Memento Park Page 18

  * * *

  CAN WE REALLY HAVE BEHAVED AS I REMEMBER IT, Virgil, there in that furnace, among the stone, among the steel? The place was deserted, to be sure, the ticket taker undoubtedly still glued to her phone; and there were any number of hidden corners. My memories of Rachel, turned away from me, hands on the massive calf of a charging soldier, offering herself to me, crying out despite the unbearable heat, are undeniable. There was an electricity, an illicit madness, and perhaps a sort of desperation that briefly overtook us both, discarding all our normal cautions as we fell on each other as two people amid a dead or dying world. Under the watchful eyes of these discarded behemoths, my lawyer and I rutted like dogs. Of course it happened. And yet.

  Do not make the mistake of assuming that because you know what someone will do, you know who they are.

  Just a few months later, as we were to lay the old man to rest, Tracy would say those identical words to me—not a paraphrase, but word for word—and that cannot be possible. They cannot both have said this to me in precisely the same way. I’m sure it happened, yet those few hours with Rachel have the quality of a dream misremembered. So brief, so inscrutable this window of intimacy, of honesty.

  We raced past the ticket seller to catch the last bus back, and something in her eyes told me she knew what we’d gotten up to out there, and that we probably weren’t the first. By the time we arrived at our hotel it was dark, hotter still if that was possible, and we retreated to the air-conditioned safety of my room. Amid the awkward fumbling, the tussle with our desires and our good sense, she noticed the blank sheet on the writing desk, creased, bare but for the single word Dad, the list I’d begun but never finished. She asked about it, so I told her. She looked at me with such pity. “Oh, Matt.”

  RACHEL SPENT THE FOLLOWING MORNING VOMITING in my bathroom. Something had come over her, perhaps it was the sour cream–rich Hungarian cuisine or maybe something deeper, regret over our performance in the park. Her piteous groans as she slid back under the covers did not invite inquiry. She waved me off, urged me to go out and make something of my last day in Budapest. I ventured once more, map in hand, into the blistering heat, though a storm now threatened, promising relief from the relentless humidity. One of Rachel’s investigators (yes, her firm used investigators, which seemed to me both quaint and sinister) had come up with the address where Ferenc Halasz, our deceased Arrow Cross instigator, had last lived in Budapest, and I wanted to see it.

  Halasz had lived on a broad, tree-lined street near what was now called Heroes’ Square. Town houses stood shoulder to shoulder, low gates encasing modest patches of grass. I stood in front of his building, a reddish-brown three-story structure with an untended lawn. I wanted something, was feeling confrontational, and finally walked up the five steps to the button on the door, which now bore the name ORBAN. More than sixty years had passed since Halasz traded my grandfather his life for a painting. This was a fool’s errand but my anger was growing, roiling like those green seas I saw with Rachel that day at the Norton Simon.

  To my surprise, I rang the bell. I had no plan, did not know what to say or do, but it didn’t matter. No one answered. For some reason, the silence provoked me, and I rang again and again, longer and harder, and then I began to bang on the door, harder and harder, and the knocking became pounding, obscenity laced, and then I began kicking the door, which didn’t budge an inch, bored beneath my blows. I paused in my shrieking to catch my breath. I was drawing attention from passersby when I noticed a mottled old face—man or woman? Impossible to tell—peering out through a tattered lace curtain next door, and although it’s nothing more than melodramatic fancy, I was sure he/she/it was snarling at me. She, a crone, surely. Had she known Halasz? She was about the right age. What did she remember, the bitch? The lace billowed and when it settled, the space in the window was empty. I turned and looked up and down the street and suddenly every elderly face was suspect. A pensioner—do they call them that here?—hobbled by, hunched over a string shopping bag filled with canned goods. He wouldn’t make eye contact with me, and although it was probably nothing more than an advanced case of osteoporosis, I was convinced it was guilt that stooped him.

  I surrendered to the futility of my errand and decided it was time to move on, lest someone call the police or make other mischief for me. I felt so defeated, Virgil. Halasz is dead and in the ground and any evidence of his time here is long since swept away. His was an age of tanks and pistols and telegrams and mine is an age of cell phones and broadband. This house—this street, this place—may throb with interred guilt, with accusation, but I am too late. There are pages of the past that are lost forever, never to be rewritten or recovered.

