The next morning I squatted in the courtyard in front of a stove—three bricks and an iron grill—on which bean soup was cooking painfully slowly. My duty was to keep it well stirred, taste it from time to time to see if it was softening up, and stoke the embers with pieces of sawed-up chair legs. Klára stood next to me and talked about her first two years in school, when she couldn’t bring herself to say a word. She would do her work, but not utter a single syllable. She would have liked to say at least hello to the other children, but could not open her mouth. I was more interested in whether the soup was ready. I lifted the cover and stuck in a wooden spoon.
The roar of a Russian fighter plane. Klára pressed against the wall. When she screamed “Come here!” there was such rage in her voice that I spun around in astonishment. The fighter sprinkled the interior flagstone courtyards of the block with machine-gun rounds, hitting no one. The reason Klára was so angry was that I was always playing the hero, which was a decided exaggeration. Suddenly I heard the embers sizzling and looked down to see soup pouring out of a hole in the pot: a bullet had passed through the bottom of the large red enameled vessel. Had I not turned around, it would also have passed through my head, which had been bent over the soup. Finding another pot was no easy task.
“Why did you scream at me?” I asked Klára that evening.
“I don’t know,” she answered, unsure of herself by then.
We stood on the rooftop and heard a famous actress singing. Coming from the Russian military’s speakers, her voice took on a deep, threatening thrum. The goal was to plant fear in the faltering hearts of the Hungarian soldiers pointlessly defending themselves alongside the Germans: “You cannot run, you cannot hide. Your fate, it cannot be denied.” The Russians had entered the city and advanced all the way to the Angyalföld district. The speakers were just a few blocks away. A Stalin-candle shot up, illuminating the rooftops. Hand in hand, we watched, squinting. “It’s beautiful,” whispered Klára. We both laughed at her whisper.
We had an unexpected visitor at the safe house: Nene. She brought a small aluminum medallion of Mary on a chain. Nene asked us to wear it around our necks. She wanted us to convert to Catholicism. If we did—or merely declared our willingness to do—she would take us to a convent where they protected and hid converted Jewish children. We thanked Nene for her offer, but told her we would rather not.
We children had agreed on a plan in case we were driven out in a large group, which would most likely end with our being shot into the Danube: we would drop our knapsacks at the corner of the park and run off in different directions. Even if they shot at us—and plenty of guards would be on hand if hundreds of Jews were turned out of their building—some might make it.
The next morning four or five Arrow Cross men and gendarmes burst into the room, screaming at us to get dressed and turn over all weapons, including kitchen knives and pocketknives, plus anything of value, and then line up obediently and quietly on the sidewalk in front of the building. They had a rabbi with them, who gently counseled us to obey and specifically recommended that we hand over all necklaces, mementoes, and engagement rings. I took my time putting my socks on.
Down in front of the building Rebenyák’s red hat stood out. Rebenyák was the house’s bad boy. He would have liked to belong to our gang, but we never let him in. He speculated that the rabbi would get his cut of the items, assuming they didn’t shoot him. We looked at one another inquisitively, wondering whether this was the time to implement the plan and whether we should let Rebenyák in on it, when two loud-voiced men came along, one wearing a gendarme’s uniform, the other a German officer’s. They were shouting—not at us but at the Arrow Cross men and the two gendarmes with us—and ordered us back into the building. They might have been communists in disguise or two Jewish actors. The better actor played his role less effectively; the worse actor was more convincing. Soon we were back in our room again, still in our overcoats, clueless.
