The Elixir of Immortality

by Gabi Gleichmann

  Sara provided for her family with her job as a seamstress in a boutique where affluent ladies had their clothes made. It was in the center of the city, and she walked there every workday, all year around. It took her two hours to get to the shop and just as long to come home. By walking she saved the cost of tram fare, enough to keep the three old women alive. Only every fourth Sunday was she spared from leaving home at five in the morning and returning at seven in the evening. That was always the shortest day of the month, for it was devoted to cleaning, laundry, cooking, and sleeping. But Sara never complained. She considered that it would do no good. In any case, she had no time to think of herself because she was constantly busy with the needs of others. Five times in the course of as many years she became pregnant, however, even though Nathan was almost never home, and most of the time he was depositing his semen in the bellies of other women. With her five pregnancies she gave birth to two children who were healthy and survived, Carlo and Ilona.

  After his time in prison Nathan found it hard to go back to ordinary life. The considerable inheritance from his father was long gone. He had no job, and it wasn’t easy for an ex-convict to get work, especially if he’d been closely associated with the Republic of the Councils. He had his own family now and wanted to keep them out of the gutter, so he went on a long round of knocking on doors. His past followed him doggedly. Besides, the times were hard; not for nothing was Hungary called the land of three million beggars.

  SÁNDOR FÜRST AND IMRE SALLAI were executed in Budapest on July 29, 1932. They had been sentenced to death two weeks earlier after a summary trial, charged with plotting the attack at Biatorbágy, the sleepy little village some twenty miles west of Budapest where the Vienna Express had been dynamited the previous year and twenty-two people died. Everyone knew the truth: Fürst and Sallai were innocent. They had watertight alibis. The perpetrator, Szilveszter Matuska, had confessed his odious crime; he’d even boasted about it. Huge protests were organized in many parts of the world, demanding that the two men be freed. All for nothing. The Horthy regime was absolutely determined to make an example by sending Jewish communist leaders Fürst and Sallai to the gallows.

  It was purely by chance that Nathan, who for many years had been one of the most public faces of the Hungarian Communist Party, as it was called in those days, wasn’t arrested along with Sallai and the other comrades when the police raided the secret headquarters of the banned party. Shortly before this, you see, Nathan had been infected by a venereal disease, and Sara wasn’t about to put up with that indelicate affliction of her husband’s. She’d learned to live with the fact that he frequented whores, but bringing home exotic illnesses was something else again. She had a fit of righteous indignation. She scolded him and swore and whacked him on the head with a frying pan. Nathan’s usual placid self-confidence in crises was knocked out of him, and for once in his life he showed signs of something resembling remorse. He promised to reform and do better. Sara didn’t believe him. She was certain that her obsessive whoremonger of a husband neither wanted to reform nor was capable of changing his ways. She demanded just one thing of him: to accompany her the next morning to Aunt Luiza’s funeral. Nathan hadn’t noticed the old woman’s death, even though they’d been living under the same roof. He’d had more important things to think of. But he was relieved to hear that she was finally out of the way, so without thinking much about it, he agreed. He felt all the more relieved the following afternoon when he realized that as he’d been watching Luiza’s simple wooden coffin sinking slowly into the grave, the police had been raiding the office where he usually spent his mornings and arresting all the comrades there.

  Nathan’s calm, impassive exterior concealed deep apprehension. He had a distinct foreboding that years of prison and persecution lay before him. In his darkest hours he feared for his life. He argued his case before the party leadership, and in a lengthy discussion he offered a long list of justifications for taking refuge abroad. They concluded that the best course was for him to emigrate to the Soviet Union. Alone, of course, without his family. They were conferring a great privilege upon him, since fundamental doctrine required every communist to strive to bring about the revolution in his own country. But Nathan was entirely too important. He had a keen sense of what moved people, he was a brilliant analyst, and he’d mastered even the most obscure points of Marxist doctrine, quite an unusual achievement in party circles. They agreed that he was in great danger of arrest, so they decided to smuggle him out of Hungary that very night. He would wait in Berlin for a visa to the Soviet Union. Nathan was greatly relieved. At last he was on the way to the promised land, escaping the shackles of the bourgeois world. The implications for the future of his wife and children were of very little concern to him.