  * * *

  TWO HOURS LATER, the effects of my outburst still pulsing within me, I struggled to find Kálmán’s headstone. A layer of gray clouds had settled in overhead, the rain imminent, the wind gusting. Still, I didn’t mind meandering down the peaceful, tree-lined lanes that could have been a city park but for the wildness of the place, overrun with untended flora. I thought back to Kálmán’s bathers at the Norton Simon. A profusion of grays, more than I had imagined possible, shaded the landscape, impressing a damp but welcoming sadness upon my heart. I only rarely encountered another mourner—is that what I was as well, a mourner?—and I found the quiet restorative, briefly silencing that angry buzz that had plagued me since we’d arrived.

  The Kozma Street Cemetery was enormous and not well mapped out. I had a grave-site location that I’d found online, but it took ages to find the corresponding spot. The headstones were by and large well tended, though a few were so old that they had begun to crumble, the inscriptions long ago worn away as though by the tide. Between Hungarian and Hebrew, they were unreadable to me regardless of their condition. I passed flowers and stone-laden markers, and I thought with shame about my father’s ashes, languishing in a New York mortician’s office, waiting to be collected.

  I finally found Kálmán’s grave huddled in semidisgrace with the other suicides, in a section set off from the main part of the cemetery, just a few yards along from a pale blue art nouveau tomb that looked like the entrance to a carnival ride. His stone was black, highly polished, with gold letters. His name. Dates. A Star of David. And the Hungarian word festőművész. I looked the word up later. Painter—festő. With connotations of an artist—művész. An abundance of flowers suggested a regular stream of visitors, more it seemed than frequented his galleries. I stared at the headstone for a long time, hoping for some wisdom, and then I actually spoke to it.

  “So, I’ve got your painting. What now?”

  I thought of the decomposed remains beneath the stone, the life that had once animated those bones, the sentience that had directed his brushstrokes, and Budapest Street Scene never felt less mine. Unsurprisingly, Kálmán offered no wisdom, no guidance. I took a photo of the headstone with my phone to show Rachel.

  It took me another thirty minutes stumbling around to find the Szantos gravestones. Béla and Lily. My grandparents. Order of operations, eh, Virgil? There would have been no body beneath Lily’s stone, her bullet-riddled corpse having been swept along the Danube with countless others. It pained me to think of poor Béla-bácsi alone in this place, and I wondered, as I scanned the horizon, the tombstones like soldiers on the march, how many other markers ending in 1944 sat over empty graves. The date stung no less than it had in my study, as I examined the family tree. I touched Béla’s fading granite headstone, and felt a tightness in my chest as I remembered our evening in synagogue. I placed the stones on his grave, as I had seen my mother’s mother do years ago, without knowing why. Rachel would explain it later, although, as with so much of Jewish tradition, there appeared to be no clear-cut answer, with possibilities ranging from the permanence of stones (as opposed to the fleeting lives of flowers) to a method for helping keep souls weighted in place. I had no knowledge of any of this at the time, just a desire to make some form of tribute to my grandfather. I contemplated placi
ng a smoldering cigar on the edge of the headstone and imagined a conversation between Kálmán and my grandfather, whiling away eternity in the ground, arguing about art. Their styles could not have been more different and in life they would not have had the remotest interest in each other, and yet, for some reason, it pleased me to think they might enjoy each other’s company, their talk frequently turning to serious affairs.

  The afternoon’s long shadows were beginning to stretch toward me. A light rain started to fall. As I left the cemetery, I saw a pair of young workmen halfheartedly scrubbing away at a swastika that had been painted on a headstone. I could only make out one of the Hungarian words scrawled beneath it: ZSIDÓ. Jew.

  * * *

  LUCK OF THE FUCKING DRAW, Virgil. Had I made the decision to return to the hotel after the cemetery, none of what came next would have befallen me. And yet, months later, I cannot shake the feeling of Yahweh’s rough justice.

