Burning Cold

by Lisa Lieberman

  “Mard,” I corrected him automatically. Then I shared my thinking. “We know that Father met your mother when Zoltán was small, right? By the time you were born, he was already in America. I’m guessing that his wife and son stayed in Mád. Where else could she have gone? A woman without a husband in those days would have had no option but to rely on her family. Maybe that’s how Dr. Szabó knew where he was. I mean, it makes sense that he’d go back to the place where he grew up, not to some random town in the middle of nowhere. Some of his relatives on his mother’s side might still be alive. He could be hiding with someone he knows.”

  True to form, Gray threw cold water on my hopeful speculations. “It’s still going to be like trying to find a needle in a haystack. We don’t know the slightest thing about Zoltán’s mother, beginning with her maiden name. How are we supposed to find her family?”

  “Someone ought to know,” I persisted. “Look at the map. Mád’s a teensy-weensy village. I’m sure everybody knows everybody else. If we ask around, I bet someone will be able to direct us to their house.”

  My husband interrupted me. “You don’t want to do that, najdroższa, believe me.”

  “I don’t?”

  “These little villages have complicated pasts. The last thing people want is to be reminded of the Jews who lived there before the war. Some of them may have benefited, you see, taking over Jewish property when they realized that the owners weren’t coming back. They might think we’ve come to reclaim it.” He stopped and a haunted look came to his eyes. When he resumed speaking, his voice was low and uneven, the words tumbling out of his mouth as if by speaking in a rush, he could rid himself of the memories they evoked.

  “I heard about it in Warsaw when I went back afterward to look for my family, in ’45. The handful of survivors who returned from the camps found Polish families living in their homes. It happened in Kielce and Kraków and in some of the smaller villages too. There were pogroms, just like in the old days. Mobs hunting Jews down in the streets, beatings and lynchings. Hundreds were murdered.”

  Hundreds. I felt cold, profoundly cold, as if I had been thrust naked into the frigid landscape outside. The death camps, I had thought, were the worst thing human beings could do to one another.

  Six months earlier I’d seen Night and Fog. Images of the skeletal inmates behind barbed wire, the mounds of corpses being shoveled by bulldozers into mass graves, the small detail of fingernail scratches in the cement ceilings of the crematoria still haunted my dreams: none of this would I allow myself to forget. Now I was learning that the survivors’ suffering didn’t end with their liberation. Imagine coming back from that hell and being set upon by your former neighbors. I could hardly bear to think about it and, from the look on Gray’s face, it was plain that he was equally appalled, but he was fortunate in having an excellent memory for poetry. Once more, he sought refuge in Dante:

  “Three dispositions adverse to heaven’s will,

  “Incontinence, malice, and mad brutishness.”

  Jakub bowed his head in mute acknowledgment of the poet’s acuity. “These sins were common all across Europe after the war,” he said. “I knew Jews in France who had to petition through the courts to get their apartments back when they returned from the camps, and it took months. Many people helped Jews, or kept quiet about their neighbors who were hiding them, but there were some who betrayed them, and from what I witnessed, the French authorities were only too willing to hand Jews over to the Gestapo. It will be years before the full story is known, and I have no doubt that it’s the same here in Hungary. We’re outsiders, don’t forget. It’ll be hard enough to earn the trust of the villagers as it is. We’d be making a serious mistake if we were to dredge up incidents that most, I’m sure, would prefer to forget.”

  “I understand.” If Jakub was having second thoughts, it was time to concede the battle. “You think we should turn around?”

  “Certainly not! There are other ways of tracking your brother down, as I said.” A half smile lit his face. “God’s on our side, you know.”

  Gray and I looked at one another, uncertain whether we’d heard him properly. My husband had never once mentioned God in all the time we’d been together. Granted we hadn’t been together all that long, but he’d led me to assume that music was his religion. Indeed, to hear him play the violin was to enter some higher realm.

  “Today is Friday,” he explained. “If there are any Jews left in Mád, they’ll be gathering at sundown to pray.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  If any Jews remained in Mád, they were keeping a very low profile, and yet the place once teemed with Jewish life. A ruined synagogue perched on a hill near the village center attested to the fact, as did the old cemetery at the far edge of town, its weathered tombstones etched with Hebrew inscriptions. Some of these dated back to the eighteenth century, but none of the graves appeared to have been tended in a long time.

