The Time of the Uprooted: A Novel

  “And where is this woman?”

  “Where do you think she is? In the Museum of Modern Art? She’s in the hospital, you idiot.”

  Everyone around the table burst out laughing.

  “Oh, I see, a hospital? She’s not in a prison, maybe in Moscow?” put in Diego, the short anarchist from Barcelona, who could never pass up an opportunity to mock the behavior of Communists wherever they might be. He had picked up the name Diego in Spain, where he went to enlist in the International Brigades. What was his real name? He claimed he’d erased it from memory. His friends suspected he was originally from Lithuania, whose melodious, intellectual Yiddish he still spoke. But his true life had started dramatically somewhere near Valladolid, in Spain. “I’ll bet that patient was a Communist when she was young,” he added. “Like all of us.”

  “Oh shut up, hombre,” said Yasha, who was in a bad mood. “You have no right to insult that unfortunate woman.”

  “How do you know she’s unfortunate?”

  “If she weren’t, she wouldn’t be in this place that our dear Bolek can’t even locate.”

  “Bolek, if you know where she is, say so. But be careful,” said Gad, for whom “be careful” was a rule that applied to every hour of the day.

  Everyone insisted, until Bolek finally gave the name of the hospital.

  And that is how Gamaliel comes to be in this gloomy ward dominated by sickness and misery.

  At the old woman’s bedside, he asks in Hungarian, “You’re from Budapest?” She seems not to hear him. In what spheres has her mind lost its way? “You are Madame Zsuzsi Szabó?” he asks. Her face remains entirely still. Her eyes never seek those of her visitor. To her, he doesn’t exist. Or is it she who no longer exists?

  ALL AT ONCE, GAMALIEL SEES HIMSELF IN BUDAPEST in 1948. Ilonka was going to a hospital, a bouquet of flowers in her hand: A Jewish friend of his mother, a survivor of the camps, was seriously ill. When Gamaliel refused to stay home alone, Ilonka let him accompany her. “You’ll wait for me outside, young man, promise?” He promised; he would have promised anything to be allowed to go with her. She disappeared into a lugubrious gray building. Time went by; she did not return. Rain began to fall, first a few drops, then more. Gamaliel decided to go inside. There was no one in the corridor. He could hear muffled voices coming from several rooms. One voice sounded familiar, so he pushed on the half-open door. Ilonka was standing at the foot of the bed; the flowers lay on the bedcovers. She was speaking in a low voice to an old woman who was not answering. Ilonka seemed to be imploring the patient, repeating again and again, “Say something, my dearest Hegedüs Néni. I beg of you, say something. . . . Mama was your friend, your good friend. You remember her, don’t you? Answer me, my dear, dear Hegedüs Néni. Say something, just a few words. Do it for me; do it for Mama. . . .”

  The old woman closed her eyes, then opened them again immediately. When she spoke, she hardly moved her dry lips, and her voice was barely audible. “What do you want of me? How dare you speak to me? What did I do to you? Who authorized you to come into my grave? Who are you?”

  She spoke of her “grave,” Gamaliel realized, trying not to show his dismay. She’s not just sick. She’s crazy.

  Not knowing what to say, Ilonka reached out to stroke her hand, but the patient withdrew it. “Go away,” she went on in the same cold, distant voice. “How dare you disturb the sleep of the dead.”

  She said “sleep of the dead,” Gamaliel thought. So, in her insanity she considers herself dead?

  “I beg your pardon, Hegedüs Néni,” said Ilonka. “I—”

  “You dare to beg my pardon! Oh, you people who are living, it’s all so easy for you. You do awful things, horrible things; then you say ‘beg your pardon,’ and that’s supposed to make everything all right, all the wounds healed, turn the page. Not here, dear lady, not among us. We the dead don’t forgive so easily. The dead have long memories. Unlike the living.”

  But who was she? Gamaliel will wonder about that, with foreboding in his heart, for many years. He remembers her now as he stands before this wounded old woman. What face is hiding behind that ravaged mask? What painful truth is her silence concealing? From what danger was she fleeing, and why did she take refuge behind this barricade of indifference? What message would this woman send to the world of the living? Unfortunately, Gamaliel does not know how to make the patient speak, as Ilonka did. “I’m Ilonka, the singer,” the Jewish boy’s guardian had said. “Ilonka. Mama and you were friends from childhood. I would like to be able to help you.”

