Mortal Sins

by Anna Porter

  On the way they discovered that the streets of Eger were still much as they had been in the Middle Ages; few had room for cars, and only officials and other “important people” had telephones. What was the point when you could just as easily walk over to see someone at home? If you had to call long distance, you could do so from the post office or the hotels.

  The Markhots’ dressmaking shop was across the street from the double-towered church of the Minorites (another bit of furtive obeisance by István—“a habit, that’s all”), lit up by the faint yellow of the wrought-iron street lamps. The store window was protected by wrought-iron braces on the outside. The entrance was dark, but there was light upstairs behind the gauze curtains.

  “Even the old people go to bed late in Eger,” István said as he knocked on the glass door. “Not much happens here during the winter. We sit in the coffeehouses or we visit one another. Some people go skiing in the Mátras.”

  Judging by the look of surprise on the old woman’s face when she appeared, he was inventing his stories as he went. She hadn’t been expecting any visitors and wasn’t overjoyed to see them. Still, István was convincing enough to gain them entry after a lengthy exchange in Hungarian. “I told her it was a matter of life and death,” he joked to David, as they were led up the narrow winding staircase to the small room at the top, which gave off a pungent smell of cooked cabbage and musky perfume. Inside there were two beds, a table with an old porcelain lamp, two armchairs with embroidered backs, a row of painted plates along one wall facing an impressive array of portraits of the Virgin Mary and, in the corner, a tall black cross.

  Sári Markhot looked to be around 70. Her skin was heavily lined, sallow, the eyebrows jutting out over her watery eyes. Her back was bent, the shoulders drawn up around her head. She glared belligerently at the two foreigners who had intruded on her evening.

  István kept talking and smiling. “He’d make one helluva salesman,” Judith said when the old woman’s expression softened.

  “She doesn’t understand a word of English,” István said. “Her daughter does, but she’s in Czechoslovakia buying linen for the spring season.”

  Sári Markhot gestured for them to sit on the beds while she boiled water for tea. She produced blue china cups with gold rims and the dark residue of many years of tea stuck to their bottoms. She put lemon wedges in the saucers.

  “She says there isn’t much to tell about the Zimmermans,” István told them. He had taken one of the armchairs while David and Judith sat side by side on the bed, fondling their warm teacups. Sári Markhot spoke in a flat monotone, occasionally gesticulating with one hand, drawing her black lace shawl close around her head and shoulders. The little room was cold despite the iron burner she had lit when they came up. “They used to live on the far side of the castle, a big white house with a garden that needed two people to keep it trimmed. There were a lot of roses. Madame liked flowers. She wore summer dresses with flower designs. Often she brought the patterns right from Vienna where her husband had a flat. She was a talented woman. She drew. Played music. They had a grand piano in the living room and she often played and sang for the guests. The children had tutors in French, English, and German, and they both studied music like their mother. She was thought a great beauty, Sári says. She had the figure of a young girl. She loved silk.”

  “Ask her about the children,” David suggested.

  “The little girl was called Meredith.” Both István and Sári pronounced it the way Eva Zimmerman had, flat vowels and a hard t. “She was like her mother, all song and happiness. Everybody loved her. She had dark brown hair she wore in ringlets. Her clothes were all stitched by hand. Big, wide—how do you say—ballerina skirts, with tight waists and ribbons. She loved those ribbons, in her hair, at her throat, tied around her waist. Even on her shoes...” Sári Markhot’s hands flew from her hair to her neck and, with a girlish movement, to her own broad waist, and she smiled at the memory.

  “Does she remember Paul Zimmerman?” David asked. “Pali?”

  “She says he was a quiet boy, shortsighted, small for his age. The family hoped he would be a soldier one day, like his father had been during the First World War, but he took no interest in fighting. He read a lot. He had a special violin he’d received for his birthday some years back, he liked to play it. Sometimes his mother accompanied him on the piano. He played Viennese waltzes, Dvořák, even Liszt. She didn’t use to make his clothes—his father bought them from his tailors in Budapest or Vienna. All the local boys used to tease him about the way he dressed. Stiff high collars. Tight jackets.”

