The County of Birches

by Judith Kalman

  “Look, Apu, see the moo-cows?” I ask. But, although he pats my shoulder, I can tell he doesn’t notice. Otherwise he’d identify their breed for me, sum up their condition in a glance.

  The platform of the Keleti Pályaudvar had swarmed with our relatives and friends, most of them the post-war remains of Apu’s large extended family. Blowing into his monogrammed handkerchief, he wouldn’t look through the glass. His round face, at the best of times doleful, was shadowed under the brim of his fedora. His fleshy palm, my domain, failed to respond to my tugs: “Apu, A-pu, when will the train start?”

  It vexes me when he drifts off into that other place from before the war, but he usually makes up for it, returning to me and Lili and placating us with a story he found there. I remember one of my favourites, starting like a once-upon-a-time:

  “When I was a very little boy, just about your age, Danuska, not even four, I was taken for the first time to my beloved Great-Uncle Itzák’s, to commemorate the Yahrzeit of his late father, your ancestor Hermann Grószmann. This was a grand occasion. Every year there came hundreds: relations, friends, rabbis, beggars from far and wide, for it was considered a blessing to give, especially to the poor. The more you would give in this world, the closer you would be to God in the next. And Great-Uncle Itzák was both a rich and a pious man.

  “I was hardly more than a babe in arms, still with ringlets to my shoulders, but old enough to know that if I made a commotion my mother would not leave me behind. So, after a shameful display of willfulness that, I’m sorry to say, made my poor beloved father throw up his hands, he had the coachman put an extra fur rug into the szánkó, where, bundled in the back between my dear mother and father, I excitedly awaited the flick of the reins that would begin my first journey from the Rákóczi Tanya.”

  Who can resist the charm of horse-drawn sleighs and a father’s childhood misbehaviour? But I resent it when he stays locked in that place and won’t come out, assailed by other kinds of memories that make him feel no good can come of our endeavours.

  I have no patience with Apu when he doesn’t see that the bad things are over. Especially when it is daytime and he is with me and Lili. Things are good now, his children safe beside him. Not like the time when he was made to enlist in the labour battalion, board the train at their private platform on the Rákóczi Tanya, and be borne away from his family estate. Each labour service Apu went through, he’s said, he thought would be the end of him. Yet it was he who survived, those he left at home lost. Vicious joke of fate, he has spat into the night. What kind of joke is that, I wondered. Wife, daughter, niece; parents, brothers; cousins, aunts, uncles. One night, in a fit of remorseless self-punishment, I heard him count off the kinfolk lost. All hauled away by the rails he now presumes to ride into a better world.

  Apu won’t look at what he’s leaving. The betraying grind of the wheels holds him fast. He can’t accept he is abandoning all that remains of what he knew and loved. He is leaving yet again but—by choice—the dear familiar faces. He wouldn’t look at them in the station despite my insistence on what was plain: “Apu, see. See! Blanka-néni’s waving.”

  Apu does not glance out the train window as we pass the flat fields of the Hungarian countryside. He says no good-bye. From the first jolt of the train as it prepared to groan out of the Keleti Pályaudvar, Apu let go the reins. As the train jerked to a start, he disengaged.

  Despite my father’s withdrawal, I let myself be mesmerized by the flow of images on the window’s changing screen. That Apu is gloomy does not really matter. Parents are gloomy. Gloomy and anxious and often irritable. It doesn’t trouble me. I know I’m central—Lili and I. We’re a force that wrenches my father from the past he cherishes. We little girls, me trained to the window, Lili older but still charmed by store-bought packages, we small priestesses of motion are his transport. We were invoked by my mother for months. She wanted a future for her children. How was she to provide it when every penny he made he spent on his aunts and cousins? Did he not see while he fretted over the petty quarrels of the great-aunties that all his reaching into his pockets wouldn’t recover their losses? She wasn’t about to be sacrificed! Not she, nor anything of hers. His first wife and child went up in smoke. Enough sacrificed. Not her. Not hers.

