The Choice Page 10

  Magda is physically better off than I am, and she tries to put our lives in order. One day when the German family is out of the house, Magda opens closets until she finds dresses for us to wear. She sends letters—to Klara, to our mother’s brother in Budapest, to our mother’s sister in Miskolc, letters that won’t ever be read—to discover who might still be living, to discover where to build a life when it’s time to leave Wels. I can’t remember how to write my own name. Much less an address. A sentence. Are you there?

  One day the GI brings paper and pencils. We start with the alphabet. He writes a capital A. A lowercase a. Capital B. Lowercase b. He gives me the pencil and nods. Can I make any letters? He wants me to try. He wants to see how far I’ve regressed, how much I remember. I can write C and c. D and d. I remember! He encourages me. He cheers me on. E and e. F and f. But then I falter. I know that G comes next, but I can’t picture it, can’t think how to form it on the page.

  One day he brings a radio. He plays the happiest music I have ever heard. It’s buoyant. It propels you. I hear horns. They insist that you move. Their shimmer isn’t seduction—it’s deeper than that, it’s invitation, impossible to refuse. The GI and his friends show Magda and me the dances that go along with the sound—jitterbug, boogie-woogie. The men pair up like ballroom dancers. Even the way they hold their arms is new to me—it’s ballroom style but loose, pliable. It’s informal but not sloppy. How do they keep themselves so taut with energy and yet so flexible? So ready? Their bodies live out whatever the music sets in motion. I want to dance like that. I want to let my muscles remember.

  * * *

  Magda goes to take a bath one morning and returns to the room shaking. Her hair is wet, her clothes half off. She rocks on the bed with her eyes closed. I’ve been sleeping on the bed while she bathed—I’m too big for the crib now—and I don’t know whether or not she knows I am awake.

  It’s been more than a month since liberation. Magda and I have spent almost every hour of the last forty days together in this room. We have regained the use of our bodies, we have regained the ability to talk and to write and even to try to dance. We can talk about Klara, about our hope that somewhere she is alive and trying to find us. But we can’t talk about what we have endured.

  Maybe in our silence we are trying to create a sphere that is free from our trauma. Wels is a limbo life, but presumably a new life beckons. Maybe we are trying to give each other and ourselves a blank room in which to build the future. We don’t want to sully the room with images of violence and loss. We want to be able to see something besides death. And so we tacitly agree not to talk about anything that will rupture the bubble of survival.

  Now my sister is trembling and hurting. If I tell her I am awake, if I ask her what is wrong, if I become witness to her breakdown, she won’t have to be all alone with whatever is making her shake. But if I pretend I am asleep, I can preserve for her a mirror that doesn’t reflect back this new pain; I can be a selective mirror, I can shine back at her the things she wants to cultivate and leave everything else invisible.

  In the end, I don’t have to decide what to do. She begins to speak.

  “Before I leave this house, I will get my revenge,” she vows.

  We rarely see the family whose house we occupy, but her quiet, bitter anger compels me to imagine the worst. I picture the father coming into the bathroom while she undressed. “Did he …” I stammer.

  “No.” Her breath is jagged. “I tried to use the soap. The room started spinning.”

  “Are you ill?”

  “No. Yes. I don’t know.”

  “Do you have a fever?”

  “No. It’s the soap, Dicu. I couldn’t touch it. A sort of panic came over me.”

  “No one hurt you?”

  “No. It was the soap. You know what they say. They say it’s made from people. From the ones they killed.” I don’t know if it’s true. But this close to Gunskirchen? Maybe.

  “I still want to kill a German mother,” Magda says. I remember all the miles we walked in winter when this was her fantasy, her refrain. “I could do it, you know.”

  There are different ways to keep yourself going. I will have to find my own way to live with what has happened. I don’t know what it is yet. We’re free from the death camps, but we also must be free to—free to create, to make a life, to choose. And until we find our freedom to, we’re just spinning around in the same endless darkness.

  Later there will be doctors to help us repair our physical health. But no one will explain the psychological dimension of recovery. It will be many years before I begin to understand that.

  * * *

  One day the GI and his friends come to tell us we’ll be leaving Wels, that the Russians are helping transport the survivors home. They come to say goodbye. They bring the radio. Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood” comes on, and we let loose. With my broken back, I can barely manage the steps, but in my mind, in my spirit, we are spinning tops. Slow, slow, fast-fast, slow. Slow, slow, fast-fast, slow. I can do it too—keep my arms and legs loose but not limp. Glenn Miller. Duke Ellington. I repeat the big names in big band over and over. The GI leads me in a careful turn, a tiny dip, a breakaway. I am still so weak, but I can feel the potential in my body, all the things it will be possible to say with it when I have healed. Many years later I’ll work with an amputee, and he’ll explain the disorientation of feeling his phantom limb. When I dance to Glenn Miller six weeks after liberation, with my sister who is alive and the GI who almost raped me but didn’t, I have reverse phantom limbs. It’s sensation not in something that is lost but in a part of me that is returning, that is coming into its own. I can feel all the potential of the limbs and the life I can grow into again.