  “Nobody came back? Not a single soul?” I said, unnerved by the air of desolation that hung about the site. The graves were crowded together in disorderly rows, a good many of them tilting at precarious angles or toppled over completely.

  Jakub’s response was matter-of-fact. “They had nothing to come back for, najdroższa.”

  It wasn’t only the Jewish sites that were neglected; the entire village was in shambles. Nestled amid terraced hills planted with rows and rows of grapevines, Mád appeared quite picturesque from a distance, its red tile roofs with their dusting of snow reminding me somehow of Italy, or of how I imagined Italy would look in winter. As we drew closer, however, the signs of deterioration were impossible to miss. Driving the town’s rutted roads, we passed stately buildings in disrepair, crumbling stucco walls revealing the rotten wooden structure underneath. Weed-filled courtyards could be glimpsed through rusty gates fronting the few sizable homes in town—vestiges of a more prosperous era, clearly, as was the shuttered bank, a majestic two-story building that took up half a block.

  Time had not stood still in this remote part of Hungary, it had moved backward.

  I tried to imagine how Mád might have appeared in Father’s day. The dilapidated cottages we saw would have been new then, their walls freshly painted. The mule-drawn carts wouldn’t have had to contend with automobiles and trucks on the narrow streets, and somehow I thought that the faces of the town’s inhabitants would not have been so dour in the early part of the twentieth century, when Franz Joseph reigned and Hungary flourished.

  Our roundabout route had added more than an hour onto our journey, and the light was already fading as we pulled into town. Dark clouds smudged the sky, but the sleet was tapering off, which made exploring the place on foot feasible, although hardly pleasant in such raw weather. The cemetery was located at the end of a steep dirt track too treacherous to drive. We’d had to leave the Škoda at the bottom and walk around the perimeter through the slush until we found the opening in the wall, and by the time we got inside the graveyard, our shoes were soaked through.

  “Look, I’ve found them!” Gray hailed us from midway down the hill, where he’d wandered in search of the family plot. Treading carefully to avoid slipping on the icy slope, Jakub and I picked our way down to where he was standing. “Szabó Mozes, Szabó Dávid, Szabó Eszter, Szabó Izsak, Szabó Judit, Szabó Zsófia,” he read from the clustered tombstones.

  “Zsófia?” I peered at the gravestones. “Which one’s hers?”

  My brother gave me a quizzical look and pointed to one of the more upright markers. “Why are you asking?”

  “Father mentioned a sister named Zsófia. I’m wondering if it could be her. Look, she was born in 1896, three years after him.” I noted that she’d died in 1937, at the relatively young age of forty-one. Perhaps this was fortunate, dying before the war and the deportations. Had Father known that his younger sister had died back in Hungary? I’d have been around four at the time, too young to h
ave remembered if he’d grieved a loss, but he was so private where his past was concerned that I rather doubted he’d shared the news with anyone, apart from my mother. And perhaps not even her; Vivien was considerably younger than Father, her experience of the world quite limited. In 1937, she’d have been twenty-one.

  Gray hadn’t known the names of any of Father’s siblings. Like me, he hadn’t been curious enough to ask.

  “You know, it’s hard to believe that Father could have expunged his entire history. I mean, he didn’t just cut out on his wife and son—which was bad enough, don’t get me wrong—he walked away from all of this,” he said, making a sweeping gesture with his arm.

  “He closed the door and never looked back,” I agreed. “But that’s Hollywood, isn’t it? People moved there to reinvent themselves, changing their names, their nationality, their life stories, as easily as they changed their hair color. If Father was trying to forget his past, I’d say he picked the perfect place to go and do it.”

  “Yeah,” said Gray, “but don’t you think it’s strange that he never mentioned any of this, not even privately to us? Two sisters and a brother, parents, and grandparents. Aunts and uncles and cousins too, I’d imagine. His entire childhood spent in this town and we never knew a thing about it.”

  “We never asked,” I pointed out.

