The Time of the Uprooted: A Novel

  “You’re right: She was a saint,” Lili says in a tentative manner. “But in what way was she different from other saints, whose good deeds we read about in sacred writings?”

  “She was a believer, but her saintliness had nothing to do with her religion. It was all from the heart, from her great and generous heart, the kind we don’t see anymore. Understand? Ilonka was human, admirably human, and to me, that places her above any saint.”

  The doctor looks surprised. “Why do you say that? Is the divine that much of a problem for you? Since when is being human the supreme virtue? Remember the beautiful old saying that the goal of mankind is to become god?”

  “To which I would reply that to my mind the goal of mankind is to become human. Ilonka saved my life. She was a brave woman, a noble and passionate one; she was a heroic figure. That’s why I think of her with love and admiration.”

  The doctor persists: “If a person risks life and liberty to help victims of persecution, well, that makes her a saint in my eyes. Besides, you yourself said it.” Gamaliel does not answer immediately, preferring to end the discussion. The doctor interprets his silence as assent: “We agree, then, about Ilonka? Good. What sort of woman was she? Was she cultivated, intellectual? Did she like gardening, classical music? Did she read the novels of Stendhal and Victor Hugo?”

  Gamaliel stares at her, wondering whether he should hurt her feelings. Should he say to her that all the intellectuals of Europe are not worth the loving grace of this unschooled woman who did so much to save one human life, his own? He cannot make up his mind.

  The doctor offers him a way out: “You were very young when she took you in, weren’t you?”

  “Not that young.”

  “Too young to understand what she really did.”

  “She was a cabaret singer.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, she sang in a cabaret.”

  “And that’s all she did?”

  Gamaliel bites his lips. Gestures, hushed voices, feelings are shooting like bolts of lightning through his mind. Ilonka leaning over the little boy curled up on the sofa. “Péter, are you asleep? Good. Sleep, my big boy. Sleep, and sweet dreams. It’s better that way.” She puts out the light and goes into the bedroom. But Gamaliel is not asleep. He follows her movements through half-closed eyes. She is not alone. A man is with her. Gamaliel recognizes him: It is the loudmouthed head of the Nyilas, the Hungarian fascists, whom he observed at the cabaret. He catches strange muffled sounds coming from the bedroom. He doesn’t understand their cause or their meaning—or perhaps he doesn’t want to understand. The same scene takes place every night, but the man who accompanies Ilonka is not always the same.

  “That’s all she did,” he says at last to the young woman. “She was a singer. I heard her sing. She was good, very good indeed. When she sang, her voice lifted your spirits and gave you wings, and from up in the sky, you looked down at the earth as if it were a sanctuary.”

  Has the doctor noticed the change in Gamaliel’s voice? If so, she doesn’t show it. All she does is give him a supportive smile, while he tries to remember how long it was before he came to understand the nature of his protector’s profession. “Tell me some more about yourself,” the young woman says, and she touches him lightly, timidly, on the arm. “And if that bores you, tell me a story.”

  All right, a story, but which one? And why now, on this early day of spring, under this tree in bloom, so close to the hospital building housing human beings in whom the course of illness is running to its conclusion, where they completely lose their minds? Is she trying to provoke a response from him? Or is it for some professional, perhaps medical, reason? Does she see in him a disorder of which he is not aware? He decides to tell her about an incident that still embarrasses him many decades later. “At the time, I was still young, and I didn’t know my way around, as the saying goes,” he began in a neutral tone. “I’d just arrived in Paris. I was poor—all I had was a travel permit stamped by the French consulate—and I didn’t know anyone.”

  At the time, late 1956, some frontiers in Europe were relatively easy to cross. It was done every day by thousands of Hungarian refugees fleeing from the Red Army tanks that had crushed their insurrection. The governments of Western Europe must have felt guilty about them, for these refugees were better received than those who had preceded them in 1945–1946. Gamaliel was not yet twenty when he stepped off the Orient Express, which had taken him from Vienna to Paris. Before he even went to the hotel where he was to join other refugees, he went on foot from the Gare de l’Est to the rue Saint-Denis. A Party comrade had sung the praises of this section of Paris while telling him everything he needed to know to achieve his desired goal. “What came first and foremost, according to my comrade? Don’t laugh: He said you must make love to understand the secret of all Creation.”

