The Time of the Uprooted (12 page)

“Yes, fortunately,” says Gamaliel, impressed by such a conclusion to her story.

A familiar impulse draws him to the doctor, who seems suddenly to have cast off her melancholy. Not knowing why, he hears himself asking her if she intends to get married again.

“To whom?” she replies.

Gamaliel has a crazy notion to say “To me,” if only to observe the surprise on her face. She must have guessed what he is thinking, for she blushes. She tries to change the tenor of the conversation. “You really don’t want to sit down?”

Now Colette’s former husband, as embarrassed as a shy teenager, realizes he is still standing. “Excuse me,” he says as he sits down.

They gaze at each other in silence, aware perhaps of the weight of this moment that has brought them together. Gamaliel would like to ease the tension by resuming their conversation, but it is she who wipes her forehead, as if to banish some fear, and continues in a lighter manner: “Your name was Péter, wasn’t it? That’s what Bolek—”

“But call me Gamaliel.”

“My name is—”

“You told me. Lili. Lili Rosenkrantz. I like that name; it’s beautiful. Like a melody. It makes me dream.”

“Dream about what?”

“About music, about dance. Let’s say about my childhood.”

It’s seemingly everyday conversation, an exchange of information: polite words, cordial questions and answers, memories connected to Budapest.

“Are you still stateless?”

“Technically, no. But I’ve been without a country for a long time.”

“Is it a difficult situation to be in?”

“Very difficult; in fact, it’s unbearable.”

“Like Bolek?”

“Yes, like him, and like so many others. We used to dream that we’d make a homeland for those who didn’t have one, that we’d give an identity to those who’d been deprived of theirs. How about you?”

“I’ve always had a country. First Romania, now America, thanks to my stepfather. His ancestors were Russian Jews. You noticed that I haven’t completely lost my Romanian accent. Still, I’m American enough to feel guilty about what we did to those poor Indians.”

Ask her how she expresses her Jewishness? No, that’s indiscreet, too personal a question. Save it for another time. But will there be another time? Better change the subject. Bolek, for example: How did she meet him?

“Oh yes, Bolek, what a fellow,” she says, clapping her hands. “Some character, isn’t he? Always falling in love, never twice with the same woman, always in addition to his wife. He picked me up in the subway by offering me his seat. Can you imagine? Naturally, I thanked him. At that, he asked me to have coffee with him. When? At the next station. Since he had a pleasant face, I accepted. I found him entertaining, and interesting. All these stories about being a refugee in Germany, then in France, then in the United States . . . He has a wonderful sense of humor. Everything makes him laugh. When he found out I was born in Eastern Europe during the war, he mentioned your name—or rather, your two names, and their story. As it happens, I knew about your names. My mother used to mention you sometimes while spending an evening with friends. When they talked about the German occupation and the persecution of the Jews, one of them would say he knew someone from your circle.”

While he listens, Gamaliel is watching her with growing emotion. He hardly dares breathe. A thought flashes through his mind: Can that sick old woman upstairs really be Ilonka? Can it be that I did not recognize the young singer with the sparkling talent in the old woman’s ravaged face? True, a lot of water has flowed under the bridges of the Danube and the Hudson since the days when she was sheltering me. Can a human being so change that her present erases every trace of her past?

The young woman’s soft, lilting voice rouses him from his reverie. “Last week, our patient seemed to come out of her coma. She tried to speak. She murmured a few words, maybe names. . . .”

“What names?” Gamaliel exclaims. “Try to remember. It’s important to me. Did she say a name that sounded like Ilonka?”

The doctor reflects. She turns serious, almost pained. She repeats the name several times: “Ilonka, Ilonka, a Hungarian name . . . a woman’s name . . . No, I don’t think so.” Gamaliel, his nerves stretched tight as a bow, is watching her lips. “So who is this Ilonka?” she asks.

“A saint.” And after a moment’s silence, he adds, “A true saint, not the usual kind.”

“One of your conquests, was she?”

“Yes, I conquered her, and I’m proud to say so. It was she who saved the conqueror.”

Gamaliel falls silent. Words and pictures are swimming around in his mind. It’s not the melancholy doctor whom I’m here to captivate, he realizes. It’s Ilonka, that wonderful protector of mine, who would as readily weep as make love. Is it she whom I’m forever seeking in every woman who attracts me?

