Love and Treasure (16 page)

“Today I can’t stay, but Saturday is Erev Purim, and there will be a big celebration in the evening. Will you come?”

“To Muelln?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, sure.”

She kissed him good-bye on the cheek, but he turned his head and pressed his lips to hers. For a moment it seemed like she might wriggle away, but then she relaxed in his arms. He ran the fingers of his right hand through her hair and gripped her skull in his hand, kneading it gently with his fingertips. His left arm circled around her. He fingered the strap of her brassiere, wishing he could push it aside and hold her breast in his hand.

“Don’t go yet,” he said. “I have something to show you.”

“What is it?”

“Most of the stuff here isn’t labeled, but some is, and all along I’ve kept my eye out for property from your town, from Nagyvárad. You won’t believe it, but just today we found a case. The name of a jeweler was printed on the inside lid. Csillag and Dux.”

A sad smile. “My family used to shop there sometimes. I remember my uncle bought my aunt Firenze’s wedding ring there. I helped him choose it.”

“Do you want to see it?”

“What’s in it?”

“Watches and some jewelry. Although I don’t know if what was in the box actually came from Nagyvárad at all. The Jewish Property Office did a lot of sorting and reorganizing before they loaded everything on the train.”

She stood still for a minute, biting her lip.

“Okay, yes. Show me.”

Jack took her back into the warehouse, to the corner where he’d placed the case. He took it down, balanced it on a wooden crate, and opened it. For a moment she just looked at the case, at the printed name and address on the silk, at the heap of gold watches. Then she picked up the velvet pouch and dumped the contents out into the palm of her hand. She stared at the peacock pendant.

For a moment, Jack allowed himself to imagine that everything they had together and lost was there again, to hope that the pendant, and by extension the one who had shown it to her, had laid a claim on Ilona. A claim she was willing to honor.

“Do you recognize it?” he asked eagerly.

“No,” she said.

“You don’t?”

“Nagyvárad is a large town. And people from the countryside come
to shop there. This necklace could have belonged to anyone from the district, or like you said, from anywhere in Hungary.” She dropped it back into the little velvet bag and the bag into the case. She turned away. “Anyway, peacock feathers bring bad luck. Who would wear such a thing?”

“Do you want to look through the rest of the case?”

“What’s the point?” She walked quickly away, up through the aisle of crates and boxes, past the stacks of paintings, until she reached the front of the warehouse, where she waited for him.

When he caught up with her, she said in a voice of brittle, false cheer, “So I will see you on Purim?”

“I shouldn’t have showed you that. I’m so sorry.”

“You don’t need to be sorry. I’m okay. I’m fine. It’s only … for a moment I hoped that by some miracle you found something of mine. Or something of my parents’. I was just disappointed. But even if you had found something that belonged to me back then, I don’t know if I would want it. All that is the past. And I am done with the past. I don’t want anything from the old world.”

“I understand. Of course.”

She seemed to gather her energy and gave him another kiss on the cheek. “I’ll see you Saturday.”

“See you Saturday,” he said, and watched her go.

•
12
•

THE ROAD LEADING INTO
the camp at Muelln was lined with oversized tombstones. Cut with crude artfulness from cardboard and plywood, they were inscribed, in gay lettering, with the dates of the birth and death of Adolf Hitler. The walls of the barracks were hung with painted banners depicting the late Führer in various tortured poses, some of the caricatures verging on the obscene. Stuffed effigies recognizable by their bristle-brush mustaches hung by their ankles or their necks from every lamppost. A boy of about ten years stood in front of a makeshift fire pit in which blazed a small but merry flame. The boy was holding a book and offering passersby the opportunity to tear out a page and fling it into the fire. Jack watched one man shove a page down the back of his pants before crumpling it up and lobbing it into the flames. The boy laughed so hard he doubled over and wiped tears from his eyes. When he stood up he noticed Jack and waved to him.

“Look!” he said in English, turning the volume so that Jack could see its cover, with the black-lettered title:
Mein Kampf
. “You want wipe your ass with Haman’s book?”

“Hitler is Haman?” Jack asked.

“Hitler is the biggest Haman of all!”

