The County of Birches Read online

  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?

  “János,” Gábor began, “the men are deeply distressed at having to work and desecrate this Holy Day.”

  “Is that so?” The reply was curt and impassive. “Let them make their apologies to the Lord then.”

  Gábor was surprised and offended. He was a man of social standing, accustomed to respect in the Jewish community. Shrugging, he returned to the others.

  Rosh Hashanah dawned, a day like any other. And as on any other day, János Weisz marched his men into the woods.

  Ten days later, on Yom Kippur, no one appealed to the Jew in János Weisz. True, Gábor recalled, the mood among the company was funereal. But no one suggested observing the Day of Days. Those who chose would fast and pray while they worked.

  János Weisz called up his company on Yom Kippur and marched them out. Each man carried his axe and his pack. At home, they would have walked the shortest distance to shul. They would have spent the day in prayer neither drinking nor eating until the first star appeared in the heavens. This Yom Kippur morning was cold and clear. The sun rose in a cloudless sky, brightening the firmament. Ordinarily it would have been the kind of fall day they might have liked being outside. The trees would wear long shadows; the men would take in the cold air, and watch clouds of breath affirm that they were alive. But because it was Yom Kippur, the boots marched into the forest bearing them like husks.

  The discontent, unvoiced, was nonetheless pronounced. Day after day their company of Jews had felled timber to meet a daily quota. The military officer had come out once or twice to keep up a semblance of command, but regularly he was more than content to leave the company’s direction to Weisz. Far from the front, and performing menial back-up services, their company had received only tertiary attention from the authorities. All Rosh Hashanah day they had wielded their axes. And if János Weisz had called just a fifteen-minute break for them to respectfully say a few prayers, there would have been none to know the difference. When his men looked at János Weisz, they did not see his military training. That meant nothing to them. What they saw was an apostate Jew, and he affected them with horror.

  At noon of the holiest day of the year, János Weisz gave the order to stop. The axes ceased swinging. The men looked up. No one pulled bread from his pack. János Weisz barked, “Quota met! Company, dismissed!” The men stood irresolutely, unsure of what was meant by the command. Clearly they had not achieved the day’s requirement. “Dismissed!” János Weisz shouted again.

  Gábor summoned his two younger brothers. Arms around each other, they turned to face east to the Holy Land, as did each member of the company. Then, not daring to murmur their prayers aloud, they began to sway to an ingrained measure. Some had hats; others tore leaves from the trees to cover their heads, not to appear bareheaded before the Lord.

  Outside, under the sun and among the trees, they celebrated the Holy One, praised be He. Gábor said later that the sun’s rays had poured over them. In all his life, he never had—and never would again—feel so tangibly the presence of God. As a boy in the synagogue of his paternal grandfather he had not felt so near to the Deity. Nagyapa Weisz with his prophet’s face and passion had awed the boy with the force of his faith. Yet here in the woods, in the open air, Gábor felt the Creator in His element. Gábor felt loved by God.

  “What do you mean, Apu?” I asked, hearing this story for the third or fourth time. “What do you mean, ‘loved by God’? How did He love you different from the others? Why you, Apu, why did God love you and not János Weisz or Bandi-bácsi or Miklós-bácsi, or your wife Miri-néni or your baby Clárika?”

  “I don’t say God loved only me, where do you get that?” he answered testily. “I say that I felt at that moment that indeed God loved me. He loved us all to pour His glory over us. To let us worship Him so purely out in the open amid His creations. He could only love us to create for us such a wonderful moment. Terror and sorrow and loss transformed into the glory of God. He must have loved us to create for us such a moment. And I felt He loved me. That He was there with me, beside me, warming me with the breath of His love.”

  While the company of Jews prayed, János Weisz struck his axe. Throughout the afternoon, he maintained a steady rhythm. That is how the sergeant found them. From a distance, a single axe stroke did not sound thin. But as the sergeant neared it would have become evident that not everyone could be working. Even so, he was taken by surprise at the sight awaiting him when he came through the trees. Men scattered in the woods, swaying silently, lost in their own private worlds like inmates in an asylum for lunatics. One madman swinging an axe. A company of mindless mutes, facing east, swaying on its heels.

  The sergeant was a thick-armed peasant. Having neither money nor education nor aristocratic name, he would never have reached the rank of officer in normal times. Some officers with little experience compensated with excessive brutality.

  “Weisz! What’s the meaning of this?” he demanded.

  János Weisz had laid down his axe, Gábor said. He stood smartly at attention to answer his commanding officer.

  “Sir,” he said distinctly and without hesitation, “the men are overworked, Sir. They need to rest.”

  “And who decided this? Who said they are tired? Who gave them permission to rest?”

  “I did, Sir.”

  Stalled by the authority in his subordinate’s response, the sergeant wavered indecisively until he was struck by a baffling observation.

  “On their feet! They rest on their feet?”

  “Yes, Sir,” said János Weisz without blinking or expression. “That’s how they rest, Sir—Jews. Like horses.”

