His mother waited for years to tell him the details of that fateful journey. From as far back as he could remember she had mentioned bits and pieces in order to impress on him above all that he was lucky to be alive, that they all were. People had been ravished by the war, the scars were clear on their faces and everywhere in Budapest, as they still are. Nevertheless, his mother was a cheerful person and taught him to be thankful for every breath he took. But it was the story of Rezso Kasztner that defined his mother’s view of the world. Her life, as well as his own, began to make sense to him only after she shared the story of the train and the man who arranged for it. The paradox of Kasztner was a symbol of the capricious nature of people and their lives, the veil through which his mother saw the workings of the universe.
On June 30th, 1944, his mother boarded a train in Budapest that was to take her and almost seventeen-hundred other Jews to safety in Switzerland. Over the past few months Rezso Kasztner, a journalist and lawyer, had used his influence and savvy to negotiate the ransom of these passengers with the Nazi authorities. He had met with these Nazis and discussed numbers, bargained for the lives of people who otherwise would have perished. Some of these people knew Reszo personally, others did not. How he came up with the list of names Egon’s mother could not say. At that point she still thought, along with most Jews in Hungary, that she was being relocated to a concentration camp and did not yet know the massacre that awaited once under captivity. Reszo Kasztner knew. He kept it to himself but decided to save 1,685 or so fellow Jews from death in Auschwitz.
Several months pregnant by the time she boarded the train, she was terrified of the possibilities that awaited her first child. Should the journey be delayed her son might be born in the train and not survive. The thought of attaining freedom at the cost of her unborn churned her stomach with guilt. She described the fear etched on people’s faces as they settled in their seats. Most were solemnly quiet except for the children who were too young to understand the situation but old enough to be scared. Tears streamed down people’s faces with thoughts of those left behind. Years later they would know that almost half a million of their countrymen fell victim to the gas chambers of Auschwitz. In the train with these lucky few were three suitcases filled with cash, jewels, gold, and shares of stock, amounting to about one thousand dollars per person, which Kasztner collected to be paid to SS officer Kurt Becher as their ransom. When she uttered that number, Egon felt his skin crawl. The mathematics of such a transaction bewildered him and left him short of breath.
His mother then described to him in detail the days spent in limbo at the concentration camp. A pregnant woman she had noticed when boarding the train gave birth during that time and other prisoners helped look after her and the newborn. She realized then that she was less alone than it seemed, witnessing the power of people’s goodness in the midst of such evil. In August she was picked to join the first group that was allowed to continue on the train to freedom. Recalling the day she reached Switzerland, his mother smiled and shed tears of joy.
Egon asked simple questions. He wanted to know what they ate on the train. How they went to the bathroom. What the temperature was. As he listened to his mother he tried to imagine himself on that train, outside of his mother’s womb. He stumbled down the crowded aisles and looked into people’s eyes. Amidst the faces of complete strangers he recognized those of his loved ones. He sensed their fear and felt his stomach turn. His mother stopped talking and stared into her son’s eyes. For a long while they sat in silence studying each other and the story unfolded before them, its memories and repercussions bridging the gap between mother and son, the train making a connection with his birth in Switzerland and his childhood in Budapest, so that when his mother broke the silence she skipped ahead more than ten years and recounted Reszo Kasztner’s assassination on a quiet Tel Aviv street. At that time the story of the train had been retold, now from the perspective of those left behind. He had withheld information which cost the lives of the masses, had made a list of those to be saved, had negotiated with Nazis, had vouched for them in court, had sold his soul to the devil. He was called a traitor. His daughters were taunted in school, he was spat upon in the streets and finally gunned down by three fellow Jews in 1957. One year after his death the courts cleared Kasztner of all charges. His killers were pardoned some years later.
The figure of Reszo Kasztner flickered in Egon’s mind. He tried hard to imagine what the man looked like. He could picture nothing but a tall, faceless body. He was a hero, a traitor, a hero again. From this story alone he could not understand Reszo Kasztner, much less imagine what he looked like. He searched for his features in the placid eyes of his mother, who once again sat in silence, smiling tenderly. But in her eyes he found only the enigma of life.
Mom repeated that things were just fine. She tried to convince me by giving me a new dress, and by then I was old enough to know that such tricks were a bad sign. She didn’t know but I would catch her crying in the kitchen while she made dinner. I would sense the growing anxiety in my father’s hands every time he ran his fingers through my hair at night and whispered “sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite,” his breath still sweet from the after dinner cognac. And I could see it in their eyes when they looked at each other.
