The Invisible Bridge

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX. Subcarpathía

IN JANUARY OF 1940, Labor Service Company 112/30 of the Hungarian Army was stationed in Carpatho-Ruthenia, somewhere between the towns of Jalová and Stakčin, not far from the Cirocha River. This was the territory Hungary had annexed from Czechoslovakia after Germany had taken back the Sudetenland. It was a craggy wild landscape of scrub-covered peaks and wooded hillsides, snow-filled valleys, frozen rock-choked streams. When Andras had read about the annexation of Ruthenia in the Paris newspapers or seen newsreel footage of its forested hills, the land had been nothing more than an abstraction to him, a pawn in a game of Hitlerian chess. Now he was living under the canopy of a Carpatho-Ruthenian forest, working as a member of a Hungarian Labor Service road-construction crew. After his return to Budapest, all hope of having his visa renewed had quickly evaporated. The clerk at the visa office, his breath reeking of onions and peppers, had met Andras’a request with laughter, pointing out that Andras was both a Jew and of military age; his chances of being granted a second two-year visa were comparable to the chances that he, Márkus Kovács, would spend his next holiday in Corfu with Lily Pons, ha ha ha. The man’s superior, a more sober-minded but equally malodorous man-cigars, sausages, sweat-scrutinized the letter from the École Spéciale and declared, with a patriotic side-glance at the Hungarian flag, that he did not speak French. When Andras translated the letter for him, the superior proclaimed that if the school was so fond of him now, it would still want him after he’d finished his two years of military service. Andras had persisted, going to the office day after day with increasing frustration and urgency. August was coming to an end. They had to get back to Paris. Klara’s situation was perilous and could only become more so the longer they stayed. Then, in the first week of September, Europe went to war.

On the flimsiest of pretexts-SS men dressed as Polish soldiers had faked an attack on a German radio station in the border town of Gleiwitz-Hitler sent a million and a half troops and two thousand tanks across the Polish border. The Budapest daily carried photographs of Polish horsemen riding with swords and lances against German panzer divisions. The next day’s paper showed a battlefield littered with dismembered horses and the remnants of ancient armor; grinning panzer troops clutched the greaves and breastplates to their chests. The paper reported that the armor would be displayed in a new Museum of Conquest that was under construction in Berlin. A few weeks later, as Germany and Russia negotiated the division of the conquered territory, Andras received his labor-service call-up. It would be another eighteen months before Hungary entered the war, but the draft of Jewish men had begun in July. Andras reported to the battalion offices on Soroksári út, where he learned that his company, the 112/30th, would be deployed to Ruthenia. He was to depart in three weeks’ time.

He brought the news to Mátyás at the lingerie shop on Váci utca where he was arranging a new display window. A group of correctly dressed middle-aged ladies watched from the sidewalk as Mátyás draped a line of dress forms with a series of progressively smaller underthings, a chaste burlesque captured in time. When Andras rapped on the glass, Mátyás raised a finger to signal his brother to wait; he finished pinning the back of a lilac slip, then disappeared through an elf-sized door in the display window. A moment later he appeared at the human-sized door of the shop, a tape measure slung over his shoulders, his lapel laddered with pins. Over the past two years he had changed from a rawboned boy into a slim, compact youth; he moved through the mundane ballet of his day with a dancer’s unselfconscious grace. At his jawline a perpetual shadow of stubble had emerged, and at his throat the neat small box of an Adam’s apple. He had their mother’s heavy dark hair and high sharp cheekbones.

“I’ve got a couple more wire girls to dress,” he said. “Why don’t you join me? You can give me the news while I’m pinning.”

They went into the shop and entered the display window through the elf-sized door. “What do you think?” Mátyás said, turning to a narrowwaisted dress form. “The pink chemise or the blue?” It was his practice to trim his windows during business hours; he found it drew a steady stream of customers demanding to buy the very things he was installing.

“The blue,” Andras said, and then, “Can you guess where I’ll be in three weeks?”

“Not Paris, I’d imagine.”

“ Ruthenia, with my labor company.”

Mátyás shook his head. “If I were you, I’d run right now. Hop a train back to Paris and beg political asylum. Say you refuse to go into service for a country that takes gifts of land from the Nazis.” He sank a pin into the strap of the blue chemise.

“I can’t become a fugitive. I’m engaged to be married. And the French borders are closed now, anyway.”

“Then go somewhere else. Belgium. Switzerland. You said yourself that Klara’s not safe here. Take her with you.”

“Ride the rails like vagrants, both of us?”

“Why not? It’s a lot better than being shipped off to Ruthenia.” But then he straightened from his work and regarded Andras for a long moment, his expression darkening. “You’ve really got to go, don’t you.”

“I can’t see any way around it. The first deployment’s only six months.”

“And then you’ll have a stingy furlough, and then you’ll be sent back for another six months. And then you’ll have to do that twice more.” Mátyás crossed his arms. “I still think you should run.”

“I wish I could, believe me.”

“Klara’s not going to be too happy about any of this.”

“I know. I’m on my way to see her now. She’s expecting me at her mother’s.”

Mátyás cuffed him on the shoulder for luck and held the little door open so he could slip through. He stepped down into the shop and went out through the bigger doors, waving to Mátyás through the glass as he made his way past the women who had gathered to watch. He could scarcely believe it was nearing October and he wasn’t on his way back to school; in recent days he’d found himself combing the Pesti Napló obsessively for news of Paris. Today’s papers had shown a crush at the railway stations as sixteen thousand children were evacuated to the countryside. If he and Klara had remained in France, perhaps they would have left the city too; or perhaps they would have chosen to stay, bracing themselves for whatever was to come. Instead here he was in Budapest, walking along Andrássy út toward the Városliget, toward the tree-shadowed avenues of Klara’s childhood. It had come to seem almost ordinary now to spend an afternoon at the house on Benczúr utca, though only a month had passed since they had first arrived in Budapest. At that time they’d been so uncertain about Klara’s situation that they’d been afraid even to go to the house; they’d taken a room under Andras’s name at a tiny out-of-the-way hotel on Cukor utca, and decided that the best course of action would be to warn Klara’s mother of her fugitive daughter’s presence in Budapest before Klara herself appeared at the house. The next afternoon he’d gone to Benczúr utca and presented himself to the housemaid as a friend of József’s. She had shown him into the same pink-and-gold-upholstered sitting room where he’d passed an uncomfortable hour on the day of his departure for Paris. The younger and elder Mrs. Hász were engaged in a card game at a gilt table by the window, and József was draped over a salmon-colored chair with a book in his lap. When he saw Andras in the doorway, József peeled himself from the chair and delivered the expected jovial greetings, the expected expressions of regret that Andras, too, had been forced to return to Budapest. The younger Mrs. Hász offered a polite nod, the elder a smile of welcome and recognition. But something about Andras’s look must have caught Klara’s mother’s attention, because a moment later she laid her fan of cards on the table and got to her feet.

“Mr. Lévi,” she said. “Are you well? You look a bit pale.” She crossed the room to take his hand, her expression stoic, as if she were bracing for bad news.

“I’m well,” he said. “And so is Klara.”

She regarded him with frank surprise, and József’s mother rose too. “Mr. Lévi,” she began, and paused, apparently unsure of how she might caution him without revealing too much to her son.

“Who is Klara?” József said. “Surely you don’t mean Klara Hász?”

“I do,” Andras said. And he explained how he’d carried a letter to Klara from her mother two years earlier, and then how he’d been introduced to her. “She lives under the name of Morgenstern now. You know her daughter. Elisabet.”

József sat down slowly on the damask chair, looking as though Andras had struck him with a fist. “Elisabet?” he said. “Do you mean to say that Elisabet Morgenstern is Klara’s daugher? Klara, my lost aunt?” And then he must have remembered the rumors of what had existed between Andras and the mother of Elisabet Morgenstern, because he seemed to focus more sharply on Andras, staring at him as if he’d never seen him before.

“Why have you come?” the younger Mrs. Hász asked. “What is it you want to tell us?”

And finally Andras broke the news he had come to deliver: that Klara was not only well, but here in Budapest, staying at a hotel in the Ferencváros. As soon as he’d spoken, Klara’s mother’s eyes filled with tears; then her expression became overshadowed with terror. Why, she asked, had Klara had undertaken such a terrible risk?

“I’m afraid I’m partly to blame,” Andras said. “I had to return to Budapest myself. And Klara and I are engaged to be married.”

At those words, a kind of pandemonium broke upon the sitting room. József’s mother lost her composure entirely; in a panic-laced soprano she demanded to know how such a thing could have come to pass, and then she declared that she didn’t want to know, that it was absurd and unthinkable. She called the housemaid and and asked for her heart medication, and then told József to fetch his father from the bank immediately. A moment later she retracted the command on the basis that György’s hasty exit in the middle of the day might raise unnecessary suspicion. Meanwhile, the elder Mrs. Hász implored Andras to tell her where Klara might be found, whether she was safe, and how she might be visited. Andras, at the center of this maelstrom, began to wonder whether he would emerge on the other side of it still engaged to Klara, or if her brother and his wife could exercise some esoteric power that would nullify any attachment between a member of Klara’s class and one of his own. Already József Hász was looking at Andras with an unfamiliar, perhaps even a hostile expression-of confusion, betrayal, and, most disturbingly to Andras, distrust.

Soon it became clear that the elder Mrs. Hász could not be prevented from going to Klara at once. She had already called for the car; she wanted Andras to accompany her. The chauffeur would drive them halfway to the tiny hotel on Cukor utca, and they would walk the remaining blocks. József, without a parting word to Andras, took his mother upstairs to tend to her nerves. Klara’s mother gave Andras a single look that seemed to indicate how ridiculous she considered her daughter-in-law’s behavior to be. She threw a coat over her dress and they ran outside to the waiting car. As they drove through the streets she begged him to tell her if Klara were well, and what she looked like now, and, finally, whether she wanted to see her mother.

“More than anything,” Andras said. “You must know that.”

“Eighteen years!” she said in a half whisper, and then fell silent, overcome.

A few moments later the car let them out at the base of Andrássy út, and Andras put a hand on Mrs. Hász’s elbow as they hurried through the streets. Her hair loosened from its knot as she went, and her hastily tied scarf fell from her neck; Andras caught the square of violet silk in his fingertips as they entered the narrow lobby of the hotel. At the foot of the cast-iron stair a wordless trepidation seemed to take Klara’s mother. She climbed the steps with a slow and deliberate tread, as though she needed time to rehearse in her mind a few of her thousand imaginings of this moment. When Andras indicated that they’d reached the correct floor, she followed him down the hall without a word and watched gravely as he took the key from his pocket. He unlocked the door and pushed it open. There was Klara at the window in her fawn-colored dress, midmorning light falling across her face, a handkerchief crushed in her hand. Her mother approached like a somnambulist; she went to the window, took Klara’s hands, touched her face, pronounced her name. Klara, trembling, laid her head on her mother’s shoulder and wept. And there they stood in shuddering silence as Andras watched. Here was the reverse of what he’d witnessed a few weeks earlier at Elisabet’s embarkation: a vanished child returned, the intangible made real. He knew the reunion was taking place on the shabby top floor of a cramped hotel room on an unlovely street in Budapest, but he felt he was witnessing a kind of unearthly reconnection, a conjunction so stunning he had to turn away. Here was the closing of the distance between Klara’s past life and her present; it seemed not unthinkable that he and she might enter a new life together now. At that time his difficulties at the Budapest visa office had not yet begun. The French border was still open. All seemed possible.

Now, four weeks later, what he had learned for certain was that he wouldn’t return to Paris as they’d hoped. Worse than that: He’d soon be sent far away from Klara, into a distant and unknown forest. When he arrived at Benczúr utca that afternoon with the news he’d just delivered to his brother-that he was to be deployed to Carpatho-Ruthenia in three weeks’ time-he found to his relief that no one was awaiting him besides Klara herself. She’d asked to have tea served in her favorite upstairs room, a pretty boudoir with a window seat that faced the garden. When she was a child, she told Andras, this was where she had come when she wanted to be alone. She called it the Rabbit Room because of the beautiful Dürer engraving that hung above the mantel: a young hare posed in half profile, its soft-furred haunches bunched, its ears rotated back. She’d lit a fire in the grate and requested pastries for their tea. But once he told her what he’d learned at the battalion office, they could only sit in silence and stare at the plate of walnut and poppyseed strudel.

“You’ve got to get home as soon as the French border opens again,” he said, finally. “It terrifies me to think of the danger you’re in.”

“ Paris won’t be safer,” she said. “It could be bombed at any time.”

“You could go to the countryside with Mrs. Apfel. You could go to Nice.”

She shook her head. “I won’t leave you here. We’re going to be married.”

“But it’s madness to stay,” he said. “Sooner or later they’ll learn who you are.”

“There’s nothing for me in Paris now. Elisabet’s gone. You’re here. And my mother, and György. I can’t go back, Andras.”

“What about your friends, your students, the rest of your life?”

She shook her head. “ France is at war. My students are gone to the countryside. I’d have to close the school in any case, at least for a time. Perhaps the war will be a short one. With any luck it’ll be over before you finish your military service. Then you’ll get another visa and we’ll go home together.”

“And all that time you’ll stay here, in peril?”

“I’ll live quietly under your surname. No one will have reason to come looking for me. I’ll rent the apartment and studio in Paris and take a little place in the Jewish Quarter here. Maybe I’ll teach a few private students.”

He sighed and rubbed his face with both hands. “This will be the death of me,” he said. “Thinking of you living in Budapest, outside the law.”

“I was living outside the law in Paris.”

“But the law was so much farther away!”

“I won’t leave you here in Hungary,” she said. “That’s all.”

He had never dared to imagine that he and Klara might be married at the Dohány Street Synagogue, nor that his parents and Mátyás might be there to witness it; he had certainly never dreamed that Klara’s family might be there, too-her mother, who had shed her widow’s garb for a column of rose-colored silk, weeping with joy; the younger Mrs. Hász tight-lipped and erect in a drooping Vionnet gown; Klara’s brother, György, his affection for Klara having overcome whatever reservations he might have had about Andras, striding about with as much bluster and anxiety as if he were the bride’s father; and József Hász, watching the proceedings with silent detachment. Their wedding canopy was Lucky Béla’s prayer shawl, and Klara’s wedding ring the simple gold band that had belonged to Béla’s mother. They were married on an October afternoon in the synagogue courtyard. A grand ceremony in the sanctuary was out of the question. There could be nothing public about their union except the paperwork that would place the bride’s name at a still-farther remove from the Klara Hász she had once been. She couldn’t become a citizen, thanks to a new anti-Jewish law that had been passed in May, but she could still legally change her surname to Andras’s, and apply for a residence permit under that veil. Andras’s father himself read the marriage contract aloud, his rabbinical-school training in Aramaic having prepared him for the role. And Andras’s mother, shy before the few assembled guests, presented the glass to be broken under Andras’s foot.

What no one mentioned-not during the wedding itself, nor during the luncheon at Benczúr utca that followed-was Andras’s imminent departure for Carpatho-Ruthenia. But the awareness of it ran underneath every event of the day like an elegy. József, it turned out, had been saved from a similar fate; the Hász family had managed to secure his exemption from labor service by bribing a government official. The exemption had come at a price proportionate to the Hászes’ wealth: They had been forced to give the government official their chalet on Lake Balaton, where Klara had spent her childhood summers. József’s student visa had been renewed and he would return to France as soon as the borders opened, though no one knew when that might be, nor whether France would admit citizens of countries allied with Germany. Andras’s parents were in no position to buy him an exemption. The lumberyard barely supplied their existence. Klara had suggested that her brother might help, but Andras refused to discuss the possibility. There was the danger, first of all, of alerting the government authorities to the link between Andras and the Hász family; nor did Andras want to be a financial burden to György. In desperation, Klara suggested selling her apartment and studio in Paris, but Andras wouldn’t let her consider that either. The apartment on the rue de Sévigné was her home. If her situation in Hungary became more precarious, she would have to return there at once by whatever means possible. And there was a less practical element to the decision too: As long as Klara owned the apartment and studio, they could imagine themselves back in Paris someday. Andras would endure his two years in the work service; by then, as Klara had said, the war might be over, and they could return to France.

For a few sweet hours, during the wedding festivities on Benczúr utca, Andras found it possible almost to forget about his impending departure. In a large gallery that had been cleared of furniture, he was lifted on a chair beside his new bride while a pair of musicians played Gypsy music. Afterward, he and Mátyás and their father danced together, holding each other by the arms and spinning until they stumbled. József Hász, who could not resist the role of host even at a wedding of which he seemed to disapprove, kept everyone’s champagne glasses full. And Mátyás, in the tradition of making the bride and groom laugh, performed a Chaplinesque tap dance that involved a collapsing cane and a top hat that kept leaping away. Klara cried with laughter. Her pale forehead had flushed pink, and dark curls sprang from her chignon. But it was impossible for Andras to forget entirely that all of this was fleeting, that soon he would have to kiss his new bride goodbye and board a train for Carpatho-Ruthenia. Nor would his joy have been uncomplicated in any case. He couldn’t ignore the younger Mrs. Hász’s coldness, nor the reminders on all sides of how different Klara’s early life had been from his own. His mother, elegant as she was in her gray gown, seemed afraid to handle the delicate Hász champagne flutes; his father had little to say to Klara’s brother, and even less to say to József. If Tibor had been there, Andras thought, he might have found a way to bridge the divide. But Tibor was absent, of course, as were three others, the lack of whom made the day’s events seem somehow unreal: Polaner and Rosen, who had nonetheless sent telegrams of congratulations, and Ben Yakov, from whom there had been continued silence. He knew Klara was experiencing her own private pain in the midst of her happiness: She must have been thinking of her father, and of Elisabet, thousands of miles away.

The war was discussed, and Hungary ’s possible role in it. Now that Poland had fallen, György Hász said, England and France might pressure Germany into a cease-fire before Hungary could be forced to come to the aid of its ally. It seemed to Andras a far-fetched idea, but the day demanded an optimistic view. It was mid-October, one of the last warm afternoons of the year. The plane trees were filled with slanting light, and a gold haze pooled in the garden like a flood of honey. As the sun slipped toward the edge of the garden wall, Klara took Andras’s hand and led him outside. She brought him to a corner of the garden behind a privet hedge, where a marble bench stood beneath a fall of ivy. He sat down and took her onto his lap. The skin of her neck was warm and damp, the scent of roses mingled with the faint mineral tang of her sweat. She inclined her face to his, and when he kissed her she tasted of wedding cake.

That was the moment that came back to him again and again, those nights in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains. That moment, and the ones that came afterward in their suite at the Gellért Hotel. Their honeymoon had been a brief one: three days, that was all. Now it sustained him like bread: the moment they’d registered at the hotel as husband and wife; the look of relief she’d given him when they were alone in the room together at last; her surprising shyness in their bridal bed; the curve of her naked back in the tangled sheets when they woke in the morning; the wedding ring a surprising new weight on his hand. It seemed an incongruous luxury to wear the ring now as he worked, not just because of the contrast of the gold with the dirt and grayness of everything around him, but because it seemed part of their intimacy, sweetly private. Ani l’dodi v’dodi li, she had said in Hebrew when she’d given it to him, a line from the Song of Songs: I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine. He was hers and she was his, even here in Carpatho-Ruthenia.

He and his workmates lived on an abandoned farm in an abandoned hamlet near a stone quarry that had long since given up all the granite anyone cared to take from it. He didn’t know how long ago the farm had been deserted by its inhabitants; the barn held only the faintest ghost odor of animals. Fifty men slept in the barn, twenty in a converted chicken house, thirty in the stables, and fifty more in a newly constructed barracks. The platoon captains and the company commander and the doctor and the work foremen slept in the farmhouse, where they had real beds and indoor plumbing. In the barn, each man had a metal cot and a bare mattress stuffed with hay. At the foot of each cot was a wooden kit box stamped with its owner’s identification number. The food was meager but steady: coffee and bread in the morning, potato soup or beans at noon, more soup and more bread at night. They had clothing enough to keep them warm: overcoats and winter uniforms, woolen underthings, woolen socks, stiff black boots. Their overcoats, shirts, and trousers were nearly identical to the uniforms worn by the rest of the Hungarian Army. The only difference was the green M sewn onto their lapels, for Munkaszolgálat, the labor service. No one ever said Munkaszolgálat, though; they called it Musz, a single resentful syllable. In the Musz, his company-mates told him, you were just like any other member of the military; the difference was that your life was worth even less than shit. In the Musz, they said, you got paid the same as any other enlisted man: just enough for your family to starve on. The Musz wasn’t bent on killing you, just on using you until you wanted to kill yourself. And of course there was the other difference: Everyone in his labor-service company was Jewish. The Hungarian Ministry of Defense considered it dangerous to let Jews bear arms. The military classified them as unreliable, and sent them to cut trees, to build roads and bridges, to erect army barracks for the troops who would be stationed in Ruthenia.

There were privileges Andras hadn’t foreseen. Because he was married, he received extra pay and a housing-assistance stipend. He had a pay book stamped with the Hungarian royal seal; he was paid twice a month in government checks. He could send and receive letters and packages, though everything was subject to inspection. And because he had his baccalaureate, he was given the status of labor-service officer. He was the leader of his squad of twenty men. He had an officer’s cap and a double-chevron badge on his pocket, and the other members of the squad had to salute and call him sir. He had to take roll and organize the night watch. His twenty men had to address their special requests or problems to him; he would adjudicate in cases of disagreement. Twice a week he had to report to the company commander on the status of his squad.

The 112/30th had been sent to clear a swath of forest where a road would be built in the spring. In the morning they rose in the dark and washed in snowmelt water; they dressed and shoved their feet into cold-hardened boots. In the dim red glow of the woodstove they drank bitter coffee and ate their ration of bread. There were morning calisthenics: push-ups, side bends, squat jumps. Then, at the sergeant’s command, they formed a marching block in the courtyard, their axes slung over their shoulders like rifles, and struck out through the dark toward the work site.

The one miracle afforded to Andras in that place was the identity of his work partner. It was none other than Mendel Horovitz, who had spent six years at school with Andras in Debrecen, and who had broken the Hungarian record in the hundred-meter dash and the long jump in the 1936 Olympic trials. For all of ten minutes, Mendel had been a member of the Hungarian Olympic Team-after his final jump, someone had draped an official jacket around his shoulders and had led him to a registration table, where the team secretary was recording the personal information of all the athletes who had qualified. But the third question, after name and city of origin, had been religion, and that was where Mendel had failed. He had known in advance, of course, that Jews weren’t allowed to participate; he’d gone to the trials as a form of protest, and in the wild hope that they might make an exception for him. They hadn’t, of course, a decision the team officials later came to regret: Mendel’s hundred-meter record was a tenth of a second shy of Jesse Owens’s gold-medal time.

When Mendel and Andras first saw each other at the Labor Service rail yard in Budapest, there was so much back-slapping and exclamation that they had each begun their time in the Munkaszolgálat with a comportment demerit. Mendel had a craggy face and a wry V of a mouth and eyebrows like the feathery antennae of moths. He’d been born in Zalaszabar and educated at the Debrecen Gimnázium at the expense of a maternal uncle who insisted that his protégé train for a future as a mathematician. But Mendel had no inclination toward mathematic abstraction; nor did he aspire to a career in athletics, despite his talents. What he wanted was to be a journalist. After the Olympic team disappointment, he’d gotten a copyediting job at the evening paper, the Budapest Esti Kurír. Soon he’d started penning his own columns, satirical journalistic petits-fours which he slipped into the editor’s mailbox under a pen name and which occasionally saw print. He’d been working at the Esti Kurír for a year before he was conscripted, having survived a round of firings that followed the new six percent quota on Jewish members of the press. Andras found him remarkably sanguine about having been shipped off to Subcarpathia. He liked being in the mountains, he said, liked being outside and working with his hands. He didn’t even mind the relentless labor of woodcutting.

Andras might not have minded it himself had the tools been sharp and the food more plentiful, the season warm and the job a matter of choice. For every tree they cut at the vast work site in the forest, there was a kind of satisfying ritual. Mendel would make the first notch with the axe, and Andras would fit the crosscut saw into the groove. Then they would both take their handles and lean into the work. There was a sweet-smelling spray of sawdust as they breached the outer rings, and more friction as the blade of the saw sank into the bole. They had to shove thin steel wedges into the gap to keep it open; near the center, where the wood grew denser, the blade would start to shriek. Sometimes it took half an hour to get through thirty centimeters of core. Then there was the double-time march to the other side, the completion of the struggle. When they had a few centimeters to go, they inserted more wedges and withdrew the saw. Mendel would shout All clear! and give the tree a shove. Next came a series of creaking groans, momentum traveling the length of the trunk, the upper branches shouldering past their neighbors. That was the true death of the tree, Andras thought, the instant it ceased to be an upward-reaching thing, the moment it became what they were making it: timber. The falling tree would push a great rush of wind before it; the branches cut the air with a hundred-toned whistle as the tree arced to the ground. When the trunk hit, the forest floor thrummed with the incredible weight of it, a shock that traveled through the soles of Andras’s boots and up through his bones to the top of his head, where it ricocheted in his skull like a gunshot. A reverberant moment followed, the silent Kaddish of the tree. And into that emptiness would rush the foreman’s shouted commands: All right, men! Go! Keep moving! The branches had to be chopped for firewood, the bare trunks dragged to massive flatbed trucks for transportation to a railway station, from which they would be sent to mainland Hungary.

He and Mendel made a good team. They were among the fastest of their workmates, and had earned the foreman’s praise. But there could be little satisfaction in any of it under the circumstances. He had been lifted out of his life, separated not just from Klara but from everything else that had mattered to him for the past two years. In October, while he was supposed to have been consulting with Le Corbusier over plans for a sports club in India, he was felling trees. In November, when he should have been constructing projects for the third-year exhibition, he was felling trees. And in December, when he would have been taking his midyear exams, he was felling trees. The war, he knew, would have disrupted the academic year temporarily, but it would likely have resumed by now; Polaner and Rosen and Ben Yakov-and worse, those sneering men who had taunted him after the Prix du Amphithéâtre-would be sailing on toward their degrees, translating imagined buildings into sharp black lines on drafting paper. His friends would still be meeting nightly at the Blue Dove for drinks, living in the Quartier Latin, carrying on their lives.

Or so he imagined, until Klara sent a packet of letters that contained missives from Paris. Polaner, Andras learned, had joined the Foreign Legion. If only you could have enlisted with me, he wrote. I’m training at the École Militaire now. This week I learned to shoot a rifle. For the first time in my life I have a burning desire to operate firearms. The newspapers carry frequent reports of horrors: SS Einsatzgruppen rounding up professors, artists, boy scouts, executing them in town squares. Polish Jews being loaded onto trains and relocated to miserable swamplands around Lublin. My parents are still in Kraków for now, though Father has lost his factory. I’ll fight the Reich and die if I have to.

Rosen, it had turned out, was planning to emigrate to Palestine with Shalhevet. The city’s dead boring without you, he’d scrawled in his loose script. Also, I find I’ve no patience for my studies. With Europe at war, school seems futile. But I won’t throw myself in front of tanks like Polaner. I’d rather stay alive and work. Shalhevet thinks we can set up a charitable foundation to get Jews out of Europe. Find wealthy Americans to fund it. She’s a bright girl. Perhaps she’ll make it happen. If all goes well, we leave in May. From now on I’m going to write to you only in Hebrew.

Ben Yakov, mentally exhausted by the events of the previous year, had taken a leave of absence from school and decamped to his parents’ home in Rouen. The news came not from him but from Rosen, who predicted that Ben Yakov would soon try to contact Andras himself. Sure enough, enclosed in the same packet of letters was a telegram sent to Klara’s address in Budapest: ANDRAS: NO HARD FEELINGS BETWEEN US. DESPITE ALL, EVER YOUR FRIEND. GOD KEEP YOU SAFE. BEN YAKOV.

Klara herself wrote weekly. Her official residence permit had arrived without event; as far as the government was concerned she was Claire Lévi, the French-born wife of a Hungarian labor serviceman. She had rented her apartment on the rue de Sévigné to a Polish composer who had fled to Paris; the composer knew a ballet teacher who would be glad to have a new studio, so the practice space was rented too. Klara was living now in an apartment on Király utca and had found a studio, as she’d hoped. She had taken on a few private students, and might soon begin to teach small classes. She was living a life of quiet seclusion, seeing her mother daily, walking in the park with her brother on Sunday afternoons; they had gone together to visit the grave of her teacher Viktor Romankov, who had died of a stroke after twenty years of teaching at the Royal Ballet School. Budapest was cobwebbed with memories, she wrote. Sometimes she forgot entirely that she was a grown woman; she would find herself wandering toward the house on Benczúr utca, expecting to find her father still alive, her brother a tall young gimnázium student, her girlhood room intact. At times she was melancholy, and most of all she missed Andras. But he must not fear for her. She was well. All seemed safe.

He worried still, of course, but it was a comfort to hear from her-to hear at least that she felt safe, or safe enough to tell him so. He always kept her most recent letter in his overcoat pocket. When a new one came, he would move the old one to his kit box and add it to the sheaf he kept tied with her green hair-ribbon. He had their wedding photograph in a marbled folder from Pomeranz and Sons. He counted the days before his furlough, counted and counted, through what seemed the longest winter of his life.

In spring the forest filled with the scent of black earth and the dawn-to-dusk cacophony of birdsong. Overnight, new curtains appeared in the windows of the empty houses along the way to the work site. There were children in the fields, bicyclists on the roads, the smell of grilled sausage from the roadside inns. The promised furlough had been postponed until the end of summer; there was too much work, their commander told them, to allow any of their company a break. Thank God the winter’s over, his mother wrote. Every day I worried. My Andráska in those mountains, in that terrible cold. I know you are strong, but a mother imagines the worst. Now I can imagine something better: You are warm, your work is easier, and before long you will be home. In the same circlet of foothills where Andras and his workmates had suffered endless months of labor, Hungarians now gathered to take the air and eat berries with fresh cream and swim in the freezing lakes. But for the labor servicemen, the work went on. Now that the ground had thawed and softened, now that the trees in the path of the road had been cleared, Labor Company 112/30 had to uproot the giant stumps so the roadbed might be leveled, the gravel spread for the road. The summer months appeared on the horizon with their promise of hot days amid asphalt and tar. The solstice came and went. It seemed nothing would ever change. Then, in early July, another packet of letters came from Klara, and with it news of Tibor and of France.

Tibor and Ilana had been married in May, after a long engagement and a period of reconciliation with her parents. A certain Rabbi di Samuele had interceded on behalf of the couple. He had proved such a good intermediary that Ilana’s mother and father had at last invited Tibor to Shabbos dinner. Even so, Tibor wrote, I thought her father would punch me in the eye. I was the villain, you see, not Ben Yakov; I was the man who had accompanied their daughter on the train. Every time I ventured a comment on a point of biblical interpretation, her father laughed as if my ignorance delighted him. Ilana’s mother deliberately neglected to pass me food. Halfway through the meal, the Holy One made a risky intervention: Ilana’s father fell out of his chair, half dead of a heart attack. I kept him alive with chest compressions until a real doctor was called in. In the end he survived; I was the hero of the evening; Signor and Signora di Sabato changed their views. Ilana and I were married within the month. We returned to Hungary when my visa expired and have been living here in Budapest, not far from your own lovely bride, doing what we can to keep her company and to get my papers in order for a return to Italy. I have brought my Ilana to meet Anya and Apa. They loved her, she loved them, and our father became tipsy and encouraged us at the end of the evening to go make grandchildren. As for our younger brother, he continues to run wild. This month he makes his debut at the Pineapple Club, where people will pay good money to see him tap-dance atop a white piano. Somehow he has also managed to pass his baccalaureate exams. He is still arranging shop windows and has more clients than he can serve. His girlfriend, however, has deserted him for a scoundrel. He sends his regards and the enclosed photo. The photo showed Mátyás in top hat, white tie, and tails, a cane in his hand, one foot cocked over the other to flash a glint of tap metal at the sole.

My thoughts are with you always, Tibor wrote. I hope you will never have use for the medical supplies I’m sending with this letter, but just in case, I have made an attempt to assemble a field hospital in miniature. Meanwhile I remain, in continual fear for your safety and belief in your fortitude, your loving brother, TIBOR.

The next letter was from Mátyás, dated May 29 and written in an angry scrawl. I’ve been called up, he informed Andras. The stinking bastards. They’ll never make me work for them. Horthy says he will protect the Jews. Liar! My gimnázium friend Gyula Kohn died in the labor service last month. He had a pain in his side and a fever but they sent him to work anyway. It was appendicitis. He died three days later. He was my age, nineteen.

The final letter was from Klara herself, with a newspaper clipping that showed the German Eighteenth Army marching through the streets of Paris, and an enormous Nazi flag hanging from the Hotel de Ville. Andras sat on his cot and stared at the photographs. He thought of his first brief passage through Germany what seemed a geologic age ago-his stopover in Stuttgart, when he’d tried to buy bread at a bakery that did not serve Jews. That was where he’d seen the red flag hanging from the façade of the train station, a blast of National Socialist fervor five stories high. He refused to believe what the attached article told him: that the same flag now flew from every official building in Paris; that Paul Reynaud, successor to Daladier, had resigned; that the new premier, Philippe Pétain, had declared that France would collaborate with Hitler in the formation of a New Europe. Even Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité had been replaced with a new slogan: Travail, Famille, Patrie. There was a rumor that all Jews who had volunteered for the French Army would be removed from their battalions and imprisoned in concentration camps, from which they would be deported to the East.

Polaner. He said it aloud into the damp hay-smelling air of the bunk. His eyes burned. Here he was, thousands of miles away, and helpless; there was nothing he could do, nothing anyone could do. Already Hitler had what he wanted of Poland. He had Luxembourg and Belgium and the Netherlands, he had Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, he had Italy as a member of the Tripartite Pact; he had Hungary as an ally, and now he had France. He would win the war, and what would happen to the Jews of the conquered nations? Would he force them to emigrate, deport them to marshlands at the center of ravaged Poland? It was impossible to conceive of what might happen.

He went out into the moonlit yard to read Klara’s letter. It was a humid night; a mist hovered in the assembly field, where the grass had grown shaggy with the June rains. The soldier stationed beside the barn door tipped his hat at Andras. They were all familiar with each other by now, and no one really thought anyone would try to desert. There was nowhere to go, here in Carpatho-Ruthenia. They would all be granted their first furlough soon, in any case-free transport to Budapest. Andras chose one of the large stones at the edge of the assembly field, where the moonlight came in strong and white through a few crumpled handkerchiefs of cloud.

My dear Andráska,

France has fallen. I can scarcely believe the words as I write them. It is a tragedy, a horror. The world has lost its mind. Mrs. Apfel writes that all of Paris has fled to the south. I am fortunate indeed to be here in Hungary now, rather than in France under the Nazi flag.

I was grateful for your letter of May 15. What a vast relief to know you’re well and have gotten through the winter. Now it is only a few months before you’ll be here. In the meantime, know that I am well-or as well as I can be without you. I have twenty-five students now. All of them talented children, all Jewish. What will become of them, Andras? I do not speak of my fears, of course; we practice and they improve.

Mother is well. György and Elza are well. József is well. Your brothers are well. We are all well! That is what one must write in letters. But you know how we are, my love. We are full of apprehension. Our lives are shadowed by uncertainty. You are always in my thoughts: That, at least, is certain. The days cannot pass fast enough until I see you.

With love,

Your K

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN. The Snow Goose

ALL SUMMER he sustained himself with the thought that he’d soon be with her-close enough to touch and smell and taste her, at liberty to lie in bed with her all day if he wanted, to tell her everything that had happened during the long months of his absence, and to hear what had been in her mind while he’d been away. He thought of seeing his mother and father, of taking her to their house in Konyár for the first time, of strolling with his parents and his wife through the apple orchards and into the flat grasslands. He thought, too, of seeing Tibor, who hadn’t managed to get his student visa renewed after all, and was now stranded in Hungary with Ilana. But in August, when Andras’s postponed furlough was due, Germany gave Hungary the gift of Northern Transylvania. The Carpathians, that white ridge of granite between the civilized West and the wild East, Europe’s natural barrier against its vast Communist neighbor: Horthy wanted it, even at the price of a deeper friendship with Germany; Hitler delivered it, and soon afterward the friendship was formalized by Hungary ’s entry into the Tripartite Pact. The 112/30th, having completed its road-building assignment in Subcarpathia ahead of schedule, was shipped off by railway car to Transylvania. There, in the virgin forest between Mármaros-Sziget and Borsa, the company embarked on a tree-clearing and ditch-digging project that was supposed to last through the rest of fall and winter.

When the weather began to grow cold again, it occurred to him that it had been a year, a year, since he’d seen Klara. Of their married life they’d spent a week together. Every night in the barracks, men lay weeping or cursing over the loss of their girlfriends, their fiancées, their wives, women who had loved them but who’d grown tired of waiting. What assurance did he have that Klara wouldn’t tire of her solitude? She had always surrounded herself with people; her social circle in Paris had consisted of actors and dancers, writers and composers, people who offered her unstinting stimulation. What would keep her from making ties like that in Budapest? And once she did, what would prevent her from turning toward one of her new friends for more tangible comfort? The specter of Zoltán Novak appeared to Andras one night in a dream, walking barefoot through Wesselényi utca in his smoking jacket, toward the Dohány Street Synagogue, where a woman who might have been Klara was waiting for him in the gloomy courtyard. Surely, Novak would have heard that she’d returned; surely he would try to see her. Perhaps he already had. Perhaps she was with him that moment, in some room he’d taken for their assignations.

At times Andras felt as though the work service were causing his mind to float away, piece by piece, like ashes from a fire. What would be left of him, he wondered, once he returned to Budapest? For months he’d struggled to keep his mind sharp as he worked, tried to design buildings and bridges on the slate of his brain when he couldn’t draw them on paper, tried to sing himself the French names of architectural features to keep himself awake as he slung mud with his shovel or hacked branches with his axe. Porte, fenêtre, corniche, balcon, a magic spell against mental deterioration. Now, as the prospect of a furlough slipped farther into the distance, his thoughts became a source of torment. He imagined Klara with Novak or with her memories of Sándor Goldstein; he thought about the grim progress of the war, which had gone on now for more than a year. In a series of newspaper clippings that his father sent, he read about the brutal bombardment of London, the attack by Luftwaffe planes every night for fifty-seven nights. And as the war burned on in England, he and his workmates fought a smaller war against the ravages of the Munkaszolgálat. Gradually, man by man, the 112/30th was crumbling: One man broke a leg and had to be sent home, another had a diabetic seizure and died, a third shot himself with an officer’s gun after learning that his fiancée had given birth to another man’s child. Mátyás was in the labor service now, and Tibor had just been called. Andras had heard stories of labor-service companies being sent to clear minefields in Ukraine. He imagined Mátyás in a field at dawn, making his way through a fog; in his hand a stick, a broken branch, with which to prod the ground in search of mines.

In December, when a string of blizzards scoured the mountains and the workers were often confined to the bunkhouse, Andras fell into a paralyzing depression. Instead of reading or writing letters or drawing in his damp-swollen sketchbook, he lay in bed and nursed the mysterious bruises that had begun to appear beneath his skin. He was supposed to be a leader; nominally he was still squad captain, and he still had to march the men to the assembly field and supervise the cleaning of the barracks and the maintenance of the woodstove and all the small details of their straitened lives; but more and more often he felt as if they were leading him while he trailed behind, his boots filling with snow. He hardly took notice when, one Sunday afternoon during a grinding blizzard, Mendel Horovitz conceived the idea of a Munkaszolgálat newspaper. Mendel scratched away at a series of ideas in a notebook, then borrowed a sheaf of paper and a typewriter from one of the officers so he could make the thing look official. He was not a swift typist; it took him three nights to finish two pages of articles. He typed at all hours. The men threw boots at him to stop the racket, but his desire to finish the paper exceeded his fear of flying objects. He worked every day for a week, every chance he had.

When at last he’d finished typing, he brought his pages to Andras and sat down on the edge of his cot. Outside, the wind set up a noise like the wailing of foxes. It was the third consecutive day of the worst-yet storm of the season, and the snow had reached the high windows of the bunkhouse. Work had been cancelled that day. While the other men mended their uniforms or smoked damp cigarettes or talked by the stove, Andras lay in bed, staring at the ceiling and pushing at his teeth with his tongue. His back teeth felt frighteningly loose, his gums spongy. Earlier that day he’d had a slow nosebleed that had lasted for hours. He wasn’t in the mood to talk. He didn’t care what was typed on the pages Mendel held in his hand. He pulled the coarse blanket over his head and turned away.

