Upon the Head of the Goat (15 page)

“Iboya,” she then said, “take Piri and bed yourselves down, but first do as I told you.” We all got out of her bed, and she lit a candle and walked us through the long porch and into the summer kitchen, shielding the candle from the wind with her cupped hand. She dripped some of the wax onto the cold stove and made the candle stand upright in it. “You must blow out the candle as soon as you have finished. Move fast and get under the covers. Do not make noise under any circumstances. You must remain silent no matter what you hear.”

I tried to hold on to her, but she slipped away after turning the key in the door of the summer kitchen and disappeared. Iboya, following her instructions, moved quickly. She unbraided my hair, helped me slip one of the old dresses over my head, and then smudged my face with ash. “Tie the kerchief so that none of your hair shows,” she said. Then I helped her to dress in the same way. We blew out the candle and got under the covers Mother had left on the bed, shivering from cold and from fright. Iboya turned toward the wooden plank wall and I curled around her as close as I could get, my ears keen all the while, listening to the shouting voices and the tread of boots on the ground, Iboya's breath, and the wind. Then I heard other sounds—scuffling and gnawing.

“What is that?” I asked Iboya in a whisper.

“Mice, I think,” she answered and I tensed and snuggled still closer to her. The mice continued to chew on whatever they had found to eat, and I closed my eyes and held my breath as long as I could.

The next thing I was conscious of was light and the sound of the key in the door. Mother came in wearing old clothes, her face smudged, and a kerchief on her head hiding her hair. For a moment I forgot where I was and was startled by Mother's strange appearance. Then, seeing Iboya sitting up beside me dressed the same way, I remembered what had taken place last night. “You can come out now,” Mother said, “things have quieted down.”

“Did they come?” asked Iboya.

“They came,” Mother answered.

“I heard them,” said Iboya.

“They did not come into our house, but they were on our street.”

Sandor and Joli laughed when they saw Iboya and me come into the kitchen. “You two look funny,” Sandor said. Joli stopped giggling and her steel-blue eyes showed fear. She wrapped her arms around her small body and shook. “I don't like you this way.”

Mother gave us a basin of water. “You can wash your faces now—there should be no trouble during the day, but any contact with the Germans will be dangerous. Yellow star or not, I don't want you to leave the house. Not until we see what happens.”

By ten o'clock, Mother had changed into her disguise. Now, dressed as a peasant woman, wearing the same clothes she wore to Poland when she had gone looking for Lilli, she said to us, “Bolt the gate, lock up the house, and don't let the children out. I must run and pick up the matzos I ordered at the temple yard. Maybe I can pick up something else at the market next door as well, and then I'll come back. Tomorrow is the first night of seder.”

“Don't you want me to come along to help?” Iboya asked.

“No, you are to stay in the house with Piri and the children.”

After Mother left, Iboya told me that yesterday in the fish store she heard someone say the Germans had taken over Budapest.

“What will happen to Etu?” I asked as we cleared away the breakfast dishes. “Why did Mrs. Gerber tell Mother to leave her there, saying that she would be better off in Budapest?”

Iboya looked at me, started to say something, changed her mind, and continued to wash the dishes in silence. And as I continued to dry them, I remembered the time of the Hungarian-Ukrainian border war when the closing of the border kept me in Komjaty. In my mind, I could see Rozsi, Babi, and me sitting in the kitchen listening to the sounds of gunfire in the distance. I was so afraid, I wanted to run and hide. But Babi sat very calmly in her chair reading her prayer book. I looked to her face with each explosion; not once did she wince, but just kept on quietly reading the prayer. And the next day when I had seen the bodies of the soldiers floating in the Rika, and had run home to Babi, filled with fear and confusion, I remembered how gently she had calmed me. And when Grandpa died, she had come out of the bedroom and said softly, “God took him to Himself.”

“Why did He take away my grandpa?” I had asked.

“Because we are all His,” she answered. “We are only here to do His work, and when we finish, He takes us back to Him.”

