The County of Birches (6 page)

Liliana noticed too, but she refused to credit what she saw. Why, just last week Gabi was able to stand through most of the Shabbat prayers,
davening
like a little man. They adhered strictly to the regime set out by the doctor in nearby Debrecen, from whom they had sought a second opinion. He had assured them that with the support of the corset and the plaster cast on his bed, Gabi's back would straighten. She would not believe what her eyes told her. Surely Gabi's condition could not have so deteriorated in a few short weeks that he could barely manage two steps up into the box on the carriage. The Lord who had spared Abraham his Isaac would not take from her her firstborn child.

Szedrás stewed. The scene was not playing as he'd imagined. He had pictured his nephews in the beautifully appointed replica, but with handsome Bandi up in the box and Gabi's disability disguised inside the carriage. The striking equipage would first, at a princely pace, circle the great courtyard, then Bandi would urge the ponies into a canter and weave them masterfully between the buildings, demonstrating to all who looked on what this family had become. But there was Gabi weak as a worm, teetering over the reins. It was an unbearable mockery. “He's going to make a laughingstock of us!” Szedrás exploded.

Gabi sat on the box precariously, almost swaying from the effort it had taken to get up there. His hand clasped the reins like a life line. He had not realized how tightly he held on until his hand throbbed inside the leather casing. When the ponies tugged, the leather bit his skin. Poor creatures, Csapati thought, it was a wonder the boy didn't cut their mouths, he leaned on the reins so heavily.

“Let go,” Bandi prompted from inside the carriage. Gabi knew he should unwrap his hand from the leather bandage, but even this seemed an effort.

*   *   *

Gábor's voice dropped somewhat, as though he were about to say something off the record. “I had for a while felt my strength fading, but a child does not understand. I obediently surrendered myself to the regime of the corset and the cast that the Debrecen doctor said would heal my condition. Naturally I believed in what my parents thought best.

“The surgeon in Budapest whom my dear father had first consulted was a specialist in pediatric orthopedics, but what he had prescribed was so risky and impractical my parents recoiled from the procedure. I was to be brought to him every few months and he would drain the pus from the abscess in my spine. ‘And how exactly, Honourable Doctor, do you propose to drain the abscess?' my father had asked, blanching before he even heard the response. But the famous doctor guaranteed nothing. Not how many times it would be necessary to pierce my spinal column, nor a complete recovery. He made no assurances.

“My beloved parents chose the less radical treatment recommended by the second doctor in nearby Debrecen. It was wartime, no simple journey to Budapest. There were long delays and disruptions along the rails, with military transports taking precedence over civilian travel. My parents made the reasonable decision.

“I felt my strength wane, but a boy entrusts himself to his elders. My mother believed fervently in the usefulness of the corset. At that time any form of surgery was feared like the plague and to be avoided at any cost; yes, any. My grandmother, Grandfather Aron's beloved wife, had left him a widower with twelve motherless children because she refused to let an aggravated hernia be operated on. And Grandfather Aron himself would in due course succumb to diabetes he treated with no more than the mineral waters at the Carlsbad spa. Before their eyes I withered until finally, in desperation, my beloved father wrapped me in blankets and almost carried me, alternating between horse and buggy, and rail, and lastly from the outskirts of Budapest by motor car, to the great surgeon in the capital who brutally accused him: ‘You call yourself a father, Mr. Weisz. In my eyes you are a murderer.'”

“But as you can see,” Gábor resumed a heavier tone, “my dear father did not kill me with a tenderness that had only tried to spare me pain. For from then on we travelled regularly to Budapest, wartime notwithstanding, both of us imagining all the way the dreadful needle. He did not kill me after all, for the famous Budapest surgeon was not famous for nothing. In Budapest today the clinic is called the National Children's Institute, but people still refer to it as the Berek Klinika. They no longer care who Károly Berek was, but here, a continent, an ocean and a lifetime away, an indebted former patient remembers.”

*   *   *

“Gee-yup!”

