The Collaborator Read online

  She looks at him questioningly.

  ‘This is in memory of another event in our unhappy history. In 1945, Hungarian fascist militia, Arrow Cross, brought thousands of Jewish people to this place. They forced them to take off all clothes, tied hands behind backs, and shot them. To save bullets, sometimes they tied families together and shot person in front so all fell into Danube and drowned.’

  Annika’s mouth is so dry she can’t speak. Although the sun is warm on her shoulders, she shivers. What a horrible way to die. In her mind she sees the crowd of people herded along this embankment at gunpoint, husbands and wives perhaps, and mothers and children, hears them crying, screaming or pleading. Did they suspect what was to befall them? Did they hope, even at that moment, to be rescued? Did they realise that this river beside which they used to play as children, where they wheeled their own children in prams, strolled with their sweethearts, or dreamed about the future, would become their tomb? She thinks about her grandmother. Thank God Marika escaped such a terrible fate.

  As she stands there, lost in thought, a car screeches to a halt and two young men lean out of the window, yell something at them, and speed away. Jansci raises his middle finger and yells something back. When he turns towards her, his face is white and hard.

  ‘What was that about? What did they say?’ she asks.

  He hesitates before saying, ‘They called us dirty Jews.’

  To have racist abuse hurled at her beside this memorial to the victims of race hate infuriates her. She wants to yell something back but it’s too late, and besides they wouldn’t understand her. She feels sick, and flops onto a nearby bench, staring at the shoes.

  ‘Does this happen often?’ she asks.

  ‘Too often,’ Jansci replies. ‘We have not many Jews but much anti-Semitism. If Hitler came back today, ultranationalist Jobbik party would do like Arrow Cross. We have fascists in government.’

  She wonders if he is Jewish, but he is already standing up. ‘Tamás said you are interested in Dohány Tsinagoga. We go now.’

  Half an hour later, standing in the doorway of the synagogue, she is struck by the opulent decor, the enormous organ, the frescoed ceiling, the pulpit to one side, and three richly decorated aisles. ‘This is amazing,’ she whispers. ‘It reminds me of a cathedral or a mosque.’

  Jansci is watching her with a smile, obviously pleased at her reaction. ‘It’s a potpourri of architecture,’ he says. ‘They called it Israelite cathedral but it’s a mix of Byzantine, Gothic, Moorish, Christian and Jewish, with rose stained-glass window, five-thousand-pipe organ inside and onion domes outside.’

  ‘I didn’t know synagogues had organs,’ Annika says.

  ‘This one is unique. Franz Liszt played it when synagogue opened in 1859. The Jewish community was big then, it could seat about three thousand people. I suppose you know what happened to most of them. Not many left today.’

  She is silent. After a pause, he says, ‘It’s unique for another reason as well. Come outside and I’ll show you.’

  At the back of the synagogue, they stand in a paved courtyard.

  ‘This is cemetery,’ he tells her. ‘In 1944, Eichmann made this area into ghetto and relocated over seventy thousand Jews in here from provinces. Thousands died of hunger and cold and were buried here, that’s why we have cemetery next to synagogue. You don’t see that anywhere else.’

  Wandering around the sunlit courtyard, she comes to the Raoul Wallenberg Emlekpark with a memorial in the centre to the Hungarian Jewish martyrs. The memorial resembles a silver weeping willow whose delicate leaves are engraved with the names and tattoo numbers of the dead.

  ‘Is called Tree of Life,’ Jansci says. As she gazes at the thousands of silver leaves, a breeze stirs them and they make a haunting sound, like the tinkling of tiny bells outside a Buddhist temple.

  She stands very still. It seems as if the souls of the dead are whispering all around her, trying to tell their stories, and although she can’t understand what they are saying, she strains to listen, and suddenly everything blurs.

  Jansci looks at her with concern. ‘You are upset, I think so. We will go from here.’

  She shakes her head. ‘I’m all right. It’s just, so much emotion in one morning.’ She blows her nose and straightens her shoulders. ‘This is a beautiful memorial.’

