The Time of the Uprooted: A Novel

  How well he speaks, Gamaliel thinks admiringly. That means he’s not a writer. He teaches literature—that’s it. I should get his address, look him up, ask him to tell me about his theories on language.

  “Luckily, the new administration here has changed everything, you understand,” the old man continues. “All because of me—believe me when I say that. I could no longer stand my poor wife’s suffering. I complained. I threatened. I got people in high places to put in a word. And then, my dear sir, from one day to the next, medical policy in this place did change for the better. I’m telling you this to reassure you. You have nothing to fear for that patient who is dear to you. I’m not saying electroshock treatment has been completely abolished, but that it’s never practiced on people who are unable to speak for themselves. It’s only used on people . . .” Here the old man, while still fiddling with his beard, stops talking in order to observe the effect of his words on his companion.

  Gamaliel starts in surprise and asks, “Used only on whom?”

  “On people like you,” the old man replies with a chuckle. “People who claim to be innocent, and therefore sound in mind and body. But don’t you understand, dear sir, that innocence makes you all sick? In this world, innocence is a disease. And I am one of those who knows how to cure it.” He points to the fourth floor of the building.“Look at the fourth window on the left. Look at it carefully. It doesn’t look like anything special. But that’s where we take care of big shots like you.”

  Here’s the poisoned gift of the gods, thinks Gamaliel, who has suddenly realized why he’s feeling so exasperated. Great! I happened on this guide, who is bright and erudite— and crazy enough to be put in a straitjacket. How can I rid myself of him without offending him? Suppose he’s violent? That’s all I need this morning—some kind of incident. Gamaliel looks around and spots a pair of white coats, a man and a woman, coming out of the building facing him. The pair walk toward the bench. Gamaliel recognizes his earlier benefactor as the man in the white coat, who now addresses the old man.

  “Here you are back, Martin! How was your visit with your family? But I thought you were supposed to come back last night.”

  “My pass was good for twenty-four hours,” the old man replies, eyes down, suddenly humble.

  “I know that,” says the woman. “But we like you. You’re our dear Mr. Johnson. We value your company. One day a month is just what you need to rest and pull yourself together. But we miss you. You know that, don’t you?”

  The old man has made himself even smaller.

  “I think I’d better go back to my room.”

  Gamaliel looks over at the woman doctor. Around forty. Still attractive. Slender. Delicate features.

  “You know him?” she asks.

  “I just met him. What a character! I could listen to him for hours.”

  “Well, good luck!” She stretches out her hand, then asks, “Who are you looking for here?”

  “I don’t know. . . .” Quickly, he corrects himself. “Wait, I’m not like him. . . .”

  “You are lucky.”

  “I’m looking for a woman. . . . Sorry, a woman in the hospital here . . . a patient of Hungarian origin.”

  “Oh, then you must be Gamaliel.”

  “How did you know that?”

  “I’m the one who gave Bolek the message for you. Excuse me, I forgot to tell you that I’m the doctor treating that patient. According to her papers, she’s named Zsuzsi Szabó, but who knows? We have no further information on her. Does that name mean anything to you?”

  “No, I don’t think so,” says Gamaliel, “but I thought her name was Lili Rosenkrantz.”

  “I’m Lili Rosenkrantz,” the young doctor explains, smiling.

  “Oh, I see.”

  “But Zsuzsi Szabó—that name really doesn’t ring a bell with you?”

  “No, it doesn’t.”

  The two doctors exchange a look.

  “Come with us,” she says.

  They walk in silence. A strange thought occurs to Gamaliel: Suppose these two are also out of their minds? They don’t seem it, but who knows? A while ago, the old man didn’t seem so deranged, either. And yet . . . Maybe I’d do better to go away and come back another day. But if that woman is Ilonka . . . No, it can’t be. In 1956, Ilonka stayed in Budapest. In Paris, he’d gone to the Red Cross as soon as he could and asked them to make a search for her, and he’d tried other connections that he thought might find out something. It was all in vain. Hope for a miracle? Absurd. No, not so absurd if Ilonka was right. Time and again, she’d told him she believed in miracles, but she always added a warning: “My boy, if you want the Lord to help you, then you must help Him. It’s too difficult, even for Him, unless you help. We mustn’t expect Him to deal alone with all the madmen and imbeciles and scoundrels who make trouble in this poor little world of His, where there are so many more sinners than saints. Why should we expect Him to carry all that burden on His shoulders? You have to give Him a hand. You understand?” “But,” he would complain, “how can a little boy— even a big boy—be any help to God Almighty, who is stronger than all the kings on earth?” “I’ll show you how,” Ilonka would say, and she’d hug him.

  They are following a long, poorly lit corridor on the fourth floor when the woman doctor stops by a half-open window to whisper to a tall, imperious-looking nurse. The doctor’s face darkens.

  “Our patient needs emergency care,” she explains to Gamaliel. “I’m very sorry. Could you come back this afternoon?”

  “Of course,” Gamaliel replies.