  The woman opened her mouth with difficulty: “Ilonka . . . Ilonka . . . are you Jewish?”

  “No, I’m not.”

  The patient seemed to frown. “If you’re not Jewish, what are you doing in my world?”

  “I found out that you were here. I had to come.”

  “Can’t you see I’m alone? Why did you come? To take my solitude away from me?”

  “No, no . . . I swear it.”

  “To share it with me maybe?”

  “I would like to, Madame Hegedüs, but I don’t know how.”

  “You can never know. Try it and you’ll find out. You’re not Jewish; therefore, you’re not dead. The Jews are all dead. Only the dead may come in here with me.” Then, as if a distant memory had come to her, she sat up and pointed to a chair by her bed. “Sit down. The dead are either lying down or standing, never sitting. But you, you’re living, so you may sit.”

  Gamaliel, in the background, looked around, as if seeking someone whom he could ask how he should comport himself. But there was no doctor or nurse in the ward. As for the other patients, either they weren’t listening to the conversation or they didn’t want to get involved. He saw Ilonka seat herself. He remained standing, and waited.

  Suddenly, the patient’s eyes lit up strangely. “Your accent.” She spoke as if in a reverie. “Your accent sounds familiar. You’re from Budapest. Aren’t you from Budapest?”

  “Yes, but I was born in Fehérvàros.”

  “So was I.”

  “I know. You and Mama were from the same village.”

  Even as he recalls the patient in Budapest, Gamaliel is leaning over to get a better look at Zsuzsi Szabó. “Who are you?” he asks all at once.

  In his delirious imagining, the two women merge, like red flames chasing each other in a magic kaleidoscope, and their faces and their destinies become one. He knows it’s impossible, but still he wonders. Suppose the two are one. At once, the boundaries of space and time vanish.

  The patient in Budapest seemed suddenly seized with fear. “You don’t ask such questions of the dead,” she hissed.

  But what was the question? For the life of him, Gamaliel can’t remember. He starts when he feels a hand on his shoulder. The doctor, Lili Rosenkrantz, is standing behind him; she looks composed and interested. He had not heard her come in. “Now that you’ve seen her, let’s go outside,” she says. “We can talk better there.”

  “But . . .”

  “Believe me, we’ll be better off outside.”

  Reluctantly, he follows her out of the building, feeling vaguely guilty toward the patient he is abandoning to her solitude.

  Once in the courtyard, they find a bench under a fruit tree that is already half in bloom. She sits down and motions to the seat at her left, but he remains standing. “I don’t understand what’s going on,” he says. “I came here because she wanted to see me. . . .”

  “I’m the one who wanted to see you,” the doctor explains. “I told you. She’s my patient. I thought you might be able to help me.”

  Gamaliel, surprised at her terse, professional tone, studies her in silence. Now he finds her less vulnerable, although melancholy. He’s always been attracted to melancholy women. He was attracted to the others also, the pleasure seekers, but not in the same way.

  “So it was you who wanted to see me?”

  “Well . . . ,” she says. She smiles and tosses her head.

  He’s alwa
ys loved women who smile as they toss their heads. They make him want to respond with some sort of gesture of complicity.

  The doctor waits for him to ask more questions, but he just gazes at her. “I see that I owe you an explanation,” she says, still smiling. “I know you lived in Budapest. I know that from our mutual friend, Bolek. I introduced him to my husband, but that didn’t stop him from being a bit infatuated with me, as he is with so many women. I thought you could get my patient to talk. . . . Her case isn’t hopeless, but it’s certainly discouraging. She refuses to live because she thinks she’s already dead.”

  “What makes you say that, given that she’s mute?”

  “True, she’s virtually mute. But a psychiatrist can recognize the symptoms. There are patients who believe they are not living or have no right to live.”