I thought then that God must be very selfish, but had begun to understand that Babi's strength came from inside her, from her faith. I tried to trust and to accept things the way she did, but I couldn't feel Him anywhere, especially not now.

17

I
BOYA'S CONCERNED VOICE
interrupted my mind's wanderings. “Mother has been gone for two hours. I wish she had let me go with her.”

“What do you think will happen to us now that the Germans are taking over? Will we become refugees, too?” I asked.

“There is no other place to run. Hungary was the last country to give in to Hitler's demands about the Jews.”

Mother did not return until half-past one. She came in carrying a large brown paper package tied with string. Her face was white, her eyes murky and dark.

“Children,” she said, “the Germans are parked in our temple courtyard. They have taken it over as their head-quarters. I have just spoken to them. I conversed with German officers.” She set the parcel of matzos on the floor and walked over to the chair. She did not look at us, but stared straight ahead as she continued to talk.

“As I came through the courtyard gate, they were asking if anyone spoke German. I could have pretended not to understand. I don't know what possessed me, but I said, ‘
Ich spreche Deutsch.
' Can you imagine me offering to help them? An officer waved me in and asked me to direct him to the Juden Bureau. I started to give him directions, but he said, ‘Come in the car and show us.' I had no choice. He told me to sit in the front with the driver, and he sat down in the back seat. So I am inside a car and riding with two Germans. The officer sitting in the back asked me questions about the different places we passed.”

“Could you answer all his questions in German?” I asked.

“Not very well, but he seemed to understand. He made me come into the Bureau in case he needed me to translate. I got some looks from the men as we walked in. I wasn't sure whether or not they recognized me. Mr. Hirsch welcomed us in as if we were important expected guests and pulled up some chairs for us. Once I heard Mr. Hirsch's German, I knew that they would not need me, but I sat and listened anyway.”

“What did you find out?”

“First they talked about where they would be staying and about provisions for the soldiers. Then the officer said that they had locked the old men at prayer in the synagogue and would release them for an agreed sum of money. Mr. Hirsch did not seem surprised. God only knows who is in there or how long they might keep them. They were sitting and discussing it as though it were a simple business transaction involving merchandise. Then they talked about dividing the city into districts. They studied a map, and looked at a list of names that Mr. Hirsch gave them, and the German officer put red marks on the map for each of the names. I couldn't follow the reason for the red marks. Then I jumped up from the chair and said, ‘I must go home to my children.'

“The officer, whose name had been mentioned several times by then—von Heckendorff—jumped up, too, and shook my hand and said, ‘
Danke schön, Frau
…' and waited for me to supply my name. ‘Da-vid-o-vitch,' I said, giving it the Russian pronunciation. Thank God our name isn't Cohen or something like that, or I would have had to think very fast and lie. As it was, I did not look at Mr. Hirsch or at any of the other men. I left quickly. I ran all the way back to the temple yard, through the market, and ducked into the matzos stall. Mr. Heller could not believe that I had come to pick up the matzos.

“‘It is a dead giveaway,' he said. ‘If they pick you up with them, they will know; your clothes will not help.'

“All the packages were stacked against the wall waiting to be picked up. They had finished baking and packing the matzos before the Germans got here. I put down my thirty pengö, picked up my matzos, and stepped right back into the marketplace. I waited by a stall for a few minutes, and when I saw that no one was nearby, I ran. Luckily, the Germans are so disorganized and worn out by last night's carousing that they are not yet aware of the matzos stall. But I saw some of the soldiers walking through the market, helping themselves to whatever caught their fancy, so it won't be long before they find out about the matzos.”

Later that day, two yeshiva students came to ask for money to make up the ransom for the old men locked in the synagogue. Mother opened her purse.

“What is the ransom?” she asked.

“Twenty thousand pengö,” one of the students replied.

Mother turned her purse upside down over the kitchen table. She smoothed out some bills and gathered up the change. “Twenty thousand pengö! I'm afraid that my seventeen pengö and change won't make much of a dent in that amount.”

