The Birthday Buyer (9 page)

Parents, whenever they could, said goodbye to their children, knowing that in a few hours they would never be together again, that they would shortly die, and die painfully. Today I wonder what that moment would be like, the goodbye to my children, if they gave me that opportunity, after informing me that they would be murdered, shot, beheaded or gassed in a few hours. I am incapable of conceiving such a farewell; it is impossible, I cannot conceive such a final farewell. Let alone imagine it.

I felt under a responsibility to give Hurbinek a future and that occasionally led me to look for him concealed within the personality of a man called Pavel Farin. Or rather to believe—as Fanny later said—that if Hurbinek had lived on, he might be that Pavel Farin who appeared as such a happy find. Perhaps Hurbinek really lives on as that individual, Farin the Russian. A life that was inserted, decided by me, the creator of his future. Why not? Why couldn’t he have more lives? Other possible lives?

I came across him when he was some fifty-three years old. Fanny and I had gone to the theater, one autumnal night in 1995, to see a performance by a contemporary dance company named after its director and lead dancer, Claude Schlumberger. Our attention was riveted in every act by the dramatic, baroque, bubbly, explosively colorful stage sets. I searched the programme for the name of the set designer and costume designer. And yes, there it was: Pavel Farin, a name that at the time meant absolutely nothing to me, but was renowned in the world of dance. The performance was extremely polished and the final applause from the audience was never-ending. All the dancers came out and bowed, as did Schlumberger himself, sweating and clutching a bouquet of flowers, alongside a man on crutches who had a dreadful limp. He stood at one end of the stage. A spotlight focused on him. The director introduced him as Pavel Farin, the great costume designer. I then saw that he was supporting his whole body with the crutches and practically dragged his legs behind him. Why couldn’t he be Hurbinek?

When the Red Army arrived and liberated the camp in Auschwitz, Hurbinek survived. Quite miraculously, it must be said, since some of his key organs had begun to fail as a result of Mengele’s lunacy, and his paralysis hinted at the future decay of his lower limbs. On February 27, 1945 he was transferred by Russian nurses who took pity on that human remnant that was half child, half nothing. First they put him in an ambulance crammed with wounded and then in a hospital train that went to Moscow, where he became one of hundreds of thousands of orphaned children who were distributed between state bodies throughout the Soviet Union. In Hurbinek’s case, given his physical condition and moribund state of health, it was decided not to send him to a far-flung province, where he would be certain to die because he was so weak due to a lack of medical resources. Doctors in Moscow’s Central Hospital took him on and gave him a thorough examination, and he was considered to be a special case and was sent here and there, and in a few years, quite remarkably, he recovered part of his bodily functions, even his speech. But it was a long time before he was able to walk, after numerous operations that restored some feeling, though very little, to the lower part of his torso. The aftermath of those many operations on his hips and spine to find out why he was so immobile would be that he would always have to drag his feet and rely on crutches, as Fanny and I saw on that stage set in Madrid. It is most likely that Hurbinek would have lived with other children at the expense of the state in the Communist Colony no. 1 for Victims of the Patriotic War, based at 7 Ulitsa Engelskaya, which he would only leave when he had appointments for treatment on the Central Hospital at Kalinin Prospekt. He was brought up in the Colony, in the section for orphans, by Party bureaucrats who explained why that strange number was tattooed on his arm—those numbers that never faded however hard he rubbed—but they never told him he was Jewish, or that maybe his parents were, because they never mentioned his parents, and, indeed, what sense would it have made to do that, if they were only ashes, ashes that were unfortunately not simply ashes. They merely saw him as one more Russian child, abandoned and anonymous in a death camp, victim of the aggressive turn taken by History. Hurbinek, the name they gave him in that Auschwitz infirmary, in his most recent, but very distant past, was a word he found inscrutable, immediately rejected and literally erased from his mind. He would never utter the word again. They then gave him the name of Pavel Farin because one of those bureaucrats did supply him with a first name and surname (though nothing else; Hurbinek never saw him again), a mere administrative means of registering orphans found in the camps as legitimate citizens and avoiding difficulties for their adoptive families, since there wasn’t really an adoption process, only red tape so the state could look after them. The majority, especially the older children, were then conscripted into the Red Army. Now definitively converted into Pavel Farin, Hurbinek learned Russian, that he always considered to be his mother tongue, and it would be several years before he suspected his real origins. He had been saved. (Or rather, I rescued him.)