Jack remembered a proverb his grandfather used to mutter when reading the newspaper: So many Hamans, and only one Purim.

The closest Jack had come in his life to celebrating the holiday of Purim was to eat the three-cornered
hamentaschen
his
bubbe
used to make. But if the wild revelry going on right now in the DP camp was what Purim was like, he had had no idea what he was missing. The roadways and paths of the Muelln camp, a former army barracks, were teeming with people in costumes and masks. It was like Halloween, except here the adults dressed up, too. There were jesters and queens, leopards, witches, and Cossacks. One young man had scavenged most of an SS uniform, complete with cap and death’s-head insignia. He had padded out the seat of his gray jodhpurs with a pillow, and he carried a wooden paddle that he offered to passersby, inviting them to land a hefty wallop
on his behind. With every blow he would fling himself down into the dirt, feigning agony, howling for his “Mama Adolf” to save him.

Jack passed a booth featuring a huge plywood tombstone that read
HERE LIES HITLER, MAY HIS NAME BE BLOTTED OUT
. People took turns climbing up a painter’s ladder, dipping brushes into a bucket of black paint, and slapping paint over their tormentor’s name.

As Jack watched the crowd stream through the pathways, in their motley and ghoulish giddiness, he felt his own spirits lift. Somebody handed him a tin cup filled with some unholy brew of K ration lemon-drink powder and grain alcohol. He drank it all and searched the painted faces for Ilona’s. He doubted he would find her in her room, even if he could bully his way through the crowd to get there. He mooched a refill of his cup from a passing girl with a pitcher and climbed up onto the roof of a porch of one of the barracks, where he could see the parade that was about to begin.

The camp orchestra led the way, a battered hodgepodge of clarinetists and violinists, bassoonists and saxophonists, many of the finest lights of European classical music, playing a raucous version, half polka, half circus, of John Philip Sousa’s “The Liberty Bell.” They flung their legs about in a parody of the goose step as the spectators clapped their hands along with the music. Next came the Muelln Football Club in homemade uniforms, their muscular legs extending from their shorts, followed closely behind by a team of teenage gymnasts, boys and girls, turning cartwheels down the parade route. Jack peered at the next group to be sure that his eyes were not clouded by alcohol. There was no mistaking the small group of tiny people, waist-high adults bedecked in matching lederhosen, the women with their hair hidden beneath cloth caps. The Seven Dwarfs, but without their Snow White. Every group in the parade carried a gaudy hand-lettered banner: the needleworkers’ union, the trade school students, the hospital staff. A group of young people wearing shorts and sandals inadequate to the March cold bore a banner proclaiming themselves members of the youth group Betar; another group was members of Kibbutz HaShomer HaTzair. A group of scouts attempted a valiant if hopeless simulacrum of a color guard, each scout desperately waving his or her own homemade version of the flag of the Zionist movement, a blue Star of David on a white background between two horizontal blue stripes. Then came the kindergarten, the children hopping delightedly from foot to foot, running this way and that, barely able even to keep to the parade route, let alone march. In their midst,
laughing joyously, was Ilona. A gaily patterned kerchief covered her head, and she wore a matching apron. She’d braided her hair in two pigtails that stood out crookedly from beneath the kerchief. She’d drawn large freckles across her nose and painted a bright red cupid’s bow over her pale lips. She wore two different striped stockings, one red, one black.

Jack swallowed the last of his drink, climbed down from the roof, and ducked through the crowd until he caught up with the parade. He called to her. At the sound of her name she scanned the crowd.

“Ilona!” he shouted again. He wormed his way through the crowd until he reached the edge of the parade. She disentangled her hand from that of one of the small children who clung to it and waved him over. He plunged in. He wanted to take her in his arms, but the parade in which they both now marched propelled him forward.

“Ilona!”

She smiled. “Happy holiday, Jack,” she said in Hebrew.

“Happy holiday to you, too!”