  ‘You heard of Tony Curtis, Hollywood actor? He was born Bernard Schwartz, in Hungary. He paid sculptor to design it,’ he said. ‘And Madame Lauder, cosmetics lady, she paid for renovation of synagogue after war.’

  On the other side of the courtyard, Annika stops beside a plaque commemorating Raoul Wallenberg. She has heard of the Swedish diplomat who rescued thousands of Jews during the Holocaust, but plaques nearby honour people she has never heard of: the Swiss Vice-Consul Carl Lutz, Angelo Rotta the Apostolic Nuncio to the Pope, and various Spanish and Portuguese diplomats.

  Standing beside her, Jansci says, ‘One name is not here. Nagy Miklós.’

  ‘Miklós Nagy,’ she repeats, astonished to hear him say the name. ‘Do you know anything about him?’

  ‘He saved my father and my grandparents,’ Jansci replies.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  2005

  Inside the Europa Café there’s a buzz of conversation and a clatter of plates as waitresses in starched white aprons with sweet smiles and soft twittery voices run around serving coffee and pastries. As they make their way to the only free table, Annika and Jansci pass the curved glass counter displaying cheesecakes, raspberry tarts, swirled walnut pastries, poppyseed twists and chocolate hazelnut gateaux. As soon as Annika spots the dobos torte she exclaims, ‘My grandmother’s speciality!’

  From their table in the far corner, she gazes at the tasselled velvet curtains, silver and gold wallpaper and crystal chandeliers. ‘I’ve never seen such an ornate café,’ she says.

  ‘Is oldest in Budapest. Politicians and diplomats came here in Hapsburg days. They say Houdini came too.’

  She raises her eyebrows, and he shrugs. ‘Maybe not Houdini, but he was born near here.’

  A moment later a group of musicians enters the café and begins to serenade the customers with gypsy melodies, their shrewd eyes searching for female tourists. Hearing their rhythmic melodies, Annika closes her eyes and sways in time to the seductive beat. It feels as if the music is embedded in her soul.

  Jansci leans forward. ‘You like czárdás, madame?’

  She grimaces. ‘Please don’t call me madame. My name is Annika.’

  The musicians move towards their table, and the leader, a burly man with a big black moustache and a stomach that swells his embroidered vest, says something to Jansci while looking at Annika.

  ‘He wants to play for you,’ Jansci translates. ‘He asks what you like.’

  Taken by surprise, she can’t think of any tune that these musicians would know. ‘You choose,’ she whispers.

  She doesn’t recognise the song, but she loves its sensual rhythm, and the way the violinist plays it, not taking his smouldering black eyes from her face. She looks away. It feels as if he can see into the secret crevices of her life.

  The song ends, and Jansci takes a few forints from his pocket and hands them to the violinist who bows and moves to the next table. ‘That was Hungarian love song, Annika, about man who loves woman but he knows she will never love him.’

  It’s the first time he has said her name, elongating it so that it sounded like Aanikaa. Was there something intimate in the way he said it, and the way he looked at her as he talked about the song, or did she imagine it? The blood rushes to her cheeks, and she looks down at the menu, feigning sudden interest in the selection of pastries and deserts.

  ‘They all sound tempting, but I have to try the dobos torte. My grandmother always makes it for me.’

  Jansci is still looking at her.

  ‘You are telling about grandmother but nothing about you,’ he says. He glances at her hands and she wonders if he is looking for a wedding ring. ‘In Sy
dney you have boyfriend, yes?’

  Annika controls the urge to retort that she doesn’t feel disposed to discuss her private life with a stranger who is probably hitting on her. She has heard too many stories about gullible tourists getting involved with predatory guides. And they weren’t naive, stupid women either. Just the previous year her friend Ella, the headmistress of a girls’ school in Melbourne, had fallen for her guide in Cairo. He had sworn she was the love of his life and promised to follow her to Australia and marry her, but she found out too late that he was married and had five children. On her return to Melbourne she had to have an abortion. Annika had been incredulous. How could a smart, educated woman of forty-three be so stupid? ‘But he was so handsome and so passionate, and he looked like Omar Sharif,’ Ella had sobbed. ‘He made me feel like a teenager again.’

