The Invisible Bridge

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR. Turka

IN THE DAYS and nights he spent on the train, after he’d shouted himself hoarse with protest and exhausted all hope of escape, a kind of numbness seemed to overtake him. He stood with Mendel for hours at the small high window, watching the world pass by outside like a catalogue of the impossible: That motorbike, with its suggestion of a quick escape. That road, and the freedom to follow it home to Klara. That mail truck, which might carry a letter to her. He knew from the direction of the light that they were headed northeast. He would have known it anyway because the train was climbing. They ascended into the northern uplands through Gyöngyös and Füzesabony; at times the train crawled, and at other times it stopped for hours. Each time it stopped, Andras thought they might be led off to their new work site. On the second night they were actually ordered to leave the train, and herded into an empty warehouse that must have once been used to store the red wine of the region, Egri Bikavér, bull’s blood. The air had the sweet oaky tang of wine barrels; the dirt floor was stained with faded purple rings. Two army cooks fed them a thin cabbage soup and hunks of hard dark bread, the familiar Munkaszolgálat food. They stood in line to wash at a spigot in a corner of the warehouse. They weren’t allowed to speak to each other, or to venture outside, not even for a piss; they had to use a barrel for that. The warehouse door was locked, the building guarded by soldiers. In the morning they were put back on the train and sent east again.

That was the third day of travel. He was supposed to have embarked for Palestine the next morning. What would Klara be doing now? He knew it was futile to hope she would have gone on without him. What would she have thought two nights before, when the hour grew later and later and he hadn’t come home? He imagined her bending over the valises, packing the baby’s things, checking the clock on the dresser; he imagined her mild worry when the usual hour of his return had passed-had he stopped to have a last drink in Budapest with Mendel, or a last stroll through the familiar streets? The dinner she’d made would have grown cold in the kitchen. She would have put Tamás to bed, her worry shading into fear as eight o’clock became nine, and nine became ten.

What did she imagine had happened to him? Did she think he’d been thrown in jail or killed? Had the work-service administration told her anything, even now? In all probability she still didn’t know. And what about Varsádi’s threat? Would he be content when his men found the originals of The Crooked Rail at Eppler’s offices, or would he insist that the apartment be searched too?

There was constant speculation on the train about where they were going and what awaited them at the end of the journey. The prevailing opinion was that there had been some mistake about the company’s transfer. They were supposed to have been sent northwest to Esztergom at the end of the month, to work at another rail yard. The orders must have gotten confused. The mix-up would soon be discovered, and they would be put on a westbound train. But that didn’t explain why soldiers had been sent to Szentendre Yard to load the men onto the trains, nor why they’d been shipped off with such haste. The Ivory Tower, the former professor of history, offered another theory: He believed they were being sent east because they had all been witness to a crime, the slow and systematic diversion of millions of pengős’ worth of goods into the black market. The government had begun a campaign to rout out military embezzlement, the Ivory Tower said. The stealing of goods intended for use on the battlefront was considered an act of treason punishable by death. A panic had spread among the labor service company commanders, who were the worst offenders of all. The Jewish labor servicemen could not be trusted to vouch for the innocence of officers who had abused them daily; instead they had to be shunted away out of sight, perhaps even to the Eastern Front.

József was terrified. Andras could see it. He hardly spoke. He kept to himself, gingerly touching his face where Varsádi had struck him. He never slept, not that Andras saw; he sat up all night sorting and rearranging the few items in his pack. He wouldn’t crack a joke. He wouldn’t eat the Munkaszolgálat food, preferring instead to pick at a crust of challah left over from the last lunch he’d brought to Szentendre. He refused at first to use the communal toilet can in the corner of the train; when necessity forced him to use it at last, he returned looking as though he’d been beaten.

Day became night again and the train went on. There was no stop for food or water. There was no respite from the heat. The men couldn’t lie down; there wasn’t room. They could take turns sitting on the floor of the boxcar or raising their faces to the window. There was some relief in those moments when they could breathe fresh air. But by the fourth day there was no way to ignore the deepening stink nor the clawing thirst that had come upon them, and Andras began to wonder if the true purpose of the trip was to keep them on the train until they died of thirst. In the haze of his dehydration, he came to understand that it was all his fault that they were imprisoned on this eastbound train. The Crooked Rail, however tongue-in-cheek, had in fact documented Szentendre’s involvement in the black market; it had made the situation known to any labor serviceman too blind or naïve to see it on his own, and might well have spread word of the operation beyond Szentendre. Klara had been right; he’d taken an absurd and unnecessary risk. The paper might have been a slender tree in a forest of incriminating evidence, but there it was nonetheless. Varsádi considered it important enough to have called a private conference with Andras and Mendel, important enough to have threatened them with a gun. If fifty copies of the paper hadn’t made their way among the men each week, and perhaps out into the city, would Varsádi have been transformed from a tippling laxard into a man willing to send an entire company to the front just to save his own skin?

That afternoon, Andras stood at the window as they climbed through a rainstorm into a region of rock-strewn hills. A massive black shape emerged from behind a curtain of fog: the ruin of a medieval fortress, a jagged-toothed castle thrusting its black donjon into the sky. Andras prodded Mendel’s shoulder and made him look. His own chest constricted with the sensation that he had dreamed this moment long ago. Everything about it seemed familiar: the sound of the wheels on the tracks, the filtered darkness of the boxcar, the stink of men packed close together, the chewed-off black shape of the fortress. A metallic taste came into his mouth, and his skin prickled with a feeling akin to shame. How had he let himself believe that he and Klara and Tamás, Tibor and Ilana and Ádám, would be hidden in the hold of a Danube barge by now, making their way toward Romania, where they would board a boat that would take them to Palestine? How had he let himself believe they would safely cross a submarine-laced sea, that they would reach Haifa unscathed and start a new life in one of the settlements, that they would bring their parents over, that he himself would help to assemble the bones of a Jewish homeland? He had even let himself believe that Mátyás would return from the work service alive and unhurt and join them in Palestine. But the castle on the hilltop, the fog, this train: Somehow he’d known it was coming all along. Somehow he’d known they would never leave Budapest together, that they would never make it out of Hungary and across the Mediterranean. He wondered if Klara had known too. If she had, how had they allowed each other to persist in their mutual delusion?

For years now, he understood at last, he’d had to cultivate the habit of blind hope. It had become as natural to him as breathing. It had taken him from Konyár to Budapest to Paris, from the lonely chill of his room on the rue des Écoles to the close heat of the rue de Sévigné, from the despair of Carpathian winter to Forget-Me-Not Street in the Erzsébetváros. It was the inevitable by-product of love, the clear and potent distillate of fatherhood. It had prevented him from thinking too long or too hard about what might have happened to Polaner, to Ben Yakov, to his own younger brother. It had kept him from dwelling upon the possible consequences of publishing a paper like The Crooked Rail. It had stopped him from imagining himself shipped east into the mouth of the battle. But here he was, and here was Mendel Horovitz, watching the castle disappear into the fog.

The train went on and on, always climbing, moving slowly into thinner, drier air. The brutal heat began to fall away, and a scent of fir trees edged through the small high window. The men were silent, parched, faint with hunger and lack of sleep. They took turns sitting and standing. They drifted between sleep and wakefulness, their legs swaying with the motion of the train, their feet numb with the vibration of the wheels on the endless tracks. When the train stopped at a station on the fifth day, Andras could think only of how good it would feel to stretch himself out on the ground and sleep. From outside came the rattle of the door being unchained and drawn aside; a wave of fresh air moved through the stinking car, and the men pushed out onto the platform. Through the fog of his exhaustion, Andras read the station sign. TYPKA. A click at the front of the palate, a pursing of the lips around ka, the Hungarian diminutive. A shock of relief went through him: They weren’t on the Eastern Front after all. They were still within their own borders.

TYPKA. He didn’t realize he’d said it aloud until the Ivory Tower, standing next to him, shook his head and corrected him. “Turka,” he said. “It’s written in Cyrillic.”

And so it was, because they had reached Ukraine.

The camp where they were supposed to stay had been bombed a week earlier. A hundred and seventy men had been killed, the barracks leveled. The remaining men had had to dig vast graves to bury their comrades; the turned dirt had slumped into the pits with that week’s rain. That labor company had left nothing behind but the bones of their dead-no sign or tool or scrap of comfort for the men of the 79/6th. Andras and the others camped in the mud of the assembly ground, and the next day they were installed in the main house and outbuildings of an empty Jewish orphanage half a kilometer away.

The place was built of Soviet cinderblock, its whitewash greened with mildew. Everything inside the main house had been intended for the use of children. The bunks were absurdly short. The only way to lie on them was to curl one’s knees to one’s chest. The sinks had running water, which was nothing less than a miracle, but they were built so low that it was necessary almost to kneel in order to wash one’s face. The mess hall was furnished with tiny benches and low tables; the hallways were still marked with the children’s heel-scuffs and muddy footprints. There was no other sign of them in the place. Every shred of clothing, every shoe and book and spoon, had been removed as though the children had never existed.

Their new commander was a beefy-looking black-haired Magyar whose face was bisected by a spectacular keloid scar. The scar ran in an arc from the middle of his forehead to the tip of his chin, obliterating his right eyelid, skirting his nose by a millimeter, splitting his lips into four unequal parts. The lidless right eye gave his features a cast of perpetual surprise and horror, as if the initial shock of the wound had never left him. His name was Kozma. He came from Győr. He had a gray wolfhound whom he alternately kicked and petted, and a lieutenant named Horvath whom he treated in the same manner. On their first morning at the orphanage, Kozma assembled the company in the yard and marched them five kilometers down the road, double-time, to a wet field where grass had grown unevenly over a long filled-in trench. This was where the children of the orphanage had been lined up and shot, their new commander told them, and this was where they, too, would be shot when their usefulness to the Hungarian Army had been exhausted. Their dog tags might return home, but they never would; they were filthier than pigs, lower than worms, already as good as dead. For now, though, their company would join the five hundred work servicemen who were rebuilding the road between Turka and Stryj. The old road flooded every time the Stryj River topped its banks. The new road would be laid on higher ground. Minefields posed a minor obstacle to the operation; on occasion, servicemen must clear the fields in order to allow the road to pass through. They were to finish the road by the time the snows came. Then they would be responsible for keeping it clear. The records-master, Orbán, would see to their pay books. Tolnay, the medical officer, would treat them if they fell ill. But shirkers would not be tolerated. Tolnay was under strict orders to do everything in his power to keep the men from missing work. They were to obey the guards and officers in all matters; troublemakers would be punished, deserters shot.

When he’d concluded his speech, Kozma clicked his heels, swiveled the mass of his body with surprising speed, and stepped aside to let his lieutenant address the company. Lieutenant Horvath seemed a kind of collapsible model, his frame and features accordioned into a slimmer version of an ordinary man. He balanced a pair of spectacles on his nose and drew a memo from his breast pocket. There would be no electric light after dark, he told them in his thin monotone, no letter-writing, no canteen shop where they might replenish their supplies, no replacement uniforms if their uniforms got worn out or torn, no forming of groups, no fraternizing with guards, no pocketknives, no smoking, no hoarding of valuables, no shopping at stores in town or trading with the local peasantry. Their families would soon be informed of their transfer, but there was to be no postal communication between the 79/6th and the outside world-no packages, no letters, no telegrams. For safety’s sake they must wear their armbands at all times. Without the proper identification, a person might be mistaken for the enemy and shot.

Horvath shouted them into five columns and marched them into the road again; they were to depart for their work site at once. The road was wet with deep sucking mud. As the light began to rise, Andras saw that they were in a broad river valley that stretched between foothills dense with evergreens. In the distance rose the jagged gray peaks of the Carpathians. Clouds lay on the hillsides, bleeding fog into the valley. The rain-swollen Stryj rushed past between steep brown banks. Before long, Andras could feel the upward slope of the road in his back and thighs. The list of prohibitions kept spooling itself through his head: no electric light after dark, no letter-writing, no postal communication. No way to get word to Klara. No way to learn what had happened to her, or to Tibor and Ilana and Ádám, or to Mátyás, if news of Mátyás ever came. During his other periods of service, it had been Klara’s letters that had kept him from despairing; the need to write I am well that had kept him, relatively speaking, well. How could he bear not to communicate, particularly after what had happened? He would have to find a way to send word to her, whatever the consequences. He’d bribe someone, sign promissory notes if he had to. He would write letters and his letters would find her. In the midst of the vast uncertainty that surrounded him, he knew that much.

It was ten kilometers to the work site; there, they were issued picks and shovels and divided into twenty teams of six. Each team had two wheelbarrow men and four shovelers. They could see hundreds of these teams shoveling dirt and carting it away, leveling the roadbed for the laying of gravel and asphalt. A line of leveled road stretched back toward Turka; a trail of red surveyors’ markers pricked the green infinity between the work site and Skhidnytsya. Overseers snaked among the groups, slicing at the labor servicemen’s backs and legs with narrow wooden rods.

They worked for five hours without pause. At noon they were given ten decagrams of a bread so gritty it must have been baked with sawdust, and a ladleful of watery turnip soup. Then they worked until nightfall and marched home in the dark. At the orphanage the company cook gave them each a cupful of onion broth. They were lined up in the courtyard and made to stand at attention for three hours before Kozma sent them to bed in their child-sized bunks. And that was to be the structure of their new lives.

Andras had a top bunk near a window, and Mendel had the bunk beside him, above the Ivory Tower. József occupied the bunk below Andras. Their first week at the orphanage Andras could hear József turning and shifting for hours on the hard wooden slats. Every time he turned, he shook Andras from the edge of sleep. By the fifth night Andras felt inclined to strangle him. All he wanted was to sleep so he wouldn’t have to think about where he was, and why. But József wouldn’t allow it. He rolled and shifted, rolled and shifted, for hours and hours.

“Stop it!” Andras hissed. “Go to sleep.”

“Go to hell,” József whispered.

“You go to hell.”

“I’m in hell already,” József said. “I’m going to die here. I know it.”

“Something will kill us all, eventually,” Mendel offered from the neighboring bunk.

“I’ve got a weak constitution and a short temper,” József said. “I make bad decisions. I’m liable to talk back to someone with a gun.”

“You’ve been in the work service for two months now,” Andras said. “You haven’t died yet.”

“This isn’t Szentendre,” József said.

“Think of it as Szentendre with worse food and an uglier commander.”

“For God’s sake, Lévi, aren’t you listening? I need help.”

“Keep it down!” someone said.

Andras climbed down from his bunk and sat at the edge of József’s. He found József’s eyes in the dark. “What is it?” he whispered. “What do you want?”

“I don’t want to die before I’m thirty,” József whispered back, his voice breaking like a boy’s. He ran a hand under his nose. “I’m unprepared for this. I’ve done nothing these past five years but eat and drink and fuck and make paintings. I can’t survive work camp.”