  NATHAN ARRIVED IN MOSCOW after five months in Berlin, shortly before the long night of National Socialism fell over Germany. He traveled in the company of eight German comrades, dedicated communists who’d lost the battle against Hitler and were forced to flee in order to save their skins. Six years later when Nathan at last had the good fortune of being allowed to leave the Soviet Union to return home, not a single one of them was still alive. The revolution had devoured the best of its children, detaining them, brutally torturing them, and sending them to inhumane conditions in Siberian camps, then dispatching them with carefully aimed shots in the nape of the neck, a process very similar to that described by Chiara Luzzatto a hundred and thirty years earlier.

  The first to disappear was David Goldstücker. Although originally from an affluent bourgeois Jewish family in Kopenick, he had served the proletarian revolution with his whole heart. He led an armed cell that waged many bloody battles with Nazi Brownshirts in the hot summer of 1932. They developed a warm friendship when Nathan stayed with him in Berlin, even though personal bonds between party members were considered suspect and therefore likely to be denounced as political factionalism, a mortal sin. Loyalty to the party demanded absolute obedience and an end to competing ties of friendship. Individuals could make mistakes; they could be led astray by those close to them. Not so the party. The party was infallible, and only those who believed blindly in the party as the perfect manifestation of revolutionary ideals in world history could be given the responsibilities of leadership. Nathan and Goldstücker did not give a damn for any of that cant. They took great pleasure in each other’s company. When they were alone in private, Goldstücker was a cheerful man with a lively wit that delighted Nathan. He was also thick-skinned and phlegmatic, impervious to discouragement. His concept of the workers’ paradise of the East corresponded exactly to that depicted in party propaganda. He believed that the Soviet Union was seething with eagerness and creativity, disciplined workers and enthusiastic peasants, and that a shared society was being constructed under the leadership of efficient engineers and irreproachable officials, all of whom took their inspiration from visionaries and were led by the selfless comrades of the party leadership. As soon as they reached the border, however, Goldstücker was presented with some food for thought. Grim Soviet customs officials opened all their valises and examined the contents with suspicion: every article of clothing was turned inside out, each book and piece of printed matter was laboriously examined. Nothing was neglected. Everything was inspected in detail and then tossed back into the suitcases. Everything, that is, except food, which—to judge by the hungry faces of the customs officials—wound up in their own pockets. Processing took an eternity. The train stood for a full day at the border station before it was permitted to depart for Moscow. Out on the endless Ukrainian steppes it halted countless times at ramshackle railway stations where platforms were teeming with terribly thin men offering embroidered tablecloths, icons, and jewelry in exchange for bread, and wasted women tearfully begged travelers to take their children, whose swollen bellies, sunken features, and arms and legs as thin as spaghetti made them look more dead than alive. Everyone from Berlin could see that the country that was supposed to surpass America with it
s current five-year plan, with goals the party leaders were promising to meet ahead of schedule, was in fact a primitive land suffering from general famine. They all saw this and understood it, but only Goldstücker had the courage to put his own conscience above the party’s requirement of self-censorship. He dared to ask questions. In Moscow Nathan and the German party comrades were received by Stalin’s protégé Lavrenty Beria, a stubby, bald, nearsighted man with a pince-nez. It was Beria’s responsibility to receive the newcomers and help them get on their feet. The conversation with him went through interpreters because he spoke no German. At the very first meeting Goldstücker asked Beria to explain why there were so many hungry men, women, and children in the Ukraine, a place known, after all, for its flourishing agriculture. The interpreter politely discouraged him from raising that topic, but Goldstücker was not to be dissuaded. No one knew exactly how the interpreter worded his inquiry, but they all saw that Beria was displeased by it. He took off his spectacles and wiped them on his handkerchief. This was a delaying tactic, and he managed only to make the lenses even dirtier. It was clear he was in no hurry to reply. A dry rasping sound came from his throat. Eventually he overcame the temporary obstruction of his vocal cords and explained that the Ukraine, so long neglected during the rule of the czar, was undergoing a comprehensive restructuring. There were plans to construct five new steel mills to produce a full range of products, from ingots to rolled steel, a concept one had to admit was unique, considering that the United States had only one such mill, located in Cleveland. The total production of those five steel mills was calculated to grow to three million tons of rolled sheets annually. Goldstücker wasn’t satisfied with the answer, but Beria adjourned the meeting before any further questions could be asked. At the next meeting, Goldstücker said he was haunted by the awful thought of all those starving in the Ukraine, so he was obliged to repeat his question. Beria explained that under the current five-year plan the construction of two enormous power stations had begun in the Ukraine, on the Bug River and on the Dnieper, and the country’s largest plant for manufacturing locomotives and agricultural machinery was under construction in Dnipropetrovsk. Goldstücker didn’t attend the third meeting with Beria. He didn’t come the next time or the time after that, either. That’s when Nathan asked Beria where the comrade from Berlin had gone. Beria replied that comrade Goldstücker had applied to travel to Donetskbackenet to attend the ceremonial opening of the Dneproges dam. Nathan asked when he would return. Beria avoided answering directly. It was cold down there in the southern Ukraine, Beria said, and comrade Goldstücker had caught a chill; he was in the hospital with an inflammation of the lungs. Not even the doctors there could predict whether he would recover. No further questions were asked. The mood became somewhat sorrowful and gloomy. David Goldstücker’s name never came up again.