“All right, Parisi,” Mendel said, and pulled the blanket down. “Enough sulking.” Parisi: It was Mendel’s nickname for him; he was envious of Andras’s time in France, and had wanted to hear about it in detail-particularly about evenings at József’s, and the backstage drama of the Sarah-Bernhardt, and the romantic exploits of Andras’s friends.

“Leave me alone,” Andras said.

“I can’t. I need your help.”

Andras sat up in bed. “Look at me,” he said, holding out his arms. Clusters of blood-violets bloomed beneath the skin. “I’m sick. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Do I look like a person who can be of help to anyone?”

“You’re the squad captain,” Mendel said. “It’s your duty.”

“I don’t want to be squad captain anymore.”

“I’m afraid that’s not up to you, Parisi.”

Andras sighed. “What is it, exactly, that you want me to do?”

“I want you to illustrate the newspaper.” He dropped his typed pages onto Andras’s lap. “Nothing fancy. None of your art-school nonsense. Just some crude drawings. I’ve left space for you around the articles.” He deposited a modest cache of pencils into Andras’s hand, some of them colored.

Andras couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen colored pencils. These were sharp and clean and unbroken, a small revelation in the smoky dark of the bunkhouse.

“Where did you get these?” he asked.

“Stole them from the office.”

Andras pushed himself up onto his elbows. “What do you call that rag of yours?”

“The Snow Goose.”

“All right. I’ll take a look. Now leave me alone.”

In addition to news of the war, The Snow Goose had weather reports (Monday: Snow. Tuesday: Snow. Wednesday: Snow.); a fashion column (Report from a Fashion Show at Dawn: The dreaming labor workers lined up in handsome suits of coarse blanket, this winter’s most stylish fabric. Mangold Béla Kolos, Budapest’s premier fashion dictator, predicts that this picturesque style will spread throughout Hungary in no time); a sports page (The Golden Youth of Transylvania love the sporting life. Yesterday at 5:00 a.m., the woods were full of youth disporting themselves at today’s most popular amusements: wheelbarrow-pushing, snow-shoveling, and tree-felling); an advice column (Dear Miss Coco: I’m a twenty-year-old woman. Will it hurt my reputation if I spend the night in the officers’ quarters? Love, Virgin. Dear Virgin: Your question is too general. Please describe your plans in detail so I can give an appropriate reply. Love, Miss Coco); travel ads (Bored? Want a change of scene? Try our deluxe tour of rural Ukraine!); and in honor of Andras, an article about a feat of architecture (Engineering Marvel! Paris-trained architect-engineer Andras Lévi has designed an invisible bridge. The materials are remarkably lightweight and it can be constructed in almost no time. It is undetectable by enemy forces. Tests suggest that the design of the bridge may still need some refinement; a battalion of the Hungarian Army mysteriously plunged into a chasm while crossing. Some argue, however, that the bridge has already attained its perfect form). And then there was the pièce de résistance, the Ten Commandments à la Munkaszolgálat:

1. IF THOU MAKEST A GRAVE MISTAKE, THOU SHALT NOT TELL. THOU SHALT LET OTHERS TAKE THE BLAME FOR THEE.

2. THOU SHALT NOT SHARPEN THINE OWN SAW. LEAVE THE SHARPENING TO WHOMSOEVER MAY USE IT NEXT.

3. THOU SHALT NOT BOTHER TO WASH THYSELF. THY WORKMATES STINKETH ANYWAY.

4. WHEN THOU STANDEST IN LINE FOR LUNCH, THOU SHALT ELBOW TO THE FRONT. OTHERWISE THOU GETTEST NOT THE SINGLE POTATO IN THE SOUP.

5. ON THE WAY TO WORK, THOU SHALT DISAPPEAR. LET THE FOREMAN FIND SOMEONE ELSE TO REPLACE THEE.

6. IF THOU COVETEST THY NEIGHBOR’S THINGS, KEEPEST THINE OWN COUNSEL. IF THOU DOST NOT, THY NEIGHBOR’S THINGS MAY DISAPPEAR BEFORE THOU CANST STEAL THEM.

7. IF THY WORKMATE IS NAÏVE, THOU SHALT BORROW EVERYTHING FROM HIM AND NEGLECT TO RETURN IT.

8. WHEN THOU COMEST IN FROM THE NIGHT WATCH, THOU SHALT MAKE A GREAT NOISE. WHY SHOULDST THOU LET OTHERS SLEEP WHILST THOU WAKEST?

9. IF THOU FALLEST ILL, THOU SHALT LIE ABED AS LONG AS THOU CANST. IF THY MATES SUFFER FROM OVERWORK THEREFORE, THEY MAY GAIN THE PRIVILEGE OF ILLNESS TOO.

10. FOLLOW THESE RULES THAT THOU MAYST HAVE TIME TO PREACH CONSIDERATION.

Grudgingly at first, and then with growing enjoyment, Andras illustrated The Snow Goose. For the weather report he drew a series of boxes, each more thickly swarmed with snowflakes. For the fashion column he drew a likeness of Mendel himself, his hair raked upright, his torso swathed toga-style in a ragged gray blanket. On the sports page, three perspiring labor servicemen dragged gravel wagons up a steep hill. The advice column sported a sketch of the saucy, bespectacled Coco, her legs long and bare, a pencil held to her lips. The travel ad for Ukraine showed a beach umbrella planted in the blowing snow. The architecture piece called for an image of the architect pointing proudly at an empty gorge. And the Ten Commandments required only the background sketch of two stone tablets. When he’d finished, he held the work at arm’s length and squinted at the drawings. They were the lowest grade of caricature, rendered in haste while the artist lay in bed. But Mendel was right: They suited The Snow Goose perfectly.

That single copy of the newspaper made its way through the hands of two hundred men, who could soon be heard quoting the Fourth Commandment in the soup line or speculating wistfully about vacations to Ukraine. Andras couldn’t keep from feeling a certain proprietary satisfaction, a sensation he hadn’t experienced in months. Once it was determined that the illustrator who signed himself Parisi was actually Squad Captain Lévi, men began to approach him to ask for drawings. The most frequent request was for a nude version of Coco. He drew her on the lid of a man’s wooden footlocker, and then in the lining of someone else’s cap, and then on a letter to someone’s younger brother, holding a sign that said Hi, Sugar! The drawing of Mendel spawned another fad, this one for likenesses; men would line up to have Andras draw their portraits. He wasn’t a very good portraitist, but the men didn’t seem to care. The roughness of the lines, the charcoal haze around a subject’s eyes or chin, captured the essential uncertainty of their lives in the Munkaszolgálat. Mendel Horovitz, too, began receiving requests: He became a kind of professional letter-writer, penning expressions of love and regret and longing that would slip into the turbulent stream of the military mail service, and might or might not reach the wives and brothers and children for whom they were intended.

When the first issue of The Snow Goose finally disintegrated, Mendel wrote a new one and Andras illustrated it again. Emboldened by the popularity of the earlier edition, they brought their newspaper directly to the office, where there was a mimeograph machine. They offered the company secretary fifteen pengő as a bribe. At the risk of punishment and loss of position the company secretary printed ten copies, which were quickly subsumed into the ranks of the 112/30th. A third issue of thirty copies followed. As the men read and laughed over the paper, Andras began to feel as if he had awakened from a long, drugged sleep. He was surprised he’d been so weak, so willing to allow his mind to be overtaken by miserable thoughts and then hollowed to nothingness. Now he was drawing every day. They were absurd little sketches, to be sure, but they oxygenated him, made the effort of breathing seem worthwhile.

Then, on a raw, wet day in March, Andras and Mendel were summoned to the office of the company commander. The summons came from Major Kálozi’s first lieutenant, a scowling, boarlike man by the unfortunate name of Grimasz. At dinnertime he approached Andras and Mendel in the assembly ground and knocked their mess tins from their hands. He held a crumpled copy of the most recent Snow Goose, which contained a love poem from a certain Lieutenant G to a certain Major K, and made other insinuations as to the nature of the relationship between them. Lieutenant Grimasz’s face burned red; his neck seemed to have swollen to twice its normal size. He crushed the paper in his blocky fist. The other men took a step back from Andras and Mendel, who were left to absorb the full force of Grimasz’s glare.

“Kálozi wants you in the office,” he growled.

“Right away, Lieutenant, sir,” Mendel said, and dared to wink at Andras.

Grimasz caught the tone, the wink. He raised his hand to cuff Mendel, but Mendel ducked the blow. The men gave a muffled cheer. Grimasz grabbed Mendel by the collar and half shoved, half dragged him to the office, while Andras followed at a run.

Major János Kálozi wasn’t a cruel man, but he was ambitious. The son of a Gypsy woman and an itinerant knife-grinder, he’d been promoted through the Munkaszolgálat himself, hoping for a transfer to the gun-carrying branch of the military. He’d been given his present assignment because he had actual knowledge of forestry; he had worked the forests of Transylvania before he’d emigrated to Hungary in the twenties. Andras had never before been called to his office, which was located in the only barracks building that had a porch and its own outhouse. Kálozi had, of course, appropriated the room with the largest window. This had proved to be a mistake. The window, a many-paned affair gleaned from the south-facing wall of a burned farmhouse, smelled of carbon and welcomed the cold. Kálozi had been obliged to cover it with army blankets of the same kind touted in the Fashion Column, rendering the office dark as a cellar. Beneath the smell of carbon was a distinct odor of horse; before the blankets had been put to their current use, they had been stored in a stable. Kálozi sat in the midst of this pungent gloom behind a massive metal desk. A coal brazier kept the place just warm enough to suggest that warm rooms existed and that this was not one of them.

Andras and Mendel stood at attention while Kálozi glanced through a near-complete set of The Snow Goose, beginning in December 1940 and ending with this week’s edition, dated March 7, 1941. Only the disintegrated inaugural issue was lacking. The major had grown visibly older in the time he’d directed the 112/30th. The hair at his temples had gone gray and his broad nose had become cobwebbed with tiny red veins. He looked up at Andras and Mendel with the air of a weary school principal.

“Fun and games,” he said, removing his glasses. “Please explain, Squad Captain Lévi. Or shall I call you Parisi?”

“It was my doing, sir,” Mendel said. He held his Munkaszolgálat cap in his hands, his thumb working over the brass button at its forward-tilted peak. “I wrote the first issue and asked the squad captain to illustrate it. And we went on from there.”

“You did indeed,” Kálozi said. “You gained access to the mimeograph machine and printed dozens of copies.”

“As squad captain I accept full responsibility,” Andras said.

“I’m afraid I can’t give you all the credit, Parisi. Our man Horovitz is so very talented, we can’t let his efforts go unrecognized.” Kálozi turned to an article he’d bookmarked with a bitten pencil. “Change of Leadership at Erdei Camp,” he read aloud. “The veteran potentate Commander Jánika Kálozi the Cross-Eyed, at the behest of Regent Miklós Horthy himself, was deposed from his military appointment this week due to gross ineptitude and disgraceful behavior. In a ceremony at the parade ground he was replaced by a leader deemed more worthy, a male baboon by the name of Rosy Buttocks. The commander was escorted from the parade ground amid a deafening chorus of flatulence and applause.” He turned the newspaper around to reveal Andras’s drawing of the major, cross-eyed, in full uniform on top and ladies’ underdrawers beneath, mincing on high heels beside his first lieutenant, an unmistakably boar-headed man, while in the background a florid-assed monkey saluted the assembled work servicemen.

Andras fought to suppress a grin. He was particularly fond of that drawing.

“What are you laughing at, Squad Captain?”

“Nothing, sir,” Andras said. He’d known Kálozi for a year and a half now, and understood that he was soft at heart; in fact, he seemed to take a certain pride in his own reluctance to mete out harsh punishment. Andras had hoped Kálozi wouldn’t come across that particular issue of The Snow Goose, but he hadn’t felt any particular trepidation when he’d drawn the picture.

“I don’t mind a laugh now and then,” Kálozi said, “but I can’t have the men ridiculing me. This company will fall into chaos.”

“I understand, sir,” Andras said. “We meant no harm.”

“What do you know of harm?” Kálozi said, rising from his chair. A vein had begun to pump at his temple; for the first time since they’d entered the office, Andras felt a stirring of fear. “When I served in the Great War, an officer might have flayed a man who drew something like this.”

“You’ve always been kind to us,” Andras said.

“That’s right. I’ve coddled you flea-bitten Jews. I’ve kept you clothed and fed and I’ve let you loll in bed on cold days and driven you half as hard as I should have. And in return you produce this filth and spread it through the company.”

“Just for laughs, sir,” Mendel said.

“Not any longer. Not at my expense.”

Andras pressed his unsteady teeth with his tongue. The pain radiated deep into his gums, and he fought an urge to turn and flee. But he drew himself up to his full height and met Kálozi’s eye “I offer my sincere apologies,” he said.

“Why apologize?” Kálozi said. “In one sense you’ve done the Munkaszolgálat a great favor. It seems some people have been spreading lies about the gross mistreatment of work servicemen in our national armed forces. A rag like this will be a powerful piece of counterevidence.” He rolled a copy of The Snow Goose into a stiff tube. “The work service encourages fellowship and humor, et cetera. Conditions are so humane that you men are free to joke and laugh and make light of your situation. You’ve even had typewriters, drawing supplies, and mimeograph machines at your disposal. Free speech. It’s practically French.” He grinned, because they all knew what had become of free speech in France.

“But there is something I want from you,” Kálozi went on. “I think you’ll consider it fair, given the situation. Since you’ve humiliated me publicly, I think it’s fitting that you be punished publicly in return.”

Andras swallowed. At his side, Mendel had gone pale. They had both heard rumors of what went on in other labor-service companies, and neither was so naïve as to think those things couldn’t happen in the 112/30th. Most horrifying was the case of the brother of one of their own workmates, who had been a member of the Debrecen labor battalion. As a punishment for stealing a loaf of bread from the officers’ pantry, the man had been stripped naked and buried to his knees in mud; he’d been made to stand there for three days as the weather got progressively colder, until, on the third night, he’d died of exposure.

“I’m speaking to you, Squad Captain Lévi,” Kálozi said. “Look at me. Don’t hang your head like a dog.”

Andras raised his eyes to Kálozi’s. The major didn’t blink. “I’ve thought long and hard about an appropriate punishment,” he said. “As it happens, I’m rather fond of you boys. You’ve both been good workers. But you’ve shamed me. You’ve shamed me in front of my men. And so, Lévi and Horovitz”-here Kálozi paused for effect, tapping his rolled-up copy of The Snow Goose against the desk-“I’m afraid you will have to eat your words.”

That was how Andras and Mendel came to find themselves stripped to their underclothes, their hands manacled behind their backs, kneeling before the assembled 112/30th at six o’clock on a cold March morning. Ten issues of The Snow Goose lay on a bench before them. While the labor servicemen watched, Lieutenant Grimasz tore off strips of the newspaper, crumpled them up, dunked them in water, and stuffed them into the mouths of co-publishers Lévi and Horovitz. Over a period of two hours they were each forced to eat twenty pages of The Snow Goose. As Andras clenched his teeth against Grimasz’s prodding hands, he began to understand for the first time what a comfortable and protected life he had led, relatively speaking, in the Munkaszolgálat. He had never before had his hands bound behind his back, or been forced to kneel coatless and pant-less in the snow for hours on end; he had, in fact, been fed and clothed and housed, his miseries eased by the knowledge that all the men of Company 112/30 were suffering similar miseries. Now he became aware of a new kind of hell, one he could scarcely allow himself to imagine. He knew that what was happening here, on the grand continuum of punishment, might still be classed as relatively humane; far off down that tunnel existed punishments that could make a man long for death. He forced himself to chew and swallow, chew and swallow, telling himself it was the only way to get through the hideous thing that was happening to him. Somewhere after the fifteenth page he tasted blood in his mouth and spat out a molar. His gums, spongy with scurvy, had finally begun to give up their teeth. He screwed his eyes shut and ate paper and ate paper and ate paper until finally he lost consciousness, and then he collapsed into the cold wet shock of the snow.

He was dragged to the infirmary and placed in the care of the company’s only doctor, a man named Báruch Imber, whose sole purpose in life had become to save labor servicemen from the ravages of the labor service. Imber nursed Andras and Mendel for five days in the infirmary, and when they had recovered from hypothermia and forced paper consumption, he diagnosed them both with advanced scurvy and anemia and sent them home to Budapest for treatment in the military hospital, to be followed by a two-week furlough.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT. Furlough

AFTER A WEEK-LONG train journey, during which their hair became infested with lice and their skin began to flake and bleed, they were transferred to an ambulance van that held sick and dying work servicemen. The floor of the van was lined with hay, but the men shivered in their coarse wool blankets. There were eight men in the van, most of whom were far worse off than Andras and Mendel. A man with tuberculosis had a massive tumor at his hip, another man had been blinded when a stove exploded, a third had a mouth full of abscesses. Andras put his head out the open back windows of the van as they entered Budapest. The sight of ordinary city life-of streetcars and pastry shops, boys and girls out for an evening, movie marquees with their clean black letters-filled him with unreasonable fury, as if it were all a mockery of his time in the Munkaszolgálat.

The van pulled up at the military hospital and the patients walked or were carried to a registration hall, where Andras and Mendel waited all night on a cold bench while hundreds of workers and soldiers had their names and numbers recorded in an official ledger. Sometime in the early morning, Mendel was inscribed in the hospital book and taken away to be bathed and treated. It was another two hours before they came to Andras, but at last, dazed with exhaustion, he found himself following a male nurse to a shower room, where the man stripped him of his filthy clothes, shaved his head, sprayed him with a burning disinfectant, and stood him in a torrent of hot water. The nurse washed his bruised skin all over with a kind of impersonal tenderness, a knowing forbearance for the failings of the human body. The man dried him and led him to a long ward heated by radiators that ran its entire length. Andras was shown to a narrow metal bed, and for the first time in a year and a half he slept on a real mattress, between real sheets. When he awoke after what seemed only a few moments, Klara was there at his bedside, her eyes red and raw. He pushed himself upright, took her hands, demanded the terrible news: Who had died? What new tragedy had befallen them?

“Andráska,” she said, in a voice fractured with pity; and he understood that he was the tragedy, that she was weeping over what remained of him. He didn’t know how much weight he’d lost in the work service, on that diet of coffee and soup and hard bread-only that he’d had to keep cinching the belt of his trousers tighter, and that his bones had become more prominent beneath the skin. His arms and legs were roped with the wiry muscles he’d built from the constant labor; even through the previous winter’s depression he’d never actually felt weak. But he saw how little his body disturbed the blanket that was pulled over him. He could only imagine how bony and strange he must look in his hospital pajamas, with his blood-blotched arms and his shaved head. He almost wished Klara had stayed away until he looked like a man again. He lowered his eyes and held his own elbows in what felt like self-protection. He watched her fold her hands in her lap; there was the gold glint of her wedding band. The ring was still smooth and reflective, her hands as white as they’d been when he’d last seen her. His own ring was scratched to dullness, his hands brown and cracked with work.

“The doctor’s been here,” Klara said. “He says you’ll be all right. But you’ve got to take vitamin C and iron and have a long rest.”

“I don’t need rest,” Andras said, determined that she should see him on his feet. He wasn’t wounded or crippled, after all. He swung his legs off the bed and planted his feet on the cool linoleum. But then a wave of dizziness hit him, and he put a hand to his head.

“You have to eat,” she said. “You’ve been asleep for twenty hours.”

“I have?”

“I’m to give you some vitamin tablets and some broth, and later some bread.”

“Oh, Klara,” he said, and lowered his head into his hands. “Just leave me alone here. I’m a horror.”

She sat down on the bed next to him and put her arms around him. Her smell was vaguely different-he detected a hint of lilac soap or hair-dressing, something that reminded him of the long-ago Éva Kereny, his first love in Debrecen. She kissed his dry lips and put her head on his shoulder. He let her hold him, too exhausted to resist.

“Have some respect, Squad Captain,” came a voice from across the ward. It was Mendel, lying in his own clean bed. He, too, had had his head shaved bare.

Andras raised his hand and waved. “My apologies, Serviceman,” he said. It gave him a feeling of vertigo to be here in a military hospital with Mendel Horovitz, and to have Klara beside him at the same time. His head ached. He lay back against his pillow and let Klara give him his vitamins and broth. His wife. Klara Lévi. He opened his eyes to look at her, at the familiar sweep of her hair across her brow, the lean strength of her arms, the way she pressed her lips inward as she concentrated, her deep gray eyes resting on him, on him, at last.

It didn’t take him long to understand that the furlough was another form of torture, a lesson that had to be learned in preparation for a more difficult test. Before, when he’d gotten his call-up notice, he’d had only the vaguest idea of what it might mean to be separated from Klara. Now he knew. In the face of that misery, two weeks seemed an impossibly short time.

His furlough began officially when he was released from the military hospital, three days after he had entered it. Klara had had his uniform laundered and mended, and on the day of his release she brought him the miraculous gift of a new pair of boots. He had new underclothes, new socks, a new peaked cap with a shining brass button at the front. He felt more than a little ashamed to appear in front of Mendel Horovitz in those fine clean clothes. Mendel had no one to take care of him. He was unmarried, and his mother had died when he was a boy; his father was still in Zalaszabar. As he stood with Andras and Klara near the hospital gate, waiting for the streetcar, Andras asked him how he planned to spend the furlough.

Mendel shrugged. “An old roommate of mine still lives in Budapest. I can stay with him.”

Klara touched Andras’s arm, and they exchanged a glance. It was a difficult thing to decide without discussion; it had been so long since they’d been alone together. But Mendel was an old friend, and during their time in the 112/30th he’d become Andras’s family. They both knew Andras had to make the offer.

“We’re going to my parents’ house in the country,” he said. “There’s room, if you’d like to come. Nothing fancy. But I’m certain my mother would take good care of you.”

The shadows around Mendel’s eyes deepened into an expression of gratitude. “It’s good of you, Parisi,” he said.

So that morning it was the three of them together on the train to Konyár. They rode past Maglód, past Tápiogyörgy, past Újszász, into the Hajdú flatlands, sharing a thermos of coffee among them and eating cherry strudel. The tart sweetness of the fruit nearly brought tears to Andras’s eyes. He took Klara’s hand and pressed it between his own; she met his gaze and he felt she understood him. She was a person who knew something about shock, about returning from a state of desperation. He wondered how she had tolerated his own ignorance for so long.

It was the first week of April. The fields were still barren and cold, but a haze of green had begun to appear on the shrubs that clustered near the farmhouses; the bare branches of the creek willows had turned a brilliant yellow. He knew that the loveliness of the farm would still be hidden, its yard a disaster of mud, its stunted apple trees bare, its garden empty. He regretted that he couldn’t show it to Klara in the summertime. But when they finally arrived, when they disembarked at the familiar train station and saw the low whitewashed house with its dark thatched roof, the barn and the mill and the millpond where he and Mátyás and Tibor used to sail wooden boats, he thought he had never seen any place more beautiful. Smoke rose from the stone chimney; from the barn came the steady whine of the electric saw. Stacks of fresh-cut lumber had been piled around the yard. In the orchard, the bare apple trees held their branches toward the April sky. He dropped his army duffel in the yard, and, taking Klara’s hand, ran to the front door. He rapped on the windowpane and waited for his mother to come.

A young blond woman opened the door. On her hip was a red-faced infant with a macerated zwieback in its hand. When the woman saw Andras and Mendel in their military coats, her eyebrows lifted in fear.

“Jenő!” she cried. “Come quick!”

A stocky man in overalls came running from the barn. “What’s the matter?” he called. And when he’d reached them, “What’s your business here?”

Andras blinked. The sun had just come out from behind a cloud; it was difficult to focus on the man’s features. “I’m Captain Lévi,” he said. “This is my parents’ house.”

“Was their house,” the man said, with an edge of pride. He narrowed his eyes at Andras. “You don’t look like a military officer.”

“Squad Captain Lévi of Company 112/30,” Andras said, but the man wasn’t looking at Andras anymore. He glanced at Mendel, whose coat was devoid of officers’ bars. Then he turned his eyes upon Klara and raked her with a slow appreciative gaze.

“And you don’t look like a country girl,” he said.

Andras felt the blood rush to his face. “Where are my parents?” he said.

“How should I know?” the man said. “You people wander here and there.”

“Don’t be an ass, Jenő,” the woman said, and then to Andras, “They’re in Debrecen. They sold this place to us a month ago. Didn’t they write you?”

A month. It would have taken that long for a letter to reach Andras at the border. It was probably there now, moldering in the mail room, if they hadn’t burned it for tinder. He tried to look past the woman and into the kitchen; the old kitchen table, the one whose every knot and groove he knew by heart, was still there. The baby turned its head to see what had interested Andras, then began to chew the zwieback again.

“Listen,” the woman said. “Don’t you have family in Debrecen? Can’t someone tell you where your parents are staying?”

“I haven’t been there in years,” Andras said. “I don’t know.”

“Well, I’ve got work to do,” the man said. “I think you’re finished talking to my wife.”

“And I think you’re finished looking at mine,” Andras said.

But the man reached out at that moment and pinched Klara’s waist, and Klara gasped. Without thinking, Andras put a fist into the man’s gut. The man blew out a breath and stumbled back. His heel hit a rock and he fell backwards into the dense rich mud of the yard. When he tried to get to his feet, he slid forward and fell onto his hands. By that time Andras and Klara and Mendel were running toward the station, their bags flying behind them. Until that moment Andras had never appreciated the advantage of living so close to the train; now he did something he’d seen Mátyás do countless times. He charged toward an open boxcar and swung his bag inside, and he gave Klara a leg up. Then he and Mendel jumped into the car, just as the train began to creak out of the station toward Debrecen. There was just enough time for them to witness the new owner of the lumberyard charging from the house with his shotgun in his hand, calling for his wife to find his goddamned shells.

In the chill of that April afternoon they rode toward Debrecen in the open boxcar, trying to catch their breath. Andras was certain Klara would be horrified, but she was laughing. Her shoes and the hem of her dress were black with mud.

“I’ll never forget the look on his face,” she said. “He didn’t see it coming.”

“Neither did I,” Andras said.

“He deserved worse,” Mendel said. “I would have liked to get a few licks in.”

“I wouldn’t advise you to go back for another try,” Klara said.

Andras sat back against the wall of the boxcar and put an arm around her, and Mendel took a cigarette from the pocket of his overcoat and lay on his side, smoking and laughing to himself. The breeze was so thrilling, the noontime sun so bright, that Andras felt something like triumph. It wasn’t until he looked at Klara again-her eyes serious now, as though to convey a private understanding of what had taken place in that mud-choked yard-that he realized he had just seen the last of his childhood home.

It didn’t take them long to find his parents’ apartment in Debrecen. They stopped at a kosher bakery near the synagogue, and Andras learned from the baker that his mother had just been there to buy matzoh; Passover began on Friday.

Passover. Last year the holiday had come and gone so quickly: a few Orthodox men had staged a seder in the bunkhouse, said the blessings just as if they’d had wine and greens and charoset and matzoh and bitter herbs before them, though all they had was potato soup. He vaguely remembered refusing the bread at dinner a few times, then becoming so weak that he had to start eating it again. He hadn’t bothered to hope that he might be with his parents for Passover this year. But now he led Klara and Mendel down the avenue that led to Simonffy utca, where the baker had said his parents lived. There, in an ancient apartment building with two white goats in the courtyard and a still-leafless vine strung from balcony to balcony, they found his mother scrubbing the tiles of the second-floor veranda. A bucket of hot water steamed beside her; she wore a printed blue kerchief, and her arms were bright pink to the elbow. When she saw Andras and Klara and Mendel, she got to her feet and ran downstairs.

His little mother. She crossed the courtyard in an instant, still nimble, and took Andras in her arms. Her quick dark eyes moved over him; she pressed him to her chest and held him there. After a long while she released him and embraced Klara, calling her kislányom, my daughter. Finally she put her arms around Mendel, who tolerated this with a good-natured side glance at Andras; she knew Mendel from Andras’s school days, and had always treated him as though he were another of her sons.

“You poor boys,” she said. “Look how they’ve used you.”

“We’ll be all right, Anya. We’ve got a two-week furlough.”

“Two weeks!” She shook her head. “After a year and a half, two weeks. But at least you’ll be here for Pesach.”

“And who’s that garden slug living in our house in Konyár?”

His mother put a hand to her mouth. “I hope you didn’t quarrel with him.”

“Quarrel with him?” Andras said. “No! He was delightful. I kissed his hand. We’re friends for life.”

“Oh, dear.”

“He chased us with a shotgun,” Mendel said.

“God, what a terrible man! It pains me to think of him living in that house.”

“I hope you got a good price for the place, at least,” Andras said.

“Your father arranged it all,” his mother said, and sighed. “He said we were lucky to get what we did. We’re comfortable here. There aren’t so many chores. And I still have Kicsi and Noni.” She nodded at the two little dairy goats who stood in their fenced enclosure in the yard.

“You ought to have telephoned me,” Klara said. “I would have come to help you move.”

His mother lowered her eyes. “We didn’t want to disturb you. We knew you were busy with your students.”

“You’re my family.”

“That’s kind of you,” Andras’s mother said, but there was a note of reserve in her voice, almost a hint of deference. The next moment Andras wondered if he’d only imagined it, because his mother had taken Klara’s arm and begun to lead her across the courtyard.

The apartment was small and bright, a three-room corner unit with French doors leading out onto the veranda. His mother had planted winter kale in terra-cotta pots; she boiled some of it for their lunch and served it to them with potatoes and eggs and red peppers, and Andras and Mendel took their vitamin pills and ate a few apples Klara had brought for them, each in its own square of green paper. As they ate, his mother told them the news of Mátyás and Tibor: Mátyás was stationed near Abaszéplak, where his labor company was building a bridge over the Torysa River. But that wasn’t all; before his conscription he’d created such a sensation at the Pineapple Club, dancing atop that piano in his white tie and tails, that the manager had offered him a two-year contract. In his letters he wrote that he was practicing, always practicing-working out steps in his mind while he and his mates built the Torysa Bridge, then keeping the poor fellows up at night while he danced the steps he’d worked out that day. By the time he got home, he said, he’d be tapping so fast they’d have to invent a new kind of music just to keep up with him.

Tibor, Andras’s mother told them, had joined a detachment of his labor-service battalion in Transylvania last November; his training in Modena had won him the job of company medic. His letters didn’t carry much news about his work-Andras’s mother suspected he didn’t want to horrify her-but he always told her what he was reading. At the moment it was Miklós Radnóti, a young Jewish poet from Budapest who’d been conscripted into the labor service last fall. Like Andras, Radnóti had lived in Paris for a time. Some of his poems-one about sitting with a Japanese doctor on the terrace of the Rotonde, another about indolent afternoons in the Jardin du Luxembourg-put Tibor in mind of the time he’d spent there. It was rumored that Radnóti’s battalion was serving not far from Tibor’s own; the thought had helped Tibor endure the winter.

To Andras it seemed a terrible and surreal luxury to sit in the kitchen of this clean sunny apartment while his mother delivered news of Mátyás and Tibor and their time in the labor service. How could he relax into this familiar chair, how could he eat apples with Klara and Mendel and listen to the bleating of white goats in the courtyard, while his brothers built bridges and treated sick men in Ruthenia and Transylvania? It was terrible to feel this sweet drowsiness, terrible to find himself anticipating an afternoon nap in his own childhood bed, if indeed his childhood bed had been brought here from Konyár. Even the table before him-the small yellow one from the outdoor summer kitchen-gave him a pang of displaced longing, as though he’d become the conduit of his brothers’ homesickness. This little table his father had built before Andras was born: He remembered sitting underneath it on a hot afternoon as his mother shelled peas for their dinner. He was eating a handful of peas as he watched an inchworm scale one of the table legs. He could see the inchworm in his mind even now, that snip of green elastic with its tiny blunt legs, coiling and stretching its way toward the tabletop, on a mission whose nature was a mystery. Survival, he understood now-that was all. That contracting and straining, that frantic rearing-up to look around: It was nothing less than the urgent business of staying alive.

“What are you thinking of?” his mother asked, and pressed his hand.

“The summer kitchen.”

She laughed. “You recognized this table.”

“Of course.”

“Andras used to keep me company while I baked,” his mother told Klara. “He used to draw in the dirt with a stick. I used to sweep the rest of the kitchen every day, but I would sweep around his drawings.”

There was a soft hoarse intake of breath from Mendel; he hadn’t waited to find a comfortable place for a nap. He’d fallen asleep at the kitchen table, his head pillowed on his arms. Andras led Mendel to the sofa and covered him with a quilt. Mendel didn’t wake, not through the walk across the room, nor through the arrangement of his limbs upon the sofa. It was a talent he had. Sometimes he’d sleep all the way through the morning march to the work site.

“Will you sleep too?” Klara asked Andras. “I’ll help your mother.”

But the bright sharp taste of the apples had woken him; now he didn’t feel like sleeping. What he wanted, what he couldn’t wait another moment to do, was to find his father.

It was a piece of raw Hungarian irony that his father was employed in the milling of timber-some of it, perhaps, the very same timber that Andras had cut in the forests of Transylvania and Subcarpathia. Debrecen Consolidated Lumber bore no resemblance to the lumberyard Lucky Béla had sold to the hateful young man in Konyár. This was a large-scale government-funded operation that processed hundreds of trees daily, and turned out thousands of cords of lumber for use in the building of army barracks and storage facilities and railroad stations. For months now Hungary had been girding itself for war, anticipating that it might be forced to enter the conflict alongside Germany. If that were to happen, vast quantities of timber would be needed to support the army’s advance. Of course, if he’d had a choice, Lucky Béla would have preferred to work for a smaller company whose products were to be sold for peaceful purposes. But he knew how fortunate he was to have a job at all when so many Jews were out of work. And if Hungary went to war, even the smaller lumber companies would be drafted into government service. So he’d taken the job of second assistant foreman when the previous second assistant foreman had died of pneumonia that past winter. The first assistant foreman, a school friend of Béla’s, had offered him the job as a temporary measure, a way to see Béla through the lean winter months. For two months Béla had lived in Debrecen and gone home on weekends, leaving the care of his own mill to his foreman. When the school friend had offered the job on a permanent basis, Béla and Flóra had decided that the time had come to sell their tiny operation. They were getting older. The chores had become more difficult, their debt deeper. With the money from the sale, they could pay their creditors and rent a small apartment in Debrecen.

It was their bad luck that the only interested buyer had been a member of Hungary’s National Socialist Party, the Arrow Cross, and that the man’s offer was half of what the lumberyard was worth. Béla had no choice but to sell. It had been a hard winter. They’d had barely enough to eat, and for an entire month the trains had failed to come to Konyár. There had been a track failure that no one seemed inclined to fix. Certain normal processes-the delivery of mail, the restocking of provisions, the hauling away of milled lumber-had shut down altogether. But in Debrecen there was no food shortage, no slowdown at the mill. He would be paid twice what he could pay himself at his own lumberyard. It was a terrible shame to have had to sell at such a price, but the move had already done them good-Flóra had regained the weight she had lost during that long starved winter, and Béla’s cough and rheumatism had abated. His voice and gait were strong as he walked through the lumberyard with Andras, telling the story.

“What we need, you and I,” he concluded, as he hung his hard hat in the foremen’s locker room, “is a nice cold glass of lager.”

“I’d be a fool to argue,” Andras said, and they set off together toward his father’s favorite beer hall, a cavelike establishment not far from Rózsa utca, with taxidermied wolves’ heads and deer antlers hanging on the walls and a giant old-fashioned barrel of beer on a wooden stand. At the tables, men smoked Fox cigarettes and argued about the fate of Europe. The bartender was an enormous mustachioed man who looked as though he subsisted on fried doughnuts and beer.

“How’s the lager today, Rudolf?” his father asked.

Rudolf gave him a small-toothed smile. “Gets you drunk,” he said.

It seemed to be a routine of theirs. The bartender filled two glasses and poured himself a shot of whiskey, and they toasted each other’s health.

“Who’s this skinny lad?” Rudolf asked.

“My middle boy, the architect.”

“Architect, eh?” Rudolf raised an eyebrow. “Build anything around here?”

“Not yet,” Andras said.

“Army service?”

“Munkaszolgálat.”

“That who’s starving you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I was a huszár in the Great War, like your father. On the Serbian front. Nearly lost a leg at Varaždin. But the labor service, now, that’s a different story. Digging around in the muck all day, no excitement, no chance for glory, and a starvation diet on top of it.” He shook his head. “That’s no job for a smart boy like you. How much longer have you got?”

“Six months,” Andras said.

“Six months! That’s not so long. And good weather all the way. You’ll do fine. But have another round on me, just in case. Bottoms up. May we all cheat death a thousand times!”

They drank. Then Andras and his father retreated to their own table in a dark corner of the room, beneath a wolf head frozen in a howl. The head gave Andras a chill to the base of his spine. That winter in Transylvania he’d heard wolves howling at night, and had imagined their yellow teeth and silvered fur. There had been times when he’d felt so desperate he’d wanted to give himself up to them. As if to remind himself that he was home on furlough, he reached into his pocket and touched his father’s watch; he’d left it with Klara when he’d gone to the Munkaszolgálat. Now he took it out to show his father.

“It’s a good watch,” Béla said, turning it over in his fingers. “A great watch.”

“In Paris,” Andras said, “whenever I was in a bad spot, I used to take it out and think about what you might do.”

His father gave him a rueful smile. “I’ll bet you didn’t always do what I would have done.”

“Not always,” Andras said.

“You’re a good boy,” his father said. “A thoughtful boy. You’re always putting on a brave face in your letters from the Musz, to keep your mother’s spirits up. But I know it’s much worse than you let on. Look at you. They’ve half killed you.”

“It’s not so bad,” Andras said, feeling as he said it that it was true. It was just work, after all; he’d worked all his life. “We’ve been fed,” he said. “They give us clothes and boots. We have a roof over our heads.”

“But you’ve had to leave school. I think about that every day.”

“I’ll go back,” he said.

“To where? France doesn’t exist anymore, not as a place for Jews. And this country…” He shook his head in dismay and disgust. “But you’ll find a way to finish. You’ve got to. I don’t want to see you abandoning your studies.”

Andras understood what he was thinking. “You didn’t abandon your studies,” he said. “You left Prague because you had to.”

“But I didn’t go back, did I?”

“You didn’t have much of a choice.” He couldn’t see any point in continuing the line of conversation; he was powerless to do anything about school now, and his father knew it as well as he did. The thought that it had been almost two years since he’d been at the École Spéciale made him feel pressed under a great and immovable weight. He looked up at a cluster of men who were going over the sports page in the Pesti Hírlap, arguing over which wrestler would win a tournament at the National Sports Club that night. He had never heard any of the wrestlers’ names before.

“It’s good to see Klara, I’m sure,” his father said. “It’s hard to be away from your wife for so long. She’s a nice girl, your Klara.” But there was an echo of the look Andras had seen on his mother’s face earlier, a shadow of hesitation, of reserve.

“I wish you’d written to tell her you were moving,” Andras said. “She would have come out to help you.”

“Your mother’s kitchen girl helped. She was glad to have the extra work.”

“Klara’s our family, Apa.”

His father pushed his lips out and shrugged. “Why should we trouble her with our problems?”

Andras wasn’t going to say what had occurred to him as his father had narrated their story: that he wished Klara might have been the one to negotiate the sale of the lumberyard, that he was certain she would have insisted on a better price and gotten it. But such a negotiation, which might have taken place in Paris without raising the slightest notice, would have been unthinkable in Konyár; here on the Hajdú plains, women did not haggle over real estate with men. “Klara’s no stranger to hard work,” Andras said. “She’s had to support herself since she was sixteen. And in any case, she thinks of you and Anya as her own parents.”

“Now that’s a quaint notion,” Béla said, and shook his head. “Don’t forget, my boy, that we celebrated your wedding at her mother’s house. I’ve met Mrs. Hász. I’ve met Klara’s brother. I don’t think Klara could ever mistake us for her own family.”

“That’s not what I mean. You’re pretending not to understand me.”

“In Paris, maybe you and Klara were just two Hungarians keeping each other company,” Béla said. “Here at home, things are different. Look around you. The rich don’t sit down with the poor.”

“She’s not the rich, Apa. She’s my wife.”

“Her family bought out that nephew of hers. He didn’t have to break his back in the work service. But they didn’t do the same for you.”

“I told her brother I wouldn’t consider it.”

“And he didn’t argue, did he?”

Andras felt the back of his neck grow warm; a flash of anger moved through him. “It’s not fair of you to hold that against Klara,” he said.

“What’s unfair is that some should have to work while others don’t.”

“I didn’t come here to argue with you.”

“Let’s not argue, then.”

But it was too late. Andras was furious. He didn’t want to be in his father’s presence a moment longer. He put money on the table for the beer, but his father pushed it away.