“This saint who wasn’t the usual kind, what became of her?” the doctor asks. “Did she have a hard time of it during the war? Did she find herself a husband? Did fate reward her, as she deserved?”

“Ilonka was better at making others happy than she was at finding happiness for herself.”

“Then she was unhappy!” the doctor exclaims. A wisp of hair falls over her forehead.

“Yes, much of the time. What can you expect? Everyone she loved left her.”

“Who were they?”

“My mother and I. There must have been others, too.”

“Why did you leave her?”

“We had to.”

“You’re saying that with regret, but surely it wasn’t your fault.”

“I know that, and she knew it, too. That didn’t save her from suffering.”

It was Ilonka herself who decided on their first separation. Foreseeing danger, she sent the little boy to a safe location, dispatching him with a onetime dancer to another part of Budapest.

Soon after he left, she was denounced by an anti-Semite at the cabaret and then arrested by the Nyilas. She was beaten, humiliated, raped. Her torturers tried to make her reveal under what names the Jews were hiding, and with whom. She made up names and addresses. Each time, the sadists came back empty-handed and insane with rage. Ilonka screamed, wept, entreated; she was determined to endure anything, to withstand anything. The role of informer did not suit her, as she explained to Gamaliel when she had found him again.

“You’re right: She was a saint,” Lili says in a tentative manner. “But in what way was she different from other saints, whose good deeds we read about in sacred writings?”

“She was a believer, but her saintliness had nothing to do with her religion. It was all from the heart, from her great and generous heart, the kind we don’t see anymore. Understand? Ilonka was human, admirably human, and to me, that places her above any saint.”

The doctor looks surprised. “Why do you say that? Is the divine that much of a problem for you? Since when is being human the supreme virtue? Remember the beautiful old saying that the goal of mankind is to become god?”

“To which I would reply that to my mind the goal of mankind is to become human. Ilonka saved my life. She was a brave woman, a noble and passionate one; she was a heroic figure. That’s why I think of her with love and admiration.”

The doctor persists: “If a person risks life and liberty to help victims of persecution, well, that makes her a saint in my eyes. Besides, you yourself said it.” Gamaliel does not answer immediately, preferring to end the discussion. The doctor interprets his silence as assent: “We agree, then, about Ilonka? Good. What sort of woman was she? Was she cultivated, intellectual? Did she like gardening, classical music? Did she read the novels of Stendhal and Victor Hugo?”

Gamaliel stares at her, wondering whether he should hurt her feelings. Should he say to her that all the intellectuals of Europe are not worth the loving grace of this unschooled woman who did so much to save one human life, his own? He cannot make up his mind.

The doctor offers him a way out: “You were very young when she took you in, weren’t you?”

“Not that young.”

“Too young to understand what she really did.”

“She was a cabaret singer.”

“Really?”

“Yes, she sang in a cabaret.”

“And that’s all she did?”

Gamaliel bites his lips. Gestures, hushed voices, feelings are shooting like bolts of lightning through his mind. Ilonka leaning over the little boy curled up on the sofa. “Péter, are you asleep? Good. Sleep, my big boy. Sleep, and sweet dreams. It’s better that way.” She puts out the light and goes into the bedroom. But Gamaliel is not asleep. He follows her movements through half-closed eyes. She is not alone. A man is with her. Gamaliel recognizes him: It is the loudmouthed head of the Nyilas, the Hungarian fascists, whom he observed at the cabaret. He catches strange muffled sounds coming from the bedroom. He doesn’t understand their cause or their meaning—or perhaps he doesn’t want to understand. The same scene takes place every night, but the man who accompanies Ilonka is not always the same.

“That’s all she did,” he says at last to the young woman. “She was a singer. I heard her sing. She was good, very good indeed. When she sang, her voice lifted your spirits and gave you wings, and from up in the sky, you looked down at the earth as if it were a sanctuary.”

Has the doctor noticed the change in Gamaliel’s voice? If so, she doesn’t show it. All she does is give him a supportive smile, while he tries to remember how long it was before he came to understand the nature of his protector’s profession. “Tell me some more about yourself,” the young woman says, and she touches him lightly, timidly, on the arm. “And if that bores you, tell me a story.”