  Not that she herself has been a good judge of men. The ones she has fallen for, who all seemed perfect at the beginning, turned out to be more devoted to their mothers, their footy mates, or their self-indulgent lives than to her. One talked incessantly about his first wife while another wanted her to give up her career. She had been appalled. She was a magazine editor, not a docile homemaker from the 1950s. She has always been convinced that her identity was enmeshed with her career, an idea that makes her smile bitterly when she thinks about it now. So if she wasn’t an editor, who was she?

  Finding the right man has always seemed impossible. The men who worked on the magazine were more feminine than the women, so she had taken Cassie’s advice and tried the internet dating sites. In the photos, the guys all looked good, and each one claimed to be a sensitive new age man with a good sense of humour. They all enjoyed travel, food, and the movies, but the reality was very different. For many of them, their idea of travel was a trip to a footy match with a meat pie in one hand and a tinnie in the other, after which they tried to fumble with her clothes in the car.

  Cassie had blamed her for being too picky and too impatient. She said that Annika was setting herself up to fail because she didn’t really want a relationship, which meant having to compromise. That almost ended their friendship. But even Cassie agreed that she was lucky to get away from her last date in time. It turned out that he was being treated for a personality disorder, and had spent time in prison for assault. That was eighteen months ago and since then she has lost confidence in her own judgment and the hope of ever finding the right man.

  But when she looks at Jansci, she doesn’t see a calculating guide who preys on female tourists. She likes the warm honey colour of his complexion and the candid expression in his dark eyes. He wasn’t Hollywood handsome but there was something engaging about him. An Italian word pops into her mind: simpatico.

  He watches her with an amused expression as she tucks into the dobos torte with its layers of sponge cake filled with chocolate cream, topped by a smooth layer of golden toffee.

  ‘Is as good as grandmother’s torte?’

  ‘My grandmother’s torte has seven layers,’ she says, scraping up the splinters of toffee with her fork, but her mind is on something else. She leans forward. ‘When we were looking at the plaques in the cemetery behind the synagogue, you mentioned that Miklós Nagy saved your father. What else do you know about him?’

  ‘In 1944 he got many Jews out of Hungary on special train. My father was on it with his mother and father. But I don’t know more.’

  ‘So he was like Schindler and Wallenberg?’

  ‘Yes, but Nagy was Jew. Imagine, a Jew with guts to deal with Nazis for Jewish lives!’

  Annika is frowning. ‘So why wasn’t he included among the heroes in that memorial garden?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  She recalls some of the vituperative entries she read on the internet. ‘There was a controversy about him. Do you know about that?’

  ‘No. I didn’t ask about past when I was young, and Father didn’t talk about war.’

  ‘But didn’t you ask why they were on that train?’

  He shakes his head. ‘They are not living anymore, so now is too late.’

  Annika thinks about this select group of Jews miraculously snatched from the jaws of death, a group that included his parents as well as her own grandmother. How could Marika be so angry with the man who saved her life? And why hadn’t he received the recognition he deserved?

  Despite the lack of information, she feels a surge of excitement she hasn’t felt since she chased up leads for a scoop when she was a reporter many years ago. That shiver of recognition was familiar and tantalising, like knowing there was a seam of gold in the ground just beneath your feet and all you needed was a pick fine enough to extract it. She would keep searching.

  For the next few hours, they walk along wide tree-lined avenues and wander in magnificent plazas where children chase each other around gigantic monuments. In Hero Square, in front of the colonnaded structure topped by rearing bronze horses and seven gigantic statues of ancient Magyar chiefs, Jansci explains that seven is a significant number for Hungary on account of the seven legendary Magyar chiefs who founded the nation. They linger near a film crew photographing three teenage girls who perform intricate jumps as they skip between ropes twirled by two ponytailed guys.

  ‘I loved jumping rope like that when I was in primary school,’ she says, suddenly nostalgic about the past. ‘The trouble was, my hair used to fly all over the place, and some of the girls called me Mop-Top.’

  ‘But your hair is so beautiful!’ he exclaims, and from the way his eyes rest on it, she feels he means it.