  Tibor had told me about a Holocaust memorial on the Danube, sixty bronze pairs of shoes left on the embankment where many of the murders had taken place. The last light was fading, but this seemed like a fitting cap to the day. I planned only to stay a few moments, and then return to look in on Rachel. I still break out into a cold sweat when I remember, when I think about how easily I could have turned away.

  The memorial was difficult to locate. There were no signs or markers that I could find, and it was along an embankment separated from the city streets by a busy, fast-moving highway. The two access points to cross the road were equally distant in opposite directions from the memorial itself. It was as though having reluctantly allowed this confrontation with the past, the city was determined to keep it from view. They were going to make you work for it. I was tired, impatient, and eschewed the distant crosswalks, waited for a break in traffic—not easy to see around a blind curve—and ran across, narrowly avoiding being hit by a speeding Volkswagen full of raucous teenagers.

  Once safely on the other side, I walked across a wide field of gray, cracked cobblestones, toward a concrete ledge that marked the edge of the embankment and the beginning of the Danube. The rain was now steady, though not heavy, and after the oppressive heat of the day, it was a relief. From a distance, the shoes looked like flies stuck on paper. A handful of tourists lingered beneath umbrellas over the strange sight, these abandoned objects, unexplained save for a single plaque, rendered in Hebrew and in English: TO THE MEMORY OF THE VICTIMS SHOT INTO THE DANUBE BY ARROW CROSS MILITIAMEN IN 1944 – 45. The word “Jews” nowhere in evidence. It was easy to imagine they’d been left behind by a group of midnight swimmers who had not yet returned to collect them. Until you approached them up close and saw the stones nestled inside, where a child’s foot was supposed to fit. Memorial candles flickered plangently, housed beneath glass to protect them from the wind and rain. The detail of the sculptures was admirable, and despite the permanence of the bronze, the shoes all appeared worn and neglected. Men’s loafers beside women’s boots beside children’s slippers. I stood there alone, light-headed, breathing heavily. The sounds of the city, of the traffic racing past behind me, fell away, as did the rain, despite the angry winds whipping off the river and racing unchecked through the wide-open river walk.

  I bent over to set a stone in a woman’s shoe for my grandmother—how natural the gesture was becoming—when I noticed a flight of stairs, leading down, away from the memorial, toward the river. I straightened up to the sight of a pair of tourists, pausing for a photo op. A heavyset, middle-aged couple. I thought I heard a word or two of German but I hardly trust myself on that score anymore. He held the camera as she posed, smiling for the photo. It was that idiot grin that undid me. Could she be so unaware of where she was standing? Or, perhaps worse, was she aware? Either way, I needed to escape them, lest my need for confrontation, simmering again, get the better of me. So I took the stairs down, away from the shoes, to the Danube.

  I felt uneasy as I walked down, already sensing … well, dammit, it must be said, sensing the presence of death. I knew this was a bad place, marked by time, but I had turned away from too much already. I tottered down a dozen or so steps of cracked stone—there was no handrail, nothing to grip along the way. The stairs were littered with cigarette butts and the odd patch of grass and weeds struggling between the cracks. The walls of the embankment rose around me until I reached the bottom, a landing level with the river. I was now invisible to anyone on my side of the Danube, could only be seen from the Buda side. I felt confined, as in a prison cell. There were no safety railings. No warning sign. The landing was completely exposed. It would have been a simple matter of a single step—or push—to be borne away by the current. The platform was wet, scattered with muddy puddles, water lapping up and over at my feet. I was impressed by the speed of the current, and revolted by the ugly brown-gray color of the water, no romantic Blue Danube here.

  Standing there, it was as though I were no longer myself. I imagined, instead, being—literally—in the shoes of the people murdered here, imagined their terror, their disbelief that their lives were coming to an end at the hands of their neighbors, their classmates, their coworkers. Not Germans, not outsiders. The people they saw in the street every day. The Fat General from the Tower Club, come to murder his countrymen. And women. And children. Could they see beyond the disbelief of what their world had become to understand that their last sight would be this ugly, cold river roaring past? I saw my grandmother among them. Bound to her neighbors by wire or rope, the brief pop of a pistol, and then the weight pulling them over, into the water, dragging them away.