The lobby was our clubhouse. Kids would alternate looking out while the rest of us slid down the marble ramp along the bottom flight of stairs. Rebenyák showed up in his red cap. He was fourteen or so and was always pestering me with his stamps, knowing I had brought my stamp album from Újfalu. I always traded smaller, more valuable stamps for larger, nicer-looking ones. I had trouble understanding him: his language was full of city-tough words. Instead of “piss” he would say “drimple,” or “wankle,” or “slash.” He spoke obscurely of some pussy or other, by which I finally realized he meant the sexual organ of one of the older girls. He would punctuate his sentences with “You dig, buddy? No? Then suck my dick!” Klára said he was just throwing his weight around; she had more brains in her shoelaces than Rebenyák under that red hat of his. He liked to boast he could no longer even look at the broads, the tomatoes, the merchandise—in short, at women—who were supposedly all over him down in the cellar. Klára reviewed my trades, checking the stamps’ value in a catalogue. “That lying bastard is constantly getting the better of you. Don’t you mind?” I didn’t really. Ultimately I gave Rebenyák my entire stamp album for a hunk of bacon which, when roasted with onion atop a dish of peas, became the envy of the apartment house. Rebenyák had pinched the bacon from under his mother’s bed in the cellar and crept back with it, weasel-like. He slept in the same bed as his mother, a strong-smelling corpulent woman with hair sprouting from her chin.
I ran into Rebenyák decades later. He was lame and living in a cellar again: he had ceded three apartments to three wives, who would come home with lovers more muscular than he and announce that for the time being Rebenyák would be sleeping in the next room. In his basement flat Rebenyák bought and sold girls from orphanages to rich tourists, instructing the former to steal the latter’s passports. Rebenyák delighted in the possibilities: Swedish, Brazilian, Australian …
In the safe house Rebenyák would venture upstairs despite his mother’s warning that fire was more likely to hit the building there: he was attracted by our cosmopolitan ways. Longingly, he would study the Rosenthal soup cups we ate beans from at the long black table, holding them up to the light: translucent. He stole one.
“Don’t be a creep,” I said. “They might shoot you tomorrow.”
Rebenyák was superstitious, and my remark got to him. “Know who they’re going to shoot tomorrow? You, you wooden-dicked Újfalu crybaby!”
Klára twisted his arm. “You take that back!” She was superstitious herself.
“Just see if your wooden pussy ever gets my jism!” But after whimpering a while in his agony, he brought it back.
More shots penetrated the apartment. Shards of glass made the beans in the Rosenthal cups inedible. The iron stove, whose exhaust pipe we had aimed out of the window, was buckled over like a man kicked in the stomach. Machine gun fire ricocheted off the outside wall. Klára suddenly turned childlike, sitting underneath the table and directing a sumptuous wedding of a clay lamb and a wooden mouse. Rebenyák crouched under the table next to her. I made him nervous.
“Are you really in love with that dodo? I mean, he doesn’t even know the difference between allegory and paregoric.”
“What’s … allegory?” I asked suspiciously.
Rebenyák changed the subject to the pot with the hole: “You saved that hick’s life. Isn’t that enough? Now fall in love with me.”
A depraved smile appeared on Klára’s face.
“Fine. Just give me your stamp collection and fill my hat with sugar cubes.”
Rebenyák blushed, but did not reach for the hat, whose wheat-blue tassel had dangled before my eyes from morning to night.
That night a young fellow named Mário, who lived in the next room, came back from the Danube. The shot had hit him in the arm, and he’d managed to swim out. The only hard part was to free himself from his father, to whom he had been tied. His father had been hit in the chest and held him fast for a while, but finally let go. Clinging to a block of ice, Mário had drifted down the Danube under the bridges.
He was afraid of being crushed between blocks of ice. Ultimately he had climbed out onto the stairs at the foot of the Elisabeth Bridge and made his way home, wet and bloody. He was stopped on the way, but was by then indifferent to everything.
“Shoot me into the Danube again if you want.”
“Jews are like cats,” said an old Arrow Cross man. “They keep coming back to life.” He sees it all the time. That’s why they’re so dangerous. Here he’s hardly out of the river and he gets cheeky. When it’s all over, they’ll have the nerve to blame it all on us. “Hey, weren’t you our guest once?”
Yes, he had been—he and his father. They had grilled him about his younger brother, who had taken part in a weapons heist. His father didn’t know anything. They said that if he didn’t tell them they would take care of his other son, Mário. The father gave a false address. The Arrow Cross men came back enraged, then shot someone else instead of the brother they were after. As long as they had him there, they subjected Mário’s testicles to their boot heels. Finally a gendarme officer came into the Arrow Cross building and dragged them off. A good thing.
