The Choice Read online

  * * *

  Magda and I spend at least a week in bed, naked, bodies doused in calamine. Klara doesn’t ask us questions. She doesn’t ask us where our mother and father are. She talks so that we don’t have to. She talks so that she doesn’t have to hear. Everything she tells us is phrased like a miracle. And it is miraculous. Here we are together. We are the lucky ones. There are few reunions like ours. Our aunt and uncle—our mother’s siblings—were thrown off a bridge and drowned in the Danube, Klara tells us, blunt, matter-of-fact, but when the last remaining Jews in Hungary were rounded up, she escaped detection. She lived in her professor’s house, disguised as a gentile. “One day my professor said, ‘You have to learn the Bible tomorrow, you are going to start teaching it, you are going to live in a nunnery.’ It seemed like the best way to keep me hidden. The convent was nearly two hundred miles from Budapest. I wore a habit. But one day a girl from the academy recognized me, and I snuck away on a train back to Budapest.”

  Sometime in the summer, she got a letter from our parents. It was the letter they had written while we were in the brick factory, telling Klara where we were imprisoned, that we were together, safe, that we thought we would be transferred to a work camp called Kenyérmező. I remember seeing my mother drop the letter onto the street during our evacuation from the brick factory, since there was no way to mail it. At the time I thought she had dropped it in resignation. But listening to Klara tell her story of survival, I see things differently. In releasing the letter, my mother wasn’t relinquishing hope—she was kindling it. Either way, whether she dropped the letter in defeat or in hope, she took a risk. The letter pointed a finger at my sister, a blond-haired Jew hiding in Budapest. It gave her address. While we trundled in the dark toward Auschwitz, someone, a stranger, held that letter in his hand. He could have opened it, he could have turned Klara in to the nyilas. He could have thrown the letter away in the trash, or left it in the street. But this stranger put a stamp on it and mailed it to Klara in Budapest. This is as unbelievable to me as my sister’s reappearance, it’s a magic trick, evidence of a lifeline that runs between us, evidence, too, that kindness still existed in the world even then. Through the dirt kicked up by three thousand pairs of feet, many of them headed straight for a chimney in Poland, our mother’s letter flew. A blond-haired girl set her violin down to rip open the seal.

  Klara tells another story with a happy ending. With the knowledge that we’d been evacuated to the brick factory, that we expected any day to get shipped away, to Kenyérmező or who knows where, she went to the German consulate in Budapest to demand to be sent to wherever we were. At the consulate, the doorman told her, “Little girl, go away. Don’t come in here.” She wasn’t going to be told no. She tried to sneak back in the building. The doorman saw her and beat her up, punching her shoulders, her arms, her stomach, her face. “Get out of here,” he said again.

  “He beat me up and saved my life,” she tells us.

  Near the end of the war when the Russians surrounded Budapest, the Nazis became even more determined to rid the city of Jews. “We had to carry identification cards with our name, religion, picture. They were checking these cards all the time on the streets, and if they saw you were a Jew they might kill you. I did not want to carry my card, but I was afraid I would need something to prove who I was after the war. So I decided to give mine to a girlfriend to keep for me. She lived across the harbor, so I had to cross the bridge to get there, and when I got to the bridge the soldiers were checking identification. They said, ‘Please show me who you are.’ I said I had nothing, and somehow, I don’t know how, they let me go across. My blond hair and blue eyes must have convinced them. I never went back to my friend’s house to retrieve the card.”

  When you can’t go in through a door, go in through a window, our mother used to say. There is no door for survival. Or recovery either. It’s all windows. Latches you can’t reach easily, panes too small, spaces where a body shouldn’t fit. But you can’t stand where you are. You must find a way.

  After the German surrender, while Magda and I were recovering in Wels, Klara went to a consulate again, this time the Russian consulate, because Budapest had been liberated from Nazi control by the Red Army, and tried to learn what had become of us. They had no information about our family, but in exchange for a free concert, they offered to help her get home to Košice. “When I played, two hundred Russians attended, and then I was brought home on top of a train. They watched over me when we stopped and slept.” When she opened the door to our old apartment, everything was in disarray, our furniture and possessions looted. The rooms had been used as a stable and the floors were covered in horse manure. While we were learning to eat, walk, write our names in Wels, Klara began playing concerts for money and scrubbing the floors.

