Kingdom of Shadows (2 page)

“I haven’t heard it.”

“They run into each other on the street in Bucharest, Gheorgiu is carrying a suitcase. ‘Where are you off to?’ Petrescu asks. ‘Cernauti,’ his friend says. ‘Liar!’ Petrescu shouts. ‘You tell me you’re going to Cernauti to make me think you’re going to Iasi, but I’ve bribed your office boy, and I know you’re going to Cernauti!’ ”

Morath laughed.

“You know Von Schleben?”

“Which one was he?”

“Wearing a raincoat.”

Hyacinthe appeared. Polanyi ordered a Ricon.

“I don’t think so,” Morath said. He wasn’t completely sure. The man was tall, with pale, fading hair a little longer than it should be, and something about the face was impish; he had the sly grin of the practical joker. Quite handsome, he could have played the suitor—not the one who wins, the one who loses—in an English drawing-room comedy. Morath was sure he’d seen him somewhere. “Who is he?”

“He works in the diplomatic area. Not a bad sort, when all is said and done, I’ll introduce you sometime.”

The Ricon arrived, and Morath ordered another
gentiane.
“I never did get lunch,” his uncle said. “Not really. Hyacinthe?”

“Monsieur?”

“What’s for lunch today?”

“Tête de veau.”

“How is it?”

“Not too bad.”

“I think I’ll have some. Nicholas?”

Morath shook his head. He placed a small packet on the table. The size of a hand, it was wrapped in very old, yellowed muslin, perhaps a piece cut from a curtain a long time ago. He unfolded the fabric, revealing a silver cross on a faded ribbon, black and gold, the colors of Austria-Hungary. “This he sent to you.”

Polanyi sighed. “Sandor,” he said, as though the coachman could hear him. He picked up the medal, let it lie flat on his open hand. “A Silver Cross of Valor. You know, Nicholas, I’m honored, but this is worth something.”

Morath nodded. “I offered it to the daughter, with your kindest sympathies, but she wouldn’t hear of it.”

“No. Of course not.”

“When is it from?”

Polanyi thought for a time. “The late eighties, as near as I can work it out. A Serbian rising, down in the Banat. Sandor was a sergeant, in the regiment raised in Pozsony. It was Pressburg then.”

“Bratislava, now.”

“The same place, before they gave it to the Slovaks. Anyhow, he used to talk about it, now and then. The Serbs gave them a hard time, they had snipers up in the caves, on the hillsides. Sandor’s company spent a week dealing with that—some villages had to be burnt down—and he got the cross.”

“He wanted you to have it.”

Polanyi nodded that he understood. “Is anything left, up there?”

“Not much. They stripped the house, after the border moved. Doorknobs, windows, the good floors, fireplace brick, chimneys, whatever pipe they could get out of the walls. The livestock’s long gone, of course. Some of the vineyard remains. The older fruit trees.”

“
Nem, nem, soha,”
Polanyi said. No, no, never—the Hungarian rejection of Trianon, the treaty that took away two thirds of its land and people after the Austro-Hungarian army was defeated in the Great War. There was more than a touch of irony in Polanyi’s voice when he said it, a shrug,
all we can do is whine,
but that wasn’t all. In some sense, complex, possibly obscure, he meant it.

“One day, perhaps, it comes back.”

The group at the next table had been attentive. One pugnacious little man, balding, nostrils flared, the reek of his mildewed room floating over their aperitifs, said
“Revanchiste.”
He didn’t say it to them, quite, or to his friends, perhaps he meant it for the world at large.

They looked at him.
Revanchist, irredentist Hungarian fascists,
he meant, seething with Red Front indignation. But Morath and Polanyi were not that, they were of the Hungarian Nation, as the nobility was called, Magyars with family histories that went back a thousand years, and they were quite prepared, with chair leg and wine bottle, to throw the whole crowd out into the rue Beaujolais.

When the group at the next table had returned, ostentatiously, to minding its own business, Polanyi carefully folded the medal back into its wrapping and put it in the inside pocket of his jacket.

“He spent a long time dying,” Morath said. “Not in pain, and he wasn’t sad—he just had a hardheaded soul, it didn’t want to go.”

From Polanyi, a tender little snort of pleasure as he tasted the veal.

“Also,” Morath went on, “he wanted me to tell you something.”