  Moscow was no paradise; one couldn’t dream one’s way out of its reality. Six years of life in the Soviet Union cured Nathan of most of his illusions. But he held his tongue, even though he knew that the man who remains mute only serves evil. He felt undecided and unsettled. The dark shadow of terror lengthened within Nathan’s soul at the same rhythm that Hitler built up his armies. The nearer war came, the darker were the images that haunted him. The vulnerability of the Jews in Europe, a constant preoccupation, kept him up at night. He thought of Sara and the children, whom he had essentially abandoned, and he feared for them. His own security was no better assured. Stalin’s paranoia had taken over and decimated the leadership; only a handful of the comrades who’d been in the most senior party ranks were still alive. That knowledge became ever harder for him to bear. Not least because he knew that it would do no good to question decades of uninterrupted loyalty to the party. One rumor scared him to death: Béla Kun, whom he’d supported, had fallen into disgrace. Nathan knew very well what that meant. He asked permission to return immediately to Budapest to carry the fight to the enemy there.

  NO ONE in our family ever wanted to talk about what had happened during the war. Whenever Sasha and I asked about that time, the adults bowed their heads, fixed their eyes on the floor, and a painful silence settled over everyone. Mother and Father were especially unwilling; they changed the subject whenever the war was mentioned. Even my great-uncle avoided the topic—a curious complicit silence from the man who accepted Shoshana’s help from beyond the grave to pry open not only the past but also the hidden recesses of the human soul. Maybe they just wanted to spare Sasha and me from the frightful things they had experienced. For in the Torah it is said, “Let there be light, God said, and there was light.” The act of speaking of something endows it with life. We Jews are the people of the Book, and our lives came out of the Word. So it would be entirely reasonable to suppose that the adults in our family were guided by the principle that speaking of something gives it an existence denied by silence. A more likely explanation, however, is that they were trying to forget harrowing memories. But memories resist banishment and they lived with constant nightmares. Sometimes we were awakened by screams in the night.

