“Will you put Uncle Franz into a book someday, his miraculous escape? It’s time you told me about it, anyway.”
A day passed before she responded. Then: “Here is how Franz escaped. A large group of Jews including his family had been marched from their small city to a village near a forest some miles from Budapest. They were crammed into a three-story wooden structure. They knew they would be moved any day to a cruel and permanent place. Franz and his family were on the third floor. Snow covered the hard earth. The building was unguarded.
“‘Jump from the window,’ his mother hissed that first night.
“‘Mama…’
“‘Jump.’
“‘Mama.’
“She opened the window and picked him up — he was a slight twelve-year-old — and held him to her massive chest. Then her iron hands grasped him under the armpits. She thrust him through the window toward the icy night, and held him in the air like a blanket to be shaken. He had stopped saying ‘Mama.’ She held him and held him and held him. Then all at once she bent double over the sill and released her child. He landed unharmed on snow, and stumbled into the woods, and kept going. He met others. They survived the war there, some of them: the ragged, the starving, the ill. If you put your ear to Franz’s chest you can still hear the rattle of an old lung disease.
“Could I offer that story to the world, Lance? What could I add to it that would not degrade it? Winged soldiers, Dutchmen poking needles into flowers, scamps on the docks of Smyrna — they are my material, history as diversion, the fellow said. They are my antidote to the unbearable past.” She added in a labored voice, “Franz was the only member of his entire family to survive, the only student from his school.”
“Franz and Madame…they met as refugees?”
“Yes.”
“They couldn’t have children together, Franz and Madame?”
“No.”
“Uncle Franz is the last of the Szatmar line.”
Silence. Then: “You could say so.”
We attended the annual business meeting of the lower valley historical society. “Piscataqua?” Toby inquired during the social hour that followed.
“An old name dating from the centuries when the area was populated and governed by its aboriginal inhabitants,” said Mr. Jennings, the chairman, bending his head toward the beautiful woman with the metallic hair. “It has been determined that the names of the lake and the river came from the Abenaki language, the word being a probable combination of a syllable meaning ‘branch’ and another meaning ‘a river with a strong current.’”
“How ancient is Abenaki?”
“Oh, it was spoken before Columbus.”
“Latin was spoken before the Babylonian captivity.”
“Nevertheless.”
“Nevertheless,” she repeated in her golden voice, “linguistic economy indicates that the river and the lake were named not by the Abenaki but by the Roman-Briton arrivistes.”
“My dear Ms. Bluestein,” he said, falling in love before my eyes — well, he wasn’t the first to do so—“Romans didn’t arrive on these shores until the nineteenth century, when they came in droves. Mostly shoemakers and fruit farmers.”
“My dear Mr. Jennings, you are talking about Italians, as you well know. The Roman-Britons came in 500 A.D.”
“How on earth — on sea, ha-ha — did they travel?”
“In Roman longships, descendants of Roman galleys, themselves descendants of Roman quinqueremes. The longships made it to shore and then crumbled.”
“Then there is no proof of their existence.”
“There is no proof of their nonexistence.”
Mr. Jennings produced a smitten smile. “What do you think they were like, these ships that sailed the sea before the era of sails?”
“Oh, they had sails. And oars, of course.”
“The last of the Romans left Britain in 410,” Mr. Jennings said. “They did not sail the Atlantic, then called Thalassa. They sailed only to the Continent and then made their way home on foot. According to popular belief, the first European to reach North America was Leif Eriksson. He landed on the coast of what is now Newfoundland in 980.”
“I respect popular belief,” Toby said. “It’s mostly guesswork, like my own endeavors. Mr. Jennings, there are things we know without knowing that we know them.”
“Yes, but…” He didn’t finish the sentence. Both he and I could tell there was no stopping her.
So she started her next book before the gazebo was begun. She wrote in her bedroom loft. The book’s hero was young Titus of the port of London.
For Titus in the shipyard, working with the oaken, the sea always beckoned. It beckoned with the crooked finger of death, for he had lost father, brothers, uncles, and a cousin to the foam. Some with his history might have fled inland and become a laborer on a farm, or made his home in a town, or joined an abbey. But water was Titus’s passion.
“How are you getting on?” asked Mr. Jennings, whose feet were planted on the Turkish rug. He had dropped in with a basket of zucchini; I was slicing the squash on the tiny counter.
“Getting on fine,” Toby called down.
Titus was in charge of the construction of the longboat. The Roman/British longboat, unremembered by historians, was graceful, narrow, light, with a shallow draft hull designed for speed and which allowed navigations in waters only one meter deep. The longboat was fitted with oars along the length of the vessel. It bore a rectangular sail on a single mast which was used to replace or aid the effort of the rowers, particularly during long journeys like the one planned now.
The next time he brought wine. “Full sails ahead,” Toby informed him.
They left London, Titus on the seventh oar — for though he was master and captain, there was no provision made for rank; everyone rowed. He was a short, muscular young man with a Saxon profile grafted onto a Roman head, and his hair was dark…Months later, his battered ship sighted the coast of what would one day be called these United States.
“Would you like to give a talk at the library?” Mr. Jennings asked on his now daily visit.
“Love to.”
A coastline of cliffs and gorges and rocks presents an unwelcoming aspect. The newcomers rowed on. Romans were aware of premonition: the feeling that imminent disaster is hiding behind every cloud, every wave. They lived in a permanent state of anxiety. Titus feigned boldness, but he constantly fingered the good-luck coin his sweetheart had given him, which hung on his chest. Where on this earth would they land?
They landed in the estuary formed by the then unnamed river and the sea. Now called Piscataqua, of course.
“Would you read me some of your work?” said Mr. Jennings, looking loftward from the chair I’d provided.
“…Okay.
“‘After the brave beginning came the deaths by disease, by unknown poisons in plants, by animals; came wars with natives, peace with natives, children. Came hurricanes, surely sent by the God. Came the final disease, a mercilessly lengthy fever; and then came the collapse into itself and then into dust of everything remembered, everything that could be remembered, obliteration as complete as that of…’”
“Atlantis?” wondered Mr. Jennings. “Troy?”
“I am thinking of a Hungarian community in 1943.”