“I’m going for a walk,” Andras said, getting to his feet. “I need some air.”

“Well, let your old father walk with you.”

He couldn’t conceive of a way to say no. His father followed him out of the bar and they walked together in the blue light of evening. All along the avenue, yellow streetlamps had come on to illuminate the buildings with their flaking plaster and faded paint. He didn’t think about where he was walking; he wished he could walk faster, lose his father in the dusk, but the fact was that he was exhausted, anemic, and in need of sleep. He pressed onward past the Aranybika Hotel, an aging dowager in white wooden lace; he walked past the double towers of the Lutheran church with its stolid spires. He kept walking, head down, all the way to the park across the street from the Déri Museum, a squat Baroque-style building clad in yellow stucco. The April evening, soft at the edges, reminded him of a thousand evenings he’d spent here as a schoolboy, with friends or alone, worrying the edges of his adolescent problems like the pages of favorite books. In those days he could always console himself with thoughts of home, of that patch of land in Konyár with its orchard and barn and lumberyard and millpond. Now his home in Konyár would never be his home again. His past, his earliest childhood, had been stolen from him. And his future, the life he had imagined when he was a student here, had been stolen too. He sat on a bench and bent over his knees, his head in his hands; the hurt and dislocation he’d suffered for eighteen months seemed to come over him all at once, and he found himself choking out hoarse sobs into the night.

Lucky Béla stared at this son of his, this boy whose troubles had always been closest to his own heart. He himself had never been subject to fits of weeping, nor had he encouraged them in his sons. He’d taught them to turn their hurt into work. That was what had saved his own life, after all. He hadn’t raised his sons with much physical affection; that had been their mother’s domain, not his. But as he watched his boy, this sick and beaten-down young man, sobbing jaggedly into his knees, he knew what he had to do: He sat down beside Andras on the bench and put his arms around him. His love had always seemed to mean something particular to this boy. He hoped it would mean something still.

They stayed in Debrecen for a week. His mother fed him and tended his ravaged feet and made hot baths for him in the kitchen; she laughed at Mendel’s stories about their mates in the work service, and cleaned the house for Passover with Klara. The new kitchen maid, an aging spinster named Márika, developed a fierce attachment to Mendel, whom she claimed was the spitting image of her brother who’d been killed in the Great War. She left him surreptitious gifts of woolen socks and underclothes, which must have cost a good portion of her wages. When he protested that the gifts were too fine, she pretended to know nothing about them. To Andras the dull familiarity of Debrecen was a kind of relief. He was glad to walk with his friend and his wife through the old neighborhoods, to buy them conical doughnuts at the same doughnut shop where he’d spent his pennies as a child, to show Klara the Jewish Gimnázium and the outdoor skating rink on Piac utca. His body grew stronger, his spongy gums firm again. The patches of old blood beneath his skin began to fade.

He’d been painfully shy with Klara those first few days. He couldn’t stand to have her see his body in its weakened state, and he doubted he would be equal to the demands of lovemaking. But he was a twenty-five-year-old man, and she was the woman he loved; it wasn’t long before he moved toward her in the night, on the thin mattress they shared in the tiny extra room his mother used for sewing. All around them were garments his mother was mending or making to give to Andras or to send to his brothers in their work-service companies. The room was redolent of laundered cotton and the scorched sweetness of ironing. In that bower, in their second marriage bed, he reached for her and she came into his arms. He could scarcely believe that her physical being still existed, that he was allowed to revisit the parts of her he’d carried in his mind like talismans those eighteen months: her small high breasts, the silvery-white scar on her belly, the twin peaks of her hips. As they made love she kept her eyes open and steady on his. He couldn’t read their color in the faint light that filtered through the covered window, but he could see the sharp intensity he recognized and loved. At times they seemed to struggle like old foes; part of him wanted almost to punish her for the longing she had made him feel. She seemed to understand, and met his anger with her own. When he collapsed against her at last, his heart beating against her chest, he knew they would find their way back across the distance that their long separation had opened between them.

By the end of their week in Debrecen, a subtle change had occurred between Andras’s mother and Klara. Knowing looks passed between them during meals; his mother insisted upon having Klara along when she went to the market, and she had asked her to make the matzo balls for their Passover seder. The matzo balls were the glory of the meal, more highly anticipated even than the fried cutlets of chicken or the potato kugel or the gefilte fish she always made from a live carp, which in Konyár had lived in a large tin tub of water in the summer kitchen, but which in Debrecen was forced to reside in the courtyard, on public display. (Two children, a girl and her brother, had befriended the fish, feeding it bits of bread when they got home from school; when it disappeared to become the second course of the seder, Andras told them he’d taken it to the city park and set it free, which earned him their enmity forever-though he insisted that it was what the carp had wanted, its instructions whispered to him in Carpathian, a language he claimed to have learned in the Munkaszolgálat.) His mother’s matzo-ball recipe was written in a spidery lace of black ink upon a holy-looking piece of what could only have been parchment. It had been the property of Flóra’s great-grandmother Rifka, and it had been given to Flóra on her wedding day in a small silver box tooled with the Yiddish word Knaidlach.

One afternoon, when he came in from a walk with Mendel, he found his mother and Klara in the kitchen together, the silver box open on the table, the precious recipe in Klara’s hands. Her hair was tied back in a kerchief, and she wore an apron embroidered with strawberries; her skin was bright with the heat of the kitchen. She squinted at the spidery script and then at the ingredients Andras’s mother had laid out on the table.

“But how much of everything?” she asked Flóra. “Where are the measures?”

“Don’t worry about that,” Andras’ mother said. “Just do it by feel.”

Klara gave Andras a panicked smile.

“Can I help?” Andras asked.

“Yes, darling boy,” Flóra said. “Get your father from work. If I know him, he’ll have forgotten he’s supposed to come home early.”

“All right,” Andras said. “But first I’d like a word with my wife.” He took the recipe from her and laid it with care in the silver box; then he grabbed Klara’s hand and pulled her into the little sewing room. He closed the door. Klara put her hands over her face and laughed.

“Oh, God!” she said. “I can’t make these matzo balls.”

“You could just surrender, you know.”

“What a recipe, that recipe! It might as well be written in secret code!”

“Maybe it’s magic. Maybe the quantities don’t matter.”

“If only Mrs. Apfel were here. Or Elisabet.” A wash of grief darkened her features, as it did every time she’d mentioned Elisabet’s name that week. Her expectations had come to pass: The parents who lived on an estate in Connecticut had wanted nothing to do with Elisabet, and had cut off their son entirely. Undaunted, Paul and Elisabet had taken an apartment in Manhattan and had gone to work-Paul as a graphic artist, Elisabet as a baker’s apprentice. Elisabet had excelled at the job, and had been promoted to assistant pastry chef; the fact that she was French gave her a certain cachet, and she had written a few months ago to say that a cake she’d decorated had served as the centerpiece for a grand wedding in the ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. The mothers of wealthy young ladies had begun to come to her with requests. But now there was a child on the way. That piece of news had arrived in the most recent letter, just a few weeks earlier.

“Klara,” he said, and touched her hand. “Elisabet will be all right, you know.”

She sighed. “It’s been a comfort to be here,” she said. “To be with you. And to spend time with your mother. She loves her children like I love that girl.”

“You have to tell me what you did,” he said. “You’ve bewitched her.”

“What are you talking about?”

“My mother’s fallen in love with you, that’s what.”

Klara leaned against the wall and crossed her slender ankles. “I took her into my confidence,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“I told her the truth. Everything. I wanted her to know what happened when I was a girl, and how I’ve lived since then. I was sure it would make a difference.”

“And it has.”

“Yes.”

“But now you’ve got to make matzo balls.”

“I think it’s a kind of final test,” Klara said, and smiled.

“I hope you pass,” he said.

“You don’t seem confident.”

“Of course I’m confident.”

“Go get your father,” she said, and pushed him toward the door.

By the time he and Mendel returned with Lucky Béla, there were matzo balls boiling in a pot on the stove. The gefilte fish was finished, the table laid with a white cloth, the plates and silverware gleaming in the light of two white tapers. At the center of the table was a silver seder plate, the one they’d used every year since Andras could remember, with greens and bitter herbs, salt water and charoset, egg and shank bone laid out in its six silver cups.

Lucky Béla stood beside his chair at the head of the table, silent with the news he’d received just before the boys had met him at work. In the foremen’s office he’d heard it come in on the radio: Horthy had decided to let Hitler invade Yugoslavia from Hungarian soil-Yugoslavia, with whom Hungary had signed an agreement of peace and friendship a year before. Nazi troops had gathered at Barcs and swarmed across the Drava River while Luftwaffe bombers decimated Belgrade. Béla knew what it was all about: Hitler was punishing the country for the military coup and the popular uprising that had followed Yugoslavia’s entry into the Tripartite Pact. Not a week earlier, Germany had pledged to guarantee the borders of Yugoslavia for a thousand years; now Hitler had set his armies against it. The invasion had begun that afternoon. Hungarian troops would be sent to Belgrade later that week to support the German Army. It would be Hungary’s first military action in the European conflict. It seemed clear to Béla that this was only the beginning, that Hungary could not avoid being drawn further into the war. Thousands of boys would lose their lives. His children would be sent to work on the front lines. He had listened to the news and let it sink into his bones, but when Andras and Mendel had arrived he’d kept it from them. Nor would he say anything now, in the presence of this sacred-looking table. He couldn’t bear the thought that the news might ruin what his wife and his son’s wife had created. He led the seder as usual, feeling the absence of his youngest and eldest sons as a sharp constriction in his chest. He retold the story of the exodus and let Mendel recite the Four Questions. He managed to eat the familiar meal, with the boiled egg on greens and the fresh gefilte fish and the matzo balls in their gold broth. He sang the blessings afterward as he always did, and was grateful for the fourth ceremonial glass of wine. When he opened the door at the end of the seder to give the prophet Elijah his welcome, he saw open doors all around the courtyard. It was a comfort to know he was surrounded by other Jews. But he couldn’t keep the news at bay forever. From the courtyard came the gritty sound of the national news station; someone downstairs had put a radio in the window so others could hear. A man was making a speech in a grave aristocratic voice: It was Miklós Horthy, their regent, mobilizing the country toward its glorious destiny within the new Europe. Béla could see the understanding come over his wife’s face, then his son’s. Hungary was involved now, irrevocably so. As they crowded out onto the balcony to listen to the broadcast, Béla pushed the door open a few more centimeters. Eliahu ha Navi, he sang, under his breath. Eliahu ha Tishbi. He stood with one hand on the doorframe, intoning the holy man’s name; he had not yet given up hope for a different kind of prophecy.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE. Bánhida Camp

WHEN ANDRAS AND MENDEL reported to the battalion office at the end of their furlough, they learned that they would not rejoin the 112/30th in Transylvania. Major Kálozi, they were told by the battalion secretary, had had enough of them. Instead they would be deployed at Bánhida, fifty kilometers northwest of Budapest, where they would join Company 101/18 at a coal mine and power plant.

Fifty kilometers from Budapest! It was conceivable that he might be able to see Klara on a weekend furlough. And the mail might not take a month to travel between them. He and Mendel were sent to wait for the returning members of their new company at the rail yard, where they were divided into work groups and assigned to a passenger carriage. The men returning to Bánhida seemed to have passed an easier winter than Andras and Mendel had. Their clothes were intact, their bodies solid-looking. Between them there was a casual jocularity, as though they were schoolmates returning to gimnázium after a holiday. As the train moved east through the green rolling hills of Buda, then into the wooded and cultivated country beyond, the passenger car filled with the earthy smell of spring. But the workers’ conversation grew quieter the closer they got to Bánhida. Their eyes seemed to take on a sober cast, their shoulders an invisible weight. The greenery began to fall away outside the window, replaced at first by the low, desperate-looking habitations that always seemed to precede a train’s arrival into a town, and then by the town itself with its twisting veinery of streets and its red-roofed houses, and then, as they passed through the railway station and moved toward the power plant, by an increasingly unlovely prospect of hard-packed dirt roads and warehouses and machine shops. Finally they came into view of the plant itself, a battleship with three smokestacks sending plumes of auburn smoke into the blue spring sky. The train shrieked to a halt in a rail yard choked with hundreds of rusted boxcars. Across a barren field were rows of cinderblock barracks behind a chain-link fence. Farther off still, men pushed small coal trolleys toward the power plant. Not a single tree or shrub interrupted the view of trampled mud. In the distance, like a sweet-voiced taunt, rose the cool green hills of the Gerecse and Vertes ranges.

Guards threw open the doors of the railcars and shouted the men off the train. In the barren field the new arrivals were separated from the returnees; the returnees were sent off to work at once. The rest of the men were ordered to deposit their knapsacks at their assigned barracks and then to report to the assembly ground at the center of the compound. The cinderblock barracks at Bánhida looked to have been built without any consideration besides economy; the materials were cheap, the windows high and small and few. As he entered, Andras had the sensation of being buried underground. He and Mendel claimed bunks at the end of one of the rows, a spot that afforded the privacy of a wall. Then they followed their mates out to the assembly ground, a vast quadrangle carpeted in mud.

Two sergeants lined the men up in rows of ten; that day there were fifty new arrivals at Bánhida Camp. They were ordered to stand at attention and wait for Major Barna, the company commander, who would inspect them. Then they would be divided into work groups and their new service would begin. They stood in the mud for nearly an hour, silent, listening to the far-off commands of work foremen and the electric throb of the power plant and the sound of metal wheels on rails. At last the new commander emerged from an administrative building, his cap trimmed with gold braid, a pair of high glossy boots on his feet. He walked the rows briskly, scanning the men’s faces. Andras thought he resembled a schoolbook illustration of Napoleon; he was dark-haired, compact, with an erect bearing and an imperious look. On his second pass through Andras’s line, he paused in front of Andras and asked him to state his position.

Andras saluted. “Squad captain, sir.”

“What was that?”

“Squad captain,” Andras said again, this time at a higher volume. Sometimes the commanders wanted the men to shout their responses, as if this were the real military and not just the work service. Andras found these episodes particularly depressing. Now Major Barna ordered him to step out of the ranks and march to the front.

He hated being told to march. He hated all of it. A few weeks at home had refreshed in him the dangerous awareness that he was a human being. When he reached the front of the lineup he stood at a tense and quivering attention while Major Barna looked him over. The man seemed to regard him with a kind of disgusted fascination, as if Andras were a freak in a traveling show. Then he pulled out a pearl-handled pocketknife and held it beneath Andras’s nose. Andras sniffed. He thought he might sneeze. He could smell the metal of the blade. He didn’t know what Barna meant to do. The mayor’s small dark eyes held a glint of mischief, as if he and Andras were meant to be co-conspirators in whatever was about to happen. With a wink he moved the knife away from Andras’s face and wedged its tip under the officer’s insignia on Andras’s overcoat, and with a few quick strokes he tore the patch from Andras’s chest. The patch fell into the mud; Barna pressed it down with his foot until it disappeared. Then he put a hand on Andras’s head, on the new cap Klara had given him. Another few strokes of the knife and he’d removed the officer’s insignia from the cap as well.

“What’s your rank now, Serviceman?” Major Barna shouted, loud enough for the men at the back to hear.

Andras had never heard of such a thing happening. He hadn’t known it was possible to be stripped of rank if you hadn’t been convicted of a crime. With a surge of daring, he pulled himself up to his full height-a good six inches taller than Barna-and shouted, “Squad captain, sir!”

There was a flash of movement from Barna, and an explosion of pain at the back of Andras’s skull. He fell to his hands and knees in the mud.

“Not at Bánhida,” Major Barna shouted. In his quivering hand he held a white beech walking-stick hazed with Andras’s blood. Despite the pain, Andras almost let out a laugh. It all seemed so absurd. Hadn’t he just been eating apples in his mother’s kitchen? Hadn’t he just been making love to his wife? He put a hand to the back of his head: warm blood, a painful lump.

“Get to your feet, Labor Serviceman,” the major shouted. “Rejoin ranks.”

He had no choice. Without another word, he complied.

His welcome to Bánhida was a taste of what was to come. Something had changed in the brief time Andras had been away from the Munkaszolgálat, or perhaps things were different in the 101/18th. There were no Jewish officers at any level; there were no Jewish medics or engineers or work foremen. The guards were crueler and shorter-tempered, the officers quicker to deliver punishment. Bánhida was an unabashedly ugly place. Everything about it seemed designed for the discomfort or the unhappiness of its inhabitants. Day and night the power plant let forth its three great billows of brown coal smoke; the air reeked of sulfur, and everything was filmed with a fine orange-brown dust that turned to a chalky paste in the rain. The barracks smelled of mildew, the windows let in heat but little light or air, and the roofs leaked onto the bunks. The paths and roads, it seemed, had been laid out to run through the wettest parts of camp. There was a downpour every afternoon promptly at three, turning the place into a treacherous mud-slick swamp. A hot wet breeze swept the smell of the latrines across the camp, and the men choked on the stench as they worked. Mosquitoes bred in the puddles and attacked the men, clustering on their foreheads and necks and arms. The flies were worse, though; their bites left tender red welts that were slow to heal.

Andras and Mendel had been assigned to shovel brown coal into mine carts and then to push the carts along rusted tracks to the power plant. The tracks were laid upon the ground but not fixed in place, and the reason for this soon became clear: as the rains increased, the tracks had to be taken up and redirected around puddles the size of small ponds. When there was no way to avoid the puddles, timbers had to be laid across them and the rails on top of those. The carts weighed hundreds of kilograms with their full loads. The men pulled and pushed and winched them, and when they still wouldn’t move, the men cursed and struck them with their shovels. Each truck was emblazoned with the white letters KMOF, for Közérdekű Munkaszolgálat Országos Felügyelője, the National Administration of the Labor-Service System; but Mendel insisted that the letters stood for Királyi Marhák Ostobasági Földbirtoka, the Royal Idiots’ Stupidity Farm.

There were things to be grateful for. It would have been worse if they’d had to work in the power plant, where the coal dust and chemical fumes turned the air into a thick unbreatheable stew. It would have been worse if they’d been sent down into the mines. It would have been worse to be there without each other. And it would have been worse to be hundreds of kilometers from Budapest, as they’d been in Ruthenia and Transylvania. At Bánhida the mail moved quickly. His parents’ letters took two weeks to arrive, and Klara’s came in a week. Once she enclosed a missive from Rosen, five pages of large loose script sent all the way from Palestine. He and Shalhevet had slipped out of France just before its borders were closed to emigrating Jews, and had been married in Jerusalem, where they were both working for the Palestine Jewish Community: Rosen in the department of settlement planning, and Shalhevet in the immigration advocacy office. They had a child on the way, due in November. There were even letters from Andras’s brothers: Tibor, home to spend his furlough with Ilana, had taken her to the top of Castle Hill for the first time; a photograph showed the two of them before a parapet, Ilana’s smile radiant, her hand enclosed in Tibor’s. Mátyás, still stuck in his labor-service company but struck with spring fever, had made a secret foray to a nearby town, where he had drunk beer, waltzed with girls at the local tavern, tap-danced on the zinc bar in his boots, and made it back to his battalion without getting caught.

In the face of the misery of Bánhida, Mendel conceived a new publication called The Biting Fly. Though at first it seemed to Andras an act of audacity verging on foolhardiness to revive the idea of a newspaper after what had happened in the 112/30th, Mendel argued that they had to do something to keep from going mad. The new publication, he said, would maintain a tone of protest while avoiding direct ridicule of the camp authorities. If they were caught, there would be nothing for their commander to take personally. There would be a certain degree of risk involved, of course, but the alternative was to allow themselves to be silenced by the Munkaszolgálat. After the humiliation Andras had suffered on the assembly ground, how could he refuse to raise his voice in protest?

In the end, Andras agreed to join Mendel again as co-publisher. His decision was driven in part by vanity, he suspected, and in part by desire to maintain his dignity; a greater part was the idea that he and Mendel were conspiring on behalf of free speech and their workmates’ morale. In the 112/30th he had seen how The Snow Goose had become an emblem of the men’s struggle. It had given them a certain relief to see their daily miseries recorded-to see them recognized as outrages that demanded the publication of an underground paper, even one as absurd as The Snow Goose. Here at Bánhida, at least, it would be easier to get drawing materials; there was a black market for all sorts of things. In addition to Debrecen sausages, Fox cigarettes, pinups of Hedy Lamarr and Rita Hayworth, cans of peas, woolen socks, tooth powder, and vodka, one could buy paper and drawing pencils. And there was plenty to illustrate. The first issue of The Biting Fly contained a lexicon that defined such terms as Morning Lineup (a popular parlor game involving alternating rounds of boredom, calisthenics, and humiliation), Water Carrier (a laborman with an empty bucket and a full mouth), and Sleep (a rare natural phenomenon about which little is known). There was a horoscope promising woe for every sign of the Zodiac. There was an advertisement for the services of a private detective who would let you know if your wife or girlfriend had been unfaithful, with a disclaimer releasing the detective from blame if a relationship should inadvertently develop between himself and the subject of his investigation. There were classified ads (Wanted: Arsenic. Will pay in installments) and a serialized adventure novel about a North Pole expedition, increasingly popular at the weather grew hotter. With the aid of a Jewish clerk in the supply office, the paper was printed in weekly editions of fifty copies. Before long Andras and Mendel began to enjoy a quiet journalistic fame among the camp inhabitants.

But what The Biting Fly failed to provide was the one thing they all wanted most from a paper: real news of Budapest and the world. For that they had to rely on the few tattered copies of newspapers that had been sent by relatives or thrown out by the guards. Those papers would be passed around until they were unreadable and the news they contained had long ago gone stale. But there were some events of such great importance that they became known to the men not long after they occurred. In the third week of June, scarcely a year after France had fallen, Hitler’s troops invaded the Soviet Union along a twelve-hundred-kilometer front that ran from the Baltic to the Black Sea. The Kremlin seemed just as shocked by that turn of events as the men of Bánhida Camp. It appeared that Moscow had believed Germany to be committed to its nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union. But Hitler, Mendel pointed out, must have been planning the attack for months. How else would he have mustered so many hundreds of thousands of troops, so many planes, so many panzer divisions? Not a week later, Andras and Mendel learned from the camp postmaster that Soviet planes-or what had appeared at first to be Soviet planes, but might have been German planes in disguise-had bombed the Magyar border town of Kassa. The message was clear: Hungary had no choice but to send its armies into Russia. If Prime Minister Bárdossy refused, Hungary would lose all the territories Germany had returned to it. In fact, Bárdossy, who had long opposed Hungary ’s entry into the war, now seemed to view it as inevitable. Soon the headlines trumpeted a declaration of war against the Soviet Union, and Hungarian Army units were on their way to join the Axis invasion. The men of the 101/18th knew what that meant: For every Hungarian unit sent to the front, a unit of labor servicemen would be sent to support it.

No one knew how long the war might go on, or what the labor servicemen might be called upon to do. In the barracks there were rumors that they would be used as human shields, or sent first across the lines to draw enemy fire. But at Bánhida there was no immediate change; the coal came out of the ground, the men loaded it into the carts, the power plant burned it, the sulfurous dust rose into the air. In July, when the mud dried up and the spring insects died of thirst, the pace of work seemed to grow more urgent, as if more power were needed to fuel the engines of war. The heat was so intense that the men stripped down to their underwear each day by noon. There were no trees to provide shelter from the sun, no swimming hole to cool their sunburned skin. Andras knew that cold raspberry-flavored seltzer existed not far off, in the town they’d passed en route to the camp, and on the hottest days he thought he might abandon his cart-damn the consequences-and walk until he reached the cool umbrella forest of a sidewalk café. He began to see shimmering mirages of water beside the tracks; at times the whole expanse of the camp floated atop a glittering silver-black sea. How long had it been since he’d seen the real sea, with its aquamarine swells and its icy-looking whitecaps? He could see it just beyond the chain-link fence as he pushed the carts of coal: the Mediterranean, a hammered copper-blue, stretching away toward the unimaginable shores of Africa. There was Klara in her black swimsuit, her white bathing cap with racing stripes, stepping into the foam at the water’s edge; Klara submerged to her thighs, her legs zigzagging into watery distortion. Klara on the wooden diving tower; Klara executing an Odettelike swan dive.

And then the foreman was at Andras’s side, shouting his orders. The coal had to be shoveled, the carts had to be moved, because somewhere to the east a war had to be fought.

The most stunning news of Andras’s life reached him on a still, hot evening in July, a month after Hungary had entered the war, in the dead hour between work and dinner, on the front steps of Barracks 21. He and two of his barracks-mates, a pair of lanky red-haired twins from Sopron, had gone to the office after work to get their letters and parcels. The men were blistered with sunburn, their eyes dazed from the brightness of the day; their sweat had turned the dust into a fine paste, which had dried into a thin crackling film on their skin. As ever, there was an interminable line at the post office. The mail was subject to inspection by the postmaster and his staff, which meant that every parcel had to be opened, inspected, and robbed of any food or cigarettes or money it might contain before its recipient could take away what was left. The Sopron twins chuckled over a recent copy of The Biting Fly as they waited. Andras’s mind was muffled with heat; he could scarcely remember illustrating that issue. He uncorked his canteen and drank the last few drops of water. If they had to wait in this line much longer, there wouldn’t be time to wash before dinner. Had he asked Klara to send him shaving soap? He envisioned a clean cake of it, wrapped in waxy white paper and printed with the image of a girl in an old-fashioned bathing costume. Or perhaps there would be something else, something less necessary but just as good: a box of violet pastilles, say, or a new photograph of Klara.

When they reached the window at last, the mail clerk put two identical packages into the twins’ hands. Each had been opened and inspected as usual, and the wrappers of four chocolate bars lay nested inside the packages like a taunt. But there must have been a surplus of baked goods in the mail that day: the parcels still contained identical tins of cinnamon rugelach. Miku and Samu were generous boys, and they admired Andras for his role in the creation of The Biting Fly; they waited for him while he retrieved a single thin envelope from Klara, and on the way back to the barracks they shared their bounty with him. Despite the comforts of cinnamon and sugar, Andras couldn’t help but feel disappointed with his own lean envelope. He was out of shaving soap and vitamins and a hundred other things. His wife might have thought about his needs. She might have sent him even a small package. While the twins went inside with their own parcels, he sat down on the steps and tore open the letter with his pocketknife.

From across the quadrangle, Mendel Horovitz saw Andras sitting on the barracks steps with a letter in his hands. He hurried across the yard, hoping to catch his friend before he went to the sinks to wash for dinner. Mendel had just come from the supply office, where the clerk had allowed him to use the typewriter; in a mere forty-five minutes he’d managed to type all six pages of the new Biting Fly. He thought there might still be time for Andras to begin the illustrations that evening. He whistled a tune from Tin Pan Alley, the movie he’d seen while in Budapest on furlough. But when he reached the barracks steps he stopped and fell silent. Andras had raised his eyes to Mendel, the letter trembling in his hand.

“What is it, Parisi?” Mendel said.

Andras couldn’t speak; he thought he might never speak again. Perhaps he had failed to understand. But he looked at the letter again, and there were the words in Klara’s neat slanted script.

She was pregnant. He, Andras Lévi, was going to be a father.

What did it matter now how many tons of coal he had to shovel? Who cared how many times the cart tipped from its unstable rails, how many times his blisters broke and bled, how brutally the guards abused him? What did it matter how hungry or thirsty he was, or how little sleep he got, or how long he had to stand in the quadrangle for lineup? What did he care for his own body? Fifty miles away in Budapest, Klara was pregnant with his child. All that mattered was that he survive the months between now and the date she’d projected in her letter-the twenty-ninth of December. By then he would have fulfilled his two years of military service. The war might even be finished, depending upon the outcome of Hitler’s campaign in Russia. Who knew what life might be like for Jews in Hungary then, but if Horthy was still regent it might not be an impossible place to live. Or maybe they would emigrate to America, to the dirty and glamorous city of New York. The day he got Klara’s letter he drew a calendar on the back of a copy of The Biting Fly. At the end of each workday he crossed off a square, and gradually the days began to queue up into a long succession of Xs. Letters flew between Budapest and Bánhida: Klara was still teaching private students, would continue to teach as long as she could demonstrate the steps. She was putting money away so they might rent a larger apartment when Andras came home. A friend of her mother’s owned a building on Nefelejcs utca; the neighborhood wasn’t fashionable, but the building was close to the house on Benczúr utca and only a few blocks from the city park. Nefelejcs was the name of the tiny blue flower that grew in the woods, the one with the infinitesimal yellow ring at its center: forget-me-not. He couldn’t, of course, not for a moment; his life seemed balanced on the edge of an unimaginable change.

In September a miracle occurred: Andras received a three-day furlough. There was no particular reason for that piece of luck, as far as he could determine; at Bánhida it seemed furloughs were granted at random except in the case of a death in the family. He learned of the furlough on a Thursday, received his papers on Friday, boarded a train to Budapest on Saturday morning. It was a luminous day, the air soft with the last radiant warmth of summer. The sky overhead burned a clear pale blue, and as they moved away from Bánhida the smell of sulfur faded into the sweet green smell of cut grass. Along the dirt roads that ran beside the tracks, farmers drove wagons heavy with hay and corn. The markets in Budapest would be full of squashes and apples and red cabbages, bell peppers and pears, late grapes, potatoes. It was astonishing to remember that such things still existed in the world-that they’d existed all along while he’d survived on a daily diet of coffee and thin soup and a couple hundred grams of sandy bread.

Klara was waiting for him at Keleti Station. He had never seen a woman so beautiful in all his life: She wore a dress of rose-colored jersey that grazed the swell of her belly, and a neat close-fitting hat of cinnamon wool. In continued defiance of the prevailing fashion, her hair was uncut and uncurled; she had looped it into a low chignon at the base of her neck. He folded her into his arms, breathing in the dusky smell of her skin. He was afraid to crush her against him as fiercely as he wanted to. He held her at arm’s length and looked at her.

“Is it true?” he said.

“As you can see.”

“But is it really?”

“I suppose we’ll find out in a few months.” She took his arm and led him from the station toward the Városliget. He could hardly believe it was possible to stroll through the September afternoon with Klara at his side, his work tools far away in Bánhida, nothing ahead of him but the prospect of pleasure and rest. Then, as they turned at István út and it became apparent that they were heading for her family’s house, he braced himself for the necessity of an interaction with her brother and sister-in-law and possibly even with József, who had rented an atelier in Buda so he could paint again. The absence of Andras’s officer’s insignia would have to be explained, his gauntness remarked over and regretted, and all that time he would have to look into the complacent and well-fed countenances of Klara’s relatives and feel the painful difference between their situation and his own. But when they reached the corner of István and Nefelejcs, Klara paused at the door of a gray stone building and took a key ring from her pocket. She held up an ornate key for Andras to admire. Then she fitted the key into the lock of the entry door, and the door swung inward to admit them.

“Where are we?” Andras asked.

“You’ll see.”

The courtyard was filled with courtyard things: bicycles and potted ferns and rows of tomato plants in wooden boxes. At the center there was a mossy fountain with lily pads and goldfish; a dark-haired girl sat at its edge, trailing her hand in the water. She looked up at Andras and Klara with serious eyes, then dried her hand on her skirt and ran to one of the ground-floor apartments. Klara led Andras to an open stairway with a vine-patterned railing, and they climbed three flights of shallow stairs. With a different key she opened a set of double doors and let him into an apartment overlooking the street. The place smelled of roasted chicken and fried potatoes. There were four brass coat hooks beside the door; an old homburg hat of Andras’s hung on one of them, and Klara’s gray coat on the other.

“This can’t be our apartment,” Andras said.

“Who else’s?”

“Impossible. It’s too fine.”

“You haven’t even seen it yet. Don’t judge it so quickly. You might find it not at all to your taste.”

But of course it was exactly to his taste. She knew perfectly well what he liked. There was a red-tiled kitchen, a bedroom for Andras and Klara, a tiny second bedroom that might be used as a nursery, a private bath with its own enameled tub. The sitting room was lined with bookshelves, which Klara had begun to fill with new books on ballet and music and architecture. There was a wooden drafting table in one corner, a distant Hungarian cousin of the one Klara had given Andras in Paris. A phonograph stood on a thin-legged taboret in another corner. At the far end of the room, a low sofa faced an inlaid wooden table. Two ivory-striped armchairs flanked the high windows with their view of the neo-Baroque apartment building across the street.

“It’s a home,” he said. “You made us a home.” And he took her into his arms.

What he wanted most during the short span of his furlough, he told Klara, was to be at liberty to see to his pregnant wife’s needs. She resisted at first, pointing out that he had no one to care for him at Bánhida. But he argued that to care for her would be a far greater luxury than to be cared for himself. And so, that first night home, after they’d eaten the roasted chicken and potatoes, she allowed him to make her coffee and read to her from the newspaper, and then to run a bath for her and bathe her with the large yellow sponge. Her pregnant body was a miraculous thing to him. A pink bloom had come out beneath the surface of her pale skin, and her hair seemed thicker and more lustrous. He washed it himself and pulled it forward to drape over her breasts. Her areolae had grown larger and darker, and a faint tawny line had emerged between her navel and her pubic triangle, transected by the silvery scar of her earlier pregnancy. Her bones no longer showed so starkly beneath the skin. Most notably, a complicated inward look had appeared in her eyes-such a deep commingling of sadness and expectancy that it was almost a relief when she closed them. As she lay back in the bathtub, cooling her arms against the enamel, he was struck by the fact that at Bánhida his life had been reduced to the simplest needs and emotions: the hope for a piece of carrot in his soup, the fear of the foreman’s anger, the desire for another fifteen minutes of sleep. For Klara, who had lived in greater security here in Budapest, there remained the opportunity for more complicated reflection. It was happening as he watched, as he bathed her with the yellow sponge.

“Tell me what you’re thinking,” he said. “I can’t guess.”

She opened her gray eyes and turned to him. “How strange it is,” she said. “To be pregnant while we’re at war. If Hitler controls all of Europe, and perhaps Russia, too, who knows what may happen to this child? There’s no use pretending Horthy can keep us from harm.”

“Do you think we should try to emigrate?”

She sighed. “I’ve thought about it. I’ve even written to Elisabet. But the situation is as I expected. It’s almost impossible to get an entry visa now. Even if we could, I’m not certain I’d want to. Our families are here. I can’t imagine leaving my mother again, particularly now. And it’s hard to imagine starting another life in a strange country.”

“The travel, too,” he said, stroking her wet shoulders. “It’s hardly safe to cross an ocean during a war.”

Encircling her knees with her arms, she said, “It’s not just the war I’ve been thinking about. I’ve had all kinds of doubts.”

“What doubts?”

“About what sort of mother I’ll be to this child. About the hundred thousand ways I failed Elisabet.”

“You didn’t fail Elisabet. She turned out a strong and beautiful woman. And your situation was different then. You were alone, and you were just a child yourself.”

“And now I’m practically an old woman.”

“That’s nonsense, Klara.”

“Not really.” She frowned at her knees. “I’m thirty-four, you know. The birth was a near disaster last time. The obstetrician says my womb may have been damaged. My mother came to my last appointment, and I wish now that she hadn’t. She’s been driving herself mad with worry.”

“Why, Klara? Is there a danger to the baby?” He took her chin and made her raise her eyes to him. “Are you in danger yourself?”

“Women give birth every day,” she said, and tried to smile.

“What did the doctor say?”

“He says there’s a risk of complication. He wants me to have the child at the hospital.”

“Of course you’ll have it at the hospital,” Andras said. “I don’t care what it costs. We’ll find a way to pay.”

“My brother will help,” she said.

“I’ll get work,” Andras said. “We’ll make the money somehow.”

“György wouldn’t begrudge us anything,” Klara said. “No more than your own brothers would.”

Andras didn’t want to argue, not during the brief time they had together. “I know he’d help if we needed it,” he said. “Let’s hope we don’t have to ask him.”

“My mother wants me to move home to Benczúr utca,” Klara said, twisting her wet hair into a rope. “She doesn’t understand why I insist that you and I must have our own apartment. She thinks it’s a needless expense. And she doesn’t like me to be alone. What if something were to happen? she says. As if I hadn’t spent all those years alone in Paris.”

“She wants to protect you all the more, because of that,” he said. “It must have tortured her not to be with you when you were pregnant with Elisabet.”

“I understand, of course. But I’m not a child of fifteen anymore.”

“Perhaps she’s right, though. If there’s a danger, wouldn’t it be better for you to be at home?”

“Not you, too, Andráska!”

“I hate to think of you being alone.”

“I’m not alone. Ilana is here with me almost every day. And I can walk to my mother’s house in six minutes. But I can’t live there again, and not just because I’m accustomed to being on my own. What if the authorities were to discover who I am? If I were living in my family’s house, they’d be directly implicated.”

“Ah, Klara! How I wish you didn’t have to think about any of this.”

“And how I wish you didn’t either,” she said. And then she stood from the bath, and the water fell from her skin in a glittering curtain, and he followed the new curves of her body with his hands.

Later that night, when he found he couldn’t sleep, he got out of bed and went into the sitting room, to the drafting table Klara had bought for him; he ran his hands over that smooth hard surface devoid of paper or tools. There was a time when he might have comforted himself with work, even if it were just a project he had set himself; the pure concentration required to draw a series of fine unbroken black lines could turn his mind aside, even if just for a few moments, from the gravest of problems. But the fact was that he’d never before had to worry about the fate of his pregnant wife and his unborn child and the entire Western world. In any case, there was no project he could imagine taking up now; when it came to the study and practice of architecture, his mind was as blank and planless as the drafting table before him. The work he’d done those past two years when he wasn’t cutting trees or building roads or shoveling coal-scratching in notebooks, doodling in the margins of Mendel’s newspapers-might have kept his hands from lying idle; it might even have kept him from going mad. But it had also been a distraction from the fact that his life as a student of architecture was slipping farther and farther away, his hands losing their memory of how to make a perfect line, his mind losing its ability to solve problems of form and function. How far away he felt now from that atelier at the École Spéciale where he and Polaner had suspended a running track from the roof of a sports club. How astounding that such an idea had occurred to them. It seemed an eternity since he’d looked at a building with any thought in his mind beside the hope that its roof wouldn’t leak and that it would keep out the wind. He’d hardly even taken note of what the façade of this building looked like.

He wished he could talk to Tibor. He would know what Andras should do, how he might protect Klara and begin to reclaim his life. But Tibor was three hundred kilometers away in the Carpathians. Andras couldn’t imagine when they might next sit down together to make sense of who they were now, or at least to take some comfort in their shared uncertainty.

As it happened, it was his younger brother-the one whose function had always been to cause trouble, rather than to alleviate it-who materialized in Budapest during Andras’s furlough. Mátyás rolled into Nyugati Station with the rest of his company, which had been posted nearby while it awaited a transfer, and jumped off the train to enjoy a furlough of his own making. His company was directed by a lax young officer who allowed his men to buy an occasional exemption from work. Mátyás, who had hoarded money during his window-trimming days, had bought a few days off to see a shopgirl he’d met on one of his jobs. He had no idea that Andras was home on furlough, too, and so it was purely by accident that, on Monday afternoon, Mátyás jumped onto the back of a streetcar and found himself face-to-face with his brother. He was so surprised that he would have fallen off again if Andras hadn’t grabbed his arm and held him.

“What are you doing here?” Mátyás cried. “You’re supposed to be slaving at a mine.”

“And you’re supposed to be-doing what?”

“Building bridges. But not today! Today I’m going to see a girl named Serafina.”

An elderly woman in a kerchief gave them a disapproving look, as if they ought to know better than to engage in such loud and animated conversation on a streetcar. But Andras pulled Mátyás’s face close to his own and said to the woman, “It’s my brother, do you see? My brother!”

“You must have had donkeys for parents,” the woman said.

“Pardon us, your ladyship,” Mátyás said. He tipped his hat and executed a perfect backflip from the side rail of the streetcar to the pavement, so swiftly that the woman gave a little scream. As the passengers watched in astonishment, he tapped out a soft-shoe rhythm against the cobblestones and then fleetfooted his way up onto the curb, scattering the pedestrians there; he turned a double spin, whipped off his hat, and bowed to a young woman in a blue twill coat. Everyone who’d seen him gave a cheer. Andras jumped down from the streetcar and waited until his brother had finished taking his curtain calls.

“Needless foolishness,” Andras said, once the applause had died down.

“I must emblazon that on a flag and carry it everywhere.”

“You might well. Then everyone would have some warning.”

“Where are you going with a market bag full of potatoes?” Mátyás asked.

“Home to my apartment, where my wife is waiting for me.”

“Your apartment? What apartment?”

“Thirty-five Nefelejcs utca, third floor, apartment B.”

“Since when do you live there? And for how long?”