“Yes, you can. You’re young and healthy. You’ll get through it.”

They sat silent for a long moment, listening to the breathing of the men around them. The sound of fifty men breathing in their sleep: It was like the string section of an orchestra playing on stringless violins and violas and cellos, an endless shushing of horsehair on wood. Every now and then a woodwind sneeze or a brassy cough would break the stream of breathing, but the stringless music continued, a constant sighing in the dark.

“Is that all, then?” József said, finally. “That’s what you’ve got for me?”

“Here’s the truth,” Andras said. “I don’t have much heart to give you a pep talk.”

“I don’t want a pep talk,” József whispered. “I want to know how to survive. You’ve been doing this for almost three years. Don’t you have any advice?”

“Well, don’t publish a subversive newspaper, for one thing,” Andras said. “You might find your commanding officer pointing a gun at you across his desk.”

“Is that what happened?” József said. “What did he want?”

“Our printing plates and originals. He threatened to search our houses if we didn’t produce them.”

“Oh, God. What did you tell him?”

“The truth. The originals are in our editor’s office at the Jewish News. Or were. Varsádi’s got them by now, I’m sure.”

József let out a long breath. “That’ll have been a bad day at work for your editor.”

“I know. I’ve been sick about it. But what were we going to do? We couldn’t send Varsádi’s men to Nefelejcs utca.”

“All right,” József whispered. “I’ll be certain not to publish a subversive newspaper. What else?”

Andras told József what he knew: Keep quiet. Become invisible. Don’t make enemies of the other work servicemen. Don’t talk back to the guards. Eat what they give you, no matter how bad it is, and always save something for later. Keep as clean as you can. Keep your feet dry. Take care of your clothes so they don’t fall apart. Know which guards are sympathetic. Follow all the rules you can stand to follow; when you break the rules, don’t get caught. Don’t let yourself forget the life back home. Don’t forget that your term of service is finite.

He went silent, remembering the other list he and Mendel had made long ago, the ten commandments of the Munkaszolgálat. Had it only been three years since he’d been sent to Carpatho-Ruthenia? By whose reckoning could the term of service be called finite? Suddenly he couldn’t stand to think or talk about it a moment longer. “I’ve got to get to sleep,” he said.

“All right,” József said. “Listen, though. Thanks.”

“Shut up, you idiots,” Mendel whispered from the neighboring bunk.

“You’re welcome,” Andras said. “Now go to sleep.”

Andras climbed up into his own bunk and wrapped himself in his blanket. József didn’t make another sound; his tossing and shifting had stilled. But Andras lay awake and listened to the other men’s breathing. He remembered quiet nights like this from the beginning of his first conscription. Before long there would be no easy sleep for any of them; someone would always be coughing or groaning or running for the latrine, and there would be the torment of lice, and the dull nauseating pain of hunger. Midnight lineups, too, if Kozma was inclined. The Munkaszolgálat was like a chronic disease, he thought-its symptoms abated at times, but always returned. When he’d begun his service in Transylvania he’d felt precisely what József was feeling now, the deep injustice of it all. This couldn’t possibly be happening to him, not to him and Klara, not to his mind, not to his body, that sturdy and faithful machine. He couldn’t believe that all the great urgencies of his time in Paris-everything that had seemed important, all his studies, every project, every moment with Klara, every secret, every worry about money or school or work or food-had been boxed away, stripped of context, made nonsensical, made small, consigned to impossibility, crammed into a space too narrow to admit life. But today as he’d marched to work and shoveled dirt and eaten the miserable food and slogged home through the mud, he hadn’t felt indignant; he’d hardly felt anything at all. He was just an animal on the earth, one of billions. The fact that he’d had a happy childhood in Konyár, had gone to school, learned to draw, gone to Paris, fallen in love, studied, worked, had a son-none of it was predictive of what might happen in the future; it was largely a matter of luck. None of it was a reward, no more than the Munkaszolgálat was a punishment; none of it entitled him to future happiness or comfort. Men and women suffered all over the world. Hundreds of thousands had already died in this war, and he himself might die here in Turka. He suspected the chances were heavily in favor of it. The things he could control were few and small; he was a particle of life, a speck of human dust, lost on the eastern edge of Europe. He knew there would come a time, perhaps not far off, when he would find it hard to follow the rules he’d just set out for József.

He had to think of Klara, he told himself. He had to think of Tamás. And his parents, and Tibor, and Mátyás. He had to pretend it wasn’t hopeless; he had to allow himself to be fooled into staying alive. He had to make himself a willing party to the insidious trick of love.

At the end of Andras’s second week in Turka, the road surveyor’s assistant was killed by a land mine. It happened at the cusp of the new road, a few kilometers from Andras’s work site, but word traveled quickly through the line of work teams. The surveyor’s assistant had been one of them, a labor serviceman. He’d been helping the surveyor map the road through a Soviet minefield. The field was supposed to have been cleared months earlier by another labor company, but that group must have been anxious to call the job finished. The assistant had tripped the mine as he’d been setting up the tripod. The explosion had killed him instantly.

The surveyor was a work serviceman too, an engineer from Szeged. Andras had seen him pass by on his way to the surveying site. He was short and pallid, with rimless spectacles and a brushy gray moustache; his uniform jacket was just as threadbare as anyone else’s, his boots wrapped with rags to keep them from falling apart. But because his function was so important to the army, he had an official-looking hat and an insignia on the pocket of his overcoat. He was allowed to buy things in town and to smoke cigarettes. And he was always being called upon to interpret for someone: He knew Polish, Russian, even some Ukrainian, and could speak to any Galician peasant in his native tongue. His assistant, a slim dark-eyed boy who couldn’t have been more than twenty, had been a silent shadow at his heels. After the boy died, the surveyor tore his sleeve in mourning and rubbed his face with ashes. He dragged his equipment to and from the surveying site with an expression of abstracted despair. The boy had been like a son to him, everyone said; in fact, Andras learned later, he had been the son of the surveyor’s closest friend in Szeged.

As August rolled forward, it became clear that the surveyor would have to choose a new assistant soon. He was too old to drag the equipment around by himself; someone would have to help him if the road were to be marked out to Skhidnytsya by the time the German inspectors arrived in November. The surveyor began asking around as he made his way past the groups of work servicemen: Did anyone know mathematics? Had anyone studied engineering? Was there a draftsman among them, an architect? At the noon meal they saw him studying lists of the work servicemen’s names and former occupations, looking for someone who could be of use.

One morning, as Andras and Mendel and the rest of their group worked to clear a mass of broken asphalt, the surveyor came shuffling up the road behind Major Kozma. When they reached Andras’s group, the major stopped and cocked a thumb at Andras.

“That’s the one,” he said. “Lévi, Andras. He doesn’t look like much, but apparently he’s had some training.”

The surveyor scrutinized his list. “You were a student of architecture,” he said.

Andras shrugged. It hardly seemed true anymore.

“How long did you study?”

“Two years. One course in engineering.”

“Well,” the surveyor said, and sighed. “That’ll do.”

Mendel, who had been listening, moved closer to Andras now; he fixed his eyes on the surveyor and said, “He doesn’t want the job.”

In an instant, Major Kozma’s hand had moved to the riding crop tucked into his belt. He turned to Mendel and squinted his good eye. “Did anyone speak to you, cockroach?”

For a moment Mendel hesitated, but then he continued as though the major were not to be feared. “The job is dangerous, sir. Lévi is a husband and a father. Take someone who’s got less to lose.”

The major’s scar flushed red. He pulled the crop from his belt and struck Mendel across the face. “Don’t tell me how to manage my company, cockroach,” he said. And then to Andras: “Present your work papers, Lévi.”

Andras did as he was told.

Kozma withdrew a grease pencil from his uniform pocket and made a notation on the papers, indicating that Andras was now under the surveyor’s immediate command. While he wrote, Andras extracted a crumpled handkerchief from his pocket and offered it to Mendel, whose cheek showed a line of blood; Mendel pressed the handkerchief to his cheek. The surveyor watched them, seeming to understand the relationship between them. He cleared his throat and signaled to Kozma.

“Just a thought,” the surveyor said. “If you please, Major.”

“What is it now?”

“Why don’t you give me that one, too?” He cocked a thumb at Mendel. “He’s tall and strong. He can carry the equipment. And if there’s dangerous work to be done, I can make him do it. I wouldn’t want to lose another good assistant.”

Kozma pursed his ruined lips. “You want both of them?”

“It’s an idea, sir.”

“You’re a greedy little Jew, Szolomon.”

“The road has to be mapped. It’ll go faster with two of them.”

By that time, another officer had made his way over to their work group. This man was the general work foreman, a reserve colonel from the Royal Hungarian Corps of Engineers. He wanted to know the reason for the delay.

“Szolomon wants these two men to assist with the surveying.”

“Well, sign them up and send them off. We can’t have men standing around.”

And so Andras and Mendel became the surveyor’s new assistants, heirs to the position of the boy who had been killed.

By day they mapped the course of the road between Turka and Yavora, between Yavora and Novyi Kropyvnyk, between Novyi Kropyvnyk and Skhidnytsya. They learned the mysteries of the surveyor’s glass, the theodolite; the surveyor taught them how to mount it on the tripod and how to calibrate it with plumb and spirit level. He taught them how to orient it toward true north and how to line up the sight axis and the horizontal axis. He taught them to think of the landscape in the language of geometric forms: planes bisected by other planes lying at oblique or acute angles, all of it comprehensible, quantifiable, sane. The jagged hills were nothing more than complex polyhedrons, the Stryj a twisting half cylinder extending from the border of Lvivska Province to the deeper, longer trench of the Dniester. But they found it impossible to see only the geometry of the land; evidence of the war lay in plain view everywhere, demanding to be acknowledged. Farms had been burned, some of them by the Germans in their advance, others by the Russians in retreat. Untended crops had rotted in the fields. In the towns, Jewish businesses had been vandalized and looted and now stood empty. There was not a Jewish man or woman or child to be seen. The Poles were gone too. The Ukrainians who remained were opaque-eyed, as if the horrors they’d witnessed had led them to curtain their souls. Though the summer grasses still grew tall, and tart blackberries had come out on the shrubs along the roadside, the country itself seemed dead, an animal killed and gutted on the forest floor. Now the Germans were trying to stuff it full of new organs and make it crawl forward again. A new heart, new blood, a new liver, new entrails-and a new nerve center, Hitler’s headquarters at Vinnitsa. The road itself was a vein. Soldiers, forced laborers, ammunition, and supplies would run through it toward the front.

The surveyor was a clever man, and knew that his theodolite might be useful beyond its role in mapping the road. He had realized, not long into his sojourn in Ukraine, that it might work as a powerful tool of persuasion. When they came upon a prosperous-looking farmhouse or inn, he would set up the theodolite within view of the owners; someone would come out of the farmhouse or inn to ask what the surveyor was doing, and he would tell them that the road was to pass through their land, and possibly through their very house. Bargaining would follow: Could the surveyor be persuaded to move the road just a little to the east, just a little farther off? The surveyor could, for a modest price. In that manner he collected bread and cheese, fresh eggs, late summer fruit, old overcoats, blankets, candles. Andras and Mendel brought food and supplies home to the orphanage nearly every night and distributed them among the men.

The surveyor also had valuable connections, among them a friend at the Royal Hungarian Officers’ Training School in Turka-an officer there who had once been a well-known actor back in Szeged. This man, Pál Erdő, had been charged with staging a production of Károly Kisfaludy’s famous martial drama, The Tatars in Hungary. When he and the surveyor met in town, Erdő complained of the difficulty and the absurdity of producing a play in the midst of preparing young men to go to war. The surveyor began lobbying him to use the play as an excuse to do some good-to request, for example, the help of the labor servicemen, who might benefit from spending a few of their evening hours in the relative calm and safety of the school’s assembly hall. In particular he mentioned Andras’s background in set design and Mendel’s literary ability. Captain Erdő, an old-guard liberal, was eager to do what he could to ease the labor servicemen’s situation; in addition to Andras and Mendel he requested the aid of six others from the 79/6th, among them József Hász, with his talent for painting, as well as a tailor, a carpenter, and an electrician. Three evenings a week this group marched directly from the work site to the officers’ training school, where they assisted in the staging of a smaller military drama within the larger one. For payment they received an extra measure of soup from the kitchen of the officers’ training school.

On the days when the surveyor didn’t need them-days when he had to sit in an office and make calculations, correct topographical maps, and write his reports-Andras and Mendel worked with the others on the road. Those days, Kozma made them pay for their time with the surveyor and their evenings at the officers’ training school. Without fail he gave them the hardest work. If the work required tools, he took the tools away and made them do it with their rag-wrapped hands. When their work group had to transport wooden pilings to shore up the embankments on either side of the road, he made a guard sit in the middle of Andras’s and Mendel’s pilings while they carried them. When they had to cart barrowfuls of sand, he removed the wheels from their wheelbarrows and made them drag the carts through the mud. They paid the price without a word. They knew that their position with the surveyor and their work at the officers’ training school might keep them alive once the cold weather set in.

There was no discussion between Andras and Mendel of writing a newspaper for the 79/6th, of course; even if they’d had the time, there was no way to convince themselves that it would be safe. Only once did the subject of The Crooked Rail come up again between them. It was on a rainy Tuesday in early September, when they were out with the surveyor at the far end of the road, mapping a course toward a bridge that had to be rebuilt. Szolomon had left them in an abandoned dairy barn while he went to speak to a farmer whose pigsties were situated too close to the roadbed-to-be. Outside the barn, a steady drizzle fell. Inside, Andras and Mendel sat on overturned milk pails and ate the brown bread and soft-curd cheese the surveyor had gleaned for them that morning.

“Not bad for a Munkaszolgálat lunch,” Mendel said.

“We’ve had worse.”

“It’s no milk and honey, though.” Mendel’s usual wry expression had fallen away. “I think about it every day,” he said. “You might have been in Palestine by now. Instead, thanks to me, we’re touring beautiful rural Ukraine.” Their old joke from The Snow Goose.

“Thanks to you?” Andras said. “That’s ridiculous, you know.”

“Not really,” Mendel said, his moth-antenna eyebrows drawing close together. “The Snow Goose was my doing. So was The Biting Fly. The Crooked Rail came naturally, of course. I was the one who wrote the first piece. And I was the one who suggested we use the paper to get the men angry and make them slow down the operation.”

“What does that have to do with it?”

“I keep thinking about it, Andras. Maybe Varsádi’s operation fell under suspicion because we were making the trains run late. Maybe we slowed things down just enough to raise a red flag.”

“If the trains ran late, it’s because the men in charge of the operation were too greedy to send them out on time. You can’t take the blame for that.”

“You can’t ignore the connection,” Mendel said.