  My brother considered this. “Maybe he felt guilty about leaving his wife for another woman. Everyone in town must’ve sided with her.”

  “That would explain why he didn’t go back before the war, when his relatives were still alive.”

  “There was no going back, after what he did,” said Jakub. “Not in a traditional Jewish community like this one.”

  We both stared at him, appalled. “That’s pretty extreme punishment for adultery, isn’t it?” Gray commented.

  “Your mother wasn’t Jewish, was she?” Jakub asked my brother.

  “No, she was Roman Catholic.” He gave a wry smile. “Lapsed, obviously.”

  “Lapsed or not, by marrying her, your father violated Jewish law. A Jew who marries outside his faith is as good as dead. His children will not be Jewish, you see, because their mother isn’t Jewish. The status passes through the mother.”

  A worrying thought occurred to me. “Would your parents have objected to our marriage?”

  Jakub reached for my hand and gave it a reassuring squeeze. “My family was not observant. We ate pork and celebrated Christmas, like ordinary Poles, and rarely went to synagogue. My parents would have loved you, najdroższa.”

  “I wish I could have met them.” I stood on tiptoes and kissed him. As I did, another thought occurred to me. “But how do you know so much about Jewish tradition if you weren’t raised in a religious household?”

  “Hitler made me Jewish. Since the war, I’ve taken it upon myself to learn what that means.”

  “Do you know what this means?” asked Gray. He was crouched by one of the half-toppled tombstones in the Szabó family plot, examining a small mound of pebbles resting in its lee. It was obvious they’d been placed there deliberately, and scanning the neighboring graves with their light covering of snow, I saw that a fair number of them, including Zsófia’s, exhibited similar mounds: small cairns either balanced on top of the headstone if it was standing upright, or piled on the ground in front of the ones that had tilted precariously or fallen over entirely.

  Jakub was elated. “It tells me that not all of Mád’s Jews are gone,” he said. “Someone’s been visiting these graves. They’ve left the stones to honor the memory of the dead and, from the looks of it, they’ve been coming regularly. I wonder if they’ve visited anyone else besides your family. I’m just going to have another look around.” His voice trailed off as he ambled away to scrutinize the next row of tombstones, pausing to read the inscriptions and standing, lost in thought for a moment or two, in front of each one before moving on.

  I was wearing slacks, a wool hat, and gloves. I’d pulled my coat’s beaver collar up around my ears in an effort to keep out the wind, but I was still chilled to the bone. Jakub was making very slow progress. I tried stamping my feet to keep my circulation going, but after watching him for several minutes and growing progressively more frozen, I told my brother I’d be waiting for them back in the car. It would soon be dark and we needed to think about where we’d be spending the night. There was nothing remotely resembling a hotel in Mád.

  “Are you looking for someone in particular?” An old tramp accosted me at the cemetery entrance. Taken aback by his sudden appearance, it didn’t even register, the fact that he’d addressed me in English, and with a British accent, no less.

  “Um, well, yes, we are. Or, we were, but we found them. My father’s family.”

  The tramp’s features were difficult to discern beneath his grizzled beard. Lacking a hat, he’d wrapped a wool scarf, mummy fashion, around his head. Only his eyes peeked out, dark and penetrating. Yet for all his shabbiness, the tattered overcoat, the threadbare trousers patched in multiple places, giving him a harlequin air, the ancient rucksack slung on his back, he conveyed a gentleness that put me instantly at ease.

  “And who am I speaking to?” he said. Then he paused and put a hand to his forehead. “Excuse me, my English has grown rusty from disuse. I ought to have said ‘to whom.’”

  Only now did the incongruity strike me: coming upon a beggar in this tiny town in a remote part of Hungary who not only spoke English, but who primly corrected his own grammar.

  “I’m Cara. Cara Walden. To whom do I have the pleasure of speaking?” I couldn’t resist adding. I don’t think I imagined the twinkle in his eye.

  “György.” He held out a gloved hand. “Fleischmann György. Although you’d put it in the reverse order, wouldn’t you?” Here he paused. “Walden? Do I know a Walden?”

  “Sorry, I should have explained. My father changed his name. It used to be. . .”