Polanyi raised his eyebrows.

“It had to do with the death of his grandfather, who was ninety-five, he thought, and who had died in the same bed. The family knew the time had come, they were all gathered around. Suddenly, the old man became agitated and started to talk. Sandor had to lean close in order to hear him. ‘Remember,’ he whispered, ‘life is like licking honey . . .’ He said it three or four times, and Sandor could tell there was more. At last, he managed—‘licking honey off a thorn.’ ”

Polanyi smiled, acknowledging the story. “It’s been twenty years,” he said, “since I saw him. When it was no longer Hungary, I didn’t want anything to do with it, I knew it would be destroyed.” He took a sip of the wine, then more. “You want some, Nicholas? I’ll have them bring a glass.”

“No, thank you.”

“I wouldn’t go up there,” Polanyi said. “That was weak. And I knew it.” He shrugged, forgiving himself.

“He didn’t hold it against you.”

“No, he understood. His family was there?”

“All sorts. Daughters, a son, nieces and nephews, his brother.”

“Ferenc.”

“Yes, Ferenc. They had all the mirrors turned around. One old lady—immense, she cried, she laughed, she cooked me an egg—couldn’t stop talking about it. When the soul leaves, it mustn’t ever be allowed to see itself in the mirror. Because, she said, if it did, it might like looking at itself, and then it would be back, again and again.”

“I don’t think mine would. Did they put out the tub of water?”

“By the door. For death to wash his scythe. Otherwise, he would have to go all the way down to the creek, and somebody else in the house would die within the year.”

Polanyi daintily ate a chunk of bread he’d soaked in the sauce. When he looked up, the waiter was just passing by. “Hyacinthe,
s’il vous plaît,
a glass for my nephew here. And, while you’re at it, another carafe.”

They walked in the Palais Royal gardens after lunch. A dark afternoon, perpetual dusk, Polanyi and Morath like two ghosts in overcoats, moving slowly past the gray branches of the winter parterre.

Polanyi wanted to hear about Austria—he knew that Wehrmacht units were poised on the borders, ready to march in to suppress the “riots” organized by the Austrian Nazis. “If Hitler gets his Anschluss, there will be war in Europe,” he said.

“The trip was a nightmare,” Morath said. A nightmare that began with an absurdity—a fistfight in the corridor of the first-class car between two German harmonica salesmen. “Imagine, two stout men, both with mustaches, screaming insults at each other and flailing away with their little white fists. By the time we got them separated, they were bright red. We made them sit down, gave them water. We were afraid one of them would drop dead, and the conductor would have to stop the train and call for the police. Nobody,
nobody
in the car wanted that.”

“It started in Bucharest, no doubt,” Polanyi said. Roumania, he explained, had been forced to sell its wheat harvest to Germany, and the Reich finance ministry refused to pay in marks. They would only barter. For, exclusively, aspirin, Leica cameras, or harmonicas.

“Well, that was just the beginning,” Morath said. “We were still in western Hungary.” While the train stood in the station in Vienna, a man approximately Morath’s age, pale, trembling, had taken the seat across from him. When the family that occupied the rest of the compartment went off to the dining car, they had started to talk.

The man was a Viennese Jew, an obstetrician. He told Morath that the Jewish communities of Austria had been destroyed in a day and a night. It was, he said, sudden, chaotic, not like Berlin. By which he meant, Morath knew, a certain style of persecution—the slow, meticulous grinding of civil servants.
Schreibtischtäter,
he called them, “desk-murderers.”

The mobs had run wild in the city, led by Austrian SS and SA, hauling Jews out of their apartments—identified by the building custodians—and forcing them to scrub the walls free of slogans for Schuschnigg, the elected chancellor, in the plebiscite that Hitler refused to allow. In the wealthy Jewish suburb of Währing, they made the women put on their fur coats and forced them to clean the streets on their hands and knees, then stood over them and urinated on their heads.

Morath grew worried, the man was coming apart before his eyes. Would he care for a cigarette? No, he didn’t smoke. Perhaps a brandy. Morath offered to go to the dining car and bring it back. The man shook his head—what was the point? “We are finished,” he said. Eight hundred years of Jewish life, ended in one night. At the hospital, an hour before he’d made a run for it, a woman with a newborn child had taken it in her arms and jumped out a window on the top floor. Other patients crawled from their beds and fled into the streets. A young intern said he’d seen a man standing at a bar, the night before, who took a razor from his pocket and cut his throat.