“It’s not your fault we’re here. There’s a war on, in case you haven’t heard.”

“I can’t help thinking we might have pushed things over the edge. It’s been keeping me up at night, to tell you the truth. I can’t help but feel like we’re the ones to blame.”

The same thought had occurred to him, on the train and many times since. But when he heard Mendel speak the words aloud, they seemed to reflect a novel kind of desperation, a brand of desire Andras had never considered before. Here was Mendel Horovitz insisting, even at the price of terrible burning guilt, that he’d had some control over his own fate and Andras’s, some agency in the events that had swept them up and deposited them on the Eastern Front. Of course, Andras thought. Of course. Why would a man not argue his own shameful culpability, why would he not crave responsibility for disaster, when the alternative was to feel himself to be nothing more than a speck of human dust?

Every Munkaszolgálat commander, as Andras had learned by now, possessed his own special array of neuroses, his own set of axes to grind. One way to survive in a labor camp was to determine what might elicit the commander’s anger and to shape one’s own behavior to avoid it. But Kozma’s triggers were delicate and mysterious, his moods volatile, the roots of his neuroses hidden in darkness. What made him so cruel to Lieutenant Horvath? What made him kick his gray wolfhound? Where and how had he gotten the scar that bisected his face? No one knew, not even the guards. Kozma’s anger, once evoked, could not be turned aside. Nor was it reserved for men like Andras and Mendel who received special privileges. Any form of weakness drew his attention. A man who showed signs of fatigue might be beaten, or tortured: made to stand at attention with full buckets of water in his outstretched arms, or perform calisthenics after the workday was finished, or sleep outside in the rain. By mid-September the men began to die, despite the still-mild weather and the attentions of Tolnay, the company medic. One of the older men contracted a lung infection that devolved into fatal pneumonia; another succumbed to heart failure at work. Bouts of dysentery came and went, sometimes taking a man with them. Injuries often went untreated; even a shallow cut might lead to blood poisoning or result in the loss of a limb. Tolnay made frequent and alarming reports to Kozma, but a man had to be near death before Kozma would send him to the Munkaszolgálat infirmary in the village.

Nights at the orphanage held unpredictable terrors. At two o’clock in the morning Kozma might wake all the men and command them to stand at attention until dawn; the guards would beat them if they fell asleep or dropped to their knees. Other nights, when Kozma and Horvath drank with their fellow officers in their quarters, four of the labor servicemen might be called to come before them and play a horrible game: two of the men would have to sit on the others’ shoulders and try to wrestle each other to the ground. Kozma would beat them with his riding crop if the fighting wasn’t fierce enough. The game ended only when one of the men had been knocked unconscious.

But Kozma’s cruelest form of torture, and the one he exercised most frequently, was the withholding of rations. He seemed to love knowing that his men were hungry, that he alone controlled their food supply; he seemed to enjoy the fact that they were at his mercy and desperate to have what he alone could give them. If it hadn’t been for the extra food Andras and Mendel brought back secretly from their surveying trips, the 79/6th might have starved outright. As it was, the younger men among them were always ravenous. Even the full ration wouldn’t have been enough to replace the energy they lost at work. They didn’t understand how the other labor companies in Turka could have withstood the hunger for months on end; what was keeping them alive? They began to ask, up and down the lines of servicemen who worked along the road, what one did to keep from starving. Soon the news came back that there was a thriving black market in the village, and that all kinds of provisions were available if the men had something to trade. It seemed a bitter irony that a company of men who’d been sent away because of their officers’ black-market dealings would now be forced to buy from the black market themselves, but the fact was that no other alternative existed.

One night in the bunk room, the men of the 79/6th pooled a few valuables-two watches, some paper money, a silver cigarette lighter, a pocketknife with an inlaid ebony handle-and held a hushed conference to decide who would risk the trip to the village. The perils were well known. How many times had Horvath reminded them that unaccompanied labor servicemen would be shot? The Ivory Tower, acting as moderator, began by laying out a set of parameters for their decision: No one who was sick would be allowed to go, and no one older than forty or younger than twenty. No one who had had to play Kozma’s horrible game that week, and no one who had recently been subjected to exposure in the courtyard. No one who had children at home. No one who was married. The men looked around at each other, trying to determine who was left.

“I’m still eligible,” Mendel said. “Anyone else?”

“I’m up,” said a man called Goldfarb, a sturdy shock-haired redhead whose nose looked to have been broken in a series of fights dating back to early boyhood. He was a pastry chef from the Sixth District of Budapest, a favorite among them.

“Is that all?” asked the Ivory Tower.

Andras knew who else had survived the elimination: József Hász. But József was edging toward the door of the bunk room as if he meant to slip away. Just before he could duck through, the Ivory Tower called him.

“How about you, Hász?”

“I believe I’m getting a fever,” József said.

The men of the 79/6th, who had been subjected to József’s complaints ever since his conscription three months earlier, had little patience for his excuses now. A few of them pulled him back into the room and stood him at the middle of their circle. A tense silence ensued, and József must have grasped his situation quickly: No one would mind seeing him risk his skin for the benefit of the group. Too often it was his shirking that brought Kozma’s anger down upon the rest of them. He seemed to shrink into himself, his shoulders curling.

“I’m no good at sneaking around in the woods,” he said. “I’m as obvious as day.”

“It’s time you started pulling your weight,” said Zilber, the electrician who worked with them at the officers’ training school. “You don’t hear Horovitz complaining, and he’s been scrounging extra food for the rest of us for weeks now.”

“Why would he complain?” József said. “He’s been walking the countryside with Szolomon while the rest of us shovel asphalt.”

“You’ll remember what happened to Szolomon’s last assistant,” the electrician said. “I wouldn’t take that job if it came with a private room and a pair of melon-titted farm girls.”

A number of men voiced their willingness to take Mendel’s job under those circumstances. Mendel assured them that the job carried no such benefits. But József Hász wasn’t laughing; he was scanning the circle, his expression shading toward panic as he failed to find an ally. Andras watched with a pang of sympathy-and, he had to admit, a certain guilty satisfaction. Here was Hász learning once again that he was not exempt from the forces that shaped the lives of mortal men. In this orphanage in Ukraine, no one cared whose heir he was or what he owned, nor were they impressed by his dark good looks or his side-leaning smile. They were hungry; they needed someone to go to town for food; he fit their parameters. In another moment he would have to capitulate.

But József Hász disliked being cornered, above all else. In a cool and reasonable tone that masked his panic, he said, “You can’t possibly choose me over Horovitz.”

“And why is that?” the electrician said.

“If it weren’t for him, you wouldn’t be here.”

Zilber laughed, and others joined in. “I suppose he put us on the train himself!” Zilber said. “I suppose he started the war.”

“No, but he did publish that newspaper full of articles about the black market. He let Varsádi know that we all knew what was going on.”

Andras couldn’t believe what was happening, what he was hearing. Among the men there was a moment of vibrating silence, then a rumble of discussion. The Ivory Tower called for order. “Quiet, all of you,” he whispered. “If the guards overhear us, this project is through.”

“You understand me,” József said, looking around at the men in the dim light. “If it weren’t for the paper, Varsádi might not have lost his head.” He glanced at Andras, but didn’t call attention to his role as illustrator; he must have been offering that omission as a form of thanks for Andras’s advice.

“That’s pure idiocy,” the electrician said. “No one shipped us off because of The Crooked Rail. We were all slowing down the operation, for the sake of the poor buggers in postings like the one we’re in now. Maybe that’s why Varsádi got scared of being found out.” But a few of the men had begun to whisper to each other and look at Mendel, then at Andras. Mendel lowered his eyes in shame; József Hász had only given voice to what he already felt.

József, sensing a shift in the sentiment of the group, grasped his advantage. “The day we were sent off,” he said. “Do you know what happened? Varsádi called Horovitz to his office for a conference. What do you think he wanted? It wasn’t to congratulate our colleague on his talents as a writer, I’m afraid.”

“That’s enough, Hász,” Andras said, stepping toward him.

“What’s the matter, Uncle?” József said, staring a threat back at Andras. “I’m just telling them what you told me.”

“What did he want?” one of the men asked.

“According to Lévi here, he wanted all the originals and printing plates of The Crooked Rail. He was desperate enough to turn a gun on our co-editors. I’m sure we can all understand, given the circumstances, why Horovitz berayed the editor at the Jewish Journal who’d been helping him print the paper. In any case, half an hour later we were all being loaded onto the train.”

The men stared at Mendel, who would not refute a word József had said. Andras wanted nothing more than to fly at József and knock him to the barracks floor; all that stopped him was the knowledge that a fight would bring the guards.

“Listen, men,” the Ivory Tower said. “This isn’t about The Crooked Rail, and it’s not a trial. We didn’t come here to decide who’s responsible for our being sent off. We’re hungry and there’s food to be got if someone’s willing to get it. Perhaps we’d have been better off drawing straws.”

A rumbling from the men, a shaking of heads: They weren’t going to leave the matter to chance now.

“Let me go to the village on my own,” Mendel said, his eyes set on the Ivory Tower’s. “I’m fast, you know. If I go alone I’ll be there and back in no time.”

The Ivory Tower protested. There were fifty men in their squad, all of them hungry; the hope was that the load of black-market goods would be too much for one person to carry.

The rest of the men looked at Goldfarb, at József Hász, and finally at Andras. Andras and Mendel were understood to be a team; what they did, they did together. A sense of expectation seemed to collect in the dim light of the bunkroom. Andras met Mendel’s eyes, ready to volunteer, but Mendel gave an almost imperceptible shake of his head. Hold out.

Another long silent moment passed before anyone spoke. József stood with his arms crossed over his chest, confident that his argument would have the desired result. And finally it was Goldfarb who stepped forward. “I’ll go,” he said. “It won’t be the last time we have to do this. Next time we’ll send Lévi and Hász, or whoever else we’re in the mood to blame.”

The 79/6th let out its breath. A decision had been reached: Horovitz and Goldfarb would make the trip. Much time had been wasted already; the night was slipping away, and the men had to depart at once. Mendel and his partner loaded the pooled valuables into their trouser pockets, wrapped themselves against the cold, and crept out into the dark. And the 79/6th climbed into its bunks to wait-all except Andras Lévi and József Hász, who could be heard conducting a hushed argument in the latrine. Before József could climb into his bunk, Andras had caught him by the collar and dragged him into the washroom with its tiny commodes, its line of child-sized sinks. He pushed József against the wall and twisted his collar until he was struggling for breath.

“Stop it,” József gasped. “Let me go.”

“I’ll stop when I’m ready to stop, you self-serving little worm!”

“I didn’t say anything that wasn’t true,” József said, and wrenched Andras’s hand from his collar. “You published that rag with Horovitz. You’re just as much to blame as he is. I could have made a point of that, but I didn’t.”

“What do you want me to do? Say thanks? Kiss your filthy hand?”

“I don’t care what you do. You can go to hell, Uncle.”

“You were right the other night,” Andras said. “You’re not cut out for labor camp. It’s going to kill you, and I hope it won’t take long.”

“I’m not so sure about that,” József said, cutting Andras his tilted smile. “After all, I’m in here now instead of out in the woods.”

And finally Andras did what he’d been longing to do for months: He pulled back his fist and hit József square across the face, hard enough to send him to the floor. József knelt on the concrete, holding his jaw with one hand, and spat blood into a metal drain. Andras rubbed his bruised knuckles. He expected to feel the familiar shock of remorse that always tempered his hatred for József, but the shock failed to arrive. All he felt now was hunger and exhaustion and the desire to hit József again, just as hard as the first time. With some effort he left József on the bathroom floor and went back to his bunk to wait for Mendel.

It was three miles to the village through the woods in the dark; Andras figured it might take them an hour to get there. Once they arrived they’d have to find their contact and negotiate the trade-all the while avoiding the night patrols who would shoot them on sight. If they did find their contact, and if the contact was willing to trade, and if he had anything worth trading for, it might be another hour before they could return; they might not be back until just before reveille. He lay awake picturing the two men making their way through the woods, Mendel’s long legs covering ground quickly, Goldfarb half running to keep up. It was a clear night, cold enough to make the men’s breath visible before them. The moon and stars were out; there would be light even in the forest. A wind would rile the fallen leaves and hide their trail. Mendel and Goldfarb would see the glow of the village from far off, would navigate through the trees toward that amber wash in the sky. They might be halfway there by now.

But then Andras began to hear a frenzied barking from the woods behind the orphanage. He knew the sound; they all did. It was Major Kozma’s ill-tempered dog, the gray wolfhound they hated and who hated them. A din of shouting rose from the woods. The men half fell out of their beds and rushed to the windows. The woods were full of the swinging beams of flashlights, the sound of branches snapping; unintelligible shouts drew closer and resolved into a stream of abusive Hungarian. Dark shadows struggled toward the light, flashed into momentary view, and disappeared before anyone could identify them. Men’s forms approached the orphanage wall and pushed through its gates. Five minutes later, Kozma himself was shouting all the men out of the bunk room and commanding them to file into the courtyard.

They stumbled outside bareheaded and coatless in the cold. The moon was bright enough to make midnight seem like day; the men’s shadows fell sharp against the brick wall of the yard. In the northwest corner there was a commotion of guards, the growl of a dog, a struggle, shouts of pain. Kozma commanded the men to stand at attention and keep their eyes on him. He climbed onto a little schoolroom chair so he could see them all. Andras and József stood close to the front. It was cold in the courtyard, the wind a skate blade across the back of Andras’s neck. Kozma barked a command; two guards marched László Goldfarb and Mendel Horovitz out of their corner. They were both covered in bleeding scratches, as though they had stumbled through a tangle of briars. The left leg of Goldfarb’s pants was torn away below the knee. In the hard moonlight they could see the marks of the dog’s teeth on his shin. Mendel held an arm against his chest. His blood-streaked face was contracted in pain, and on his right foot he dragged a small animal trap. The steel teeth had gone through his boot.

“Look what Erzsi turned up in the woods tonight,” Kozma said, petting the dog so roughly it whimpered. “Lieutenant Horvath was kind enough to go out and see what all the commotion was about, and he came across these two fine specimens in a culvert. Not what we thought we’d catch in our trap, was it, Erzsi?” He scoured the dog’s back with his gloved hand. Then he commanded Mendel and Goldfarb to strip to their skins.