“Since last night. And for another day and a half, until I have to go back to Bánhida.”

Mátyás laughed. “Then I suppose I caught you by your shirttails.”

“Or I caught you. Why don’t you come for dinner?”

“I might be otherwise engaged.”

“And what if this Serafina sees you for the glib young fool you are?”

“In that case I’ll come over at once.” Mátyás kissed Andras on both cheeks and hopped aboard the next streetcar, which by that time had pulled up beside them.

For a few blocks, as Andras walked toward home, he felt inclined to tap-dance himself. Chance favored him at times; it had delivered the unexpected furlough, and now it had delivered Mátyás. But not even that welcome surprise could divert his mind from its new channel of worry. The newspaper he’d bought that afternoon had delivered a sobering view of events in the east: Kiev had fallen to the Germans, and Hitler’s armies lay within a hundred miles of Leningrad and Moscow. In a radio address earlier that week, the Führer had proclaimed the imminent capitulation of the Soviet Union. Andras feared that the British, who had held out fiercely in the Mediterranean, would lose hope now; if their defenses crumbled, Hitler would rule all of Europe. He thought of Rosen at the Blue Dove three years earlier, declaring that Hitler wanted to make a Germany of the world. Not even Rosen could have predicted the degree to which that speculation would prove true. German territory had spread across the map of Europe like spilled ink. And the people of the conquered countries had been turned from their homes, deported to wastelands or clapped into ghettoes or sent to labor camps. He wanted to believe that Hungary might remain a refuge at the center of the firestorm; it was easier to believe such a thing here in Budapest, far from the heat and stink of Bánhida Camp. But if Russia were to fall, no country in Europe would be safe, particularly not for Jews-certainly not Hungary, where the Arrow Cross had gained strength in every recent election. Into this baffling uncertainty, Andras and Klara’s child would be born. He began to understand how his own parents must have felt when his mother had become pregnant with him during the Great War, though the situation had been different then: His father had been a Hungarian soldier, not a forced laborer, and there had been no crazed Führer dreaming of a Jew-free Europe.

At home he found Klara and Ilana sitting at the kitchen table and laughing over some intimacy, Ilana’s hands clasped in Klara’s own. It was clear to him, even at first glance, that the connection between them had deepened in his absence; in her letters Klara had often mentioned how grateful she was for Ilana’s companionship, and he’d been relieved to know that they lived just a few blocks from each other and crossed the distance often. If Klara had been Ilana’s confidante and protector in Paris, now she seemed to have become something like an older sister. Soon after Ilana had arrived in Budapest, Klara had told him, they’d begun a ritual of going to the market together every Monday and Thursday morning. When Tibor had gone to the Munkaszolgálat, Klara had seen to it that Ilana wasn’t lonely; they cooked together, spent evenings with Klara’s records or Ilana’s books, strolled the boulevards and parks on Sunday afternoons. That particular night, just before Andras had arrived, Ilana had delivered a piece of sweet and complicated news: She was pregnant. She repeated the news now in her tentative Hungarian. It had happened while Tibor was home on his last furlough. If all went well, the babies would be born two months apart. She’d written to Tibor and received a letter assuring her that he was well, that his labor company was far from the dangerous action farther east, that the summer weather had made everything more bearable, that her news had made him happier than he’d believed he could be.

But there was no happiness that fall of 1941 that wasn’t complicated by worry. Andras could see it in the narrow lines that had gathered on Ilana’s brow. He knew what this pregnancy must mean to her after her miscarriage, and how terrified she would be for the baby’s safety even if they weren’t in the midst of a war. He would have embraced her if her observance hadn’t forbidden it. As it was, he had to be content to congratulate her and express his fervent wish that all would go well. Then he told the two of them how he had run into Mátyás on the streetcar.

“Well,” Klara said. “It’s a good thing I bought extra pastries for dessert. That young goat would eat us into starvation otherwise.”

Mátyás arrived just as Klara was setting out the pastries in the sitting room after dinner. He gave her a kiss on the cheek and plucked a cream-filled mille-feuille from the silver tray. For Ilana he had a deep bow and a flourish of his hat.

“Your romancing must have gone well,” Andras said. “Your cheeks are on fire with lipstick.”

“It’s not lipstick,” Mátyás said. “It’s the stain of breached innocence. Serafina is far too worldly for me. I’m still blushing from what she said when we parted.”

“We won’t ask what it was,” Klara said.

“I wouldn’t tell anyway,” he said, and winked. He looked around him at the furnishings of the sitting room. “What a place,” he said. “All of this just for the two of you!”

“For the three of us, soon,” Klara said.

“Of course. I nearly forgot. Andras is going to be a papa.”

“And so is Tibor,” Ilana said.

“Good God!” Mátyás said. “Is it true? Both of you?”

“It’s true,” Ilana said, and then pointed a teasing finger at him. “Now your anya and apa will want you to be married, too, just to complete the picture.”

“Not a chance,” Mátyás said, with another wink. He laid down a quick combination of syncopated steps across the parquet floor of the sitting room, then mock-fell over the back of the sofa and landed upright beside the low table. “Tell me I haven’t got talent,” he demanded, and knelt before Klara with his arms outstretched. “You should know, dancing mistress.”

“We don’t call that dancing where I come from,” Klara said, and smiled.

“How about this, then?” Mátyás got to his feet and executed a double-pirouette with his arms above his head. But at the end he lost his balance and had to catch himself on the mantel. He stood for a moment breathing hard, shaking his head as if to clear it of a gyrational ghost, and for the first time Andras noticed how exhausted and ravenous he looked. He took Mátyás by the shoulder and led him to one of the striped ivory chairs.

“Sit here for a while,” Andras said. “You’ll feel better when you get up.”

“Don’t you like my dancing?”

“Not at the moment, brother.”

Klara made a plate of pastries for Mátyás, and Andras poured him a glass of slivovitz. For a while they all sat together and talked as though there were no such thing as war or worry or the work service. Andras kept the dessert plates and coffee cups filled. Ilana blushed at the attention, protesting that it wasn’t right to allow herself to be waited upon by her husband’s brother. Andras thought he had never seen her look so beautiful. Her skin, like Klara’s, seemed lit from within. Her hair was hidden under the kerchief worn by observant married women, but the scarf she’d chosen was made of lilac-colored silk shot through with silver. When she laughed at Mátyás’s jokes, the black-brown depths of her eyes seemed to flare with intelligent light. It was astonishing to think that this was the same girl who had lain pale and terrified in a hospital bed in Paris, her lips whitening with pain as she woke from the anesthesia.

After they finished their coffee, Andras and Mátyás went out for a walk together in the mild September night. From Nefelejcs utca it was only a few blocks to the city park, where gold floodlights illuminated the Vajdahunyad Castle. The paths were full of pedestrians even at that hour; in the shadowy recesses of the castle walls they could see men and women moving against each other in imperfect privacy. Mátyás’s high spirits had quieted now that the two of them were alone. He crossed his arms over his chest as if he were cold in the warm breeze. His time in the Munkaszolgálat seemed to have sharpened him somehow; the planes of his face had become harder and more distinct. His high forehead and prominent cheekbones, so much like their mother’s, had begun to lend him a gravity that seemed at odds with his prankster wit.

“My brothers have beautiful wives,” he said. “I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t jealous.”

“Well, I’d be rather disappointed if you weren’t.”

“You’re truly going to be a father?”

“So it seems.”

He let out a low whistle. “Excited?”

“Terrified.”

“Nonsense. You’ll be wonderful. And Klara’s been through it once before.”

“Her child wasn’t born during a war,” Andras said.

“No, but she didn’t have a husband then, either.”

“She didn’t seem so much the worse for it. She got work. She raised her daughter. Elisabet might have been a more pleasant girl if she’d had a different sort of family-a brother or sister to play with, and a father to stop her from being so unkind to her mother. But she turned out all right, after all. I’m not much use as a husband. So far I’ve been nothing but a weight around Klara’s neck.”

“You were drafted,” Mátyás said. “You had to serve. It’s not as though you had any choice.”

“I haven’t finished my studies. I can’t come home and start working as an architect.”

“Then you’ll go back to school.”

“If I can get into school. And then there’s the time and expense.”

“What you need,” Mátyás said, “is some well-paid work that doesn’t take all your time. Why not go into business with me?”

“What, as a tap dancer? Do you imagine us as a performing team? The Amazing Lévi Brothers?”

“No, you dolt. We’ll be a team of window-trimmers. The work will go twice as fast with two of us doing it. I’ll be the stylist. You’ll be my slave. We’ll get double the clients.”

“I don’t know if I could take orders from you,” Andras said. “You’d break my back.”

“What’ll you do for money, then? Sit on a street corner and make caricatures?”

“I’ve been thinking,” Andras said. “My old friend Mendel Horovitz worked at the Budapest Evening Courier before he went into the labor service. He says they’re always looking for layout artists and illustrators. And the pay’s not bad.”

“Akh. But then you’d just be someone else’s slave.”

“If I’ve got to be someone’s slave, I might as well do it in a field where I’ve got experience.”

“What experience?”

“Well, there was my old job at Past and Future. And then there are the newspapers Mendel and I have been making, the ones I wrote you about. I would have brought you a copy if I’d known I was going to see you.”

“I understand,” Mátyás said. “Window-trimming isn’t fancy enough work for you. Not after your Paris education.” He was teasing, but his expression betrayed a flicker of pique. Andras remembered the fierce letters Mátyás had written from Debrecen while Andras was in Paris-the ones in which Mátyás had claimed his own share of an education. Then the war had begun, and Mátyás had been stuck in Hungary, working first at window-trimming and then in the Munkaszolgálat. Andras was ashamed to realize that he did feel as if he should have moved beyond a job like window-trimming, which carried a flavor of commercial servitude. It was the wild luck of his last months in Paris that had made him feel that way, the kindness of his professors and his mentors that had led him to expect something different. But that was behind him now. He needed to earn money. In a few months he would be a father.

“Forgive me,” Andras said. “I didn’t mean to suggest your work wasn’t an art. It’s a higher art than newspaper illustration, that’s for certain.”

Mátyás’s look seemed to soften, and he put a hand on his brother’s arm. “That’s all right,” he said. “I might think myself too fine for window-trimming, too, if Le Corbusier and Auguste Perret had been my drinking companions.”

“We were never drinking companions,” Andras said.

“Don’t try to go in for humility now.”

“Oh, all right. We were great friends. We drank together constantly.” He fell silent, thinking of his real friends, the ones who were scattered across the Western Hemisphere now. Those men were his brothers too. But there hadn’t been word from Ben Yakov after that conciliatory telegram, nor from Polaner since he’d joined the Foreign Legion. Andras wondered what had happened to the photograph that had been taken when he and Polaner had won the Prix du Amphithéâtre. It seemed strange to think it might still exist somewhere, a record of a vanished life.

“You look grim, brother,” Mátyás said. “Do we need to get some wine into you?”

“It couldn’t hurt,” Andras said.

So they went to a café overlooking the artificial lake, the one that became a skating rink in winter, and they sat at a table outside and ordered Tokaji. The war had made wine expensive, but Mátyás insisted upon the indulgence and further insisted upon paying, since he didn’t have a wife or future child to support. He promised to let Andras pay the next time, once he’d landed a job at a newspaper, though of course neither of them knew when that might happen, or even when they might next be home together.

“Now, who’s this Serafina?” Andras asked, looking at his brother through the amber lens of his glass of Tokaji. “And when will we meet her?”

“She’s a seamstress at a dress shop on Váci utca.”

“And?”

“And, I met her when I was working on a window. She was wearing a white dress embroidered with cherries. I made her take it off so I could put it in the window display.”

“You made her take her dress off?”

“Do you see why it might be an attractive job?”

“Did she go back to her sewing machine naked?”

“No. Sadly, the dressmaker had something else for her to put on.”

“Now, that’s a shame.”

“Yes. I’ve felt the sting of it ever since. That’s why I decided to pursue her. I wanted to see what I missed when she stepped behind the changing-room curtain.”

“You must have seen enough to make it seem worth the pursuit.”

“Plenty. She’s what I like. Just a shade taller than me. Black hair cut into a neat little cap. And a mole on her cheek like a spot of brown ink.”

“Well, I can’t wait to make her acquaintance.”

Again, the glint of mirth faded out of Mátyás’s eyes; the faint shadows beneath them seemed to deepen as he looked down into his glass of wine. “I’m going to follow my company tomorrow,” he said. “We’re off to the big party.”

“What big party?”

“Belgorod, in Russia. The front lines.”

A terrible clang in Andras’s chest, as though the bell of his ribcage had been struck with an iron hammer. “Oh, Mátyás. No.”

“Yes,” Mátyás said. He looked up and grinned, but his expression was one of fear. “So you see, it’s a good thing we ran into each other.”

“Can’t you get a transfer? Have you tried?”

“Money’s the only way, and I’ve only got enough for small bribes.”

“How much would it cost?”

“Oh, I don’t know. At this point, hundreds. Maybe thousands.”

Andras thought again of György Hász in his villa on Benczúr utca, where he was most likely sitting by the fire in a cashmere robe and reading one of the financial papers. He wanted to take Hász and turn him upside down, shake him until gold coins rained out of him as if from a broken bank. He could think of no reason why that man’s son should have a painting studio and a stretch of leisure-filled months ahead, while Mátyás Lévi, son of Lucky Béla of Konyár, had to go to the Eastern Front and take his chances in the minefields. He, Andras, would be a fool, worse than a fool, if he allowed his pride to keep him from applying to György for help. This wasn’t a matter of whether or not Andras could support Klara and their child; Mátyás’s life was at stake.

“I’ll pay a visit to Hász,” Andras said. “They’ve got to have a chest of kroner hidden somewhere, or something they can sell.”

Mátyás nodded. “I don’t suppose József Hász has to go to the front lines.”

“No, indeed. József Hász has got himself a nice atelier in Buda.”

“How timely,” Mátyás said. “The destruction of the Western world should make an interesting subject.”

“Yes. Although, strange to say, I haven’t felt the urge to visit him and check the progress of his work.”

“That is strange.”

“In seriousness, though, I’m not sure Hász the Elder has ready cash. I think it’s all they can do to keep that house on Benczúr utca and maintain Madame’s furs and their opera box. They had to sell their car to get József exempted from his second call-up.”

“At least they still have the opera box,” Mátyás said. “Music can be such a comfort when other people are dying.” He winked at Andras, then raised his glass and drained it.

The next day, after Andras had seen his brother off at Nyugati Station, he went to call on György Hász at home. He knew Hász came home every day to have lunch with his wife and mother, and that afterward he liked to spend half an hour with the newspaper before he went back to his office. Even in uncertain times he was a man of regular habits. In defiance of the change in his professional circumstances, he had retained the gentlemanly schedule of his days as the bank’s director; his services were too valuable for the new bank president to prevent him from taking that liberty. As Andras had expected, he found his brother-in-law in the library of the house on Benczúr utca, his reading glasses on, the newspaper butterflied in his hands. When the manservant announced Andras’s arrival, Hász dropped the paper and got to his feet.

“Is everything well with Klara?” he said.

“Everything’s fine,” Andras said. “We’re both fine.”

Hász’s brow relaxed and he gave a sharp sigh. “Forgive me,” he said. “I wasn’t expecting to see you. I didn’t know you were home.”

“I’ve had a few days’ furlough. I’m going back tomorrow.”

“Please sit down,” Hász said. To the man who had conducted Andras in, he said, “Tell Kati to bring us tea.” The man went out silently, and György Hász gave Andras a slow, careful perusal. Andras had chosen to wear his Munkaszolgálat uniform that day, with its green M on the breast pocket and its mended places where Major Barna had torn off his marks of rank. Hász glanced at Andras’s uniform, then put a hand to his own tie, blue silk with a narrow ivory stripe. “Well,” he said. “You’ve got only three more months of service, by my calculation.”

“That’s right,” Andras said. “And then the baby will be born.”

“And you’re well? You seem well.”

“As well as can be expected.”

Hász nodded and sat back in his chair, crossing his fingers over his vest. In addition to the blue silk tie he was wearing an Italian poplin shirt and a suit of dark gray wool. His hands were the soft hands of a man who had always worked indoors, his fingernails pink and smooth. But he looked at Andras with such genuine and unguarded concern that it was impossible to resent him entirely. When the tea arrived, he prepared Andras’s cup himself and handed it across the table.

“How can I help you?” he said. “What brought you here?”

“My brother Mátyás has been deployed to the Eastern Front,” Andras said. “His company left this afternoon to meet the rest of their battalion in Debrecen, and from there they’ll go to Belgorod.”

Hász put down his cup and looked at Andras. “Belgorod,” he said. “The minefields.”

“Yes. They’ll be clearing the way for the Hungarian Army.”

“But what can I do?” Hász said. “How can I help him?”

“I know you’ve done a great deal for us already,” Andras said. “You’ve looked out for Klara while I’ve been away. That’s the best service you could have rendered me. Believe me, I would never ask for anything more if I didn’t believe it was a matter of life and death. But I wonder if it might be possible to do for Mátyás something like what you’ve done for József. If not exempt him entirely, at least get him transferred to another company. One that’s not likely to be so close to the action. He’s got eleven months left.”

György Hász raised an eyebrow, then sat back in his chair. “You’d like me to buy his freedom,” he said.

“At least his freedom from working on the front lines.”

“I understand.” He steepled his hands and looked at Andras across the desk.

“I know the price isn’t the same for everyone,” Andras said. He set his cup in the saucer and gave it a careful turn. “I imagine it would be a great deal less for my brother than it was for your son. I have the name of Mátyás’s battalion commander. If we could arrange for a certain sum to be transferred to him through an independent agent-a lawyer of your acquaintance, say-we might accomplish it all without revealing to the authorities the connection between your family and mine. That is to say, without compromising Klara’s security. I’m certain we could buy my brother’s freedom at what would seem to you a negligible sum.”

Hász pressed his lips together and brought his steepled hands against them, then tapped his fingers as he looked toward the fire. Andras waited for his answer as if György were a magistrate and Mátyás in the seat of judgment before him. But Mátyás was not, of course, before him; he was already on a train headed toward the Eastern Front. All at once it seemed a folly to have imagined that György Hász might have the power to stop what had already been set in motion.

“Does Klara know you came to me?” Hász asked.

“No,” Andras said. “Though she wouldn’t have discouraged me. She’s confident of your help in all matters. I’m the one whose pride generally prevents the asking.”

György Hász pushed himself up from the leather chair and went to tend the fire. The previous day’s soft heat had blown away overnight; a sharp wind rattled the casement windows. He moved the logs with the poker and a flight of sparks soared up into the heights of the fireplace. Then he replaced the tool and turned to face Andras.

“I have to apologize before I speak further,” he said. “I hope you’ll understand the decisions I’ve made.”

“Apologize for what?” Andras said. “What decisions?”

“For some time I’ve been operating under a rather heavy financial and emotional burden,” he said. “It’s entirely independent of my son’s situation, and I’m afraid it’s going to continue for some time. I can’t imagine what the end of it will be, in fact. I haven’t spoken to you about it because I knew it would be a source of worry at a time when your greatest concern was to stay alive. But I’m going to tell you now. It’s a grave thing you’ve come to ask of me, and I find it impossible to give an answer without making you understand my situation. Our situation, I should say.” He took his seat across from Andras once again and pulled his chair closer to the table. “It concerns someone dear to us both,” he said. “It’s about Klara, of course. Her troubles. What happened to her when she was a girl.”

Andras’s skin went cold all at once. “What do you mean?”

“Not long after you went into the Munkaszolgálat, a woman came forward and informed the authorities that the Claire Morgenstern who had recently entered the country was the same Klara Hász who had fled eighteen years earlier.”

His ears rang with the shock of it. “Who?” he demanded. “What woman?”

“A certain Madame Novak, who had returned from Paris herself not long before.”

“Madame Novak,” Andras repeated. In his mind she appeared as she had that night at Marcelle Gérard’s party, quietly triumphant in her velvet gown and jasmine perfume-on the verge of effecting a twelve-hundred-kilometer separation between her husband and the woman he loved, the woman who had been his mistress for eleven years.

“So you know the situation, and why she might have done such a thing.”

“I know what happened in Paris,” Andras said. “I know why she has reason to hate Klara-or why she had reason to, in any case.”

“It seems to have been a persistent hate,” György said.

“You’re telling me that the authorities know. They know she’s here, and who she is. You’re telling me they’ve known for months.”

“I’m afraid so. They’ve compiled a great dossier on her case. They know everything about her flight from Budapest and what she’s done since then. They know she’s married to you, and they know all about your family-where your parents live, where your father works, what your brothers did before they entered the military, where they’re stationed now. There’s no chance, I’m afraid, that we could arrange an exemption for your brother at the common rate. Our families are connected, and the connection is known by those who have power in these matters. But even if we could convince your brother’s battalion commander to name a price-and that in itself is not at all certain, considering how many of those men are terrible anti-Semites-it might be impossible to produce the money. You see, I’ve had to make a financial arrangement to preserve Klara’s freedom, too. The chief magistrate in charge of her case happens to be an old acquaintance of mine-and happens, as well, to be intimate with my financial affairs, due to my removal from the bank presidency and my efforts to protest it. When the information about Klara emerged, he was the one to offer a kind of solution-or what one might call a solution, in the absence of any other source of hope. A sort of trade, as he put it to me. I would pay a certain percentage of my assets every month in perpetuity, and the Ministry of Justice would leave Klara alone. They would also see to it that the Central Alien Control Office renews her official residence permit each year. They don’t want her deported, of course, now that they’ve got her back in the country and can use her to their advantage.”

Andras drew a breath into the constricted passages of his lungs. “So that’s what you’ve done,” he said. “That’s where the money’s going.”

“I’m afraid so.”

“And she knows nothing about it?”

“Nothing. I want her to have the illusion of safety, at least. I think it’s best to say nothing to her unless the situation changes significantly for the better or the worse. If she knew, I’m certain she would try to stop me. I don’t know what form her attempt might take or what its consequences might be. I’ve informed my wife about the arrangement, of course-I’ve had to explain to her why it’s been necessary to dissolve so many of our assets-and she agrees it’s best to keep the whole thing from Klara for now. My mother disagrees, but thus far I’ve managed to make her see my perspective.”

“But how long can it go on?” Andras said. “They’ll bleed you dry.”

“That seems to be their plan. I’ve already had to place this house under a second mortgage, and recently I’ve had to ask my wife to part with some of her jewelry. We’ve sold the car and the piano and some valuable paintings. There are other things that can be sold, but not an endless supply. And as my assets diminish, the percentage inches up-it’s a way to keep the arrangement lucrative for this magistrate and his cronies in the Ministry of Justice. I believe we’ll have to sell the house soon and take a flat closer to the center of town. I dread that-it’ll become increasingly difficult to explain to Klara why we have to do these things. It’s not possible to claim József’s exemption as a continual drain of that magnitude. But Klara’s freedom may be infinitely dear. Now that the government has found a way to siphon away our assets, I’m sure they won’t stop until there’s nothing left.”

“But the government is the guilty party! Sándor Goldstein was killed. Klara was raped. Her daughter is the evidence. The government was responsible. They’re the ones who should be paying her.”

“In a just world, it might be possible to prove their guilt,” said Hász. “But my lawyers assure me that Klara’s accusations of rape would mean nothing now, particularly considering the fact that Klara fled justice herself. Not that they would have meant much at the time, mind you. Her situation was desperate from the beginning. If she’d stayed, the authorities would have pulled every dirty trick to demonstrate her guilt and hide their own. That was why my father and his lawyer decided she had to leave the country, and why they couldn’t bring her back. My father never stopped trying, though-until his dying day he hoped it might still be done.”

Andras rose and went to the fire, where the logs had burned down to glowing coals. The heat of them seemed to reach inside him and send a bright wave of anger through his chest. He turned to look into his brother-in-law’s eyes. “Klara has been in danger for months, and you didn’t tell me,” he said. “You didn’t think I could bear to know. Maybe you thought I didn’t know what existed between Klara and Novak in Paris. Maybe you’re afraid yourself that something’s happened between them here in Budapest. Did you plan to keep making these payments until the problem went away? Were you going to leave me in the dark forever?”

The furrows of Hász’s brow deepened again. “You have a right to be angry,” he said. “I did keep you in the dark. I didn’t feel I could trust you not to tell her. You have an uncommon relationship with your wife. The two of you seem to confide everything to each other. But perhaps you can understand my position, too. I wanted to protect her, and I didn’t see how the knowledge could help either of you. I imagined it could only bring you pain.”

“I’d rather have worried,” Andras said. “I’d rather have had the pain than been kept ignorant of any problem that concerns my wife.”

“I know how Klara loves you,” György said. “I wish you and I had gotten to know each other better before you were conscripted. Maybe if we had, you’d understand why I felt it was right to act as I did.”

Andras could only nod in silence.

“But as to the question of Klara’s fidelity, I can assure you I’ve never felt the slightest uncertainty in that quarter. As far as I can divine, my sister adores you and you alone. She’s never given me reason to believe otherwise, not in all the time you’ve been away.” He took the poker in his hand and looked toward the fire again, and his shoulders rose and fell in a sigh. “If I had anything like my former property or influence, I might be more certain of being able to do something for your brother. The military has become increasingly greedy regarding bribes and favors. But I’ll see if I can speak to someone I know.”

“And what about Klara?” Andras said. “How can we be certain she’s safe?”

“For now, apparently, the payments protect her. We can hope that the authorities will lose interest before my assets are exhausted. If the war goes on, they’ll have more pressing worries. As for taking the course we took before-in 1920, I mean-Klara’s leaving the country is an impossibility, particularly in her current state. Her comings and goings are too closely watched. In any case, it’s impossible to get entry visas now to the countries where she might be safe. We’ll have to persevere, that’s all.”

“Klara is an intelligent woman,” Andras said. “Perhaps she could help us see a way through this.”

“I have the most profound admiration for my sister’s intelligence,” Hász said. “She’s managed brilliantly in adverse circumstances. But I don’t want these concerns to weigh upon her. I want her to feel safe as long as she can.”

“So do I,” Andras said. “But, as you observed, I’m not in the habit of keeping secrets from my wife.”

“You’ve got to promise me you won’t speak to her about it. I don’t like to place you in a position of incomplete honesty, but in this situation I find I have no choice.”

“You mean to say that I have no choice.”

“Understand me, Andras. We’ve invested a great deal in Klara’s safety already. If you were to tell her now, it might all have been in vain.”

“What if it were my wife’s wish not to bring her family to ruin?”

“What else can we do? Would you prefer that she turn herself in? Or that she risk her own life and your child’s in an escape attempt?” He got to his feet and paced before the fireplace. “I assure you I’ve considered the problem from every angle. I see no other course. I beg you to respect my judgment, Andras. You must believe that I have some insight into Klara’s character too.”

Though it still seemed a betrayal, Andras agreed to keep his silence. In fact he had no other choice; he had no money of his own, no high connections, no way to step between Klara and the law. And he was to leave again for Bánhida in the morning. At least the current arrangement would keep Klara protected while he was away. He thanked Hász for his pledge to see what might be done for Mátyás, and they parted with handshakes and serious looks that suggested they would move through this difficulty with the stoicism of Hungarian men. But as Andras left the house on Benczúr utca the news struck him again with all its original force. He felt as if he were walking through a different city, one that had lain all this time just behind the city he had known; the feeling brought to mind Monsieur Forestier’s stage sets, those palimpsestic architectures in which the familiar concealed the strange and terrifying. In this inside-out reality, the secret of Klara’s identity had become a secret kept from her, rather than one held by her; now Andras, no longer deceived, had agreed to become his wife’s deceiver.

He thought it might calm his nerves to go down to the river and stand on the Széchenyi Bridge. He needed some time to arrange the situation in his mind before he went home to Klara. How long after he’d entered the work service, he wondered, had Madame Novak gone to the authorities? Was it merely the memory of past wrongs that had sent her there, or had there been a more recent wound? What did he really know of the present situation between Klara and Novak? Was it possible that, despite György’s reassurances, Andras had been betrayed? A jolt of nausea went through him, and he had to stop at the curb and sit down. A stray mutt sniffed around his ankles; when he extended a hand toward the dog it drew back and ran away. He got up and pulled his coat closer, tightened his muffler around his throat. From Benczúr utca he walked to Bajza utca, and from Bajza to the tree-lined stretch of Andrássy út, where pedestrians huddled against the chilly wind and the streetcar sounded its familiar bell. But as he walked down Andrássy he found himself becoming increasingly anxious, and he realized that it was because he was approaching the Opera House, where, as far as he knew, Zoltán Novak was still director. It had been more than two years since he’d seen Novak; the party at Marcelle’s had been the last time. He wondered if the wounds Novak had suffered that night could have moved him to a cruel and subtle act-if he might have brought Klara’s peril to his wife’s attention, might have betrayed Klara through his knowledge that Edith would want to be rid of her. Andras stopped on the street before the Operaház and considered what he might say to Novak that very moment if he could walk into the man’s office and confront him. What accusations might he make, what would Novak admit? The knot of connection among the three of them, himself and Novak and Klara, was so convoluted that to pull at any one of its strands was to draw the whole mess tighter. It was possible that if Andras walked into that building he might emerge with the knowledge that Klara had betrayed him, had been unfaithful to him for months-even that the child she was carrying was not his own. But wasn’t it worse to stand outside in ignorance, worse to return to Bánhida and not know? The doors of the Operaház were open to the brisk afternoon; he could see men and women inside, waiting in line at the boxoffice window. He drew a breath and went in.

How many months had passed, he wondered, since he’d been inside a theater? It had been since his last summer in Paris-he and Klara had gone to see a dress rehearsal of La Fille Mal Gardée. Now he walked in through one of the Romanesque doorways of the performance space and made his way down the carpeted aisle. Onstage, the curtains had been drawn aside to reveal an Italian village square with a white marble fountain at its center. The buildings surrounding it were made of fake stone cut from yellow-painted pasteboard, with awnings of green-and-white-striped canvas. A carpenter bent over a set of steps leading into one of the buildings; the sound of his hammer in the open space of the auditorium gave Andras a pang of nostalgia. How he wished he were arriving here to install a set, or even to set up a coffee table for the actors and deliver their messages and fetch them when it was time to go onstage. How he wished he had a deskful of half-finished drawings waiting for him at home, a studio deadline looming in the near distance.

He ran to the front of the auditorium and climbed the steps at the side of the stage. The carpenter didn’t look up from his work. In the wings, a man who must have been the properties master was arranging props on their shelves; the whine of an electric saw rose from the set-building shop, and the smell of fresh-cut wood came to Andras with its layered suggestions of his father’s lumberyard and the Sarah-Bernhardt and Monsieur Forestier’s workshop and the labor camp in Subcarpathia. He wandered farther into the back hallways of the theater, up a set of stairs to the dressing rooms; the whitewashed doors, with their copperplate-lettered names in brass cardholders, chastely hid the disasters of makeup boxes and stained dressing gowns and plumed hats and torn stockings and dog-eared scripts and moldering armchairs and cracked mirrors and wilted bouquets that he knew must lie on the other side. When Klara had been a girl, he realized, she must have dressed for her performances in one of these rooms. He remembered a photograph from those days, Klara in a skirt of tattered leaves, her hair interwoven with twigs like a woodland fairy’s. He could almost see her sylphid shadow slipping across the hall from one room to another.

He walked down the hallway and climbed a flight of stairs; at the top, a hallway held another row of dressing rooms. The hall ended at a wooden door with a white enameled nameplate, the same one Novak had used at the Sarah-Bernhardt in Paris. There were the familiar words etched in black paint, their gold highlights and curlicues dimmed by the travel between Paris and Budapest: Zoltán Novak, Directeur. From behind the door came a deep cough. Andras raised a hand to knock, then let it drop. Now that he had arrived at this threshold, his courage had fled. He had no idea what he would say to Zoltán Novak. From within came another deep cough, and then a third, closer. The door opened, and Andras found himself face-to-face with Novak himself. He was pale, wasted, his eyes bright with what appeared to be fever; his moustache drooped, and his suit hung loose on his frame. When he saw Andras before him his shoulders went slack.

“Lévi,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

“I don’t know,” Andras said. “I suppose I wanted a word with you.”

Novak stood for a long moment before Andras, taking in the Munkaszolgálat uniform and the other changes that accompanied it. He let out a long and labored exhalation, then lifted his eyes to Andras’s.

“I must say you’re the last person I would have expected to find outside my door,” he said. “And, to be perfectly honest, among the last I might have wanted to see. But since you’re here, you might as well come in.”

Andras found himself following Novak into the dim sanctum of the office and standing before the large leather-topped desk. Novak waved a hand toward a chair, and Andras took off his cap and sat down. He glanced around at the shelves of libretti, the ledger books, the photographs of opera stars in costume. It was the Sarah-Bernhardt office refigured in a smaller, darker form.

“Well,” Novak said. “You might as well tell me what brings you here, Lévi.”

Andras folded and unfolded his Munkaszolgálat cap. “I had some news this afternoon,” he said. “I’ve just learned that your wife revealed Klara’s identity to the Hungarian police.”

“You learned that just this afternoon?” Novak said. “But it happened nearly two years ago.”

Andras’s face flamed, but he kept his eyes steady on Novak’s. “György Hász saw to it that I knew nothing. I went to him today to see if he could help exempt my brother from front-line duty, and he told me that his funds were engaged in keeping my wife out of jail.”

Novak got up to pour himself a drink from the decanter that stood on a table in the corner. He glanced back over his shoulder. Andras shook his head.

“It’s just tea,” Novak said. “I can’t take spirits anymore.”

“No, thank you,” Andras said.

Novak returned to the desk with his glass of tea. He was pale and haggard, but his eyes burned with a terrible fierce light, the source of which Andras was afraid to guess. “The government is a clever extortionist,” Novak said.

“Thanks to Edith, Klara’s life is in danger,” Andras said. “And my brother is on a train to Belgorod as we speak. I’m to rejoin my company in Bánhida tomorrow morning and can do nothing about any of it.”

“We all have our tragedies,” Novak said. “Those are yours. I’ve got mine.”

“How can you speak that way?” Andras said. “It’s your own wife who did this. And it wouldn’t surprise me if you’d had a hand in it.”

“Edith did what she got it into her mind to do,” Novak said curtly. “She heard a rumor from a friend that Klara had come back to town. Heard she’d married you, and that you’d gone to the work service. I suppose she thought I might go looking for Klara, or that Klara might look for me.” He spoke the last words in a tone of bitter irony. “Edith wanted to give her what she thought she deserved. She thought it would be a simple matter, but she didn’t count on the Ministry of Justice to be so willing to be bought off. When she heard about the arrangement they’d made with your brother-in-law, she was furious.”

“And now? How do I know she won’t do something more, or worse?”

“Edith died of ovarian cancer last spring,” Novak said. He gave Andras a challenging look, as if daring him to show pity.

“I’m sorry,” Andras said.

“Spare me your condolences. If you’re sorry, it’s only because you’ve lost the chance to hold her accountable for what she did. But she was punished enough while she lived. Her death was a terrible one. My son and I had to watch her go through it. Carry that back with you to the work service, if you want something to ease your anger.”

Andras twisted his hat in silence. There was no way to reply. Novak, seeing he’d rendered Andras mute, seemed to relent a little. “I miss her,” he said. “I was never as good to her as she deserved. I suspect it’s my own guilt that makes me cruel to you.”

“I shouldn’t have come here,” Andras said.

“I’m glad you did. I’m glad to know Klara’s still safe, at least. I’ve tried not to hear of her at all, but I’m glad to know that much.” He began to cough deeply, and had to wipe his eyes and take a drink of his tea. “I won’t know more of her for a long time, if ever. I’m leaving here in a month. I’ve been called too.”

“Called where?”

“To the labor service.”

“But that’s impossible,” Andras said. “You’re not of military age. You have your position here at the Opera. You’re not even Jewish.”

“I’m Jewish enough for them,” Novak said. “My mother was a Jew. I converted as a young man, but no one cares much about that now. I shouldn’t have been allowed to keep this job after the race laws changed, but some friends of mine in the Ministry of Culture chose to look the other way. They’ve all lost their jobs by now. As for my position in the community, that’s part of the problem. They mean to remove me from it. Apparently there’s a new secret quota for the labor battalions. A certain percentage of conscripts must be so-called prominent Jews. I’ll be in illustrious company. My colleague at the symphony was called to the same battalion, and we’ve just learned that the former president of the engineering college will be joining us too. Age isn’t a factor. Nor, unfortunately, is fitness for service. I’ve never quite shaken the consumption that brought me back here in ’37. You’ve been through the service yourself; you know as well as I do that I’m not likely to return.”

“Surely they won’t make you do hard labor,” Andras said. “Surely they’ll give you a job in an office, at least.”

“Now, Andras,” Novak said, with a note of reproach. “We both know that’s not true. What will happen will happen.”

“What about your son?” Andras said.

“Yes, what about my son?” Novak said. “What about him?” His voice trailed into silence, and they sat together without saying a word. Into Andras’s mind came the image of his own child, that boy or girl sitting cross-legged in Klara’s womb-that child who might never be born, and who, if born, might never live past babyhood, and who might then live only to see the world consumed by flames. Novak, watching Andras, seemed to apprehend a new grief of his own.

“So,” he said, finally. “You understand. You’re a father too.”

“Soon,” Andras said. “In a few months.”

“And you’ll be finished with the labor service by then?”

“Who knows? Anything might happen.”

“It’ll be all right,” he said. “You’ll make it home. You’ll be with Klara and the child. György will maintain his arrangement with the authorities. It’s not her they want, you know; it’s his money. If they prosecute her it will only bring their own guilt to light.”

Andras nodded, wanting to believe it. He was surprised to feel reassured, and then ashamed that it was Novak who had reassured him-Novak, who had lost everything but his young son. “Who will look after your boy?” he asked again.

“Edith’s parents. And my sister. It’s fortunate we came back when we did,” Novak said. “If we’d stayed in France, we might be in an internment camp by now. The boy too. They’re not sparing the children.”

“God,” Andras said, and put his head into his hands. “What’ll become of us? All of us?”

Novak looked up at him from beneath his graying brows; the last trace of anger had gone out of his eyes. “In the end, only one thing,” he said. “Some by fire, some by water. Some by the sword, some by wild beasts. Some by hunger, some by thirst. You know how the prayer goes, Andras.”

“Forgive me,” Andras said. “Forgive me for saying you weren’t a Jew.” For it was the verse from the Rosh Hashanah liturgy, the prayer that prefigured all ends. Soon he would say that prayer himself, in the camp at Bánhida among his workmates.

“I am a Jew,” Novak said. “That was why I hired you in Paris. You were my brother.”

“I’m sorry, Novak-úr,” Andras said. “I’m sorry. I never meant you any harm. You were always kind to me.”

“It’s not your fault,” Novak said. “I’m glad you came here. At least this way we can take leave of each other.”

Andras rose and put on his military cap. Novak extended his hand across the desk, and Andras took it. There was nothing more to do except bid each other farewell. They did it in few words, and then Andras left the office and pulled the door closed behind him.

CHAPTER THIRTY. Barna and the General

THAT EVENING, when he returned home to the apartment on Nefelejcs utca, he told Klara nothing of what had passed between him and her brother; nor did he mention that he had seen Novak. He said only that he’d been on a long walk around the city, that he had been thinking about what he might do when he returned from the service. He knew she’d taken note of his anxious distraction, but she didn’t ask him to explain his mood. The fact that he was going back to Bánhida the next day must have seemed explanation enough. They ate a quiet dinner in the kitchen, their chairs close together at the little table. Afterward, in the sitting room, they listened to Sibelius on the phonograph and watched the fire burning in the grate. Andras wore a flannel robe Klara had bought for him, and a pair of lambswool slippers. He couldn’t have imagined a setting more replete with comfort, but soon he’d be gone and Klara would be alone again to face whatever might come. The more comfortable he felt, the more contented and drowsy Klara looked as she lay back against the sofa cushions, the more painful it was to imagine what lay on the other side. György was right, he thought, to have protected Klara from the knowledge of what had happened. Her tranquility seemed worth his own dishonesty. She was utterly serene as she spoke of the changes pregnancy had brought about in her body, and of the comfort of being able to talk to her mother about them. She was tender with Andras, physically affectionate; she wanted to make love, and he was happy for the distraction. But when they were in bed, her body surprising in its new balance, he had to turn his face away. He was afraid she would sense he was keeping something from her, and would demand to know what it was.

