The Elixir of Immortality

by Gabi Gleichmann

  AFTER THE LIBERATION it was dangerous to be seen on the streets of Budapest. Ragged drunken soldiers of the Red Army terrorized the city. Sometimes they forced people to strip naked in the street in the middle of the day and stole their clothes and everything of value. It might be disagreeable to fall victim to such uniformed thieves, but their victims were more fortunate than all those men forced into the backs of trucks and shipped in cattle cars to the Soviet Union for malenkij robot—“some easy work”—which in fact meant long years of forced labor in factories and camps. Soldiers broke into countless private homes under the pretext of searching for members of the fascist resistance and brazenly took away everything they could carry. They prized strong drink above everything else. One day the Russians might be moved to tears by the misery of the people and give their food rations to starving civilians; the next day they would plunder the houses of the very same people and rape even the most elderly women. Grandmother sometimes said that in a way it was just as well that her mother was sent directly to the gas chamber, since it spared her from living through liberation by the Russians.

  In December 1948, two days before Hungary’s communist regime was appointed, the Moscow-line party leader Mátyás Rákosi offered Grandfather the post of minister of the interior. His choice of Nathan Spinoza surprised no one. Grandfather had a solid reputation as an honorable and loyal communist. So it astonished quite a few when he stood at full attention with a bleak expression on his face and turned down the offer on the grounds of poor health. Rákosi didn’t believe a word of it. He was furious. He refused to accept a “no” from anyone. He cursed and raved. He called Grandfather arrogant and conceited, though not to his face, of course. Grandfather’s treachery was insignificant compared with the atrocities Rákosi had committed in the name of the Communist Party. He was a demon and a wild animal. All the comrades in the party leadership knew it. But they’d long been paralyzed by fear and weren’t brave enough to do the right thing. They all knew Nathan Spinoza was as good as dead.

  What made Grandfather refuse when he knew very well the personal risk he was running? Hypocrisy. Plots. Bribes. The slandering of honest men. Purification of the ranks. The knowledge that the Communist Party had the Russian occupation forces behind it but lacked the support of the people. The insight that Mátyás Rákosi, Stalin’s most faithful disciple, was in the process of transforming Hungary into a miniature Soviet Union. He was well acquainted with the party’s thirst for blood, and he could visualize the heaps of victims the new society would require. He refused to become the executioner. That wasn’t the future he had dreamed of.

  UNCLE CARLO came back to Budapest after four years in a Soviet POW camp, so changed that he frightened the family. His body, previously thin and clumsy, had become muscular and athletic. There was something wolfish in his expression. It was clear he had been thoroughly brainwashed. There was a bitter undertone in everything he said. He fiercely hated the fascists who had sent him onto the killing fields as forced labor. He boasted that someone highly placed in the party had offered him a position with the security services. Grandfather gave his elated son a sharply skeptical look and with heavy sarcasm quoted a cryptic line from Benjamin’s book: “A fish and a bird are capable of falling in love.” Grandmother begged him to take a different job. Carlo replied that it was an honor to be accepted into the inner ranks and serve the party.

  Carlo was proud that his first major assignment came from Mátyás Rákosi himself. He was to interrogate former foreign minister László Rajk, who as minister of the interior had forged the nation’s police force into an obedient tool of the party. This loyal party member was accused of conspiracy for having collaborated with Tito and the CIA to overturn the Hungarian communist regime. He’d been deprived of sleep for several days. Now that he was properly softened up, it was time for Carlo to extract a confession. Carlo went methodically to work. He ripped off Rajk’s clothes and slammed a pistol butt into the man’s naked chest, shoulders, back, thighs, and genitals. Every part of the man’s body had to feel and acknowledge Carlo’s power as chief interrogator. He abused the foreign minister for more than two hours, then took a break and peered into Rajk’s face for some indication he was willing to cooperate. Rajk remained silent, even though he didn’t have much face left. Carlo stuck the barrel of the pistol into his mouth and threatened to pull the trigger. The response? None—not a word, not a gesture, not a blink. The interrogation continued. Carlo might just as well have abused the wall and told it to talk, for the result would have been the same. Rajk would not confess to any crime. Each succeeding day Carlo became more irascible at the effort required, and he intensified the torture. He was given a day off after two exhausting weeks. János Kádár took over. He was Rajk’s best friend and godfather to his newborn son. Kádár explained that he was personally convinced of Rajk’s innocence but the fact was that the party needed a scapegoat. For the good of the party, for communism, for the people, and not least for the welfare of his own family, Rajk had to sacrifice himself and sign a confession. That was the least one could expect of a true communist. In official terms his confession would result in a guilty verdict and severe punishment, but in reality he would be allowed to leave the country with his family the very next day to begin a new life in the Soviet Union under a new identity. Rajk was silent for a long time, so Kádár told Rajk his wife was sitting in jail suffering from milk fever and their little son was in the hands of social workers. Rajk then readily signed the confession that someone had already written out for him. He thought he’d get to see his family, but they hanged him that same night, no farewells allowed.

