a small barrel of salted herring made from the fish supplied by Mr. Schwartz. Mother was a wonder of resourcefulness.
Mrs. Gerber, not wanting to be on the receiving end all of the time, sometimes arrived with a gift from her house.
“If you don’t stop this,” Mother said, “you’ll end up with an empty house.”
“My house is no good to me full or empty,” Mrs. Gerber replied. “You always cheer me up.”
Judi, Iboya, and I never ran out of conversation, and Pali, Sandor, and Joli always seemed to be amused in their games together. Joli, now three years old, had grown into a beautiful little girl despite the hardship and grief surrounding her. She and Sandor became good company for each other and, looking at them together, I often remembered the way Sandor and Manci used to play with each other.
I never spoke of Manci in front of Mother. I could not bear the pain in her eyes at the mention of her name. Not even the absence of Lilli hurt as intensely as the loss of her granddaughter. She never stopped wrestling with the thought that Manci could have been saved. In a thousand ways, it kept repeating in her mind that she could have stopped them from taking her.
Sometimes when I woke up during the night and went into the kitchen for water, I found Mother sitting there in the cold. I would startle her by touching her on the shoulder and saying, “Anyuka, go to bed, the house is cold.”
“I can’t sleep,” she usually replied.
At a loss to console her, I would get my coat, put it on, and sit down beside her, saying nothing. In this silent way we often sat together, waiting for a new day.
* * *
The winter snow was finally washed away by the rains of a new spring, and patches of green began to appear in the garden. The days grew warmer, and the sun dried the sandbox. Sandor and Joli moved out of doors to play. The walnut tree sprouted
buds. Passover was approaching, and Mother quietly started the preparations. The tradition was so deeply ingrained that neither yesterday’s sorrows nor the rapidly approaching Germans could alter the ritual. I helped Mother take down the Passover dishes and sweep out the chometz; every last crumb of bread from pantry and cupboard was collected and burned together with the straw broom. A few days before the holiday eve, she discovered a forgotten box containing Passover condiments. “I want to share these spices with Grandmother Davidowitz,” she said to me. “You must take some to her.” I left our house with her firm instructions to return immediately after I had delivered the spices.
When I arrived at the Davidowitz house, I had to knock on the gate several times before Sanyi, looking confused and anxious, came out of the house. He opened the gate to let me into the yard, but instead of continuing to the house, he stood with me in the yard.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
“Mother sent these Passover spices to Grandmother,” I replied, showing him the small box I was holding. “Are you having a seder?” I continued hesitantly, remembering their recent sorrow.
“Piri,” Sanyi answered, “we are leaving the country. Mother and Father have already left the house with a special messenger from the Juden Bureau. I am packing a few things before I meet them. The Germans are about to take over.”
I must have looked shocked as I felt a great surge of panic envelop me. I took a deep breath and asked, “Where are you going?”
“I don’t know. Lujza arranged everything before…” Sanyi stopped for a moment and then went on: “She even had Christian papers made for us, and I think she was planning to have them made for you, Iboya, and the children. Your mother already has them—from her trip to Poland to look for Lilli. I have to go.” He took me to him and hugged me tightly. “Tell your mother to run, too,” he said as he released me. I did not know what to say. I went through the gate and then turned to watch him disappear into the house.
“Mother,” I said, when I returned to our kitchen, “they have no use for the spices. They are leaving the country. Sanyi said to tell you to run, too, because the Germans are taking over.” Mother dropped the plate she was drying, which shattered into fragments at her feet.
“Did he say where they were going?”
“He didn’t know. Lujza had arranged it all with someone at the Juden Bureau. She also had Christian papers made for them like the ones you have, and he said that she was planning to have them made for the rest of us…” Mother turned while I was still speaking and went into the bedroom. She began to gather up clothing to pack, but soon she abandoned the piles of clothing she had thrown on the bed. “Where could we go?” she said, shrugging. “You children have no papers, and it is two-thirty, almost curfew time.” She went back to drying the dishes, and I asked, “What exactly is the Juden Bureau?” She explained, “It is an organization made up of prominent Jewish men. They act as our leaders.”
Just then Iboya came into the kitchen carrying a fish wrapped in newspaper. “Did you hear anything?” Mother asked her.
“They say that Horthy has been locked up by the Germans and that a new government is coming into power. Something about a take-over. The new government is going to be more cooperative with the Germans. We have to wear the yellow Star of David.”
We put the light out early that evening but did not go to sleep. Mother, Iboya, and I sat in the dark and listened to every sound outside our window. Even in the darkness of the bedroom, I could see Mother’s face tense at the sound of footsteps in the street or at the sound of male voices.
“You two are going to sleep in the summer kitchen tonight. I put some bedding on the chair along with two of my old dresses and two kerchiefs. I want you to look like beggar women, so that if they do come they won’t bother you. Piri, you will unbraid your hair and hide it all under the kerchief. Smudge your faces with ash from the stove. Make yourselves as unattractive as possible. Soldiers after a victory behave like animals. I remember that from the last war, and these are Germans. So you must do as I tell you.”
“What about you and the children?” Iboya asked.
“They won’t bother me, and they have no use for children. Looting and young women are what they are after.”