  * * *

  During the several hours’ train ride from Wels to Vienna, through Russian-occupied Austria, I scratch at the rash, from lice or rubella, that still covers my body. Home. We are going home. In two more days we will be home! And yet it is impossible to feel the joy of our homecoming uncoupled from the devastation of loss. I know my mother and grandparents are dead, and surely my father too. They have been dead for more than a year. To go home without them is to lose them again. Maybe Klara, I allow myself to hope. Maybe Eric.

  In the seat next to ours, two brothers sit. They are survivors too. Orphans. From Kassa, like us! Lester and Imre, they are called. Later we will learn that their father was shot in the back as he walked between them on the Death March. Soon we will understand that out of more than fifteen thousand deportees from our hometown, we are among the only seventy who have survived the war.

  “We have one another,” they say now. “We are lucky, lucky.”

  Lester and Imre, Magda and me. We are the anomalies. The Nazis didn’t just murder millions of people. They murdered families. And now, beside the incomprehensible roster of the missing and the dead, our lives go on. Later we will hear stories from the displaced persons camps all over Europe. Reunions. Weddings. Births. We will hear of the special rations tickets issued to couples to obtain wedding clothes. We, too, will scour the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration newspapers and hold our breath, hoping to see familiar names among the list of survivors scattered over the Continent. But for now we do nothing but stare out the windows of the train, looking at empty fields, broken bridges, and, in some places, the fragile beginnings of crops. The Allied occupation of Austria will last another ten years. The mood in the towns we pass through isn’t of relief or celebration—it’s a teeth-clenched atmosphere of uncertainty and hunger. The war is over, but it’s not over.

  * * *

  “Do I have ugly lips?” Magda asks as we near the outskirts of Vienna. She is studying her reflection in the window glass, superimposed over the landscape.

  “Why, are you planning to use them?” I joke with her, I try to coax out that relentlessly teasing part of her. I try to tamp my own impossible fantasies, that Eric is alive somewhere, that soon I will be a postwar bride under a makes
hift veil. That I will be together with my beloved forever, never alone.

  “I’m serious,” she says. “Tell me the truth.”

  Her anxiety reminds me of our first day at Auschwitz when she stood naked with her shaved head, gripping strands of her hair. Maybe she condenses the huge global fears about what will happen next into more specific and personal fears—the fear that she is not attractive enough to find a man, the fear that her lips are ugly. Or maybe her questions are tangled up in deeper uncertainty—about her essential worth.

  “What’s wrong with your lips?” I ask.

  “Mama hated them. Someone on the street complimented my eyes once and she said, ‘Yes, she’s got beautiful eyes, but look at her thick lips.’ ”

  Survival is black and white, no “buts” can intrude when you are fighting for your life. Now the “buts” come rushing in. We have bread to eat. Yes, but we are penniless. You are gaining weight. Yes, but my heart is heavy. You are alive. Yes, but my mother is dead.

  * * *

  Lester and Imre decide to stay on in Vienna for a few days; they promise to look for us at home. Magda and I board another train that will carry us eight hours northwest to Prague. A man blocks the entrance to the train car. “Nasa lude,” he sneers. Our people. He is Slovak. The Jews must ride on top of the train car.

  “The Nazis lost,” Magda mutters, “but it’s the same as before.”

  There is no other way to get home. We climb to the top of the train car, joining ranks with the other displaced persons. We hold hands. Magda sits beside a young man named Laci Gladstein. He caresses Magda’s fingers with his own, his fingers barely more than bones. We do not ask one another where we have been. Our bodies and our haunted eyes say everything there is to know. Magda leans against Laci’s thin chest, searching for warmth. I am jealous of the solace they seem to find in each other, the attraction, the belonging. I am too committed to my love for Eric, to my hope that I will find him again, to seek a man’s arms to hold me now. Even if I didn’t carry Eric’s voice with me still, I think I would be too afraid to look for comfort, for intimacy. I am skin and bones. I am covered in bugs and sores. Who would want me? Better not to risk connection and be denied, better not to have my damage confirmed. And besides, who would provide the best shelter now? Someone who knows what I have endured, a fellow survivor? Or someone who doesn’t, who can help me forget? Someone who knew me before I went through hell, who can help me back to my former self? Or someone who can look at me now without always seeing what’s been destroyed? I’ll never forget your eyes, Eric told me. I’ll never forget your hands. For more than a year I have held on to these words like a map that could lead me to freedom. But what if Eric can’t face what I have become? What if we find each other and build a life, only to find that our children are the children of ghosts?

  I huddle against Magda. She and Laci talk about the future.

  “I’m going to be a doctor,” he says.

  It’s noble, a young man who, like me, was little more than dead only a month or two ago. He has lived, he will heal, he will heal others. His ambition reassures me. And it startles. He has come out of the death camps with dreams. It seems an unnecessary risk. Even now that I have known starvation and atrocity, I remember the pain of lesser hurts, of a dream ruined by prejudice, of the way my coach spoke to me when she cut me from the Olympic training team. I remember my grandfather, how he retired from the Singer Sewing Machine Company and waited for his pension check. How he waited and waited, how he talked of little else. Finally he received his first check. A week later we were evacuated to the brick factory. A few weeks later, he was dead. I don’t want to dream the wrong thing.

