So when Sarah looked back on her life she couldn’t help but consider her marriage perfect. As she passed into her eighth decade, well after most of her sisters and cousins had been widowed by husbands who had never left home, her husband was still sending her love letters. And even though he had wandered a bit, he had never failed to write home.
So Sarah died embracing his memory, listening to one of her granddaughters read aloud what was in fact Johann Luigi’s last letter, delivered on the morning of the day she died, an exquisite description of a sunset at Mt Sinai that ended with the customary promise that soon, very soon now, he and his beloved Sarah would be together again.
And so they were. Smiling gently, she closed her eyes. Those sweet words from her husband the last she heard in life.
For years an exact count couldn’t be made of Johann Luigi’s love letters. But not long after he left Budapest, two facts had become apparent to Sarah.
First, the love letters were beginning to fill the floor-to-ceiling bookcases she had built in her kitchen so his letters would be near her while she was cooking.
And second, the love letters were likely to become the most complete source of information on the Middle East to be found anywhere in Europe.
By nature Sarah was an imaginative and energetic woman who found housework tedious. Therefore as soon as her children were no longer infants she began to cast about for a project that could engage her talents.
One Friday afternoon while reading a letter from her husband on Damascus cutlery, an idea struck her. As was obvious, the amount of detail on purely commercial matters in her husband’s love letters was no less than astonishing. Why not use this information for a trading venture?
Secretly she went to a moneylender and mortgaged her house to raise funds. The sale of imported Damascus cutlery was a success and with the profits she turned to a second scheme, rugs from Persia, as described in another love letter. The rugs paid off her mortgage and after that came cotton from Egypt and jewels from Baghdad.
With business growing, Sarah began employing her sisters and aunts and female cousins as bookkeepers. Momentum gathered as more love letters arrived from the wandering Johann Luigi, detailing possibilities of new markets. Paying interest on bank loans seemed a waste of resources, so Sarah decided to found her own merchant bank.
Banking soon intrigued her as much as trade, so she opened a commercial bank as well. Its operations multiplied and she bought several other banks. By the age of forty her banking assets were the largest in Budapest, and by the age of fifty her branches in Vienna and Prague and elsewhere accounted for the bulk of financial business in those cities. Assets swelled, as did trade with the Levant, based on her husband’s love letters.
Until by the time of her death the House of Szondi, as it had come to be called, was the single most powerful financial institution in central Europe.
The executive pattern of the House of Szondi remained the same after her death. From the beginning the boards of the banks had been staffed exclusively by her female relatives, first sisters and aunts, later nieces and grandnieces.
The senior managing board for all the banks, known collectively when in session as the Sarahs, in honor of the founder, met upon her death and naturally chose not Sarah’s son but her daughter to be the new head of the House.
Sarah the Second assumed her position as managing directress, but being less single-minded than her mother she also took into consideration the men of the family. Now that the House of Szondi had become so rich it seemed ridiculous, to her, for the husbands and sons and fathers of the directors to be still working as petty local traders, the only life they had known since the ninth century.
Even her own older brother Munk was still running a discount dry goods store on the lower east side of Budapest, where he labored long hours stacking imperfect sheets and pillowcases.
Sarah the Second knew that her brother had always secretly loved the violin, which he played at home in a tiny windowless room no bigger than a closet, music being widely viewed as a frivolous pastime in his trade, where men were supposed to have strictly practical interests.
So Sarah the Second made her brother an offer. If Munk would come out of the closet and devote himself full-time to his real passion, music, she would support him for the rest of his life. Naturally Munk was enthusiastic and readily agreed.
At the next meeting of the Sarahs she announced what she had done, thereby in effect setting the course for a new family pattern. The directors were quick to follow her example and other secret musicians soon emerged from among the males in the family. Munk himself was immediately joined by three cousins, equally talented men who had also been running discount stores on the lower east side of Budapest. Together they formed a competent string quartet, which was soon in demand on the concert circuit.
The next generation of male Szondis was surrounded by music from childhood. Brothers and nephews and granduncles took to practicing together, under the baton and guidance of the reigning Munk, and over the following decades the all-male Szondi Symphonic Philharmonic, not to mention the numerous Szondi baroque ensembles, became as famous in the musical circles of central Europe as the all-female House of Szondi had become in the world of banking.
Thus while the women of the family made money, led by the reigning Sarah, the men of the family made music, led by the reigning Munk. But in keeping with the new matriarchal traditions of the family the first-born male in each generation, the new Munk, was never the son of a Munk but always the son of a Sarah, and therefore the eldest nephew of the last Munk, a confusing line of descent not easily understood by anyone but the Szondis.
The Szondi women naturally spent long hours doing research in the family archives in connection with their business training, but the Szondi men also had a special obligation in that regard.
Each spring they put aside their music and returned to the roomy old kitchen of Sarah the First, there to spend the months of annual awakening immersed in the bookshelves that contained the sources of the family’s material and artistic success, amidst the twitterings of the birds outside in the garden and the heady fragrances of new flowers wafting into the kitchen on gentle breezes, perusing at their leisure those thousands and thousands of tender love letters a wandering Szondi husband had once sent to his loyal Szondi wife.