They sat me down after school one Friday and tried to explain the situation very gently to me. At that point I wasn’t as much bothered by the idea of them being apart. It was their inability to accept that I knew full well what was happening that really infuriated me. It made me feel like a child and I had just begun to see myself as something other than that. Not yet an adult, but something more than a child, with insights into dark, secret places that most people ignored. I wanted to let them know that I was privy to this new knowledge, that I knew people lied, that people had to lie. Sitting there at the kitchen table listening to them beat around the bush, I became angry at myself for not knowing how to tell them. I knew everything would be okay. I knew things would be different and I was fine with it.
For a few months my father kept an apartment in the city and only came home during the weekends. When he was home he would drive me to the ice-cream parlor or the arcade and we would talk about all the other times we’d been to those places together. I wanted to go somewhere else, somewhere new we’d never been to before. I couldn’t keep my father from going back to those same old places.
When he showed up my mother would find chores around the house to keep her busy. He would find her tearing up weeds in the garden or searching for something in the attic and ask her if she wanted to join us. She would pretend to be too busy with the task at hand and politely decline. When we’d get in the car I couldn’t help but picture mom crying while she repeated the same motions again and again like a robot in short-circuit.
After months of this same routine my mother began to cheer up. She started leaving the house more often, meeting friends for dinner and going on walks around the lake. When it started to get cold she decided to clean out the house and held a garage sale that did away with most of the objects she associated with memories too strong to bear on a daily basis. She said it made no sense to her why people did this sort of thing in the spring. “When winter comes you’re locked up inside, so why not make more space”. She was reinventing herself slowly, starting with what she knew best, which was the house.
One day my father invited the two of us to breakfast in the city. There was a shabby old diner we used to go to, and he must have figured it’d be a good place to pretend things were normal. My mother was still too used to pretending to know how to stop. I got dressed quickly and sat on my mother’s bed watching her try on different outfits, stand at the mirror curling her hair and nervously apply makeup. I could sense her fear from across the room. Neither of us said a word to each other. As she drove she kept playing with her hair and checking her makeup in the rearview mirror, then clenching the steering wheel with an anxious grip. I asked her if she was okay.
“I’m fine, just not sure I want to drive all the way. Do you mind if we take the train in?”
Once in the train my mother closed her eyes and sat back in her chair. She held my hand tightly once the train started to move, turning her head away to look out of the window at the bright day outside. When the train went under an overpass I quickly caught her reflection on the window and saw a streak of tears rolling down her face. I squeezed her hand tightly and she squeezed back, remaining perfectly still and quiet.
The train let out a painful groan that slowed time down then suddenly jolted forward with a terrible force. My mother and I slammed our heads into the seats in front of us and passengers flew out of their seats onto the aisle and bags crashed down from the rafters spilling onto people’s heads. The train’s moan was joined by the gasps and screams of those being pummeled by its momentum. I felt my whole body shake from the force of it, felt the fragility of my bones at the mercy of this metal monster and its grinding loss of control. My head spun with weird memories as if awoken by this shove. Then in a flash the train stopped and everyone looked around with great big eyes full of surprise. People were scattered about in awkward positions. The sight of men in business suits crumpled up in between seats like day-old newspaper was eerie. The human body caught by surprise, an abrupt break in routine. Everything seemed very clear and obvious in that moment. Everything made sense. I felt more alive than ever before. My mother’s nose was bleeding from the impact and her expression was one of terror, but I knew everything would be all right from that moment on. My mother was petrified with shock. She asked me if I was okay and then looked around frantically trying to piece together what had just happened. I grabbed her hand once again and squeezed even tighter than before.
“Mom,” I said, “everything is going to be okay. You’re going to be fine.” She stared at me and her body relaxed. I smiled and she began to cry. She wrapped her hands around me in a starved hug. She was laughing and sobbing at the same time. Finally, catching her breath, she said, “Yes, baby. We’re going to be fine.”