  “Like horses,” Gábor said. “János Weisz said ‘like horses.’” And Gábor would chuckle slyly. He was not a man given to laughter. When he did laugh, it was always with some guilt. “Like horses. Do you see?” Not one of us enjoyed the joke more than Gábor. It was always fresh for him.

  No one had laughed in the woods. No one moved for some moments. The silence was complete, palpable with the sense of impending reprisal. But the sergeant retreated without comment.

  * * *

  My mother listened quietly whenever Gábor told us the story of the Yom Kippur woods. She never said impatiently, as she did to so many of my father’s anecdotes, “We know that one already.” The rapt way in which I followed Gábor’s tales usually made her fidget or get up to make a phone call. But she would listen to this story, told always the same way, ending always with Gábor’s chuckle, “Like horses.” My mother recognized the humour. She knew the man who wooed a young bride inside a barracks that was a portico to death, the man who could find something funny in these circumstances. At the time she had understood János’s recklessness as ardour, but Gábor’s story showed a man who
defied the inexorable march of history by slowing it down a few paces. As Gábor wove the scene of the Erdelyi Woods, Sári listened. So this was the man who had pleasured her in the dark. This was the man with whom she might have spent her life.

  Gábor survived four labour services altogether. It was during a discharge, as he was about to board the train that would take him home to where his wife, Miri, and their child had moved to be with his parents, that his path literally crossed that of his fellow serviceman. János Weisz was disembarking. He had been called up to re-enlist. The two men greeted each other warmly, hands clasping in the steaming stench and roar of the station.

  And how have you fared in these lousy times?

  They had not been close, not friends. After the Yom Kippur episode, János Weisz had maintained his reserve. But when they met in the Nagyvárad train station, János and Gábor felt a warmth for each other that might have blossomed into friendship in another clime. They shook hands, and Gábor clapped the other man’s shoulder.

  “So, you’re on your way then. Do you know where they’re sending you?”

  “Who knows anything?” János replied. “But you’re going home. That’s what matters. Look, I’m not doing so bad. Let me show you.”

  Gábor was anxious to board. At home they were waiting for him. Miri had written that the child, Clárika, had started to read since he’d last seen her. She had taught herself her letters, and not yet four years old. They would be waiting in the carriage sent to meet his train.

  János Weisz pulled something from his breast pocket. Grinning, he handed it to Gábor.

  “She’s a beauty, isn’t she? We’ve just been engaged.”

  Gábor said he didn’t take much notice of the photograph. It was a studio shot that revealed little more than a pretty face. He glanced at the photograph of Sári Friedlander courteously. He was glad for János Weisz. You had to go on living, believing that one day the world would turn itself right side up.

  “I wish you one hundred and twenty years of happiness,” Gábor said, using a Yiddish expression.

  They had parted, one going home and the other away, one east and the other west. But they didn’t end up at different destinations. Inscrutable the ways of the Lord that bestowed and denied, filled a moment with meaning and discarded human life. Their paths eventually met rather than crossed. They joined at the woman who would bear their name.

  * * *

  János Weisz returned to Hungary from the Soviet Union in June of 1948, when my sister, Lili, was seven months old. Sári and Gábor had known of his whereabouts for a short while. They were lovers at the time János was traced to a camp for prisoners of war, as the first prisoners were released by the Russians and began to trickle home, bringing with them the names of others.

  Sári lost her bearings when János wrote to say he was coming home. She had given him up with the others for dead. How could he be alive if everyone else who had belonged to her was done for or gone? She had been deserted by everyone. Mamuka. Apuka. Her sisters, too: Toni, Netti, Erzsike, all her older sisters dead. Her brother Laci had escaped to England to avoid the labour service draft. Izi, her other brother, was pioneering in Palestine. Only Sári and her youngest sister, Cimi, remained. The dead were all dead. They were a vast collective. She was numb at the thought of them. Them, the solid crowd of them. When János broke from the ranks of the dead, the whole company crumpled into separate, excruciating parts.

  Gábor and Sári weren’t married. Without death certificates for their spouses, they could not legally marry for seven years. This allowed for the lost to be found, the departed to return, for time to sort the living from the dead. They were not officially joined, and now János was said to be alive when Sári considered someone else in every way her husband.

  She had no idea what her parents would have had her do. No one had taught her the rules for this contingency. Where were Mamuka and Apuka when she needed their guidance most? How could they have left her? What would they tell her was right? Right for her. Right for János, and right for this man they had never met but who looked to her as a plant looks up at the sun and drinks the rain. She was distracted by rage and loss. Cimi was no help. Cimi was starving somewhere in the south of the country, with a Chassidic boy she had picked up like a stray cat. Sári screamed at Gábor to keep away.

  Gábor found a rabbi—most likely a reasonable proxy, a young man who was once a rabbinical student, perhaps—and they built a chupah, the ceremonial canopy used in Jewish weddings. He told Sári: What did the state matter? They would be joined as Jews, they would become man and wife in the eyes of the Lord.