  Lili and me. Hers. Her children. It is spring of 1957. Gunfire in Budapest during the fall revolution made her call up our names in the same breath as the future. We are going to a place where the future resides.

  Apu pulls me down abruptly and holds me tight. He presses his face to mine, and his warm tears make our cheeks stick. It feels as though he’s hanging on to me. Taken aback, I wonder with dawning alarm how I will manage to hold him up. My little arms wriggle and struggle free. They circle his neck like a life buoy, for I feel light and floatable and he is adrift.

  * * *

  Once we cross the Hungarian border there’s no turning back. The passports, just exit visas really, only let us out. I deduce this from the way Apu concedes authority to my mother. In Hungary he was a patriarch to his family. He had a position of repute in his field. He was at home and in command of his milieu. On the train he can’t even speak. Some internal inflexibility keeps him from testing new sounds. Apu lacks my mother’s fluidity with language. She tries out foreign words on any train official who passes us. When she gets a response, however incomprehensible, her mouth sets in a satisfied line.

  Lili’s head rocks in my mother’s lap. When I tear my eyes from the window, I glimpse Lili’s big hair bow drooping atop her head like a giant butterfly with folded wings. I wish I could wear my hair like Lili’s, but it is too fine to hold such an ornament.

  Unlike Lili, I resist sleep and try to keep my eyes open. I think that by staying watchful I can prevent anything bad from taking place. Really I trust the worst is over, but it’s smart to be prepared. If need be, Lili and I can benefit from the tragic mistakes of the past. We will know who to call, when to get out, where to run to, how to live.

  Our half-sister, Clárika, as I’ve seen her in a photograph Apu keeps wrapped in his prayer shawl, was a serious child, bird-boned, with straight hair tied up in a fat ribbon like Lili’s. But while Lili’s mouth is full and usually animated, our half-sister looks pinched and studious, older than her six years. Beside her stands her cousin, who was raised with her on the Tanya. They look like mismatched twins. They’re the same height, but the cousin’s face is round and impish, with the same screwed-up little grin I wear in the passport photo taken before we left. It is the grin of the great-aunties and, Apu says, of his mother.

  I don’t imagine my grandmother with a screwed-up impish grin. I see her always on a death train, chanting a low prayer. She fingers something fine and beautiful as she prays. Mari-néni, one of the relatives who came back, said my grandmother was stopped before boarding the train by someone called Eichmann. There is always silence when that name is uttered. Eichmann. I cringe from whispering it even to myself.

  “Was ist das?” Eichmann had demanded, holding up the white silk shawl my grandmother always wore on Yom Kippur. Mari-néni said my grandmother looked past the monster as though he were just a post and answered flatly, not in German, but in the Yiddish she knew he’d understand: “Clothes to die in.” Mari-néni brought these words back to Apu like a keepsake.

  She recalled too how my half-sister had held tightly to her mother’s hand all that final journey. Her mother’s gentle voice never faltered, calmly reassuring, “Soon we’ll catch up with Apu. Soon we’ll join your father.” I imagine the pinched, serious child’s face but can’t hold it in my mind for long. It slides, instead, into the visage of the other, the little cousin with the wrinkle-nosed grin and abundant curls that might have saved the two children.

  “The Rákóczi Tanya where I grew up was a big estate with many holds of land that we farmed for tobacco,” Apu has told us. “It was the largest tobacco plantation in Hungary, but the estate itself was small compared to the lands next to ours, belonging to the Gyorgyi count
s. On the counts’ land there were two castles, no less. The eldest count, Count László, occupied the big kastély for part of the year, but no one in his family used the smaller manor house. The little kastély, as it happened, was located beside the Rákóczi Tanya, and one day, if you can believe, the count called for my father and offered to lease him the little kastély for our use. Jews in a kastély, can you imagine? Well, as it turned out, your beloved and devout grandmother could not. She told my father to graciously decline the offer. Appealing as it might have been for me and my young brothers to live in a castle, our mother would not dream of making a kosher household out of a place that had housed generations of Catholic aristocrats.”