When Goldfarb made a noise of protest, Lieutenant Horvath silenced him with a blow from the butt of his pistol. The two men struggled out of their clothes, Horvath shouting at them all the while; Mendel couldn’t remove his right pant leg around his boot and the trap, so he stood with his trousers at his feet until Horvath cut the pants off with his knife. Once they were naked, the men huddled against the wall and shivered violently, their hands crossed over their groins. Goldfarb looked out toward the rest of his comrades in a kind of stupefied daze, as if the lines of men were part of an incomprehensible show he’d been commanded to watch. Mendel met Andras’s eye for a single agonizing moment and gave a wink. The gesture was meant to reassure, Andras knew, but it clenched his insides in pain: That naked and bleeding man was Mendel Horovitz, his childhood friend and co-editor, not some clever simulacrum devised as another Munkaszolgálat torture. Kozma ordered one of the guards to blindfold the two men with their own shirts. The guard was someone who had become familiar to Andras, a former plumber’s assistant named Lukás, who escorted them to the officers’ school every evening and slipped them cigarettes whenever he could. His expression, too, was incredulous and fearful. But he covered the men’s eyes as he had been commanded. Goldfarb put a hand under the blindfold to loosen it a bit. Andras couldn’t bear to look at Mendel’s lowered head, his shaking arms. He dropped his gaze to Mendel’s feet, but then there was the trap, its teeth penetrating Mendel’s boot. Goldfarb was shoeless; he had crossed his feet to keep them warm. The quiet of the courtyard hummed with the men’s breathing.

For a long time nothing happened-long enough to make Andras believe that this cold naked humiliation was to be the sum of the punishment. Soon, Mendel and Goldfarb would be allowed to dress and report to Tolnay, the medical officer, who would see to their wounds. But then something happened that Andras could not at once understand: A line of five guards marched into the space that separated the ranks of the 79/6th from the shivering men against the wall. The guards filled that space as if in protection, as if their function were to shield Mendel and Goldfarb’s nakedness from the eyes of their comrades. Kozma gave a command, and the guards braced rifles against their shoulders and leveled them at the blindfolded men. A murmur of disbelief from the lines; a wild rage of protest in Andras’s chest. Then the sound of rifles being cocked.

From Kozma, a single word: Fire.

An explosion of gunpowder rocketed through the yard, reverberated against the stone walls and poured up into the sky. Beyond a haze of smoke, Mendel Horovitz and László Goldfarb had slumped against the wall.

Andras pressed his fists against his eyes. The noise of the explosions seemed to go on and on inside his head. The two men who had been standing a moment before now sat on the ground, their knees folded against their chests. They sat still and white, no longer shivering; they sat without the slightest movement, their heads bent close together as though in secret conference.

“Deserters,” Kozma said, once the smoke had cleared. “Thieves. Their pockets were full of pretty things. Now you’ve been warned against following their example. Desertion is treason. The penalty is death.” He got down from his little chair, turned, and marched into the orphanage with his dog at his heels and Lieutenant Horvath close behind.

As soon as the door had closed, Andras ran to Mendel at the wall, knelt beside him, put a hand to his neck, his chest. No drumbeat of life; nothing. In the courtyard, silence. Not even the guards made a move. The Ivory Tower stepped forward and bent to László Goldfarb; no one stopped him. Then he got up and spoke quietly to the guard called Lukás. When he’d finished speaking, Lukás gave a nod and went to the corner of the yard. He removed a key ring from his belt and unlocked the wooden shed that held the shovels. The Ivory Tower took out a shovel and began to dig a hole near the courtyard wall. Andras watched through the haze of a nightmare, saw other men join the Ivory Tower at that incomprehensible task. József stood in open-mouthed silence until someone prodded him in the back; then he, too, took up a shovel and began to dig. Someone else must have helped Andras to his feet. He found himself stumbling toward the shed, taking the shovel Lukás handed him, bending beside József. As if in a dream, he angled the shovel toward the earth and jammed it in with all his strength. The earth was hard, compacted; the jolt of the blade radiated up the handle and into his bones. Under his breath he began to murmur a series of words in Hebrew: You deliver us from the snare of the fowler and the pestilence of destruction, cover us with your pinions, protect us from the plague that stalks in darkness and the disease that wastes at noon. You are our protection. No evil will befall us. The angels guard us on our way, carrying us in their hands. He knew the words came from the Ninety-first Psalm, the one recited at funerals. He knew he was digging a grave. But he could not make himself believe that the body beside the wall belonged to Mendel Horovitz, could not believe that this man he’d loved since boyhood had been killed. He could not grasp that stunning absolute. He could not breathe, could not think. In his head, the Ninety-first Psalm, the flash and crack of gunshots, the sound of shovels against cold earth.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE. The Tatars in Hungary

THE MEN WERE BURIED at daybreak. There was no time for shivah, no time even to wash the bodies. Kozma considered it a kindness that he had let the 79/6th bury its fallen comrades. In compensation for that kindness, he withheld their soup rations for the rest of the week. The days passed in a kind of shocked silence, a vibrating disbelief. It was terrible enough to see older men worked to death, or dying of illness; it was another thing altogether to see young men shot. József Hász seemed to react with the deepest shock of all, as though it were new information that any action of his, any exercise of his will, might have disastrous consequences for another human being. After that first week, during which he ate little and slept less, he stunned the company by volunteering for Mendel’s position as the surveyor’s second assistant. By now the position was believed to be cursed; no one else would touch it. But József seemed to consider it a kind of penance. On the surveying runs he made himself Andras’s servant. If there was heavy equipment to carry, he carried it. He gathered wood, built the cooking fires, surrendered his share of any food the surveyor gleaned. The surveyor, who had heard the story of what had happened to Mendel Horovitz and László Goldfarb, accepted József’s servitude with quiet gravity. What had taken place was yet another of the Munkaszolgálat atrocities, playing out its second act now in the emotional torture of this inexperienced young man. But Andras, two decades younger than the surveyor and still capable of being stunned by human selfishness and cruelty, refused to forgive József, refused even to look at him. Every time he passed through Andras’s field of vision, the same ribbon of thoughts would unspool in Andras’s mind. Why had it been Mendel and not József? Why not József in the woods that night, József’s foot in a trap? Why could they not trade places still? Why not József, now, irrevocably gone? Andras had thought he’d tasted frustration and futility; he thought he’d been an intimate of grief. But what he felt now was sharper than any frustration, any grief, he’d ever known before. It seemed to refer not only to Mendel but to Andras too; it was not only the horror of Mendel’s death, the undeniable fact of Mendel’s being gone, but also the knowledge that Andras himself and all the 79/6th had entered another level of hell, that their lives were worthless to their commanding officers, that it was likely Andras would never see his wife and son again. József had done this, too, had brought Andras to this dangerous state of hopelessness. He found he could inhabit that place and still feel a burning anger at József for bringing him there. When a surveying assignment led Andras and József near a stretch of mined earth, he found himself wishing to see József subsumed in a deafening blast of fire. It seemed no worse than he deserved. Twice that year-once in Budapest, once in Ukraine -József had betrayed Andras at excruciating cost. The fact that József was connected by blood to Klara, the person Andras loved most in the world, was another agony; if he could have erased József from Klara’s memory, erased him from the Hász family altogether, he would have done it in an instant. But József stubbornly refused to be erased. He refused to trip a land mine. He hovered at the edge of Andras’s vision, a reminder that what had happened was not an illusion and would not change.

Evenings at the officers’ training school brought no relief. Andras and József were meant to be partners there too, Andras the set designer and József the artistic director. The play, Kisfaludy’s The Tatars in Hungary, was more than familiar to Andras; he’d studied it ad nauseam at his village school in Konyár. A strict schoolmaster had lodged the history soundly in his brain: Before Kisfaludy was a playwright, he’d been a soldier in the Napoleonic wars. When he came home from battle he wanted to bring his experience to the stage, but the recent wars seemed too fresh; instead he fixed his gaze on Hungary ’s distant past. Andras had written a long essay on Kisfaludy for his graduation from primary school. Now here he was, designing sets for The Tatars in Hungary at an officers’ training school in Ukraine in the midst of a world war, and his design partner was a man responsible, in some measure, for Mendel Horovitz’s death. But there was no time to dwell on that slice of irreality. Captain Erdő, the director of the project, was operating under a great urgency. The new minister of defense was soon to pay a visit to the officers’ training school; the play would make its debut in his honor.

On a Thursday evening early in October, Andras and József found themselves standing at attention in the cavernous meeting hall of the officers’ training school while Erdő reviewed their plans. The captain was a tall barrel-chested man with a corona of whitening hair cut close to the scalp. He cultivated a goatee and affected a monocle, but his air of self-mockery suggested it was all a farce, a costume: He considered himself ridiculous and wanted everyone else to be in on the joke. As he critiqued the plans, he spoke as if he were three or four people instead of just one. Instead of these painted trees, he said, might not a few real trees be brought in to suggest woods? Was that impractical? Terribly impractical! Real trees? Who had the time or inclination to dig up trees? But wasn’t it important to achieve an air of realism? Of course. Real trees, then; real trees. Real tents, too, might be used for the encampment. That was a fine idea. There were plenty of tents around, they wouldn’t cost a thing. This large-as-life cave meant to be constructed from chicken wire and papier-mâché, could it be built in two pieces to make it easier to move? Of course it could, if it were designed properly, and that was why he’d engaged József and Andras, wasn’t it? Everything had to be designed and carried out with the utmost professionalism. He didn’t have an enormous budget, but the school wanted to make a good impression upon the new minister of defense. He told Andras and József to make a list of building materials: wood, chicken wire, newspaper, canvas, whatever it was they needed. Then, leaning closer, he began to speak in a different tone.

“Listen, boys,” he said. “Szolomon tells me what goes on in that company of yours. Kozma’s a beast of a man. It’s abominable. Let me know what I can do for you. Anything. Do you need food? Clothes? Do you have enough blankets?”

Andras could hardly begin to answer. What did the 79/6th need? Everything. Morphine, penicillin, bandages, food, blankets, overcoats, boots and woolen underthings and trousers and a week’s worth of sleep. “Medical supplies,” he managed to say. “Any kind. And vitamin tablets. And blankets. We’re grateful for anything.”

But József had another thought. “You can send letters, can’t you?” he said. “You can let our families know we’re safe.”

Erdő nodded slowly.

“And you can get mail for us, too, if they send it to your attention.”

“I can, yes. But it’s a dangerous matter. What you’re suggesting goes against regulations, of course, and everything’s censored. You’ll have to be sure your family understands that. The wrong kind of letter might compromise us all.”

“We’ll make them understand,” József said. And then, “Can you get us pens and ink? And some kind of writing paper?”

“Of course. That’s easy enough.”

“If we bring the letters tomorrow, can you send them by the next day’s post?”

Erdő gave another stern and somber nod. “I can, boys,” he said. “I will.”

That night, as the guard named Lukás marched Andras and József back to the orphanage along with the others who’d been requisitioned to work on The Tatars in Hungary, Andras found himself forced to admit that József’s idea had been a good one. It made him dizzy to imagine what he might write to Klara that night. By now you know why I didn’t return home the day before our journey: I was kidnapped along with the rest of my company and sent to Ukraine. Since we’ve been here we’ve been starved, beaten, made sick with work, allowed to die of illness, killed outright. Mendel Horovitz is dead. He died blindfolded and naked before a firing squad, in part thanks to your nephew. As for myself, I can scarcely tell if I’m dead or alive. None of that could be written, of course; the truth would never pass the censors. But he could beg Klara to go to Palestine-he could find a way to get that into the letter, however coded the message might be. He even dared to hope she might be in Palestine already-that a reply from Elza Hász might bring the news that Klara and Tamás had gone down the Danube with Tibor and Ilana and Ádám, had crossed the Black Sea and passed through the Bosporus just as they’d planned, had taken up a life in Palestine where she and Tamás were safe from the war, relatively speaking. If he had known he would be posted to Ukraine, he would have begged her to go. He would have asked her to weigh her life and Tamás’s against his own, and would have made her see what she had to do. But he hadn’t been there to persuade her. Instead he had been deported, and the uncertainty of his situation would have argued for her to stay-her love for him a snare, a trap, but not the kind likely to keep her alive.

Dear K, he wrote that night. Your nephew and I send greetings from the town of T. I write with the hope that this letter will not reach you in Budapest, that you will have already departed for the country. If you have postponed that trip, I beg you not to delay longer for my sake. You must go at once if the opportunity arises. I am well, but would be better if I knew you were proceeding with our plans. And then the terrible news: Our friend M.H., I must tell you, was forced to depart a month ago for Lachaise. A reference to the cemetery in Paris. Would she understand? I feel as you might imagine. I miss you and Tamás terribly and think of you day and night. Will write again as soon as possible. With love, your A.

He folded the letter and hid it in the inner pocket of his jacket, and the next day he put it into Erdő’s hands. There was no way to know when or whether or how it might find its way to Klara, but the thought that it might do so eventually was the first consolation he’d had in recent memory.

If Andras was surprised when the young officers-in-training, his set-building crew, accepted his direction with respectful deference, the surprise faded quickly. After a few weeks of evening duty at the officers’ training school, it came to seem ordinary to walk among them as a kind of foreman, checking their adherence to his plans. Between them there was little consciousness of difference and little formality. The officers-in-training and the work servicemen called each other by their first names, then by diminutives-Sanyi, Józska, Bandi. They weren’t allowed to eat together in the officers’ mess hall, but often the crew went to the back door of the kitchen at dinnertime and brought back food for all of them. They ate on the stage, cross-legged amid the construction projects and half-painted backdrops. Andras and József, locked in a wordless struggle, nonetheless gained weight and got the sets built. They waited for answers to their letters, hoping each time Erdő entered the officers’ meeting hall that he would call them into his office and pull a smudged envelope from his breast pocket. But the weeks dragged on and no response came. Erdő told them to be patient; the mail service was notoriously slow, and even slower when the correspondence had to cross borders.

As the performance of The Tatars in Hungary drew nearer and still no response arrived, Andras grew half mad with worry. He was sure that Klara and György and Elza had been arrested and thrown in jail, that Tamás had been left in the care of strangers. Klara would be tried and convicted and killed. And he was trapped here in Ukraine, where he could do nothing, nothing; and once the play was finished he would lose his connection to Erdő, and with it the possibility of sending or receiving word from home.

On the twenty-ninth of October, the new Hungarian minister of defense arrived in Turka. There was to be an official procession through the village. All the companies in the vicinity were to be present. That morning, Major Kozma marched the men of the 79/6th to the central square of the village and commanded them to stand at attention along its western side. They had been ordered to wash and mend their torn uniforms in preparation for General Vilmos Nagy’s visit; thread and patches had been provided. They had done what they could, but still they looked like scarecrows. Roadwork had destroyed their jackets and trousers. They had managed to cadge a few pieces of civilian clothing from the Ukrainian black-market ragmen, but they couldn’t replace their torn uniforms with new ones; the army no longer supplied clothing for labor servicemen. Andras had observed the degeneration of his own uniform during his time at the officers’ training school. His jacket and trousers had come to look more and more like a vagrant’s costume alongside the young officers’ starched khakis.