“Fool!” Csapati spat into his moustache. Szedrás had sprung from the house, spurring the carriage to a start with a smart smack to the hindquarters of the white pony. The eager heads of the animals arched forward as they broke suddenly into step, jerking Gabi from the seat he had just laboriously gained. From the house it looked to Liliana that her child dangled from the reins like an entangled marionette. Her heart leapt into her mouth, displacing words of prayer. Realizing his error in judgement, Szedrás tried to intercept the animals, but they were strong and quick and relieved to get going.

“Stay down! Down!” Csapati shouted at Bandi, who tried from inside the carriage to grab hold of his older brother. “Down!” Csapati yelled, running from the stable towards the bolting ponies. He knew the carriage must be too light for the combined strength of the animals, and would tip like a rowboat if rocked from within.

But Bandi heard nothing over the whir of the wheels. He stretched out for Gabi, then pitched sideways when, headed off by Csapati, the animals slowed and veered into a turn. Liliana watched helplessly as the carriage tipped over, spilling her children. Szedrás caught Bandi as he hurtled out and hit the ground running. Little Miki rolled into the dust. But Gabi and the ponies were still bound together. Liliana didn't remember leaving the house, but she was standing over Gabi, whose little hands were tangled in the reins. Her own hands fluttered. She couldn't bring herself to look at her son, only his trapped hands. If she looked at him he might be broken, his delicate limbs twisted unnaturally. He might be bleeding. As long as she didn't look at him, she could still think of him as whole. She concentrated on his hands. She had to do something about his hands. Someone was screaming but she refused to hear. Trembling, the maternal fingers unwound her child's from their noose. Then, stopping her ears with silence, she followed on rubber legs while Csapati carried the sobbing boy back to the house.

*   *   *

That was the first of the tumbles taken by all the children in the család. The pony carriage became a popular attraction to visiting cousins. It balanced well enough when hitched to just one of the ponies, but the children couldn't resist their beautiful pairing, nor the added thrill of going as fast as possible without tipping over. Home on leave from the emperor's Hussars, Uncle Szedrás was often rewarded with the sight of a pretty, ringletted cousin, the ribbons of her straw hat flying behind her as with one hand she clasped her hat, and with the other steadied herself on the rattling door of the racing carriage. Little Miki's ringlets, too, whipped behind him as he flicked the reins or snapped the silver-handled lash above his head.

Gábor drew meaning from his accident, as he was inclined to do from all his experiences. “I look back on my carriage accident as the first intimation of my family's slide from grace, but it was, for me personally, a blessing. As she followed the coachman who carried me in his arms, my dear mother had to admit in her heart the seriousness of my disease. Bruised and terrified, from that point on, I stopped hiding my discomfort. It seemed to the family that my condition had worsened with alarming speed. The uncles and aunts openly referred to me as ‘poor darling.'

“During my early years a polite but recurring debate had waged between my parents over how we boys should be educated. It came swiftly to an end. There was no question now of sending me, the cripple, away to school. And because the natural inclination within the család was to do things ‘en bloc,' so to speak, my brothers too stayed on the Tanya.

“Talmud-Torah scholars were available by the dozen. Grandfather Aron had his pick of the best. Soon a brilliant tutor and his family were established in a Tanya farmhouse to teach the Weisz boys the ancient wisdom of our people. For almost a decade this was the only formal learning from which we benefited. My beloved father had cherished a dream of a secular education for his sons, but édes Anyuka mistrusted gentile thought. Her cause was furthered by our studying at home, since secular scholars did not wander, hungry, around the countryside like itinerant yeshiva bochers. No professor could be found to meet my father's specifications.

“During that childhood decade, the Great War raged and reduced the Austro-Hungarian empire. An aborted Bolshevik uprising forced the család to abandon the Tanya for a brief period, and seek refuge with relations in the capital. The Romanians occupied the country temporarily, which we took note of principally through an eruption of my Uncle Szedrás's outrage that resulted in a duel between him and one of the local Romanian constabulary and, to smooth things out, the near depletion of Grandfather Aron's reserves, already taxed heavily by wartime demands. But it was as though history stormed around us while we enjoyed a perpetual calm. For us boys, tutored and raised at home, childhood was an arbour of familial doting. We felt that no matter what went on outside, we were protected and blessed.