  And now we’ve come. When our rashes are healed, we take turns leaving the apartment. There is only one good pair of shoes among the three of us. When it’s my turn to wear the shoes, I walk slowly on the sidewalk, back and forth, still too weak to go far. A neighbor recognizes me. “I’m surprised to see you made it,” he says. “You were always such a skinny little kid.” I could feel triumph. Against all odds, a happy ending! But I feel guilt. Why me? Why did I make it? There is no explanation. It’s a fluke. Or a mistake.

  * * *

  People can be sorted two ways: survived; didn’t. The latter are not here to tell their tale. The portrait of our mother’s mother still hangs on the wall. Her dark hair is parted down the middle and pulled back in a tight bun. A few curly strands feather across her smooth forehead. She doesn’t smile in the picture, but her eyes are more sincere than severe. She watches us, knowing and no-nonsense. Magda talks to her portrait as our mother used to do. Sometimes she asks for help. Sometimes she mutters and rants. “Those Nazi bastards … The fucking nyilas …” The piano that lived against the wall under her portrait is gone. The piano was so present in our daily lives that it was almost invisible, like breath. Now its absence dominates the room. Magda rages at the empty space. With the piano gone, something in her is missing too. A piece of her identity. An outlet for her self-expression. In its absence, she finds anger. Vibrant, full voiced, willful. I admire her for it. My anger turns inward and congeals in my lungs.

  Magda grows stronger as the days pass, but I am still weak. My upper back continues to ache, making it difficult to walk, and my chest is heavy with congestion. I rarely leave the house. Even if I weren’t sick, there is nowhere I want to go. When death is the answer to every question, why go walking? Why talk when any interaction with the living serves to prove that you move through the world in the company of an ever-growing congregation of ghosts? Why miss anyone in particular when everyone has so many to mourn?

  I rely on my sisters: Klara, my devoted nurse; Magda, my source of news, my connection to the greater world. One day she comes home breathless. “The piano!” she says. “I found it. It’s in the coffeehouse. Our piano. We’ve got to get it back.”

  The coffeehouse owner won’t believe that it’s ours. Klara and Magda take turns pleading. They describe the family chamber music concerts in our parlor, how János Starker, Klara’s cellist friend, another child prodigy from the conservatory, played a concert with Klara in our house the year of his professional debut. None of their words holds sway. Finally, Magda seeks out the piano tuner. He comes with her to the café and talks to the owner and then looks inside the piano lid to read the serial number. “Yes,” he says, nodding, “this is the Elefánt piano.” He gets together a crew of men to bring it back to our apartment.

  Is there something inside me that can verify my identity, that can restore myself to myself? If such a thing existed, who would I seek out to lift the lid, read the code?

  * * *

  One day a package arrives from Aunt Matilda. Valentine Avenue, the Bronx, the return address reads. She sends tea, Crisco. We have never seen Crisco before and so have no idea that it’s a butter substitute to be used for cooking and baking. We eat it
plain, we spread it on bread. We reuse the tea bags again and again. How many cups can we brew with the same leaves?

  * * *

  Occasionally, our doorbell rings, and I jolt up in bed. These are the best moments. Someone is waiting outside the door, and in the seconds before we open it, that person could be anyone. Sometimes I imagine it is our father. He survived the first selection after all. He found a way to work, to appear young throughout the rest of the war, and here he is, smoking a cigarette, holding a piece of chalk, a long measuring tape slung around his neck like a scarf. Sometimes it is Eric I imagine on the stoop. He holds a bouquet of roses.

  My father never comes. That is how we know for sure that he is dead.