At the head of a company of scrubbed-looking officer-trainees on the opposite side of the square, Andras could make out Erdő’s erect posture and winking monocle. His buttons flashed gold fire in the morning light. This was high drama for him, all of it. He was satisfied with the work Andras and József had done. When they’d displayed the finished sets and backdrops just before the dress rehearsal, he’d been so enthusiastic in his praise that he had burst a capillary in his left eye. The dress rehearsal itself had been perfect except for a few forgotten lines, but all had been rectified now, all had been polished to a military sheen. The sets, the costumes, even a grand curtain of red-and-gold-painted canvas, waited in readiness for the general’s arrival. The play would make its debut that night.

The general’s motorcade was preceded by the officer-trainees’ marching band: a few desperately earnest trumpeters, a phlegmatic trombonist, a fat flautist, a red-faced drummer. Behind them came a pair of armored trucks flying the Hungarian flag, then a string of military policemen on motorcycles, and finally General Vilmos Nagybaczoni Nagy in an open car, a glossy black Lada with white-rimmed tires. The general was younger than Andras had expected, not yet gray, still inhabiting a vigorous middle age. His uniform bristled with decorations of every shape and color, including the turquoise-and-gold cross that represented the Honvédség’s highest award for bravery in combat. Riding beside him was a younger man in a less resplendent uniform, apparently an adjutant or secretary. Every few moments the general would look away from the ranks of men to whisper something in the young officer’s ear, and the young officer would scribble furiously on a stenographer’s pad. The general’s gaze seemed to linger over the companies of work servicemen in particular. Andras didn’t dare look at him directly, but felt Nagy’s eyes passing over him as the motorcade rolled by. The general bent his head and spoke to the adjutant, and the young man took notes. After the motorcade had made its turn around the square, the band stepped out of its way and the cars roared off in the direction of the officers’ training school.

When Andras and József arrived at the meeting hall to make the last preparations for the show, they found that all had fallen into confusion. The stage sets had been shoved aside so the chief officer of the academy might give the official welcome speech, and in the process, two of the backdrops had been torn and one side of the papier-mâché cave had been crushed. Erdő paced from one end of the stage to the other in panicked dismay, declaring at full volume that the repairs would never be finished in time, while Andras and József and the others rushed to make things right. Andras patched the cave with a bucket of paste and some brown paper; József mended a Roman ruin with a roll of canvas tape. The other men realigned and rehung the second torn backdrop. By the time the dinner hour was over, all was in order. The actors arrived to don their Tatar and Magyar costumes and practice their vocal exercises. They preened and buzzed and mumbled their lines backstage with as much gravity and self-importance as the actors at the Sarah-Bernhardt.

At half past eight the meeting hall filled with officers-in-training. There was a tense festivity in their clamor, a rising thrum of anticipation. Andras found a dim corner of the wings from which he could watch the speeches and the show. He caught a glimpse of the martial glitter of the general’s jacket as he strode up the center aisle and took his seat in the front row of benches. The school’s chief officer mounted the stage and made his address, a rhetorical pas de deux of deference and pomposity, punctuated with gestures that Andras recognized from newsreels of Hitler: the hammerlike fist on the podium, the uptwisting index finger, the conductorial palm. The chief officer’s bluster earned him six seconds of dutiful applause from the officers-in-training. But when General Nagy rose to take the stage, the men got to their feet and roared. He had chosen them, had graced them with the first stop of his eastern tour; when he left them he would go directly to Hitler’s headquarters at Vinnitsa. He raised a hand to thank them, and they sat down again and fell silent with anticipation.

“Soldiers,” he began. “Young men. I won’t make a long speech. I don’t have to tell you that war is a terrible thing. You’re far from home and family, and you’ll go farther still before you return. You’re brave boys, all of you.” Vilmos Nagy had none of the swagger or dramatic fire of the school’s commanding officer; he spoke with the rounded vowels of a Hajdú peasant, gripping the podium with his large red hands. “I’ll speak frankly,” he said. “The Soviets are stronger than we thought. You’re here because we didn’t take Russia in the spring. Many of your comrades have died already. You’re being trained to lead more men into battle. But you are Magyars, boys. You’ve survived a thousand years of battle. No enemy can match you. No foe can defeat you. You slew the Tatars at Pest. You routed eighty thousand Turks at Eger Castle. You were better warriors and better leaders.”

A round of wild cheers broke forth from the officers-in-training; the general waited until the noise had subsided. “Remember,” he said, “you’re fighting for Hungary. For Hungary, and no one else. The Germans may be our allies, but they’re not our masters. Their way is not our way. The Magyars are not an Aryan people. The Germans see us as a benighted nation. We’ve got barbarian blood, wild ideas. We refuse to embrace totalitarianism. We won’t deport our Jews or our Gypsies. We cling to our strange language. We fight to win, not to die.”

Another cheer from the men, this one more tentative. The young officers-in-training had been taught to revere German authority absolutely; they had been taught to speak of Hungary’s all-important and all-powerful ally with unconditional respect.

“Remember what happened this summer on the banks of the Don,” Nagy said. “Our General Jány’s ten divisions were spread over a hundred kilometers between Voronezh and Pavlovsk. With just those ten light divisions, Generalfeldmarschall von Weichs expected us to keep the Russians on the east bank. But you know the story: Our tanks were defenseless against the Soviets’ T-34s. Our arms were outmatched. Our supply chain failed. Our men were dying. So Jány pulled his divisions back and made them take defensive positions. He saw where he stood and made a decision that saved the lives of thousands of men. For this, von Weichs and General Halder accused us of cowardice! Perhaps they would have admired us more if we’d let forty or sixty thousand of our men die, instead of only twenty thousand. Perhaps they would have liked to see us spill every last drop of our barbarian blood.” He paused and looked out across the rows of silent men, seeming to meet their eyes in the dark. “Germany is our ally. Her victory will strengthen us. But never believe that Germany has any other aim besides the survival of the Reich. Our aim is Hungary’s survival-and by that I mean not just the preservation of our sovereignty and our territories, but of our young men’s lives.”

The men had fallen into a rapt silence. No one applauded now; they were all waiting for Nagy to go on. So seldom had they been told the truth, Andras thought, that it had struck them dumb.

“You men have been trained to fight intelligently and minimize our losses,” Nagy continued. “We want to bring you home alive. We won’t need you any less once the war is over.” He paused and gave a deep sigh; his hands were trembling now, as if the effort of delivering the speech had exhausted him. He glanced into the wings of the stage, into the darkness where Andras stood watching. His eyes settled on Andras for a long moment, and then he looked out at the young officers-in-training again. “And one more thing,” he said. “Respect the labor servicemen. They’re getting their hands dirty for you. They’re your brothers in this war. Some officers have chosen to treat them like dogs, but that’s going to change. Be good men, is what I’m saying. Give respect where it’s due.” He bowed his head as if in thought, and then shrugged. “That’s all,” he said. “You’re fine brave soldiers, all of you. I thank you for your work.”

He stepped down from the podium to an accompaniment of somber, bewildered applause. No one seemed to know quite what to think of this new minister of defense; some of the things he’d just said sounded as though they shouldn’t have been uttered in public, and certainly not at an officers’ training school. But there was little opportunity to react. It was time for the play to begin. The Magyars assembled onstage for the first scene, and the work servicemen dragged the Roman ruin into place and lowered a backdrop that depicted a wash of blue sky above the moss-colored hills of Buda. When they hoisted the curtain a flood of light filled the stage, illuminating the martial-looking Hungarians in their painted armor. The Magyar chieftain drew his sword and raised it aloft. Then, just before he could speak his opening line, the air itself seemed to break into a deep keening. The assembly hall reverberated with a rising and falling plaint of grief. Andras knew the sound: It was an air-raid siren. They had all practiced the drill, both here and at the orphanage. But there was no drill planned for this evening, nor was this part of the play. This was the real thing. They were going to be bombed.

All at once the audience got to its feet and began pushing toward the exits. A cluster of officers surrounded General Nagy, who lost his hat in the crush. He clutched at his bare head and glanced around him as his staff hustled him to a side door. The actors fled the stage, dropping their pasteboard weapons, and began to crowd toward a stairway at the back of the hall. Andras and József and the other work servicemen followed the actors down a flight of stairs that led to a shelter beneath the building. The shelter was a honeycomb of concrete rooms linked by low-ceilinged hallways. The men pushed into a dark enclosure at a turn of one of the hallways; more officers-in-training poured into the room after them. Far above, the air-raid sirens wailed.

When the first bombs hit, the shelter shook as if the moon itself had fallen from its orbit and crashed to earth just overhead. Concrete dust rained from the ceiling, and the lightbulbs flickered in their wire cages. A few men cursed. Others closed their eyes as if in prayer. József asked an officer-in-training for a cigarette and began to smoke it.

“Put that out,” Andras whispered. “If there’s a gas leak down here, we’ll all be killed.”

“If I’m about to die, I’m going to smoke,” József said.

Andras shook his head. Beside him, József released a complex luxuriant cloud through his nostrils, as if he meant to take his time. But another concussive blast threw him against Andras, and he dropped the cigarette. A series of shuddering jolts rocketed through the foundation of the building like small earthquakes; this was anti-aircraft fire, the kick of the artillery installation housed not far from the assembly hall. Glass exploded above, and faint cries reached the men through the walls of the shelter.

“At attention, men!” one of the officers commanded. They stood at attention. It took some concentration, there in the flickering dark; they stood that way until the next bombs hit. As the foundation shuddered, Andras thought of the weight of building materials arranged above him: the heavy beams, the flooring, the walls, the tons of cinderblock and brickwork, the roof struts and frame, the thousands and thousands of slate tiles. He thought of all those materials raining down upon the architecture of his own body. Fragile skin, fragile muscle, fragile bone, the clever structures of the organs, the intricate arrangement of his cells-all the things Tibor had pointed out in Klara’s anatomy book a lifetime ago in Paris. Suddenly he couldn’t breathe. Another detonation knocked the room sideways, and a crack appeared in the ceiling.

Then there was a lull. The men stood silent, waiting. The anti-aircraft artillery must have been hit, or the gunners must have been waiting for the next wave of planes. That was worse-not to know when the next barrage was going to come. József’s lips moved with some whispered incantation. Andras leaned in, wondering what psalm or prayer might have brought such a look of tranquility to József’s features; when the words resolved into an intelligible line, he almost laughed aloud. It was a Cole Porter tune József had often played on his phonograph at parties. I’m with you once more under the stars / And down by the shore an orchestra’s playing / And even the palms seem to be swaying / When they begin the beguine. The quiet ended with the renewed staccato of anti-aircraft fire, then a percussive chord of blasts, as if a trio of bombs had struck all at once. The men fell to their knees and the lights went out. József made an animal noise of panic. So this was how it would happen, Andras thought: József would receive his retribution here in this tomb under the officers’ meeting hall. How like a fairy tale, where selfish wishes often carried a cruel price: József would die, but Andras would have to die with him. As the bombs continued to fall, József lowered his forehead to Andras’s collarbone and said, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” The cigarette smoke in his hair was the smell of evenings in Paris. For one unthinking moment, Andras put a hand on József’s head.

Then, all at once, the lights flickered on again. The men got to their feet. They dusted off their uniforms and pretended they hadn’t just been clutching each other’s arms, crushing their faces against each other’s chests, praying and crying and apologizing. They glanced around as if to confirm that none of them had really been afraid. The earth had gone still now; the bombing had stopped. Above, all was silent.

“All right, men,” said the officer who had commanded them to stand at attention. “Wait for the all clear.”

It was a long time before the signal sounded. When it came at last there was a push toward the hallways, a crush of men talking in shock-dulled voices. No one knew what they would find when they emerged. Andras thought of the labor camp where they were supposed to stay when they had first arrived in Turka-its mass grave, the wet dirt slumped into the ground like a sodden blanket. He and József shouldered into a stream of men making their way back toward the staircase. The air in the bunker seemed overbreathed, devoid of oxygen.

There was a bottleneck at the foot of the stairway. As Andras shuffled toward the stairs, someone bumped against him and pushed something into his hand. It was Erdő, his face red and wet, his monocle fallen. “I didn’t think of it earlier,” he said into Andras’s ear. “I was preoccupied with the play. I might have died and never given it to you, or you might have died and never gotten it.”

Andras looked down to see what he held in his hand. It was a piece of folded paper wrapped in a handkerchief.

He couldn’t wait. He had to see. He unwrapped the corner of the handkerchief, and there was Klara’s handwriting on a thin blue envelope. His heart lurched in his chest.

“Hide that,” Erdő said, and Andras did.

Back at the orphanage he wanted only to be alone-to get to some private place where he could read Klara’s letter. But the men of Company 79/6 met him and the others with a storm of questions. What had happened? Had they seen the planes? Had anyone been killed? Had they themselves been injured? What was the meaning of an air raid so far from the front lines? The guards had been listening to the radio in Kozma’s private quarters, but had told the men nothing, of course; the bombing had gone on for so long that the men thought everyone at the school must be dead.

Men had died. That much was true. When they’d come out of the meeting hall-the three walls that remained of it, in any case-they’d been swept into a stream of men running for one of the shelters, which had caved in upon the officers-in-training who had been huddled there. For three hours the labor servicemen and soldiers worked with shovels and pickaxes, ropes and jeeps, to move the mass of wood and concrete that had trapped the men. Seventeen of them had been killed outright by the cave-in. Dozens of others were injured. There were other casualties elsewhere: The mess hall had been flattened before the cooks and dishwashers could get to a shelter, and eleven men had died. It was deduced that General Vilmos Nagy had been the reason for the raid; intelligence of his visit must have reached the NKVD, and Soviet Air Force troops commissioned to attempt an assassination via bombing. But General Nagy had survived. He had personally supervised the attempt to rescue the men from the collapsed shelter, to the dismay of his young adjutant, who stood nearby surveying the firelit cloud cover as if another rain of Soviet YAK-1s might drop out of it at any moment.

All that time, Andras had carried Klara’s letter in his pocket, not daring to read it. Now, finally, he was at liberty to climb into his bunk and try to decipher her lines in the dark. József seemed nearly as anxious as Andras; he sat cross-legged on the bunk below, awaiting news. Andras slit the envelope carefully with his razor, then maneuvered into a position that would allow him to use the moonlight as a torch. He pulled the letter out and unfolded it with trembling hands.

15 October 1942

Budapest

Dear A,

Imagine my relief, and your brother’s, when we received your letter! We have all decided to postpone our trip to the country until you return. Tamás is well, and I am as well as might be expected. Your parents are in good health. Please send greetings to my nephew. His parents are well, too. As for what you wrote about M.H.’s departure for Lachaise, I must hope I have misunderstood you. Please write again soon.

As ever,

Your K.