  Gamaliel does not know how to respond. What advice would he be given by Rebbe Zusya, the Sage who knows so much about so many fields? A woman is convinced that she is no longer of this world, but has gone to what is said to be the world of truth. But hasn’t Gamaliel himself sometimes thought his true life lay elsewhere? That it is by mistake that he was born before the Second World War in Czechoslovakia, by mistake that he came to be in Christian Hungary, by mistake that he was saved in Budapest and then declared stateless in Paris? Married by mistake, a father by accident. His very identity may have been an error: Suppose he were to discover that Ilonka was really his mother? What part does this old patient play in his life’s journey? Is it conceivable that she alone holds the answers to some of the questions that have been haunting him? And one day she will appear in his thoughts and demand to be included in the narratives he writes? No, he would send her away. Writing? At times, Gamaliel no longer wants to go on with it. To hell with this slave labor that is supposed to be so free and liberating. He’s written too much as it is. Too many sentences summoned to a blank page to express the thoughts and desires that lay jumbled in other minds. Too many words scattered to the four winds, seeds that neither took root nor bore fruit, wounded birds that fell to earth on land that was arid and lifeless and exhausted. Has he lived more than enough? Rebbe Zusya would shout his answer: “No, a thousand times no! You have no right to give up on life when you feel it’s hopeless. Each day is a blessing; each moment gives you an opportunity for grace. Haven’t I taught you anything?” Of course Rebbe Zusya would be right. But the problem is not in knowing why he should live, but how, in the midst of so much duplicity. He has an absurd impulse to tell the young doctor about his strained, complex relationship with the Just One, the Tzaddik of Brooklyn. He changes his mind, preferring to get her to talk instead. “I came here because of you, and for you. That gives me the right to know you a little better, doesn’t it?”

  “I’ve already told you about my marriage, or at least how it ended.”

  “And before? Where do you come from? And how did you come to be here? What made you choose medicine? You speak with an accent.”

  She waited before answering. “You’re right. But my story is almost commonplace. Other people could tell you better stories, more colorful ones. I was born in Romania. My father disappeared in a camp near Mogilev, somewhere in Transnistria.”

  Her story, like that of so many others of her generation, could be told in the Book of Job or the book of survivors. A story of chance, of miracles. Her mother had found refuge in Budapest, where she married an American journalist. The little girl made the couple laugh at the way she mangled the few words of Hungarian that their housekeeper had taught her. Soon the family emigrated to America. Then a boy was born, who later would die in a car accident. Not long after that, her stepfather, in Europe on business, collapsed from a heart attack and died on a Paris boulevard. Her mother fell into a depression, from which she never recovered. “She died in this very hospital,” the young woman tells him. “Fortunately, I’m a psychiatrist.”

  “Yes, fortunately,” says Gamaliel, impressed by such a conclusion to her story.

  A familiar impulse draws him to the doctor, who seems suddenly to have cast off her melancholy. Not knowing why, he hears himself asking her if she intends to get married again.

  “To whom?” she replies.

  Gamaliel has a crazy notion to say “To me,” if only to observe the surprise on her face. She must have guessed what he is thinking, for she blushes. She tries to change the tenor of the conversation. “You really don’t want to sit down?”

  Now Colette’s former husband, as embarrassed as a shy teenager, realizes he is still standing. “Excuse me,” he says as he sits down.

  They gaze at each other in silence, aware perhaps of the weight of this moment that has brought them together. Gamaliel would like to ease the tension by resuming their conversation, but it is she who wipes her forehead, as if to banish some fear, and continues in a lighter manner: “Your name was Péter, wasn’t it? That’s what Bolek—”

  “But call me Gamaliel.”

  “My name is—”

  “You told me. Lili. Lili Rosenkrantz. I like that name; it’s beautiful. Like a melody. It makes me dream.”

  “Dream about what?”

  “About music, about dance. Let’s say about my childhood.”

  It’s seemingly everyday conversation, an exchange of information: polite words, cordial questions and answers, memories connected to Budapest.

  “Are you still stateless?”

  “Technically, no. But I’ve been without a country for a long time.”

  “Is it a difficult situation to be in?”

  “Very difficult; in fact, it’s unbearable.”

  “Like Bolek?”