At the age of thirteen Pavel started to walk with the support of crutches, in 1955, when he started his apprenticeship in a theater scenery workshop, the Igor Landau Workshop for the Decorative Arts, at 26 Ulitsa Serafimovich in Moscow. He was immediately attracted by the half solemn, half ironic colors of the illuminated manuscripts and medieval paintings, in the great variety of reproductions held in Landau’s collections. They used them to inspire the craftsmen in the workshops who were making backcloths and costumes for the classical works performed on stage and in the cinema with popular actors like Cherkasov or Boliyedev or dancers at the Bolshoi, stars like Ermoleyev and Plisetskaya. By the age of twenty, Pavel had already drawn and painted at the Landau all the sets for the operas that he came to love over time:
Boris Godunov
,
The Marriage of Figaro
,
Rigoletto
,
Il Trovatore
, and
Carmen
; or for famous ballets like Khrennikov’s
Love for Love
and Pushkin’s
Mozart and Salieri
, or for plays in vogue: Gorky’s
Summerfolk
, Alexei Tolstoy’s
Tsar Fyodor
, Chekov’s
The Seagull
, and hundreds of other works. New worlds, full of playfulness and whimsy, that he could create as he wished, and even create as works unique on the face of the world. For the first time in his life he felt happy. He learned the trade of poster art and studied Russian iconography from the twenties and thirties. He imitated his favorite, Gustav Klucis. He became expert and was much in demand in Moscow’s theaterland. He grew up drawing and painting nonstop. At twenty-five, he took a position at the prestigious Comedy and Drama Theater on Ulitsa Jalova, directed by Liubimov. This was a very famous theater popular with Moscovites, who began to call it by the name of the nearest subway station: the Taganskaya. Pavel began as third dressing room assistant and was not granted permission to travel with the company. He became familiar with the repertory that was sometimes considered too liberal for the mood of the times in the USSR: Mayakovsky, Pushkin, Brecht, Bulgakov and Sholokhov. Helped by his cruel physique, by the end of the year Pavel was using his dark sense of humor and acerbic critical spirit to shape his artistic personality. Many felt he liked to pose as a
maudit
, or was blinded by bitterness, though others considered him to be an artist blinded by the gods. He devoured the Russian classics. The Taganskaya gradually incorporated into its repertory as their own many of Pavel Farin’s creations, and by 1970 he was the company’s premier set-designer, had four assistants and all the iconography the theater produced was his: costumes, posters, curtains, stage sets, brochures, and make up. Liubimov drew up the season’s programme with him, and his opinions were very present both in the official and clandestine press. The sight of that frail man standing only with the support of his crutches made him appear extremely fragile and soon became familiar in all theaters, and he became a prestigious, even mythical figure. People felt a mixture of pity and admiration for the backcloths, stage sets and costumes created by a man who was so deformed in the lower part of his body, with legs floating like loose sticks in trouser legs that seemed to contain nothing at all. Almost pathetically thin, grasping a sempiternal glass of vodka, Pavel, who spurned the sun, possessed a pallid, phantom aspect that well suited the persona of a saturnine artist. Inevitably, as if predestined, though he was completely unaware of the process, old traces began to appear on his face of Hurbinek, that strange child he once was and would never recognize.