  A year and a half went by before Carlo was again entrusted with the interrogation of a senior party official. Interior Minister János Kádár had been relieved of his post several weeks earlier “for reasons of health,” but the all-powerful party leader Mátyás Rákosi told a party conclave he was still dissatisfied with the way things were going. He openly criticized both the newly appointed interior minister, Sándor Zöld, and his predecessor, Kádár. Terrified, Zöld went home, killed his wife, mother, and two small sons, and then put a bullet in his brain. Rákosi sent Kádár to Carlo. The man was of the same stuff as his late friend Rajk. Carlo pulled out all his nails and almost beat him to death, but Kádár didn’t say a word. It may have been that he had nothing to confess. Or perhaps, as Grandmother maintained, Carlo was completely incompetent, as usual.

  THEY ARRESTED GRANDFATHER in the summer of 1951 and accused him of attempting to bribe two officials of the Department of Health and Welfare. The case was a complete fabrication. The prosecutor didn’t elaborate and presented no evidence. Grandfather had never met the officials in question and certainly had never done any business with them, so it was just as well they weren’t called to the witness stand. The judge noted for the record that my grandfather had failed to prove his innocence and sentenced him to eleven years in prison. The sentence was unusually harsh, even back then. As it turned out, Grandfather spent only six years behind bars. Dictator János Kádár pardoned him in August 1957, his way of sending a friendly greeting from the new party leader to an old party comrade.

  Mother and Father took Grandmother and Grandfather in hand. Or, at a minimum, they took care of the old folks and let them live with us. One assumes that in their youth my parents and paternal grandparents had possessed the characteristic Jewish sense of humor, the ability to distance oneself from troubles by making light of them, but life had made them increasingly morose. I’d be hard put to claim we had a happy childhood. Of course, my great-uncle brought a note of cheer to my life and Sasha’s with his tall tales and his delight in Spinoza family history, but that didn’t entirely make up for the lack of warmth and affection.

  Sasha was the apple of my parents’ eyes. My mother’s nickname for me was “Ratko boy.” I assumed this was a term of endearment, and I was flattered that she never used it for my brother. I was mistaken. Not too long ago I discovered that Anna Ratko was the Hungar
ian minister of health from 1950 to 1953, and her first official act was to prohibit abortions. It turns out that I was one of those unwanted children born during her time in office.

  Mornings of torment, days of agony. The hardest thing is probably this fatigue that only death will cure. But I must collect my forces and continue the story until the great final silence descends upon me. I have to put it in words and write as much as I can to keep away the silence, for once I stop putting my thoughts into words, my memories will wither away in my soul like a plant drying out in the desert, and our world will disappear, unnoticed by anyone.

  I’VE KEPT PUTTING OFF the story of my worst experience, the tragedy of my life. It happened on August 12, 1965. That was the day I lost my brother, Sasha, the boy I was closely tied to via the peculiar and mysterious kinship of twins. He died a terrible death, and it was entirely my fault.

  I’ll never forget that Thursday. The day was unusually warm. By nine o’clock the mercury in the thermometer outside the kitchen window was pushing toward ninety degrees. My morning had already been ruined by a quarrel with Sasha. We’d both wanted the last piece of processed cheese in the refrigerator. We adored those little triangular foil-wrapped wedges of cheese with the picture of a waving Teddy bear on the label. Sasha won the dispute. He grabbed me around the neck as I was on my way to the refrigerator and held me from behind in his iron grip. It hurt and I couldn’t breathe. I was forced to give in. I was humiliated even further when he made me repeat after him that he was stronger, so he deserved to have the cheese. Sasha opened the refrigerator door and scornfully said I was a born loser. We didn’t say another word during breakfast. Sasha silently lorded it over me, and I was close to tears. The physical pain of it was made worse by my feelings of misery and despair. After breakfast I went into the bedroom and sobbed my heart out.