Dr. Erdős and a group of other elderly Jews had been pulled out of 49 Pozsonyi Avenue to build a cobblestone barricade on the corner: the younger Jews had long since been taken away. Six stones high and four deep, the wall was impenetrable. The T-34 tanks that had made it all the way from Stalingrad would certainly be stopped dead here.
We children watched from the entrance as the old men, stooping against the cold, hacked at the stones with pokers and hammers, separating the blocks stuck together with pitch, then lifting them into their laps and lugging them over to the roadblock. Young men in hunting boots, black trousers, and green shirts watched over the work, prodding the old men on. One of them cracked a whip, once used by a cabby on his horses, over the old Jews’ necks. They could in fact have worked with more vigor.
It was probably the fellow with the whip who outraged an older gentleman from the next building, a building inhabited by Christians. Sometimes old men stick together, even if it means crossing congregational boundaries. In any case the old gentleman pulled out his hunting rifle and wounded the young whip-cracker. The Arrow Cross men thought that one of the Jews had taken the shot, and started shooting back blindly. The twenty barricade builders ran for cover and fell. Dr. Erdős himself made for the main door of the building, though taking his time so as not to draw attention to himself. I was the only one still standing in the doorway: the other children and the doorkeeper, an even older Jew, had dashed up the steps upon hearing the shots.
I opened the boarded-up entrance door. Dr. Erdős darted inside. I wanted to shut and lock it before the tall young man pursuing him could shove his way in, and the two of us, child and graybeard, pushed from the inside, but our besieger, who was twenty-five or so, took a running start and rammed us back enough to make a crack for the tip of his boot. The game was his. There he stood, pistol in hand.
He was taller than Dr. Erdős, and his lip was quivering from wounded pride: Jews slamming the door in my face just like that? A slight smile, the smile of the vanquished, flashed over Dr. Erdős’ face. The young man held up the pistol and fired into the doctor’s temple. Dr. Kálmán Erdős fell, his blood flowing over the muddy, pink imitation marble. Then the young man took aim at my forehead. I looked at him more in amazement than in fear. He lowered his pistol and headed out of the door.
By this time the trams were delivering ammunition crates ever more desperately to the front, that is, the immediate vicinity, yet courageous women would leave the building and still manage to forage bread. On the night of 17–18 January 1945 we moved to the inner room to sleep, since the outer one, damaged by a bomb, lacked a windowpane. Instead of going to bed, however, we crouched by the window, where we could watch the fighting. By the light of the Stalin-candles whizzing into the sky we saw a newsreel scene in all its glory, unbounded by the screen: a tank rumbling through the barricade, sweeping aside the basalt blocks, with more tanks and infantry in its wake; German soldiers, who had been on their bellies with machine guns behind the stone-piles, dashing for the park as the front moved on toward the Saint Stephen Ring.
As dawn came up on 18 January I watched the historical turning point of the war (liberation for me, defeat for others) with my own eyes. A few excited young women—teachers, fashion designers, dancers—hummed the “Internationale.” Magda, a tall, strawberry-blonde dancer, taught us to sing with them. She was a communist and said we should be communists too, because they were the only party in the underground; the others were collaborating with the government. At four o’clock on that morning we gave ourselves over to the spirit of liberation.
In time Magda lost her enthusiasm. She tried to slip over the border in 1949, wearing the same ski boots she had worn during the winter of the siege. The border guards shot her dead.