Or else Hurbinek metamorphosed into an employee of the Budapest Tram System, one Jozsef Kolunga, who was promoted at twenty-eight to the rank of inspector for repairs at the terminal in Zsigmont Móricz Square, where line 61 started. His promotion had been hotly contested, his rivals being two companions considered to be “healthy” and who, unlike Jozsef, didn’t move around on bothersome crutches. However, a lot was owed to the influence of Ferenc Kolunga, his adoptive father, a tram driver who entered the System in the thirties and ended up being a legend, a point of reference for workers since he personified both class and patriotic pride. Many brave feats of his were recounted, the greatest of which was perhaps when he saved 230 Jewish children in 1944, at the end of the war, when the Nazis began to transport hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz, where they were thrown into the crematoria upon arrival, with no intermediate stages at all. Ferenc Kolunga risked his life when he moved those children across the city, crouching on the floor of his tram as they passed through German checkpoints, until he could hide them in one of the terminals, perhaps the very same terminal where on his birthday in 1970 his son is now celebrating his promotion. He isn’t his son exactly, or is, depending on how you look at it. What happened was that, at the end of the war someone in the Soviet Red Cross told him about a tiny three-year-old boy, who couldn’t walk, and who had appeared in an infirmary in the Polish camp in Auschwitz. Nobody knew where he came from; maybe he was Hungarian or Bohemian. The memory of how he had saved those children only a year ago was still fresh in his mind, and he took the boy, whom he brought up as his own son, although he was a bachelor. Father and son always lived alone like that: Ferenc cared for Jozsef, Ferenc’s inevitable heir. The legs of little Jozsef (since he was baptized with that name as a Catholic in the Central Parish Church) strengthened and when he could walk, his father started to take him to the Tram System’s canteen, and later on to the workshops, and even later, to the offices where he sat an examination and started working in the supplies department. He dealt with paperwork, administration and spent his days filling in forms to apply for spare parts. Every day on his walk to work from the family house in Belváros Jozsef would cross the Szabadság bridge early, stop opposite Béla Bartók Avenue (whose music he adored, especially his string quartets, practically the official music of the Kolunga household) and watch the trams pass by, with their chrome-plating, sluggish speed and the bewitching mechanical hum of their condensors. He sometimes jumped on one and, as he was wearing his uniform, the drivers let him share the driver’s seat. He knew he could never drive one of those beautiful vehicles, but he came that close, very close to doing so. Traveling there was most like what he longed to do—to drive a tram. He often jumped aboard an empty tram in the terminal, when it was standing empty in its shed, and sat behind the handle, dreaming he was driving across the city, as his father had so often done. Ferenc was the leader of the Budapest tram drivers, and that made his son very proud. From his office desk, Jozsef could also see that the post of workshop inspector, essential for keeping a check on the departures and arrivals of trams, was not beyond his reach. It only required patience and a good temper. He wouldn’t even have to move much around the sheds, as it sufficed to spend the whole shift in his office, morning or night; the drivers had to come to his office and leave the ignition key and their daily report sheet. His father got him his promotion and he stayed there for a long time. Ferenc Kolunga’s son was happy among the trams. He came to love them. When Fanny and I were in Prague in the mid-eighties, we walked down Béla Bartók Avenue (whose string quartets are my favorite pieces of music) and passed a man in a tram driver’s uniform who walked with the help of sticks in Zsigmont Móricz Square tram station) I don’t remember his face, because I only saw him from the back, and for a few seconds at that, as he was disappearing through a door into an area that was off limits to non-authorized personnel. It was then that I began to imagine Hurbinek had survived.

Or else:

Like Kolunga, Pablo Orgambide, the writer, was handed over to the Red Cross in Auschwitz without a name (or with that strange moniker of Hurbinek) and, just like Farin’s or Kolunga’s, his life could be Hurbinek’s. Today I imagine him on his wedding day: it is a day at the end of November 1975 and Pablo is thirty-three. Two weeks before, a street boy killed Pasolini on the beach in Ostia and Pablo worshipped Pasolini. He is getting married in Madrid, in a country that is experiencing political upheaval under a moribund dictator who signed his last five death sentences a month before. A country that isn’t
his
, though Pablo doesn’t know that, and when, with the passage of time, there is overwhelming evidence that his real name was something else, it is to seem unimportant, because he has lived a life rich in experience with a name he has been known by ever since he can remember: Pablo Orgambide. They never told him, or made the slightest hint. How he came to be part of that family is a mystery, even for his family. His father, who gave him the name he now lives under and was the only one who knew the secret, died in 1968 and took it with him to the grave, and his mother had died many years before with her lips sealed: she had given birth to three daughters and that boy was to be be the son she couldn’t give him. Then somebody, who perhaps wanted to spread doubts and wreak conflict between him and his sisters, circulated the rumor that their father had brought a child with him from Russia, when they began to allow men who had fought in the Blue Division to return. A child who surely was Pablo. He studied Law at the university where he joined a left-wing party that was clandestine at the time. When Franco was in his final death throes, Pablo enjoyed a comfortable position in society, though his family wasn’t well-to-do, but merely middle class and fallen on hard times. Old man Orgambide, politically conservative and close to the Franco regime, worked as a lawyer in Spain for a Belgian timber company, the Compagnie Nationale des Bois, that owned land in the Congo. The Nationale lost its licence to operate and went bankrupt in 1956. It was the same year that Pablo began to write a weekly society column for the evening newspaper
Informaciones
where he met the woman he would marry, Esther Rubio. Pablo Orgambide now works for publishers in Barcelona who pay him quite well to write biographies of historical figures. He is thinking of giving the column up to continue with the series on a freelance basis and take on others as they come up. Coincidentally one of the biographies he finished before his wedding, in the summer of 1975, was Adolf Hitler’s. (I think: it’s really a macabre irony that Hurbinek should write a life of Hitler, but there was also a hint of vengeance.) He had gone to Majorca to finish the book. His fiancée’s family owned a very rustic cabin that was called precisely that, Sa Cabana, on the road to Inca. He spent three months surrounded by books on the Third Reich and all kinds of apologias for the Führer. He ended up disgusted, because he thought that character was completely obnoxious. He found his hatred of the Jews abominable. And yet it was never revealed to him how close to that abomination he had in fact lived. When Pablo was in puberty and asked why that number was tattooed on his arm, he would only receive evasive replies, the sincere fruit of ignorance: nobody in the Orgambide family suspected the boy’s real origins. “Don’t tell us you are a Jew!” his sisters exclaimed scornfully, though in an incredulous rather than wary tone. His father got a number tattoo as well so he could tell his son it was an ancient family rite, a numbering that affected various members of the family over generations, an absurd explanation that Pablo accepted, as yet another of the strange ideas that ruled the impenetrable mind of his father, whom he admired but didn’t understand however much the two of them took frequent strolls together along the streets of Madrid in an illusory attempt at sharing affection. Over time, his marriage to Esther would become a stable, happy union, because he found she supported him in his aspiration to be a writer, one that he did in fact fulfill. He wrote novels, history books, and still more biographies (his
Life of Hernán Cortés
became a classic; his biography of Hitler went through several editions and can even be found to this day on book bargain shelves, where I bought mine; he also wrote a life of Cervantes) and wrote fewer and fewer articles as a journalist until he finally gave up from exhaustion. He and Esther were to have two children. He was to win prizes and collect aquariums with exotic fish, small, elusive fish, and that was to become his favorite hobby, as it was Primo Levi’s when he was a child, when he named each fish after a mineral. But Orgambide died never knowing that they were together, even if only for a very short time, in Auschwitz. Travelling was never a problem, since that limp of his, that only weighed on him when he forgot to conceal it, never stopped him from leading the life he wanted to lead. Neither Esther nor he (come to think of it, he was fated to marry a woman whose name was so significantly Hebraic) thought the rumors about Pablo’s Russian origins were in any way credible. Had they investigated further, those origins would have taken them to very distant places, a world that no longer existed but that once had as a backdrop a city called Rzeszów. The day I am imagining today, the day they wed, Franco died. He was asked to write Franco’s life, but never did. Instead, he wrote a life of Pasolini.