  “I have an uncle in America,” Laci continues. “In Texas. I’ll go there, work, save up for school.”

  “Maybe we’ll go to America too,” Magda says. She must be thinking of Aunt Matilda, in the Bronx. All around us on the top of the train car there is talk of America, of Palestine. Why keep living in the ashes of our loss? Why keep scratching for survival in a place where we’re not wanted? Soon we will learn of the restrictive immigration limits in America and Palestine. There is no haven free of limitation, of prejudice. Wherever we go, life might always be like this. Trying to ignore the fear that any minute we’ll be bombed, shot, tossed in a ditch. Or at best forced to ride on top of the train. Holding hands against the wind.

  * * *

  In Prague we are to change trains again. We say goodbye to Laci. Magda gives him our old address, Kossuth Lajos Utca #6. He promises to keep in touch. There’s time before the next departure, time to stretch our legs, sit in the sun and the quiet to eat our bread. I want to find a park. I want to see green growth, flowers. I close my eyes every few steps and take in the smells of a city, the streets and sidewalks and civilian bustle. Bakeries, car exhaust, perfume. It’s hard to believe that all of this existed while we were in our hell. I gaze in shop windows. It doesn’t matter that I am penniless. It will matter, of course. In Košice food won’t be given out for free. But at this moment I feel completely full just seeing that there are dresses and stockings to buy, jewelry, pipes, stationery. Life and commerce go on. A woman fingers the weight of a summer dress. A man admires a necklace. Things aren’t important, but beauty is. Here is a city full of people who have not lost the capacity to imagine, make, and admire beautiful things. I will be a resident again—a resident of somewhere. I will run errands and buy gifts. I will stand in line at the post office. I will eat bread that I have baked. I will wear fine couture in honor of my father. I will go to the opera in honor of my mother, of how she would sit at the edge of her chair listening to Wagner, how she would weep. I will go to the symphony. And for Klara, I’ll seek out every performance of Mendelssohn’s violin concerto. That longing and wistfulness. The urgency as the line climbs, and then the rippling cadenza, the crashing, rising chords. And then the more sinister theme in the strings, threatening the solo violin’s rising dreams. Standing on the sidewalk, I’ve closed my eyes so I can hear the echo of my sister’s violin. Magda startles me.

  “Wake up, Dicu!”

  And when I open my eyes, right here in the thick of the city, near the entrance to the park, there’s a concert poster advertising a performance with a solo violinist.

  The picture on the poster is my sister’s.

  There on the paper my Klarie sits, holding her violin.

  CHAPTER 8

  In Through a Window

  We step off the train in Košice. Our hometown is no longer in Hungary. It is part of Czechoslovakia again. We blink into the June sun. We have no money for a taxi, no money for anything, no idea if our family’s old apartment is occupied, no idea how we will find a way to live. But we are home. We are ready to search for Klara. Klara, who gave a concert in Prague only weeks ago. Klara who, somewhere, is alive.

  We walk through Mestský Park, toward the center of town. People sit at outdoor tables, on benches. Children gather around the fountains. There’s the clock where we watched the boys gather to meet Magda. There’s the balcony of our father’s shop, the gold medals blazing from the railing. He’s here! I am so certain of it that I smell his tobacco, feel his mustache on my cheek. But the windows of the shop are dark. We walk toward our apartment at Kossuth Lajos Utca #6, and here on the sidewalk near the place where the wagon parked before it carried us to the brick factory, a miracle occurs. Klara materializes, walking out the front door. Her hair is braided and coiled like our mother’s. She carries her violin. When she sees me, she drops the violin case on the sidewalk and runs to me. She’s moaning. “Dicuka, Dicuka!” she cries. She picks me up like a baby, her arms a cradle.

  “Don’t hug us!” Magda shrieks. “We’re covered in bugs and sores!”

  I think what she means is, Dear sister, we’re scarred. She means, Don’t let what we’ve seen hurt you. Don’t make it worse. Don’t ask us what happened. Don’t vanish into thin air.

  Klara rocks me and rocks me. “This is my little one!” she calls to
a passing stranger. From this moment on she becomes my mother. She has already seen in our faces that the position is empty and must be filled.

  It has been at least a year and a half since we have seen her. She is on her way to the radio station to give a concert. We are desperate not to have her out of sight, out of touch. “Stay, stay,” we beg. But she is already late. “If I don’t play, we don’t eat,” she says. “Hurry, follow me inside.” Maybe it is a blessing that there is no time to talk now. We wouldn’t know how to begin. Though it must shock Klara to see us so physically ravaged, maybe that is a blessing too. There is something concrete Klara can do to express her love and relief, to point us in the direction of healing. It will take more than rest. Perhaps we will never recover. But there is something she can do right now. She brings us inside and strips off our dirty clothes. She helps us stretch out on the white sheets in the bed where our parents used to sleep. She rubs calamine lotion into the rash that covers our bodies. The rash that makes us itch and itch, that passes instantly from our bodies to hers so she can barely play her concert for the burning all over her skin. Our reunion is physical.