Once he was back at Bánhida he was spared that danger, at least. He had never been so glad to have to do heavy work. He could numb his mind with the endless loading of brown coal into dusty carts, the endless pulling and pushing of the carts along the tracks. He could stun his limbs with calisthenics in the evening lineup, could submit to the drudgery of chores-the cleaning of barracks, the cutting of firewood, the hauling away of kitchen garbage-in the hope that the exhaustion would allow him to fall asleep at once, before his mind opened its kit bag of worries and began to display them in graphic detail, one after the next. Even if he managed to avoid that grim parade, he was at the mercy of his dreams. In the one that recurred most frequently, he would come upon Ilana lying in the hospital in a place that wasn’t quite Paris but wasn’t Budapest either, on the brink of death; then it wasn’t Ilana but Klara, and he knew he had to give his blood to her, but he couldn’t figure out how to transfer it from his own veins into hers. He stood at her bedside with a scalpel in his hand, and she lay in bed pale and terrified, and he thought he must first press the scalpel to his wrist and then think of a solution. Night after night he woke in the dark among the coughs and snores of his squad-mates, certain that Klara had died and that he had done nothing to save her. His sole consolation was that his term of service would end on December fifteenth, two weeks before she was due. He knew that it was foolish to pin all his hopes on that release date when the Munkaszolgálat showed so little respect for the promises it had made to its conscripts; he tried to remember the hard lessons of disappointment he’d learned in his first year of service. But the date was all he had, and he held on to it like a talisman. December fifteenth, December fifteenth: He said it under his breath as he worked, as if the repetition might hasten its arrival.

One morning when he was feeling particularly desperate, he went to the prayer service before work. A group of men met in an empty storage building every day at dawn; some of them had tiny dog-eared prayer books, and there was a miniature Torah from which they read on Mondays, Thursdays, and Shabbos. Inside his tallis, Andras found himself thinking not of the prayers, but, as often happened when he performed any religious observance, of his parents. When he’d written to tell them Klara was pregnant, his father had written back to say they’d make a trip to Budapest at once. Andras had been skeptical. His parents hated to travel. They hated the noise and expense and crowds, and they hated the crush of Budapest. But a few weeks later they had gone to visit Klara and had stayed for three days. Andras’s mother had promised to come back before the baby was born and to stay as long as Klara needed her.

She must have known it would be a comfort to Andras. She was expert at comforting him, at making him feel safe; she had done it unfailingly all through his childhood. During the silent Amidah, what came to him was a memory from Konyár: For his sixth birthday he’d been given a wind-up tin circus train with little tin animals rattling behind the bars of their carriages. You could open the carriages to take out the elephants and lions and bears, who could then be made to perform in a circus ring you’d drawn in the dust. The toy had come from Budapest in a red cardboard box. It so exceeded any Konyár child’s imagining of a toy that it made Andras the subject of jealous rage among his classmates-most notably the two blond boys who chased him home from school one afternoon, trying to catch him and take the train away. He ran with the red cardboard box clutched against his chest, ran toward the figure of his mother, whom he could see up ahead in the yard: She was beating rugs on wooden racks at the edge of the orchard. She turned at the sound of the boys’ approaching footsteps. By that time Andras couldn’t have been three meters away. But before he could reach her, his foot caught on an apple-tree root and he flew forward, the red box leaving his hands in a rising arc as he threw out his hands to catch himself. In one graceful motion his mother dropped her rug-beating baton and caught the box. The footsteps of Andras’s pursuers came to a halt. Andras raised his head to see his mother tuck the train box under one arm and pick up her rug-beater in the other hand. She didn’t make a move, just stood there with the tool upraised. It was a stout branch with a sort of flat round basket fixed to one end. She took a single step toward the two blond boys. Though Andras knew his mother to be a gentle person-she had never struck any of her sons-her posture seemed to suggest that she was ready to beat Andras’s attackers with just as much fervor as she had employed in beating her rugs. Andras got up in time to see the blond boys fleeing up the road, their bare feet raising clouds of dust. His mother handed him the red box and suggested that he keep the train at home for a while. Andras had entered the house with the sense that his mother was a superhuman creature, ready to fly to his aid in moments of peril. The feeling had faded soon enough; not long afterward he’d left for school in Debrecen, where his mother couldn’t protect him. But the incident had left a deep imprint upon him. He could feel his mother’s power now as if it were all happening again: The red cardboard box of his life was flying through the air, and his mother had stretched out her hands to catch it.

When he wasn’t consumed with thoughts of Klara, he was thinking about his brothers. The mail distribution center had become a source of constant dread. Every time he passed it he imagined receiving a telegram that brought terrible news about Mátyás’s fate. There had been no word since his deployment to the east, and György’s efforts to help him had met with frustration. György had sent a series of letters to high Munkaszolgálat officials, but had been told that no one could bother with a problem of this scale when there was a war to be fought. If he wanted to arrange Mátyás’s exemption from service he would have to contact the boy’s battalion commander in Belgorod. Further inquiry revealed that Mátyás’s battalion had finished its service in Belgorod and had been sent farther east; now the battalion command headquarters was situated somewhere near Rostov-on-Don. György sent a barrage of telegrams to the commander but heard nothing for weeks. Then he received a brief handwritten note from a battalion secretary, who informed him that Mátyás’s company had slipped into the whiteout of the Russian winter. They had registered their location via wireless a few weeks earlier, but their communication lines had since been broken and their whereabouts could not be determined now with any certainty.

So this was what he had to picture: his brother Mátyás somewhere far away in the snow, the tether to his battalion command center severed, his company drifting with its army group toward deeper cold and danger. What was he eating? What was he wearing? Where was he sleeping? How could Andras lie in a bunk at night and eat bread every morning when his brother was lost in Ukraine? Did Mátyás imagine that Andras hadn’t tried to help him, or that György Hász had refused? Who was responsible for Mátyás’s current peril? Was it Edith Novak, who had spilled Klara’s secret? Was it Klara’s long-ago attackers? Was it Andras himself, whose connection to Klara had made the price of his brother’s freedom so high? Was it Miklós Horthy, whose desire to restore Hungary ’s territories had drawn him into the war, or Hitler, whose madness had driven him into Russia? How many other men besides Mátyás found themselves in extremis that winter, and how many more would die before the war was over?

It was some comfort to know that Tibor, at least, remained far from the front lines. His letters continued to drift in from Transylvania according to the whims of the military postal service. Three weeks would go by without a word, then a clutch of five letters would come, then a single postcard the next day, and then nothing for two weeks. During his time in the Carpathians, the tone of Tibor’s writing had devolved from its casual banter to a stricken monotone: Dear Andras, another day of bridge-building. I miss Ilana terribly. Worry about her every minute. Plenty of disaster here: Today my workmate Roszenzweig broke his arm. A complex open fracture. I have no splints or casting materials or antibiotics, of course. Had to set the fracture with strip of planking from the barracks floor. Or, Eight servicemen down with pneumonia last week. Three died. How it grieves me to think of it! I know I could have kept them hydrated if I hadn’t been sent out with the road crew. And another letter, in its entirety: Dear Andráska, I can’t sleep. Ilana is in her 21st week now. Last time the miscarriage occurred in the 22nd. Andras wished he could write to Tibor about what he’d learned in Budapest, but he didn’t want to compound Tibor’s fears with his own. He wasn’t alone in his anxiety, though; every week a pair of ivory-colored envelopes arrived from Benczúr utca with words of reassurance. One would be from György-No news, no new threats. All goes on as before-and the other would carry Klara’s mother’s seal-Dear Andras, know that we are all thinking of you and wishing you a speedy return. How Klara misses you, dear boy! And how happy it will make her when you come home. The doctor believes her to be getting on quite well. Once she sent Andras a small package, the contents of which had evidently been so attractive that nothing remained in the box except her note: Andráska, here are a few sweets for you. If you like them, I’ll send more. Andras had brought the box back to the barracks to show it to Mendel, who had roared with laughter and suggested they display it on a shelf as an icon of life at Bánhida. It was a comfort, too, to have Mendel there; they would finish their terms of service together and would travel back to Budapest on the same train. At least that was what they planned, marking off the boxes on their hand-drawn calendar as the days grew colder and the distant hills faded to winter brown.

But on the twenty-fifth of November, a day whose gray blankness yielded in the evening to a confetti storm of snow, there was a telegram from György waiting for Andras at the central office. He tore it open with shaking hands and read that Klara had given birth the previous night, five weeks before her due date. They had a son, but he was very ill. Andras must come home at once.

It was a long time before he could move or speak. Other work servicemen tried to shuffle him aside to get to the counter; was he going to stand there all day? He made his way to the door of the office and staggered out into the snow. The lights of the camp had been lit early that evening. They formed a brilliant halo around the quadrangle, broken only by a brace of brighter, taller lights on either side of the administrative offices. Andras moved toward that bracket of lights as if toward a portal through which he might be conducted to Budapest. He had a son, but he was very ill. A son. A boy. His boy, and Klara’s. Fifty miles away. Two hours by train.

The guards who usually flanked the door had gone to supper. Andras went in unhindered. He passed by offices with electric heaters, telephones, mimeograph machines. He didn’t know where Major Barna’s office was, but he felt his way into the heart of the building, following the architectural lines of force. There, where he would have placed the major’s office if he had designed this building, was the major’s office. But its door was locked. Barna, too, had gone to supper. Andras went back outside into the blowing snow.

Everyone knew where the officers’ mess hall was. It was the only place at Bánhida from which the smell of real food issued. No thin broth, no hard bread there; instead they ate chicken and potatoes and mushroom soup, veal paprikás, stuffed cabbage, all of it with white bread. Servicemen who had been assigned to deliver coal or remove garbage from the officers’ mess hall had to suffer the aromas of those dishes. No serviceman, except those who waited on the officers, could enter the mess hall; it was guarded by soldiers with guns. But Andras approached the building without fear. He had a son. The first flush of his joy had mingled with the physical need to protect this child, to interpose his own body between him and whatever might do him harm. And Klara: If their child was dangerously ill, she needed him too. Guards with guns were of no consequence. The only thing that mattered was that he get out of Bánhida.

The guards at the door were not ones he recognized; they must have been fresh from Budapest. That was to Andras’s advantage. He approached the door and addressed himself to the shorter and stockier guard, a fellow who looked as though the smells of meat and roasted peppers were a torment to him.

“Telegram for Major Barna,” Andras said, raising the blue envelope in one hand.

The guard squinted at him in the glow of the electric lights. Snow swirled between them. “Where’s the adjutant?” he asked.

“He’s at dinner, too, sir,” Andras said. “Kovács at the communications center ordered me to bring it myself.”

“Leave it with me,” the guard said. “I’ll see he gets it.”

“I was ordered to deliver it in person and wait for a reply.”

The short stocky guard glanced at his counterpart, a bullish young soldier half asleep at his post. Then he beckoned Andras closer and bent his head to him. “What do you really want?” he asked. “Work servicemen don’t deliver telegrams to camp commanders. I may be new here, but I’m not an idiot.” He held Andras’s gaze steady with his own, and Andras’s instinct was to answer truthfully.

“My wife just gave birth five weeks early,” he said. “The baby’s sick. I have to get home. I want to ask for a special leave.”

The guard laughed. “In the middle of dinner? You must be crazy.”

“It can’t wait,” Andras said. “I’ve got to get home now.”

The guard seemed to consider what might be done. He looked over his shoulder into the mess hall, and then at the bullish young soldier again. “Hey, Mohács,” he said. “Cover guard duty for a minute, will you? I have to take this fellow inside.”

The bullish man shrugged, made a grunt of assent, and sank back almost immediately into his half-conscious state.

“All right,” said the first soldier. “Come in. I’ll have to pat you down.”

Andras, speechless with gratitude, followed the soldier into the vestibule and submitted to a search. When the guard had determined that Andras was not carrying a weapon, he put a hand on his arm and said, “Come with me. And don’t speak to anyone, understand?”

Andras nodded, and they stepped into the clamor of the officers’ dining room. The long tables were arranged in rows, the officers seated according to rank. Barna dined with his lieutenants at a raised table overlooking the others. At his side was a high-ranked officer Andras had never seen before, a compact silver-haired man in a coat bright with braid, his shoulders bristling with decorations. He had a fine steely beard in an antiquated style, and a gold-rimmed monocle. He looked like an old general from the Great War.

“Who is that?” Andras asked the guard.

“No idea,” the guard said. “They don’t tell us anything. But it looks like you’ve picked a good night to make your début in dinner theater.” He led Andras to another soldier who stood at attention near the head table, and he bent his head to that soldier’s ear and said a few words. The soldier nodded and went to an adjutant who was sitting at one of the tables close to the front. He bent to the adjutant and spoke, and the adjutant raised his head from his dinner and regarded Andras with an expression of wonderment and pity. Slowly he got up from his bench and went to the head table, where he saluted Major Barna and repeated the message, glancing back over his shoulder at Andras. Barna’s brows drew together and his mouth hardened into a white line. He put down his fork and knife and got to his feet. The men fell silent. The splendid elderly officer glanced up in inquiry.

Barna drew himself to his full height. “Where is this Lévi?” he said.

Andras had never heard his name sound so much like a curse. He struggled to keep his shoulders straight as he answered, “Here I am, sir.”

“Step forward, Lévi,” said the major.

It was the second time Barna had given him that command. He remembered well what had happened the first time. He took a few steps forward and dropped his gaze to the floor.

“You see, sir,” Barna said, addressing the decorated gentleman beside him. “This is why we can’t be too careful about the liberties we give our laborers. Do you see this cockroach?” He indicated Andras with his hand. “I’ve disciplined him before. He dared to be insolent to me on an earlier occasion. And here he is again.”

“What was the earlier occasion?” the general said-with, Andras thought, a hint of mockery, almost as though it might please him to hear of someone’s insolence to Barna.

But Barna didn’t seem to catch the note. “It was when he first arrived,” he said, and narrowed his eyes at Andras. “Did you think I’d forgotten, Lévi? I had to strip him of his rank.” Barna smiled at the elder officer. “He tried to cling to it, so I punished him.”

“Why was he stripped of rank?”

“Because he’d misplaced his foreskin,” Barna said.

The room broke out in laugher, but the general frowned at his dinner plate. Barna didn’t seem to notice that either. “Now he’s come to us with an important request,” he went on. “Why don’t you step forward and state your business, Lévi?”

Andras took a step forward. He refused to be cowed by Barna, though his pulse pounded deafeningly in his temples. He held the telegram in his clenched hand. “Request permission for special family leave, sir,” he said.

“What’s so urgent?” Barna said. “Does your wife need a fuck?”

More laughter from the men.

“You can be sure that problem will take care of itself,” Barna said. “It always does.”

“With your permission, sir,” Andras began again, his voice tight with rage.

“What’s that in your hand, Lévi? Adjutant, bring me that piece of paper.”

The adjutant approached Andras and took the telegram from his hand. Andras had never felt such profound humiliation or fury. He stood no more than eight feet from Barna; in another moment he might have his hands around the major’s throat. The thought was some consolation as he watched Barna scan the telegram. Barna raised his eyebrows in bemused surprise.

“What do you know?” he said to the assembled men. “Mrs. Lévi just had a kid. Lévi is a father.”

Applause from the men, along with whistles and cheers.

“But the baby’s very sick. Come home at once. That sounds bad.”

Andras fought the impulse to run at Barna. He bit his lip and fixed his eyes again on the floor. What he did not want was to be shot.

“Well, there’s no use giving you a special leave now, is there?” Barna said. “If the boy’s really that sick, you can just go home when he’s dead.”

A dense silence filled Andras’s ears like the rushing of a train. Barna looked around the room, his hands on the table; the men seemed to understand that he wanted them to laugh again, and there was a swell of uncomfortable laughter.

“You’re dismissed, Lévi,” Barna said. “I’d like to enjoy my coffee now.”

Before anyone could move, the elderly general brought his hand down against the table. “This is a disgrace,” he said, getting to his feet, his voice graveled with anger. He turned a thick-browed scowl on Barna. “You are a disgrace.”

Barna gave a crooked smile, as if this were all part of the joke.

“Don’t you smirk at me, Major,” the general said. “Apologize to this serviceman at once.”

Barna hesitated a moment, then nodded at the guard who’d brought Andras in. “Remove that clod of dirt from my sight.”

“Did you mishear me?” the general said. “I ordered you to apologize.”

Barna’s eyes darted from Andras to the general to the officers at their tables. “We’re done with this, sir,” he said, in an undertone that Andras was close enough to hear.

“You’re not done, Major,” the general said. “Get down off this platform and apologize to that man.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You heard what I said.”

The men sat in silence, watching. Barna stood still for a long time, seeming to wage an inner battle; his color changed from red to purple to white. The general stood beside him with his arms crossed over his chest. There was no way for him to disobey. The elder man held unquestionable military superiority. Barna stepped down off the dais and marched toward Andras. He paused in front of him, and, with a medicine-swallowing grimace, extended a hand. Andras sent the general a look of gratitude and took Barna’s hand. But no sooner had his own hand touched Barna’s than Barna spat in his face and slapped him with the hand Andras had touched. Without another word, the major made his way through the rows of tables and went out into the night. Andras drew a sleeve across his face, numb with pain.

The general remained at the center of the dais, looking down upon the officers on their benches. Everything had come to a standstill: The servicemen who waited on the officers had paused at the edges of the room with dirty plates in their hands; the cook had ceased to bang the pots in the kitchen; the officers were silent, their tin forks and spoons laid beside their plates.

“The Royal Hungarian Army is dishonored by what has happened here,” the general said. “When I entered the army, my first commanding officer was a Jew. He was a brave man who lost his life at Lemberg in the service of his country. Whatever Hungary is now, it’s not the country he died to defend.” He picked up the crumpled telegram form and handed it down to Andras. Then he threw his napkin onto the table and commanded the young guard to bring Andras to his quarters at once.

General Martón was quartered in the largest and most comfortable set of rooms at Bánhida, which meant that he had a bedroom and a sitting room, if the cold and uninviting cubicle in which Andras found himself could have been called a sitting room; it contained nothing but a table with an ashtray and a pair of rough wooden chairs so narrow and straight-backed as to discourage all but the briefest sitting. Electric lights blazed. The fireplace was dark. An assistant was packing the general’s things in the adjacent room. As Andras stood near the door, waiting to hear what the general would say, the general gave orders for his car to be brought around.

“I won’t stay at this place another night,” he told a frightened-looking secretary who hovered near his side. “My inspection of this camp is complete, as far as I’m concerned. Send word to Major Barna to tell him I’ve gone.”

“Yes, sir,” the secretary said.

“And go to the office and get this man’s dossier,” he said. “Be quick about it.”

“Yes, sir,” the secretary said, and hurried out.

The general turned to Andras. “Tell me, now,” he said. “How much time is left in your army service?”

“Two weeks, sir,” Andras said.

“Two weeks. And in relation to the time you’ve already spent in the service, do you consider two weeks to be a long time?”

“Under the circumstances, sir, it’s an eternity.”

“What would you say, then, to getting out of this hellhole altogether?”

“I’m not sure I understand you, sir.”

“I’m going to arrange for your discharge from Bánhida,” the general said. “You’ve served here long enough. I can’t guarantee you won’t be called up again, particularly not with matters as uncertain as they are. But I can get you to Budapest tonight. You can ride in my car. I’m going there at once. I was sent to conduct a detailed inspection of Barna’s establishment here, as he’s being considered for promotion, but I’ve already seen as much as I care to see.” He took a box of cigarettes from his breast pocket and tapped one out, then put it away again as if he didn’t have the heart to smoke it. “The gall of that man,” he said. “He’s unfit to lead a donkey, let alone a labor battalion. It’s not the Jews that are the problem, it’s men like him. Who do you think got us into this mess? At war with Russia and Britain at once! What do you think will come of that?”

Andras couldn’t bring himself to consider the question. There was another issue that seemed, at that moment, to be of even greater magnitude. “Do I understand you, sir?” he asked. “Am I to leave for Budapest tonight?”

The general gave a brisk nod. “You’d better pack your things. We’ll leave in half an hour.”

At the barracks there was general incredulity, and then, when Andras had related the story, raucous cheering. Mendel kissed Andras on both cheeks, promising to come to the apartment on Nefelejcs utca as soon as he returned to Budapest. When the half hour had passed, everyone came out to see the black car pull up and the driver help Andras lift his duffel bag into the sloping trunk. When was the last time anyone had helped one of them, the workers, lift a heavy object? When was the last time any of them had ridden in a car? The men clustered near the barracks steps, the wind lifting the lapels of their shabby coats, and Andras felt a stab of guilt to think of leaving them. He stood before Mendel and placed a hand on his arm.

“I wish you were coming,” he said.

“It’s only two more weeks,” Mendel said.

“What will you do about The Biting Fly?”

Mendel smiled. “Maybe it’s time to shut down the operation. The flies are all dead anyway.”

“Two weeks, then,” Andras said, and squeezed Mendel’s shoulder.

“Good luck, Parisi.”

“Let’s go,” the driver called. “The general’s waiting.”

Andras climbed into the front seat and shut the door. The motor roared, and they drove off to the officers’ quarters. When they arrived, it became clear that there had been some further argument between Barna and the general; Barna could be seen pacing furiously inside the general’s quarters as the general emerged with his traveling bag. The driver threw the general’s bag into the trunk and the general slid into the backseat without a word.

Before Andras could grasp the idea that he was truly leaving, that he would never have to return to the sulfurous coal pits of Bánhida again, the car had pulled through the gate and onto the road. All through that long dark drive, the only sounds were the purring of the engine and the susurrus of tires on snow. As the headlights cut through endless flocks of snowflakes, Andras thought again of that New Year’s Day when he and Klara had gone to the Square Barye to watch the sun rise over the chilly Seine. That long-ago January morning, he would never have believed that he would someday be the father of Klara’s child, that he would someday be flying through the night in a Hungarian Army limousine to see their newborn son. He remembered the Schubert piece Klara had played for him one winter evening, Der Erlkönig, about a father carrying his sick child on horseback through the night while the elf-king followed them, trying to get his hands on the child. He remembered the father’s desperation, the son’s inexorable slide toward death. He had always envisioned the chase taking place on a night like this. His hands grew cold in the heat of the car. He turned around to see what lay behind them. All he could see was the general snoring softly in the backseat, and, through the small oval of rear-window glass, a swarm of snowflakes lit up red in the taillights.

It took them an hour and a half to get to Gróf Apponyi Albert Hospital. When the car pulled to a stop, the general awoke and cleared his throat. He settled his hat onto his head and straightened his decorated jacket.

“All right, now,” he said. “Let’s go.”

“You don’t mean to come inside with me, sir,” Andras said.

“I mean to finish what I started. Give the driver your address and he’ll leave your things with the caretaker there.”

Andras gave the driver the address on Nefelejcs utca. The driver jumped out to open the door for the general, and the general waited until Andras had joined him on the curb. He turned and marched into the hospital with Andras at his side.

At the night attendant’s desk, a narrow-shouldered man with an eye patch sat with his feet propped on a metal garbage can, reading a Hungarian translation of Mein Kampf. When he looked up to see the general approaching, he dropped the book and got to his feet. His good eye shifted between Andras and the general; he seemed baffled by the sight of this decorated leader of the Hungarian Army in the company of a gaunt, shabby work serviceman. He stammered an inquiry as to how he might serve the general.

“This man needs to see his wife and son,” the general said.

The attendant glanced away down the hall, as if it might yield some form of help or enlightenment. The hall remained empty. The attendant twisted his hands. “Visiting hours are between four and six, sir,” he said.

“This man is visiting now,” the general said. “His surname is Lévi.”

The attendant paged through a logbook on his desk. “Mrs. Lévi is on the third floor,” he said. “Maternity ward. But sir, I’m not supposed to let anyone upstairs. I’ll be fired.”

The general took a name card from a leather case. “If anyone gives you trouble, tell them to discuss the situation with me.”

“Yes, sir,” the attendant said, and sank back down into his chair.

The general turned to Andras with another name card. “If there’s anything else I can do, send word to me.”

“I don’t know how to thank you,” Andras said.

“Be a good father to your son,” the general said, and put a hand on Andras’s shoulder. “May he live to see a more enlightened age than our own.” He held Andras’s gaze a moment longer, then turned and made his way out into the snow. The door closed behind him with a breath of cold air.

The attendant stared after the general in amazement. “How’d you make a friend like that?” he asked Andras.

“Luck, I suppose,” Andras said. “It runs in my family.”

“Well, go on,” said the attendant, cocking a thumb toward the stairway. “If anyone asks who let you in, it wasn’t me.”

Andras raced up the staircase to the third floor, then followed signs to Klara’s ward. There, in the semidark of the hospital night, new mothers lay in a double row of beds with bassinets at their feet. Some of the bassinets held swaddled babies; other babies nursed, or drowsed in their mothers’ arms. But where was Klara? Where was her bed, and which of these children was his son? He ran the row twice before he saw her: Klara Lévi, his wife, pale and damp-haired, her mouth swollen, her eyes ringed in dark shadow, lying in a dead sleep in the glow of a green-shaded light. He crept closer, his heart hammering, to see what she held in her arms. But when he reached the bedside he saw that it was an empty blanket, nothing more. The bassinet at the foot of her bed was empty too.

The ground seemed to fall away beneath him. So he had come too late despite everything. The world held no possibility for happiness; his life and Klara’s were a ruin of grief. He covered his mouth, afraid he’d cry aloud. Someone laid a cool hand on his arm; he turned to see a nurse in a white apron.

“How did you get in?” she asked, more perplexed than angry. “Is this your wife?”

“The child,” he said, in a whisper. “Where is he?”

The nurse drew her eyebrows together. “Are you the father?”

Andras nodded mutely.

The nurse beckoned him into the hall, toward a bright-lit room filled with padded tables, infant scales, cloth diapers, feeding bottles and nipples. Two nurses stood at the tables, changing babies’ diapers.

“Krisztina,” said the nurse. “Show Mr. Lévi his son.”

The nurse at the changing table held up a tiny pink froglet, naked except for a blue cotton hat and white socks, a bandage covering its umbilicus. As Andras watched, the baby raised a fist to its open mouth and extended its petal of a tongue.

“Great God,” Andras said. “My son.”

“Two kilos,” the nurse said. “Not bad for a baby born so early. He has a bit of a lung infection, poor thing, but he’s doing better than he was at first.”

“Oh, my God. Let me look at him.”

“You can hold him if you like,” the one called Krisztina said. She pinned the baby’s diaper, wrapped him in a blanket, and set him in Andras’s arms. Andras didn’t dare breathe. The baby seemed to weigh almost nothing. Its eyes were closed, its skin translucent, its hair a dark whorl on its head. Here was his son, his son. He was this person’s father. He put his cheek to the curve of the baby’s head.

“You can take him back to your wife,” Krisztina said. “As long as you’re here in the middle of the night, you might as well be of use.”

Andras nodded, unable to move or speak. In his arms he held what seemed the sum of his existence. The baby wrestled its blankets, opened its mouth, and pronounced a strong one-note cry.

“He’s hungry,” the nurse said. “You’d better take him to her.”

And so, for the first time, he answered his son’s need: He brought him down the ward to Klara’s bed. At the sound of the baby’s next cry, Klara opened her eyes and pushed herself up onto her elbows. Andras bent over her and put their son into her arms.

“Andráska,” she said, her eyes filling with tears. “Am I dreaming?”

He bent to kiss her. He was shaking so hard he had to sit down on the bed. He embraced them both at once, Klara and the baby, holding them as close as he dared.

“How can it be?” she said. “How did you get here?”

He pulled back just far enough to look at her. “A general gave me a ride in his car.”

“Don’t tease me, darling! I’ve just had a cesarean.”

“I’m perfectly serious. I’ll tell you the story sometime.”

“I had a terrible fear that something had happened to you,” she said.

“There’s nothing to fear now,” he said, and stroked her damp hair.

“Look at this boy,” she said. “Our little son.” She pulled the blanket lower so he could see the baby’s face, his curled hands, his delicate wrists.

“Our son.” He shook his head, still unable to believe it. “I’ve seen him. He was au naturel when I came in.”

The baby turned his face toward Klara’s breast and opened his mouth against her nightgown. She unbuttoned the gown and settled him in to nurse, stroking his featherlike hair. “He looks just like you,” she said, and her eyes filled again.

“Életem.” My life. “Five weeks early! You must have been terrified.”

“My mother was with me. She brought me to the hospital herself. And now to have you here, too, even if just for a short time!”

“I’m finished with Bánhida,” he said. “My service is over.” He could hardly believe it himself, but it had happened. Nothing could make him go back. “I’m home with you now,” he told her. And slowly that truth came to seem real to him as he and Klara sat on her bed at Gróf Apponyi Albert Hospital, laughing and crying over the sleek downy head of their little son.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE. Tamás Lévi

THEY NAMED THE BABY after Klara’s father. The first weeks of his life were a blue haze to Andras: There were ten days in the hospital, during which the baby lost weight, fought his lung infection, nearly died, and recovered again; there was the homecoming to their apartment on Nefelejcs utca, which seemed not really to be their home at all, stuffed as it was with flowers and gifts and guests who had come to see the baby; there was Klara’s mother, unfailingly solicitous but incapable of doing anything practical to help, as her own babies had been tended entirely by nurses; there was Andras’s mother, who knew how to tend to the baby’s needs, but who also felt it important to show Klara the correct way to pin a diaper or elicit a baby’s eructation; there was Ilana, now seven months pregnant, cooking endless Italian meals for Andras and Klara and their well-wishers; there was Mendel Horovitz, liberated from the Munkaszolgálat, sitting in the kitchen until the middle of the night, sipping vodka and inviting Andras to describe in detail the vicissitudes of new parenthood; and then there was the plain relentless work of caring for a newborn child: the feedings every two hours, the diaper changes, the brief and broken sleep, the moments of incredulous joy and bottomless fear. Every time the baby cried it seemed to Andras he might never stop, that his crying would exhaust him and make him sick again. But Klara, who had already raised a child, understood that the baby was crying because he had a simple need, and she knew she could determine the need and meet it. Soon the baby would stop crying; the house would fall into a state of delicate peace. Andras and Klara would sit together and look at the baby, their Tamás, admiring the eyebrows that were like hers, the mouth that was like his, the chin with its dimple like Elisabet’s.

Through those dreamlike days he was aware of little else beside the ebb and flow of Tamás Lévi’s needs. The war seemed far away and irrelevant, the Munkaszolgálat a bad dream. But on the night of the seventh of December, the eve of Tamás’s bris, Andras’s father brought the news that the Japanese had bombed an American naval base in Hawaii. Pearl Harbor: The name conjured a tranquil image, pale gray sky above an expanse of nacreous water. But the attack had been a bloodbath. The Japanese had badly damaged or destroyed four U.S. battleships and nearly two hundred planes, and had killed more than twenty-four hundred men and wounded twelve hundred others. Andras knew that the States would declare war on Japan now, closing the ring of the war around the earth. And in fact the declaration came the next morning as Tamás Lévi entered the covenant of circumcision. Three days later Germany and Italy declared war on the United States, and then Hungary declared war on the Western Allies.

As Andras stood at the bedroom window that night, listening to a volley of voices from Bethlen Gábor tér, he found himself considering what the new declaration of war might mean for his little family, and for his brothers and his parents and Mendel Horovitz. The city might be bombed. What had become scarce would get scarcer. More troops would be called, more labor servicemen deployed. He had just told Klara that he was home for good, but how long would this spell of freedom last? The KMOF wouldn’t care that he was just now beginning to recover the health and strength he’d lost during his months in the Munkaszolgálat. They would use him as they’d used him all along, as a simple tool in a war whose aim was to destroy him. But they didn’t have him yet, he thought: Not yet. For the moment he was here at home, in this quiet bedroom with his sleeping wife and child. He could look for work, could begin to support Klara and the baby. And he could give something to György Hász, some small part of the vast sum he was paying each month to keep Klara out of the hands of the authorities. He had hoped he might approach Mendel Horovitz’s editor at the Evening Courier and speak to him about a position in layout or illustration, but Mendel had left the Courier when he’d been conscripted; his old job had long since been filled, and the editor himself had been fired and called into the Munkaszolgálat. Since his return, Mendel had been pounding the pavement every day with his portfolio of clips. In the afternoons he could be found at the Café Europa at Hunyadi tér, a cup of black coffee before him, a notebook open on the table. Well, Andras would go to Hunyadi tér the next day and approach Mendel with a proposition: the two of them might present themselves at the office of Frigyes Eppler, Andras’s former editor at Past and Future, and ask to be hired jointly as writer and illustrator. Frigyes Eppler now worked at the Magyar Jewish Journal. The paper’s offices were located on Wesselényi utca, a few blocks from the Café Europa.

At three o’clock the next afternoon, Andras walked through the gilt-scrolled doors of the café to find Mendel at the usual table with the usual notebook before him. He sat down across from his friend, ordered a cup of black coffee, and stated the proposition.

Mendel pulled the V of his mouth into a narrow point. “It would have to be the Magyar Jewish Journal,” he said.

“What’s wrong with the Journal?”

“Have you read it lately?”

“I’ve been the full-time servant of Tamás and Klara Lévi lately.”

“It’s been dishing up a steady diet of assimilationist drivel. Apparently, we’ve just got to put our faith in the Christian aristocrats in the government and all will be well. We’re supposed to keep saluting the flag and singing the anthem, just as though the anti-Jewish laws didn’t exist. Be Magyar first and Jewish second.”

“Well, we’re safer if the government considers us Magyar first.”

“But the government doesn’t consider us Magyar! I don’t have to tell you that. You’ve just done your time in the Munkaszolgálat. The government considers us Jews, plain and simple.”

“At least they consider us necessary.”

“For how much longer?” Mendel said. “We can’t work for that paper, Parisi. We should look for work at one of the left-wing rags.”

“I don’t have connections at any of those places. And I don’t have time to spare. I’ve got to start supporting this son of mine before I’m conscripted again.”

“What makes you think Eppler would consider taking us both?”

“He knows good work when he sees it. Once he reads you, he’ll want to hire you.”

Mendel gave a half laugh. “The Jewish Journal!” he said. “You’re going to drag me down there and get me a job, aren’t you.”

“Frigyes Eppler’s no conservative, or at least he wasn’t when I knew him. Past and Future was a Zionist operation if ever there was one. Every issue carried some romantic piece about Palestine and the adventures of emigration. And you might remember their lead story from May of ’36. It concerned a certain record-breaking sprinter who wasn’t to be allowed on the Hungarian Olympic team because he was a Jew. Eppler was the one who pushed that story. If he’s at the Jewish Journal now, it must be because he means to stir things up.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Mendel said. “All right. We’ll talk to the man.” He closed his notebook and paid his bill, and they went off together toward Wesselényi utca.

On the editorial floor of the Journal they found Frigyes Eppler embroiled in a shouting match with the managing editor inside the managing editor’s glassed-in office; through the windows that looked upon the newsroom, the two men could be seen carving a series of emphases into the air as they argued. Since Andras had last seen his former editor, Eppler had gone entirely bald and had adopted a pair of horn-rimmed glasses. He was round-shouldered and heavyset; his shirttails were apt to fly free of his trousers, and his tie often showed the mark of a hasty lunch. He never seemed to be able to find his hat or his keys or his cigarette case. But in his editorial work he missed no detail. Past and Future had won international awards every year Frigyes Eppler had edited it. His greatest triumph had been his placement of the young men and women who had worked for him; his efforts on Andras’s behalf were among the many generous acts he undertook to promote the careers of his writers and copy editors and graphic artists. He had shown no surprise when Andras had been offered a place at the École Spéciale. As he had told Andras then, his aim had always been to hire people who would quit for better work before he had a chance to fire them.

Andras couldn’t make out the content of the argument with the managing editor, but it was clear that Eppler was losing. His gestures increased in size, his shouts in volume, as the altercation went on; the managing editor, though wearing a look of triumph, backed toward the door of his own office as if he meant to flee as soon as his victory was complete. At last the door flew open and the managing editor stepped onto the newsroom floor. He called an order to his secretary, trundled off down the length of the room, and escaped into the stairwell as if he were afraid Eppler might chase him. The fuming and defeated Eppler stood alone the empty office, polishing his scalp with both hands. Andras waved in greeting.

“What is it now?” Eppler said, not looking at Andras; then, recognizing him, he gave a cry and clapped his hands to his chest as if to keep his heart from falling out. “Lévi!” he shouted. “Andras Lévi! What in God’s name are you doing here?”

“I’m here to see you, Eppler-úr.”

“How long has it been now? A hundred years? A thousand? But I’d have recognized that face anywhere. What are you wasting your time at these days?”

“Not enough,” Andras said. “That’s the problem.”

“Well, I hope you haven’t come here looking for a job. I sent you off into the world long ago. Aren’t you an architect by now?”

Andras shook his head. “I’ve just finished a two-year spell in the Munkaszolgálat. This tall fellow is a childhood friend and company-mate of mine, Mendel Horovitz.”

Mendel gave a slight bow and touched his hat in greeting, and Frigyes Eppler looked him up and down. “Horovitz,” he said. “I’ve seen your picture somewhere.”

“Mendel holds the Hungarian record in the hundred-meter dash,” Andras said.

“That’s right! Wasn’t there some scandal about you a number of years back?”

“Scandal?” Mendel showed his wry grin. “Don’t I wish.”

“They wouldn’t allow him on the Hungarian Olympic team in ’36,” Andras said. “There was a piece about it in Past and Future. You edited it yourself.”

“Of course! What a fool I am. You’re that Horovitz. Whatever have you done with yourself since then?”

“Gotten into journalism, I’m afraid.”

“Well, of all ridiculous things! So you’re here as a supplicant too?”

“Parisi and I come as a team.”

“You mean Lévi, here? Ah, you call him Parisi because of that stint of his at the École Spéciale. I was responsible for that, you know. Not that he’d ever give me credit. He’d claim it was all due to his own talent.”

“Well, he’s not such a bad draughtsman. I hired him for the paper I was editing.”

“And what paper was that?”

From his satchel, Mendel produced a few dog-eared copies of The Biting Fly. “This is the one we made in the camp at Bánhida. It’s not as funny as the one we wrote when we were posted in Subcarpathia and Transylvania, but that one got us kicked out of our company. We were made to eat our words, in fact. Twenty pages of them apiece.”

For the first time, Frigyes Eppler’s expression grew serious; he looked carefully at Andras and Mendel, and then sat down at his managing editor’s desk to page through The Biting Fly. After reading for a while in silence, he glanced up at Mendel and gave a low chuckle. “I recognize your work,” he said. “You were the one writing that man-about-town column for the Evening Courier. A smart political instrument dressed up as a young good-for-nothing’s good-for-nothing ravings. But you were pretty sharp, weren’t you?”

Mendel smiled. “At my worst.”

“Tell me something,” Eppler said in a lowered tone. “Just what are you doing here? This paper doesn’t represent the leading edge of modern thought, you know.”

“With all respect, sir, we might ask you the same question,” Mendel said.

Eppler massaged the sallow dome of his head with one hand. “A man doesn’t always find himself where he wants to be,” he said. “I was at the Pesti Napló for a while, but they let some of us go. By which you understand what I mean.” He let out an unhappy laugh that was half wheeze; he was an inveterate smoker. “At least I stayed out of the Munkaszolgálat. I’m lucky they didn’t send me to the Eastern Front, just to make an example of me. In any case, to put it simply, I had to keep body and soul together-an old habit, you might say-so when a position opened here, I took it. Better than singing in the street for my bread.”

“Which is what we’ll be doing soon,” Mendel said. “Unless we find some work.”

“Well, I can’t say I recommend this place,” Eppler said. “As you may have gathered, I don’t always see eye to eye with the rest of the editorial staff. I’m supposed to be the chief, but, as you witnessed, my managing editor often ends up managing me.”

“Perhaps you could use someone to take your side,” Andras said.

“If I were to hire you, Lévi, it wouldn’t be to take sides. It would be to get a job done, just as when you were fresh from gimnázium.”

“I’ve learned a thing or two since then.”

“I’m sure you have. And your friend here seems an interesting fellow. I can’t say, Horovitz, that I would have hired you on the basis of your Biting Fly, but I did follow your column for a time.”

“I’m flattered.”

“Don’t be. I read every rag in this town. I consider it my job.”

“Do you think you can find something for us?” Mendel asked. “I hate to be blunt, but someone’s got to be. Lévi here has a son to look out for.”

“A son! Good God. If you’ve got a son, Lévi, then I’m an old man.” He sighed and hitched up his trousers. “What the hell, boys. Come to work here if you want to work so badly. I’ll dig something up for you.”

That night Andras found himself at the kitchen table at home, sitting with his mother and the baby while Klara lay asleep on the sofa in the front room. His mother removed a pin from the nightshirt she was sewing and sank it into her gray velveteen pincushion, the same one she’d used for as long as Andras could remember. She had brought her old sewing box with her to Budapest, and Andras had been surprised to find that his mind contained a comprehensive record of its contents: the frayed tape measure, the round blue tin that held a minestrone of buttons, the black-handled scissors with their bright blades, the mysterious prickle-edged marking wheel, the spools and spools of colored silk and cotton. Her tiny whipstitches were as tight and precise as the ones that had edged Andras’s collars when he was a boy. When she finished her row of hemming, she tied off the thread and cut it with her teeth.