  One day Lester Korda, one of the two brothers who rode with us on the train from Wels to Vienna, rings the bell. He has come to see how we are making out. “Call me Csicsi,” he says. He is like fresh air rushing into our stale rooms. We are in an ongoing limbo, my sisters and I, between looking back and moving on. So much of our energy is used just to restore things—our health, our belongings, what we can of life before loss and imprisonment. Csicsi’s warmth and interest in our welfare remind me that there is more to live for than that.

  Klara is in the other room, practicing violin. Csicsi’s eyes light up when he hears the music. “May I meet the musician?” he asks, and Klara obliges. She plays a Hungarian czardas. Csicsi dances. Maybe it is time to build our lives—not back to what they were, but anew.

  Throughout the summer of 1945, Csicsi becomes a regular visitor. When Klara has to travel to Prague for another concert, Csicsi offers to go with her.

  “Shall I bake a wedding cake now?” Magda asks.

  “Stop it,” Klara says. “He has a girlfriend. He’s just being polite.”

  “Are you sure you’re not falling in love?” I ask.

  “He remembers our parents,” she says, “and I remember his.”

  * * *

  When I have been home a few weeks, although I am barely strong enough, I make the journey on foot to Eric’s old apartment. No one from his family has returned. The apartment is empty. I vow to go back as often as I can. The pain of staying away is greater than the disappointment of vigilance. To mourn him is to mourn more than a person. In the camps I could long for his physical presence and hold on to the promise of our future. If I survive today, tomorrow I will be free. The irony of freedom is that it is harder to find hope and purpose. Now I must come to terms with the fact that anyone I marry won’t know my parents. If I ever have children, they won’t know their grandparents. It isn’t just my own loss that hurts. It’s the way it ripples out into the future. The way it perpetuates. My mother used to tell me to look for a man with a wide forehead because that means he’s intelligent. “Watch how he uses his handkerchief,” she would say. “Make sure he always carries a clean one. Make sure his shoes are polished.” She won’t be at my wedding. She won’t ever know who I become, whom I choose.

  Klara is my mother now. She does it out of love and a natural competence. She also does it out of guilt. She wasn’t there to protect us at Auschwitz. She will protect us now. She does all the cooking. She feeds me with a spoon, like I’m a baby. I love her, I love her attention, I love being held and made to feel safe. But it is suffocating too. Her kindness leaves me no breathing room. And she seems to need something from me in return. Not gratitude or appreciation. Something deeper. I can feel that she relies on me for her own sense of purpose. For her reason for being. In taking care of me, she finds the reason why she was spared. My role is to be healthy enough to stay alive yet helpless enough to need her. That is my reason for having survived.

  * * *

  By the end of June, my back still isn’t healed. There is a constant crunching, piercing feeling between my shoulder blades. And my chest still hurts, even to breathe. Then I break out in a fever. Klara takes me to the hospital. She insists that I be given a private room, the very best care. I worry about the expense, but she says she will just play more concerts, she will find a way to cover it. When the doctor comes in to examine me, I recognize him. He’s the older brother of my former schoolmate. His name is Gaby. I remember that his sister called him the Angel Gabriel. She is dead now, I learn. She died at Auschwitz. He asks me if I ever saw her there. I wish I had a last image for him to remember her by, and I consider lying, telling him a story in which I witnessed her do something brave, speak of him lovingly. But I don’t lie. I would rather face the unknown void of my father and Eric’s last minutes than to be told something that, however comforting, isn’t true. The Angel Gabriel gives me my first medical attention since liberation. He diagnoses me with typhoid fever, pneumonia, pleurisy, a broken back. He makes a removable cast for me that covers my whole torso. I place it on the bed at night so that I can climb inside it, my plaster shell.

  Gaby’s visits become more than just physically therapeutic. He doesn’t charge me for his medical care. We sit and reminisce. I can’t grieve with my sisters, not explicitly. It’s too raw, too present. And to grieve with them seems like a defilement of the miracle of our togetherness. We never hold one another and cry. But with Gaby I can allow myself to grieve. One day I ask Gaby about Eric. He remembers him but doesn’t know what became of him. Gaby has colleagues working at a repatriation center in the Tatra Mountains. He says he will ask them to see what they can learn about Eric.

