Love and Treasure (13 page)

His hand hovered in the air over her head. He wanted to touch her, to smooth her hair and cup her cheek in the palm of his hand, but he was afraid she might flinch.

He put his hand back in his lap. He knelt next to the bed, still and quiet, listening to her breathe, until one of the women brought him a stool. He sat on the stool and rubbed his knees where they ached from the floor. He extended one leg, and his stiff knee cracked, a gunshot in the quiet room. Ilona’s eyelids flew open. After a moment, she closed them again.

He would just sit here next to her. He wouldn’t bother her. He wouldn’t touch her or speak to her or force himself on her in any way. He would just sit here and wait and show her by waiting that he would always be here, that she could trust him never to leave her alone.

He listened closely for her breath, matching her inhalations and exhalations with his own. He was not sure how long he sat; his sense of time was not as honed as his sense of direction. It might have been an hour, maybe more, maybe less.

The Hungarian woman came over with a tin cup of hot water in which she had mixed some of the soluble coffee Jack had given Ilona the last time he saw her. This woman was older than Ilona, anywhere between thirty and fifty, or perhaps a brutalized twenty-five. Her hair had grown back only in patches, the rest of her skull red and peeling, inadequately covered with a triangle of grass-green cloth. She had beautiful eyes, though. Deep and dark, with long sooty lashes. She set the cup of coffee on the floor next to the bed and began murmuring to Ilona. Gently she pulled Ilona up until the girl was sitting, bent over, her arms still wrapping her body, all the while murmuring in Hungarian, her voice low and rhythmic, like a song. She took Ilona’s hands and cupped Ilona’s cheeks, her fingertips pressing gently into the bruised circles under her eyes.

Ilona opened her mouth in a wide O, and Jack waited for her inevitable tears, but instead she sagged silently against the woman’s wasted bosom. The woman cocked her head at Jack, motioning him over with her chin. He shook his head, but she shifted Ilona’s weight to one of her arms and with the other grabbed his shirt, pulling him to her. Awkwardly, the placket of his shirt gripped in her iron hand, Jack moved from the stool to the bed. In one fluid motion, the woman transferred Ilona from her arms to his. She rose to her feet and walked swiftly away.

Ilona leaned on him only for a minute before lifting her head. She rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands.

“Etelka is dead,” she said flatly.

His emotions upon hearing the inevitability for which he’d been waiting for weeks and months were complex. He felt at once terribly sad for Ilona and relieved that the charade would end. He was both afraid and excited about the future that now opened before them. Would she leave Salzburg and return to Hungary? Would she go to England, or would she stay with him, come home with him? And through this complex fabric of emotions was woven a ribbon of something strange, even ridiculous. He was conscious of a peculiar disappointment, as if he, too, had been hoping against hope that Etelka could have survived.

Though he knew it was the last thing he should say, the last thing she’d want to hear, Jack said, “I’m sorry.”

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9
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DURING THE EARLY SUMMER
of 1937, when Ilona was ten years old and her sister, Etelka, was nearly twelve, the family Jakab repaired to Bad Gastein so that Mr. Jakab could relieve the pain of his arthritic knees in the restorative radon baths. It was the last of their yearly trips to this mountain village a couple of hours south of Salzburg. In March of 1938, Hitler invaded Austria, and they were no longer welcome. But in that last glorious summer, they took a suite of rooms at the Grand Hotel de l’Europe, one each for the parents, one for the girls and their nanny, and a sitting room for the mornings when they wished to enjoy their breakfast and the newspapers without changing out of their robes and slippers. It was their last family vacation, and Ilona remembered it as their last period of careless happiness, a year before Hungary’s new anti-Jewish laws changed their lives, four years before the first Jewish massacre in Hungary, twenty thousand refugees murdered in Kameniec-Podolsk.

The Grand was the queen mother of Bad Gastein’s spa hotels. A colossal Jugendstil confection of arched windows and ornate balconies, it dominated the landscape of the town. While Mr. Jakab occupied his mornings soaking in the waters and inhaling the toxic vapor that might eventually have killed him, had he only lived long enough, his wife and daughters hiked through the alpine meadows and up to the town’s waterfalls. The little girls wove garlands of wild daisies and brilliant purple gentians. In the afternoon the family promenaded along the main road or played croquet on the great lawn of the hotel.

