The Teacher Page 7

  Now she heard about anti-Semitic incidents on a daily basis, about people around them—acquaintances whose names she knew, passersby whose existence she noticed—who were suddenly taken away, arbitrarily, to a concentration camp. Of course it could happen to them as well, it was impossible to deny the reality that something awful was going on, and her thoughts sometimes mixed with a wish that she be relieved already of something she was ill-suited for. Once, before the announcement in early May expelling the Jews to the ghetto, she went for a stroll around town alone, without wearing the badge, as if challenging the regulations that explicitly prohibited leaving one’s apartment not only at night but during most hours of the day. The city was silent and deserted; even in the commercial areas the weariness was felt. She rushed past the pool—pretending not to notice the sign on the front door printed in black letters, “No Entry for Jews”—in order to get to the park, which also wasn’t overrun with people, unlike regular days during early afternoon hours, making her wonder whether the changes had already reached what seemed to her the other side of the world. She sat on a bench at the edge of the park as if considering whether to enter, and was suddenly gripped by the odd urge to share something about herself with another girl who sat on another bench, also alone, not far from her, to tell her that while she was wandering around in broad daylight, she was actually doing it covertly, but something stopped her, blunt gestures were not in her nature, or perhaps it was merely the fear that she would be incriminating herself. She lingered there for a while, contemplating what to do next, and then decided to open the book she had with her, Nausea by Sartre, but didn’t really read it, only skimmed the pages, and for a moment felt overcome by fatigue, not from a lack of alertness, but a kind of internal desire to detach; and then she thought perhaps it wasn’t a very good idea to come here, she wasn’t able to derive a shred of pleasure from it, but she could have anticipated that. In a parting gesture, she smiled as if telling herself a joke, a gesture that even had a certain theatricality to it, to tread the same paths, to sit on the same bench, to open a book as she had in the past, to observe her surroundings with the same distracted gaze. She took a deep breath, almost relaxed, and considered going to the nearby café to order a hot chocolate and Dobos torte for old time’s sake. This thought also amused her, and she once again gazed across the park; but the houses and figures gradually distanced themselves as if withdrawing from her, the sky grew dark, and she had to get up and leave. She stood up hesitantly, but when realizing it would indeed be for the last time, she shook herself and glanced around again, to make sure she was safe and no one was looking at her, and she turned back home, struggling not to break into a run and arouse suspicion. Eric stared at her at the entrance helplessly. “Are you mad? Do you have any idea how worried we were?” She curled up in the corner of the living room couch and held her head between her hands. Then she looked up at him. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have done it. I apologize.” “You have no idea,” he said with a weary expression.

  Things went downhill at a dizzying pace. The dispossessions, the confiscations, the freezing of bank accounts, the burning of books by Jewish authors, the arrests on the street. Until then, her Jewish identity hadn’t told her anything meaningful about herself, and it seemed odd to her that the identity a person was randomly born with could turn into the subject of shame or pride. Not only because she usually felt comfortable around non-Jews, but because she could not ascribe a general attitude or shared consciousness to the community. In Paris, she and a young American girl her age who had lived in the same boardinghouse, she couldn’t remember her name, had taken a walk together one day to the Jewish Quarter. She had approached Elsa and asked to join her, and Elsa said why not, gladly, and they strolled along the bank and passed the Notre-Dame and crossed Pont Marie and the Ile Saint-Louis and walked down rue Pavée to rue des Rosiers, where Elsa decided to enter a shop of Judaica and sacred books. She perused the books for a while, as if meeting an old acquaintance, and when they left the young American told her she felt suffocated, that they must leave the Quarter at once, and looked at her with fresh eyes as if suddenly seeing something intimidating in her, something unbearable. What was that thing, what had she seemingly discovered about her? What did she suspect her of? Elsa did not confront her, and perhaps did not even consciously ask herself these questions, and they returned to the boardinghouse in silence and no longer sat together; in fact, they never exchanged another word. She did not feel distress because she had not become attached to that woman, but recalling the incident now, she realized she had instantly dismissed what had happened, had rushed to shrink its dimensions to a mere accident. She is Jewish. But she refuses to make an issue of it. She could fill it with substance, but she doesn’t want to. She has a different world and she’s happy within it. Now she wondered what other things she had ignored, what else she had averted her gaze from. Because there were, of course, other incidents she did not understand, or simply refused to understand, for example the wonderment of that woman whom Elsa rushed to help with her suitcase all the way up to the train station, and when the woman asked for Elsa’s name and Elsa replied, she responded with bafflement: “Jewish?” as if something in her behavior, a Jewish girl lending her, a Christian, a hand, was an obtuse breach of the natural order, ultimately causing more embarrassment than good.

