The Wrong Boy (22 page)

“So the plan worked?”

Erika nodded. “They helped us onto the cart and drove us to their farm. They let us sleep in the stable and share the scraps they fed their pigs. We hid there till the Russians arrived. Then I came looking for you.”

“And Piri?” I held my breath. I imagined my teacher renting an apartment near the Karlsplatz and playing piano with the Vienna Philharmonic, or living near the Parc de la Villette and teaching piano at the Paris Conservatory.

“She’s headed for Italy and from there to Australia.”

“Australia?”

Erika nodded. “It’s as far away from Europe as you can get.” She turned towards me, her eyebrows raised. “We could join her. Or we could go somewhere else. New York. London. We can start again. I’ll go to university, you can play piano.”

I shook my head.

“Erika, we’ll need to get jobs. The money Papa left us … I dug up the ground. It’s …”

Erika’s face split into a smile. She lifted the mattress from the floor.

“Here?”

Under the mattress was Father’s biscuit tin. Erika tossed it to me. I pried open the lid and pulled out father’s pocket watch. 11.46 pm. It was still keeping time.

“Paris and New York sound wonderful.” I wrapped my arms around my sister’s narrow waist. “But we’re not going anywhere. Not till we’ve heard about
Anyu
and Papa.”

I dragged a mattress into the music room and we set up a makeshift home. We slept together between the piano and the wind instruments. We ate in the hall and showered on the third floor in the women’s gymnasium. I wanted to return to Hatvan Street and demand our apartment back, but Erika was against it. The military police wouldn’t help us and Erika had heard of too many Jews being chased from their homes. When Mr Faranc, our neighbour, forced his way back into apartment 12A, I begged Erika to reconsider. But when Mr Faranc’s body was found floating face down in Lake Bekas two days later, I dropped the subject.

The days snaked past slowly. Daylight lengthened, melting the last of the snow. We agreed not to mourn for our parents, not till we knew. We looked for their names on the first floor noticeboard every morning before breakfast and every evening before bed. We looked for them at the synagogue and at the doughnut shop in Hatvan Street. We put up posters at the train station. We celebrated Passover in March at the Community Centre and left two empty chairs at the Seder table, just in case. We set aside a bowl of chicken soup for
Anyu
and saved a slice of gefilte fish for Papa, but we celebrated the end of slavery under Pharoah – and our own liberation – alone.

I told Erika about Karl and our last days together. I didn’t tell her that remembering him hurt, or that I thought of him almost as often as I thought of
Anyu
and Papa.

“Karl did the right thing,” Erika told me, “and so have you. You had to let him go, for both your sakes.”

I tried to let him go. I tried to fill the emptiness with music. I practised piano every day. I played every composer Hitler banned, and every piece of music the commandant detested. I practised till my fingers hurt. With my weekly allowance from the relief fund I didn’t have to work, so I filled my days reading books and hiking in the hills. I did all the things I’d dreamed of doing in the camp. I picnicked in the park with friends. I went to the circus and taught myself to ride a bike. I went to my first wedding.

There were so many weddings in Debrecen, so many people looking to replace lost loves and lost children. I wasn’t looking to replace a lost love. I was looking for the old Hanna Mendel, the girl I used to be – the woman I was meant to become. So I let Michael trail after me as I wandered Debrecen’s laneways, and I let him accompany me to the park when I fed the ducks. I let him sit in the music room and watch me practise. It felt good being with someone who understood how I ached. It felt good being among my own people. After everything that had happened, I was still a Jew. Not because I’d been locked in a cattle train or branded with a tattoo. Baking challah with my mother, lighting the Sabbath candles, eating latkes on Chanukah – that’s what being a Jew meant.

I couldn’t run from it. And I didn’t want to.

The number of concentration camp survivors grew but my parents’ names didn’t appear on the list. In April, three camps in Germany – Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen and Dachau – were liberated, and the list on the first floor pin-board ran to six sheets. On the eighth of May 1945, Germany surrendered and the war was over. On the tenth of May the printed list of survivors was taken down.

Erika and I sat shiva that day. We mourned for our parents as Jewish custom demanded. We tore our clothes and sat on low stools and prayed to God to protect their souls. I didn’t play the piano. We didn’t go out. We clung to each other and the memories we shared: Father at his workbench, smiling over his spectacles; Mother in the kitchen humming to Bartok as she baked. We didn’t have photos to pore over. I couldn’t run to my mother’s dresser and inhale her perfume or fling father’s drawers open and find a scarf to put on. There were no mementos of their life with which we could comfort ourselves, no bits left behind, so we told each other stories and helped each other remember.

We hid in our cocoon, but we had to emerge eventually. After seven days of mourning we bathed and dressed. We lit a memorial candle and placed it on top of the piano beside Papa’s pocketwatch. I played Liszt’s
Hungarian Rhapsody
for my mother, and Erika sang my father’s favourite Yiddish lullaby, the same one he’d sung to us every night when we were young. We kept the pocketwatch to remember Father, and Mother’s wedding band to remember her, and buried the skullcap and prayer book by the lake in the Puszta forest.

