Read Online Love and Treasure by Ayelet Waldman - Free Book Online Page A

her sister had been moved to a different satellite camp, near Obermeitingen, and not, as Ilona had feared, sent to the gas.
    “I have been looking for Etelka since liberation,” Ilona said. “Everyone that was there in Obermeitingen, I ask them.”
    Jack didn’t ask the question, but she answered it anyway.
    “I know she’s alive. Etelka was an athlete. Before the war, she was a champion fencer. Then came the anti-Jewish laws, and she could no longer compete, but she still trained at home with our uncle Samu. She only stopped when we went to the ghetto. She’s so strong! There was a time in the munitions factory when our job was to unload iron beams from a train and carry them two hundred meters up a hill to the smelter. She always took the rear, where the load was heaviest, because she was so much stronger than I. Also, she was a medical student before the war, and in the camps she was like a doctor to so many people. Even sometimes the Kapos came to her if they were hurt. When she helped them, they would give her food. If I can survive, so can Etelka.”
    “How will you find her?”
    “We had agreed, if we were ever separated, we would meet in Salzburg.”
    “Why here?”
    “We used to come here many times as children on our way to Bad Gastein, where my father liked to take the waters.”
    In her smile, Jack saw flickering to life the city as it was before the war, as he had never seen it. Whimsical alleyways and squares wherethere were now rubble-strewn paths. The elegant wrecks in front of the Müllner church brought back to life, buildings reconstructed behind what were now mere façades. The listing balconies righted on the Grecian reliefs that held them up, the statues’ heads restored. Gone in her smile were the orderly piles of rubble, boulders separated from blocks, flat pieces of stone stacked up by size like planks fresh from the sawmill. Gone were the bundles of wire like tumbleweeds or balls of hair hanging on telephone poles beside ruined buildings. And the richly costumed people, the men coming in from their fields in their lederhosen and jaunty feathered caps bedecked with whisk brooms, the dirndled women wrapped in embroidered aprons, not wooden-faced folk enacting an insincere pastiche of history, a parody of tradition, but pleasant, simple, generous people. He saw in Ilona’s smile a Salzburg that was not merely a picturesque corpse but a pretty, vibrant place, full of music and joy.
    She said, “We even met here our English governess.”
    “You had an English governess?”
    “You think all Hungarian girls speak such good English? Miss Richards was with us six years as a governess, then she married my uncle and became our auntie Firenze. She would have gone with us even to the ghetto, but my father forbade it. When I find Etelka, we will go home to Auntie Firenze in Nagyvárad.”
    The waiter came by again, obviously eager for them to release the table to one of the other young couples who waited impatiently to be seated. They were everywhere in Salzburg, American soldiers and their Austrian girlfriends, cheerfully violating the rules against fraternization and providing steady business to the city’s newly opened cafés and bars.
    “Well,” Ilona asked, neatly folding her napkin, “shall we walk?”
    “Would that be all right for you?” he said, recalling her limp. “Would you prefer to take the streetcar?”
    “I like to walk. Especially after a meal where I have eaten everything but the tablecloth and the flowers in the vase.”
    “I saw you eyeing the flowers,” he said. “Frankly I was a little worried for them.”
    She laughed and took his arm. They meandered along the east bank of the Salzach, until they rounded a corner at Mozartsteg and came face-to-face with Lieutenant Hoyle, Jack’s roommate. Hoyle had his arm slung around the waist of a girl, young, giggly, no more than fourteen or fifteen years old. Her lips were painted with an inexpert wobble of clown red that