The future Munk of Jerusalem poker, born in 1890, chose the cello as his musical instrument and naturally he mastered it. But he was also an exception among male Szondis, because music didn’t seem enough to him in life. Vaguely he yearned for something quite different, although what it might be he didn’t know.
In fact as a boy, young Munk tried every conceivable occupation for a week or a month, avidly pursuing his new role. For a while he was a postman, then a fireman, then a railroad conductor. In the spring of his ninth year he was a surgeon operating in his bedroom, only to turn that summer to hunting lions and elephants in public gardens. By the following autumn he had already tried horticulture and painting and carpentry, and served as a distinguished judge.
When he was eleven he fell under the spell of the letters of his great-grandfather, the tireless Johann Luigi Szondi, and proceeded to relive those prodigious travels up and down the Nile and across the Middle East. He too marveled at the deserted stone city of Petra and marched through Nubia eating dates, covering nine hundred miles in a month, then paused to measure Rameses’ ear as three feet, four inches long before pushing south from Shendi to the Red Sea.
But eventually none of these lives satisfied him, not even the splendid journeys of his great-grandfather, perhaps because those journeys weren’t originally his. He did come to learn, however, that he wanted to get away from his family and their traditions, which he was beginning to find oppressive. Yet the Szondis never sensed this because young Munk lived so much within himself as a boy. Had they known him better, they might have realized he strikingly combined the qualities of the first Sarah and her wandering husband, energy and imagination and a
passion for details.
What are you going to do, young Munk? his relatives asked him again and again in exasperation.
But Munk only smiled and shrugged and said he didn’t know, then returned to the family archives to try to discover the secret he knew must be there, the secret of an unusual life, made unique because lived according to its own nature and nothing else.
What was the secret that had driven his great-grandfather to do all the incredible things he had done? Simple curiosity? A fascination with strange customs? To see what others hadn’t seen?
In the comfortable kitchen of Sarah the First, surrounded by the enormous bookshelves with their thousands and thousands of love letters, young Munk sat gazing out the window not really seeing what lay beyond it. Certainly his great-grandfather must have had all those feelings, he was aware of that. But what else had there been for Johann Luigi? What had driven him? What was the secret?
At the age of eighteen, with his family insisting he choose a profession, he finally made a decision. And when he announced his choice they received it in utter amazement.
But why that, Munk? If you’re not interested in being a musician, then trade at least would be understandable. We certainly did that for a long time. Or scholarship or one of the professions. Your great-grandfather was both a scholar and a medical doctor, after all. Or chemistry or languages, he did that too. But a Szondi in the army? In the Austro-Hungarian Imperial Army? A Szondi pursuing a military career? It’s unheard of.
Yes, said Munk quietly, smiling. I thought so myself.
But after being trained and serving for a short time with a regiment of dragoons near Vienna, young Munk realized everyday soldiering wasn’t for him either.
He applied for duty overseas, and as luck would have it an aide to the Austro-Hungarian military attaché in Constantinople died that very week as a result of having eaten bad Turkish meat. Thus in the summer of 1908, Munk found himself seconded to the capital of the Ottoman Empire.
He had been there little more than a month when the Austrian annexation of Bosnia brought on yet another Balkan crisis, causing the Turks to undertake secret military preparations. Lieutenant Szondi’s reports from the field proved so valuable he was promoted to captain early in December.
Then on Christmas the attaché and his entire staff, except for Munk, were violently stricken by food poisoning while consuming a holiday feast of contaminated wild Turkish boar. Munk escaped the poisoning because he had been eating large amounts of garlic since entering Turkey, having learned of this simple yet effective antidote to bad meat from the letters of his great-grandfather, who had used the remedy successfully throughout his travels.
A few of his fellow officers lingered into the new year, but all were dead by Epiphany. Since there was no one else in Constantinople who could fill the position, the ambassador named Munk acting military attaché, an astonishing responsibility for one so young.
But Munk’s rapid rise had only begun. The former attaché had not had time to submit his annual summary of the situation in the Ottoman Empire, and Munk took the opportunity to completely revise it.
Of course his superiors had no way of knowing he was able to draw on the vast accumulation of information he had learned as a boy while studying the secret Szondi archives in Budapest. What they did know was that another incident involving foul Turkish meat, a hazard faced by all Europeans in Constantinople, had suddenly brought to their attention a brilliant young officer with an unsurpassed knowledge of the Ottoman Empire.
Munk received a letter of commendation. He was promoted to major and made the permanent acting attaché.
Now Munk had found something that did interest him. For the next four years, eating handfuls of garlic and happily indulging his passion for details, he traveled extensively in the Balkans analyzing the impossible confusion there as Ottoman power disintegrated. None of the other European military attachés could keep up with him, crippled as they were by bad Turkish meat. In recognition of his achievements he was duly promoted to lieutenant colonel.
Then in the autumn of 1912 the Turks announced maneuvers near Adrianople and all the Balkan states mobilized. The first Balkan war broke out with the Bulgarians and the Serbs and the Montenegrins, the Albanians and the Macedonians all rising up against the Turks. Meanwhile Russia and Austria-Hungary prepared for war against each other to support their various interests.
