The County of Birches (7 page)

“This was when Csapati said the words I can still hear plainly, especially their sly innuendo.

“‘Not many are left around here,' he said, ‘not since it pleased you all to take off.'

“
Pleased us.
He said it
pleased
us. He was afraid, you see, that I might hold him accountable in some way.
Pleased
us to take off. As though we had left of our own volition. If only God had so willed.

“
Why?
Why, you want to know, did we not leave before it was too late? Across Europe Jews were dying. We did not acknowledge it, but we knew. In Hungary it was different. We felt protected by an independent government. Hungary was not occupied by the Germans until the very end. Hungary supported Germany, but stopped short of the final solution. In the desert of Nazi Europe, until the very end, Hungary was an oasis in a manner of speaking. When the Lord surveyed what He created, He found it was good. Why would we have questioned His judgement?

“You think you are smart, still a child but already you think you know everything. Then answer me this. Do you think we'd be here now—me, you, your sister and your mother—in a land thick with forests—if you children hadn't sprouted from the ashes of the dead?

“I left my homeland for more reasons, probably, than even I can guess, stripped like my ancestor Itzig to nothing. And I came with a new family to a strange land, with only the legacy I carried in my heart. I brought with me my father's name, a name I loved because there was nothing
grósz,
nothing grand, about it.”

*   *   *

Before the War that brought about the Fall of the Jews of Europe and the Rákóczi Tanya, as well as the failure of Love, Gábor said there was Light. I imagined a red dawn glowing in the east. A world emerged on that horizon. Under its sun a small paradise bloomed that was heaven and earth together. And in that world there was Life, not just its shadow, Memory. Who was I to question?

T
HE
C
OUNTY OF
B
IRCHES

My mother, Sári, met my father, Gábor, in a schoolhouse in September 1945. She sat with the women at the back of the schoolroom that smelled of dust and dry leaves and a trace of chalk, like ash. The evocation of ash was almost sensual. Powdery and soft as child's hair, and that unreal. Murmuring was subdued, because of those who weren't there.

The young men improvising the Rosh Hashanah service sat up front behind a lectern. One by one they stood to read the prayers they knew by heart, avoiding the eyes of those who had gathered.

“And this one?” Sári whispered. “Who is the one pulling his ear like a sidelock? Kramer, you say, from Nyirbátor? And the one with red hair…?”

She had drifted to her first husband's county when she had found no one of her own in Beregszász. In any event, the conference in Yalta had traded her hometown to the Soviets. She left while the boundaries were just dotted and pencilled in, as empty-handed as she'd arrived. What could she have taken that would have survived the war, a bolt of cloth from her mother's shop?

“What about this one, the big one? Weisz? Weisz, you say? What Weisz? Which Weisz? From where—Vaja? The Vaja Weiszes? No.” No, János had never mentioned any relations from that village.

Sári Friedlander Weisz shared Gábor's name by marriage. She would have passed him over like the rest had she not learned from the other women that he was head of local
JOINT
, where those who came back sought assistance. Gábor Weisz was the man to see about finding János.

Sári observed him reading. The voice tuneless but proficient, round head nodding to an age-old cadence, thick fingers turning the page ahead of his words, just like any old-fashioned davening Jew. He couldn't have been more different from her János. Weisz. The same name, and from the same county. It was a cruel coincidence that another Weisz, but of no shared blood, belonged to this sad scrap of earth.

The town of Nyiregyháza where Sári met Gábor is named for the birch tree, like many of the cities and hamlets of the plain in northeastern Hungary. This flatland is actually more distinguished by the acacias that grow profusely in its sandy soil than by anything we North Americans would recognize as birch. Nonetheless, my father's region abounds in tributes to the white-barked tree. The Nyirség, it is called—the state of being birch—and its towns reflect this birchness in name if nothing else: Nyirmada, Nyirgyulaj, Nyirbátor, Nyirvásvári, Nyirmegges, Nyirjákó, Nyirvaja. The birch names are as ubiquitous as they are unpronounceable in English.