  “I’m not laughing,” says the doctor, and she squeezes his arm very hard.

  “It was the first time.”

  “And you were almost twenty?”

  “Is that so unusual?”

  “For some people, everything is unusual,” she says gently. “Every moment of their lives is both predictable and unexpected. And you, poor fellow, seem to be one of them.”

  “Please, don’t feel sorry for me. I . . .” Gamaliel stops in midsentence, and his face darkens.

  “Well, I’m still waiting for your story,” says the doctor.

  “It’s not very pretty.”

  “I don’t like stories that are too pretty. I spend my time listening to the other kind.”

  Walking along rue Saint-Denis that day, Gamaliel felt desire gathering in him like a thunderstorm. He didn’t know where to look, or how to respond to the invitations he was hearing. Alluring, heavily made-up women were soliciting him in English, in German, never in Hungarian, but he understood French, thanks to the journalist in Budapest and the courses he had taken in school. He chose the one who promised him in French an hour in paradise, smilingly requiring only a few hundred francs as the price of admission.

  The furniture and the walls of the dingy hotel room smelled of mildew. She began rapidly to shed her clothes, but Gamaliel was taking his time. “You want me to get completely undressed?” she asked in a bored tone. “That costs extra.”

  “Don’t bother,” he said in a choked voice.

  “As you please. But hurry up, my boy,” she said while she pulled down her red panties and tossed them on a filthy chair. “I don’t have all day.”

  Gamaliel’s cheeks were flaming as he took off his trousers and carefully folded them. The woman lying on the bed was getting impatient. “How about my present?” He didn’t understand. “The money,” she said, irritated. “Where’s the cash you owe me?” He felt around in his jacket pocket and handed her a few bills. She counted them and kept them in her hand. “All right, come on.”

  “Not yet,” said Gamaliel.

  All he could do was stare at her, while she, stretched out on the dirty sheet, knees apart, was losing all patience. “How many times do I have to tell you, baby? I don’t have the rest of my lousy life for this, you know. So come take what you paid for.”

  “Not yet.”

  “What’re you waiting for? The revolution, or maybe the Messiah?”

  He blushed. Like all Jews, he knew that he must always be ready for the coming of the Messiah even though He might be late, but he would never have imagined that the Redeemer would make His appearance in a place like this.

  Abruptly, the woman sat up. “Tell me what it is, you little brat. You don’t want me? I’m not sexy enough? Or does my body disgust you?”

  “Yes . . .” He caught himself. “I mean no. Not now. Not like this.”

  “Say, are you some kind of pervert? No? Well then, stop wasting my time. Come on, let’s get it over with.”

  Gamaliel saw her hard face, her folded legs; he stared at her and was seized with panic. “It’s my first time,” he said hoarsely.

  She burst out laughing.
“A virgin, imagine that! You’ll bring me luck. Now come here!”

  Gamaliel, unable to master his embarrassment, hurriedly threw on his clothes and fled.

  “It’s dangerous to look where we’re not supposed to,” the doctor comments. “That’s why we close our eyes when we’re making love. You learned that afterward, didn’t you?”

  “I learned a lot of things,” Gamaliel replies. He’d like to touch her hand, her arm, caress her hair, her neck, her face, offer her his lips, come to terms with life and with the living, but he’s afraid he’ll make a fool of himself. Hell, what’s the worst that could happen to me? Be rejected? My life’s been nothing but a series of rejections. When I spoke, they told me to shut up. When I was silent, they wanted to make me speak. I have never been able to be myself, not even in love.

  He leaned toward Lili, but she shook her head. “Not like that, not now, not here.”

  Then where? And when?

  5

  “NOT HERE,” GAD HAD SAID.

  “Why not?” asked Diego, professing surprise.

  “There’s a time and place for everything. It would be unseemly to talk of hatred now in this place. Be careful, my friends.”