  “Yes, like him, and like so many others. We used to dream that we’d make a homeland for those who didn’t have one, that we’d give an identity to those who’d been deprived of theirs. How about you?”

  “I’ve always had a country. First Romania, now America, thanks to my stepfather. His ancestors were Russian Jews. You noticed that I haven’t completely lost my Romanian accent. Still, I’m American enough to feel guilty about what we did to those poor Indians.”

  Ask her how she expresses her Jewishness? No, that’s indiscreet, too personal a question. Save it for another time. But will there be another time? Better change the subject. Bolek, for example: How did she meet him?

  “Oh yes, Bolek, what a fellow,” she says, clapping her hands. “Some character, isn’t he? Always falling in love, never twice with the same woman, always in addition to his wife. He picked me up in the subway by offering me his seat. Can you imagine? Naturally, I thanked him. At that, he asked me to have coffee with him. When? At the next station. Since he had a pleasant face, I accepted. I found him entertaining, and interesting. All these stories about being a refugee in Germany, then in France, then in the United States . . . He has a wonderful sense of humor. Everything makes him laugh. When he found out I was born in Eastern Europe during the war, he mentioned your name—or rather, your two names, and their story. As it happens, I knew about your names. My mother used to mention you sometimes while spending an evening with friends. When they talked about the German occupation and the persecution of the Jews, one of them would say he knew someone from your circle.”

  While he listens, Gamaliel is watching her with growing emotion. He hardly dares breathe. A thought flashes through his mind: Can that sick old woman upstairs really be Ilonka? Can it be that I did not recognize the young singer with the sparkling talent in the old woman’s ravaged face? True, a lot of water has flowed under the bridges of the Danube and the Hudson since the days when she was sheltering me. Can a human being so change that her present erases every trace of her past?

  The young woman’s soft, lilting voice rouses him from his reverie. “Last week, our patient seemed to come out of her coma. She tried to speak. She murmured a few words, maybe names. . . .”

  “What names?” Gamaliel exclaims. “Try to remember. It’s important to me. Did she say a name that sounded like Ilonka?”

  The doctor ref
lects. She turns serious, almost pained. She repeats the name several times: “Ilonka, Ilonka, a Hungarian name . . . a woman’s name . . . No, I don’t think so.” Gamaliel, his nerves stretched tight as a bow, is watching her lips. “So who is this Ilonka?” she asks.

  “A saint.” And after a moment’s silence, he adds, “A true saint, not the usual kind.”

  “One of your conquests, was she?”

  “Yes, I conquered her, and I’m proud to say so. It was she who saved the conqueror.”

  Gamaliel falls silent. Words and pictures are swimming around in his mind. It’s not the melancholy doctor whom I’m here to captivate, he realizes. It’s Ilonka, that wonderful protector of mine, who would as readily weep as make love. Is it she whom I’m forever seeking in every woman who attracts me?

  “This saint who wasn’t the usual kind, what became of her?” the doctor asks. “Did she have a hard time of it during the war? Did she find herself a husband? Did fate reward her, as she deserved?”

  “Ilonka was better at making others happy than she was at finding happiness for herself.”

  “Then she was unhappy!” the doctor exclaims. A wisp of hair falls over her forehead.

  “Yes, much of the time. What can you expect? Everyone she loved left her.”

  “Who were they?”

  “My mother and I. There must have been others, too.”

  “Why did you leave her?”

  “We had to.”

  “You’re saying that with regret, but surely it wasn’t your fault.”

  “I know that, and she knew it, too. That didn’t save her from suffering.”

  It was Ilonka herself who decided on their first separation. Foreseeing danger, she sent the little boy to a safe location, dispatching him with a onetime dancer to another part of Budapest.

  Soon after he left, she was denounced by an anti-Semite at the cabaret and then arrested by the Nyilas. She was beaten, humiliated, raped. Her torturers tried to make her reveal under what names the Jews were hiding, and with whom. She made up names and addresses. Each time, the sadists came back empty-handed and insane with rage. Ilonka screamed, wept, entreated; she was determined to endure anything, to withstand anything. The role of informer did not suit her, as she explained to Gamaliel when she had found him again.