All right, a story, but which one? And why now, on this early day of spring, under this tree in bloom, so close to the hospital building housing human beings in whom the course of illness is running to its conclusion, where they completely lose their minds? Is she trying to provoke a response from him? Or is it for some professional, perhaps medical, reason? Does she see in him a disorder of which he is not aware? He decides to tell her about an incident that still embarrasses him many decades later. “At the time, I was still young, and I didn’t know my way around, as the saying goes,” he began in a neutral tone. “I’d just arrived in Paris. I was poor—all I had was a travel permit stamped by the French consulate—and I didn’t know anyone.”

At the time, late 1956, some frontiers in Europe were relatively easy to cross. It was done every day by thousands of Hungarian refugees fleeing from the Red Army tanks that had crushed their insurrection. The governments of Western Europe must have felt guilty about them, for these refugees were better received than those who had preceded them in 1945–1946. Gamaliel was not yet twenty when he stepped off the Orient Express, which had taken him from Vienna to Paris. Before he even went to the hotel where he was to join other refugees, he went on foot from the Gare de l’Est to the rue Saint-Denis. A Party comrade had sung the praises of this section of Paris while telling him everything he needed to know to achieve his desired goal. “What came first and foremost, according to my comrade? Don’t laugh: He said you must make love to understand the secret of all Creation.”

“I’m not laughing,” says the doctor, and she squeezes his arm very hard.

“It was the first time.”

“And you were almost twenty?”

“Is that so unusual?”

“For some people, everything is unusual,” she says gently. “Every moment of their lives is both predictable and unexpected. And you, poor fellow, seem to be one of them.”

“Please, don’t feel sorry for me. I . . .” Gamaliel stops in midsentence, and his face darkens.

“Well, I’m still waiting for your story,” says the doctor.

“It’s not very pretty.”

“I don’t like stories that are too pretty. I spend my time listening to the other kind.”

Walking along rue Saint-Denis that day, Gamaliel felt desire gathering in him like a thunderstorm. He didn’t know where to look, or how to respond to the invitations he was hearing. Alluring, heavily made-up women were soliciting him in English, in German, never in Hungarian, but he understood French, thanks to the journalist in Budapest and the courses he had taken in school. He chose the one who promised him in French an hour in paradise, smilingly requiring only a few hundred francs as the price of admission.

The furniture and the walls of the dingy hotel room smelled of mildew. She began rapidly to shed her clothes, but Gamaliel was taking his time. “You want me to get completely undressed?” she asked in a bored tone. “That costs extra.”

“Don’t bother,” he said in a choked voice.

“As you please. But hurry up, my boy,” she said while she pulled down her red panties and tossed them on a filthy chair. “I don’t have all day.”

Gamaliel’s cheeks were flaming as he took off his trousers and carefully folded them. The woman lying on the bed was getting impatient. “How about my present?” He didn’t understand. “The money,” she said, irritated. “Where’s the cash you owe me?” He felt around in his jacket pocket and handed her a few bills. She counted them and kept them in her hand. “All right, come on.”

“Not yet,” said Gamaliel.

All he could do was stare at her, while she, stretched out on the dirty sheet, knees apart, was losing all patience. “How many times do I have to tell you, baby? I don’t have the rest of my lousy life for this, you know. So come take what you paid for.”

“Not yet.”

“What’re you waiting for? The revolution, or maybe the Messiah?”

He blushed. Like all Jews, he knew that he must always be ready for the coming of the Messiah even though He might be late, but he would never have imagined that the Redeemer would make His appearance in a place like this.

Abruptly, the woman sat up. “Tell me what it is, you little brat. You don’t want me? I’m not sexy enough? Or does my body disgust you?”

“Yes . . .” He caught himself. “I mean no. Not now. Not like this.”

“Say, are you some kind of pervert? No? Well then, stop wasting my time. Come on, let’s get it over with.”

Gamaliel saw her hard face, her folded legs; he stared at her and was seized with panic. “It’s my first time,” he said hoarsely.

She burst out laughing. “A virgin, imagine that! You’ll bring me luck. Now come here!”