  The doctor presses a button, a door opens, and she disappears. But the memory of Ilonka lingers. Gamaliel remembers how devoted she was. As if she had been his mother, she did everything to keep him busy in his mother’s absence. Among her friends there was a French journalist. No doubt he was using the little boy as a pretext when he said to him, “I’ll be your teacher.” Always elegant, wearing a tie, his pockets filled with scraps of paper, the journalist would give the boy French lessons to pass the hours until Ilonka came home from singing in the nightclub. She was so pleased that she kissed the journalist on both checks, and then he came more and more often. So it was that Gamaliel learned enough French to get by when he arrived in Paris.

  He remembers Ilonka’s laugh, her delicate hands, her tenderness. She promised him she’d teach him how to live.

  She was so good at it.

  GAMALIEL WAS AT LOOSE ENDS AFTER HE LEFT the hospital. His thoughts turned to the sayings of his old teacher, Rabbi Zusya: “To a man born blind, God is blind. To a sick child, God is unfair. To the condemned man in prison, God is also a prisoner. On the other hand, to a free man, God is both the source of his freedom and its justification. To be free is to be made in God’s image. Anyone who tries to place himself between the freedom of God and the freedom of man, between the word of man and the thought of God, is only being false to both man and God.”

  And also: “I no longer understand the Creator of human beings. Why did He put us on this earth? Was it to glorify Himself? These earthworms, these specks of dust, able, if not eager, to corrupt all that is noble in the soul, unfortunate mortals who need bread, water, and air to survive, how could they in their wretchedness bring forth true glory and offer it to Him? For what reason should He have need of them, He who is the beginning and the achievement and the rebirth of all that is and ever shall be? I no longer understand.”

  And this: “I, Zusya, son of Rachel, I say unto Thee, God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, that Thy creation is racing to its doom through a land of ashes. If Thou dost not see this, if Thou seest it and dost not intervene, if Thou hast forgotten the procession of doomed Jewish children marching through the night to the flames, God of charity, I will tell my prayer to howl. I’ll no longer have the strength to invoke Thy Holy Name. I will command my mind to close Thee out of my thoughts forever.”

  3

  “PÉTER, MY CHILD, ”SAID ILONKA, STROKING HIS hair, “remember that your na
me’s Péter now. Not Gamaliel, but Péter. Remember this name: Péter Kertész. You’re my little nephew; you’re the youngest son of my big sister, Magda. You must remember that; it’s important. Your life depends on it, and so does mine. Please repeat it after me. Péter, not Gamaliel. Your mother’s named Magda. Magda Kertész. And you’re Péter Kertész.”

  At first, Péter hadn’t liked Ilonka’s caresses, for fear they might make him forget his mother’s warm and appeasing touch. But in time, he came to accept them. Besides, she never insisted; she never pressed herself on him.

  “Your mama, God save her, has become my best friend,” she told him one evening before leaving for the cabaret. She continued as she prepared his dinner. “What a woman your mama is; she’s all heart. We’ve just recently become friends, but she matters to me. I’ve learned a lot from her. I don’t know what I’d do with my life without her. I’d die of shame. . . . My family lives far away, in the Carpathians. My parents are poor and sickly. We’ll go visit them one day, maybe in July. No, that’s not a good idea. They’d know that you’re not Magda’s son—they see her children every Sunday in church. We’ll spend the summer here, and, God willing, we’ll try to find a way to get in touch with your parents.” She quickly corrected herself: “No, bad idea. Your papa’s in prison and your mama’s in hiding. Too many informers on the street. They’re like mad dogs the way they sniff around, hunting out your people. May the Lord crush them like rats. You don’t know who you can trust anymore.”

  Ilonka’s sharp, insistent voice only deepened Péter’s melancholy. It aroused a flood of memories that, from her first words, broke over him in waves. The meals of the Sabbath, the simple purity of the Sabbath, his mother’s delicate hands lighting the candles on the table covered with a white tablecloth—that image would stay with Gamaliel forever— his father’s gentle, nostalgic songs. The peace of the Sabbath: Banished were all melancholy and all passion, all worries, regrets, thoughts of failure, all remorse. The sublime meaning of the Sabbath: the final reconciliation of the Creator and his Creation, of the Jew and his soul. But now, in Ilonka’s quiet home, there was no more Sabbath.

  Besides, she was trying to persuade him that for the time being—only the time being, she insisted—he must forget everything that had to do with the past.

  “Tell yourself you’re a Christian.”

  “But my father . . .”

  “I know, I know. Your father wants you to be a Jew, and so do I, believe me. I’d never do anything contrary to his will.”

  “But then . . .”

  “Péter, my child, listen to me carefully. Your father wants first of all and above all for you to stay alive. If you’re a Jew, the odds are against you. Your mama understood that; otherwise, she’d never have left you. If she’s in hiding, it’s not just for her own good; it’s for yours also. That’s why she put you in my care. To save both your lives. You also, you have to understand.”

  “But I don’t want to be a Christian! I don’t!”

  “I’m not asking you to, not really. I’m just asking you to make believe. . . .”

  She fastened around his neck a silver chain, from which hung a small cross.