“We are also asking for jewelry and other valuables,” the other student said.

“I have already given those things away,” Mother replied, and the students left, thanking her for her contribution.

Toward evening, Mr. Hirsch came from the Juden Bureau. I let him in and Mother jumped as he came through the kitchen door.

“What are you doing out? It is past curfew.”

“I am on special permission.” Mr. Hirsch pointed to his white armband. “We just aren't getting close to the twenty thousand pengö demand, so we are going out ourselves, hoping to find people more generous to us than they were to the students.”

“Clever, aren't they, the Germans, the way they have us following their orders,” Mother commented bitterly. “You giving them names of important townspeople—working one Jew against the other.”

“What choice is there?” Mr. Hirsch protested. “We hope that our appointments will give us some bargaining power—to ease the blow, so to speak. And what were you doing there today, dressed as a peasant woman? We weren't really sure it was you until you gave your name. What a chance you took! What were you doing out?”

“I have children. They need to eat,” Mother said, walking Mr. Hirsch into the salon. They stayed in there and talked for a while. Mother came back to the kitchen without her pearl earrings. They were part of her features and she looked bare without them.

“You gave him your earrings!” Iboya, like me, had noticed their absence at once.

“That is all I had left to give,” Mother said to us as she walked Mr. Hirsch to the gate.

*   *   *

The day of Passover Eve, Mother decided to send me over to the Gerbers to find out how they were. I was afraid to go.

“By myself?” I asked.

“It is broad daylight. It is three hours before curfew time and things have quieted down,” Mother said. “You are still a child, they won't question you, but we will dress you up just in case.” She sat me down and unwound my braids. Instead of the usual side part, she made a part in the middle of my head and rebraided my hair. Then she took the black peasant shawl and tied it covering part of my head and crisscrossed it under my arms with a knot in the small of my back. After surveying me a moment, she said, “Take off your shoes. Go barefoot. It is not cold. Once you start walking, you'll be all right. Skip to keep warm if you have to.”

She gave a demonstration, skipping across the kitchen. She called Iboya in from where she sat in Lilli's chair watching Sandor and Joli at play in the sandbox. “What do you think?” Mother asked her after Iboya had come into the kitchen. “I am sending Piri to look in on the Gerbers. They would not dare to wander out of their house.”

“Her feet are too clean. Otherwise, she looks like a peasant girl.”

“Good. I would like to send them some of the matzos for their seder, but I don't dare send her out with matzos on her.”

“They don't believe in Passover anyway,” I said. But to make it just a little special, Mother brushed the white sprouts off four shriveled potatoes, poured some sunflower oil into a little flask, and tied it all up into a small bundle.

“They can have some pancakes out of them. I wish I had an egg. Don't tell them about my going for the matzos. Say we are fine and that as soon as things calm down, we'll get together. Don't go by Main Street near the synagogue. Take the long way. And you are to come right back! Rub some dirt on your feet in the yard; I'll be right out to give you a final looking over.”

Still apprehensive, but curious to see if Beregszász had changed, I let Mother push me through the gate. The sun was warm, and the chestnut trees lining both sides of our street were covered with tight buds ready to burst out into shiny leaves. The cement sidewalk, hard and coarse under my feet, felt strange. I had walked barefoot in Komjaty so many summers, but this sensation was different. I was a peasant child in the city. I wondered if Molcha would feel strange if she were walking here now, if she would stare at the colorful brick and stucco houses and look into the modern shop windows. Two German soldiers appeared with rifles on their shoulders, coming toward me. I knew that I could not look frightened. I kept walking at the same pace, and they passed by me silently.

Approaching Dr. Feher's house, I heard loud voices and, as I came closer, saw people all over the yard. I wandered into the courtyard and soon heard the reason for the gathering of the crowd. Dr. Feher was dead. German soldiers had broken into his house last night and violated the women—both his wife and his daughter. He could no longer bear to live, he wrote in a note, and then shot himself with a hunting rifle.