After a while the fire died out, but we remained sitting on Mother’s bed with our clothes on. As the room grew colder, we climbed into the bed and pulled the feather-down coverlet over us. Listening to the rhythmic breathing of Sandor and Joli made me drowsy, and I put my head on Mother’s shoulder. She kissed me on the forehead.
“Iboya,” she then said, “take Piri and bed yourselves down, but first do as I told you.” We all got out of her bed, and she lit a candle and walked us through the long porch and into the summer kitchen, shielding the candle from the wind with her cupped hand. She dripped some of the wax onto the cold stove and made the candle stand upright in it. “You must blow out the candle as soon as you have finished. Move fast and get under the covers. Do not make noise under any circumstances. You must remain silent no matter what you hear.”
I tried to hold on to her, but she slipped away after turning the key in the door of the summer kitchen and disappeared. Iboya, following her instructions, moved quickly. She unbraided my hair, helped me slip one of the old dresses over my head, and then smudged my face with ash. “Tie the kerchief so that none of your hair shows,” she said. Then I helped her to dress in the same way. We blew out the candle and got under the covers Mother had left on the bed, shivering from cold and from fright. Iboya turned toward the wooden plank wall and I curled around her as close as I could get, my ears keen all the while, listening to the shouting voices and the tread of boots on the ground, Iboya’s breath, and the wind. Then I heard other sounds—scuffling and gnawing.
“What is that?” I asked Iboya in a whisper.
“Mice, I think,” she answered and I tensed and snuggled still closer to her. The mice continued to chew on whatever they had found to eat, and I closed my eyes and held my breath as long as I could.
The next thing I was conscious of was light and the sound of the key in the door. Mother came in wearing old clothes, her face smudged, and a kerchief on her head hiding her hair. For a moment I forgot where I was and was startled by Mother’s strange appearance. Then, seeing Iboya sitting up beside me dressed the same way, I remembered what had taken place last night. “You can come out now,” Mother said, “things have quieted down.”
“Did they come?” asked Iboya.
“They came,” Mother answered.
“I heard them,” said Iboya.
“They did not come into our house, but they were on our street.”
Sandor and Joli laughed when they saw Iboya and me come into the kitchen. “You two look funny,” Sandor said. Joli stopped giggling and her steel-blue eyes showed fear. She wrapped her arms around her small body and shook. “I don’t like you this way.”
Mother gave us a basin of water. “You can wash your faces now—there should be no trouble during the day, but any contact with the Germans will be dangerous. Yellow star or not, I don’t want you to leave the house. Not until we see what happens.”
By ten o’clock, Mother had changed into her disguise. Now, dressed as a peasant woman, wearing the same clothes she wore to Poland when she had gone looking for Lilli, she said to us, “Bolt the gate, lock up the house, and don’t let the children out. I must run and pick up the matzos I ordered at the temple yard. Maybe I can pick up something else at the market next door as well, and then I’ll come back. Tomorrow is the first night of seder.”
“Don’t you want me to come along to help?” Iboya asked.
“No, you are to stay in the house with Piri and the children.”
After Mother left, Iboya told me that yesterday in the fish store she heard someone say the Germans had taken over Budapest.
“What will happen to Etu?” I asked as we cleared away the breakfast dishes. “Why did Mrs. Gerber tell Mother to leave her there, sayin
g that she would be better off in Budapest?”
Iboya looked at me, started to say something, changed her mind, and continued to wash the dishes in silence. And as I continued to dry them, I remembered the time of the Hungarian-Ukrainian border war when the closing of the border kept me in Komjaty. In my mind, I could see Rozsi, Babi, and me sitting in the kitchen listening to the sounds of gunfire in the distance. I was so afraid, I wanted to run and hide. But Babi sat very calmly in her chair reading her prayer book. I looked to her face with each explosion; not once did she wince, but just kept on quietly reading the prayer. And the next day when I had seen the bodies of the soldiers floating in the Rika, and had run home to Babi, filled with fear and confusion, I remembered how gently she had calmed me. And when Grandpa died, she had come out of the bedroom and said softly, “God took him to Himself.”
“Why did He take away my grandpa?” I had asked.
“Because we are all His,” she answered. “We are only here to do His work, and when we finish, He takes us back to Him.”
I thought then that God must be very selfish, but had begun to understand that Babi’s strength came from inside her, from her faith. I tried to trust and to accept things the way she did, but I couldn’t feel Him anywhere, especially not now.
17
IBOYA’S CONCERNED VOICE interrupted my mind’s wanderings. “Mother has been gone for two hours. I wish she had let me go with her.”
“What do you think will happen to us now that the Germans are taking over? Will we become refugees, too?” I asked.
“There is no other place to run. Hungary was the last country to give in to Hitler’s demands about the Jews.”
Mother did not return until half-past one. She came in carrying a large brown paper package tied with string. Her face was white, her eyes murky and dark.
“Children,” she said, “the Germans are parked in our temple courtyard. They have taken it over as their head-quarters. I have just spoken to them. I conversed with German officers.” She set the parcel of matzos on the floor and walked over to the chair. She did not look at us, but stared straight ahead as she continued to talk.
Upon the Head of the Goat Page 11