  David showed her the photograph of the two boys he had been given by Deidre. “Is this Paul Zimmerman?”

  She held the picture up to the lamp, studied it for a moment, then nodded a lot. “Yes,” István said. “That’s him. She says the picture looks like it was taken around 1940. All the children in the back garden. They built a pool in 1939. The children in the neighborhood would go around there and play. The other boy, he was around a lot. They were friends.”

  David stood over the old woman’s shoulder and looked at the picture with her. She was still talking and gesticulating about the magnificence of the Zimmermans’ garden.

  “Ask her, would you, to point at Paul Zimmerman for me, Pál, Pali, you know,” he beamed encouragement at Sári, who appeared to understand, because she pointed at one of the boys in the photograph. She smiled and looked up at David.

  “Is she sure?”

  “Sure, sure,” István said, and Sári nodded vigorously, her bent arthritic right finger pointing at the smaller of the two boys, the one who wore the baggy singlet to hide his childish belly. His right arm reached over the taller boy’s shoulder. He was squinting into the camera, grimacing against the bright sunshine.

  “Who is the other boy?” asked Judith. She was now also standing, crowded around the small photograph with the others. “Does she know who it is?” She pointed at the tall blond boy who so amazingly resembled Arthur Zimmerman.

  Sári Markhot handed back the photograph. She shook her head and said something to István in rapid-fire Hungarian that translated as, “She doesn’t think she can remember his name.”

  “Perhaps a local boy?” David prompted.

  István shook his head. “She can’t remember at all,” he insisted. Though Sári added a whole lot more in her angry Hungarian, he seemed to have lost interest in translating.

  Thirty-Six

  AT FIRST THEY had both been too exhausted to sleep. They sat in David’s bed trying to make sense of who Paul Zimmerman really was. What was it Sári Markhot had said to István that had turned the formerly voluble travel guide into such a tight-lipped interpreter? He had remained quiet on the way home, and when Judith pressed him to explain why Sári had suddenly become angry when she saw the photograph of the two boys, he claimed he hadn’t noticed.

  “Hungarians are passionate people. Very patriotic. She was recalling the invasion of Eger. By the Germans, of course. We call the Russians ‘liberators.’ There is a difference,” he declared.

  Lenin Street was pitch dark by then; even the Park’s neon sign had been extinguished. Judith’s leather-soled boots skidded along the ice-covered paving stones.

  “We don’t use salt on the old streets,” István said. “It would damage the ancient paving. They have been here for five centuries and will, we hope, remain for five more. That sort of thinking puts everything in perspective, don’t you think?”

  “Most things,” Judith agreed. She doubted if a feeling for local history would have helped Eger’s Jews as they were trucked off to the death camps.

  Around 2 A.M. she filled the huge lion’s-footed bathtub with sulfurous hot water and immersed herself, trying to relax into sleep. She drank the last of the Pálinka and counted Hungarian sheep over snow-covered fences.

  When she returned to the bedroom, David was already snoring—a gentle, rhythmic sound she would normally have found irritating, but tonight it seemed comfor
tingly familiar in a strange town too far away from home. For the sake of propriety (you never quite shake off the ill effects of a Protestant childhood), she crumpled the sheets and turned down the blankets in her own room, then curled up next to David under his soft down duvet.

  They woke at 7 to a bright sunny morning and crisp mountain air that testified that the Park didn’t subscribe to the decadent capitalist indulgence of individual room heating. A smiling maid, wearing two sweaters under her woolen apron, provided a sturdy breakfast of brown buns, strawberry jam, thick Turkish coffee, and warm milk.

  At 8 A.M. they had a visit from Comrade Szabo of the Eger constabulary. He had brought Józsi bácsi with him to translate in French that he was delighted to welcome such a distinguished member of a brother police force—mes frères—to his humble town.

  “So that’s why they had to have our passports overnight,” David said. “They check your credentials. Do you suppose they know why we’re here now?” He extricated his fingers from his brother officer’s fierce grasp.