  “This doesn’t mean anything. I mean, not for you it doesn’t. In your heart you’re still a Jew, just like your parents. Make believe that it’s Purim. I’ve lived around Jews enough to know that on that day everyone wears a mask. And now you, too, are in disguise. What’s wrong with that? The day will come when you’ll take off your mask and everything will be the way it was before.”

  She taught him several prayers that every Christian child can recite by heart:

  “Repeat after me: ‘Our Father, who art in heaven . . .’ ”

  Péter had no problem with that prayer. After all, it was addressed to God, not to Jesus Christ. He remembered a prayer that his father specially loved, Avinu Malkenu: “Our Father, our King, hear our voices, take pity on Thy children.” And also “Our Father, our King, for Thy sake have compassion on us.” He could recite Ilonka’s prayer in peace without betraying his father. It was harder in the case of the Hail Mary. Who was this gentle Mary, blessed and adored, who was asked to pray for people? The mama of God? But how could God have a mother, He the invisible Creator of the heavens and of the earth? How could He have a mother, since He wasn’t a man?

  “Mary, holy Mary, is the mama of Jesus,” explained Ilonka, patient as always. “Jesus is our Lord. Therefore, Mary is the mother of our Lord.”

  “And your Lord is God?”

  “He is the Son of God.”

  “When you pray to the Lord to save us, to help us, who are you praying to? The father or the son?”

  “To both of them. But also—”

  “Also what?”

  “Also there’s the Holy Spirit.”

  “What? You have three gods?”

  “No, three divinities.”

  “You mean that seriously? You’re telling me that the Christians believe in two gods and three divinities? But then you must not know our Shma. I was only three when my father, sitting on my bed, taught me the most important of our prayers: ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.’ How can you ask me to say that there’s more than one God?”

  Poor Ilonka didn’t know which way to turn. She realized she shouldn’t have spoken to him about the Holy Trinity. Now the child was even more confused. Having run out of arguments, she could only say to him what her parents had often said to her when she was a child: “Later on you’ll understand.”

  Péter at last gave in. But from then on, he put more energy and determination into his daily recitation of the morning prayer Modeh Ani and the evening Shma Yisrael. Lying in bed with his eyes closed, he would begin his prayers by murmuring, “My name is Gamaliel. My father’s name is Pinhas. My mother’s name is Ruth.” Ilonka did not object. She just warned him to be careful and to be sure not to mix any Hebrew words into the Christian prayers he recited in Hungarian.

  Recalling that time in his life, Gamaliel has a memory of familiarity and warmth. Brave, wonderful Ilonka. Why had she been so kind to him? What made her risk her liberty and her life—a quiet, if not very happy life—to protect a little Jewish boy who, without his parents, had no one else to turn to?

  Ilonka had become more and more worried. The hatred expressed by those swine the Nyilas, the Hungarian Nazis, was too violent. The arrests too frequent. As were the roundups, which were ever more carefully organized. The net was tightening around the Jews in hiding. There were too many informers, too many police raids on nearby buildings, too many searches, too many screams and tears in the night. Not all of those arrested were able to hold out under torture. The jails were overflowing.

  “Now listen, my boy,” Ilonka said. “When I’m at work, you open the door for no one. You understand? No one at all. If someone knocks at the door, you stay still. Don’t move. If someone calls out, you stay silent. Be careful: Don’t make a sound, not even when you breathe.”

  No one knocked at the door that night. But the little Jewish boy did not fall asleep. He was wide-awake and on edge, sitting quietly in a corner, hands on his knees, waiting for Ilonka to come home. His anxiety grew by the minute. It became thicker, heavier; it stuck to his skin, crushed his chest. He wanted to cry; then he wanted to die. To keep himself under control, he imagined his mother’s face: She was smiling at him, and it broke his heart. Where was she? “In the neighborhood,” Ilonka had told him. Why so vague? She thought it was better that way. It was dangerous to know too much. But now where was Ilonka? Why was she late coming home? If she’d been arrested, who would look after him? The dawn was breaking, red and fiery, when he heard the key turn in the lock.

  “If you only knew what bad luck I had,” Ilonka said while she took off her coat. “This curfew was a lot stricter last night. All of us had to stay in the cabaret, including the manager, even though he’s one of those filthy Nyilas.”

  She hugged him close and kissed him on the forehead.

  ?
??You must have been scared, Péter, my child. I’m so sorry. I’ll find some other way to protect us next time if the roundups start again and those swine are causing trouble.”

  The little boy felt safe in her arms.

  “Now let’s go to sleep. I’m worn-out and you must be, too.”

  They stretched out on the one bed, still in their clothes, and she went right to sleep, but he did not. That afternoon, she buttered some slices of bread for him, but he couldn’t eat. Anxiety had robbed him of his appetite.

  Ilonka picked up a rumor the following week that the Nyilas had uncovered more information—more lists, more addresses—and, with the Germans’ help, they knew just where to strike next. The Jews were in more danger than ever.

  She invited the boy to sit by her on the sofa.

  “I’m taking you with me tonight,” she told him.