  “Szabó,” he said in quiet amazement. “Szabó Robi!” Tears sprung to my companion’s eyes. “Szabó Robi,” he repeated, overcome with emotion. “Please forgive me.”

  I waited for him to collect himself. “You knew my father?” It was almost too much for me to take in, and I fought back the urge to throw my arms around him and hug him.

  “I did indeed. We grew up together.” He drew an old-fashioned pair of eyeglasses from some hidden pocket and attached them to his ears. I saw his eyes widen in surprise as I came into focus.

  “Your father, did you say? That can’t be right. Robi’s an old man, like me. He couldn’t possibly have a daughter your age. His son would be over forty by now.”

  His son. He must have meant Zoltán. Did he know our brother? It sounded as if he had at one time, but “would be” suggested that he hadn’t seen Zoltán for a while. My brain was flooded with questions, beyond the simple curiosity of what had brought this poor man out to the graveyard on such a miserable day. But before I could pose them, we were joined by Gray and Jakub and my questions were lost in the flurry of introducing them to György.

  “Children,” he said in a shaky voice as he fought once more to regain his composure. “Please, we should not be standing out here in the cold. I invite you to come back with me, to my home. There is room for you to stay the night. Plenty of room. And I will give you something to eat. But first we must stop at the shul. It won’t take long, I promise.”

  We bundled ourselves into the Škoda and drove the short distance from the cemetery to Mád’s synagogue. Jakub parked in front, as instructed, and György led the way around to a double door on the east side of the building. Pulling a set of keys from his pocket, he fumbled in the half light until he found the one he wanted, then went to insert it in the lock, but the doors swung open of their own accord the moment he touched them.

  “Ó, ne. Már megint?” He turned to face us, distraught. “Not again.”

  “What is it? What’s wrong
?” we asked in alarm.

  “Vandals,” he said.

  Worriedly, I asked if it was safe to go inside and Jakub offered to take a look around, just in case they were still on the premises, but György assured us that we had nothing to fear.

  “They’re always breaking in, the boys from the town. I don’t know what they expect to find. There’s nothing left to steal.”

  He entered the building and beckoned for the three of us to come along. We found ourselves in a kind of antechamber that opened onto the main sanctuary. György urged us forward and pulled the door closed behind us. Reaching into a small recess by the doorway, he brought out two dusty black skullcaps, brushed them off as best he could, and gave them to Gray and Jakub. Fastidious to a fault, my brother grimaced as he realized that he was expected to wear the yarmulke. Our companion noticed his hesitation. “You may keep your own hat on, if you prefer,” he said as he proceeded to unwind the scarf from around his head, revealing a skullcap of his own, a colorful one festooned with a yellow star of David embroidered on a field of red, white, and green.

  “A Bar Mitzvah gift,” he said with a slight smile. The three of us must have been staring. “One of my aunts made it for me. She was quite nationalistic, Aunt Edit. It’s embroidered in the colors of the Hungarian flag. The old flag, that is.”

  “You kept it all these years?”

  “Nothing could induce me to wear it at the time, but I was too afraid of Aunt Edit to get rid of it. She used to ask me to show it to her when she visited, which wasn’t often, fortunately. I found it in the back of my bureau drawer. The Russians must have missed it.”

  “I gather they didn’t miss much,” said Gray.

  György acknowledged the comment with a nod, but he said nothing. Shrugging off the canvas rucksack, he stuffed his scarf inside the front pouch. From the main compartment, he extracted a flashlight and shone it into the sanctuary. The beam illuminated a scene of utter desecration. Busted wooden pews were strewn about like broken playthings, and these were no flimsy benches. It must have taken several men to pry the massive rows of seats with their carved backs and solid armrests from their fixtures and drag them across the floor. Nor was this the worst of it. Arched windows spaced at intervals along the high-ceilinged room, their glass missing, threw dusky light upon an even greater sacrilege. The temple’s ark, which had once held Torahs, was now nothing more than a gaping hole. It looked as if someone had taken a sledgehammer to the marble encasement and laid waste to the entire structure after burning the scrolls within. The surrounding masonry was scorched all the way up to the high arched ceiling. Next to me, Jakub gave a sharp intake of breath.