FIVE YEARS AGO, in March of 1944, Gabor died. He died along with many young men pulled from trams or found in train stations or airports in the days after the Germans invaded Budapest. Now that the war was clearly lost, Hitler was afraid that Hungary would make a separate peace with Britain and America; thus, by March, he took a firmer hand. That spring, the Germans would begin the process of gathering the Jews of Hungary’s provinces for deportation east. The Germans worked against time, emptying villages before they could be liberated by the Soviets.
Five years ago, in June, months after Gabor’s death, I put on the old lamb’s-wool coat, stuffed cigarettes, a comb, and my papers in its pocket, and moved to a Yellow Star House. The house was in the Kiraly district, and other Yellow Star Houses were by policy scattered throughout the city so that Jews would be spared no part of the Allied bombings. By then, a lot of Pest was rubble. The flat I occupied was not so far from Aunt Monika’s old place. The owner remembered me and said, “Poor Moni. She was a lady. She’d die if she saw the class of people they’ve got here now.”
Perhaps I did look a cut above the rest, as I wasn’t hunchbacked under a life’s belongings, but almost at once I sunk to their level. There were twelve of us in three rooms, with our elbows in each other’s faces, bickering over where to hang the wash or who got first crack at the bath-water. We slept in our clothes because we never knew what would happen in the middle of the night. There was no privacy for changing anyhow, though in the end, modesty gave way along with everything else.
Nine of the twelve of us were women. Most had sons or husbands in Labor Battalions, some in Romania and some in Serbia. A few of the husbands had been in the Ukraine when it was liberated, and their wives kept a little apart from the rest of us, as though they had something we didn’t. Though they’d heard no word from them, they never stopped speculating on when they would appear at the head of an invading Soviet army.
What I wouldn’t have given to get out of that place, even for an hour, but it was safest to remain indoors. Curfew was arbitrary. Sometimes they would give us two hours to see a doctor or buy groceries, and without warning we would have to drop our bags and run for shelter for fear of arrest. Still, for all the chaos of those months, there were a lot of rules. A list was posted in the house lobby with restrictions on entertaining guests, shouting from balconies, and disposing of rubbish.
Those rules were a great comfort. We reasoned: Someone must have taken the trouble to formulate those impossible sentences and post the list in every Yellow Star House. We had heard rumors about the provinces, talk of Jews from Debrecen and Szeged being deported to some desolate part of the Great Plains or to a labor camp called Waldsee. A few of us began to receive messages from family who’d been sent to Waldsee: I have arrived. Am well. These handwritten postcards were at first reassuring, but when they began to arrive in great numbers, all bearing the same message—I have arrived. Am well—we did not know what to think. I received one from Adele, whom I hadn’t heard from since winter.
One thing seemed certain: They would not deport Budapestis. If someone cared about how we disposed of our rubbish, why would they bother to displace us altogether? Maybe we could just sit out the rest of the war.
By summer, Romania had been liberated and American bombs blasted the roof off a church not far from the house. Plaster rained into our soup. That soup was muddy and foul, full of pumpkin-fragments and tallow dumplings. Plaster might have improved the taste. We used teacups for bowls.
A woman who’d just arrived looked at me over her cup. “So where’s your husband?”
I said, “East.”
“Perhaps he’s escaped and joined the partisans,” she said. She wanted to cheer me up.
It took a long time to chew through one of those dumplings. I swallowed hard and said, “Perhaps he has.”
THEN THERE WAS Louisa. I hadn’t seen her since the day of Gabor’s death, and as far as I knew, she had moved back with her parents on Rose Hill. We were not in touch. Then, in October, I returned from shopping and found her at the entrance of the house. Non-Jews were not forbidden to enter a Yellow Star House. A few even had rooms there because they refused to be forced to make way for us. Still, Louisa couldn’t have looked more conspicuous. She wore a warm blue coat I’d never seen before, and with her pink cheeks and her glossy hair, she might have lived on pastries and cream.
Without preamble, she came to me and said, “I’ll take your bag.”
I didn’t reply.
“I’ll take it up for you,” she said. “Let me.”
“Go home,” I said to Louisa. “This isn’t the place for you.”
Something in my voice must have alarmed her. She turned pale. Then, with no warning, she tore the bag out of my arms and stumbled back with a strange smile on her face.
I asked her, “How did you find me?”
“I had to talk to you,” she said. “I couldn’t—”
I broke in. “You want the groceries? Take the groceries. There’s nothing I can do.”
“Mutti,” Louisa began. “I had to see you, that you’re alive.” She was so much stronger than me that she could cradle that heavy bag of canned milk and potatoes in a single arm, and she approached me with the free hand outstretched; I cannot fully describe the heat and nausea that radiated from her to myself.
With all my strength, I pushed Louisa back. She stumbled, whimpering, and spilled those pathetic groceries onto the muddy sidewalk, and before she could recover, I fled upstairs where I wrenched open the door and closed it behind me, holding myself against it, shaking so hard that I could feel it rattle in its hinges.
NOT LONG AFTER that, news came to us by way of a radio three floors down. Hungary had begun negotiations with the Soviets. We actually believed it was the end, that the bombs would stop falling and the Germans would leave and the Red Army would roll into Pest. It was so sudden and so dazzling that we didn’t know what to do with ourselves. Some of the girls tore off their yellow stars. Later, I heard that in the labor camps the men threw down their picks and danced.
In fact, the news was false. That was the day of the German coup. Hitler ordered the current government of Hungary to be replaced by the Arrow Cross, Hungarian Nazis. There would be no more quotas or curfews and no more laws about collecting rubbish. In a month, maybe two, we’d all be dead.
By evening, I was huddled in a doorway somewhere near the Duna with my heart in my throat. Gunfire at close range is unmistakable, even if you’ve never heard it before. I pulled tight that lamb’s-wool coat and was thankful that I was well-hidden because somehow, even if I didn’t care whether I lived or died, my body disagreed.
I shivered; the lining of that coat had disintegrated into a few rags crosshatched by soft threads. I dug my hands into what was left of the pockets, and by then I’d grown so thin I couldn’t even find my own legs. Then, something bit my thigh. It was a key.
It was the key to the padlock of Louisa Bauer’s cellar door. I knew that because once I had a son who told me those things. On my face was an expression of mingled grief and hostility, and then that face broke like an egg, or like Gabor’s head broke the day he died. I will not describe that death in detail now. Save it for later.
This much I will tell you. I considered the possibility that I could manage to make my way across the bridge to Rose Hill, to the house with the green shutters. I had never seen the house before, but it had been described to me. I knew the way. And what would the Arrow Cross make of this thin, pale woman moving steadily down the lip of the Duna River with one hand across her heart, the other plunged into the pocket of her coat? Let them make a corpse of her. She is already a corpse. She finds that cellar door, and she opens the padlock and crawls into the dark. The door closes behind her.