I just want to go home. Yesterday I turned 28 sitting in a muddy ditch outside of Da Nang with my best friend dying in my arms. You know I don’t care about birthdays but this one had been creeping up on me in a strange way, had me thinking about it more than I care to admit, and sure enough it turned into the second worst day in my life. When that man came into my house and murdered my family he was 28 years old. That was 16 years ago, and at the time he had seemed like an old man to me, or just a monster with no age. But over the years I started to think about it and the closer I got to turning his age the more scared I got. ‘Cause in the end even though I’m here doing what I’m doing I still feel like a kid. Now I realize that he was just a kid too. They said he lived with his mother, didn’t have a job. That morning before he went out and killed all those people his mother made him breakfast, fried eggs and cereal, they said. I don’t know why they told me that then, but since that day I haven’t been able to eat a fried egg without thinking about that old woman setting the table for her 28 year old little boy right before he up and killed thirteen people. Thing is he had seen the shit himself. That part of it I only started to understand now, of course. He was a tank soldier and he was at the Battle of the Bulge. He was a nobody back home, probably had no friends to speak of, people made fun of him. But he was a good soldier and he came home from that war with a chest full of medals and I’m sure that was hard to top. They said he used his basement in Camden for target practice after he came back, and I recognize what he was thinking about every time he pulled that trigger down there. If he was crazy before the war, I don’t know. If he was, it probably helped him on the battlefield and only got worse after. I know he didn’t kill my dad because of the argument they had a couple weeks before, he killed him because he was crazy. But why he was crazy is what haunts me now more than ever. Last thing he said before they locked him up was “I’d have killed a thousand if I had bullets enough.” That sentence keeps coming back to me, I can’t get it out of my head. I’m sorry I’m writing about this right now, I’m sure you’d like to hear about our situation over here and how I’m doing and all, but this is what’s been on my mind. I just want to go home after yesterday. I feel like maybe I brought it on myself thinking about this so much for the past few months. It would have been bad enough if it wasn’t on my birthday and I didn’t have all of this churning in my mind. All these details that I thought I had forgotten came back yesterday when I was laying in that ditch. I could hear my mother gasping for her last breath inside the closet. I’m sorry, I don’t want to upset you, but you’re the only one I can talk to about this. I miss you terribly. I wish I could just lay with you on the couch next to the fireplace. I don’t think I’ve been dry since the day I got here. Funny thing is, that’s one of the memories that came back yesterday, was how bright that day was. A beautiful day really. Hard to remember that, considering. Over here it’s always a wet hell, and even when the sun comes out you know it’ll get dark and pour on you in the blink of an eye. But sitting there in that ditch, on my birthday, in the rain, I could see that bright sun beating down on the streets of Camden, I could remember sitting in the back of the police car, not knowing what to think. Mom, dad, grandma. Just like that. You have a beautiful life, it’s a beautiful day, and then suddenly this other person’s past comes rushing out of them and changes the rest of your life, creates your own past you can’t escape from. Over here that happens everyday, and people are starting to get used to it. You have to live now, they say, and worry about it later. But I’m scared of what will happen when I can’t forget this. I’m scared of getting used to it, and I know that’s the only way. Have to go now. Will try to write again soon. Love, Charles.
They called me in to identify the body. My mother’s wrinkled face was black with ash and blue with death. Her eyes were closed but her mouth still agape, still gasping for air. Her thin hair was mostly burnt and she looked like a man. I could still hear her screaming my name in frustration from across the apartment, as she often did when I still lived there. For the most part I tried to forget that part of my life. I didn’t miss my mother. I could barely remember her at all.
Olivia had been the one dealing with mother’s foul temper for the past few years, and I cringed at how that was damaging her forever. At her age I had been living in Warsaw for a year with Artur. At her age I’d almost had a child, seen my future play out like an old movie without subtitles. At her age I was already planning my return to New York.
I stood beside Olivia and watched her chest move up and down slowly. Her arms had been burnt and her skin looked grey, but she was still beautiful, even in that state. Her long lashes trembled and although they were closed I could see her bright blue eyes. She was always prettier than me. My friends told me she had recently been responding to the boys in the neighborhood, who for years had worked feverishly to grab her attention. Puerto Rican boys, Brazilian boys, Italian boys, and of course all the Polish boys who felt they were most entitled to her affection.
It had been the same with me, even if I had succumbed to men and their ways at a much younger age. Olivia was quiet and kept to herself. She had few friends, and the ones she had didn’t know what was going on inside her. She used to lock herself up in our room and not let me in for hours. Mother had given up on her, just like she had given up on me. She was rarely home and when she was she wished Olivia and I weren’t there. Her job took everything out of her, drained her dry. She would complain about the men at the sites harassing her, saying disgusting things to her when she was in the middle of an inspection or grabbing her when she got on the elevator. She was cursed with a beautiful body and a cold heart at the age of 44.
In the past few months it had gotten worse, Olivia had been telling me about it when we talked on the phone. Mother had been fired from the job after she complained about her mistreatment. Jurek had encouraged her to file a lawsuit. He had been showing up more often now, and Olivia seemed to think he was genuinely trying to console my mother. I often tried to imagine mother being taken advantage of by a man like Jurek. It made me feel better imagining her fall prey to the same schemes she jealously berated me about when men became interested in me. Though I hadn’t thought about him for years, I seemed to remember Jurek better than I remembered my mother. He was tall and lanky, his body seeming to occupy all the space in the room. He was a barber and always smelled like talcum powder. He would show up on weekends and play with us before sitting at the kitchen table with my mother and talking for hours. Then they would leave the apartment to go on a walk. Olivia and I never knew where they walked to, but I knew it probably wasn’t very far. Then he had stopped coming for a while and mother’s temper had transformed into a quiet sadness. Now he was back, and he must have been talking to mother at the kitchen table as usual that night, because he was also in the hospital struggling to stay alive. But the other man lying in the hospital I did not recognize.
