Love and Treasure (20 page)

“I don’t understand you.”

“Of course you don’t understand. How could you? You are a lucky boy from America. You don’t know anything.”

“I know what happened to you.”

“Do you?”

“Yes.”

“You think you know. But you don’t really know how I lived for almost a year.”

“Yeah, well, I spent a year getting shot at by Germans, and you know what? That was no goddamn picnic, either.”

Even as he said it, Jack knew that if this was the game they were doomed to play, he had already lost. In the hierarchy of horrors, as dreadful as his were, they were far down the list. Jack imagined a chart. Color coded, with rows and columns, figures and values. Picking up his first sergeant’s helmet after a mortar blast and finding inside the rubbery gray remains of the man’s brain was worth a few points, he supposed, but fewer than inhaling the dust of your mother’s burned body. Being stripped of your clothes, forced to wear nothing more than a dead woman’s torn blouse, the shredded shirttails barely covering your ass as you stood at attention hour after hour, the sun raising blisters on the top of your shorn scalp: ten points. The blood of your final menstrual period dripping down your thighs as you waited to be selected for death or another day of starvation? Another five. Scrambling to dig a foxhole in the frozen dirt while mortar shells whistle down around your ears: two points, at most. Taking cover beneath the dead body of your best friend?
Four more points. Or perhaps five. If there were actuaries in the world who could accurately assess the worth of a man’s life, surely someone could determine the value of his misery.

He said, “The people Yuval works for, in Palestine? The Jewish Agency people? These are the very same people who are telling the U.S. government not to send the property from the train back to Hungary. They’re the same people, do you understand? You were so angry at them. You said they were stealing your bicycle.”

“No. I said you were stealing my bicycle.”

“We aren’t stealing anything.” He paused. “Okay, yes. The U.S. brass are stealing stuff from the train. But they’ll give it all back.” Even as he said it, Jack knew this was at best a pathetic hope, at worst a bald-faced lie. When had the brass ever given anything back?

He continued, “It’s not the U.S. Army’s fault that the property hasn’t been given back. If it weren’t for the Jewish Agency, we would have sent the train back to Hungary by now. Your friend Yuval’s bosses are telling the U.S. Army to sell the contents of the train and give them the money instead of sending it back to Hungary.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about. Why would they do that?”

“For the money! You think this huge immigration project of theirs is free? Yuval and his buddies are buying trucks and boats and weapons. They’ve got to bribe every Italian bureaucrat between the Alps and the Mediterranean. Not to mention what it costs to feed and train all the refugees in the camps along the way. Yuval’s American cigarettes alone cost more than your bicycle.”

“You know where I think my bicycle is, Jack?”

He sighed.

“I think a nice Romanian lady in Oradea is right now riding my Jewish bicycle home from work. Maybe she works in a bakery stolen also from Jews. Maybe she lives in a house stolen from Jews. Or maybe not. Maybe she has lived all her life in her house, and it is only her sister who stole a Jewish house. This kind Romanian lady, she took only a Jewish bicycle.”

“Ilona!” Yuval called. “It’s time to go.”

Urgently, Jack said, “The Romanians are horrible. And the Hungarians, they’re horrible, too. I don’t think you should go back there. But Yuval and the rest of them aren’t your answer. Palestine isn’t your answer. You don’t need to become a martyr. Come with me instead!”

“Come with you where?”

“Home. To New York.”

“You want me to come live with you in New York City?”

“Yes.”

“Because in New York City they love so much the Jews?”

“New York is full of Jews.”

Tzipi and Micha swung up into their truck, slamming the doors. He had no time.

Ilona said, “You know what the Hungarians called Budapest before the war?”

“No.”

“Jew-dapest.”

“It’s different. Please, Ilona!”

“In New York I will not be the dregs of Europe?”