“You used to like to watch me sew when you were little,” she said.

“I remember. It seemed like magic.”

She raised an eyebrow. “If it were magic, it would go faster.”

“Speed is the enemy of precision,” Andras said. “That’s what my drawing master in Paris used to tell us.”

His mother knotted the end of the thread and raised her eyes to him again. “It’s a long time since you left school, isn’t it?” she said.

“Forever.”

“You’ll go back to your studies when this is all over.”

“Yes, that’s what Apa says, too. But I don’t know what will happen. I have a wife and son now.”

“Well, it’s good news about the job,” his mother said. “You were wise to think of Eppler.”

“Yes, it’s good news,” Andras said, but it felt less like good news than he’d imagined it would. Though he was relieved to know he had a way to earn money, the idea of going back to work for Eppler seemed to erase his time in Paris entirely. He knew it made no sense; he’d met Klara in Paris, after all, and here on the table before him, asleep in a wicker basket, was Tamás Lévi, the miraculous evidence of their life together. But to arrive at work the next morning and receive the day’s assignments from Eppler-it was what he had been doing at nineteen, at twenty. It seemed to negate the possibility that he would ever complete his training, that he would ever get to do the work he craved. Everything in the world stood against his going back to school. The France in which he’d been a student had disappeared. His friends were dispersed. His teachers had fled. No school in Hungary would open its doors to him. No free country would open its borders to him. The war worsened daily. Their lives were in danger now. He suspected it wouldn’t be long before Budapest was bombed.

“Don’t give me such a dark look,” his mother said. “I’m not responsible for the situation. I’m just your mother.”

The baby began to stir in his basket. He shifted his head back and forth against the blankets, scrunched his face into a pink asterisk, and let out a cry. Andras bent over the basket and lifted the baby to his chest.

“I’ll walk him around the courtyard,” he said.

“You can’t take him outside,” his mother said. “He’ll catch his death of cold.”

“I won’t have him wake Klara. She’s been up every night for weeks.”

“Well, for pity’s sake, put a blanket over him. And put a coat over your shoulders. Here, hold him like this, and let me put his hat on. Keep his blanket over his head so he’ll stay warm.”

He let his mother swaddle them both against the cold. “Don’t stay out long,” she said, patting the baby’s back. “He’ll fall asleep after you walk him for a minute or two.”

It was a relief to get out of the close heat of the apartment. The night was clear and cold, with a frozen slice of moon suspended in the sky by an invisible filament. Beyond the haze of city lights he could make out the faint ice crystals of stars. The baby was cocooned against him, quiet. He could feel the rapid rise and fall of his son’s chest against his own. He walked around the courtyard and hummed a lullaby, circling the fountain where he and Klara had seen the little dark-haired girl trailing a hand through the water. The stone basin was crusted with ice now. The courtyard security light illuminated its depths, and as he leaned over it he could make out the fiery glints of goldfish beneath the surface. There, beneath the cover of the ice, their flickering lives went on. He wanted to know how they did it, how they withstood the slowing of their hearts, the chilling of their blood, through the long darkness of winter.

There was something otherworldly, it seemed to Andras, about the advertisements published in the Magyar Jewish Journal. As assistant layout editor it was his job to arrange those neatly illustrated boxes in the margins that flanked the articles; inside the bordered rectangles depicting clothes and shoes and soap, ladies’ perfume and hats, the war seemed not to exist. It was impossible to reconcile this ad for cordovan leather evening shoes with the idea of Mátyás spending a winter outdoors in Ukraine, perhaps without a good pair of boots or an adequate set of foot rags. It was impossible to read this druggist’s advertisement listing the merits of its Patented Knee Brace, and then to think of Tibor having to set a serviceman’s compound fracture with a length of wood torn from a barracks floor. The signs of war-the absence of silk stockings, the scarcity of metal goods, the disappearance of American and English products-were negations rather than additions; the blank spaces where the advertisements for those items would have appeared had been filled with other images, other distractions. The sporting-goods store on Szerb utca was the only one whose ad made reference to the war, however obliquely; it proclaimed the merits of a product called the Outdoorsman’s Equipage, a knapsack containing everything you would need for a sojourn in the Munkaszolgálat: a collapsible cup, a set of interlocking cutlery, a mess tin, an insulated canteen, a thick woolen blanket, stout boots, a camping knife, a waterproof slicker, a gas lantern, a first-aid kit. It wasn’t advertised for use in the Munkaszolgálat, but what else would Budapest residents be doing outdoors in the middle of January?

As for the articles that occupied the space between the ads, Andras could only gape at the rigid and shortsighted optimism he saw reflected there. This paper was supposed to be the mouthpiece of the Jewish community; how could it proclaim, on its editorial page, that the Hungarian Jew was at one with the Magyar nation in language, spirit, culture, and feeling, when the Hungarian Jew was, in fact, being sent into the mouth of battle to remove mines, so that the Hungarian army might pass through to support its Nazi allies? Mendel had been right about the paper’s content. To the extent that it reported the news, it did so with the sole apparent aim of keeping Hungarian Jews from falling into a panic. His second week at the paper, it was reported with great relish that Admiral Horthy had fired the most staunchly pro-German members of his staff; here was concrete evidence of the solidarity of the Hungarian leadership with the Jewish people.

But the Journal wasn’t the only paper in town, and the smaller left-leaning independents carried news that reflected the world Andras had glimpsed in the labor service. There were reports of a massacre carried out in Kamenets-Podolsk not long after Hungary entered the war against the Soviet Union; one paper printed an anonymous interview with a member of a Hungarian sapper platoon, a man who’d been present at the mass killing and had been consumed by guilt since his return. After the Hungarian Central Alien Control Office had rounded up Jews of dubious citizenship, this man reported, the detainees had been handed over to the German authorities in Galicia, trucked to Kolomyya, and marched ten miles to a string of bomb craters near Kamenets-Podolsk, under the guard of SS units and the source’s Hungarian sapper platoon. There, every one of them was shot to death, along with the original Jewish population of Kamenets-Podolsk-twenty-three thousand Jews in all. The idea had been to clear Hungary of Jewish aliens, but many of the Jews who were killed were Hungarians who hadn’t been able to produce their citizenship papers quickly enough. This, it seemed, was what had troubled the Hungarian who’d given the interview: He had killed his own countrymen in cold blood. So it seemed that the Hungarians did feel a certain solidarity with their Jewish brethren after all, though in the source’s case the solidarity hadn’t run deep enough to keep him from pulling the trigger.

Then, in the last week of February, there was a report published in the People’s Voice about another massacre of Jews, this one in the Délvidék, the strip of Yugoslavia that Hitler had returned to Hungary ten months earlier. A certain General Feketehalmy-Czeydner, the paper reported, had ordered the execution of thousands of Jews under the guise of routing Tito partisans. Refugees from the region had begun to drift back to Budapest with horrifying stories of the killings-people had been dragged to the Danube beach, made to strip in the freezing cold, lined up in rows of four on the diving board over a hole that had been cannon-blasted into the ice of the river, and machine-gunned into the water. Andras arrived early one morning at the Magyar Jewish Journal to find his employer sitting in the middle of the newsroom in a mute paroxysm of horror, a copy of the Voice open on the desk before him. He handed the paper to Andras and retreated into his office without a word. When the managing editor arrived, another glass-enclosed argument ensued, but no word about the massacre appeared in the Jewish Journal.

Later that same week, Ilana Lévi went to Gróf Apponyi Albert Hospital and gave birth to a baby boy. There had been a letter from Tibor only three days before: He hoped to be released from his labor company by Wednesday evening, and so hadn’t despaired of being home in time for the birth. But the event had come and gone without any sign of him. On Ilana’s first night home from the hospital, Andras and Klara brought her Shabbos dinner. Though she was still exhausted from the loss of blood, she had insisted upon setting the table herself; there were the candlesticks she’d received as a wedding present from Béla and Flóra, and the Florentine plates her mother had given her to take back to Hungary. She and Klara lit the candles, Andras blessed the wine, and they sat down to eat while the babies slept in their arms. The room held a deep and pervasive quiet that seemed to emanate from the architecture itself. The apartment was on the ground floor, three narrow rooms made smaller by the heavy wooden beams that supported them. The French doors of the dining room looked out onto the courtyard of the building, where a bicycle mechanic had cultivated a boneyard of rusted frames and handlebars, clusters of spokes, mounds of petrified chains. The collection, dusted with snow, looked to Andras like a battlefield littered with bodies. He found himself staring out into it as the light grew blue and dim, his eyes moving between the shadows. He was the one who saw the figure through the frosty glass: a dark narrow form picking its way through the bicycles, like a ghost come back to look for his fallen comrades. At first he thought the form was nothing more than the congelation of his own fear; then, as the figure assumed a familiar shape, a manifestation of his desire. He hesitated to call Ilana’s attention to it because he thought at first that he might be imagining it. But the figure approached the windows and stared at the scene within-Andras at the head of the table with Klara at his side, a baby at Klara’s breast; Ilana with her back to the window, her arm crooked around something in a blanket-and the ghost’s hand flew to his mouth, and his legs folded beneath him. It was Tibor, home from his labor company. Andras shoved his chair away from the table and ran for the door. In an instant he was in the courtyard with his brother, both of them sitting in the snow amid the litter of dismembered bicycles, and then the women were beside them, and in another minute Tibor held his son and his wife in his arms.

Tibor. Tibor.

They shouted his name in a frenzy of insistence, as if trying to convince themselves he was real, and they brought him into the house. Tibor was deathly pale in the dim light of the sitting room. His small silver-rimmed glasses were gone, the bones of his face a sharp scaffolding beneath the skin. His coat was in rags, his trousers stiff with ice and dried blood, his boots a disaster of shredded leather. His military cap was gone. In its place he wore a fleece-lined motorcyclist’s cap from which one ear-covering had been torn away. The exposed ear was crimson with cold. Tibor tugged the cap from his head and let it fall to the floor. His hair looked as though it had been hacked to the scalp with dull scissors some weeks earlier. He had the smell of the Munkaszolgálat about him, the reek of men living together without adequate water or soap or tooth powder. That smell was mingled with the sulfurous odor of brown-coal smoke and the shit-and-sawdust stink of boxcars.

“Let me see my boy,” he said, his voice scarcely louder than a whisper, as if he hadn’t used it in days.

Ilana handed him the baby in its white swaddling of blankets. Tibor laid the baby on the sofa and knelt beside him. He took off the blanket, the cap covering the baby’s fine dark hair, the long-sleeved cotton shirt, the little pants, the socks, the diaper; through it all, the baby was silent and wide-eyed, its hands curled into fists. Tibor touched the dried remnant of the baby’s umbilical cord. He held the baby’s feet, the baby’s hands. He put his face against the crease of the baby’s neck. The baby’s name was Ádám. It was what Tibor and Ilana had decided in the letters they’d exchanged. He said the name now, as if trying to bring together the idea of this baby and the actual naked child lying on the sofa. Then he glanced up at Ilana.

“Ilanka,” he said. “I’m so sorry. I wanted to be home in time.”

“No,” she said, bending to him. “Please don’t cry.”

But he was crying. There was nothing anyone could do to stop it. He cried, and they sat down on the floor with him as though they were all in mourning. But they were not in mourning, not then; they were together, the six of them, in what was still a city unghettoized, unburned, unbombed. They sat together on the floor until Tibor stopped crying, until he could draw a full breath. He drew one deep throaty breath after another, and finally took a slow inhale through his nose.

“Oh, God,” he said, with a horrified look at Andras. “I stink. Get me out of these clothes.” He began pulling at the collar of his shredded coat. “I shouldn’t have touched the baby before I washed. I’m filthy!” He got up off the floor and went to the kitchen, leaving a trail of stiff clothing behind him. They heard the clang of a tin washtub being dropped onto the kitchen tiles, and the roar of water in the sink.

“I’ll help him,” Ilana said. “Will you take the baby?”

“Give him to me,” Klara said, and handed Tamás to Andras. They sat together on the sofa, Andras and Klara and the two babies, while Ilana heated water for Tibor’s bath. In the meantime, Tibor ate dinner in his ragged undershirt and Munkaszolgálat trousers. Then Ilana undressed him and washed him from head to toe with a new cake of soap. The smell of almonds drifted in from the kitchen. When that was finished she dressed him in a pair of flannel-lined pajamas, and he moved toward the bedroom as though he were walking in a dream. Andras followed him to the bed and sat down beside him with Tamás in his arms. Klara was close behind, holding Tibor’s son. Ilana put a pair of hot towel-wrapped bricks into the bed at Tibor’s feet and pulled the eiderdown up to his chin. They all sat with him on the bed, still trying to believe he was there.

But Tibor, or part of Tibor, had not yet returned; as he drifted to the edge of sleep he made a frightened noise, as if a stone had fallen onto his chest and knocked the wind out of him. He looked at them all, eyes wide, and said, “I’m sorry.” His eyes closed again, and he drifted again, and made that frightened noise-Hunh!-and jerked awake. “I’m sorry,” he said again, and drifted, and woke. He was sorry. His eyelids closed; he breathed; he made his noise and jerked awake, haunted by something that waited on the other side of consciousness. They stayed with him through a full hour of it until he fell into a deeper sleep at last.

Tibor’s favorite coffeehouse, the Jókai, had been replaced by a barbershop with six gleaming new chairs and a brace of mustachioed barbers. That morning the barbers were practicing their art upon the heads of two boys in military uniform. The boys looked as though they could scarcely be out of high school. They had identical jutting chins and identical peaked eyebrows; their feet, on the barber-chair footrests, were identically pigeon-toed. They must have been brothers, if not twins. Andras glanced at Tibor, whose look seemed to ask what these two brothers meant, patronizing the barbers who had neatly razored away the Jókai Káveház and replaced it with this sterile black-and-white-tiled shop. There was no question of Andras and Tibor’s stopping in for a shave. The Jókai Barbershop was a traitor.

Instead they went back down Andrássy út to the Artists’ Café, a Belle Époque establishment with wrought-iron tables, amber-shaded lamps, and a glass case full of cakes. Andras insisted upon ordering a slice of Sachertorte, against Tibor’s objections-it was too expensive, too rich, he couldn’t eat more than a bite.

“You need something rich,” Andras said. “Something made with butter.”

Tibor mustered a wan smile. “You sound like our mother.”

“If I do, you should listen.”

That smile again-a pale, preserved-looking version of Tibor’s old smile, like something kept in a jar in a museum. When the torte arrived, he cut a piece with his fork and let it sit at the edge of the plate.

“You’ve heard the news from the Délvidék by now,” Tibor said.

Andras stirred his coffee and extracted the spoon. “I’ve read an article and heard some awful rumors.”

Tibor gave a barely perceptible nod. “I was there,” he said.

Andras raised his eyes to his brother’s. It was disconcerting to see Tibor without his glasses, which had refracted his unusually large eyes into balance with the rest of his features. Without them he looked raw and vulnerable. The diet of cabbage soup and brown bread and coffee had whittled him down to this elemental state; he was essence of Tibor, reduction of Tibor, the necessary ingredient that might be recombined with ordinary life to produce the Tibor that Andras knew. He wasn’t sure he wanted to hear what had happened to Tibor in the Délvidék. He bent to his coffee rather than meet those eyes.

“I was there a month and a half ago,” Tibor began, and told the story. It had been late January. His Munkaszolgálat company had been attached to the Fifth Army Corps; they’d been slaving for an infantry company in Szeged, building pontoon bridges on the Tisza so the company could move its materiel across. One morning their sergeant had called them away from that work and told them they were needed for a ditch-digging project. They were trucked to a town called Mošorin, marched to a field, and commanded to dig a trench. “I remember the dimensions,” Tibor said. “Twenty meters long, two and a half meters wide, two meters deep. We had to do it by nightfall.”

At the table beside them, a young woman sitting with her two little girls gave Tibor a long look and then glanced away. He touched the scroll embellishment at the end of his fork and continued in a lowered voice.

“We dug the trench,” he said. “We thought it was for a battle. But it wasn’t for a battle. After dark, they marched a group of people to the field. Men and women. A hundred and twenty-three of them. We were sitting on one side of the ditch eating our soup.”

The young woman had turned slightly in her chair. She was perhaps thirty years old; they saw now that she wore a silver Star of David on a narrow chain at her neck. She raised her eyes toward her children, who were sharing a cup of chocolate and finishing the last crumbs of a slice of poppyseed strudel.

When Tibor spoke again, his voice was scarcely louder than a whisper. “There were children there, too,” he said. “Teenagers. Some of them couldn’t have been older than twelve or thirteen.”

“Zsuzsi, Anni,” the woman said. “Why don’t you go choose some little cakes to take to your grandmother?”

“I’m not done with my chocolate,” the smaller girl said.

“Tibor,” Andras said, laying a hand on his brother’s arm. “Tell me later.”

“No,” the woman said quietly, meeting Andras’s eye. “It’s all right.” To the girls she said, “Go ahead, I’ll come in a moment.” The older girl put on her coat and helped the younger one get her sleeves turned right side out. Then they went to the pastry counter and stared at the display of cakes, their fingers pressed against the glass. The woman folded her hands in her lap and looked down at her empty teacup.

“They lined up these people in front of the ditch,” Tibor said. “Hungarians. Jews, all of them. They made them strip naked and stand there in the freezing cold for half an hour. And they shot them,” he said. “Even the children. Then we had to bury them. Some of them weren’t dead yet. The soldiers turned their guns on us while we did it.”

Andras glanced at the woman beside them, who had covered her mouth with her hand. At the pastry counter beyond, her two little girls argued the merits of the cakes.

“What’s to stop them from doing it to us?” Tibor said. “We’re not safe here. Do you understand me?”

“I understand,” Andras said. Of course they weren’t safe. There wasn’t a minute that passed without his thinking about it. And the danger was deeper than Tibor knew: Andras still hadn’t told him about the situation with Klara and the Ministry of Justice.

“The threat is here inside the country,” Tibor said. “We’re lying to ourselves if we think we’ll be fine as long as Horthy holds off a German occupation. What about the Arrow Cross? What about plain old Hungarian bigotry?”

“What do you propose we do?” Andras said.

“Let me tell you something,” Tibor said. “I want to get off this continent. I want to get my wife and son out. If we stay in Europe we’re going to die.”

“How are we supposed to get out? The border’s closed. It’s impossible to get travel documents. No one will let us in. And there are the babies. It’s bad enough to imagine doing it by ourselves.” He looked over his shoulder; even to speak of these things in public seemed dangerous. “We can’t leave now,” he said. “It’s impossible.”

The woman at the next table sent a glance in Andras and Tibor’s direction, her dark eyes moving between the two of them. At the counter, her little girls had made their selections; the older one turned and called for her to come. She stood and put on her hat and coat. As she slipped through the narrow space between the tables, she gave Andras and Tibor a curt nod. It wasn’t until after she and her girls had disappeared through the beveled glass doors of the café that Andras noticed she’d dropped her handkerchief on the table. It was a fine linen handkerchief with a lace edge, embroidered with the letter B. Andras lifted it to reveal a folded scrap of paper, the stub of a streetcar ticket, onto which something had been scratched in pencil: K might be able to help you. And an address in Angyalföld, near the end of the streetcar line.

“Look at this,” Andras said, and handed the ticket stub to his brother.

Glassesless, Tibor squinted at the woman’s tiny writing. “K might be able to help you,” he said. “Who’s K?”

They rode out past the apartment blocks of central Pest, out into an industrial suburb where textile factories and machine works exhaled gray smoke into a mackerel sky. Military supply trucks rumbled down the streets, their beds stacked with steel tubes and I-beams, concrete flume sections and cinderblocks and giant parabolas of iron like leviathan ribs. They got off the streetcar at the end of the line and walked out past an ancient madhouse and a wool-washing plant, past three blocks of crumbling tenements, to a small side street called Frangepán köz, where a cluster of cottages seemed to have survived from the days when Angyalföld had been pastureland and vineyard; from behind the houses came the chatter and musk of goats. Number 18 was a plaster-and-timber cottage with a steep wood-shingled roof and flaking shutters. The window frames were peeling, the door scuffed and toothy along its edge. Winter remnants of ivy traced an unreadable map across the façade. As Andras and Tibor crossed the garden, a high gate at the side of the house opened to let forth a little green cart pulled by two strong white wethers with curving horns. The cart was packed with milk cans and crates of cheese. At the gate stood a tiny woman with a hazel switch in her hand. She wore an embroidered skirt and peasant boots, and her deep-set eyes were hard and bright as polished stones. She gave Andras a look so penetrating it seemed to touch the back of his skull.

“Does someone with the initial K live here?” he asked her.

“The initial K?” She must have been eighty, but she stood straight-backed against the wind. “Why do you want to know?”

Andras glanced at the ticket scrap on which the woman at the café had written the address. “This is 18 Frangepán köz, isn’t it?”

“What do you want with K?”

“A friend sent us here.”

“What friend?”

“A woman with two little girls.”

“You’re Jewish,” the old woman said; it was an observation, not a question. And something changed in her features as she said it, a certain softening of the lines around her eyes, an almost imperceptible relaxation of the shoulders.

“That’s right,” Andras said. “We’re Jewish.”

“And brothers. He’s the elder.” She pointed her hazel stick at Tibor.

They both nodded.

The woman lowered her stick and scrutinized Tibor as if she were trying to see beneath his skin. “You’re just back from the Munkaszolgálat,” she said.

“Yes.”

She reached into a basket for a paper-wrapped round of cheese and pressed it into his hand. When he protested, she gave him another.

“K is my grandson,” she said. “Miklós Klein. He’s a good boy, but he’s not a magician. I can’t promise he can help you. Talk to him if you like, though. Go to the door. My husband will let you in.” She closed and locked the gates of the yard behind her; then she touched the wethers on their backs with the hazel wand, and they tossed their white heads and pulled the cart into the street.

As soon as she had gone, a clutch of goats came up to the gate and bleated at Andras and Tibor. The goats seemed to expect some kind of gift. Andras showed them his empty pockets, but they wouldn’t back away. They wanted to butt their heads against Andras’s and Tibor’s hands. The kids wanted a sniff at their shoes. At the far end of the yard a stable had been converted into a goat house, sheltered from the wind and piled with new hay. Four does stood feeding at a tin trough, their coats glossy and thick.

“Not a bad place to be a goat,” Andras said. “Even in the middle of winter.”

“A better place to be a goat than a man,” Tibor said, glancing toward the factory chimneys in the near distance.

But Andras thought he wouldn’t mind living farther from the city center someday. Not, preferably, in the shadow of a textile factory, but maybe in a place where they could have a house, a yard big enough for goats and chickens and a few fruit trees. He wanted to come back with his notebook and drawing tools and study the construction of this cottage, the layout of these grounds. It was the first time in months he’d had the desire to do an architectural drawing. As he followed his brother up the walk he experienced a strange sensation in his chest, a feeling of rising, as if his lungs were filled with yeast.

When Tibor knocked on the door, a dust of yellow paint drifted down like pollen. There were shuffling footsteps from inside; the door opened to reveal a tiny dried man with two uplifted wings of gray hair. He wore a white undershirt and a dressing gown of faded crimson wool. From behind him came a strain of scratchy Bartók and the smell of pancakes.

“Mr. Klein?” Tibor said.

“The same.”

“Does Miklós Klein live here?”

“Who wants to know?”

“Tibor and Andras Lévi. We were told to come see him. Your wife said he was at home.”

The man opened the door and beckoned them into a small bright room with a red-painted concrete floor. On a table near the window, the remains of breakfast lay beside a crisply folded newspaper. “Wait here,” the elder Klein said. He went to the end of a brief hallway decorated with portraits of men and women in antique-looking costumes, the men in military uniform, the women in the cinch-waisted gowns of the previous century. A door opened and closed at the end of the hall. On the wall, a cuckoo clock struck the hour and the cuckoo sang eleven times. A collection of photographs on a side table showed a bright-eyed boy of six or seven holding the hands of a beautiful dark-haired young woman and a melancholy, intelligent-looking man; there were photographs of the three of them at the beach, on bicycles, in a park, on the steps of a synagogue. The collection conveyed the sense of a shrine or a memorial.

After a few minutes the door opened at the end of the hall, and the elder Klein shuffled toward them and beckoned with one hand. “Please,” he said. “This way.”

Andras followed his brother down the hall, past the portraits of the military men and tight-laced women. At the door, the old man stepped aside to let them in, then retreated to the sitting room.

The doorway was a portal to another world still. On one side was the universe they had just left, where breakfast things lay on a wooden table in a shaft of sun, and the bleating of goats floated in from the yard, and a dozen photographs suggested what had vanished; on the other side, in this room, were what looked like the accoutrements of a spy operation. The walls were plastered with pin-studded maps of Europe and the Mediterranean, with intricate flowcharts and newspaper clippings and photographs of men and women working the dry soil in desert settlements. On the desk, wedged between towering stacks of official-looking documents, stood a brace of typewriters, one with a Hungarian keyboard and the other with a Hebrew one. An Orion radio whined and crackled on a low table, and a quartet of clocks beside it showed the time in Constanţa, Istanbul, Cairo, and Jerusalem. Papers and dossiers rose in waist-high columns all around the room, crowding the desk, the bed, every centimeter of windowsill and table. At the center of it all stood a pale young person in a moth-eaten sweater, his short black hair like a ragged crown, his eyes raw and red as if from drink or grief. He looked to be about Andras’s age, and was unmistakably the little boy from the photographs, grown into this haggard young man. He pulled out the desk chair, moved a stack of dossiers onto the floor, and sat down to face the brothers.

“It’s all over,” he said by way of greeting. “I’m not doing it anymore.”

“We were told you could help us,” Tibor said.

“Who told you that?”

“A woman with two little girls. Initial B. She heard me talking to my brother at a café.”

“Talking to your brother about what?”

“About getting out of Hungary,” Tibor said. “One way or another.”

“First of all,” Klein said, pointing a narrow finger at Tibor, “you shouldn’t have been talking to your brother about a thing like that at a café, where anyone could hear you. Secondly, I should strangle that woman, whoever she is, for giving you my address! Initial B? Two little girls?” He put his fingers to his forehead and seemed to think. “Bruner,” he said. “Magdolna. It’s got to be. I got her brother out. But that was two years ago.”

“Is that what you do?” Andras said. “Arrange emigrations?”

“Used to,” Klein said. “Not anymore.”

“Then what’s all this stuff?”

“Ongoing projects,” Klein said. “But I’m not accepting new work.”

“We’ve got to leave the country,” Tibor said. “I’ve just been in the Délvidék. They’re killing Hungarian Jews there. It won’t be long before they come for us. We understand you can help us get out.”

“You don’t understand,” Klein said. “It’s impossible now. Look at this.” He produced a clipping from a Romanian newspaper. “This happened just a few weeks ago. This ship left Constanţa in December. The Struma. Seven hundred and sixty-nine passengers, all Romanian Jews. They were told they’d get Palestinian entry visas once the ship reached Turkey. But the ship was a wreck. Literally. Its engine was salvaged from the bottom of the Danube. And there were no entry visas. It was all a scam. Maybe at one time they’d’ve gotten in without visas-the British used to allow some paperless immigrations. Not anymore! Britain wouldn’t take the boat. They wouldn’t take anyone, not even the children. A Turkish coast guard ship towed it into the Black Sea. No fuel, no water, no food for the passengers. Left it there. What do you think happened? It was torpedoed. Boom. End of story. They think it was the Soviets who did it.”

Andras and Tibor sat silent, taking it in. Seven hundred and sixty-nine lives-a ship full of Jewish men, women, and children. An explosion in the night-how it must have sounded, how it must have felt from a berth deep inside the ship: the shock and quake of it, the sudden panic. And then the inrush of dark water.

“But what about Magdolna Bruner’s brother?” Tibor asked. “How did you get him out?”

“Things were different then,” Klein said. “I got people out along the Danube. Smuggled them out on cargo barges and riverboats. We had contacts in Palestine. We had help from the Palestine Office here. I got a lot of people out, a hundred and sixty-eight of them. If I were smart, I’d have gone, too. But my grandparents were all alone. They couldn’t make a trip like that, and I couldn’t leave them. I thought I might be of more use here. But I won’t do it anymore, so you might as well go home.”

“But this a disaster for Palestine, this Struma,” Andras said. “They’ll have to loosen the immigration restrictions now.”

“I don’t know what’ll happen,” Klein said. “They have a new colonial secretary now, a man called Cranborne. He’s supposed to be more liberal-minded. But I don’t know if he can convince the Foreign Office to relax its quotas. Even if he could, it’s far too dangerous now.”

“If it’s a matter of money, we’ll come up with it,” Tibor said.

Andras gave his brother a sharp glance. Where did Tibor expect them to get the money? But Tibor wouldn’t look at him. He kept his eyes fixed on Klein, who ran his hands through his electrified hair and leaned forward toward them.

“It’s not the money,” Klein said. “It’s just that it’s a mad thing to try.”

“It might be madder to stay,” Tibor said.

“Budapest is still one of the safest places for Jews in Europe,” Klein said.

“Budapest lives in the shadow of Berlin.”

Klein pushed back his chair and got up to pace his square of floor. “The horrible thing is that I know you’re right. We’re mad to feel any sense of security here. If you’ve been in the labor service, you know that well enough. But I can’t take the lives of two young men into my hands. Not now.”

“It’s not just us,” Tibor said. “It’s our wives, too. And a couple of babies. And our younger brother, once he returns from Ukraine. And our parents in Debrecen. We all need to get out.”

“You’re crazy!” Klein said. “Plain crazy. I can’t smuggle babies down the Danube while the country’s at war. I can’t be responsible for elderly parents. I refuse to discuss this. I’m sorry. You both seem like good men. Maybe we’ll meet in happier times and have a drink together.” He went to the door and opened it onto the hallway.

Tibor didn’t move. He scanned the stacks of papers, the typewriters, the radio, the dossier-smothered furniture, as if they might offer a different answer. But it was Andras who spoke.

“Shalhevet Rosen,” he said. “Have you heard that name?”

“No.”

“She’s in Palestine, working to get Jews out of Europe. She’s the wife of a friend of mine from school.”

“Well, maybe she can help you. I wish you luck.”

“Maybe you’ve had some correspondence with her.”

“Not that I recall.”

“Maybe she can help get us visas.”

“A visa means nothing,” Klein said. “You’ve still got to get there.”

Tibor glanced around the room again. He gave Klein a penetrating look. “This is what you do,” he said. “Do you mean to say you’re finished now?”

“I won’t send people to another Struma,” Klein said. “You can understand that. And I have to look out for my grandparents. If I get caught and thrown in jail, they’ll be all alone.”

Tibor paused at the door, his hat in his hands. “You’ll change your mind,” he said.

“I hope not.”

“Let us leave our address, at least.”

“I’m telling you, it’s no use. Goodbye, gentlemen. Farewell. Adieu.” He ushered them into the dim hallway and retreated into his room, latching the door behind him.

In the main room Andras and Tibor found the breakfast things cleared away and the elder Klein installed on the sofa, newspaper in hand. When he became aware of them standing before him, he lowered the paper and said, “Well?”

“Well,” Tibor said. “We’ll be going now. Please tell your wife we appreciate her kindness.” He raised one of the paper-wrapped rounds of goat cheese.

“One of her best,” Klein-the-elder said. “She must have taken a shine to you. She doesn’t give those away lightly.”

“She gave me two,” Tibor said, and smiled.

“Ah! Now you’re making me jealous.”

“Maybe she can prevail upon your grandson to help us. I’m afraid he turned us away without much hope.”

“Miklós is a moody boy,” the elder Klein said. “His work is difficult. He changes his mind about it daily. Does he know how to reach you?”

Tibor took a small blunt pencil from his breast pocket and asked Klein’s grandfather for a piece of paper, apologizing for the fact that he didn’t have a name card. He wrote his address on the scrap and left it on the breakfast table.

“There it is,” Tibor said. “In case he changes his mind.”

Klein’s grandfather made a noise of assent. From the yard, the raised voices of goats made a pessimistic counterpoint. The wind clattered the shutters against the house, a sound directly from Andras’s deepest childhood. He had the feeling of having stepped out of the flow of time-as if he and Tibor, when they passed through the doorway of this house, would reenter a different Budapest altogether, one in which the cars had been replaced by carriages, the electric streetlights by gaslights, the women’s knee-length skirts by ankle-length ones, the metro system erased, the news of war expunged from the pages of the Pesti Napló. The twentieth century cut clean away from the tissue of time like an act of divine surgery.

But when they opened the outer door it was all still there: the trucks rumbling along the broad cross-street at the end of the block, the towering smokestacks of the textile plant, the film advertisements plastered along a plywood construction wall. He and his brother walked in silence back toward the streetcar line and caught a near-empty train back toward the city center. It took them down Kárpát utca, with its machine-repair shops, then over the bridge behind Nyugati Station, and finally to Andrássy út, where they got off and headed toward home. But when they reached the corner of Hársfa utca, Tibor turned. Hands in his pockets, he walked the block to the gray stone building where they’d lived before Andras had gone to Paris. On the third floor were their windows, now uncurtained and dark. A row of broken flowerpots stood on the balcony; an empty bird feeder hung from the rail. Tibor looked up at the balcony, the wind lifting his collar.

“Can you blame me?” he said. “Do you understand why I want to get out?”

“I understand,” Andras said.

“Think about what I told you at the café. That happened here in Hungary. Now think what must be happening in Germany and Poland. You wouldn’t believe the things I’ve heard. People are being starved and crowded to death in ghettoes. People are being shot by the thousands. Horthy can’t hold it off forever. And the Allies don’t care about the Jews, not enough to make a difference on the ground. We have to take care of ourselves.”

“But what’s the use, if we die doing it?”

“If we have visas, we’ll have some measure of protection. Write to Shalhevet. See if there’s anything her organization can do.”

“It’ll take a long time. Months, maybe, just to exchange a few letters.”

“Then you’d better start now,” Tibor said.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO. Szentendre Yard

THAT AFTERNOON he told Klara about the cottage in Frangepán köz, and about Klein in his bedroom surrounded by the manila files of a thousand would-be emigrants. They were in the sitting room, the baby at Klara’s breast, its hand clenching and unclenching in her hair.

“What do you think?” she said quietly. “Do you think we should try to get out?”

“It seems insane, doesn’t it? But I haven’t seen the things Tibor’s seen.”

“What about your parents? And my mother?”

“I know,” he said. “It’s a desperate thing to think about. Maybe it’s not the right time. If we wait, things might get better. But maybe I should write to Shalhevet anyway. Just in case there’s something she can do.”

“You can write,” she said. “But if there were something she could do, wouldn’t she have told us about it already?” The baby moved his head and released his grip on Klara’s hair. She shifted him to the other side, draping herself with his blanket.

“I wrote to Rosen from the labor service,” Andras said. “He knew I couldn’t have left then, even if I’d wanted to.”

“And now we have the baby,” Klara said.

Andras tried to envision her feeding their son in the cargo hold of a Danube riverboat, under the cover of a tarpaulin. Did people make escape attempts with infants, he wondered? Did they drug their children with laudanum and pray they wouldn’t cry? The baby pulled the blanket away from Klara’s breast and she arranged it again.

“There’s no need to do that,” Andras said. “Let me see you.”

Klara smiled. “I suppose I got into the habit of covering up at my mother’s house. Elza can’t abide the sight of it. She considers it unsanitary. She’d be scandalized to know I do it in your presence.”

“It’s perfectly natural. And look at him. Doesn’t he look happy?”

The baby’s toes curled and uncurled. He waved a dark hank of Klara’s hair in his fist. His eyes moved to her eyes, and he blinked, and blinked again more slowly, and his eyelids drifted closed. Intoxicated with milk, he released Klara’s hair and let his legs fall limp against her arm. His hands opened into starfish. His mouth fell away from her breast.

Klara raised her eyes to Andras and held his gaze. “What if you were to go?” she said. “You and Tibor? Get there safely and send for us when you can? At least it would keep you out of the Munkaszolgálat.”

“Never,” he said. “I’d sooner die than leave without the two of you.”

“What a dramatic thing to say, darling.”

“I don’t care if it’s dramatic. That’s how I feel.”

“Here, take your little son. My leg’s asleep.” She lifted the child and handed him to Andras, then fastened the buttons of her blouse. With a grimace of pain she got to her feet and walked the length of the room. “Write to Shalhevet,” she said. “Just to see. At least then we’ll know if there’s another course of action to consider. Otherwise we’re only speculating.”

“I’m not going anywhere without you.”

“I hope not,” she said. “But it seems the wrong time for broad resolutions.”

“Won’t you let me preserve the illusion that I have a choice?”

“It’s a dangerous time for illusions, too,” she said, and came back to sit beside him on the sofa, laying her head on his shoulder. As they sat together and watched their son sleep, Andras felt a renewed pang of guilt: He was, in fact, allowing her to live inside an illusion-that she was safe, that the past was securely lodged in the past, that her fears of endangering her family by her return to Hungary had been unfounded.

The illusion continued all that spring. A reorganization in the Ministry of Justice slowed the mechanisms of extortion, and the need to give up the house on Benczúr utca was temporarily relieved. Andras continued to work as a layout artist and illustrator, with Mendel penning articles nearby in the newsroom. If it seemed surreal at first to have as their legitimate employment what had until a few months earlier been a covert and guilty extracurricular, the feeling was soon replaced by the ordinary rhythms and pressures of work. Tibor, once he had recovered his health and strength, found employment too. He became a surgical assistant at a Jewish hospital in the Erzsébetváros. In March there was news from Elisabet: Paul had joined the navy and would ship out to the South Pacific in late April. His parents, in a fit of remorse occasioned by their son’s enlistment and by the birth of their first grandchild the previous summer, had by now relented entirely and had insisted that Elisabet and little Alvie come to live with them in Connecticut. Elisabet had enclosed a photograph of the family in sledding gear, herself in a dark hooded coat, the muffled-up Alvie in her arms, Paul standing beside them holding the ropes of a long toboggan. Another photograph showed Alvie by himself, propped in a chair with pillows all around him, wearing a velvet jacket and short pants. The high round forehead and wry mouth were all Paul, but the ice-hard penetration of his baby gaze could only have been Elisabet’s. She promised that Paul’s father would speak to his contacts in the government to see if anything could be done to secure entry visas for Andras, Klara, and the baby.

Andras wrote to Shalhevet, and a reply came four weeks later. She promised to speak to the people she knew in the Immigration Office. Though she couldn’t foresee how long the process might take or whether she would succeed, she thought she could make a strong case for Andras and Tibor’s being granted visas. As Andras must know, the department’s main concern at the moment was to extract Jews from German-occupied territories. But future doctors and architects would be of great value to the Jewish community of Palestine. She might even be able to do something for Andras’s friend, the political journalist and record-breaking athlete; he, too, was the kind of exceptional young man the Immigration Office liked to help. And if Andras and Tibor came, of course their families must come with them. What a shame that they hadn’t all emigrated together before the war! Rosen missed his Paris friends desperately. Had Andras heard from Polaner or Ben Yakov? Rosen had made dozens of inquiries, to no avail.

Andras sat on the edge of the courtyard fountain and reread the letter. He hadn’t heard from Polaner or Ben Yakov, not since the missives he’d received during his first Munkaszolgálat posting. If Ben Yakov was still with his parents in Rouen, he would be living in occupied France under the Nazi flag. And Polaner, who had been so eager to fight for his adopted country-where would he have been sent after his discharge from the French military? Where would he be now? What hardships, what humiliations, would he have had to face since the last time Andras had seen him? How would Andras ever learn what had become of him? He trailed his hand through the cold water of the fountain, released now from its winter ice. Beneath the surface, the shapes of the fish moved like slender ghosts. There had been coins at the bottom of the fountain last fall, five- and ten-fillér coins glinting against the blue tiles. Someone must have removed them when the ice thawed. Now, no one would throw coins into a fountain. No one could spare ten fillér for a wish.

In the darkness of the barracks in Subcarpathia and Transylvania and Bánhida, Andras had forced himself to consider the possibility that Polaner might be dead, that he might have been beaten or starved or infected or shot; but he had never allowed himself to think that he would not someday know what had happened-not know for certain whether to search or hope or mourn. He could not mourn by default. It ran against his nature. But it had been twenty-three months since there had been any word of Polaner-soft-voiced Eli Polaner, hidden somewhere within the dark explosive tangle of Europe. He dared not follow the thought around to its other side, where the image of his brother Mátyás waited, a white shape glimpsed through the veil of a blizzard. Mátyás, still lost. No word from his Munkaszolgálat company since last November. Now it was April. In Ukraine the steady cold would have just begun to relent. Soon it would become possible to bury the winter’s dead.