  My only thought after that was to get even. Everyone knew that Sasha was afraid of machinery. So I decided to try to lure him into going with me to the shut-down textile mill where I could lock him in the vast enclosure still filled with rusty old machines. Only a few days earlier, a couple of bigger boys persuaded me to enter the place and then called me a Jew and a heathen, a spawn of the devil. They roughed me up and kept me prisoner there for two hours. I never dared tell anyone in my family because I knew they would scold me and maybe even punish me for going into the old mill, because Father had explicitly forbidden us to go there.

  Sasha accepted my proposal to go look for discarded old tools to sell to the junk man. He thought it was a fine idea, because he had been saving for a long time to buy a bicycle and needed another two hundred forints to convince the neighbor boy to sell his old bike. We set off for the decommissioned mill. Our spirits were high. We took a shortcut along the railway, which was behind a high fence. No one was allowed to enter the enclosure, a prohibition that simply pleased us all the more as we climbed the fence. I playfully suggested to Sasha that we could pretend to be Blondin, the French tightrope walker who was the first to cross Niagara Falls, as we balanced our way along the tracks. I was in the lead, showing him the way. We whistled and sang and laughed. Suddenly I heard a shriek behind me. It came from Sasha. I ignored him and just continued along my way. Sasha shouted that he’d lost his balance. I turned and saw that he’d stepped onto the ties, trying to keep from falling, but just at that moment the track mechanism shifted and trapped his foot. His shoe was clamped between two rail segments that moved to shunt traffic onto a different line. He couldn’t free his foot, no matter how hard he tried. It was jammed tight. He must have been in terrific pain. He screamed again, louder. He sounded desperate. I looked up the tracks and saw a train bearing down on us at full speed. I panicked, couldn’t breathe, and couldn’t move. Sasha screamed and begged for help. I was only thirty feet from him but I couldn’t move a muscle. My arms and legs had turned to lead. Sasha saw the train and screamed again, a heartrending shriek. The last words I heard were “Ari, save me!” The rest of his cry was drowned out by the whistle of the locomotive. The train was shunted automatically onto the other track and rushed by me, inches away. I was miraculously untouched. Nothing was left of my twin brother but his chopped-off right foot, still jammed between the tracks.

  We never mentioned Sasha’s death in our house. My mother and my father couldn’t bear to speak of it. For a long time I couldn’t remember anything at all about the accident, probably because I was in a state of shock. The strangest thing was that something happened to my voice. I tried to speak and call out, but my tongue flapped uselessly in my mouth. This terrified me. I told myself that surely my voice would come back, but it never did, no matter how many times I tried to speak.

  There was an elderly man who lived on our street. People said that he was born deaf and mute. I was always scared of him because he looked so bizarre with his comical grimaces and the insistent gestures he tried to use to compensate for the voice he lacked. I vowed I would never do that. When I wanted to communicate, I wrote whatever it was on a scrap of paper. I worked for years to improve my handwriting and produce beautifully legible script. My own nervous scribblings had always been as illegible as bird scratchings.

  One morning many months later, as I reached into the fridge and picked up a wedge of processed cheese in its foil wrapping with the label showing the waving Teddy, words echoed in my ears: Let’s live dangerously. I sat down at the kitchen table and suddenly the memory of it was crystal clear. That was the last thing I’d said to Sasha as we set off to balance our way along the tracks. That little piece of soft cheese brought back the memory of everything that had happened on that terrible Thursday. It had sunk deep into my consciousness and hidden itself.

  Sasha, let’s be Blondin, king of the air. Nothing can stop us. Let’s live dangerously!

  Were those the last words I would say in my life? Did my voice extinguish itself after I called them out to my twin brother?

  I realized in that moment that there must have been some reason for me to lose the power of speech. Some higher unknown power had decreed my fate. My crime of enticing my brother to his death had called down upon my head the wrath of God or some other power and inflicted on me this awful punishment. Because he who causes the death of his closest relation is doomed to eternal isolation.

  LATE ONE EVENING two years after Sasha’s death, Father told us that we were going to Oslo. I couldn’t believe it. We were living in a police state and borders were tightly sealed. I’d never heard of anyone receiving permission to travel to the West as a tourist.

  Why on earth would we be going to Norway?