  Once Grandmother told us—with a touch of enthusiasm that surprised us, since we’d never heard a positive word about Grandfather from her—that after his return from Moscow, Grandfather was one of the heroes of the neighborhood. Everyone in our impoverished district knew him and idolized him. This was extraordinary, considering that Jews were barely tolerated in that part of Budapest. Some folks hated us because they thought all Jews were as rich as mountain gnomes. Others were convinced that on Fridays the Jews drank Christian blood. Some of them complained that the Jews couldn’t be true Hungarians, because they always kept to themselves. Lots of envious people had a sense of cultural inferiority; they despised Jews because of the common assumption—far from true, Grandmother added—that Jews were super-talented and succeeded in everything they undertook. Her mouth twisted in a grim smile when she commented, “The people in that part of Budapest took great pleasure in denouncing their Jewish neighbors to the police, then taking a Sunday stroll down to the Danube to enjoy the matinee performance where whole families were shot in the head and dumped into the river. Then on Monday morning they took over their vacant apartments. But our neighbors never treated us that way. They hid us and protected our people even at the risk of their lives. The Gestapo was hunting your grandfather. They were determined to catch him. Not because he was a Jew, but for different reasons.”

  As a child one encounters so much that is beyond one’s comprehension. Only now do I clearly understand what she meant by “different reasons.” Our family lived within its own rigid set of principles. Some parts of this system were mystical and others were hidden, and the system was completely incomprehensible to outsiders. In the last analysis, our system was based on a covenant with God, the Creator of the universe, whose face we’d never seen and whose voice we’d never heard. The principles were extremely demanding and the penalties very severe. No Spinoza ever discussed the system; that was forbidden. But our silence was steeped in a belief in eternal life and in the sanctity of human life, because we knew that God had a great plan and we were playing an important role, and the Almighty could conceal himself in invisibility because we humans were his disciples on earth. That was the system that Hitler wanted to eliminate. That’s why he was after The Elixir of Immortality.

  ON A DIFFERENT OCCASION shortly after Aunt Ilona died, our grandmother said she knew who had betrayed their hiding place. Father and Uncle Carlo were sent off to the labor brigades. The rest of the family—Grandmother and her mother, Miriam, Grandfather, and Aunt Ilona—went into hiding every night, always at different addresses. The family had to split up, because few people could shelter more than two outsiders overnight. One night in December 1944, Grandfather was in a safe house at 19 Rottenbiller Street. That night it happened to be his turn to take care of Miriam, but he had no desire to drag the old woman along with him. He persuaded his daughter to change places with him. A van with darkened windows pulled up in the dimly lit street at t
hree o’clock in the morning. Several SS men, hefty fellows dressed in black and wearing armbands with skulls and swastikas, rang the doorbell at the home of Antal Gyurkovics, a humble welder who was a member of the clandestine Communist Party. When he opened the door, they shot him dead, brought out the women, and took them away in an entirely matter-of-fact and routine operation.

  Miriam and Ilona wound up in Auschwitz. During the sorting process on the platform the old people were sent to the left toward the gas chambers and the younger ones were directed to the right. Ilona refused to be separated from her grandmother and held her fast in her arms. The guard wielded his baton, striking Ilona on the head and shoulders. A masculine-looking Jewish woman with whom Ilona had exchanged a few words during the trip in the overcrowded cattle car threw herself on the guard, trying to stop him. A tumult ensued. Several guards surrounded the women and beat them violently. They carried Miriam off and pitched aside the half-conscious younger women. The sorting process continued.

  Her name was Eszter Heymann. Life together in the barracks made Eszter and Ilona inseparable. They shared everything, supported each other like sisters, and helped each other survive. After they returned, Ilona accused Father as if somehow it had been his fault she was sent to the death camp. She broke with the family and moved in with Eszter. The two of them opened a shop selling sewing notions. It provided a small but steady income. They were never apart, not even for a second. Neither ever felt a desire to have a husband or children. They lived together for almost twenty years. Ilona died because a routine operation went wrong, and the following day Eszter swallowed a whole bottle of sleeping tablets.