  My father’s mother. Murdered. Right here, steps from his home. His remoteness, his anger, these made a new kind of sense as I stood there, trembling. Had he ever come to this spot, I wondered? No need. He’d lived it. I always thought my father an unreflective man. Perhaps Tracy’s more generous estimation of his nature had been right all along. All at once, I yearned to speak to her. Wanted to be restored to the present. But I didn’t call. How could I have explained all this in a single phone call? I didn’t know where to begin. The sun had disappeared from view and the storm seethed. The last of the day’s warmth faded and I became aware once again of the chilling rain. Later, I decided. I would talk to her later. Will you see to it that that’s what it says on my headstone, Virgil? Here lies Mathias Santos. If only … later.

  And then she called me. Right then. Right there. As if she knew. I answered immediately, gratefully. She asked me about our progress, wanted to hear if I was doing all right, but I could hear at once that something was wrong.

  “What happened, Tracy?”

  “It’s over,” she said. “They turned us down.” Her voice was barren. There was a dullness in her tone, an awful distant stillness. I could hear in the burred edges of her words that she’d done her crying earlier. Standing there by the rushing bloody river, I experienced a convergence of death, my lost family now conjoined with the certain death that awaited Ricky McCabe. She told me he would be executed as planned in just under two months.

  I thought again of Tracy watching that video that night, of McCabe’s whispered plea: “Please don’t let me die.” She had taken his words to heart, had tried so hard, had done all that could possibly be done, and now she had come to the end of things. I remembered with shame the way I had pressed her in the kitchen, and we stood in long silence together there in the rain, knowing that words, for once, would not do. My poor, fallen Tracy. We were six thousand miles and five time zones apart, and I had just slept with another woman, and yet in those silent moments I felt us bonded, grounded in death, loss, and disappointment.

  These thoughts must have infected my voice with something, a flatness maybe, because when at length I whispered, “I’m so sorry,” Tracy’s surprising response was a terse “Really?”

  “What? Of course I am. What do you think?”

  “I don’t know. I’m just angry. I’m sorry.”

  Was she right? Was part of me relieved? Hopeful that I would hav
e her attention again, at last? It seemed easy enough to blame my indiscretion with Rachel on her benign neglect, all those hours on the case, all that time away with Brian.

  “You think I want him to die?”

  “No, of course not. Don’t be an idiot, Matt.”

  “Then what? I wasn’t enough of a true believer? I was always behind you.”

  “But that’s just it, Matt. True believer? I don’t know what you believe in at all, half the time. I mean, I love you but I swear to God, some days it’s like the world doesn’t exist beyond the tip of your nose. That’s no way to live.” She paused. “I can’t live like that. I don’t want to live like that.”

  This time it was my turn to pause.

  “Are you sleeping with Brian?”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake, Matt. Grow up.”

  My phone began to beep, warning of a low battery. I began to speak quickly, trying to get it all in.

  “Look, whatever you think, I’m sorry. I really am. I know this mattered to you and I know it’s a person’s life, for god’s sake. I’m not an animal. But I tell you, if you want the truth, I’ve never understood why. Why you keep putting this in front of everything else. Tracy? Tracy? Are you there?”

  The line was dead. I had no idea how much she’d heard, what she’d taken in. I wasn’t going to get an answer, not today. But at least I’d asked.

  I returned to the embankment, climbed back up the stairs in a daze, squinting against the darkness and the rain-streaked glare of the passing headlights. The storm had become a deluge. I was about to leave when I passed them, two thick goons—that’s the only word for them really. Let’s give them jackboots and shaved heads, though my memory of what follows is shattered, so they might have been wearing soccer outfits and sneakers for all I know. I remember jewelry. Bracelets and rings. And that sickly sweet aftershave, far too much of it. It was the idiotic guffawing that drew my attention, as they crouched before their handiwork, shoving each other playfully as though they’d chucked a water balloon instead of done what they’d done, which was to fill several of the shoes with raw, bloodied pigs’ feet. Cars passed by but took no notice.