Jack tried to imagine his parents seeing Ilona for the first time. His fastidious father pursing his narrow lips at the sight of her crippled foot, his warm but neurotic mother reduced to tears by the crooked tattoo, the number
A11436
etched in blue on the freckled skin of her arm, a few inches below the crease of her elbow. He thought of the girls he’d dated in college, the bookish ones in their headbands and plaid kilts, with whom he’d exchanged chaste kisses in the library stacks, the jolly AEPhi girls in their green-and-white sweaters, with their bouncing curls and their sturdy legs. The racy downtown girls, their mouths tasting of cigarettes and red wine, who’d occasionally let him slip his fingers beneath the elastic of their panties as they necked in the dark corners of bars and cafés. Would these girls be Ilona’s friends? What would all these cheerfully clueless people make of this dark and lonely girl with her bitter laugh?

He said, “In New York you’ll be my wife. Ilona. Marry me.” He belatedly dropped to the ground, on one knee.

“My God, Jack! Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“You fell.”

“I didn’t fall. I’m kneeling. Ilona. Please. Marry me.”

“Oh, get up. For God’s sake, get up.”

He scrambled to his feet, wiped the dirt from his knees. He felt ridiculous.

“Jack,” Ilona said. “I am not a foolish girl.”

“I know that,” he said.

“I know what Yuval and the others are doing. I know they are fighting
a battle for Palestine and that we are a weapon in this war. I know they look at us and think,
Why are you alive when so many others are dead?
I know they wonder, Did this one steal bread? Did that one betray his friends? Was this one a
Kapo
, is that why she is alive? I think the same. I ask the same questions. I know I’m not the best of my family. My sister, Etelka, she was much finer than I. She deserved more than me to live. So I am alive, and I am not the good one.”

“That’s not true!”

“No,” she agreed. “Or maybe yes. The others, maybe they’re not the good ones, either. Or maybe they are. I don’t know.”

“I love you, Ilona. I love you, and I want to marry you.”

“Once I was like you. I lived in a gossamer world, a tissue of lies, where things like love mattered. And that was all just blown away. Shredded and torn and destroyed. I don’t want to go with you to New York, where even you cannot promise me it is not the Jew-dapest of tomorrow. I want to go to Tel Aviv and live where everyone is Jewish, and if your neighbor steals your bicycle it is because he is a thief, not because he is an anti-Semite.”

“The British will never let you get to Tel Aviv.”

“Of course they will. You said so yourself. The world will not let them kill Hitler’s victims. They will not fire their guns on the few who survived.”

“They will!”

“Maybe once. Maybe they’ll kill one of us. Or two. Or ten. Maybe they will even kill me. But eventually we will win. Eventually they will have no choice but to give us the land.”

“Okay, let’s say you’re right. You’re still risking your life for people who despise you.”

“Everyone despises us. This maybe is the only lesson I have learned. Every single person despises the Jews, even the ones who say they don’t. Even the Jews themselves.” Again the bitter laugh. “Except Yuval and the others from Palestine. They despise us, but they don’t despise themselves. That is the miracle. A Jew who doesn’t hate himself.”

“I don’t despise you. I love you. And you love me. I know you do.”

“I don’t even know what that means anymore. How can I?”

“Are you saying you never loved me? You lied to me? You really did come to the warehouse and take me back because Aba Yuval needed an American military truck to smuggle DPs across the border? You made love to me to get my truck?”

The second truck started up, the engine gunning. She glanced over at it. In the faint moonlight her skin shone pale, and he imagined he could see the flutter of her pulse in her throat. He allowed himself to believe that she was fighting back tears, but when she looked up at him, her eyes were dry.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

He laughed then, a dark and bitter bark that he had learned from her. “Are you sad or apologetic?”

He left her there, walked around his truck, and swung himself into the driver’s seat. He wanted to look away but couldn’t, and so he watched as she crossed to the second truck, pulled aside the canvas curtain, and climbed inside. He waited for her to look back, to acknowledge everything that had passed between them, but she never did. So much did he loathe the idea of spending even another minute in Yuval’s presence that he considered leaving him in the rutted field in northern Italy to make his own way back to Salzburg. But in the end Jack did, as always, the honorable thing.