  Hatred and contempt. The hatred of the world for us and man’s contempt for himself. Anti-Semitism reappearing in various guises. Gamaliel often discussed it with Bolek, Diego, Gad, and Yasha now that they had found one another in New York. They had gotten in the habit of meeting at a cafeteria near the old Jewish Daily Forward on the Lower East Side. There, in a setting of reassuring camaraderie, they would share their nostalgia, their regrets perhaps, and also times of noisy partying. Gad, the closemouthed Israeli, who smiled only when he was playing his violin, was the youngest of the group. He was lean, well built, alert, with searching eyes. When his friends asked why he said so little, he invariably replied, “I’ve learned to be careful.”

  The five once-stateless men had met in Paris in the early 1960s, at an annual reunion of Jewish refugees, where the talk was about getting residence permits extended, obtaining working papers, and applying for visas to the United States or Canada. They had taken a liking to one another, and now that they were all living in New York, they would get together every so often.

  “I know about hatred,” said little Diego while he stirred sugar into his lukewarm coffee. “Back then, in Valladolid, that was all that kept us going. Sometimes I’d even pray for it. ‘Our Father, who art in heaven, give us this day our daily hate.’ God Himself had become the God of hate.”

  “That’s worse than blasphemous; it’s crazy,” Bolek said. “God may hate, but He can’t inspire hatred.”

  “What do you know about hate?” asked Diego in irritation. “First of all, I’m a free man! As free as God. We were created in God’s image, so if He can hate, so can I. Besides, you talk about God as if He were a buddy of yours, maybe an accomplice. . . . You don’t have some racket together, do you?”

  “Take it easy,” said Bolek. “Your nice Lithuanian accent is turning into bad Yiddish.”

  “Mind your own business! If I want to get mad, I’ll get mad. If I feel like cursing, I’ll curse. Understand? And if I feel like hating, I’ll hate. I learned how in Spain. Over there, we were free—free to hate.”

  “Like God,” Bolek said sarcastically as he scratched his head.

  “Yes, just like God! Not all men may be worthy of Him, but I am, because I believe that He wants us to accept the freedom that He in His audacity offers us.”

  “Freedom to do anything at all?”

  “In any case, anything I want to do.”

  “You’re going too far,” said Bolek.

  “Be careful,” Gad put in. “You’re talking too much.”

  “And you’re not talking enough!” Yasha exclaimed.

  “Yasha, do you believe in God?” Bolek asked.

  “That has nothing to do with it.”

  “How about your cat, Misha? Does he believe in God?”

  “Misha is the God of cats.”

  Why does the conversation keep coming around to God, even though the group is made up of agnostics and unbelievers? Gamaliel wondered. He recalled Chesterton’s saying that when men stopped believing in God, it was not because they believed in nothing but, rather, because they would believe in anything. Should he quote the line? He decided instead to cool the conversation down by telling a story.

  “You remember Ilonka, the singer I lived with and to whom I owe my survival? ‘I’m afraid,’ she’d often say to me at night when she came home from the cabaret. ‘I’m afraid and I’m ashamed.’ One day, a Nyilas officer she knew dropped in unexpectedly. He was in a bad mood. So was she, but I understood the reason for her low spirits. The Russians were approaching Budapest, and yet the militias were still going from house to house, searching cellars and attics, flushing out hidden Jews, whom they would beat to death and toss in the Danube. Among them were neighbors she had known. All in the river. But the officer was in a bad mood for a different reason: He hadn’t arrested enough Jews.

  “ ‘You have to help me,’ he told Ilonka. ‘I’m sure you know people who are hiding those Yids. Give me their names and addresses; I have to come up with lists.’ To distract him, she kissed him on the forehead, on the lips. They were already embracing on the bed when she saw me. ‘What’re you still doing here?’ she shouted angrily. ‘Get out of here and be quick about it! Go to your room!’ I stood there paralyzed with fear. At that, the officer jumped to his feet and shoved me out of the room so hard that it hurt. That’s when I came to hate him. Not so much because he was killing Jews—that was beyond me at the time—but because he was coming between Ilonka and me. I hate him to this day.”