They had by now reached the end of the parade route. A bearded rabbi stood on a stage erected in the middle of what had been the mustering grounds of the barracks that once occupied this site. The rabbi lifted his hand for silence, and despite their varying levels of intoxication, the large crowd quieted. He took a small leather-bound volume out of the pocket of his suit jacket and began to chant the first chapter of the Book of Esther. Jack wondered how many of the assembled crowd actually spoke Hebrew and how many merely listened for the name of the diabolical enemy of Israel. Each time the rabbi chanted “Haman,” the crowd erupted in boos and hoots. Children banged cymbals fashioned of pot lids or beat sticks together. By the end of the rabbi’s reading, the crowd was delirious with a rage-fueled joy.

The speakers came next, various camp dignitaries and officials, who decried the beast of Germany and recalled the Purims of previous years, when there had been little hope that the prophecy of Ezekiel would come to fruition, that the dry bones of Israel would live again. Some spoke in Yiddish, others in German, still others in a Hebrew sufficiently simplified that Jack had no trouble understanding it.

The speeches showed no sign of winding down, and Jack was wondering how he would get Ilona alone when she grabbed his hand.

“Come with me!” she said.

She stopped to whisper in the ear of one of the other kindergarten teachers, turning over her charges, Jack figured. She moved quickly,
snaking her way through the crowd. At times there were so many people Jack couldn’t see her ahead of him, but she held fast to his hand, and he trusted her to lead him along. They broke free and ran down a path between two barracks to a door by the barbed-wire fence that marked the boundary of the camp. They ducked inside.

The barracks had been organized into rows of cubicles demarcated by piles of furniture and makeshift plywood walls. She led him to a tiny cubicle in the middle of the barracks. Though there were small windows cut into the walls, the light barely penetrated so far inside, and so it was in murky half-light that she stripped off her clothes. He watched her, trembling. When she was naked, she lay back on the small cot. With a groan, he fell on top of her, fumbling at the buttons of his pants, the grain alcohol swirling in his belly. Her body trembled as he traced his tongue along the scars, pocks, and pleats that ravaged her beautiful, pale skin.

It was over almost as soon as it had begun, but for long moments afterward, he lay on top of her, his lips pressed into the side of her neck, murmuring her name.

She wrapped her arms around his neck, planted a wet kiss on his mouth, and said, “Come, Jack. There’s someone I want you to meet.”

•
13
•

THE MAN WHO OPENED
the door to them was short, with bushy black eyebrows from which a few wiry white hairs stuck up like antennae. More tufts of hair poked from the open collar of his shirt. The effort of producing such plenty had exhausted his follicles, however, and his pate was hairless and polished to a high shine, mottled with misshapen freckles. He greeted Ilona with a nod but raised his caterpillar brows in Jack’s direction.

“Jack Wiseman,” Ilona said. “My friend.”

“A pleasure to meet you, Captain Wiseman,” the man said, extending his hand. He had a thick eastern European accent, but his English was good.

Jack, dressed in civilian trousers and shirt, wondered how the man knew his rank.

Ilona said, “Jack, this is Aba Yuval. He is a member of the Jewish Brigade.”

When he’d first read about the Jewish Brigade in his grandfather’s Yiddish newspaper, Jack had not known whether to feel pride at their exploits or insulted by their segregation from the main body of British armed forces. Would he have wanted to be part of a specially designated, separate brigade of Jews in the U.S. Army? It was hard even to imagine such a thing coming to be, until he thought of the colored soldiers.

He followed Ilona into the room and immediately snapped to attention. Rabbi Bohnen, in uniform, sat on a wooden chair at a small table in the center of the room.

“Captain Wiseman,” the major said. “Happy Purim to you!”

“Sir.”

“ ‘Sir’ is for soldiers. You should call me rabbi.”

“I’m a soldier, sir.”

“Yes, of course you are, son. You are a soldier. But you are also a Jew. And also a righteous man, aren’t you?”

It was no easier now to answer the question than it had been the first time the rabbi had posed it, months before, no easier, in fact, even to
discern the truth behind the question. Jack felt as though the rabbi was trying to tug on a string in his heart, a string labeled “Jew.” But that string was tangled and frayed from disuse. Nothing happened when you pulled it.

The rabbi got to his feet and patted Jack on the arm. “These are fine men, Captain Wiseman. I hope you’ll help them in any way you can.”