We have all decided to postpone. It was just as he had feared, only worse. Not just Klara, but Tibor and Ilana too. He would have done the same, of course-would never have left Ilana and Ádám alone in Budapest three days after Tibor had disappeared-but it was sad and infuriating nonetheless. In one stroke the Hungarian Army had grounded the entire Lévi clan. For the sake of an underground business in army boots and tinned meat, ammunition and jeep tires, they had all been tied to a continent intent upon erasing its Jews from the earth. That horrible truth lodged beneath his diaphragm and made it impossible for him to draw a full breath. He put his hand over the side of the bed and slipped the letter to József, who reacted with a low note of distress-József, who had long argued the foolishness of the trip to Palestine. Now, after three months in Ukraine, and after what they had just experienced and seen at the officers’ training school, József knew what it meant to feel one’s own vulnerability, to taste the salt of one’s own mortality. He understood what it meant for Klara and Tamás, Tibor and Ilana and Ádám, to be stranded in Hungary while the war drew closer on all sides. He must have known what his own deportation would have meant to his parents; beneath the well in Klara’s single line about them, he must have sensed the truth.

But at least he and Andras had this letter, this evidence that life continued at home. Andras could hear Klara’s voice reading the coded lines of the letter aloud; for a moment it was as though she were with him, curled small against him in his impossibly short bunk. Her skin hot beneath her close-wrapped dress. The warm black scent of her hair. Her mouth forming a string of spy words, dropping them into his ear like cool glass beads. We have decided to postpone our trip to the country. In another moment he would reply, would tell her all that had happened. Then the illusion vanished, and he was alone in his bunk again. He rolled over and stared into the cold muddy square of the courtyard, where the footprints of his comrades had long ago obscured the child-sized prints that had been there when they’d first arrived. In the moonlight he could make out the twin mounds of earth that were Mendel’s and Goldfarb’s graves, and beyond them the high brick wall, and above it the tops of the trees, and, farther still, a mesh of stars against the blue-black void of the sky.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX. A Fire in the Snow

THE DAY AFTER the air raid, work on the Turka-Skhidnytsya highway came to a temporary halt. All the Hungarian labor companies in the area were sent to the officers’ training school to repair the damage. The bombed buildings had to be rebuilt, the torn-up roads repaired. General Vilmos Nagy was still in residence; he couldn’t go on to Hitler’s headquarters in Vinnitsa until it could be determined that the way was safe. Major Kozma, energized by Nagy’s presence but not yet appraised of his unconventional political views, took the opportunity to arrange a work circus for his entertainment. The broken bricks and splintered timbers of the officers’ dining hall were supposed to be hauled away by horse cart, but there were more carts than there were horses to fill the traces; the stables, too, had suffered in the raid. So Kozma put his men into the traces instead. Eight forced laborers, Andras and József among them, were lashed in with leather harness straps and made to pull cartloads of detritus from the ruined mess hall to the assembly ground, which had become a salvage yard for building materials. The distance could not have been more than three hundred meters, but the cart was always loaded to overflowing. The men moved as if through a lake of hardening cement. When they fell to their knees in exhaustion, the guards climbed down from the driver’s bench and laid into them with whips. A group of officer trainees had stopped their own work to watch the spectacle. They booed when the men fell to their knees, and applauded when Andras and József and the others struggled to their feet again and dragged the cart a few meters farther toward the unloading area.

By midmorning the spectacle had generated enough talk to come to the attention of Nagy himself. Against the protests of his young adjutant he emerged from the bunker where he’d taken shelter and marched across the assembly ground to the ruin of the mess hall. With his thumbs hooked into his belt, he paused to watch the work servicemen toss debris into the bed of the cart and draw it forward. The general walked from cart bed to harness line, running his hand along the leather straps that connected the men to the traces. Kozma hustled across the mess-hall ruin and positioned himself close to the general. He pulled himself up to his full height and snapped a hand to his forehead.

The general didn’t return the salute. “Why are these men harnessed to the wagon?” he asked Kozma.

“They’re the best horses we’ve got,” Kozma said, and winked his good eye.

The general removed his glasses. He was a long time cleaning them with his handkerchief, and then he put them on and gave Kozma a cool stare. “Cut your men loose,” he said. “All of them.”

Kozma looked disappointed, but he raised a hand to signal one of the guards.

“Not him,” the general said. “You do it.”

The words sent a shock of energy through the line of harnessed men, a frisson Andras felt through the leather straps at his chest and shoulders.

“At once, Major,” Nagy said. “I don’t like to repeat an order.”

And Kozma had to go to each man and cut the leather straps with his pocketknife, which required him to get closer to them than he’d gotten since they had first come under his command-close enough to smell them, Andras thought, close enough to put himself in danger of catching their chronic cough, their body lice. The major’s hands trembled as he fumbled with the interlaced straps. It took him a quarter of an hour to free the eight of them. The officer-trainees who had stopped to watch had disappeared now.

“Have your guards bring a truckload of wheelbarrows from the supply warehouse,” the general ordered Kozma. To the men he said, “You will rest here until the wheelbarrows arrive. Then you will remove the debris by the barrow-load.” He watched as the work foremen broke the men into their groups as they waited for the carts. Kozma stood silent at the general’s side, twisting and twisting his hands as if he meant to shuck them of their skins. The general seemed to have forgotten that his life was in danger, that the NKVD was aware of his presence at the camp. He paid no attention to his adjutant’s urgent request that he return to the bunker. At lunchtime, Nagy and the adjutant escorted the men to the new mess tent and saw that they received an extra twenty decagrams of bread and ten grams of margarine. The general had his adjutant drag a bench over to the patch of bare earth where the work servicemen were eating; he took his lunch with them, asking questions about their lives before the war and what they planned to do when it was over. The men responded tentatively at first, uncertain whether or not to trust this exalted person in his decorated jacket, but before long they began to speak more freely. Andras didn’t speak; he hovered at the edge of the group, aware that he was witnessing something extraordinary.

After lunch, the general ordered that the men of the 79/6th be deloused and bathed and given clean uniforms from the storehouses of the officers’ training school. They were to be examined by the medics at the school infirmary, their wounds and illnesses treated. Then they were to be reassigned to jobs that would allow them to recover their health. It was clear that they were too weak and sick to perform hard labor. For the rest of the day he sent them to work in the damp heat of the mess tent, where the cook set them to peeling potatoes and cutting onions for the officers’ dinner.

At dinnertime the men received another supplemental ration: twenty decagrams of bread again, and ten more grams of margarine. An unfamiliar officer, a tall ursine man who introduced himself to them as Major Bálint, announced that the supplement was to be permanent; the general had ordered that the men’s diet be altered. For the time being they would continue to serve in the mess tent rather than return to their work on the road. And there was to be another change: Bálint himself would be their new commander. Major Kozma would no longer have anything to do with the 79/6th, nor, if General Nagy had anything to say about it, with any other Munkaszolgálat company, except perhaps the one in which he would be forced to serve.

Not once since their arrival at Turka had there been a night at the orphanage that might have been called festive. Even when they’d observed the High Holidays they had done so with a sense of mournful duty, and an awareness of how far they were from everything and everyone they loved. That night at the barracks, at an hour when Kozma might ordinarily have lined them up outside and made them stand at attention until they fell to their knees, the men gathered in one of the downstairs classrooms to play cards and sing nonsense songs and read the news aloud from scraps of newspaper gleaned from the officers’ training school. The Soviets, the Ivory Tower read, continued to hold off the Nazi offensive at Stalingrad as the battle entered its eleventh week; bitter fighting continued on the streets of the city and in the northern suburbs, raising speculation that the Nazis might find themselves still entrenched in that fight when the Russian winter arrived. “Let them freeze!” the Ivory Tower cried, and crowned himself with a nautical hat Andras had folded from a page of advertisements. He grabbed Andras by the arms and made him dance a peasant dance. “We’re free, my darlings, free,” he sang, whirling him around the room. It wasn’t true, of course; Lukás and the other guards still kept watch at the door, and any member of the 79/6th could have been shot for walking down the road unaccompanied. But they had indeed been freed from Major Kozma. And as if that weren’t enough, they were clean and free of lice. General Nagy had gone so far as to order that their mattresses and blankets be dragged outside, burned, and replaced immediately with new bedding.

That night, from the fragrant comfort of a mattress stuffed with sweet hay, Andras wrote to Klara. Dear K, There has been a surprising turn of events. Our circumstances in T. have changed for the better. We are well, and have just received new uniforms and a good work assignment. You must not worry on our account. If an opportunity arises for you to go to the country again, you must go. I’ll follow as soon as I can. Unfortunately, I must confirm what you seem to have guessed about M.H. Please send love to my brother and Ilana. Kiss Tamás for me. As ever, your devoted A.

The next day, as he served lunch to the officer-trainees and their superiors, he waited impatiently for Erdő to come through the serving line. When Erdő came at last-grim-faced and devoid of his monocle, still mourning the loss of The Tatars in Hungary amid the camp’s other losses-Andras passed the letter to him underneath his tin plate. Without a sign or a wink or any other acknowledgment, Erdő moved down the serving line; Andras saw a flash of white as he transferred the note from his hand to his trouser pocket. As long as the mail kept moving between Ukraine and Hungary, Klara would know that Andras was well and that he wanted her to go to Palestine if she could.

General Nagy’s plan for the rehabilitation of the 79/6th continued through the middle of November. The sick men were treated at the infirmary, and those who could still work gained weight on the extra rations. It helped that they had been assigned to kitchen duty. Though the cooks kept the food supply under careful watch, it was often possible to glean a stray carrot or potato or an extra measure of soup. If Andras missed his long walks to the end of the road with the surveyor, he had the pleasure of Szolomon’s weekly visits to the officers’ training school. The surveyor brought news of the war, and, when he could, slipped Andras and József some Ukrainian delicacy or a piece of warm clothing. One chilly afternoon Andras watched József tear open a paper-wrapped package of the rolled dumplings called holushky-little ears-and felt he was watching his own ravenous self in Paris, unwrapping a poppyseed roll sent by the elder Mrs. Hász. What were they now, he and József, but a pair of hungry men on the ragged edge of a country at war, at the mercy of forces beyond their control? All the barriers between them, or at least all the markers of class that had seemed to separate them when they had lived in Paris, were arbitrary to the point of absurdity now. When József offered him the package of holushky, he took it and said köszönöm. József sent him a look of surprised relief, a reaction that confused Andras until it occurred to him that this was the first time he’d spoken a kind word to József since Mendel’s death. Strange, Andras thought, that war could lead you involuntarily to forgive a person who didn’t deserve forgiveness, just as it might make you kill a man you didn’t hate. It must have been the amnesiac effect of extremity, he thought, that bitter potion they ingested every day in Ukraine with their ration of soup and sandy bread.

One morning later that week, the men woke to find the courtyard of the orphanage blurred in a gray-white nimbus of snow. The clouds seemed intent upon giving up their contents all at once, the flakes speeding to earth in acorn-sized clusters. Here was the winter they’d dreaded, making its unambiguous entrance; the temperature had dropped twenty degrees overnight. At lineup, snow swarmed into their ears and mouths and noses. It found its way into the crevices between their overcoats and neck wraps, worked itself in through the grommets of their boots. Major Bálint took his place at the front of the assembly yard and announced with regret that the men had been removed from their duties at the officers’ training school and assigned to snow removal. The guards unlocked the shed and handed the men their tools-the same pointed spades they’d used for road-building, not the curved rectangular blades that would have suited the job-and marched them out toward the village to begin their winter work.

That afternoon, when Szolomon found Andras and József among the snow-removal teams, he delivered the news that he’d been posted to a mapping office in Voronezh, and would depart on a military train that afternoon. He wished them a safe passage through the winter, said a blessing over their heads, and stuffed their pockets with long-unseen varieties of food-tins of meat and sardines, jars of pickled herring, bags of walnuts, dense rye biscuits. Then, without a word of goodbye, their reticent patron and protector hurried down the road and disappeared behind a veil of snow.

All week the temperature fell and fell, far below zero. Andras’s back burned with the work; his hands wept with new blisters. Nothing he had done in the Munkaszolgálat was as hard as clearing that snow, day after day, as the cold deepened. But it was impossible to give up hope when there was always a chance that a letter might arrive from Budapest. Every time they went to clear snow from the roads at the officers’ training school, Andras and József looked for Captain Erdő; whenever he had mail for them he found a way to slip it into their pockets. At the beginning of December a letter came from György Hász: The family fortunes had dwindled further still, and György, Elza, and the elder Mrs. Hász had been obliged to abandon the high-ceilinged flat on Andrássy út and move in with Klara. But they must not worry. K was safe. Everyone was fine. They must concern themselves only with their own survival.

Klara’s next missive brought the news that Tibor had been called back to the Munkaszolgálat and sent to the Eastern Front. Ilana and Ádám had come to live on Nefelejcs utca along with everyone else. Now the seven of them were getting by on the money that had been intended for the trip to Palestine, which Klara’s lawyer forwarded in small increments each month. Andras tried to imagine it: the bright rooms of the apartment filled with all the things the Hász family had brought from Andrássy út, the remaining rugs and armoires and bric-a-brac of their princely estate; Elza Hász, a mourning dove in a morning dress, her wings folded at her sides; Klara and Ilana trying to keep the babies clean and calm and fed in the midst of a crowd; Klara’s mother stoic and silent in her corner; the constant smell of potatoes and paprika; the flat blond light of Budapest in winter, falling indifferently through the tall windows. Absent from the letter was any mention of Mátyás, of whom Andras thought constantly as blizzards abraded the hills and fields of Ukraine.

In mid-December a note came from József’s mother: György had been admitted to the hospital with a burning pain in his chest and a high fever. The diagnosis was an infection of the pericardium, the membrane that surrounded the heart. His doctor wanted him to be treated with colchicine, pericardiocentesis, and three weeks of rest on a cardiac ward. The cost of this medical disaster, nearly five thousand pengő, threatened to unhouse them all; Klara was trying to arrange to have her lawyer send the money.

József was downcast and silent all day after he’d received the letter. That night at the orphanage he didn’t get into bed at the ordinary hour. Instead he stood at the window and stared down into the snowy depths of the courtyard, a coarse blanket wrapped around him like a dressing gown.

Andras rolled over on his bunk and propped himself up on an elbow. “What is it?” he said. “Your father?”

József gave a nod. “He hates to be sick,” he said. “Hates to be a burden to anyone. He’s miserable if he has to miss a day of work.” He pulled the blanket closer and looked down into the courtyard. “Meanwhile I’ve done nothing at all with my life. Nothing of use to anyone, certainly not my parents. Never had a job. Never even been in love, or been loved by anyone. Not by any of those girls in Paris. No one in Budapest, either. Not even Zsófia, who was pregnant with my child.”

“Zsófia’s pregnant?” Andras said.

