Love and Treasure (15 page)

“Have you ever been laid, Wiseman?” Hoyle said.

“Let me see. Yes, Lieutenant Hoyle, I believe I have. I believe that I got laid earlier this afternoon, in fact.” And for a moment Jack enjoyed pissing on the memory.

“ ‘Earlier this afternoon’!” Hoyle bellowed, clapping Jack on the back. “You know, for a stuck-up Jew prick, you’re not so bad.”

“For a stuck-up West Point prick, Hoyle, you’re … well, you’re a stuck-up West Point prick,” Jack said, and Hoyle roared even louder.

By now they had reached the bar of the legendarily low-priced women, a dismal, underground room furnished with little more than a beer tap, a row of stools, and a fat bartender who stared at them with a sullen expression and a filthy towel draped over his shoulder. There were no women in the place at all, at any price. There were only a few men, each sitting alone and nursing a beer.

Jack was furiously disappointed. He’d been intent on erasing the afternoon with an encounter the uglier and more meaningless the better.

“Whiskey!” Hoyle said, slamming his fist on the counter.

“No whiskey,” the bartender said. He pronounced it
vis-key
, with a pause between the syllables.

“Yes, whiskey!” Hoyle said.

“Beer,” the bartender insisted, taking three earthenware steins from beneath the counter. He filled the glasses with a thick, dark brew and scraped off the foam with a knife. Jack watched the foam subside. Once the level of the beer had dropped below the lips of the steins, the bartender filled and scraped them again. Jack reached for one of the steins, but the barman shook his head, filled them a third time, scraped the foam, and only then slid one across the counter to him.

There was not enough food in the city to feed even half the population, people scrambled for bread and milk, and Ilona greeted the cans of Spam he brought her as though they were filet mignon, but the bars had reopened, and the beer was good, even though they sold it at prices only the Americans could really afford. He licked the foam mustache from his upper lip.

“S’good,” he muttered to Hoyle.

“Damn right, it’s good,” Hoyle said, taking a long swallow, then holding one hand over his belly and belching loudly.

Jack snorted into his glass, sending foam all over the counter.

“Laddies,” Ball said, reviving his brogue. “Laddies, to us! Long may we rule.”

Jack and Hoyle hoisted their glasses in the air. “To us!” they shouted.

Jack clicked his stein against Ball’s, but by now he was far too drunk to have any sense of distance or strength. He knocked Ball’s stein hard enough to send beer sloshing over the sides, drenching both his arm and his friend’s.

Nearly hysterical with laughter, Ball smashed his stein against Jack’s with enough force to shatter the earthenware. Ball stared at his palm. Blood beaded up along a long gash.

“Fuck,” he said, loudly. “Fuck my fucking hand.”

“
Schwein
.”

Jack swung around on his stool. At the far end of the bar, a man sat hunched over a glass.

“What did you say?” Jack said, politely, in his impeccable German.

The man raised his head to look at Jack. He had dark hair, thick eyebrows, and fleshy lips. His shirt was unbuttoned, and his undershirt was stained. His sleeves were rolled up over his meaty biceps. He scratched his throat, tugging down the collar of his undershirt. Whether or not he
had meant to reveal the twin lightning bolts tattooed on his neck, Jack didn’t know or care. Jack sprang off his stool and down the length of the bar. Before the man had time to react, Jack had him around the throat. He pulled the man off his stool and punched him in the face. The Nazi’s nose splintered and smeared under his fist. Jack danced back, lifting his fists to protect his face. The man staggered around, blood pouring down his shirt. Jack kicked the Nazi’s legs out from under him. The Nazi fell so hard he made the glasses on the bar jump.

“Who’s a pig?” Jack shouted, aiming a kick at his stomach. “Goddamn Nazi! Who’s a pig?” The man curled up, protecting his belly. Jack kicked him in the ass.

“Let me in,” said Hoyle, pushing Jack aside. The man spread his hands on the floor and tried to get up. Hoyle stomped on his fingers, laughing as he went down with a groan.

“Get up, you Nazi pig,” Jack said, grabbing the man by the shirt collar and heaving him to his feet. “Stand up and fight.”

The man swayed. He grabbed the bar to steady himself and then cried out at the pain of his swelling fingers, broken beneath Hoyle’s heavy boot.