  One afternoon Gaby examines my back. He waits until I am lying down on my stomach to tell me what he has learned. “Eric was sent to Auschwitz,” he says. “He died in January. The day before liberation.”

  I erupt in a wail. I think my chest will break. The blast of sorrow is so severe that tears won’t come—only a jagged moaning in my throat. I am not yet capable of clear thoughts or questions about my beloved’s last days, about his suffering, about the state of his mind and his spirit when his body gave out. I am consumed by the grief and injustice of losing him. If he could have held on for a few more hours, maybe even just a few more breaths, we could be together now. I moan into the table until my voice goes hoarse.

  As the shock dissolves, I understand that in a strange way the pain of knowing is merciful. I have no such certainty about my own father’s death. To know for sure that Eric is gone is like receiving a diagnosis after a long ache. I can pinpoint the reason for the hurt. I can clarify what has to heal.

  But a diagnosis is not a cure. I don’t know what to do with Eric’s voice now, the remembered syllables, the hope.

  * * *

  By the end of July my fever is gone, but Gaby still isn’t satisfied with my progress. My lungs, compressed too long by my broken back, are full of fluid. He worries that I might have contracted tuberculosis and recommends that I go to a TB hospital in the Tatra Mountains, near the repatriation center where he learned of Eric’s death. Klara will accompany me on the train to the nearest village in the mountains. Magda will stay at the apartment. After the effort of reclaiming it, on the off-chance of an unexpected visitor, we can’t risk leaving it empty, even for a day. Klara tends me on the journey as if I am a child. “Look at my little one!” she exclaims to fellow passengers. I beam at them like a precocious toddler. I practically look like one. My hair has fallen out again from the typhoid and is just starting to grow back, baby soft. Klara helps me cover my head with a scarf. As we gain elevation, the dry alpine air feels clean in my chest, but it’s still hard to breathe. There is a constant sludge in my lungs. It’s as though all the tears I can’t allow myself to shed on the outside are draining into a pool inside. I can’t ignore the grief, but I can’t seem to expel it either.

  Klara is due back in Košice for another radio performance—her concerts are our only source of income—and can’t accompany me to the TB hospital where I am to stay until I am well, but she refuses to let me go alone. We ask around at the repatriation center to see if anyone knows of someone going to the hospital, and I’m told that a young man staying in the nearby hotel is also going there to be treated. When I approach him
in the lobby of the hotel, he is kissing a girl.

  “Meet me at the train,” he growls.

  When I approach him on the train platform he is still kissing the girl. He is gray haired, at least ten years older than I am. I will turn eighteen in September, but with my skinny limbs and flat chest and bald head I look more like twelve. I stand beside them awkwardly as they embrace, not sure how to get his attention. I’m annoyed. This is the man to whom I’m to be entrusted?

  “Could you help me, sir?” I finally ask. “You are supposed to escort me to the hospital.”

  “I’m busy,” he says. He barely breaks his kiss to respond to me. He is like an older sibling shaking away an annoying sister. “Meet me on the train.”

  After Klara’s constant fawning and attention, his dismissiveness cuts. I don’t know why it bothers me so much. Is it that his girlfriend is alive while my boyfriend is dead? Or is it that I am already so diminished that without another person’s attention or approval I feel I am in danger of disappearing entirely?

  He buys me a sandwich on the train and a newspaper for himself. We don’t talk, other than to exchange names and formalities. Béla is his name. To me he is just a rude person on a train, a person I must grudgingly ask for help, a person who only grudgingly gives it.

  When we arrive at the station, we learn we have to walk to the TB hospital, and now there is no newspaper to distract him.

  “What did you do before the war?” he asks. I notice what I didn’t hear before—he speaks with a stutter. When I tell him that I was a gymnast and I danced ballet, he says, “That reminds me of a joke.”

  I look at him expectantly, ready for a dose of Hungarian humor, ready for the relief I felt at Auschwitz when Magda and I hosted the boob contest with our bunkmates, the lift of laughter in terrible times.