  “I doubt if the system works that well,” Judith said. “It would take them days to make all the right connections between Eger and Toronto. All he knows is that you’re a policeman and I’m a journalist, and that’s bad enough. I doubt if we’ll be able to shake him for as long as we’re here.”

  Józsi bácsi looked as though he had continued the evening well past the time David and Judith had left for Jókai Street. He also resented being dragged out of bed long before his usual time. He put heavy emphasis on words like distingué and summarized chunks of flattering information about the Toronto police force into, “He wants you to know he has studied Toronto’s gendarmerie. Probably spent the whole night on it, le pauvre.”

  Szabo asked if there was some way in which he could be of assistance, and Józsi bácsi suggested they accept his offer, otherwise he’d simply follow them around, incognito, an exercise that often made the police a touch testy. Particularly Comrade Szabo, who was much too fat to inch along the walls unnoticed. His job included keeping an eye on important visitors.

  Sympathetic to the myriad ways in which police must bend to bureaucrats, David agreed, provided Szabo stayed out of their way after leading them to Ferenc Lantos and his sweetshop on the site of the old Singer home.

  The shop turned out to be a large blue-tiled coffeehouse with an extensive display of homemade Viennese cakes and confections, American ice cream, and Turkish delight. During the summer, Józsi bácsi said, its blue and white awning extended over the sidewalk, but now the customers were all contained inside the crowded room. There were tiny round tables closely packed together, men and women in stylish knits huddled over stained tablecloths. The echoing din of loud conversation. The pungent smell of close-packed bodies and fresh-brewed coffee. The whole was dominated by a massive, silver-plated espresso machine with four black handles and a steaming spout for milk. Above it, a discreetly small photograph of Lenin. All around on the walls, large reproductions of paintings of men in battle dress striking heroic poses. Before saying goodbye, Józsi bácsi pointed out that the Petöfi Kavéház was a favorite hangout for artsy students and writers. The manager was kind enough to let them sit around all day discussing fine points of poetry and philosophy over a single cup of coffee and a piece of cake. Appropriately, the place was named after a famous Hungarian poet—a romantic and a revolutionary. Such excesses were now fashionable only among the very young and the very old.

  Ferenc Lantos appeared to be both manager and waiter; his wife, Edith, as he later introduced her, made the cakes herself. He spoke good English, a prerequisite for higher pay in the coffeehouse business. “The government,” he told Judith, “wishes to encourage us to learn languages so we can attract more foreign tourists. The difficulty is, not many foreigners come here in the winter no matter how much English we learn.” He served them chocolate cake with hard caramel topping and espresso with heavy cream. He didn’t think there had ever been anyone in his shop from Canada, and he wanted to hear all about the Rocky Mountains. He was planning a trip there when he retired.

  He was a small man with a paunch and a rosy complexion, around 55. He walked with a slight limp. When he sat down to join the overseas guests, he took off his long white napkin of an apron, revealing a pair of daring blue checked pants he said he had bought three years ago in London. They were sure to be in vogue soon here, he said. Eger was somewhat behind “the fashion mainstream.” “A little place. Out of the way.” But it had charm and tradition. He prattled on about relatives in various parts of the world who missed the kind of cooking they had been used to at home, and, even more, the hospitality, the ambience, and how glad he was to have stayed behind in ’56 when the majority of the bourgeois left. All that until David told him they had come looking for information about Paul Zimmerman. Then he stopped talking.

  He gestured to his wife to take his place while he filled the espresso machine with more hot water, strolled around chatting to other happily occupied customers, then came back to stand behind his wife’s chair and stare quizzically at the newcomers from Canada. His face, moments before openly cheerful, now held an expression of guarded suspicion.

  “You did know Paul Zimmerman,” David asked again, “didn’t you?”

  “Not very well,” Lantos said, after a moment’s hesitation.

  “Gloria Singer showed me the photographs. I thought perhaps you could tell us something about him.”

  Lantos seemed surprised. “She showed you pictures? Why?”