  To pass up the chance of living in a castle, how I regret it! But my father sounded proud of his mother’s response, as though she meant that the castle was not actually good enough for them.

  Later Apu would have occasion to reject a proposal of the younger count’s. Catching sight of the two little Jewish girls during the last months of the war, Count Ernö felt moved by the pretty cousin’s typical Magyar beauty to make an offer. Let the girls come to him to be raised as his own. Come what may, he would do what he could for them.

  Oh, I think hopefully, even though I know the real end of the story. I see that it doesn’t have to end so badly after all. The children, the little children, as is right and proper and fair, at least the children could be saved!

  “Let them go!” Apu wrote back to his wife in a letter from his last posting in the labour service. He was furious. What kind of proposal was Count Ernö making? How could the count allow himself to take advantage of the vulnerability of the children’s mothers, while Apu and his brother Miki were away in service? It was a scandal, the very idea, to split up the family and abandon the children among strangers, gentiles. What assurances would there be for their safety? What was the matter with Miri? Was she so lacking in natural feeling that she could actually entertain such a notion? Under no circumstances should they let their child—or the other—go!

  Not even one? I beg in my head, as I hear the bitter ending. Not even the pretty one with the impish grin? At least her, the one the count liked best?

  According to Mari-néni, not once on the hellish journey had my half-sister’s mother relinquished the little hand. Seared into mind as though I had seen them myself are mother and child, stripped naked, still clasped together under the spigots for gas.

  * * *

  The train, while it’s moving, is safe, but when it stops I spin, panicked. I vibrate from the steel that whirs inside me. Though the train stops, I continue.

  “Here we are!” declares my mother.

  “What! Where are we going? What are you doing?” I gasp as she stuffs our scattered belongings into her satchel.

  “It’s Bécs, see, Wien—Vienna. We change here.”

  Change?

  What change? Isn’t it supposed to be days before we arrive at our destination? I can’t stand being herded without explanation. I hate not knowing what to expect.

  “Hurry,” says my mother, bustling Lili into her overcoat.

  There are so many bundles I can tell she’ll forget something. Food, coats, blankets, papers. She seems distracted. Apu is already on the platform, weighed down by the brown metal trunk and our three leather valises. He is stuck with the valuables, the photographs of people I shall never meet, and all the crumpled, mud-stained letters he wrapped in a white, gold-threaded prayer shawl and packed away tenderly. We are supposed to have with us only what is most essential for travel, what we can actually carry, and he has brought the dead.

  I am suddenly afraid for my father down there, separated from us and encumbered by that cargo. He can’t forgive himself the harsh words he wrote to his wife. In punishment, I have heard him tell that story over and over again. I wish he would believe that it wasn’t his fault. He had no choice when he was sent off in the labour battalion. And he couldn’t have saved them anyway. He didn’t know they would die. It was almost the end of the war. He has said himself that when he boarded the train for that last labour service, he felt as close to light of heart as the times permitted. The war was almost over. The Russians were outside their borders. So far, Hungary had escaped German occupation. But the Germans entered anyway and, in a flash, the person called Eichmann swept all the Jews out of the Hungarian countryside. Apu has said a number. Half a million Hungarian Jews gone in two weeks. That doesn’t mean anything really, until I count his dear ones among them. How can he think that unforgivably, blindly, he was responsible?

  I rehearse the list of our baggage obsessively, maddening my mother.

  “Yes, yes. We have everything, don’t worry.”

  But she doesn’t pay enough attention, I think. She fails to catalogue what she stuffs away. Snatching up this or that and making it carelessly disappear. Someone must be vigilant, make sure nothing is left behind.

  I can’t digest what happened, that in a fleeting moment of time, everything was irrevocably lost. I struggle against that ephemeral instant, but it prevails. The brief but endless journey is my emotional locus, fixed. Apu’s first wife and small daughter barely stepped into Auschwitz and were gone in a flash. Lili and I are so lucky. Lucky. Lucky. We were blessed with luck to have been born after all that.