I begin here, when, after the service, Gábor passed through the congregation clasping hands. Round-faced Gábor, his nose long and sorrowful, his brown eyes initially shrinking from something so lovely as this woman with hair she threw back like a mare tossing its mane, accepted the hand Sári held out first. Sári Friedlander Weisz deliberately flaunted her hair as though it had grown thick and rich, long and dark, out of defiance. Her inborn vanity had not been expunged by near death from gas and starvation. She was a woman who had grown back hardier and harder, like a rosebush pruned close to the quick. Her hair had been fair before it was shaved.

I imagine myself conceived when my mother, tossing back her hair, felt my father's eyes upon her. Light-sensitive eyes that had sworn off joy. Deeply impressionable, they drank in her hair, brown and unfettered like his first wife Miri's had been only in the privacy of their bedroom, and her legs like a doe's slim and long, and her hand outstretched like a man's.

I begin at this point when my father's heart rekindles, though theoretically I go back further, before the great conflagration that reduced the numbers of his family from over a hundred to fewer than twenty, to the very beginning in fact of what we know of his ancestry, the pious vagabond without a surname called Itzig the Jew, which may have been a name generic to every Jew in the countryside. Itzig the Jew dragging his caftan in the dust of the Hungarian countryside at the end of the eighteenth century. I also hark back to the vineyards where my mother grew up and she and her six siblings played hide and seek, though it was forbidden to touch or trample the valuable fruit. (Among seven children, there are always a few young and small enough to wriggle belly down along the furrows, and fast enough to flee the raised fists of the field hands when they are discovered.) The story really starts with them, because who my parents once were and where they came from is a sum I repeatedly figure, trying to calculate how it adds up to me and my sister.

Like any child, most of all I care about the
I.
The I that clamours to speak for itself. This I owes less to the piety of generations of orthodox Jews or to the mercantile candour that characterized my mother's family than it does—its very inception—to the war that wedded them and to which it became reluctant heir.

I knew this war like I knew the pale hand that held the spoon to my mouth. A hand moderately proportioned, distinguished by its smoothness and the incipient arthritic swell of its knuckles. I felt these joints when I played with her wedding band, working the ring up and over the first knuckle. Even the second one arched slightly, causing the ring to skin its surface. I have always known the war like I knew the impatient withdrawal of that hand if food was not taken quickly enough or if the ring slipped and fell from my stubby fingers. I have never not known of the war, though I don't recall hearing about it for the first time any more than I remember the first chime of my mother's voice or kiss of fresh air.

The war came to me with all that is good. It dawned on me like my own sweet flesh and buds of toes and the bright gold band that lay on the soft pads of my palm.

*   *   *

My mother's marriage, the one before Gábor, was hardly more than a courtship. Promenading arm-in-arm along the
korzo,
she in her smart suit and box hat, her military man uniformed, they made a decorative couple. People mated during the disastrous decade. People stepped out and showed off. They would wake up one day and the nightmare would be over. A beautiful girl like Sári, her parents reasoned, would need to be married. My mother dwelt on that, the promenading, the handsome figure they cut as a pair. It was all she had to tell us, all there was to that match.

And that on her wedding night she was slipped under the wire of the labour camp. She'd say that matter-of-factly. On her three-week honeymoon she was smuggled into the camp nightly.
Under the wire of the labour camp.

Sári, my mother, who squirmed away impatiently whenever Gábor gave her fanny a friendly pat. Sári who, kissing me goodnight, pulled both my arms from under the bedclothes and pressed them firmly over the blankets, admonishing me to keep them that way. Sári who educated me early in the decorum of intimacy with the cryptic warning, “Remember, it's always the man who takes and the woman who gives.” Her stance was prudish and ingenuous, as though she had never been touched by men's hands.