“Say you’re a pig,” Jack said.

The man moaned and searched blindly for his stool.

“Say you’re an SS pig!” Jack repeated. He balled up his fist and readied it. “Say you’re a goddamn Nazi pig!”

Jack realized that he was speaking English.

He switched to German. “Say you are a Nazi swine.”

“I am a Nazi swine,” the man said immediately.

“Say you’re an SS swine.”

“I’m an SS swine.”

Jack tried to think of something else to make the man say. He looked over at Ball, who shrugged.

“Hit him again, Wiseman,” Hoyle said. “Hit him and then tell him he got the shit beaten out of him by a Jew.”

The man’s legs buckled. He fumbled for the stool and sat down, leaning his good hand on the bar. Jack watched him for a moment and then felt the cocktail of moonshine, schnapps, and dark beer bubble in his belly. He clasped his hand over his mouth and ran for the door, bursting out onto the sidewalk. He aimed for the gutter but instead spewed vomit all over a dun-colored Volkswagen parked at the curb.

•
11
•

THE COMPOUND HUMILIATIONS OF
Ilona’s rejection and his own horrible behavior in the bar served to shut Jack down. He did his best to become a mindless functionary, a soldier with a job about which he felt nothing, without a personal life or care. When he woke in the morning with an erection from a half-remembered dream, he tried to replace thoughts of Ilona with those of other women, like his old girlfriend or some of the prettier WACs who had lately shown up in Salzburg. But he still put most of his allotment of cigarettes aside for Ilona. He frequented the PX on the Getreidegasse, purchasing things he knew that she liked or items he thought would be useful to her in trade. For himself he bought nothing other than the most basic necessities. His parsimony made him feel good, and occasionally he allowed himself to imagine her face when he presented her with this hoard, proof that he hadn’t shirked the responsibility he’d assumed for her care.

As the weeks passed, he often thought of Rudolph Zweig’s little nephews and felt guilty. He sent packages with his most trustworthy soldier, but the last one came back unopened. Zweig and the boys were gone; they’d moved on. Jack fretted terribly about them, despite Ball’s assurances that things had improved substantially for the Jewish DPs recently. Though his friend promised that the Jewish DPs’ daily calorie ration had been increased, Jack was plagued by the thought that without his help all those for whom he’d assumed responsibility would go to bed hungry.

In this period Jack also received an overdue promotion to captain, though it had little effect on his day-to-day life beyond a marginal increase in pay. If anything, his job became more tedious. Now it consisted primarily of protecting the contents of the warehouse, not from looters or thieves, or even from the requisitions of the brass, but from his own men, who were finding it harder and harder to keep from slipping things into their pockets. He supervised his apathetic GIs on their halfhearted patrols and warned them again and again, but he couldn’t be everywhere at once, and he knew things were disappearing from the warehouse.

He felt a mounting sense of impotence, like a man trying to carry sand in a sieve. He had tried to hold on to the property in the warehouse, but between the senior command’s requisitions and the men’s pilfering, it was dribbling away. He had tried to care for the Zweigs, and they were gone. And Ilona, though he tried not to think about her, she had slipped through his fingers, too.

One afternoon, Corporal Streeter, finishing his very last week as a soldier in the U.S. Army, called Jack over. “I found something you’re going to want to see.”

They had long ago gone through the boxes and crates looking for ones of particular value, but somehow they’d missed a small leather case, a lady’s jewelry box, full of gold watches.

“Look at the lining, sir. Of the box.”

The lid of the case was lined with pink silk on which the name of a store and an address were stamped in gold lettering.

“I remember you said to tell you if we found anything from Nagyvárad.”

For the whole long period of their relationship, Jack had searched desperately and fruitlessly for anything at all from the town of Ilona’s birth. He had known that at least some of the paintings and furs, silver menorahs and tureens, must have come from this former city of twenty-five thousand Jews, but he could find no discernible trace. And now, when he’d stopped looking, here it was, a case of gold watches. He couldn’t know, of course, if the watches themselves came from Nagyvárad or only the jewelry case. Perhaps the watches had been placed in the case by the Jewish Property Office when it had sorted the property at the Óbánya Castle, before they loaded the train.