At ten in the morning on 18 January 1945 I stepped out of the front door of 49 Pozsonyi Avenue. Two Russian soldiers were standing on the sidewalk in their torn coats, slightly scruffy and more indifferent than cordial. People spoke to them. They did not understand, but nodded. It was obvious they were not much interested in us. They asked whether Hitler was in the building. I had no information suggesting that Hitler was living with Budapest Jews under Swiss protection at 49 Pozsonyi Avenue. Then they asked about Szálasi, head of the Arrow Cross: no, he wasn’t living there either. After a moment we caught on that “Hitler” meant Germans and “Szálasi” meant Arrow Cross. They were fairly simple boys. They went down into the shelter with a flashlight, prodding people with the barrels of their machine guns and shining their light into every nook. They found some military defectors in civilian dress, whom they let be. They did not particularly care that the building was inhabited by Jews: if you tried to explain to them you were a Jew and expected to get some kindness out of them, you didn’t get very far. But they were friendly enough to us boys, and we got used to their poking around in the basement looking for Hitler. There was a man down there who spoke Slovak and could understand them a little. He immediately offered to interpret for them, and as they went through a passageway, which had been opened with a pickaxe, to the shelter next door, this Slovak-speaking Jew started barking out instructions like a commander in mufti, newly appointed from the ranks of the blanket-clad. Eventually, having conquered his last vestige of hesitation, he bade farewell to his family and ran off after the Russians.
The soldiers broke into a pharmacy and drank a bottle of Chat Noir cologne. They reached for it confidently, as if familiar with the brand. It was the closest thing to liquor there. We—soldiers in mufti, locals, Jews and Christians alike—flocked after them. The more resourceful took along knapsacks. I picked up a harmonica, which I later traded to Rebenyák for a bag of sugar cubes.
We could now leave the building at will, the building whose neutral status had protected us, though it had not been enough to keep the other half of its residents alive. A few markings in Cyrillic had begun to appear. The yellow star had come down from the front entrance and lay on a snow heap. As I stepped out as a free man for the first time, I was perhaps also stepping out of my childhood, the years when prohibitions of all sorts hemmed me in. The shooting and bombing were over, and it was safe to come out of the cellar. There were still the occasional stray shots, but now it was the Germans shooting from the Buda side. At times an entire round of machine-gun fire showered the street, and I learned just how flat I could press myself against a wall.
Given that the apartment had been hit by gunfire and we were sharing it with thirty others, thought it best to leave for Aunt Zsófi and Uncle Gyula’s apartment in Szép Street, which might be empty or at least not so crowded. We felt a sudden urge to take leave of the people in the cellar and break free of the seven-story Bauhaus ghetto into which we had been squeezed.
The hard-trampled snow had iced over the asphalt. We all wore knapsacks, clutched quilts, and pulled the rest of our meager belongings on a sled behind us. The wind was kicki
ng up snow-dust. It was well below freezing, and as we had no gloves our fingers were purplish-red. We passed burning buildings in the darkening evening. Through black windows we saw dying flames painting the ceilings a rusty red. They were like a cross-section revealing the building’s naked innards after a bomb had torn its façade off: a bathtub dangling, but the sink still in place; a heavy mahogany cupboard on the wall, but the dining table three flights down. It was the shameless, twisted humor of destruction.
Exhausted, but reviving, people were carting their belongings from place to place, going home, going in search of their loved ones, going just to go: after all, someone might be baking bread somewhere. People trudged through the streets weighed down with their goods and chattels while soldiers sat around on tanks or moved around in squads. Tongues of flame soared out of windows; people and horses lay scattered on the ground. Survivors did not carve meat from people, though they did from horses: elderly gentlemen crouched inside horse corpses scraping frozen shreds of meat off bones with their pocketknives.
Our bundles of bedding were falling apart; we hung onto the quilts in desperation. I would have liked to earn Aunt Zsófi’s praise. Once she called me her “little mainstay,” but my joy at this mingled with the disappointment of being called “my little hypocrite” again for another of my attempts at pleasing her. That slightly chilly but still flirtatious irony was in Aunt Zsófi’s face now too, curious to see how I would manage a bundle that was threatening to disintegrate.
The building on the corner had been razed to the ground, but 5/a Szép Street was miraculously still standing. It had taken a few cannon shots here and there, but they were patchable holes. The marble fountain in the courtyard, untouched, had icicles hanging from the stone-rumped nymph’s jug.
A Guest in my Own Country Page 7