  “I’m opposed to hating,” said Gad, who was usually content to listen. “Anyone who gives in to hate can no longer function; he becomes stupid and vulnerable. In Israel, the commandos who went on missions with hatred in their hearts weren’t likely to return in one piece.” He paused, then added, “Same applies to the secret service.” There were rumors, legends, about Gad. As an agent of the Mossad, he had survived any number of dangers and outwitted as many traps in order to bring vital military information to the Israeli government. It was whispered that this son of German refugees in America had traveled to Arab capitals, posing as a German businessman and former Nazi. He himself said nothing. He was married but never spoke of his wife. He preferred to talk about music. He adored his violin, his constant and faithful companion; like Yasha with his cat, Gad saw in his instrument the perfect confidant, something that would never let him down. When solitude weighed too heavily on him, he would make his violin speak low, shout, sing, tell stories, and weep without tears.

  “I told you that hatred can be dangerous when we let it control us,” Gad continued. “There are certain schools where they teach you how to suppress or postpone your hatred. But there’s one kind of hate that’s harder to tame.” Contrary to his usual custom, Gad, his features tense, seemed to feel a need to unburden himself, as if his confession of vulnerability could no longer be put off after so many years of silence. “Hatred? What you’re concerned about is your own hate, not the kind that hits you over the head.” He stopped, hesitated a moment, as if wondering whether he had the right to go on. “Oh, I know, anti-Semitism, you’ve all suffered from it, even you, Diego. Well, I haven’t. But to be hated for no reason at all, not even because you’re a Jew, that’s an altogether different thing.” With that, he asked for a cigarette, this man who hardly ever smoked. Diego lit one and handed it to him. His friends, consumed with an uneasy curiosity, watched him in expectation of a dramatic tale of heroic deeds. “At the time, I was living in an Arab country,” said Gad. “Think of a Nazi Don Juan—that’s who I was. I was rich, single, a big spender. I kept company with a set of officials who liked me for the money I would throw around in nightclubs and jewelry stores, money that supposedly came from Jews who ‘disappeared’ during the war in Europe. They found that amusing.

  “One night in a
chic restaurant in the capital city, I was introduced to a foreign journalist, a woman who was a correspondent for a French magazine. I knew her name from reading her articles when I would pass through Paris. I knew she was gifted and intelligent, but her appearance surprised me. I don’t know why, but I’d expected someone older, more solidly built, almost masculine. I certainly wasn’t prepared for her inviting smile, for the challenge in her gray eyes. What was my reaction? You can probably guess. I cursed the life I was leading; I told myself that in normal times in some other place I could have fallen for her, and, who knows, made her my wife. That night, everyone was speaking English, but with different accents. Mine was German. I know she found me intriguing, because at a certain moment she turned to me and asked me who I was, where I came from, what I was doing in that city, how long I’d been there. To avoid answering her questions, I asked her if her curiosity might by any chance be connected to the fact that she was working undercover for the Jewish nation. Then one of the party, an air force major, whispered a few words in her ear. Immediately, her expression changed. She looked at me with hate in her eyes. It took my breath away. I didn’t realize that such intelligence and such hatred could coexist in one person. ‘Listen to me, Mr. Nazi,’ she shot at me in fury. ‘I’m not Israeli, I’m not even Zionist, but I am Jewish. My parents were survivors of the camps. I never knew my grandparents. They were slaughtered in Poland. I do not sit in judgment on your people; I don’t believe in collective guilt. But you, you disgust me. It makes me sick to see you free and happy in this country.’ She jumped to her feet and, turning to her host, said, ‘Please don’t hold it against me, but I refuse to sit down to dinner with this individual. I’m sure you understand.’ It was the most dangerous moment of my career as a secret agent. With my entire being, I wanted to hold her back, to send her an urgent message: ‘Don’t go by appearances. I’m a Jew, like you. I’m entitled to love you and be loved by you.’ But fortunately, I was well trained. I didn’t even blush. I looked down and in a loud voice said to my best ‘friend’ among them, ‘You see, these Jews, they live on hate.’ He apologized for her and for her behavior. But as for me, that misunderstanding made me suffer such pain as I hope you’ll never have to experience. So stop bothering me with your stories of hatred.”