As for what they lived through—always the same words: “You can’t imagine; you were lucky.” “And we were lucky,” Mitzi says with a significant look at her mother.
“Lucky to be alive,” Aunt Lea agrees without expression.
Should one ask or wait for them to tell their story? Isn’t it unnatural not to ask? “Were you in Budapest all the time?” Sophie asks Mitzi. No, they had fled; they went to the country; peasants hid them. She and her brother and grandmother together, she says looking in her lap—it was a long story.
“It’s better forgotten,” Aunt Lea says quickly, and they each say something in turn about how terrible it was for Grandmother. “Imagine, she had to eat non-kosher food. We hid as servants in different houses; we had to assume false names; we had to pretend we didn’t know each other,” Aunt Lea says with sudden emotion. Mitzi tells the story of how she and her mother had secretly arranged to meet at the market once a day and as they passed each other one whispered, “Mitzi” and the other, “Mother.”
Then as Mitzi, in her fancy pink negligee, walked her to the door: “There were things I didn’t want to talk about in front of my husband and my mother especially,” she tells Sophie in the hall. “He knows, of course, and she was present when he raped me but she can’t bear the thought, she still hasn’t gotten over it. I have,” Mitzi says gaily. “I adore my husband and my baby, why should I be unhappy?” and kisses Sophie good-bye.
Grandmother Landsmann is past eighty and blind; she isn’t wearing her ritual wig. A strong, impatient, angry woman, she pushes the hand that would guide her to the granddaughter from America. “Rudi’s daughter,” she says, feeling her hands and hair. She heard young girls painted themselves in America. “But you don’t,” she confirms with satisfaction. “So you have come, they said you were coming, you know what happened here, you know what they’ve done to...” It’s told by a raging old woman; no one can stop her. She swats at them if they try to fix her kerchief. It’s told in the pure bitterness of a personal loss: a wrong done to her, her children, grandchildren murdered, Nazi brutes did it, the enormity of evil measured in her personal loss, not in millions. Her lament as bitter for what they made her do as for what they did to her. What they’ve done to an old woman who was pious all her life. They made her remove her ritual wig and now she doesn’t care if the kerchief slides off. “Look what you have made me!” her scorn lashes indiscriminately at the whole world, her own life, those around her, the Nazi brutes, God.
“Will I see you again?” she asked anxiously after each visit.
On Sophie’s last visit, she cried bitterly in a terrible shameless way. “I’ll never see you again; I’ll be dead. And your father, why didn’t he come? Why didn’t he come to see me? Why didn’t you bring your father?” she continued wailing.
“You must feel very strange being back,” Peter says. “Do you remember that statue?” he asks her. And, after a pause, just as she is about to guess: “Please don’t say yes,” he says, “it’s the monument of Liberation built by the Russians. A bronze lady with drapery—maybe they had the Statue of Liberty in mind. She is offering a laurel. And note the pack of Russian soldiers with machine guns huddled around her to emphasize the peace motif.”
At a sidewalk patisserie a waitress laughs a deep vibrant laugh, rich and scornful, as she serves them. “A former countess,” Peter explained. He seemed on most intimate or just informal terms with the woman, perhaps slept with her. It was exciting for some of these noblewomen to leave their shuttered rooms and become waitresses, hairdressers in the capital, he told her. “No, you would not have wanted to be here,” he kept saying. “All the girls became prostitutes—and it wasn’t the nice ones who survived. But how old were you then? No, you wouldn’t have had a chance. I worked with the resistance—spy work—since my family is Catholic, so I saw what was going on. No, I’m glad you weren’t here. I suppose you could call it a time of terrible ironies,” he said facetiously with a tired smile. It was difficult to believe he was only nineteen. He told her some of the stories. Jewish boys went around at night in arrow-cross uniforms to make a bid for the poor dogs the Nazis were picking up—just to play with them. The victim might still get his arm broken—but still. A friend of his, a Jew and Latin scholar, hid camouflaged as a priest for a poor working-class community whose priest joined the Jews in their death march. He learned the whole Mass overnight. Her companion laughed, so she smiled her weary smile. She didn’t know what to say.
“You’re so serious,” he observes. Her mother had told him she was studying philosophy and writing and theater. “I wonder, I wonder,” he keeps saying. “What you will become in the end—” And taking her arm, “How come you’re so shy?” he asks. “Tell me, are you a virgin?” Amazing. He didn’t think there were virgins over fifteen in America. There certainly weren’t any in Budapest.