  My father explained that a Norwegian acquaintance had invited us to visit and was covering all the costs. The paperwork had already been approved. Mother knew and smiled in satisfaction, while my grandmother and I peered suspiciously at my father. We’d never ever heard him mention any acquaintance in Norway. Father put passports with visas and tickets onto the table in front of us. Everything was properly stamped. All we had to do was get on the train that would be leaving early the next morning. Grandmother grew agitated, not because she was staying behind but because no one had informed her this was being planned.

  It wasn’t hard to guess why my father kept it quiet. He wanted to keep Grandmother from gossiping about our plans all around the neighborhood. There was too high a risk that some envious neighbor would try to interfere. Back then it was enough for someone just to whisper that you wanted to get out of Hungary for the police to revoke your permit and block the trip.

  We packed that night. Father admonished Mother and me to travel as light as possible so as not to arouse the suspicions of the police. I didn’t understand exactly what he meant. But I noticed that he was planning to carry with him the little suitcase I had inherited from Grandfather.

  The next morning we said goodbye to Grandmother. She wasn’t unhappy to see us go, as far as I could make out. She told my father and mother she understood why they wanted to leave the country. The communists had left everything in ruins. She gave
me a kiss on the forehead, something quite unusual for her. “You’ll have to learn to speak Norwegian,” she told me emphatically.

  A well-dressed gentleman met us at the railway station in Oslo. I couldn’t believe my eyes. The resemblance was uncanny. If it hadn’t been for the enormous nose of the elegant Norwegian, I’d have sworn that Grandfather had come back from the dead to welcome us. Our host was the living image of him. He introduced himself in impeccable German as Wilhelm Amundsen Gange. There could be no doubt—even I could see it—that he was a very refined gentleman. He helped us with our luggage and placed the bags carefully in the trunk of his car. He and Father sat in the front and carried on a lively conversation. I no longer remember what they talked about. I had a weird feeling that I’d met him somewhere before. The drive took only a few minutes. He lived in a spacious apartment on the third floor of an elegant building. It was just behind the royal castle, which one could see through several of the windows in his very nicely decorated residence. He pointed at the castle and told us he worked there. He was the personal physician of King Olav V.

  My memory is failing me now. Was it the first or the second evening that Wilhelm told us his story? Maybe it wasn’t until our third evening at dinner that he told us that when he was small he’d wondered if his parents were his real mother and father. Not just because he was short and dark-haired and they were tall and blond. But because he felt unloved, especially by his father, who sometimes seemed to treat him as a leper or outcast. The feeling was especially noticeable in the late 1930s when his father was the first secretary of the Norwegian embassy in Berlin. He told his son not to visit because his appearance wasn’t Aryan enough. Wilhelm described his father as a stern person, pompous and haughty, highly aware of his own social standing. His mother came from a poor family but had learned nothing about thrift during her years at the bottom of society. She spent lavishly, which meant more often than not that his father’s ample salary was gone long before the end of the month. That didn’t appear to worry her in the least, because her only interest was playing the part of an elegant lady. The servants were left to take care of the household and their only child, so she could enjoy the luxury of sleeping late in the morning. Wilhelm wished he could have had smiling faces around him; he had to endure a great deal. No matter how hard he tried to please his parents, they were ill-tempered with him most of the time. They became even harder to put up with as the years passed, and he was secretly delighted by his father’s professional reverses, particularly at the failed attempts to get an audience with Hitler. When Norway was occupied by Nazi Germany, Wilhelm smuggled Jews across the border to Sweden. He was certain that his German-loving father and mother with their mania for the Führer couldn’t possibly be his real parents. They met a few times during the war; the atmosphere between them was always chilly. They glowered at one another across the table. His father’s death shortly before the end of the war was, frankly, a relief. Now he could confront his mother with the questions about his origins. On May 7, 1945—he laughed heartily as he told us about it—both Germany and his mother surrendered, the latter only after strong pressure. She admitted that he was adopted. After Norway gained its independence, the couple had lived in Budapest where his father was a second secretary at the embassy. They’d tried for many years to have children and finally decided to adopt a newborn. His mother said they never knew the identities of the child’s biological parents. Another twenty years would go by before Wilhelm discovered that she had been lying. He found his birth certificate among her papers after she died. The yellowing document named his biological mother as one Marika Óvári. The man she had reported as his father—without his knowledge or agreement—was someone named Nathan Spinoza.