  “I guess she thought they might be useful for the investigation.”

  “What you mean, investigation? I don’t understand.” Lantos looked back at the blue-uniformed Szabo who was sitting at the next table, eating chocolate cake and reading the paper while he waited for the distinguished Canadian visitors to finish talking. He didn’t seem to be paying any attention to the conversation.

  “What he means is, we are looking into Paul Zimmerman’s life. I am writing a story for an American magazine,” Judith interrupted. “Obviously Mrs. Singer thought you could help us. You knew Paul when you were all boys, you and Harvey were friends with Paul, weren’t you?”

  “Not specially close friends,” Lantos said impatiently, “Harvey must have told you. The two of us were close friends. Zimmermans spent only summers here. We swam in their pool. That is all. I don’t understand why so many want to know about Paul now. After all these years. He was a nice kid, but not special. You people in America have such a—how you say, gravelike, ghoulish?—curiosity. Terrible thing, of course, his dying like that, but those were terrible times for all of us here. Hell, in 1944 we ran out of most rations. Not even bread, or flour to make bread. No meat by spring. The Germans came looking in March, the peasants had nothing left to give them but their cows. So after that we had no milk. People were dying. Like flies, you would say. Christians and Jews both.”

  “His dying like that?” David asked. “How did he die?”

  “It wasn’t only him, it was all of them. The whole family. It was the times you blame, not any one person, and Feri was only a boy himself. I know he wouldn’t have thought they would be killed. I knew Feri. He wasn’t that kind of a person.” He wiped his brow with the back of his sleeve. “Only 16. He and Paul were the same age. We were all at the same school. All went swimming at Zimmermans’ pool in the summer and when they moved here from Budapest in ’39 or ’40. Sometimes they allowed us in the house. Mrs. Zimmerman didn’t think we should play inside much. Their house had pretty antiques. She wanted Paul to get fresh air. She thought the sun would make him grow strong...” He broke off for a moment and returned to the counter to adjust the espresso machine.

  “Feri?” Judith asked. “Who the hell...?”

  David put a restraining hand on her arm. “Don’t ask him now. He thinks we know more than we do. If you let on we don’t, he might clam up like István did.”

  When Lantos returned, he brought a drawing with him. It was in browns and blues, light lines and s
hading with a pale blue wash background. The picture showed a young boy with a serious face and carefully combed brown hair. He wore a white shirt, open at the neck, and held a football on his knee.

  “That’s Mrs. Zimmerman’s drawing of Harvey. He was invited in more often than the rest of us, because his parents made friends with the Zimmermans in Budapest. Harvey’s father was in the boats, but they weren’t so rich like the Zimmermans. Harvey used to tell me how big the Zimmermans’ rooms were, and how he was afraid to touch things in case it got dirty. He would sit quietly and listen to Paul play violin, and watch Meredith play with the cats. Paul’s father was industrialist. He built houses and factories. After Paul decided he didn’t want to be in the army, he was going to go into his father’s business. He was terribly good at school. After the war broke out, he had private tutors to teach him the extras we didn’t have at our high school—like music. He spoke French, German, English, and some Latin. He was studying ancient Greek. I remember Feri used to argue with him about Latin being the most useless thing anyone could learn...”

  He put the picture on the table in front of him and glanced at it from time to time as he talked. “Harvey was my best friend. We were younger than Paul and Feri. Only 14. I didn’t care he was Jewish, and I don’t think my parents cared. They never said anything at home about the Jews. But the climate was... You know... We thought the Germans were just planning to take the Jews to some camp till the war was over. For a long time, I think everyone believed that. We wanted to believe it. When the Singers asked if Harvey could stay with us while they went to the camp, my mother wouldn’t take him. She said the air would do him good.” He laughed, a harsh, mirthless sound. “You know, she was afraid of what might happen if the Nazis found out we were hiding a Jew. So they sent him to Budapest where Mr. Singer had a friend who took him in for a while. Saved his life, you know. He spent only a few months in Auschwitz.” He wiped his eyes. “God, I was so glad to see him alive.”