In Nagyvárad their father was often distracted by his business concerns, but in Bad Gastein, Ilona and Etelka enjoyed hours of his undivided attention. They dined beneath the gilded ceiling of the hotel dining room, long languid meals untroubled by discussions of fluctuating wheat prices and the effects of the weather on crops. The family Jakab had last been truly happy in Bad Gastein, and so it was there that Ilona asked Jack to take her when she found out that Etelka was dead. Jack agreed right away, thinking it possible that distraction might be an adequate substitute for comfort and a fond memory a way to feel anguish and still survive.

The Grand Hotel was the first thing they saw upon arriving in the town. To his surprise, Ilona had no interest in exploring the lobby. Instead, she led him out onto the expanse of packed snow and earth that had once been lawn. He tried to argue that it was too cold for a picnic, but she told him that her sister had always loved to picnic on the lawn, so picnic they would. She spread a tarp on the ground, opened a can of Spam, and sliced it, arranging the processed meat on pieces of bread and dotting the sandwiches with a tiny bit of the precious black-market mustard for which she had traded six U.S. Army oat bars and two packets of cigarettes. For dessert he had finagled a jam roll, and this she cut in two equal pieces.

He finished eating before she did. He leaned back on his elbow and watched her. She took large, methodical bites, chewed them gravely, and, upon swallowing, immediately opened her mouth for another. She ate no less than normal, finishing her own sandwich and the half of his that he offered, but she took none of her usual pleasure in her food. She was just chewing and swallowing, and taking another bite.

At this altitude the air was thin and crisp and smelled of snow. The sun shone overhead, and he tipped his head back to warm his face. Ilona, pale and freckled, hid from both the cold and the glare of the winter sun beneath a floppy U.S. Army winter cap. The hat was too big, and the buckled earflaps drooped to her neck as though she’d taken cover beneath the flap of a tent.

She looked, he thought, like the tomboy she had been. She had told him stories of how she and Etelka had passed the long summer days at their family cottage in Siófok on Lake Balaton, riding ponies through the countryside, bathing in the lake, and sleeping outside on a blanket spread on the grass in the garden, staring at the stars. He wished he could have known her then, the cosseted daughter of a wealthy family that spent their summers in the mountains and their holidays in elegant spas. He wished he’d been able to see her home in Nagyvárad, to understand how her family had lived, to know what paintings decorated their walls, what food they ate, what the view was from her bedroom window. He wished he had known her before she was broken and her world was broken. But perhaps part of what he loved about her was her very brokenness. After all, it was Ilona as she was right now with whom he was obsessed.

“Are you finished?” Ilona asked him.

“Yes.”

She gathered up the remains of their sandwiches. He stilled her hands
and put his arm around her, moving her close to his side. She stiffened for a moment and then relaxed against him. He pressed his lips to her hair. As deep as her grief was, he felt able to relieve her of its burden. Or at the very least share it with her.

He said, “Is it very different from what you remember?”

“Everything is different,” she said.

Something about the way the thin winter sun warmed the fabric of his pants suddenly made him conscious of a stirring in the folds of his army-issue boxer shorts. He froze, willing his erection to subside, but the increasing intensity of his attention only served to make matters worse. This had happened to him before when out with Ilona, but only in circumstances where it had been easy to disguise. He’d hidden his boner beneath restaurant tablecloths, shoved his fists into his pockets and bent over slightly while walking, flipped onto his belly when stretched out on the grass. None of these maneuvers was available to him now. He sat on the freezing ground, his legs out before him and crossed at the ankle, the fabric at the crotch of his pants bunched as if strategically to magnify not only the rise but the rising as his penis shifted and waved and grew.

He was so embarrassed he shut his eyes and thus missed her reaction. He thought, after what she said next, that it was not too much to assume that she might have looked at him fondly, patiently, even if, the day she found out about Etelka’s death, it was too soon to expect a smile.