Yet every night for three weeks, she had allowed herself to be smuggled onto János's pallet. Risking military discipline, they made a love that must have been memorable. Love, among the coughs and groans and gases of male strangers. He waited for her in the dark beside the wire fence he and his friends had clipped and disguised, then pulled her through the dark into the barracks that smelled of boots and sweat. This young woman who had accepted his kisses coquettishly, always drawing back, who had lived sheltered in her parents' home, never exposed to danger. In that animal kingdom of men and their fear of death, I assume he used humour to disarm her.
Humour.
Because what we knew about my mother's first husband, we had heard from Gábor.

My father described János Weisz as a professional soldier, an officer in fact, who had served as captain in the Magyar army. Stripped by the so-called “Jewish Laws” of his rank and career, János Weisz was conscripted into the labour service in the fall of 1941, just like Gábor and his brother Bandi, agronomists by profession, and their lawyer-brother Miklós. They were thrown together with village boys so poor and unschooled my father and his brothers had to take them in hand, show them what part of the boot to polish, simple village Jews whose main skill was the practice of Jewish tradition. János Weisz became their natural leader. When the actual sergeant turned out to be a Hungarian peasant much like themselves, pulled from his hut and put in charge of a regiment, no one questioned the authority of János Weisz over the ragtail band. The military officer was relieved to lie low in the local café.

The first labour service bore little resemblance to what would follow. As the war progressed, licence with life was taken increasingly. But when the labour service was first established, Hungarian Jews were emboldened to believe that if this was all that was going to happen—this and their restriction from professions and owning land—if what was to be taken from them fell short of breath, they could bear it. Labour service would kill Bandi in the copper mines of Bor and abandon János Weisz on the Russian front, but it saved my father from Buchenwald.

Gábor respected János Weisz. János was not a big man, but his military bearing gave him stature. He was younger than Gábor but, Gábor said, you could see that he was a man of the world, not easily intimidated. My father was impressed by the distance János Weisz kept from the rest of them, for the sake of authority.

Enlistment took place a few weeks before Jewish New Year. For many of the men in the troop this would be their first Rosh Hashanah away from home. Business and education had led Jews of the monied class out into the world, but it was usual for poor Jews of the countryside to live their lives in one village. Observance of the High Holy Days was through prayer and strict abstention from work. The village Jews assumed that the Lord would see to it that His Law, as intrinsic as the laws of nature, would prevail. Tension mounted as the High Holy Days approached and the Lord had not indicated what they should do.

János Weisz became aware that the poor Jews in his company had started looking on him as the unlikely instrument of the Lord. They were fearful and uncertain, bowed beneath centuries of religious tradition and secular authority. János Weisz knew the ways of their military and Christian masters. They didn't accept him as a real Jew; he was too worldly, too tainted by outside influences. But in his own way he was enough like them to understand their dilemma. János Weisz grew aloof. He withdrew and ate alone, giving no indication of how he would direct them on upcoming Rosh Hashanah.

Gábor and his brothers were orthodox Jews, but their God appreciated extenuating circumstances. They would risk His wrath before that of their taskmasters. Gábor sympathized with János Weisz, whose authority was unofficial at best. The slightest leniency on János Weisz's part, or suggestion that he was sparing the Jews, might unleash upon them all some devil sent to teach them a lesson, and on himself a personal penalty. But when a delegation begged Gábor to appeal to János Weisz to permit them to observe the Holy Day with respect, Gábor could not bring himself to refuse. He saw their beardless faces and heads shaved in military fashion, so incongruous with the pious stoop of their shoulders and bends of their noses and melancholy eyes, and he felt for them a deep pity. These people were helpless without their customs.

On
erev
Rosh Hashanah, the eve of the holiday, Gábor approached János Weisz. The mood in the barracks was heavy with dread. János Weisz lost his patience. Had someone died here? Which one of them had been beaten recently, or received a bullet in the head? Which one of them had passed a day without eating? What were these fools mooning about? Did they not realize? Did they not know that Jews elsewhere in Europe were dying? Now here was Gábor Weisz, a man of good sense who should know better; what did Weisz expect of him?