  As they approach the bridge, he points out that the stone lions which guard the bridgeheads have no tongues. An omission by the stonemason. Across the river, on Swabian Hill, they wander around Fishermen’s Bastion, a fairytale structure of turrets and parapets.

  ‘A Hapsburg Disneyworld,’ she quips, and he laughs.

  ‘Seven lookout towers in honour of the original seven Magyar tribes,’ he points out.

  On a small stage at the top of the hill, an elderly woman in a long crimson dress is telling stories to an audience of young children. The storyteller’s manner is so compelling that even though Annika can’t understand a single word, she is mesmerised by her delivery.

  ‘She is telling folk story about Magyar heroes long ago,’ Jansci explains as they move away. Then in a bitter tone he adds, ‘Jobbik people believe only Magyars should live in Hungary. They say Jews are not real Magyars.’

  Back on the Pest side of the city, they are walking along a square lined with pavement cafés, gelato booths, and kebab and pizza kiosks when the shriek of sirens makes her jump. Police cars speed across the city and the deafening shrill of their sirens makes conversation impossible. When they turn a corner, she is shocked to see scores of riot police lining the street. There are about eighty of them, men and women, some standing in a row, others clustered in small groups, all menacing in their black gear, with black leggings and black helmets with visors pushed back on their foreheads. She is about to dart across to ask them what was happening, when Jansci grabs her arm and pulls her away.

  ‘Maybe in Australia you ask police questions, here no.’

  A moment later she has her explanation. Coming towards them, taking up the entire width of the avenue, are hundreds of thuggish men, with distorted, red faces, yelling slogans and waving Hungarian flags. Annika’s heart is pounding. It’s clear that only a spark is needed to turn this crowd’s nationalistic fervour into a riot. Magyars against the foreigners.

  ‘Big soccer match tonight, Hungarians versus Romanians,’ Jansci says. ‘There will be drinking and fighting, so police are ready.’

  They turn down a side street and emerge on the Corso, where a row of the touristy pavement restaurants facing the river advertise gypsy music, Hungarian specialities and pizzas. Annika is too tired to keep walking so they sit down at a table at the Panorama Terasz, whose dour waiters move like sleepwalkers.

  ‘People in Budapest don’t smile,’ she says. ‘Why?’

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sp; ‘Life is hard. Don’t forget we had communist government until 1991. From 1945 to 1991, there was no God, and no religion, only communism. Suddenly, God is back, religion is back, and now we are capitalist. Too quick, too many problems. But last year we join European Union, so maybe everything will be better.’

  Annika is shocked to realise that until fourteen years ago, this was a communist country, and once again she is embarrassed by her ignorance. By the time the waiter brings them langos, fried dough with garlic sauce, it is cold, and he has forgotten to bring nokedli dumplings with her chicken paprikás.

  ‘This man, Nagy, I wonder how he managed to get those Jews out of Hungary. I wish I knew what happened here during the Holocaust.’

  Jansci checks his watch and pushes away his plate. ‘I have tourist group now so I must go, but tomorrow I have time, so if you like, call me.’ He scribbles an address on a paper serviette and hands it to her. ‘If you want to know about Holocaust, go to museum.’

  He says goodbye, takes her hand, and lifts it to his lips.

  Once she would have dismissed the idea of a man in the twenty-first century kissing a woman’s hand as absurd and patronising, but she is blushing and her heart is racing. It feels more intimate than a kiss on the cheek, or is it the way he looks into her eyes as he lingers over the kiss? She watches him walk away until he disappears among the crowd, and she feels annoyed with herself. Was she becoming one of those susceptible women she despised, the ones who fantasised about every attractive man who came their way? Perhaps Cassie was right. The only men she found interesting were the ones she couldn’t have.

  *

  The light inside the Holocaust museum is dim and the atmosphere is sombre. Accompanying the stark black-and-white photographs of Jewish men being rounded up for labour camps at the beginning of the war, and the images of Arrow Cross fascists herding people along the Danube embankment, is the frightening soundtrack of marching feet, growing ever louder and more relentless.