He had left Klara with the baby, the rest of the mail in a jumble on his desk. He would go and see if he could help her; it would only make him feel worse to sit at the edge of the fountain and consider all the things he could not know. He climbed the stairs and opened the apartment door, listening for the baby’s lifted voice. But a film of silence had settled over the rooms. The kettle had ceased to bubble on the stove. The baby’s bathwater stood cold in its little tin tub, still awaiting the addition of the hot. The baby’s towel lay folded on the kitchen table, his jacket and pants beside it.

Andras heard the baby make a noise, a brief two-note plaint; the sound came from the sitting room. He entered to find Klara on the sofa with the baby in her arms. An opened letter lay on the low table before her. She raised her eyes to Andras.

“What is it?” he said. “What’s happened?”

“You’ve been called again,” she said. “You’ve been called back to work duty.”

He scrutinized the letter, an abbreviated rectangle of thin white paper stamped with the insignia of the KMOF. He was to report to the Budapest Munkaszolgálat Office two mornings hence; he would be assigned to a new battalion and company, and given orders for six months of labor service.

“This can’t be,” he said. “I can’t leave you again, not with the baby.”

“But what can we do?”

“I still have General Martón’s card. I’ll go to his office. Maybe he can help us.”

The baby twisted in Klara’s arms and made another sound of protest. “Look at him,” she said. “Naked as a newborn. I forgot all about his bath. He must be freezing.” She got up and brought him into the kitchen, holding him against her. She emptied the kettle into his little tub and stirred the water with her hand.

“I’ll go tomorrow morning,” Andras said. “I’ll see what can be done.”

“Yes,” she said, and lowered the baby into the tub. She laid him back against her arm and rubbed soap into the fine brown fluff of his hair. “And if he can’t help, I’ll write to my solicitor in Paris. Maybe it’s time to sell the building.”

“No,” Andras said. “I won’t have you do it.”

“I won’t have you go back to the service,” she said. She wouldn’t look at him, but her voice was low and determined. “You know what goes on there now. They’re sending men to clean up minefields on the front. They’re starving them to death.”

“I survived it for two years. I can survive it for six more months.”

“Things were different before.”

“I won’t let you sell the building.”

“What do I care for the building?” she cried. The baby looked at her, startled.

“I’ll speak to Martón,” Andras said, putting a hand on her shoulder.

“And Shalhevet?” she said. “What did she write?”

“She knows some people in the Ministry of Immigration. She’ll try to make a case for our being granted visas.”

The baby kicked an arc of water into Klara’s hair, and she let out a sad laugh. “Maybe we should pray,” she said, and covered her eyes with one hand as if she were reciting the Shema. He wanted to believe that someone could be watching in pity and horror, someone who could change things if he chose. He wanted to believe that men were not in charge. But at the center of his sternum he felt a cold certainty that told him otherwise. He believed in God, yes, the God of his fathers, the one to whom he’d prayed in Konyár and Debrecen and Paris and in the work service, but that God, the One, was not One who intervened in the way they needed someone to intervene just then. He had designed the cosmos and thrown its doors open to man, and man had moved in and begun a life there. But God could no more step inside and rearrange that life than an architect could rearrange the lives of a building’s inhabitants. The world was their place now. They would use it in their fashion, live or die by their own actions. He touched Klara’s hand and she opened her eyes.

…

General Martón’s powers, though considerable, could not exempt Andras from work service. They could not even get his service postponed. But they prevented his being posted to the Eastern Front, and they won the same reprieve for Mendel Horovitz, who had been called at the same time. Andras and Mendel were assigned to Company 79/6 of the Budapest Labor Service Battalion. The company had been put to work in a rail yard so close to Budapest that the men who lived in the city could sleep at home rather than in barracks at the work site. Every morning Andras rose at four o’clock and drank his coffee in the dark kitchen, by the light of the stove; he slung his pack over his shoulder, took the tin pail of food Klara had prepared for him the night before, and slipped out into the predawn chill to meet Mendel. Now, instead of reporting to the offices of the Magyar Jewish Journal, they walked all the way to the river and crossed the Széchenyi Bridge, where the stone lions lay on their pedestals and the Romany women in black head scarves and cloaks slept with their arms around their thin-limbed children. In that blue hour a mist hovered above the surface of the Danube, rolling up from the braided currents of the water. Sometimes a barge would slide past, its low flat hull parting the vapor, and they might glimpse the bargeman’s wife standing at a glowing brazier and tending a pot of coffee. On the other side of the river they would take the tram to Óbuda, where they could get the bus that would take them to Szentendre. The bus ran along the river, and they liked to sit on the Danube side and watch the boats glide south. Often they would pass the time in silence; the subject most on their minds could not be discussed in public. Andras had received the news from Shalhevet that the Immigration Office had responded favorably to her first inquiries, and that the process was moving along more quickly than expected. There was reason to hope that they might have papers in hand by midsummer. But what then? He didn’t know whether or not he should dare to hope Klein might help them, or how much it would cost to make the journey, or how many visas Shalhevet could muster. And though spring had arrived in full force now, there was still no word from Mátyás. György’s most recent inquiries had proved fruitless. It seemed impossible to think of leaving Hungary while his brother was lost in Ukraine, perhaps dead, perhaps taken prisoner by the Soviets. But now that spring had come, Mátyás could materialize any day. It wasn’t beyond reason to hope that in three or six months they might all emigrate together. A year from now, Andras and his brothers might be going off to work in an orange grove in Palestine, perhaps at one of the kibbutzim Rosen had described, Degania or Ein Harod. Or they might be fighting for the British-Mendel had heard that there was a battalion of soldiers that had been formed from members of the Yishuv, the Jewish community of Palestine.

When the bus reached Szentendre, they climbed down with the other men-their workmates who had boarded at Óbuda or Rómaifürdő or Csillaghegy-and walked the half mile to the train-loading yard. The first trucks pulled in at seven o’clock. The drivers would roll up the tarps to reveal corded cubes of blankets, crates of potatoes, bolts of military canvas, cases of ammunition, or whatever else it was that they happened to be shipping to the front that day. Andras and Mendel and their workmates had to move the goods from the trucks to the boxcars that waited on the tracks, doors yawning wide in the growing light. When they had finished loading one car, they would move on to another and another. But the operation wasn’t as simple as it looked. The cars, once filled, were not sealed; they were left open to roll into a shed where they would be inspected. At least that was what Andras and Mendel had been told when the foreman had set them to work: After the cars were loaded, they would be inspected by a corps of specially trained soldiers. If anything was missing, the work servicemen would be held responsible and punished. Only when every item had been tallied would the trains be sealed and sent to the front.

The inspectors came and went in covered trucks. Soldiers drove the trucks directly into the inspection shed and parked them beside the train. Through the broad rectangular doors, Andras could see the soldiers moving quickly between the train and the trucks. The inspectors didn’t bother to conceal what was going on; they oversaw the operation with the confidence of their privileged place in the chain of command. Overcoats, blankets, potatoes, cans of beans, guns: Every day, a tithe of it drifted from the boxcars to the trucks. When the soldiers had finished with one boxcar, the inspectors would seal it and the train would roll forward so the soldiers could get to work on the next. They had to work fast for the trains to run on time; the railway schedule made no allowance for black-market siphoning. Once the soldiers had done their work, the inspectors would declare the trainload complete and sign the paperwork. Then they would send the train off to the front. The covered trucks would roll out, the siphoned goods would slide into the black market, and the inspectors would share the proceeds among themselves. It was a tidy and profitable business. In their shed, the inspectors smoked expensive cigars and compared gold pocket watches and played cards for piles of pengő. The guards must have been getting their share of the profits, too-at lunchtime, instead of standing in line at the mess tent, they drank beer and grilled strings of Debrecen sausages, smoked Mirjam cigarettes, and paid the work servicemen to polish their new-looking boots.

Andras knew what the skimming would mean to the soldiers and laborers on the front. There would be too few blankets to go around, too few potatoes in the soup. Someone might not get new boots when his old boots fell apart. The work servicemen would be the hardest hit: They’d be forced to write promissory notes for hundreds of pengő to buy the most basic supplies. Later, when the guards and officers went home on furlough, they would present the notes to the servicemen’s families, threatening that the men would be killed if their wives or mothers didn’t produce the money. But the labor servicemen at Szentendre Yard seemed to regard the practice as a matter of course. What could any of them have done to stop it? Day after day they loaded the trains and the soldiers unloaded them.

As if to remind them of their powerlessness, all the Jewish workers now had to wear distinguishing armbands, ugly canary-yellow tubes of fabric that slid over their sleeves. Klara had had to sew these for Andras before he reported for duty. Even Jews who had long ago converted to Christianity had to wear armbands, though theirs were white. The bands were mandatory at all times. Even when the weather turned unseasonably hot, the sun reflecting off the crushed rock of the rail yard as though from a million mirrors, and the laborers stripped off their shirts-even then, they had to wear the armbands over their bare arms. The first time Andras had been told to retrieve his band from his discarded shirt, he had stared at the guard in disbelief.

“You’re just as much a Jew with your shirt off as you are with it on,” the man had said, and he waited for Andras to put on the armband before he turned away.

The commander at Szentendre was a man called Varsádi, a tall paunchy flatlander with an even temper and a taste for leisure. Varsádi’s chief vices were mild ones: his pipe, his flask, his sweet tooth. He was a constant smoker and a happy drunk. He left the matter of discipline to his men, who were less forgiving, less easily distracted by a fine tin of Egyptian tobacco or a smoky Scotch. Varsádi himself liked to sit in the shade of the administrative office, which stood on a low artificial hill overlooking the river, and watch the proceedings of his rail yard while he entertained visiting commanders from other companies or enjoyed his share of the goods that had been intended for the front. Andras knew to be grateful that he was not a Barna nor even a Kálozi, but the sight of Varsádi with his heels on a wooden crate, his arms crossed over his chest in contentment, a lemniscate of smoke drifting from his pipe, was its own special brand of torture.

By the end of their first week, Andras and Mendel had begun to discuss the newspaper they might publish at Szentendre Yard-The Crooked Rail, it would be called. “À la Mode at Szentendre,” Mendel had extemporized to Andras one morning on the bus, indicating the band on his arm. “The color yellow, ever popular for spring, has surged to the leading edge of fashion.” Andras laughed, and Mendel took out his little notebook and began to write. The trendsetting young men of the 79/6th have made a bold statement in buttercup, he read aloud a few minutes later: Accessorize! The au courant favor a trim band of ten centimeters worn about the bicep, in an Egyptian twill suitable for all occasions. Next week: Our fashion correspondent investigates a new rage for nakedness among soldiers on the Eastern Front.

“Not bad,” Andras said.

“The Yard’s an easy target. I’m surprised they don’t have a paper already.”

“I’m not,” Andras said. “The other men seem half asleep.”

“That’s just it. Every day they’re watching these army stooges steal bread from the men on the front, and they take it all as a matter of course!”

“Only because they’re not being starved to death themselves.”

“Well, let’s wake them up,” Mendel said. “Let’s get them a little angry about what’s going on. First we’ll make them laugh in the usual manner. Then, later, we’ll slide in a piece or two about what it’s like in a real camp. Especially if you’re short on food or missing an overcoat. Maybe we’ll inspire them to slow down the operation a little. If we all drag our feet in the loading, the soldiers won’t have as much time to unload. The trains still have to roll out on time, you know.”

“But how to do it without risking our necks?”

“Maybe we don’t have to hide the paper from Varsádi and the guards. If the coating’s sweet enough, they’ll never taste what’s in the pill. We’ll praise Szentendre to the skies in comparison to the other hellholes we’ve been in, and both sides will hear what we want them to hear.”

Andras agreed, and that was where it began. The Crooked Rail would be a more elaborate operation than the previous two papers; their residence in Budapest would give them access to a typewriter, a drafting table, an array of supplies. The journey to and from Szentendre would provide time for two daily editorial meetings. They would begin slowly, filling the first issues with nothing but jokes. There would be the usual fabricated news, the usual sports, fashion, and weather; there would be a special arts section complete with event reviews. This week the Szentendre Ballet debuted “Boxcar,” Mendel wrote for the first issue, a brilliant ensemble piece choreographed by Varsádi Varsádius, Budapest’s enfant terrible of dance. A certain element of repetition was offset by a delightful variability in the ages and physiques of the dancers. And then there would be a new feature called “Ask Hitler.” On their second Monday at Szentendre, Mendel presented Andras with a typescript:

D EAR H ITLER: Please explain your plan for the progress of the war in the East. With affection, S OLDIER

D EAR S OLDIER: I’m so pleased you asked! My plan is to build a large meat-grinder in the vicinity of Leningrad, fill it with young men, and crank the handle as fast as I can. With double affection, H ITLER

D EAR H ITLER: How do you propose to fight the British fleet in the Mediterranean? Yours most sincerely, P OPEYE

D EAR P OPEYE: First of all, I’m a fan! I forgive you for being American. I hope you’ll pay us a visit in the Reich when this nasty business is all over. Secondly, here is my plan: Fire my admirals until I find one who’ll take orders from a Führer who’s never been to sea. With admiration, H ITLER

D EAR H ITLER: What is your position on Hungary? Yours, M. H ORTHY

D EAR H ORTHY: Missionary, though at times I favor the croupade, just for variation. Love, H ITLER

“Maybe we should speak to Frigyes Eppler,” Andras said, once he’d read the piece. “Maybe he’d let us print this paper on the Journal’s press. I’d hate to subject a piece of work as fine as this to the mimeograph.”

“You flatter me, Parisi,” Mendel said. “But do you think he’d go for it?”

“We can ask,” Andras said. “I don’t think he’d begrudge us a little ink and paper.”

“Make your illustrations,” Mendel said. “That can only help our case.”

Andras did, spending a sleepless night at the drafting table. He made an elaborate heading for the paper, two empty boxcars flanking a title stencilled in Gothic script. The fashion section carried a drawing of a young dandy in full Munkaszolgálat uniform, his armband radiating light. The dance review showed a line of laborers, fat and slender, young and old, struggling to hold crates of ammunition aloft. For the Hitler section, austerity and gravity seemed the best approach; Andras made a detailed pencil drawing of the Führer from an old edition of the Pesti Napló. At two in the morning Klara woke to feed Tamás, who had not yet learned to sleep through the night. After she’d put him to bed again, she came out to the sitting room and went to Andras, pressing her body against his back.

“What are you doing up so late?” she said. “Won’t you come to bed?”

“I’m almost finished. I’ll be in soon.”

She leaned over the drafting table to look at what he’d taped to its tilted plane. “The Crooked Rail,” she read. “What is that? Another newspaper?”

“The best one we’ve made so far.”

“You can’t be serious, Andras! Think of what happened in Transylvania.”

“I have,” he said. “This isn’t Transylvania. Varsádi’s not Kálozi.”

“Varsádi, Kálozi. It’s all the same. Those men have your life in their hands. Isn’t it bad enough you had to be called again? ‘Ask Hitler’?”

“The situation’s different at Szentendre,” he said. “The command structure hardly deserves the name. We’re not even going to publish underground.”

“How will you not publish underground? Do you plan to offer Varsádi a subscription?”

“As soon as we’ve got the first issue printed.”

She shook her head. “You can’t do this,” she said. “It’s too dangerous.”

“I know the risks,” he said. “Perhaps even better than you do. This paper’s not just fun and games, Klara. We want to make the men think about what’s going on at Szentendre. We’re shorting our brothers on the front every day. In my case, perhaps literally.”

“And what makes you think Varsádi won’t object?”

“He’s a sybarite and a fond old fool. The paper will praise his leadership. He won’t see anything past that. He’s got no loyalty to anything but his own pleasures. I’d be surprised if he had any politics at all.”

“And what if you’re mistaken?”

“Then we’ll stop publishing.” He stood and put his arms around her, but she kept her back erect, her eyes on his own.

“I can’t stand the thought of anything happening to you,” she said.

“I’m a husband and a father,” he said, following the ridge of her spine with his palm. “I’ll stop immediately if I think there’s any real danger.”

At that moment Tamás began to cry again, and Klara drew herself away and went to soothe him. Andras stayed up all night to finish the work. Klara would come to understand his reasons, Andras felt, even those he hadn’t voiced aloud-those that were more personal, and concerned the difference between feeling at the mercy of one’s fate and, to some small degree, the master of it.

That evening, Saturday night, he knew Eppler would be at the offices of the Journal, wrangling with the final edits of Sunday’s edition. After dinner he and Mendel took their pages to the newspaper’s offices and made their plea. They wanted permission to typeset and print a hundred copies of the paper each week. They would come in after hours and use the outdated handpress that the Journal retained strictly for emergencies.

“You want me to make you a gift of the paper and ink?” Eppler said.

“Think of it as the Magyar Jewish Journal’s contribution to the welfare of forced laborers,” Mendel said.

“What about my welfare?” Eppler said. “My managing editor does nothing but grouse about finances as it is. What will he say when supplies begin to disappear?”

“Just tell him you’re suffering from war shortages.”

“We’re already suffering from war shortages!”

“Do it for Parisi,” Mendel said. “The mimeograph blurs his drawings terribly.”

Eppler regarded Andras’s illustrations through the shallow refraction of his horn-rimmed glasses. “That’s not a bad Hitler,” he said. “I should have made better use of you when you were working for me.”

“You’ll make good use of me when I work for you again,” Andras said.

“If you let us print The Crooked Rail, Parisi will swear to work for you when he’s done with the Munkaszolgálat,” Mendel said.

“I hope he’ll get himself back to school once he’s done with the Munkaszolgálat.”

“I’ll need to have some way to pay tuition,” Andras said.

Eppler blew a stuttering breath, took out a large pocket handkerchief and wiped his brow, then glanced at the clock on the wall. “I’ve got to get back to work,” he said. “You can print fifty copies of your rag, and no more. Monday nights. Don’t let anyone catch you at it.”

“We kiss your hand, Eppler-úr,” Mendel said. “You’re a good man.”

“I’m a bitter and disillusioned man,” Eppler said. “But I like the idea that one of our presses might print a true word about the state we’re in.”

When Andras and Mendel presented Major Varsádi with the inaugural copy of The Crooked Rail, he gratified them by laughing so hard he was forced to remove his pocket handkerchief and wipe his eyes. He praised them for knowing how to make light of their situation, and opined that the other men might have something to learn from their attitude. The right state of mind, he said, pointing the burning tip of his cigar at them to make his point, could lighten any load. That night Andras brought home to Klara the news that they’d gotten permission to publish The Crooked Rail, and she gave him her reluctant blessing. The next day he and Mendel distributed fifty copies of the first issue, which spread as quickly and were consumed with as much relish as the first issues of The Snow Goose and The Biting Fly. Before long Varsádi began the practice of reading the paper aloud to the Munkaszolgálat officers who paid lunchtime visits to Szentendre Yard; Andras and Mendel could hear their laughter drifting down from the artificial hill where they took their long lunches.

Everyone at Szentendre wanted to make an appearance in the paper, even the foremen and guards who had seemed so stern in comparison to Varsádi. Their own squad foreman, Faragó, a mercurial man who liked to whistle American show tunes but had a habit of kicking his men from behind when his temper ran short, began to wink at Andras and Mendel in a companionate manner as they worked. To gratify him and avert his kicks, they wrote a piece entitled “Songbird of Szentendre,” a music review in which they praised his ability to reproduce any Broadway melody down to the thirty-second note. Their third week at the camp provided another fortuitous subject: The rail yard received a vast and mysterious shipment of ladies’ underthings, and the men had gotten them half loaded onto a train before anyone thought to wonder why the soldiers at the front might need a hundred and forty gross of reinforced German brassieres. The inspectors, giddy with the prospect of the black-market demand for those garments, appropriated three squads of labor servicemen to get the German brassieres off the train and into the covered trucks; at midday, the lunch break devolved into a fashion show of the latest support garments from the Reich. Labor servicemen and guards alike paraded in the stiff-cupped brassieres, pausing in front of Andras so he might capture their likenesses. Though the rest of the afternoon was consumed with a harder variant of labor-a half-dozen truckloads of small munitions arrived and had to be transferred to the trains-Andras scarcely felt the strain in his back or the shipping-crate splinters in his hands. He was considering the set of fashion drawings he might make-Berlin Chic angles into Budapest!-and calculating how long it might be before he and Mendel began to shift the paper toward their aim. As it turned out, the following week’s shipments provided the ideal material. For three days the supply trucks contained nothing but medical supplies, as if to stanch a great flow of blood in the east. As the soldiers transferred crates of morphine and suture to the black-market trucks, Andras thought of Tibor’s letters from his last company posting-No splints or casting materials or antibiotics, of course-and began to roll out a new section in his mind. “Complaints from the Front” it would be called, a series of letters from Munkaszolgálat conscripts in various states of illness and hunger and exposure, to which a representative of the KMOF would reply with admonitions to buck up and accept the hardships of war: Who did these whimpering fairies think they were? They should act like men, goddamn it, and consider that their suffering served the Magyar cause. Andras introduced the idea to Mendel that evening on the bus, and they mounted the series the following week, in a small box that ran on the back page.

By the end of the month an almost imperceptible shift had taken place among the ranks of the 79/6th. A few of the men seemed to be paying a different kind of attention to what went on each day in the inspection shed. In small huddled groups they watched the soldiers rushing to unload crates of food and clothing stamped with the KMOF logo. They followed the movement of the boxes from the train to the covered trucks, then watched the trucks depart through the rail-yard gates. Andras and Mendel, who had attained a certain status thanks to their role as publishers of The Crooked Rail, began to approach the groups and speak to a few of the men. In lowered voices they pointed out how little time the soldiers had to move the goods; a few small adjustments on the part of the laborers might delay the siphoning just long enough to get a few more bandages, a few more crates of overcoats, sent to the men at the front.

By the next week, almost unnoticeably, the 79/6th had begun to drag its feet as it loaded goods onto the boxcars. The change happened slowly enough and subtly enough that the foremen failed to notice a general trend. But Andras and Mendel could see it. They watched with a kind of quiet triumph, and compared their impressions in whispered conferences on the bus. All indications suggested that the small shift they’d hoped for had come to pass. Their conversations with the other men confirmed it. There was no way to know, of course, whether the change would make a difference to the men at the front, but it was something, at least: a tiny act of protest, a sole unit of drag inside the vast machine that was the Labor Service. The following week, when they brought the news to Frigyes Eppler at the Journal, he clapped them on the shoulders, offered them shots of rye from the bottle in his office, and took credit for the whole thing.

On Sundays, when Andras was free from Szentendre Yard, he and Klara went to lunch at the house on Benczúr utca, which had been stripped by now of all but its most essential furnishings. As they dined in the garden at a long table spread with white linen, Andras had the sense that he had fallen into a different life altogether. He didn’t understand how it was possible that he could have spent Saturday loading sacks of flour and crates of weapons into boxcars, and was now spending Sunday drinking sweet Tokaji wine and eating filets of Balatoni fogas in lemon sauce. József Hász would sometimes show up at these Sunday family dinners, often with his girlfriend, the lank-limbed daughter of a real-estate magnate. Zsófia was her name. They had been childhood friends, playmates at Lake Balaton, where their families had owned neighboring summer houses. The two of them would sit on a bench in a corner of the garden and smoke thin dark cigarettes, their heads bent close together as they talked. György Hász detested smoking. He would have sent József to smoke in the street if the girl hadn’t been with him. As it was, he pretended not to see them with their cigarettes. It was one of many pretenses that complicated the afternoons they spent at Benczúr utca. Sometimes it was difficult to keep track, so numerous were they. There was the pretense that Andras hadn’t spent the rest of the week loading freight cars at Szentendre while József painted at his atelier in Buda; the pretense that Klara’s long exile in France had never occurred; the pretense that she was safe now, and that the purpose of the gradual but steady disappearance of the family’s paintings and rugs and ornaments, of the younger Mrs. Hász’s jewelry and all but the most necessary servants, of the car and its driver, the piano and its gilded stool, the priceless old books and the inlaid furniture, was not to keep Klara out of the hands of the authorities but to keep József out of the Munkaszolgálat.

It was a testament to József’s egotism that he considered himself worth his family’s sacrifices. His own luxuries were undiminished. In his large bright flat in Buda, he lived among gleanings from the family home: antique rugs and furniture and crystal he’d removed before the slow, steady drain had begun. Andras had seen the flat once, a few months after the baby had been born, when they’d gone for an evening visit. József had provided them with a dinner ordered from Gundel, the famous old restaurant in the city park; he’d held the baby on his knee while Andras and Klara ate roasted game hens and white asparagus salad and a mushroom galette. He praised the shape of his baby cousin’s head and hands and declared that he looked exactly like his mother. József’s manner toward Andras was breezy and careless, though it had never quite lost the edge of resentment it had acquired when Andras had delivered the news of his relationship with Klara. It was József’s habit to mask any social discomfort with humor; Andras was Uncle Andras now, as often as József could find occasion to say his name. After dinner he took Andras and Klara into the north-facing room he used as his studio, where large canvases were propped against the walls. Four of his previous works had been sold recently, he said; through a family connection he’d begun working with Móric Papp, the Váci utca dealer who supplied Hungary’s elite with contemporary art. Andras noted with chagrin that József’s work had improved considerably since his student days in Paris. His collage paintings-nets of dark color thrown against backgrounds of fine-ground black gravel and scraps of old road signs and pieces of railroad track-might be called good, might even be seen as evocative of the uncertainty and terror into which Europe had plunged. When Andras praised the work, József responded as though accepting what was due to him. It had taken all of Andras’s effort to remain civil through the evening.

On Sunday afternoons at Benczúr utca, when József and his Zsófia joined the group at the table, what he generally had to talk about was how dull it was in Budapest during the warmer months-how much nicer it would have been at Lake Balaton, and what they’d be doing that very moment if they were there. He and Zsófia would start in on some memory from when they were children-how her brother had sailed them far out into the lake in a leaking boat, how they’d gotten sick from eating unripe melons, how József had tried to ride Zsófia’s pony and had been thrown off into a blackberry bramble-and Zsófia would laugh, and the elder Mrs. Hász would smile and nod, remembering it all, and György and his wife would exchange a look, because it was the summer house that had kept József out of the labor service, after all.

One Sunday in early June, they arrived to find József’s usual bench unoccupied. For Andras, the prospect of an afternoon without him was a relief. Tibor and Ilana had arrived some time earlier, and Ilana played in the grass with young Ádám while Tibor sat beside them on a wicker chaise longue, fixing the bent brim of Ilana’s sun hat. Andras fell into a chair beside his brother. It was a hot and cloudless day, one of a series; the new grass had gone limp for want of rain. The week at Szentendre had been an unusually grueling one, bearable only because Andras knew that on Sunday he’d be sitting in this shady garden, drinking cold soda water flavored with raspberry syrup. Klara sat down on the grass with Ilana, holding Tamás on her lap. The babies stared at each other in their usual manner, as if astonished at the revelation that another baby existed in the world. The younger Mrs. Hász emerged from the house with a bottle of seltzer, a miniature pitcher of ruby-colored syrup, and half a dozen glasses. Andras sighed and closed his eyes, waiting for a glass of raspberry soda to materialize on the low table beside him.

“Where’s your son today?” Tibor asked Elza Hász.

“In the study with his father.”

Andras caught a note of tension in her voice, and he emerged from his torpor to watch her closely as she handed the glasses of soda around. The past five years had aged her. Her dark hair, still cut fashionably short, was shot with silver now; the faint lines beside her eyes had grown deeper. She had lost weight since he’d last seen her-whether from worry or from undereating, he didn’t know. He wondered with some anxiety what György and József might be discussing in the study. He could hear their voices coming through the open windows-György’s low, grave tones, József’s higher notes of indignation. A few minutes later József burst through the French doors and crossed the terra-cotta paving stones of the patio, then strode over the lawn toward his mother, who had seated herself in a low garden chair. When he reached her, he gave her a look so charged with fury that she got to her feet.

“Say you haven’t agreed to this,” he demanded.

“We’re not going to discuss this now,” Elza Hász said, laying a hand on his arm.

“Why not? We’re all here.”

Elza sent a panicked glance in the direction of her husband, who had come out onto the patio and was hurrying toward the lawn. “György!” she said. “Tell him he’s not to discuss it.”

“József, you will drop this subject at once,” his father said as he reached them.

“I won’t have you sell this house. This is my house. It’s meant to be part of my property. I mean to bring my wife to live here someday.”

“Sell the house?” Klara said. “What do you mean?”

“Tell her about it, Father,” József said.

György Hász fixed his son in his cool, stern gaze. “Come inside,” he said.

“No.” It was the elder Mrs. Hász who had spoken, her hands firm on the armrests of her wicker chair. “Klara deserves to know what’s happening. It’s time we told her.”

Klara looked from József to her mother to György, trying to understand what this meant. “The house belongs to you, György,” Klara said. “If you’re thinking of selling it, I’m certain you must have a good reason. But is it true? Are you really?”

“You mustn’t worry, Klara,” György said. “Nothing’s certain yet. We can discuss the matter after dinner, if you’d like.”

“No,” said the elder Mrs. Hász again. “We ought to discuss it now. Klara should be part of the decision.”

“But there is no decision,” the younger Mrs. Hász said. “We have no choice. There’s nothing to discuss.”

“It’s Lévi’s fault,” József said, turning to Andras. “If it hadn’t been for him, this wouldn’t have happened. He’s the one who convinced her to come back to Hungary.”

Andras met Klara’s questioning glance, and then József’s angry one, his heart galloping in his chest. He got to his feet and stood before József. “Listen to your father,” he said. “Take it back inside.”

József’s mouth curled with spite. “Don’t tell me what to do, Uncle.”

Now Tibor was standing beside Andras, glaring at József. “Watch your tone,” he said.

“Why not call him Uncle? That’s what he is. He married my aunt.” He spat at Andras’s feet.

If Klara hadn’t taken Andras’s arm at that moment, he might have hit József. He hovered on the balls of his feet, his hands clenched. He hated József Hász. He had never known it before that moment. He hated everything he was, everything he represented. He could feel the fragile twig-structure of his own life losing its center, beginning to slip. It was József who had done this. Andras wanted to tear the man’s hair out, tear the fine cotton shirt from his back.

“Sit down, both of you,” the elder Mrs. Hász said. “It’s too hot. You’re overexcited.”

“Who’s overexcited?” József shouted. “It’s the loss of my family home, that’s all. Mother’s right: There’s no decision. It’s finished already, and no one consulted me. You all kept me in the dark. Even worse, you made me feel like it was for my sake that we had to give up the furniture, the paintings, the car, and God knows how much money! And all this time we were paying for her mistakes, and her husband’s.”

“What are you talking about?” Klara said. “How does this concern Andras and me?”

“He brought you back here. You came back. The authorities have known about it for nearly three years. Did you think you could hide behind your French name and your married name forever? Didn’t you know you’d be endangering the family?”

“Tell me what he means, György,” Klara said, turning to her brother. She held the baby on her hip and moved closer to Andras.

There was no way to avoid a disclosure now. As briefly and clearly as he could, György laid out the situation: how Madame Novak had brought Klara’s identity to light; how György had been approached, and when; how he’d arranged a solution; how he’d hoped that the authorities would have satisfied their greed, or grown tired of the whole affair, before he was forced to give up the house; and how they’d persisted, bringing the family to its current pass.

Klara grew pale as her brother spoke. She covered her mouth with her hand, looking from György to her husband. “Andras,” she said, when György had finished. “How long have you known?”

“Since last fall,” he said, forcing himself to look at her.

She took a step back and sat down in one of the wicker chairs. “Oh, God,” she said. “You knew, and you didn’t tell me. All this time.”

“Andras wanted to tell you,” György said. “I made him promise not to. I didn’t think it would be wise to worry you, in your condition.”

“And you agreed?” she asked Andras. “You thought it wouldn’t be wise to worry me, in my condition?”

“We argued about it,” György said. “He thought you would rather know. Mother, too, has always believed you should know. But Elza and I disagreed.”

Klara was crying with frustration now. She got to her feet and began to walk up and down the lawn with the baby in her arms. “This is a disaster,” she said. “I might have done something. We might have come to some solution. But no one said a word to me! Not a word! Not my husband. Not even my own mother!” She turned and went into the house, and Andras went after her; before he could catch her, she’d grabbed her cotton jacket and gone out through the heavy front door, carrying Tamás with her. Andras opened the door and followed her out onto the sidewalk. She half ran down Benczúr in the direction of Bajza utca, her melon-colored jacket fluttering behind her like a flag. The baby’s dark hair shone in the afternoon sunlight, his hand on her back just the shape and size of the starfish pin she’d worn in the south of France. Andras chased her now as he’d chased her then. He would have chased her all the way across the continent if he’d had to. But the traffic at the corner of Bajza utca and the Városliget fasor brought her to a stop, and she stood looking at the passing cars, refusing to acknowledge him. He caught up to her and took up her jacket, which had slipped from her shoulders to trail a sleeve on the sidewalk. As he draped it around her again he could feel her trembling with anger.

“Can’t you understand?” he said. “György was right. You would have risked yourself and the baby.”

The light changed, and she crossed the street toward Nefelejcs utca at the same brisk pace. He followed close behind.

“I was afraid you’d try to leave,” he said. “I had to go back to the work service. I couldn’t have gone with you.”

“Leave me alone,” she said. “I don’t want to speak to you.”

He matched her pace as she sped on toward home. “I respect György,” he said. “He took me into his confidence. I couldn’t betray him.”

“I don’t want to hear about it.”

“You’ve got to listen, Klara. You can’t just run away.”

She turned to face him now. The baby whimpered against her shoulder. “You let me beggar my family,” she said. “You made the decision for me.”

“György made the decision,” Andras said. “And be careful how you choose your words. Your brother’s not a beggar. If he has to move to an eight-room parlor-level flat in the Erzsébetváros, he’ll survive.”

“It’s my home,” she said, starting to cry again. “It’s my childhood home.”

“I lost mine, too, if you’ll recall,” Andras said.

She turned again and walked toward their building. At the entryway she fumbled in her pocketbook for the key. He extracted it for her and opened the outer door. From inside came the splash of the fountain and the sound of children playing hopscotch. She crossed the courtyard at a run and began to climb the staircase; the children stopped their game, holding their broken pot shards in their hands. Her quick steps rang on the stairs above, sounding in a spiral as she climbed. She had disappeared into the apartment by the time he reached the top. The front door stood open; the air of the hallway vibrated with silence. She had locked herself in the bedroom. The baby had begun to cry, and Andras could hear her trying to soothe him, their Tamás-talking to him, wondering aloud if he was hungry or wet, walking him up and down the room. Andras went into the kitchen and put his head against the cool flank of the icebox. His instinct had told him to tell her the truth at once. Why hadn’t he done it?

He sat in the kitchen and waited for her to come out. He waited as the shadows of the furniture lengthened across the kitchen floor and climbed the eastern wall. He made coffee and drank it. He tried to look at a newspaper but couldn’t concentrate. He waited, his hands folded in his lap, and when he got tired of waiting he went down the hallway and stood outside the door. He put a hand on the doorknob. It turned in his fingers, and there was Klara on the other side. The baby was asleep on the bed, his arms flung over his head as if in surrender. Klara’s eyes were pink, her hair loose around her shoulders. She looked exactly as Elisabet had looked when Andras had gone to see if he could coax her from her room on the rue de Sévigné. She held one arm across her chest, cupping her shoulder as if it were sore. Her footsteps had sounded on the bedroom floor for hours; all that time she must have been pacing with the baby.

“Come sit with me,” Andras said, taking her hand. He led her to the front room and brought her to the sofa, then sat down with her, keeping her hand in his own.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I should have told you.”

She looked down at his hand, closed around her own, and pushed the back of her other hand across her eyes. “I let myself think it was over,” she said. “We came back here and made a different life. I wasn’t afraid anymore. Or at least I didn’t fear the things I’d feared when I left here the first time.”

“That was what I wanted,” Andras said. “I didn’t want you to be afraid.”

“You should have trusted me to do what was right,” she said. “I wouldn’t have endangered our child. I wouldn’t have tried to leave the country while you were away in the Munkaszolgálat.”

“But what would you have done? What are we going to do now?”

“We’re going to go,” she said. “We’re all going to go, before György loses what’s left. Even if he can’t keep the house, he’s not destitute yet. There’s a great deal that might still be saved. We’re going to go talk to that Klein, you and I, and we’re going to ask him to arrange the trip. We have to try to get to Palestine. From there it might be easier to get to the United States.”

“You’re going to give up the building in Paris.”

“Of course,” she said. “Think of how much my brother’s already lost.”

“But how will we get them to stop dunning him? If you flee, won’t they go after him to tell them where you are?”

“He’s got to come too. He’s got to sell whatever’s left and get out as soon as he can.”

“And your mother? And my parents? And Mátyás? We can’t leave without knowing what’s happened to him. We’ve talked about this, Klara. We can’t do it.”

“We’ll take our parents. We’ll arrange for Mátyás to have passage too, if he returns in time.”

“And if he doesn’t?”

“Then we’ll speak to Klein and arrange for him to join us when he does return.”

“Listen to me. Hundreds of people have died trying to get to Palestine.”

“I understand. But we have to try. If we stay, they’ll bleed the family of everything. And in the end they might not be satisfied with the money.”

Andras sat silent for a long moment. “You know how Tibor feels about this,” he said. “He wanted us to go a long time ago.”

“And what do you think?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know.”

Her chest rose and fell beneath the drape of her blouse. “You have to understand,” she said. “I can’t stay here and allow us, or my family, to be done to this way. I didn’t then. And I won’t now.”

He did understand. Of course he’d known this about her: It was her nature. This was why György hadn’t told her. They were going to have to leave Hungary. They would sell the property in Paris; they would go to Klein and beg him to arrange one last trip. That night they would begin to plan how it might be done. But for the moment there was nothing more to say. He took her hand again and she held his gaze, and he knew, too, that she understood why he’d kept the truth from her for so many months.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE. Passage to the East

IN THE WEEKS that followed, he tried not to think about the Struma. He tried not to think about the deceived passengers who found themselves aboard a wreck of a ship, ill-provisioned and ill-equipped for the journey. He tried not to think about the prospect of their own passage down the Danube, the constant fear of discovery, his wife and son suffering for lack of food and water; he tried not to think about leaving his brother and his parents behind in Europe. He tried to think only of the necessity of getting out, and the means for arranging the trip. He wired Rosen to tell him of the change in their situation, the new urgency that had come upon them. Two weeks later, a reply came via air mail with the news that Shalhevet had secured six emergency visas-six!-enough for Andras and Klara, Tibor and Ilana, and the children. Once they arrived in Palestine, he wrote, it would be easier to arrange visas for the others-for Mendel Horovitz, who would be so valuable to the Yishuv; and for György and Elza and Andras’s parents and the rest of the family. There was no time to celebrate the news; there was too much to be done. Klara had to write to her solicitor in Paris to hasten the sale of the property. Andras had to write to his parents to explain what was happening, and why. And they had to see Klein.

It was Klara’s idea that they should go together, all six of them. She believed he might be more inclined to help if he met the people he’d be saving. They arranged to go on a Sunday afternoon; they dressed in visiting clothes and pushed the babies in their perambulators. Klara and Ilana walked ahead, their summer hats dipping toward each other like two bellflowers. Andras and Tibor followed. They might have been any Hungarian family out for a Sunday stroll. No one would have guessed that they were missing a seventh, a brother who was lost in Ukraine. No one would have guessed that they were trying to arrange an illegal flight from Europe. In her pocketbook Klara carried a telegram from her solicitor, stating that her property on the rue de Sévigné would be listed for ninety thousand francs, and that the transfer of the money from the sale, though difficult, might be accomplished through his contacts in Vienna, who had contacts in Budapest. Nothing would be done in Klara’s name; ownership of the building had already been officially transferred to the non-Jewish solicitor himself, because it had become illegal for Jews to own real estate in occupied France. Everyone would have to be paid along the way, of course, but if the sale went well, there would still be some seventy thousand francs left over. No one would have known, looking at Klara as she walked along Váci út that Sunday afternoon-her fine-boned back held straight, her features composed under the pale blue shadow of her hat-how unhappy she’d been two nights earlier as she’d drafted a telegram to her solicitor, instructing him to make the sale. It had been a long time since she and Andras had imagined they might go back someday to reclaim their Paris lives. But the apartment and the studio were real things that still belonged to her, things that marked out a territory for her in the city that had been her home for seventeen years. The property had made the impossible seem possible; it made them believe that everything might change, that they might return someday. The decision to sell the building carried a sense of finality. They were giving up that source of hope in order to fund a desperate journey that might fail, to a place that was utterly foreign to them-an embattled desert territory ruled by the British. But they had made their decision. They would try. And so Klara had written to her solicitor, directing him to forward the proceeds of the sale to his agents in Vienna and Budapest.