“Not anymore. Last spring. She got rid of it somehow. She didn’t want it any more than I did, that was how little she cared for me.” He released a long breath. “I can’t imagine you’d have any sympathy for me, Andras. But it’s a hard thing to have to see oneself clearly all of a sudden. You must understand what I mean.”

Andras said he believed he did.

“I know you don’t think much of my paintings,” József said. “I could see it when you came by last year, the time you and Klara brought the baby to my flat.”

“On the contrary, I thought the new work was good. I told Klara as much.”

“What if I were to try to contact my art dealer in Budapest?” József said, turning to Andras. “Have him sell something? I never considered the new pieces to be finished, but a collector might think otherwise. I might ask Papp to see what he can get for those nine big pieces.”

“You’d sell your unfinished work?”

“I can’t imagine what else I can do,” József said, turning from the window. For a moment the curve of his forehead and the dark wing of his hair were like Klara’s, and Andras experienced an unwelcome jolt of affection for him. He lay back in bed and stared at the dark plane of the ceiling.

“The pieces I saw were good,” he told József. “They didn’t seem unfinished. They might fetch a high price. But it might not be necessary to sell them. Klara may be able to get the money sent from Vienna.”

“And what if she can?” József said. “Do you think they won’t need more money for something else next month? What if one of the children gets sick, or my grandmother? What if it’s something that can’t wait for Klara to contact her lawyer?” The question hovered in the air for a long moment while they both considered that frightening possibility.

“What can I tell you?” Andras said. “I think it’s a fine idea. If I had work to sell right now, I’d sell it.”

“Give me your pen,” József said. “I’ll write my mother. Then I’ll write to Papp.”

Andras felt around in his knapsack for his pen and the last precious bottle of India ink left over from their set-design supplies. Using the windowsill as a desk and the moonlight as a lamp, József began to write. But a moment later he spoke again into the dark.

“I’ve never given my father a single thing,” he said. “Not one thing.”

“He’ll know what it means for you to sell those paintings.”

“What if he dies before my mother gets this letter?”

“Then at least your mother will know what you meant to do,” Andras said. “And Klara will know too.”

The next morning they woke and cleared snow, and the day after that they cleared snow, and the following day they encountered Captain Erdő as he was marching his trainees along the road, and József managed to slip the letters into his hand. Every day after that they cleared snow and cleared snow, until, on the twentieth of December, Major Bálint announced that they were to pack their things and clean the orphanage from top to bottom; their unit was to move east the following day.

As much as they hated the orphanage, as much as every man had loathed his too-short bunk and cursed when he had to stoop to the child-sized sinks in the chill of a winter morning, as much as they had lived in terrified awareness of the killings that had taken place on the grounds, the murder of the children that had preceded their arrival, and the execution of Mendel Horovitz and László Goldfarb, as much as they had yearned to leave those rooms where they had been starved, beaten, and humiliated, they felt a strange resistance to the thought of turning the place over to another company, a group of unknown men. The 79/6th had become the caretakers of the graves of all their dead, the mounds marked with stones carried from the roadbed. They had kept the ground swept, the stones clean; they had placed smaller stones upon the larger ones in tribute to the men who had been shot or died of illness or overwork. They had become the caretakers, too, of the ghosts of the Jewish orphans of Turka; the 79/6th were the only ones who had seen those undersized footprints left behind in the hallways and the courtyard. They had eaten at the children’s abandoned tables, memorized the shapes of the Cyrillic letters scratched into the tops of the schoolroom desks, been bitten at night by the same bedbugs that had bitten the children, stubbed their toes on the bed frames where the children had stubbed their toes. Now they would have to abandon them, too, those children who had already been abandoned three times: once by their own parents, once by the state, and finally by life itself. But the men of the 79/6th-those who survived the winter-would say Kaddish for the Jewish orphans of Turka every August for as long as they lived.

They moved east, on foot, in the direction of danger. The land all around looked just as it did in Turka: snow-laden hills, heavy pines, the papery remains of cornstalks stubbling the white fields, stands of cows chuffing cumuli into the freezing air. The towns were nothing more than scatterings of farmhouses in the shadowy folds of the hills. The wind came through the men’s overcoats and settled into their bones. They had to quarter in stables with the workhorses or sleep on the floors of the peasants’ houses, where they lay open-eyed all night in fear of the peasants, who lay open-eyed all night in fear of them. At times there was no stable or village at all, and they had to bivouac in the freezing cold under the aurora-lit sky. The temperature dropped at night to -20°C. The men always had a fire, but the fire itself was dangerous; it could mesmerize you, it could cause you to stop moving, it could distract you from the difficult work of staying alive. If you fell asleep beside it during the night watch, tricked by its warmth into letting your blanket drop from your shoulders, it might burn itself to ash and leave you exposed to the cold. One morning Andras found the Ivory Tower that way, his arms around his knees, his large head bent forward in what appeared to be sleep. In front of him was the dead black ring where the fire had burned out in the snow, and on his shoulders lay a dusting of ice and frost. Andras put a hand to the Ivory Tower’s neck, but the skin was as cold and unyielding as the ground itself. They had to carry his body with them for three days before they came across a patch of earth soft enough to receive him. It was beside a stable, where the horses’ warmth had kept the ground from being frozen solid. They buried the Ivory Tower in the middle of the night and scratched his name and the date of his death into the side of the barn. They said the Ninety-first Psalm again. By that time they could all recite it from memory.

…

The cold was with them day and night. Even inside the stables or the peasants’ houses it was impossible to get warm. They stitched clumsy mittens from the linings of their overcoats, but the mittens were thin and leaked cold at the seams. Their feet froze inside their cracked boots. The men tore horse blankets into foot rags and bound their feet like the Ukrainian peasants did. Their diet contained little to keep them warm, though Major Bálint tried to maintain the rations prescribed by General Nagy. Every now and then the peasants took pity on them and gave them something extra: a tablespoon of goose fat for their bread, a marrow bone, a bit of jam. Andras thought of the surveyor and hoped he was eating too-hoped the army was feeding him in Voronezh.

By day they shoveled snow from the roads, often not as fast as it fell. Their backs became hunched with the work, their hands crabbed from gripping the shovels. Along the half-cleared roads came trucks, jeeps, artillery, men, tanks, airplane parts, ammunition. Sometimes a German inspector would come to shout them into their lines and abuse them in his language of guttural consonants and air-starved vowels. News floated in like ash from a fire: The battle crawled onward in Stalingrad, killing tens of thousands every week; a strand of the Hungarian Second Army fought for its life at Voronezh, battered by superior Soviet forces. The men of the 79/6th shoveled their way toward that battle, though it seemed as distant as everything else. Sometimes they shoveled all night while the northern sky shouted a stream of bright curses. The men thought of their wives and girlfriends lying in warm beds in Budapest, their legs bare and smooth, their breasts asleep in the midwinter dark, their hands folded and fragrant like love letters. They repeated the names of those distant women in their minds, the twist of longing never abating, even when the names became abstractions and the men had to wonder whether the women really still existed, if they could be said to exist when their existence was taking place somewhere so far distant, beyond the granite grin of the Carpathians, across the flat cold plains of Hungarian winter. Klara was the sound of a shovel hitting frozen snow, the scrape of a blade against frozen ground. Andras told himself that if he could only clear this road, if he could only open the way for the trucks to speed toward the Eastern Front, then the war would flow in that direction and pool there, far away from Hungary and Klara and Tamás.

But in mid-January something went wrong. The traffic, which until that point had largely flowed in the direction of Russia, began to run the other way. At first it was just a trickle: a few truckloads of provisions, a few companies of foot soldiers in jeeps. After a while it became a steady stream of men and vehicles and weaponry. Then, in late January, it became a deluge, and the river of it turned red with blood. There were Red Cross ambulances full of dead and horribly injured men, casualties of the battle that had raged in Stalingrad for five months, since August of 1942. One night the news came that the Hungarian Second Army, along with the thousands of work servicemen who had been attached to it, had suffered a final and brutal defeat at Voronezh. It came just as Andras received his ration of bread with its smear of margarine. As hungry as he was, he gave his ration to József and sat down in a corner of the barn where they were quartered that night. They were sharing the barn with two dozen black-faced sheep whose wool had been allowed to grow long for the winter. The sheep nosed into the stall where Andras had sequestered himself; they lay their dusty bodies down in the hay, made their shuddering cries, snuffled at each other with their black velvet noses. It wasn’t just the surveyor, Szolomon, that Andras was thinking of; it was Mátyás, who had at one time been attached to the Hungarian Second Army. If he had lived through the last year’s winter, he might have been one of the fifty thousand posted at Voronezh. Andras imagined his parents getting the dreaded news at last, his mother standing in the kitchen of their Debrecen apartment with a telegram in her hand, his father crumpled in his chair like an empty glove. Andras had been a father for only fourteen months, but he knew what it would mean to lose a son. He thought of Tamás, of the familiar whorl of his hair, the speed of his heartbeat, the folded landscape of his body. Then he put his face into his knees and saw Mátyás standing on the rail of a Budapest streetcar, his blue shirt fluttering.

He swallowed the knot of coarse rope that had lodged itself in his throat, and drew an arm across his eyes. He would not mourn, he told himself. Not until he knew.

The river of blood continued, and before long it swept up Andras and József and the rest of the 79/6th and carried them west, back toward Hungary. Fragments of labor-service companies drifted through, men who had reached nightmarish states of emaciation. The 79/6th, whose rations had been steady, carried food each night to forced laborers who were nearly dead, whose commanders had abandoned them, who had no work now but to flee in the direction of home. They received more news of what had happened at Stalingrad-the bombing that had turned every block of the city to rubble, its buildings to a forest of broken brick and concrete; the surrounding of the German Sixth Army at the center of the city, its commander, General Paulus, hidden in a basement while the battle raged around him; the downing of the few Luftwaffe supply flights; then the Soviet Army pounding through to retake control of the Don bend, and to prevent the German Fourth from advancing to rescue the surrounded Sixth. No one knew how many had been killed-two hundred thousand? Five hundred thousand? A million?-or how many were dying still, of cold and starvation and untreated wounds, there at the dead center of winter, on the dark and barren steppes. The Soviets were said to be chasing the remnants of the Hungarian Army back across the plains. In the midst of his own fear, his own flight, Andras felt a fierce satisfaction. The German Sixth had failed to take the oil fields around Grozny; they had failed to take the city that carried Stalin’s name. Those defeats might beget others. What had failed might continue to fail. It was a terrible thing to take pleasure in, Andras knew-the fate of Hungarian companies and labor servicemen were tied to the fate of the Wehrmacht, and in any case these were human beings who were dying, whatever their nationality. But Germany had to be defeated. And if it could be defeated while Hungary remained a sovereign state, then the Jews of Hungary might never have to live under Nazi rule.

The confusion of the retreat toward Hungary begat strange convergences, foldings of fate that arose from the mingling of dozens of labor-service companies. Again and again they came across men they knew from the far-off life before the war. One night they quartered with a group of men from Debrecen, among whom were several old schoolmates of Tibor’s. Another night they encountered a group from Konyár itself, including the baker’s son, the elder brother of Orsolya Korcsolya. A third night, stranded in a March blizzard, Andras found himself sharing a corner of a granary-turned-infirmary with the managing editor of the Magyar Jewish Journal, the man who had been Frigyes Eppler’s colleague and adversary. The man was scarcely recognizable, so stripped down by cold and hunger as to seem only the wire armature upon which his former self had been built; no one could have imagined that this ravenous thin-armed man, his eyes glittering with fever, had once been a bellicose editor in an Irish tweed jacket.

The managing editor had news of Frigyes Eppler, who had lost his job after the military police had found a file of incriminating documents in his office, a set of papers rumored to have connected him to a black-market operation at Szentendre, of all places. Not long afterward, Eppler had been conscripted into the Munkaszolgálat; no one had heard from him since, or at least not as far as the managing editor knew. He himself had been called up into a different company a few weeks later. Now the managing editor was part of a group of sick and wounded men whose commander had left them in the granary to starve or to succumb to fever. Major Bálint had ordered the 79/6th to tend to the sick men-to bring them food and water and change the dirty makeshift dressings on their wounds. As Andras performed these duties for the managing editor, he learned the fate of another member of their company, a man whose story was so grim that he had earned the nickname of Uncle Job. This man, the editor told him, had once been married to a beautiful woman, a former actress, with whom he’d had a child; it was rumored that he had lived in Paris, where he had run a grand theater at the center of town. Before the war he had been forced to return to Budapest, where, for a brief time, he had taken over the directorship of the Opera. It was in Budapest that his wife had become ill and died. Soon afterward, the man, already suffering from tuberculosis, had been conscripted into the labor service-made an example of, to be certain-and had been placed into service with the labor company that the editor would join sometime later. Last fall they had been sent through the waystation of the Royal Hungarian Field Gendarmerie at Staryy Oskol, where they had been interrogated and beaten and robbed of everything they had brought with them. The Hungarian Field Gendarmerie knew who this great man was, this former luminary of the theater; they stood him up in front of the others and beat him with their rifles, and then they produced a telegram in which it was reported that the man’s son had died of measles. The telegram had been sent by the boy’s aunt to a relative in Szeged; it had been intercepted in Budapest and forwarded all the way to Staryy Oskol apparently for the express torment of this gentleman. The man begged them to kill him, too, but they left him alone with the rest of the battalion, and the next day they were all sent east again.

“But what happened to him?” Andras asked, his hands on his knees, looking into the hollowed-out eyes of the managing editor. “Did he die at Voronezh?”

“That’s the pity of it,” the editor said. “He never did die, though he kept trying. He volunteered to clear land mines. Ran into the line of fire every chance he got. Survived it all. Even the consumption couldn’t kill him.”

“How did you leave him? Where did you last see him?”

“He’s there in the corner, where your friend is sitting now.”

Andras looked over his shoulder. József had knelt to give water to a man who lay propped on a pile of folded grain sacks; the man turned his head away, and through the veil of illness and emaciation Andras recognized Zoltán Novak.

“I know him,” Andras told the editor.

“Of course. Who didn’t? He was well known.”

“Personally, I mean.”

“Go pay your regards, then.” He put a hand to Andras’s chest and gave him a push in the man’s direction, the gesture like a dim ghost of his old energy, his old vehemence.

Andras approached József and the man supported on the grain sacks. He caught József’s eye and beckoned him into a corner.

“That’s Zoltán Novak,” Andras whispered.

József wrinkled his forehead and glanced back toward the man. “Novak?” he said. “Are you certain?”

Andras nodded.

“God help us,” József said. “He’s nearly dead.”

But the man raised his head from the grain sacks and looked at Andras and József.

“I’ll be right back,” József said.

“Give me water,” said Novak, his voice a raw whisper in his throat.