“Where was this?” Jack said.

“I found it at the bottom of a crate full of cameras. I was having a heck of a time finding one with an intact lens to fill General Lorde’s order.”

Jack lifted out the watches one at a time and studied them, trying to decide if any of them might once have adorned the wrist of a prosperous grain merchant. One of them looked expensively plain, a simple case and a heavy gold band, in a way that he thought might do for the purposes of self-flagellation, remembering Ilona and the way she used to talk about her father. He lifted it out, and saw lying beneath it a pouch of black velvet. He opened the little velvet bundle, and found a piece of women’s jewelry, a large pendant decorated with an enamel painting of a peacock
in vivid purple and green, with white accents. The metal was intricately filigreed, the work of an accomplished metalsmith, and the tip of each peacock feather was inset with a gem.

He knit the braided gold chain through his fingers. He imagined the woman who had worn it, against the pulsing hollow of whose throat it had once grown warm. Had it been a gift from her husband, her father, her lover? Had she known Ilona? Was she dead? He eased the pendant back into its velvet pouch, tucked it back in among the watches, and closed the case. He wrote
GOLD WATCHES
on a paper label, dabbed the back of the label with mucilage, and pasted it to the front of the case. Then he carried it to the corner of the warehouse that he had reserved for the more-valuable property and set it on top of a stack of other boxes containing watches.

And then, as if thinking of her had conjured her presence, Ilona walked in the door. She had changed in the weeks of their separation. Her hair was longer, and she wore it pinned back from her face. She had on the wool coat his mother had sent, belted tightly at the waist, and when she removed it she revealed a new white blouse and a pale blue cardigan embroidered with rows of tiny flowers around the neck. Her pants were black wool and looked like they’d originally been a military uniform but had been altered to fit her small waist and round hips. Her lips were shell pink and moist from her lipstick, and he thought she might have powdered her nose; the freckles were smoothed over. He liked the lipstick, it reminded him of the first time they kissed, but he wanted to take out his handkerchief and rub the powder away.

Though he was happy to see her, at once realizing how much he had longed for her all these past weeks, he was conscious of a darker emotion, a complicated brew of guilt and shame, anger and hurt.

“Ilona” was all he could say.

She leaned across the improvised desk and kissed his cheek. He resisted for a moment and then gave in to his impulse and in two steps had rounded the desk and pulled her into his arms. He kissed her on the mouth, tasting the wax of her lipstick.

“You missed me, Jack,” she said. She leaned her face on his chest, and he linked his hands around her waist. He rocked back and forth on his heels.

“Yes,” he murmured into her hair.

“I, too,” she said, pulling away. “I missed you, too.”

“How are you, Ilona?” he asked. “You look good.”

“I am well. Many things are different for me. I moved. And I have a job.”

“You moved?”

“They moved all the Jews out of the Hotel Europa, so I am now in the Muelln Camp. It’s good there. Not so comfortable, but we are all Jewish there. No more Marias from the Ukraine.”

“And you’re working?”

“I am a kindergarten teacher.”

He smiled.

She pulled away, but returned his grin. “Perhaps you don’t think I am suited to this job?”

“Not at all.” He couldn’t bear not to be touching her, so he took her hand. He saw that her broken thumbnail had almost grown out. “I’m sure you’re a great teacher.”

“I am only an assistant. I take them for long walks in the mountains to strengthen their legs. And I am learning with the children. We have a teacher from Palestine who has come to teach us Hebrew. Do you know Hebrew?”

“A little.”

“I am finding it surprisingly easy to learn. You should come study with us. Perhaps it will be even easier for you. You will recognize words from synagogue.”

“I learned Hebrew in college. My family isn’t much for synagogue.”

“Of course. You told me this. My family was the same. In Nagyvárad we were Yom Kippur Jews, you know what that is?”

“I guess I do.”

“But now I study Hebrew,” Ilona said. “It took Hitler to make me a good Jew.”

He laughed, but it was out of politeness. Even in its bitterness the joke was spoiled for him by the knowledge of the kind of Jew the war had made out of Jack Wiseman. Could a religious identity be crafted from anger and disgust?

“Can I take you to dinner?” he asked. “To that restaurant you like near the Mozarteum?”