“It is best not to ask too many questions. My devout mother held that the Lord would not take me. And she was right. He did not. But it was my beloved father's faith, finally, in secular learning that overruled their fear of surgery and had him rush me to the surgeon who saved my life. I was saved. My life endured, the one that had hung by a thread. All the others, sturdy stalks that bloomed and bore fruit that was the finest of its kind, the others burned to the ground.

“Perhaps Abraham's love for Isaac was a big mistake. The Lord required a sacrifice, and He would have it one way or another.”

Looking directly at me, Gábor demanded, as though I had challenged him, “
Why
did the család not know? Why did we brothers not realize if we were so smart? And we were. Dreadfully clever. My beloved father in due course achieved his dream for our education. An illustrious instructor,
tanár-úr
Hász, was lured from the Debrecen
föiskola
—secondary school—no doubt induced by a handsome offer from my grandfather, who indulged my father like one of his own. By then I was a young man of fifteen who had long since discarded the corset and could tramp the Tanya fields like any other gentleman farmer. To Hásztanár's credit, within four years the Weisz brothers, all three of us, were accepted, despite the quotas restricting Jewish enrolment, into the Debrecen Académia. Even I with my tone-deaf ear became more fluent in Latin than the gentile students, for the entrance requirements to the Académia were much stricter for Jews. Very smart. Eventually all three of us graduated with honours, and Miki went on to Vienna to earn his Doctorate of Law.

“The name Szemes was a curse. We prided ourselves on clear-sightedness, the ability to see past the limitations of sand and poverty to a vision of an irrigated oasis in the desert. But it blinded us from seeing what is evident even to the eyes of a child, what
you
can see for yourself—that we should have used whatever influence we enjoyed to make the sacrifice. We should have given up everything and run for our lives. Indeed we were szemes, the kind of corn fodder that is turned back into the earth to enrich it.

“Csapati the coachman said something to me once that I will never forget. By then he was old and bald except for the rag of a moustache he still chewed like a nagging riddle. I had found my way home. The skin that hung on my bones was good only for lice. At the beginning of February I had left the Tanya for what I assumed would be my last service in slave labour. The Russians were on our doorstep. The Americans had landed in the west. Germany would get squeezed from both sides. My little daughter Clárika hung from my neck and I felt her breath on my cheek sweet and light and more perfect than a kiss. For the first time since the outbreak of war my heart didn't crack as I held her. The end was in sight. ‘When you come back…,' she whispered, but I didn't let her finish. I wouldn't let her make her promise, because the promise was mine. I hugged her with a kind of joy, promising it would be the last time I would have to tell her good-bye.

“Winter was yet to come when I returned in November. There had been neither spring nor summer. The seasons had stopped. The land lay fallow. Since mid-March I had received no response to my sporadic letters. No more letters reached me listing the family's confiscations and shortages. No reports of my brothers at their labour camp postings. No childish drawings. I could tell I had stumbled onto Tanya ground because the soil when I stooped to touch it was hard and cracked, not crumbly as Nyirség sand. The Tanya was bare except for a bent figure also scratching in the dust. It rose to the sound of my shuffling approach, thinking in that chewing way with its mouth.

“‘Csapati, don't you know me?' I asked.

“‘Know you, Master Gabi? Who knows anyone now? Recognize you? Perhaps.'

“I opened my hands. Speechlessly I indicated the Tanya, afraid to ask what had happened here.

“He raised an eyebrow, squinting with shrewd intelligence and trying to guess what I knew to be fact and what I only surmised. I knew the Germans in retreat had hauled away a last catch in their deadly net. All trains had headed east. My labour detachment too had advanced towards Germany. The relentless eastwards march showed me I had no alternative but to desert. I escaped, but that is another story for another day. Few were as lucky. Bandi, my beloved brother, I later learned suffocated in a copper mine on the Yugoslav border. I found out too that Miki, the család's pride, home on an unexpected leave, was rounded up with the rest. You ask me why I am always so gloomy at this time of year. This is it. There is a period before winter when the earth is barren, not festooned in snow and ice, nor brimming with harvest. Merely over and done with. It was at that time of year that I returned to the Tanya. Neither autumn nor winter, but what over here they call aptly the fall.