  They took only a few belongings upon their forced move to the ghetto, established in the Iris brick factory on the outskirts of Kolozsvár, mainly sheets and blankets, used alternatingly for covering the dusty floors and serving as makeshift partitions between the families, in the absence of walls, in order to maintain a semblance of privacy. They did not need more blankets, the summer still in full swing. In the days prior to the move, since losing their jobs, they spoke little to each other. She could not remember what was said, only the emptiness of the masking words that took over their conversation during those long hours in which they waited for the arrival of the gendarmes. She filled her bag with keepsakes and a few books, which she believed no one would covet and seize. The heavy furniture, the paintings, the libraries, the gramophone, and piano were reluctantly left in their apartments. A seal was immediately imprinted on the doors shut behind them—property of the Hungarian nation. She witnessed this as she was violently pushed with the others toward the truck covered in tarp, hurtling along the streets toward the ghetto. Did she already understand the implications? The crowdedness inside the barb-wired area, with the police officers and gendarmes, made the imposed restrictions on movement sound like a cruel and ridiculous joke, only that now she no longer allowed herself to make light of them.

  There were no toilets. The pits that were dug for the men and women, which could serve twenty people at once, were almost completely exposed. Apart from the filth, the inconvenience and distress, she found it difficult to squat, even though she was limber, she feared she would lose her balance and fall, a thought that made her sway from side to side and forced her to place her fingertips on the ground to steady herself. She accompanied her mother to help her empty her bowels and later to wash herself with a bit of water, which was also rationed for cooking and drinking. She also joined her in the long lines for food, imploring her in vain to stay in her room to rest; she must go, she told her, she could not laze about like a caged lioness, she had to see with her own eyes the thieves doling out the rations, perhaps her admonishing glare would encourage them to abandon their deviant ways. For years there had hardly been any physical intimacy between her and her mother. Their hugs were awkward, even though she could not remember when exactly she had stopped curling up in her mother’s arms and seeking the smell of her body. Her mother never exacted a price for this change, nor did she even attempt to account for it. Did she even sense it? Now she stood close to her helplessness, and memories of Grandma Rosa on her deathbed—Elsa was ten at the time—flitted before her, the old woman’s eyes fixed on her mother as if telling her, You are the strong one, I am the weak one, and the voices
that preceded (but did such a conversation ever really take place?), “I don’t want to be a burden.” “You are not a burden.” And she remembered herself thinking, Mother, don’t say that, tell her something else. But how could it be said differently? Tell her that you need her. That hasn’t been true in a long time. What does it matter? Elsa began to cry, she was a weepy child, but at about twenty years of age, when she stopped crying, the sound of wailing rose around her, bone-chilling howls that tore through the sky, and she wondered if even in the maternity ward the women’s cries were replacing the cry reserved for her and her baby.

  During that period rumors of deportation started to circulate; they said there was a very real possibility that their lives were in danger. Eric, who maintained frequent contact with the representatives of the youth movements, cautiously shared these warnings with her, partly disbelieving the words that left his mouth, partly fearing her response. It was not a concentration camp in which people were put to work, but an extermination camp, with incinerators. She listened with the same skepticism she had applied to his “exaggerations.” Not because she did not want to know the truth. On the contrary, she preferred the truth, she assured him, any truth, but she could not be expected to believe unreliable fragments of information clouded by ideological motives. She was not particularly fond of those Zionists, thought them deranged, fanatics, vain, assuming authority that did not belong to them and stirring up panic, mainly among older people too helpless to oppose them. “What do you want them to do?” she asked, enraged. He told her that he had heard things around the ghetto from refugees from Slovakia, Yugoslavia, and Poland, people who had lost jobs, homes, families, who had lost everything and were now seeking shelter here, attempting to falsify identification cards. “Do you realize what’s happening?” “Are you sure you understood them? They don’t speak Hungarian or German or Romanian. Why do you think the Jews of Poland and the Jews of Hungary share the same fate?” During these rancorous arguments she would whip out the expression “a Hungarian of the Mosaic faith” without the least bit of sarcasm. Rolling her eyes, and with what humor she had left, she skillfully recited the glorious Jewish past, as taught in the Neolog school—their role in the “golden age,” in the social elite, in the parliament, in literature, medicine, architecture. And in “the weapons and steel industry,” he chimed in. They burst into laughter. “And don’t forget that Horthy’s mother-in-law is Jewish!”

  In hindsight, she could liken the small, quiet dinners they had with her parents to sitting among the critically ill, but lacking the comfort that organic processes sometimes provide, if only because the source of the tragedy was bound up with one’s physical state and beyond human control. Moreover, they were not ill, her parents, only slightly weakened, but “thank God, healthy,” an expression that escaped from her mouth only with regard to them. The combativeness that characterized her father in the early days of the war had deserted him, replaced by a helplessness that crystalized in the look he gave her at their moment of parting, the kind she had only seen in paintings of purgatory, a look in which horror and panic coalesced with infinite distance.