  “And János?”

  Gábor, essentially a conservative man, did not even attempt to overlook the affront to decency posed by his displacement of János. János was his burden, another twist of fate to Gábor’s right arm.

  “János will know it couldn’t be helped,” he sighed.

  Sári married Gábor, older than her by thirteen years, the same age difference there had been between Sári and her eldest sister, Toni, in whose house she used to set the table and rock the baby. She would care for her own children as she had learned to nurse that baby who had been in Sári’s girlhood the best of toys. Gábor had lost a child too, also a little girl. Sári saw in Gábor someone who might span the chasm between her parents and her present. He was the bridge she crossed to bind the broken pieces of her life.

  János had written for the first time from the Soviet Union. He wrote three identical letters, sending them in care of the JOINT offices in Budapest, in Munkács and in Nyiregyháza, the places Sári would most likely have gone back to. Sári responded, telling him of her new circumstances. She asked for his forgiveness.

  No further news came from János until just before his return journey. Lili was a newborn. Sári wrote back that it was no use. But János persisted. He wrote that in the black pit of his deprivations he had thought of her and the darkness that had woven them together. He was coming home to her and to the baby, it didn’t matter whose. He wanted her and he wanted the baby and he wanted them to begin. They had never had the chance to even start their life together. They’d never known what it was like to live as man and wife.

  She answered that she was now the wife of another.

  He wrote a last time once he was back in the country. János said he bore Sári no ill. The man she had favoured was a decent man, János recognized that. He wished them well.

  As children Lili and I knew of our parents’ first spouses as we knew of all their lost relatives. The card came every holiday season from another world, somewhere called Argentina: “Best wishes, János.” It was Gábor who responded, not Sári, signing on behalf of us all.

  * * *

  It puzzled me, the Nyirség, the county where my parents met. Why was it named for birches? When I asked him, Gábor would shrug. No, he would say, birches could never have grown there. Acacias were indigenous. Acacias in the Nyirség, the county of birches. The Nyirség became for me a place of mind against which our real acacia world would never measure up.

  Gábor and Sári were plain people, something belied in the storybook concurrence of their encounter. They worked, raised their children, tended their garden, socialized little. They cared about family, tradition and security. But their story was heroic. This discrepancy irked me. The circumstances of their past imbued them with a grandeur that didn’t fit. They were ennobled by tragic events, and elevated further when these events were shaped through telling. Gábor’s stories grafted meaning to their lives. There was a point always to his anecdotes, as though history has form we have only to uncover. Caught up in the story, I learned to expect meaning that makes sense of the vicissitudes of time.

  Gábor often said that the finger of God pointed him the way out of each brush with death—the finger of God, because he was not an intuitive man, nor one given to notions beyond reason, and because he would never attribute to himself any special good sense that was not shared by other members of his family
. Gábor believed in the finger of God, because he had to explain somehow the chance of his survival. And I believed in it too; otherwise why was I here? What I figured was that for some reason or other I had to happen. Those people and their world must have been misconceived. God had made a mistake, brushed off the chalkboard, and begun again. Otherwise the tally didn’t add up. My father depicted an earlier world that was a golden era of wealth and community and insoluble family bonds. The glory, and most of the happiness, predated me. Only cataclysm could have brought about my parents’ union. And whatever for? Why would that have been?

  There’s a photograph of me before we left Hungary. I am standing in a field, on unsteady legs wrapped in ribbed leggings. I am hatless, and my few wisps of hair have been gathered in a spout on top of my head. My expression wavers between a frown and a smile. I have been crying, says my mother, because I don’t want to be photographed. The long grasses of the field bend in the breeze. I still have it in my hand, she says, the gold wedding band she has given me to distract me from my tears. It is there in the picture, although we can’t see it clutched in my plump paw. It is our last unglimpsed knowledge of its whereabouts. I know it, feel it pressed into the soft folds of my skin. It brings the tentative smile to my face. The gold in my hand is the sun emerging from my clouded features. I am last to have it, the ring that binds my mother and my father, before I let it slip into the dense wild grasses.

  PERSONAL EFFECTS

  The Budapest flat was long and sprawling. For a little one, it was endless. Along the floorboards worn so smooth I had only to watch out for the rugs with rough naps. If I slipped and slid on them, I’d get something red and sore. Some of the rugs were soft, though, and thin with age. They’d turn up and bunch and trip me if I wasn’t careful. The rugs were islands with their own landmarks, like the raised bristly whorls at the centre of the one by the kitchen. I liked to sit on it in my warm felt pants and pat the horsehair surface gingerly. See how I could tame it? Along that brown river of a hallway, there were archipelagoes of throw-about worlds. I saw my mother take them and shake them and sometimes hang them out the window. She would try to rearrange them, but I made sure they found their right spots at last, the thick woolly tassels combed neat and flat.