  “Apu,” I shout, throwing myself from the narrow opening of the train, straight over the rattling steps into his quick arms.

  * * *

  Through Hungary and Austria, Germany and Belgium, the train has churned up the voices of conductors and vendors. My ears have turned numb to them, just mishmash and noise. I’m addled by what is new and strange. Landscape slides over my vision. As we cross Europe, past rivers, towns and forests, the landscape loses definition and form. It smudges together. The world whips by a blur of images that fuse, eventually, into universal grey. Days of locomotion smear the colours I have recently learned to name.

  The train is my world now. The beat of its wheels has become my language, a restless tattoo I’m able to decode: slow screech of an approaching station; rattle of a trestle over a gully. Chugging is the song of speed. Like me, my father listens for its cues.

  “Danuska, you hear? It sounds like we are stopping. Sári,” he asks my mother crossly, “what’s the next station?”

  “How am I to know everything? You have the map.”

  But the map is in Hungarian, and the names not all the same as on the signposts.

  “It doesn’t matter, Danuska. We will get out and stretch our legs.”

  But I distrust stopovers. My heart beats too hard.

  “Where’s Lili? What’s become of Apu?” I demand of my mother.

  “He’s just over there buying a paper. Don’t worry.”

  “Where are our things? Why did we leave them on the train?”

  “Don’t worry, we’re not staying here long.”

  “Where’s the trunk?”

  “Don’t worry, we don’t need it this minute. Here’s Apu, are you happy now?”

  Don’t worry.

  I long to be back on the rocking train, safe in the sounds I’ve grown to recognize, enclosed with my family and baggage in a contained compartment, safe inside while the wide world whirls past behind the transparent shield.

  “Come!” I pull at my mother. “Come before the train leaves.”

  “I’ll lose my wits if you don’t leave me alone! See that conductor over there? Do you want me to ask him to put you on the train by yourself?”

  The man in the uniform has heard and is turning to approach us. There is a light in my head, filling it up. So much light I can’t really see. Now something floats above me. More brightness, but this time orange. Descending, the orange objects bring back to me what we have left: our circle of relatives and friends. I recognize these things that seem to be beautifully defined by their finite orange shape. Extended to me from a precipitous height by the uniformed stranger, they look like golden orbs descending. Thick, pitted surface warming my small hands like suns. T
he fragrance is so sharp it rubs into my skin. When I pass one to Lili, the citric scent lingers on my fingers. Orange globes, tartly aromatic, juice-laden. I suck mine in, a draft of colour I retain long after the world outside washes grey.

  The cloudy world mists over us, submerging us in the dull metal light of a northern climate. I succumb at last to a kind of sleep, falling into the grey world as into a waking dream, that swimming state you try to rise through, struggling for consciousness as for air. I don’t actually see the waters of the channel. I don’t remember crossing.

  FLIGHT

  The wet world receives us like a shipment of cargo. Like luggage, I feel flimsily held together by strings and brass clasps and leather straps. We’re inadequately contained. My parents, so competent on home ground, have been reduced by the strangeness to uncertainty. Stunned and light-headed and tongue-tied, disoriented by the fumes and the noise and the volume of people, we’re so clearly lost we must be shepherded from steward to porter to station attendant.

  My mother’s confusion rouses my father from the apathy he had felt on the train. She had been so eager to leave Hungary, so sure she was right. Now her bewilderment makes him feel needed. He gestures to passersby in Victoria Station. He holds out pieces of paper for them to read. Until now we’ve gotten by with some German, but my mother can’t piece together the sounds she hears in London with the English words she studied in Budapest. My able parents are stripped of their natural authority. It frightens me that they don’t know what to do or where to go, that we have stopped moving forward. There is a memory in my cells of a station platform where families are divided. It resonates through us all, underscoring our agitation.