  It was during one of these dinners that she first heard about the possibility of a rescue train to Palestine. Eric did not present it alone; he enlisted an old friend of her parents, Dr. Tibor Müllner, a distinguished judge who used to join them for cholent on Shabbat when she was a girl and sabotaged “the conversation’s free flow of ideas”—as Jan complained bitterly afterward—by pontificating about the intrusive effect on the digestive system of the white beans with smoked goose, a speech that must have utterly exhausted him given the fact that immediately upon finishing the main dish, even before the compote was served, he would enter her room without seeking permission and sink into his afternoon nap, leaving the rest of the guests speechless. Müllner, who was a close acquaintance of Jóska Fischer’s, said that while they could not fight the Germans with force, that did not mean there weren’t other ways to save Jews, since Germany was indeed losing its power, with the allies at their doorstep. Hopefully, Germany would soon be defeated. They must try to buy time and hold out, and meanwhile try to save as many Jews as possible. They could try to escape and hide out in Romania or Yugoslavia, but it was dangerous and it certainly could not become a collective tactic; the Hungarian newspapers were publishing frightening articles cautioning against escape and threatening to put to death anyone caught at the border. Her father suddenly exclaimed: “Escape? But that’s against the law!” She remembered the shock that washed over the faces of the two other men: “Bloom, apparently you’re failing to understand our reality.” He had no guile, and neither did she. It took time for her to learn suspicion, and even when she did, it remained an external layer like the heavy makeup she would come to apply years later. Müllner reiterated that a mass escape from Hungary was not a possibility. A few might try, and even succeed. However, and here he was approaching the heart of the matter, the Germans could be bribed. “But if it’s about to end,” her father said, “if it’s a matter of mere weeks, perhaps we had better wait it out?” “They might take the extreme action of someone who has nothing to lose,” Müllner stressed, “but on the other hand it seems they have a lot to lose, and perhaps they can still lose less, and that is exactly why we must try to negotiate with them, to discover their weakness.” “Would it not be better to reach out to the Hungarian authorities?” “They refuse to have any contact with Jewish representatives. And do remember it’s the Hungarian gendarmes who have been putting the Jews on the deportation trains recently. All the more reason we need to make it look like a deportation for the Hungarian authorities, put the Jews on the same cattle cars, since they might view any operation or rescue deal with the Germans as a betrayal. Our only way out is to negotiate with the Germans and no one else, and try to save as many people as we can.”

  The following conversations were not made in her presence. They must have been more specific. She understood from Eric that her father showed a reluctance toward the suggestion, that he had “more questions than a pomegranate has seeds,” as Eric described it with a certain impatience. It was clear that he and Mother preferred to remain in Kolozsvár and send her off with Eric to reunite with Jan. “But how can I trust this Kastner character and put Elsa on some train?” her father asked his son-in-law. “You have to understand,” Eric replied, “that such a negotiation, devised behind closed doors, is built upon lies and pretenses. You couldn’t have stomached it, let alone carried it out. I’m afraid I couldn’t have either. But he can. It’s a fact.” “But what if he’s lying to me too? How can I believe him?” “He has good intentions. I trust him. These days, he’s the only one looking out for us. Take into account that he’s also sending some of his own family members. You know them, they live a few blocks away …” “Maybe I didn’t explain myself,” her father said, “my problem isn’t Kastner. It’s the Germans I’m afraid of. It looks like a ruse. What do they have to gain from this? What do they need the Jews’ small change? Who would even be interested in a group of women, children, and old men who could be of no use to anyone? I have a bad feeling that this is blackmail and the people who might thwart the initiative are certain Germans who don’t like the idea that other Germans are in contact with the Jews. It goes against the very essence of the Nuremberg Laws. Even a stubborn Jew like myself knows this much.” Eric agreed that it was a very bold gamble. “It may very well only draw out the inevitable, that we’re all doomed no matter what. But at least someone is trying to act against what looks like an arbitrary blow of fate.”

  He tried to glean more information from Eric and Müllner, to find out who was preparing the passenger list, what the criteria were. He heard rumors of thousands of Jews storming the Aid and Rescue Committee offices, attempting to twist their arms, asking who had given them the moral right to make these decisions. “It isn’t the committee members’ right,” Müllner replied, “it’s their moral duty.” “So be it.” He did not know what to make of it. A cross-s
ection of the community would be chosen, he was told, it seemed to be the most logical approach under the circumstances, but some people were buying their place with money and valuables.