I stood over the sad mound of dirt and tried not to cry.

“A gold watch and a wedding band,” I said. “That’s all we have left of them.” I looked at Erika. “Papa would have wanted a Jewish burial, like Opapa’s.”

“They were kept behind a brick wall in the ghetto and then locked in a barrack. I wouldn’t want them in a box in the ground,” Erika said.

I looked up at the sky and tried to imagine my parents hovering somewhere above the hunger and pain, stretching their legs and fanning out their arms on their way to the next life.

“They’re free,” I said.

Erika nodded.

I found a smooth, grey stone and placed it on the mound of dirt, a piece of Debrecen, a rock to last for all time.

“We’ll never forget you,” I whispered. “We’ll live the lives you wanted us to live. We’ll make you proud.”

When Michael asked me to accompany him to a moonlight concert three days later, I said yes, because my parents had always liked Michael, and because it made sense. We’d lived through the same experience and been on the same side. I knew it was a date. I’d promised to live the life my parents wanted me to live, so I agreed.

“I’ll meet you at the park at six,” Michael said, his grin as wide as the Balaton river.

“It’s a date,” I said, trying to mirror his mood.

And then he looked me in the eye and said, “I know you’ve always dreamed of performing in Paris and I’d never stop you chasing your dreams.” His stare unglued me. “They have an orchestra in Palestine, a fully equipped symphony orchestra.” His cheeks turned apple-red. “And an opera company and a broadcasting station.”

I forced myself to concentrate. The mere mention of the word opera had me back at the villa, daydreaming of Karl. He was standing over me, singing
Tristan and Isolde
. We were alone. He was stroking the back of my neck …

“You wouldn’t be the first concert pianist to settle in Palestine. Weissenberg is there, Kestenberg too.”

I escaped to the music room when he paused for breath. Erika found me in front of a mirror putting on lipstick.

“You can’t paint your smile on,” she said, taking the lipstick and sitting down. I sat down next to her. “You know Michael’s mad about you.”

I nodded.

“Is that what you want?”

“What I want?” I said, getting to my feet. I wanted to stop thinking about Karl. I wanted my old life back. I wanted to want Michael Wollner. “I want
Anyu
and Papa back.”
I want Karl to walk through that door
. I grabbed my jacket from a peg on the door and my bag from the bed. “It doesn’t matter what
I
want. Michael’s a decent person, Erika. A nice person. A Jew. I promised
Anyu
and Papa I’d do the right thing …”

“You’re right,” Erika said, stepping in front of me. “You owe it to
Anyu
and Papa to do the right thing – to be happy. Don’t give in to fear now.”

I walked past Erika and swung the door open. It was ten minutes to six.

It was a short walk to the park. I arrived early and sat down on a bench. Michael would be here in five minutes.
Michael. I was choosing Michael
. I looked down at my watch and stared at the minute hand inch slowly toward the twelve. In four minutes my future would begin. I took a deep breath, stood up and grabbed my bag.

I fed a sheet of paper into the typewriter. Mrs Hermann closed the door to the office, whispering good luck as she left. Her workday at the Community Centre was done and I could have the room until the next day. I reached into my bag, pulled out Karl’s scarf and slipped it around my neck. Erika was right. My parents wanted me to be happy. My mother had told me never to give up. Choosing Michael would be a betrayal. I’d promised
Anyu
and Papa to do whatever it took to make it out of the camp, and I had. I’d promised to live a full and happy life, and keep playing piano, and I would. I’d promised to tell the world what Hitler had done.

I addressed my letter to General Kafelnikov, First Army of the Ukrainian Front, Birkenau, Poland.
You have a prisoner
, I typed.
His name is Karl Jager and he saved my life
.

I pulled my C sharp from my pocket and felt the familiar soft grain under my fingers. I laid it down on the desk and returned to the keys. I started at the beginning, in the Debrecen ghetto, with a guard banging at my door. I wrote about my father handing over the keys to our apartment and the rats at the Serly brickyard. I wrote about the dark, damp cattle train and my father’s wet, stubbled cheeks. I wrote about Mengele’s steel baton and the chimneys belching smoke. I wrote about the razor blades and tattoos and our burned scalps and blistered hands. I wrote about the stale bread and black water and playing piano on my mother’s back. I wrote about Erika and the twins.

It was almost midnight by the time I typed the commandant’s name. The pages filled with black ink and floated to the floor. I was hungry and tired but the general had to know what the commandant had done to Stanislaw, what he would’ve done to me if I’d played the wrong note. Mostly, I wrote about Karl. The general didn’t know Karl had called us by our names, or smuggled food into Birkenau. He didn’t know that when the commandant was away, Karl brought me food. He didn’t know that he had the wrong boy.

The morning light filtered through the office shutters. I reached into my bag and took Erika’s film from its hiding place. I slid the typed sheets and the film into an envelope and addressed it to the general. I’d kept my promise to my father to tell the world what I’d seen. I hoped I’d done enough to secure Karl’s release.