She stood up. “Come,” she said, holding out her hand.

He grabbed the tarp and the remains of their lunch and let her lead him back to the truck. The canvas flap was pinned up. She climbed into the back, unsnapped one side of the canvas, unrolled it, and lowered it to meet the tailgate. Then she lowered the other side of the flap and disappeared behind this fallen curtain into the mysterious dark of her intentions. He wanted to spring up into the truck like a pole-vaulter, but was that what she really wanted? Was she even in her right mind? What kind of a man would take advantage of a girl who had just found out that every last person she loved was dead?

He hovered, knotted up by his own ambivalence. Who was he, he thought, to decide what was best for her? Of course she wanted him now, in the wake of what had happened, because only he could comfort her. He was all she had. This was the justification he clung to as he climbed into the truck and let the canvas fall closed behind him.

Later in his life he would remember little of what followed. He would forget the way the pale green light seeping through the seams of the
canvas bathed Ilona’s skin like the sheer gossamer of a bridal veil, hiding her scars and pocks, the patches of discoloration and dryness on her back and legs. He would forget the heat of her body in the freezing air, the surprising heft of her ass, the dry rasp of her vagina as he pushed into her, her suppressed whimper, or the way she locked her heels around his waist and pulled him deeper inside. He would forget that she bit him, leaving a mark on his shoulder that took weeks to fade. He would forget how quickly he came, how, when he pulled out, his semen pulsed onto her belly as he buried his face in her neck.

He would remember only what happened after. The way she got to her feet and wiped herself with a corner of the tarp that had served as a picnic blanket. He would remember the way she slipped her dress over her head, wrapped herself in her coat, and, looking down at the bed of the truck as she searched for her shoes, said matter-of-factly, “There is no blood.”

Was she wondering at the lack of blood or telling him not to bother to look for any? He could not ask and would never learn if he had been the first man she’d lain with, or if there had been others before him, back home in Nagyvárad or, as horrible as it was to imagine, in her year in the camps.

“Come here,” he said, sitting up. “Come sit with me.”

She hesitated and then sat down next to him, and he was conscious of the contrast between them, his body, naked below the waist, her clothed one.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Was it … good?”

She brushed her lips against his, and he relaxed. It was enough of an answer, he thought.

“Should we see the rest of the town?” he said.

“I want to go back.”

“Okay.”

As he pulled away from the hotel, she lifted her foot into her lap, pulled off her shoe and her sock, and shook out a pebble. He had never before seen her bare foot, so it was the first time he understood the source of her limp, the slight hitch in her step. Her foot was ruined. Her pinkie toe and the one next to it were gone, and in their place was a lumpy purple-red scar. Her first and second toes had no nails, and the nail beds were puffy and swollen. Without their nails they hardly looked like toes, just small
appendages of flesh and bone. Her middle toe, however, was perfect. It was long and slender, curved slightly, with an opalescent shell of a nail.

A thick, gray callus stretched from her heel up to the back of her ankle. It was cracked at the joint, revealing tender red tissue.

“Wooden shoes,” she said. “Mine were too small.” She ran her fingers lightly over her toes. “And then frostbite. The American doctor who cut off my toes told me I was lucky not to have gangrene.”

“I’m sorry,” Jack said.

“Again with the apologies. What do you think, Jack? You are Hitler? You are Horthy Miklós? It’s your fault what happened to us?”

The harshness of her tone shocked him. All he could think to say was “Who is Horthy Miklós?”

“Horthy, our regent. Who was supposed to protect us. He murdered us, not you. You liberated us. It’s not your fault my family is dead. It is your fault I am alive.”

He realized then that he had misread her terribly, that what had passed between them had not been Ilona seeking comfort in his arms but just another punishment she had inflicted on herself.

She owed her survival only to happenstance, but he was willing to take responsibility for the deaths of her parents and sister. He had not come in time. He had not joined the army until 1944, until after he’d graduated from college and received his commission. He’d waited until it was convenient, as the world had waited, choosing to let the Jews of Europe be a carcass thrown as a sacrifice to distract the wolf while the hunters took their time readying their bows.