Gratitude Read Online Free PDF Page A

Tolgy and smothered their sound, too. Here she was, sitting on a bench in Budapest. Early spring in Budapest and unseasonably warm. She gazed at the people around her. Cheerful, most of them—all of them, actually. Had no one heard? “They are clearing out the towns,” she wanted to say but couldn’t find her voice. She sat on her bench as though she hadn’t a care in the world. Safe in Budapest. Springtime in Budapest.
    Lili got to her feet and made her way to a vegetable stand. She selected a carrot and a parsnip, offered a pengo.
    The woman sucked on her gold teeth as she examined the coin, front and back. Was it not enough? “Take the vegetables,” the woman told Lili as she slipped the coin into her apron pocket. “It’s all right. You take those. I’ll take this.”
    Lili wandered the streets for hours, past the vast Kerepesi Cemetery—more like a gallery of sculptures and shrines than a graveyard. Again, she looked over the wall but didn’t dare enter. Lili had heard that the country’s famous people lay in state here: Hungary’s first prime minister, Lajos Batthyany, and Ferenc Deak, the nineteenth-century statesman who brought Austria and Hungary together in his Grand Compromise, as Mrs. Wasserstein had described it. And there were poets there, too, she knew, like Attila Jozsef, who had taken his own life, and novelists like Kalman Mikszath. Stone upon stone, beautifully sculpted, glory upon glory, ending here.
    She passed theatres graced by classical columns and passed the impressive, broad-shouldered buildings of the technical university, then made her way along a winding street toward the centre of the city. There were florists on the street and tailors, cafés and beauty salons.
    Lili had been to Budapest once before, in 1938 when she was ten. She had come with her parents and Ferenc to visit an aging aunt. But she remembered only being struck by the lovely shop windows and the Goliath buildings, each of which, she was certain, could house the whole of her town under its roof.
    She’d been to the cinema on that occasion. It was the Tivoli, the cheerful theatre with its small curtained-off boxes and carvings of angels and sirens in gold on its walls and above the proscenium. As the newsreel played, Lili had asked her mother what those curtained-off booths were. “Nothing,” her mother had answered.
    But Ferenc said they were for lovers, “So they can hug and smooch when it’s a love story.”
    “Quiet, now,” Helen had said.
    But Lili and Ferenc were giggling, and as if on cue a couple did arrive, arm in arm, to occupy a paholy , as they were called. When they saw Ferenc and Lili watching, the woman released her boyfriend’s arm, until he roughly pulled the curtain shut.
    But after the grim newsreel about the depression, the lovers and the Bandels got A Day at the Races , with the Marx brothers and Margaret Dumont. The Marx brothers were David Bandel’s favourites, and if the lovers had come to find privacy, they had come to the wrong place. David laughed them out of their booth.
    In the vast Heroes’ Square, featuring statues of Hungary’s fiercest warriors, Lili heard what she thought was a concert. As she approached, she saw a Gypsy trio, a violin, mandolin and harmonica. With them was a fiery young girl who, oddly, sang a line here and there, but never a whole song. She was dressed in rustic reds and yellows, and she was bobbing like a flame, as if mesmerized, borne by the rhythm and sentiments. She bellowed out the words at everyone but looked at no one, not even Lili. In fact, her eyes were closed throughout. “ Turn your troubles into song ,” she was wailing. “ Come hear our music. Music makes you dumb .” She dipped and spun. “ Turn colour into sound. Let your heart fill your ears, not the buzz of your greed. Music makes you stupid. Come hear it play .”
    Lili wanted to hold the girl still. When she looked closely at her, she realized the girl wasn’t just mesmerized, not