In this vast maze of intrigue and threats and sudden attacks, young Munk moved recklessly from front to front gathering information, all the while pursuing clandestine meetings in Constantinople and elsewhere with equal abandon.
Tireless and daring, young Lieutenant Colonel Szondi acquired a notoriety that would soon become intolerable to the chief enemy of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
One of his frequent companions during those last hectic weeks of 1912 was the Japanese military attaché in Constantinople, one Major Kikuchi, a diminutive aristocrat who had become a hero of the Russo-Japanese War by ordering his men to pile up the dead horses of the Cossacks on a barren Manchurian plain, as a barrier against their incessant attacks, a desperate move that had allowed his company alone to survive the massacre of a Japanese regiment, safe behind the eight-foot-high walls of rotting meat that Kikuchi had erected.
Either because he was a Buddhist, or because of the indelible memory of that stench on a Manchurian plain, Major Kikuchi never ate meat, which allowed him to be as mobile as Munk in Turkey.
So they often traveled together, comparing their notes and talking late into the night in the clumsy wagons and lurching trains they shared while moving from front to front, developing a brief but lasting friendship that would one day lead Munk to find what he had always sought in the strange music of a desert monastery.
Late in November, Munk acquired the documents that brought an end to the first Balkan war, certain secret communications from Moscow that proved Russia would not go to war for the sake of the Balkan Slavs. Despite Russian mobilization, the territorial claims of the Serbs were to be abandoned.
These disclosures humiliated and outraged the Russians, and as a price for taking part in peace negotiations they insisted upon a cruel and unusual revenge. The notorious Austro-Hungarian military attaché who had operated so successfully in the Balkans had to be expelled from the army. Furthermore, in order to make certain he was no longer playing a part in Balkan military affairs, he had to be sent into exile in the Ottoman Empire where Russian agents could keep an eye on him.
Munk’s orders arrived early in the new year and he sadly boarded the Orient Express for Vienna, where he would experience his last day of military service.
A full color guard greeted him at the station. He was driven to the headquarters of the chief of staff, with a cavalry escort, and ceremoniously promoted to colonel, at the age of twenty-two by far the youngest in the Imperial Army. He was also awarded the Order of the Golden Fleece.
After a formal luncheon with the officers of his old regiment, the dragoons mounted a dress parade in his honor. Finally at sunset he returned to the headquarters of the chief of staff, again with a cavalry escort, to hear read aloud the order of his expulsion from the army, along with an edict from the emperor expressing condolences and decreeing his exile within the week in the cause of peace.
When Munk arrived in Budapest that evening to say good-bye to his family he found only the men at home, some event of great importance having caused the directors of the House of Szondi to gather in emergency session.
Instructions awaited him. Ex-Colonel Szondi responded at once and galloped off to the rambling old house above the Danube that had once been the home of Sarah the First.
The Sarahs were meeting in their boardroom, the kitchen, where the windows between the floor-to-ceiling family archives gave broad views of commercial traffic on the river.
Munk did a sharp military half-turn in the middle of the kitchen and came to attention facing his grandmother, the reigning chairwoman, Sarah the Second. To the old woman’s
right sat the heiress apparent, his mother Sarah the Third. Ranged elsewhere around the spacious room were Munk’s aunts and grandaunts and female cousins, the entire governing board of the House of Szondi.
Good evening, Grandmother, he said, clicking his heels and saluting smartly. It’s a pleasure to see you looking so well.
The old woman grimaced.
So well? Stop that nonsense, I look awful and I know it. I can’t do a thing with my hair in this damp weather. And what is that perfectly dreadful smell coming out of your mouth?
Garlic.
You eat pure garlic?
Yes.
How much?
A large bulb before each meal and two more afterward.
Some slovenly Mediterranean habit you’ve picked up, I suppose?
Not at all. It’s strictly therapeutic.
Bad Ottoman meat?
Yes.
Oh I remember now, it’s in the archives. Well direct the fumes toward the floor as much as you can and say hello to everyone.
Good evening, Mother, said Munk. Good evening, he repeated, nodding politely around the kitchen to the collected assembly of the Sarahs, all of whom had knitting in their laps. Those who weren’t working their needles in quick agitated strokes were patting their hair nervously or tugging at their bodices. The dozens of women were all dressed in black, without makeup, their hair drawn back into tight buns fixed by a single stickpin with a triangular diamond head. Each also wore a black hat, black gloves, and a modest diamond brooch of triangular shape above the left breast, the customary dress for a formal board meeting of the Sarahs.
Outrageous folly, exclaimed his grandmother, opening the meeting. For years now we’ve asked nothing more from the men of the family than to practice their music and stay out of the way, to behave themselves, and to give a performance or two at family gatherings. Little enough, one would think. But what do we find you doing down in this disreputable place called the Balkans? Making a spectacle of yourself. Attracting international attention. We’re bankers, young Munk, and bankers don’t like notoriety of any kind.
Jerusalem Poker (The Jerusalem Quartet Book 2) Page 12