“Was there no warning?” Morath said.

“Anti-Semites in political office,” the man said. “But you don’t sell your house because of that. A month ago, more or less, a few people left the country.” Of course there were some, he added, who’d gotten out in 1933, when Hitler came to power. He’d said, in
Mein Kampf,
that he meant to unite Austria with Germany.
Ein volk, ein Reich, ein Führer!
But reading the political future was like reading Nostradamus. His wife and children he’d put on a Danube steamer to Budapest, thank God, the last week in February. “It was her brother who did that. He came to the house, said we should leave, insisted. There was an argument, my wife in tears, bad feelings. In the end, I was so angry I let him have his way.”

“But, you stayed on,” Morath said.

“I had patients.”

They were silent for a moment. Outside, boys with swastika flags were running down the platform, screaming some kind of rhymed chant, their faces wild with excitement.

Polanyi and Morath sat on a bench in the gardens. It seemed very quiet there. A few sparrows working at the crumbs of a baguette, a little girl in a coat with a velvet collar, trying to play with a hoop and a stick while a nursemaid watched her.

“In the town of Amstetten,” Morath said, “just outside the station, they were waiting at a road crossing so they could throw rocks at the trains. We could see the police, standing around with their arms folded, they’d come to watch. They were laughing, it was a certain kind of joke. The whole thing had, more than anything, a terrible strangeness to it. I remember thinking, they’ve wanted this for a long time. Under all the sentiment and
Schlag,
was this.”

“Their cherished
Wut,
” Polanyi said. “You know the word.”

“Rage.”

“Of a particular kind, yes. The sudden burst of anger that rises from despair. The Germans believe it lies deep within their character; they suffer in silence, and then they explode. Listen to Hitler speak—it’s always, ‘How much longer must we endure . . . ,’ whatever it is. He can’t leave it alone.” Polanyi paused for a moment. “And now, with Anschluss, we will have the pleasure of their company on
our
border.”

“Will anything happen?”

“To us?”

“Yes.”

“I doubt it. Horthy will be summoned to meet with Hitler, he’ll bow and scrape, agree to anything. As you know, he has beautiful manners. Of course, what we actually do will not be quite what we’ve agreed to, but, even so, when it’s all over, we won’t keep our innocence. It can’t be done. And we will pay for that.”

For a time, they watched the people walking along the gravel paths, then Polanyi said, “These gardens will be lovely, in the spring. The whole city.”

“Soon, I hope.”

Polanyi nodded. “You know,” he said, “they fight wars, the French, but their country, their Paris, is never destroyed. Do you ever wonder how they do that?”

“They are clever.”

“Yes, they are. They are also brave. Foolish, even. But that’s not, in the end, how they save what they love. That they do by crawling.”

The eleventh of March,
Morath thought. Too cold to sit in a garden, the air damp in a certain way, sharp, as though chilled in wet earth. When it began to sprinkle rain, Morath and Polanyi rose and walked in the covered arcade, past a famous milliner, a store that sold expensive dolls, a dealer in rare coins.

“And the Viennese doctor?” Polanyi said.

“Reached Paris, long after midnight. Although he did have trouble at the German border. They tried to send him back to Vienna, something not quite right with his papers. A date. I stood next to him throughout the whole filthy business. In the end, I couldn’t keep out of it.”

“What did you do, Nicholas?”

Morath shrugged. “Looked at them a certain way. Spoke to them a certain way.”

“And it worked.”

“This time.”

4 April 1938.

Théâtre des Catacombes. 9:20
P.M.

“Know him? Yes, I know him. His wife makes love to my wife every Thursday afternoon.”

“Really? Where?”

“In the maid’s room.”

Lines not spoken from the stage—
would that they had been,
Morath thought—but overheard in the lobby during intermission. As Morath and Cara worked their way through the crowd, they were noticed, the glances polite, covert. A dramatic couple. Cara’s face was not her best feature—it was soft and plain, hard to remember. Her best feature was long, honey-gold hair, beautiful scarves, and the ways she found to make people want her. For an evening of avant-garde theatre she had added a Gypsy skirt, with appropriate hoop earrings, and soft leather boots with the tops folded over.