At the house in Frangepán köz, where time stood still and the very sunlight filtering down through the high clouds seemed antique, they found the milk goats bleating in their yard and pulling at a stack of sweet hay. Seven-month-old Tamás stared in fascination. He looked at Klara as though to ask if he should be alarmed. When he saw she was smiling, he turned again to the goats and pointed a finger.

“Our sons are city boys,” Tibor said. “By the time I was his age, I’d seen a thousand goats.”

“Perhaps they won’t be city boys for long,” Klara said.

They turned away from the goats and walked the stone path to the door. Tibor knocked, and Klein’s grandmother answered, her white hair hidden under a kerchief, her dress covered with a red-embroidered apron. From the kitchen came the smell of stuffed cabbage. Andras, exhausted from the week’s work, became suddenly and ravenously hungry. Klein’s grandmother beckoned them into the bright sitting room, where the elder Mr. Klein sat in an armchair with his feet soaking in a tin basin. He wore the same faded crimson robe he’d worn when Andras and Tibor had last visited; his hair stood up in the same winged style, as if his head meant to take flight. A haze of tea-scented steam wreathed his legs. He raised a hand in greeting.

“My husband’s bunions are bothering him,” his wife said. “Otherwise he would get up to welcome you.”

“I welcome you,” the old man said, and made a polite half bow. “Please sit.”

Mrs. Klein went off down the portrait-lined hall to get her grandson. None of them sat, despite the elder Klein’s invitation. Instead they waited in a close-shouldered group, glancing around at the room’s ancient furniture and its profusion of photographs. Andras saw Klara’s eyes move over the images of the little family-the boy that must have been the child Klein, the beautiful and mysterious woman, the sad-eyed man-and he felt again as though the house contained the ghost of some long-ago loss. Klara must have sensed it too; she drew Tamás closer and passed her thumb across his mouth, as if removing an invisible film of milk.

Klein followed his grandmother back down the hall and into the sitting room. She ducked into the kitchen; he came forward, blinking in the afternoon light. Andras had to wonder how long it had been since he’d last emerged from his den of dossiers and maps and radios. His eyes were dark-shadowed, his hair stiff for want of washing. He wore a cotton undershirt and a pair of ink-stained trousers. His feet were bare. He needed a shave. He scrutinized the group of them and shook his head.

“No,” he said. “No, I tell you. Not a chance.”

“Let me make some tea while you’re talking,” Klein’s grandmother called.

“No tea,” he called back to her. “We’re not talking. They’re leaving. Do you understand?” But they could hear a kitchen cabinet open and close, and water rolling into the metallic hollow of a teapot.

Klein raised his hands toward the ceiling.

“Be civil,” the elder Klein said to his grandson. “They’ve come all this way.”

“What you’re asking is impossible,” Klein said, speaking to Andras and Tibor. “Impossible, and illegal. You could all end up in jail, or dead.”

“We’ve considered that,” Klara said, her tone demanding that he look at her. “We still want to go.”

“Impossible!” he repeated.

“But this is what you do,” Andras said. “You’ve done it before. We can pay you. We’ve got the money, or we’ll have it soon.”

“Lower your voice,” Klein said. “The windows are open. You don’t know who might be listening.”

Andras lowered his voice. “Our situation has become urgent,” he said. “We want you to arrange our transport, and then we want to get the rest of our family out.”

Klein sat down on the sofa and put his head in his hands. “Get someone else to help you,” he said.

“Why should they get someone else?” his grandfather said. “You’re the best.”

Klein made a sound of frustration in his throat. His grandmother, having finished her preparations in the kitchen, wheeled a little tea cart into the room, parked it beside the sofa, and began to fill ancient-looking Herend cups.

“If you don’t help them, they will try someone else,” she said, with a note of quiet reproach. She cocked her head, pausing in her tea-pouring to scrutinize Klara, as if the future were written upon the dotted swiss of her dress. “They’ll go to Pál Behrenbohm, and he’ll turn them away. They’ll go to Szászon. They’ll go to Blum. And if that fails, they’ll go to János Speitzer. And you know what will happen then.” She handed the cups around, offering sugar and cream, and poured a final cup for herself.

Klein looked from his grandmother to Andras and Klara, Tibor and Ilana and the babies. He wiped his palms against his undershirt. He was one man against all of them. He raised his hands in defeat. “It’s your funeral,” he said.

“Please sit and drink your tea,” Klein’s grandmother said. “And Miklós, you need not use that morbid language.”

They took their places around the table and drank the strange smoky tea she’d prepared for them. It tasted like wood fires burning, and it made Andras think of fall. In lowered voices they talked about the details: how Klein would arrange transport down the Danube with a friend who owned a barge, and how the families would be secreted away in two ingeniously built compartments in the cargo area, and how drugged milk must be prepared for the babies so they wouldn’t cry, and how they would need to bring emergency food enough for two weeks’ travel, because a trip that ordinarily took a few days might take much longer in wartime. Klein would have to make inquiries about ships leaving from Romania, and where and how they might gain passage aboard one of them. It might take a month or two to arrange the journey, if all went well. He, Klein, was not a swindler, not like János Speitzer. He would not book passage for them upon an unsound boat, nor tell them to bring less food than was needed so they would have to buy more from his friends at cruel prices. He would not place them in care of a crew that would steal their luggage or prevent them from going ashore to a doctor if they needed one. Nor would he make false promises about the safety or success of the trip. It might fail at any point. They had to understand that.

When Klein had finished, he sat back against the sofa and scratched his chest through his undershirt. “That’s how it works,” he concluded. “A hard, risky trip. No guarantees.”

Klara moved forward in her chair and placed her cup on the little table. “No guarantees,” she repeated. “But at least we’ll have a chance.”

“I’m not going to speculate about your chances,” Klein said. “But if you still want to engage my services, I’m willing to do the work.”

They exchanged a look-Andras and Klara, Tibor and Ilana. They were ready. This was what they’d hoped for. “By all means,” Tibor said. “We’ll take whatever risks we have to take.”

The men shook hands and arranged to meet again in a week. Klein bowed to the women and retreated back down the hallway, where they heard the door of his room open and close. Andras imagined him taking a new manila folder from a box and inscribing their family name upon its tab. The thought filled him with sudden panic. So many files. Stacks and stacks of them, all over the bed and desk and bureau. What had happened to those people? How many of them had made it to Palestine?

The next evening Klara went to her brother to ask his forgiveness. She and Andras walked together to the house on Benczúr utca, pushing the baby in his carriage. In György’s study, Klara took her brother’s hands in her own and asked that he excuse her, that he understand how surprised she’d been and how incapable, at that moment, of appreciating what he’d done. She hated the thought that he’d already lost so much of his estate. She had authorized the sale of her property in Paris, she told him, and would begin to repay her debt to him as soon as she had access to the money.

“You’re in no debt to me,” György said. “What’s mine is yours. Most of what I had came from our father’s estate, in any case. And it’ll do little good for you to put money into my hands now. Our extortionists will only find a way to take it.”

“But what can I do?” she said, on the verge of tears. “How can I repay you?”

“You can forgive me for operating on your behalf without your knowledge. And perhaps you can convince your husband to forgive me for requiring that he keep the secret from you.”

“I do, of course,” Klara said; and Andras said he did as well. Everyone agreed that György had acted in Klara’s best interest, and György expressed the hope that his son would seek Klara and Andras’s forgiveness too. But as he said it, his voice faltered and broke.

“What is it?” Klara said. “What’s happened?”

“He’s received another call-up notice,” György said. “This time he’ll have to go. There’s nothing more we can do about it. We’ve offered a percentage of the proceeds from the sale of the house, but it’s not the money they want. They want to make an example of young men like József.”

“Oh, György,” Klara said.

Andras found himself speechless. He could no more imagine József Hász in the Munkaszolgálat than he could imagine Miklós Horthy himself showing up one morning on the bus from Óbuda to Szentendre, a tattered coat on his back, a lunch pail in his hand. His first sensation was one of satisfaction. Why shouldn’t József have to serve, when he, Andras, had already served for two years and was serving still? But György’s pained expression brought him back to himself. Whatever else József was, he was György’s child.

“I haven’t done a very good job of raising my son,” György said, turning his gaze toward the window. “I gave him everything he wanted, and tried to keep him from anything that would hurt him. But I gave him too much. I protected him too much. He’s come to believe that the world should present itself at his feet. He’s been living in comfort in Buda while other men serve in his place. Now he’ll have to get by on his strength and his wits, like everyone else. I hope he’s got enough of both.”

“Perhaps he can be assigned to one of the companies close to home,” Andras said.

“That won’t be up to him,” György said. “They’ll put him where they want to.”

“I can write to General Martón.”

“You don’t owe József anything,” György said.

“He helped me in Paris. More than once.”

György nodded slowly. “He can be generous when he wants to be.”

“Andras will write to the general,” Klara said. “And then maybe József will come to Palestine, with the rest of us.”

“To Palestine?” György said. “You’re not going to Palestine.”

“Yes,” Klara said. “We have no other choice.”

“But, darling, there’s no way to get to Palestine.”

Klara explained about Klein. György’s eyes grew stern as she spoke.

“Don’t you understand?” he said. “This is why I paid the Ministry of Justice. This is why I sold the paintings and the rugs and the furniture. This is why I’m selling the house! To keep you from taking a foolish risk like this.”

“It would be foolish to throw away what we have left,” Klara said.

György turned to Andras. “Please tell me you haven’t agreed to this wild scheme.”

“My brother witnessed the massacre in the Délvidék. He thinks it could happen here, and worse.”

György sank back in his chair, his face drained of blood. From outside came the drumbeat and brass of a military band; they must have been marching up Andrássy út to Heroes’ Square. “What about us?” he said, faintly. “What’s going to happen once they discover you’re gone? Who do you think they’ll question? Who’ll get the blame for spiriting you away?”

“You must join us in Palestine,” Klara said.

He shook his head. “Impossible. I’m too old to begin a new life.”

“What choice do you have?” she said. “They’ve taken away your position, your fortune, your home. Now they’re taking your son.”

“You’re dreaming,” he said.

“I wish you’d talk to Elza about it. By the end of the year they’ll call you to the labor service too. Elza and Mother will be left all alone.”

He touched the edge of his blotter with his thumbs. A stack of documents lay before him, thick sheaves of ivory legal paper. “Do you see this?” he said, pushing at the papers. “These are the documents assigning possession of the house to the new owner.”

“Who is it?” Klara asked.

“The son of the minister of justice. His wife has just given birth to their sixth child, I understand.”

“God help us,” Klara said. “The house will be a shambles.”

“Where will you live?” Andras said.

“I’ve found lodgings for us in a building at the head of Andrássy út-it’s really quite grand, or it was at one time. According to these papers, we’re allowed to take whatever furniture remains.” He swept an arm around the denuded room.

“Please speak to Elza,” Klara said.

“Six children in this house,” he said, and sighed. “What a disaster.”

General Martón’s reaction was quick and sympathetic, but he lacked range: His solution was to secure József a place in the 79/6th. When the news arrived, Andras felt as though he were being punished personally. Here was retribution for the moment of satisfaction he’d experienced when he’d first heard that József had been called. Now, every morning, József was there at the Óbuda bus stop, looking like an officer in his too-clean uniform and his unbroken military cap. He was assigned to Andras and Mendel’s work group and made to load boxcars like the rest of the conscripts. Through the first week of it he glared at Andras every chance he got, as if this were all his fault, as if Andras himself were responsible for the blisters on József’s feet and hands, the ache in his back, the peeling sunburn. He was roundly abused by the work foreman for his softness, his sloth; when he protested, Faragó kicked him to the ground and spat in his face. After that, he did his work without a word.

June turned into July and a dry spell ended. Every afternoon the sky broke open to drop sweet-tasting rain onto the tedium of Szentendre Yard. The yellow bricks of the rail yard buildings darkened to dun. On the hills across the river, the trees that had stood immobile in the dust now shook out their leaves and tossed their limbs in the wind. Weeds and wildflowers crowded between the railroad ties, and one morning a plague of tiny frogs descended upon Szentendre. They were everywhere underfoot, having arrived from no one knew where, coin-sized, the color of celery, sprinting madly toward the river. They made the work servicemen curse and dance for two days, then disappeared as mysteriously as they’d come. It was a time of year Andras had loved as a boy, the time to swim in the millpond, to eat sun-hottened strawberries directly from the vine, to hide in the shadow of the long cool grass and watch ants conduct their quick-footed business. Now there was only the slow toil of the rail yard and the prospect of escape. At night, during his few hours at home, he held his sleeping son while Klara read him passages from Bialik or Brenner or Herzl, descriptions of Palestine and of the miraculous transformation the settlers were enacting there. In his mind he had begun to see his family replanted among orange trees and honeybees, the bronze shield of the sea glittering far below, his boy growing tall in the salt-flavored air. He tried not to dwell upon the inevitable difficulties of the journey. He was no stranger to hardship, nor was Klara. Even his parents, whose recent move to Debrecen represented the most significant geographic displacement of their married lives, had agreed to undertake the trip if it was possible, if entry visas could be obtained for them; they refused to be separated from their children and grandchildren by a continent, a sea.

After the drought broke, the journey began to take shape. Klein had identified a barge captain named Szabó who would take them as far as the Romanian border, and another, Ivanescu, who would conduct them to Constanţa; he booked them passage under the family name of Gedalya aboard the Trasnet, a former fishing boat that had been converted into a refugee-smuggling vessel. They must be prepared to be crowded and hungry, overheated, dehydrated, seasick, delayed for days in Turkish ports where they could not take the risk of disembarking; they must bring with them only what was necessary. They should be glad they were undertaking the trip in summer, when the seas were calm. They would travel through the Bosporus past Istanbul, through the Marmara Denizi and into the Aegean Sea; from there they would move into the Mediterranean, and if they evaded the patrol boats and submarines they would dock three days later at Haifa. From start to finish the journey would take two weeks, if all went well. They would leave on August second.

Klara had an old-fashioned wooden wall calendar painted with the image of a bluebird on a cherry branch. Three diminutive windows showed day, date, and month; each morning Andras rolled the little wheels forward before he left for Szentendre Yard. He rolled July through its thunderstorm-drenched days, from single digits into teens, as plans for the trip went forward. They assembled clothing, boots, hats; they packed and repacked suitcases, trying to determine the densest possible arrangement of their belongings. On Sunday afternoons they walked the city together, packing their minds with the things they wanted to remember: the green haze of river-cooled air around Margaret Island; the thrumming vibration of cars crossing the Széchenyi Bridge; the smells of cut grass and hot-spring sulfur in the Városliget; the dry concrete pan of the skating pond; the long gray Danube embankment where Andras had walked with his brother a lifetime ago, when they were recent gimnázium graduates living in a room on Hársfa utca. There was the synagogue where he and Klara had been married, the hospital where their son had been born, the small bright studio where Klara taught her private students. There was their own apartment on Nefelejcs utca, the first place they’d ever lived together. And then there were the haunted places they would not visit in farewell: the house on Benczúr utca, which now stood empty in preparation for the arrival of the son of the minister of justice; the Opera House, with its echoing corridors; the patch of pavement in an alley where what had happened long ago had happened.

One Sunday, two weeks before the second of August, Andras went alone to see Klein. The packet of entry visas had arrived from Palestine. That was the last thing they needed to complete their dossier, that set of crisp white documents imprinted with the seal of the British Home Office and the Star of David stamp of the Yishuv. Klein would make facsimile copies, which he would keep in case anything happened to the originals. When Andras arrived, Klein’s grandfather was in the yard, feeding the goats. He put a hand to his hat.

“You’ll be off soon,” he said.

“Fourteen more days.”

“I knew the boy would take care of things.”

“He seems to have a talent for it.”

“That’s our boy. He’s like his father was, always planning, planning, working with his gadgets, making things happen. His father was an inventor, a man whose name everyone would have known, if he’d lived.” He told Andras that Klein’s parents had died of influenza when Klein was still in short pants; they were the man and woman depicted in the photograph, as Andras had guessed. Another child might have been destroyed by the loss, the elder Klein said, but not Miklós. He’d gotten top marks in school, particularly in the social sciences, and had grown up to become a kind of inventor in his own right-a creator of possibilities where none existed.

“What a stroke of luck it was that we found him,” Andras said.

“May your luck continue,” the grandfather said. He spat thrice and knocked on the wooden lintel of the goat house. “May your journey to Palestine be exceptional only for its tedium.”

Andras tipped his cap to the elder Klein and walked the stone path to the door. Klein’s grandmother was there in the front room, sitting in the armchair with an embroidery hoop in her lap. The design, embroidered in tiny gold Xs, showed a braided challah and the word Shabbos in Hebrew letters.

“It’s for your table in the holy land,” she said.

“Oh, no,” Andras said. “It’s too fine.” He thought of their packed and repacked suitcases, into which not a single thing more could possibly fit.

But nothing could be hidden from Klein’s grandmother. “Your wife can sew it into the lining of her summer coat,” she said. “It’s got a good luck charm in it.”

“Where?”

She showed him two minuscule Hebrew letters cross-stitched into the end of the challah. “It’s the number eighteen. Chai. Life.”

Andras nodded his thanks. “It’s very kind of you,” he said. “You’ve been a help to us all along.”

“The boy’s waiting for you in his room. Go on.”

In his file-crowded den, Klein sat on the bed with his hair in wild disorder, shirtless, a radio disemboweled on the blanket before him. If he had been disheveled and ripe-smelling the first time Andras had met him, now, after a month of planning their escape, he seemed on his way to a prehistoric state of existence. His beard had grown in scraggly and black. Andras couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen him wear a shirt. His smell was reminiscent of the barracks in Subcarpathia. Had it not been for the open window and the breeze that riffled the topmost papers on the stacks, no one could have remained in that room for long. And yet, there on the desk was a cleared-away space in which a crisp folder lay open, a coded travel itinerary stapled to one side, a fat sheaf of instructions on the other. Gedalya, their code name, on the tab. And in Andras’s hand the final piece, the packet of documents that would complete the puzzle, the legal element of their illegal flight. Never before the planning of this trip had he imagined what a byzantine maze might lie between emigration and immigration. Klein tucked a tiny screwdriver into his belt and raised his eyebrows at Andras. Andras put the documents into his lap.

“Genuine,” Klein said, touching the raised letters of the British seal. His dark-circled eyes met Andras’s own. “Well, that’s it. You’re ready.”

“We haven’t talked about money.”

“Yes, we have.” Klein reached for the folder and extracted a page torn from an accountant’s notebook, a list of figures penned in his thin left-sloping script. The cost of false papers, in case they were discovered. The fees for the barge captains and the fishing-boat captains and their part of the petrol for the journey and the cost of food and water and the extra money set aside for bribes, and the harbor fees and taxes and the cost of extra insurance, because so many boats had accidentally been torpedoed in the Mediterranean in recent months. Everything to be paid in person, incrementally, along the way. “We’ve been through it all,” he said.

“I mean your fee,” Andras said. “We haven’t talked about that.”

Klein scowled. “Don’t insult me.”

“I’m not insulting you.”

“Do I look like I need anything?”

“A shirt,” Andras said. “A bath. Maybe a new radio.”

“I won’t take money from you.”

“That’s absurd.”

“That’s the way it is.”

“Maybe you won’t take it for yourself. But take it for your grandparents.”

“They’ve got all they need.”

“Don’t be an idiot,” Andras said. “We can give you two thousand pengő. Think what that could mean.”

“Two thousand, five thousand, a hundred thousand, I don’t care! This is not paid work, do you understand? If you wanted to pay, you should have gone to Behrenbohm or Speitzer. My services aren’t for sale.”

“If you don’t want money, what do you want?”

Klein shrugged. “I want this to work. And then I want do it again for someone else, and for someone else after that, until they stop me.”

“That’s not what you said when we first met you.”

“I was scared after the Struma,” Klein said. “I’m not scared anymore.”

“Why not?”

He shrugged. “Things got worse. Paralyzing fear came to seem like a luxury.”

“What if you wanted to leave? My friend could help you get a visa.”

“I know. That’s good. I’ll keep it in mind.”

“You’ll keep it in mind? That’s all?”

He nodded at Andras and took the screwdriver from his belt again. “If you’ll excuse me, I’ve got more work to do today. We’re done, unless you hear from me. You leave in two weeks.” He bent to the radio and began to loosen a screw that secured a copper wire to its base.

“So?” Andras said. “That’s it?”

“That’s it,” Klein said. “I’m not a sentimental person. If you want a long goodbye, talk to my grandmother.”

But Klein’s grandmother had fallen asleep in her chair. She’d finished embroidering the challah cover and had wrapped it in a piece of tissue paper, written Andras’s and Klara’s names on a little card, and affixed the card to the paper with a pin. Andras bent to her ear and whispered his thanks, but she didn’t wake. The goats made their remarks in the yard. From Klein’s room came a low curse and the clatter of a thrown tool. Andras tucked the parcel under his arm and let himself out without a sound.

And then it was the week before their journey. Andras and Mendel produced the last illustrated issue of The Crooked Rail, though Andras made Mendel promise that he would continue to publish until his own visa came through. The issue featured a faux interview with a star of Hungarian pornography, a crossword puzzle whose circled letters spelled the name of their own Major Károly Varsádi, and an optimistic economic column entitled “Black Market Review,” in which all indicators pointed to an unending series of lucrative shipments. “Ask Hitler,” which had become a permanent fixture of the newspaper, carried only one letter that week:

D EAR H ITLER: When will this hot weather end? Sincerely, S UNSTRUCK.

D EAR S UNSTRUCK: It’ll end when I goddamn say it will, and not a moment sooner! Heil me, H ITLER.

In midweek, Andras’s parents came to Budapest to see their children and grandchildren once more before they left. They went to dinner at the new residence of the Hász family, a high-ceilinged apartment with crumbling plaster moldings and a parquet floor in the herringbone pattern called points de Hongrie. It had been nearly five years now, Andras realized, since he’d studied parquetry at the École Spéciale; five years since he’d learned what kind of wood suited each design, and replicated the patterns in his sketchbook. Now here he was in this apartment with his stricken parents, his fierce and lovely wife, his baby son, preparing to say goodbye to Europe altogether. The architecture of this apartment mattered only insofar as it reminded him of what he would leave behind.

His brother and Ilana arrived, their boy asleep in Ilana’s arms. They sat close together on the sofa while József perched beside them on a gold chair and smoked one of his mother’s cigarettes. Andras’s father perused a tiny book of psalms, marking a few for his sons to repeat along the journey. The elder Mrs. Hász made conversation with Andras’s mother, who had learned that her own sister knew the remnant of Mrs. Hász’s family that remained in Kaba, not far from Konyár. György arrived from work, his shirtfront damp with perspiration, and kissed Andras’s mother and shook hands with Béla. Elza Hász ushered them all into the dining room and begged them to take their places at the table.

The room was decorated as if for a party. There were tapers in silver candelabra, clusters of roses in blue glass bowls, decanters of tawny wine, the gold-rimmed plates with their design of birds. Andras’s father made the blessing over the bread, and the usual grim serving man stepped forward to fill their plates. At first the conversation was about trivial things: the fluctuating prices of lumber, the almanac’s predictions of an early fall, the scandalous relationship between a certain member of parliament and a former star of the silent screen. But inevitably the conversation turned to the war. The morning papers had reported that German U-boats had sunk a million tons of British-American shipping that summer, seven hundred thousand tons in July alone. And the news from Russia was no better: The Hungarian Second Army, after a bloody battle at Voronezh in early July, was now pushing onward in the wake of the German Sixth toward Stalingrad. The Hungarian Second Army had already paid a heavy toll to support its ally. It had lost, György had read, more than nine hundred officers and twenty thousand soldiers. No one mentioned what they were all thinking: that there were fifty thousand labor servicemen attached to the Hungarian Second Army, nearly all of them Jewish, and that if the Hungarian Second had fared badly, the labor battalions were certain to have fared worse. From the street below, like a note of punctuation, came the familiar gold-toned clang of the streetcar bell. It was a sound peculiar to Budapest, a sound amplified and made resonant by the walls of the buildings that lined the streets. Andras couldn’t help but think of that other departure five years earlier, the one that had brought him from Budapest to Paris and to Klara. The journey that lay ahead now was more desperate but strangely less frightening; between himself and the terror of the unknown lay the comfort of Klara’s presence, and Tibor’s. And at the other end of the journey would be Rosen and Shalhevet, and the prospect of hard work he wanted to do, and the promise of an unfamiliar variety of freedom. Mendel Horovitz might join them in a few months; Andras’s parents might follow soon after. In Palestine his son would never have to wear a yellow armband or live in fear of his neighbors. He himself might finish his architecture training. He couldn’t help feeling a kind of pity for József Hász, who would remain here in Budapest and struggle on alone in Company 79/6 of the Munkaszolgálat.

“You ought to be coming to Palestine, Hász,” he said. The journey to the Middle East would make Andras better traveled than József, a fact he had apprehended with a certain satisfaction.

“You wouldn’t want me,” József said flatly. “I’d be a terrible traveling companion. I’d get seasick. I’d complain constantly. And that would just be the beginning. I’d be useless in Palestine. I can’t plant trees or build houses. In any case, my mother can’t spare me, can you, Mother?”

Mrs. Hász looked first at Andras’s mother and then at her own dinner plate. “Maybe you’ll change your mind,” she said. “Maybe you’ll come with us when we go.”

“Please, Mother,” József said. “How long will you keep up that pretense? You’re not going to Palestine. You won’t even get into a boat at Lake Balaton.”

“No one’s pretending,” his mother said. “Your father and I mean to go as soon as our visas arrive. We certainly can’t stay here.”

“Grandmother,” József said. “Tell my mother she’s out of her mind.”

“I certainly will not,” said the elder Mrs. Hász. “I intend to go myself. I’ve always wanted to see the Holy Land.”

“See it, then. But don’t live there. We’re Hungarians, not desert Bedouins.”

“We were a tribal people before we were Hungarians,” Tibor said. “Don’t forget that.”

“Pardon me, Doctor,” József said. He liked to call Tibor “Doctor” as much as he liked to call Andras “Uncle.” “And before that we were hunters and gatherers in Africa. So perhaps we should bypass the Holy Land altogether and proceed directly to the darkest Congo.”

“József,” György said.

“A thousand pardons, Father. I’m sure you’d rather I kept quiet. But it’s hard, you know, to be the only sane person in the asylum.”

Béla shifted in his delicate chair, feeling the pull of his city suit against his shoulders. He was thinking that he would have liked to take the younger Hász by the shoulders and shake him. He wondered how the boy could dare speak so flippantly about what was about to befall Andras and Tibor and their wives and sons. If one of his own sons had spoken that way, Béla would have risen from his chair and given him a good tongue-lashing, even before guests. But he would never have raised a child who spoke that way. Not he, nor Flóra. She put a hand on his wrist now as if she could see what was in his mind; he wasn’t surprised she understood. Everyone could see that the boy was intolerable. At least Klara’s mother had spoken to him sternly. Béla looked across the table at her, that grave gray-eyed woman who had lost and regained her child once already and now seemed stoic at the prospect of losing her again. They had raised fine children, this woman and Béla and Flóra. He didn’t wonder anymore at the connection between Andras and Klara; he knew now that they were made of the same stuff, whatever luxuries the girl had had as a child. There she was, sitting calm as grass with the baby in her arms, looking as though she were about to take a trip to the countryside rather than down a dangerous river and across a torpedo-salted sea. He told himself to take note of that tranquil look of hers, that radiant calm; in the days and weeks ahead he would want to remember it.

…

That week, their last in Budapest, was the hottest yet of the summer. On Thursday the bus to Szentendre was stifling even at six in the morning; this was the kind of day Andras’s mother called gombás-idő- mushroom-growing weather. A damp wind blew through the channel of the Danube. Birds hustled through the wet turbulence of air, and the trees across the water flashed the white undersides of their leaves. All that week, it seemed, the command ranks at Szentendre had been out of sorts. The same foremen who’d failed to take note of the subtle slackening of work now began to drive the laborers relentlessly. Ill temper seemed to have spread through the camp like a fever. There had been a series of arguments in the officers’ headquarters between Major Varsádi and the black-market inspectors, with the result that Varsádi had unleashed a rare storm of anger upon his lieutenants; the lieutenants had behaved vilely to the guards and work foremen, and the foremen, in turn, swore at the labor servicemen, kicked them, and sliced at their backs and legs with doubled lengths of packing rope.

That morning there was to be an inspection lineup before work began. The men had been instructed in advance that their uniforms and equipment were to be in top shape. Beginning at seven o’clock, the men were made to stand at attention beside the tracks for what seemed an interminable length of time. Rain began to fall, a barrage of fat hard drops that penetrated the fabric of the men’s clothing. The waiting went on and on; the guards paced the rows of men, as bored as their charges.

“What a waste of time,” József said. “Why don’t they just send us home?”

“Hear hear,” Mendel said. “Cut us loose.”

“Quiet there, both of you,” a guard called to them.

Andras kept an eye on the low brick building that housed Varsádi’s headquarters. Through a steam-hazed window he could make out the commander holding a phone receiver to his ear. Andras rocked back and forth from his heels to the balls of his feet; he studied the stippling of rain on the back of the man in front of him. In his mind he reviewed the tasks that lay ahead in next few days: the final packing, the rechecking of their lists of clothing and supplies, the tying up and locking of the suitcases, the departure from their apartment on Nefelejcs utca, the midnight meeting at Tibor’s, the walk to the point just north of the Erzsébet Bridge where a barge would be waiting, their consignment to the damp dark hiding place where they would huddle together as the barge slipped into the current. He was there in his mind, so thoroughly hidden in the hold of that Danube barge, that at first he didn’t notice the rumble of trucks on the road. He felt a low vibration in his sternum and thought, More thunder. But the rumble continued and increased, and when he looked up at last he saw a six-truck convoy bearing Hungarian soldiers. The trucks roared through the gates of Szentendre Yard, their tires turning up dry dust beneath the rain-damp surface of the road. They parked on the bare stretch of earth that lay between the tracks and the officers’ building. The soldiers in back carried rifles fixed with bayonets; Andras could see the blades glinting in the olive-colored gloom of the canvas enclosures. When the trucks stopped, the soldiers jumped out onto the muddy gravel and held their weapons loosely at their sides. The officers in the first truck went into the low brick building, and the door closed behind them.

The work servicemen eyed the soldiers. There must have been fifty of them at least. With their officers occupied inside headquarters, the soldiers leaned their rifles against the trucks and began to smoke. One of them pulled out a deck of cards and dealt poker. Another group of men clustered around a newspaper while one of the soldiers read the headlines aloud.

“What’s going on?” whispered the man beside Andras, a tall hairless man who had been dubbed the Ivory Tower. He had been a history professor at the university; like Zoltán Novak he had been recruited to the Munkaszolgálat to fill a quota of Jewish luminaries. He was new to the work service, and had not yet learned to accept its mysteries and contradictions without protest.

“I don’t know,” Andras said. “We’ll find out.”

“Silence in the lines!” shouted a guard.

The wait continued. Some of the guards drifted toward the soldiers to trade cigarettes and news. A few of them seemed to know each other. They slapped each other on the back and shook hands. Another half hour passed, and still no one emerged from the headquarters. Finally the guards’ captain gave the command for the labor servicemen to be at ease. They could eat or smoke if they wanted. Andras and Mendel sat down on a damp railroad tie and opened their tin lunch pails, and József drew a slim leather case from his breast pocket and extracted a cigarette.

A moment later, the door of the squat brick building opened and the officers emerged-first the army officers in their crisp brass-buttoned uniforms, then the familiar Munkaszolgálat officers who had commanded them since the beginning of their time at Szentendre. Varsádi’s first lieutenant blew a whistle and ordered the servicemen to stand at attention. There was a moment of rustling confusion as the men put away their lunches. Then the sergeant shouted his orders: The men were to form ranks at the supply trucks and move the goods to the boxcars as quickly as possible.

If it hadn’t been for the presence of the soldiers, their bayonets needling skyward as if to pierce the underbellies of the low-hanging clouds, it would have seemed like any other afternoon at Szentendre Yard. The 79/6th carried crates of ammunition across the same expanse of gravel they’d crossed and recrossed a thousand times. If the guards kept a tighter rein on the men, if the officers were more strident as they shouted their orders, it seemed only an extension of the animus that had permeated the command ranks all week. Faragó, their foreman, failed to whistle a single show tune; instead he shouted Siessetek! in his thin tenor and wondered aloud how he’d been cursed with the command of such slugs, such turtles.

Halfway through the unloading, when there were still five supply trucks’ worth of goods to be transferred to the train, an adjutant of Varsádi’s approached Andras’s work group and drew Faragó aside. A moment later, Faragó was calling Andras and Mendel from their duties. The company commander, it seemed, wanted a word with them in his office.

Mendel and Andras exchanged a look: It’s nothing. Don’t panic.

“Did the fellow say what it was about, sir?” Mendel asked, though there was only one thing it could be about, only one reason for the commander to call the two of them to his office.

“You’ll find out soon enough,” Faragó said. And then, to the adjutant, “See they get back here as soon as Varsádi’s finished with them. I can’t spare them for long.”

The major’s young adjutant led them across the rail yard toward the low brick building. A clutch of armed soldiers stood at attention in the anteroom, rifles angled against their shoulders. Their eyes moved toward Andras and Mendel as they entered, but otherwise they remained still as sculptures. An orderly ushered Andras and Mendel into Varsádi’s office and closed the door behind them, and they found themselves standing unaccompanied before their commander. Varsádi’s uniform shirt was crisp despite the heat, his eyes narrow behind a pair of demilune glasses. On his desk, as Andras knew it would be, was a complete set of The Crooked Rail.

“Well, then,” Varsádi said, straightening the pages before him. “I’ll be brief. You know I like you boys and your newspaper. It’s given the men a good laugh. But I’m afraid it’s not-er-opportune to have it circulating at the moment.”

Andras experienced a moment of confusion. He had believed this meeting was to be about the resistance he and Mendel had stirred up. The quickened pace of work, the shift in the foremen’s attitude, had pointed in that direction. But Varsádi wasn’t accusing them of agitating. He seemed only to be asking them to stop publishing.

“The paper’s not really circulating, sir,” Mendel said. “Not beyond the 79/6th.”

“You’ve made fifty copies of each issue,” Varsádi said. “The men take them home. Some of those copies might find their way out into the city. And then there’s the matter of printing, the matter of your plates and originals. This is a sharp-looking paper. I know you’re not hand-cranking copies at home.”

Andras and Mendel exchanged the briefest of looks, and Mendel said, “We destroy the printing plates each week, sir. The circulation copies are all there are.”

“I understand you were both recently employed at the Budapest Jewish Journal. If we were to inquire there, or take a look around, we wouldn’t happen to find…?”

“You can look wherever you like, sir,” Mendel said. “There’s nothing to find.”

Andras watched with a kind of dreamlike detachment as the commander opened his desk drawer, removed a small revolver, and held it loosely in his hand. The body of the gun was velvet black, the muzzle snub-nosed. “There can’t be any mistake about this,” Varsádi said. “Fifty copies of each paper. That’s enough uncertainty in this equation. I need your originals and your printing plates. I need to know where those things are kept.”

“We’ve destroyed-” Mendel began again, but his eyes flicked toward the gun.

“You’re lying,” Varsádi said, matter-of-factly. “I don’t like that, after the leniency I’ve shown you.” He turned the gun over and ran a thumb along the safety. “I need the truth, and then you’ll be on your way. You printed this paper at the Budapest Jewish Journal. Can we find your originals there? I ask, gentlemen, because the only other place I can think to search is your homes. And I would prefer not to disturb your families.” The words hung in the air between them as he polished the revolver with his thumb.

Andras saw it all: The apartment on Nefelejcs ransacked, every paper and book thrown onto the floor, every cabinet emptied, the sofa disemboweled, the walls and floorboards torn open. All the preparations for their trip to Palestine laid bare to official scrutiny. And Klara, huddled in a corner, or held by the wrists-How? By whom?-as the baby wailed. He met Mendel’s eyes again and understood that Mendel had seen it, too, and had made his decision. If Andras himself didn’t tell the truth, Mendel would. And in fact, a moment later, Mendel spoke.

“The originals are at the Journal,” he said. “One copy of each issue, in a filing cabinet in the chief editor’s office. No need to disturb anyone’s family. We don’t keep anything at home.”

“Very good,” said Varsádi. He replaced the gun in the desk drawer. “That’s all I need from you now. Dismissed,” he said, and waved a hand toward the door.

They moved as if through some viscous liquid, not looking at each other. They had compromised Frigyes Eppler, his person, his position; they both knew it. There was no telling what the consequences might be, or what price Eppler would be made to pay. Outside, they found that the entire company had been moved to the assembly ground, where they stood now at uncomfortable attention. As Andras took his place in line, József threw him a look of frank curiosity. But there was no time to enlighten him; it seemed that the promised inspection was now to occur. The soldiers who had arrived that morning had dispersed themselves along the edge of the assembly ground, and the officers who had conferred with Varsádi stood at the head of the formation. When Andras looked across the expanse of gravel to the far edge of the field, he found that soldiers had lined up there as well. In front of Varsádi’s headquarters, soldiers. Along the tracks behind them, more soldiers. All at once he understood: The 79/6th had been corralled, surrounded. The soldiers who had been smoking and laughing with the guards now stood at attention with their hands on their rifles, their eyes fixed at that dangerous military middle distance, the place from which it was impossible to recognize another human being.

Varsádi emerged from the low brick building, his back erect, his medals flashing in the afternoon sun. “Into your lines,” he shouted. “Marching formation.”

Andras told himself to keep calm. They were half an hour from Budapest. This wasn’t the Délvidék. It was likely Varsádi meant to do nothing more than to scare them, make a show of control, correct for the laxity of his command. At his order the 79/6th marched out of the assembly ground and along the tracks, toward the south gate of the rail yard. The soldiers kept their lines tight around the block of work servicemen. They all stopped when they reached the end of the row of boxcars.

Three empty cars had been coupled to the end of the train, their sides emblazoned with the Munkaszolgálat acronym. Over the small, high windows of the boxcars, iron bars had been installed. The doors stood open as if in expectation. Far ahead, beyond the cars that had just been loaded with supplies, an engine exhaled brown smoke.

“At attention, men,” Varsádi shouted. “Your orders have been changed. Your services are needed elsewhere. You will leave immediately. Your duties have become classified. We cannot give you further information.”

There was a burst of incredulous protest from the men, a sudden din of shouting.

“Silence,” the commander cried. “Silence! Silence at once!” He raised his pistol and fired it into the air. The men fell silent.

“Pardon me, sir,” József said. He stood just a few feet from Andras, close enough for Andras to see a narrow vein pumping at his temple. “As I recall, the KMOF Rules of Duty Handbook says we’ve got to have a week’s notice before any change of posting. And if you don’t mind my mentioning it, we’ve hardly got the supplies.”

Major Varsádi strode toward József, pistol in hand. He took the gun by its short muzzle and delivered two swift blows with the butt-end across József’s face. A bright stuttering dart of blood appeared on the shoulder of Andras’s uniform.

“Take my advice and shut your mouth,” Varsádi said. “Where you’re going, you’d be shot for less.”

The major gave another order; the soldiers tightened their lines around the labor servicemen and squeezed them toward the train cars. Andras found himself jammed between Mendel and József. Behind them was a crush of men. They had no choice but to climb into the open mouth of the boxcar. Through the single high window Andras could see the soldiers in a line around the cars, the dull glint of their bayonets against the marbled sky. More and more servicemen were pushed into the cars until the air seemed to be made of them. Andras inhaled wet canvas and hair oil and sweat, the smell of the morning’s work cut with the tang of panic. His heart drummed in his ribcage, and his throat closed with terror. Klara would be home now, packing the last of their things. In an hour she would begin to look at the clock. He had to get off the train. He would plead illness; he would offer a bribe. He shoved and elbowed his way toward the door again, but before he could reach that rectangle of light there was an all-clear cry. Then the rattle of the door sliding closed, the descent of darkness, the sound of a chain against metal, the unmistakable click of a padlock.

A moment later the train whistle let out an indifferent screech. Through the wooden floorboards, through the soles of his summer boots and the bones of his legs, came a deep mechanical shudder, the first grinding jolt of motion. The men fell against each other, against Andras; the weight of them seemed heavy enough to squeeze his heart to stillness in his chest. And then the train lurched into its rhythm and carried them forward through the north gates of Szentendre Yard, toward a destination none of them could name.