•
15
•

IT WAS NOT UNTIL
they were knee to knee at a small table in the Centrál Kávéház that Amitai asked her name.

“Natalie,” she said, then hesitated. “Stein.”

“You’re not sure?” he said.

“It’s Natalie Stein.”

“Because you sound like a woman who has given an alias.”

She had hair the color of blood oranges, a head of coils and ringlets that shone bright amid the neobaroque splendor of the coffeehouse. She had bunched her curls up on top of her head as though to banish them for being so outrageous, affixing them with a cracked tortoiseshell clip. Her skin was pale and dappled with freckles that were the same color as her hair, like shoes dyed to match a dress. Amitai allowed his eyes to follow the trail of freckles to the point at which they disappeared into the deep V-neck of her shirt. Indeed he could not prevent them from doing so.

“It’s just that I recently changed it. It was Friedman for a little while, but now it’s back to Stein.”

“Divorce?” he asked. She looked barely thirty, at least a decade younger than he was. It surprised him that someone so young could have already made such a serious mistake.

“Yes.”

“So am I. Though my ex-wife is still Shasho. But then her maiden name is Cattan, which in Hebrew means ‘little,’ and she always resented the irony.”

“She’s not little?”

He smiled. “She is beautiful and shapely and thus, like all women who do not look like survivors of famine, despises herself.”

“You think all women despise themselves?”

“I think a woman who has the kind of body a man enjoys invariably hates it.”

He thought it best not to mention that it was the surprise discovery of Natalie’s heart-shaped ass, admirably
gadol
, that had inspired his invitation to join him at the coffeehouse, rather than discuss their mutual business
in the relatively more professional setting of Pétér Elek’s small shop off Váci Utca, on the Pest side of the Danube.

“And what kind of body does a man enjoy?” Natalie asked.

Though Amitai was not vain about his good looks, neither was he averse to taking advantage of the power conferred by them. He possessed a pair of electric blue eyes behind a tangle of long, dark lashes, lips so lush that they flirted with prettiness, and a square jaw with the barest hint of a cleft. Women always flirted with him, and so he was not surprised that Natalie’s words were flirtatious, as was the tip of her tongue as it delicately licked a bit of
dobos
torte from her fork. Yet there was something halting about her tone as she flirted, as if she were attempting to converse in a foreign language. For a moment it seemed she was batting her eyes at him from behind the layers of sponge cake, chocolate buttercream, and caramel, but then she gave that up and, with a small sigh, shoved a huge forkful into her mouth.

The waiter returned with two silver trays, each outfitted with a cup of coffee, a glass of water, and a cookie in a paper wrapping. He wore operetta livery, all brass buttons and gold frogging, but his cuffs were smeared with chocolate sauce. Amitai removed the cookie from the tray the waiter set before him and placed it on the edge of Natalie’s saucer.

“You’re not hungry?” she said.

“I don’t have much of a sweet tooth. How is your cake?”

She licked caramel from the prongs of her fork. “Mm,” she said. “So? You were saying?”

“What was I saying?”

“You were telling me what kind of body men like.”

“Was I? Actually I don’t think I was. There is not one kind of body all men like. Different men like different things. But most men, I think, prefer women who are shaped like women, not like small boys. We like hips and breasts.”

“Your wife had hips and breasts?”

“I think perhaps I have talked too much about my ex-wife. Tell me instead about the necklace. It belonged to your grandmother?”

It was the necklace—an unusual pendant, decorated with an enamel painting of a peacock, the tips of its feathers set in alternating stones of amethyst and peridot—that had brought them, and their kneecaps, together. Two days earlier, Amitai had received an urgent e-mail from his friend Pétér Elek, a dealer in jewelry and art, informing him that he
might have a lead on a painting that Amitai had been pursuing for the past few years. A young woman, Elek said, had visited his shop seeking information about the history of a pendant she had inherited. Elek had recognized the piece as similar, if not identical, to the one worn by the woman depicted in the painting. This was Amitai’s first break in the hunt for the
Portrait of Frau E
. Two days after Elek’s call, he was on a plane bound for Budapest.