“I’ll go to him,” Andras said.

“Why?”

“He knows me.”

“Somehow I don’t think that’ll be a comfort,” József said.

But Andras went to kneel on the floor beside Novak, who raised himself an inch or two on the folded sacks, his eyes closed, his breath rattling like the stroked edge of a comb.

“Give me water, there,” he said again.

Andras raised his canteen and Novak drank. When he was done, he cleared his throat and looked at Andras. A slow heat came to his expression, a faint flushing of the skin around the eyelids. He pushed himself up onto his elbows.

“Lévi,” he said, and shook his head. He made three burrs of noise that might have been consternation or laughter. The exertion seemed to have drained him. He lay back again and closed his eyes. It was a long time before he spoke again, and when he did, the words came slowly and with effort. “Lévi,” he said. “I must have died, thank God. I’ve died and gone down to Gehenna. And here you are with me, also dead, I hope.”

“No,” Andras said. “Still alive and here in Ukraine, both of us.”

Novak opened his eyes again. There was a softness in his gaze, a complicated pity that did not exclude himself but was not focused upon himself alone; it seemed to take in all of them, Andras and József and the editor and the other sick and dying men and the laborers who were bringing them water and tending their wounds.

“You see how it stands with me,” Novak said. “Maybe it gives you some satisfaction to see me like this.”

“Of course not, Novak-úr. Tell me what I can do for you.”

“There’s only one thing I want,” Novak said. “But I can’t ask for it without making a murderer of you.” He gave a half smile, pausing again to catch his breath. Then he coughed painfully and turned onto his side. “I’ve wished to die for months. But I’m quite strong, as it turns out. Isn’t that a lovely thing? And I’m too much of a coward to take my own life.”

“Are you hungry?” Andras asked. “I’ve got some bread in my knapsack.”

“Do you think I want bread?”

Andras glanced away.

“That other man’s her nephew, isn’t he,” Novak said. “He resembles her.”

“I’d like to think she’s a good deal better looking than that,” Andras said.

Novak coughed out a laugh. “You’re right, there,” he said, and then shook his head. “Andras Lévi. I hoped I wouldn’t see you again after that day at the Opera.”

“I’ll go away if you want.”

Novak shook his head again, and Andras waited for him to say something more. But he had exhausted himself with speaking; he fell into a shallow open-mouthed sleep. Andras sat with him as he struggled for breath. Outside, the wind was shrill with the force of the blizzard. Andras put his head on his arm and fell asleep, and when he woke it had grown dark inside the granary. No one had a candle; those who still had flashlights hadn’t had batteries for months. The sound and smell of sick men closed in around him like a close-woven veil. Novak was wide awake now and looking intently at him, his breathing more labored than before. Each intake of breath sounded as though he were building a complicated structure from inappropriate materials with broken tools; each exhalation was the defeated collapse of that ugly and imbalanced structure. He spoke again, so quietly that Andras had to lean close to hear.

“It’s all right now,” he was saying. “Everything’s all right.”

It was unclear whether he meant to reassure Andras or himself or both of them at once; he seemed almost to be addressing someone who wasn’t present, though his eyes were fixed on Andras in the darkness. Soon he went quiet and fell asleep again. Andras stayed beside him all night as he wandered in and out of sleep, and the next day he gave Novak his ration of bread. Novak couldn’t eat it dry, but Andras mashed it into crumbs and mixed it with melted snow. They spent three days that way, Novak drifting awake and sleeping, Andras giving him small measures of food and water, until the weather had cleared and the snow had melted enough for the 79/6th to go on again toward the border. When Bálint announced that the men would move out the following morning, Andras’s relief was cut with dismay. He begged a moment’s conference with the major; they couldn’t leave the other men there to die.

“How do you propose to move them, Serviceman?” Bálint asked, his tone stern, though not unkind. “We don’t have ambulances. We don’t have materials for litters. And we can’t possibly stay here.”

“We can improvise something, sir.”

Bálint shook his shaggy head. “These men are better off inside. The medical corps will be along in a few days. Those who can be moved will be moved then.”

“Some of them will be dead by then,” Andras said.

“In that case, Lévi, dragging them into the cold and snow won’t save them.”

“One of those men saved my life when I was a student in Paris. I can’t abandon him.”

“Listen to me,” Bálint said, his large earth-colored eyes steady on Andras’s. “I have a son and daughter at home. The others are husbands and fathers, too, many of them. We’re young men. We’ve got to get home alive. That’s the principle by which I’ve commanded this company since we turned back. We’re still a hundred kilometers from the border, five days’ walk at least. If we carry sick men with us we’ll slow the entire company. We could lose our lives.”

“Let me stay, then, sir.”

“That’s not in my orders.”

“Let me.”

“No!” Bálint said, angry now. “I’ll march you out at gunpoint if I have to.”

But in the end there was no need for a show of force. Zoltán Novak, former husband and father, former director of the Théâtre Sarah-Bernhardt and the Budapest Operaház, the man Klara Morgenstern had loved for eleven years and in some measure must have loved still, fell asleep that night and did not wake again.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN. An Escape

BY THE TIME his train reached Budapest, the forsythia had come into bloom. All else was gray or vaguely yellow-green; a few of the trees along the outer ring road showed the swelling of buds, though the city retained the wet rawness of recent snowmelt. 1943 still felt unreal to him. He had lost his sense of time entirely through the last phase of the journey home. But he knew today’s date: It was the twenty-fifth of March, seven months and three weeks since he’d been sent to Ukraine. Klara had come to meet his train at Keleti Station. He’d nearly gone faint at the sight of her on the platform with a child standing beside her-standing! His son, Tamás, in a knee-length coat and sturdy little boy’s shoes. Tamás, almost a year and a half old now; Tamás who had been a baby in Klara’s arms the last time Andras had seen him. Klara’s brow showed a narrow pleat of worry, but she was otherwise unchanged; her dark hair was caught in its loose knot at her nape, the beloved planes of her clavicles exposed by the neckline of her gray dress. She made no attempt to hide her dismay at Andras’s physical state. She put a hand over her mouth, and her eyes filled. He knew what he looked like, knew he looked like a man who’d been threshed almost free of his body. His head had been shaved for delousing; his clothes, or what was left of them, hung loosely on his frame. His hands were crabbed and bent, his cheek scarred with three white rays where the glass from a shot-out barn window had cut him. When Klara took him into her arms he felt how careful she was with him, as though she might hurt him with an embrace. József was not there to witness their reunion; he was still in Debrecen, recovering at a military hospital. His knee had been wounded during the border crossing, and he was receiving treatment for an infection of the soft tissues. He would return in another week or two. From a post office near the hospital, Andras had been able to wire Klara the news of his own return.

Darling. Darling. They would have stood there saying it to each other all night, looking at each other and kissing each other’s hands, touching each other’s faces, had not Tamás made his protest and begged to be picked up. Andras held him and looked into the round face with its inquisitive eyebrows and its large expressive eyes.

“Apa,” Klara instructed the boy, and pointed to Andras’s chest. But Tamás turned and put his arms out to Klara, afraid of this unfamiliar man.

Andras bent to his knapsack and opened the flap. Inside he found the red India-rubber ball he’d bought for three fillér from a street vendor in Debrecen. The ball had a white star at each of its poles and was bisected by a band of green paint. Tamás put out his hands for it. But Andras tossed it high into the air and caught it on his back, between his shoulder blades. He’d learned the trick from one of his schoolmates in Konyár. Now he plucked the ball from his back and bowed to Tamás, who opened his mouth and crowed with laughter.

“More,” Tamás said.

It was the first word Andras had heard him speak. The trick proved equally funny a second and third time. At last Andras gave Tamás the ball, and he held it raptly as Klara carried him through the Erzsébetváros toward home. Andras walked beside them with his hand at Klara’s waist. No longer with him was the feeling he’d had when he’d returned home from the Munkaszolgálat before: that the continuation of ordinary life in Budapest was impossible after what he’d come from, that his mental and physical torment must necessarily have changed the rest of the world. There was a certain numbness where he had once experienced incredulity. It almost frightened him, that stillness. It was inarguable evidence of his having grown older.

As they walked, Klara told him the news of the family: how the money from the sale of József’s paintings had allowed György to regain his health in the hospital; how Klara’s mother, who’d had pneumonia over the winter, was now hale enough to go to the market every morning for the day’s vegetables and bread; how Ilana had mastered Hungarian and had proved to be a genius at economizing on their rations; how Elza Hász, who before that past December had never even known how to boil an egg, had learned to make potato paprikás and chicken soup. There had even been news from Elisabet: She’d had another child, a girl. She was still living on the family estate in Connecticut while Paul served in the navy, but they planned to move to a larger apartment in New York when he returned. Of the possibility of emigrating to the States there had been no word. Other possibilities of escape had evaporated. Klein, Klara revealed in a whisper as they paused at a street corner, had been arrested for arranging illegal emigrations. He’d been in jail since the previous November, awaiting trial. She had gone a few times to visit his grandparents, who demonstrated no sign of need. They persisted with their little flock of goats in the ancient cottage in Frangepán köz; perhaps the authorities considered them too old to be worth pursuing. The names of Klein’s clients-former, current, and would-be emigrants-were concealed in his labyrinth of codes, but there was no telling how long it might be before the police found their way through the maze.

“And your parents?” she asked. “Are they well?”

“They’re fine,” Andras said. “Still sick with worry about Mátyás, though. They haven’t had a word of news. They weren’t pleased to see me looking like this, either. I didn’t tell them the half of what happened.”

“Tibor’s anxious to see you,” she said. “Ilana had to resort to threats to keep him from coming to the station. But his doctor says he’s got to rest.”

“How is he? How does he look?”

Klara sighed. “Thin and exhausted. Quiet. Sometimes he seems to see terrible things in the air between himself and us. Every minute since he’s been back he’s had Ádám in his arms. The boy is so attached to him now, Ilana can hardly feed him.”

“And you?” He put a hand to her hair, her cheek. “Klárika.”

She raised her chin to him and kissed him, there on the street with their child in her arms.

“Your letters,” she said. “If I hadn’t had them, I don’t know.”

“They can’t always have been a comfort.”

Tears came to her eyes again. “I wanted to think I’d miunderstood about Mendel. I read and reread that letter, hoping I was wrong. But it’s true, isn’t it.”

“Yes, darling, it’s true.”

“Sometime soon you’ll tell me everything,” she said, and took his hand.

They walked on together until they reached the door of the apartment building. He looked up toward the window he knew to belong to their bedroom; she’d installed a window box full of early crocuses.

“There’s one more piece of news,” she said, so gravely that at first he was certain it was news of a death. “There’s someone else staying with us now. Someone who traveled a long way to get here.”

“Who?”

“Come upstairs,” she said. “You’ll see.”

He followed her into the courtyard, his heartbeat quickening. He wasn’t certain he could face a surprise guest. He wanted to sit down on the edge of the fountain at the center of the courtyard, stay there and gather himself for a few days. As they climbed the open stairway he could see the flicker of goldfish in the fountain’s green depths.

They were at the door, and the door opened. There was Tibor, drawn and pale, his eyes full of tears behind his silver-framed glasses. He put his arms around his brother and they held each other in the hallway. Andras inhaled Tibor’s faint smell of soap and sebum and clean cotton, not wanting to move or speak. But Tibor led him into the sitting room, where the family was waiting. There was his nephew, Ádám, standing beside his mother; Ilana, her hair covered beneath an embroidered kerchief; György Hász, grayer and older; Elza Hász austere in a cotton work dress; Klara’s mother, smaller than ever, her eyes deep and bright. And beyond them, rising from the couch, a pale oval-faced man in a dark jersey that had belonged to Andras, a crumpled handkerchief in his hand.

Andras experienced a tilt of vertigo. He put a hand on the back of the sofa as the feeling passed through him like a pressure wave.

Eli Polaner.

“Not possible,” Andras said. He looked from Klara to his brother to Ilana, and then again at Polaner himself. “Is it true?” he asked in French.

“True,” Polaner said, in his familiar and long-lost voice.

It was a nightmare version of a fairy tale, a story grim enough to teach Andras new horrors after what he’d seen in Ukraine. He wished almost that he’d never had to know what had happened to Polaner at the concentration camp in Compiègne where he’d been sent after his removal from the Foreign Legion in 1940-how he’d been beaten and starved and deported half dead to Buchenwald, where he’d spent two years in forced labor and sexual slavery, his arm tattooed with his number, his chest bearing an inverted pink triangle superimposed over an upright yellow one. Polaner’s homosexuality had remained a secret until one of his workmates had given up a list of names in exchange for a position as a kapo; afterward, Polaner had found himself at the lowest level of the camp hierarchy, marked with a symbol that made him a target for the guards and kept the other prisoners from getting too close to him. He’d been assigned to the stone quarry, where he hauled bags of crushed rock for fourteen hours a day. When his shift at the quarry was finished, he had to clean the latrines of his barracks block-a reminder, the block sergeant told him, that at this camp he was lower than shit, a servant to shit. Sometimes, late at night, he and a few of the others would be led to a back door of the officers’ quarters, where they would be tied and raped, first by one of the officers and then by his secretaries and his orderly.

One night they had been presented as a secret gift to a visiting dignitary from the SS Economic-Administrative Main Office, a high-ranking concentration-camp inspector who was known to enjoy the company of young men. But the exalted official’s preferences were not what had been assumed; he was a lover of young men, not a rapist. He had the prisoners untied and washed and shaved and dressed in civilian clothes. What he wanted was to engage them in conversation, as though they were all at a party. He had them sit on sofas in his private quarters and share delicacies with him-tea and cakes, when what they’d lived on for the past three years was thin soup and beweeviled bread. The inspector was charmed by Polaner’s French and his knowledge of contemporary art and architecture. It turned out that the man had known the late vom Rath, to whom he had been a kind of political mentor. By the end of the evening he had decided to have Polaner transferred to his personal service at once. He brought Polaner to his private apartments at another camp a hundred kilometers away, and registered him as a kind of underservant, a hauler of coal and blacker of boots; in actuality Polaner was treated as a patient, kept in bed and nursed by the camp inspector’s domestic staff.

At the end of two months, when Polaner had recovered his health, the inspector performed a kind of alchemy of identity: He had false records drawn up to show that Eli Polaner, the young Jewish man who had been transferred to his service, had contracted meningitis and died; then he procured for Polaner a set of forged papers declaring him to be a young Nazi Party member by the name of Teobald Kreizel, a junior secretary with the Economic-Administrative Main Office. With Polaner dressed as a member of the inspector’s staff they traveled to Berlin, where the inspector installed Polaner in a small bright flat on the Behrenstrasse. He left Polaner with fifty thousand reichsmarks in cash and a promise that he would return as soon as possible, bringing with him books and magazines and drawing supplies, phonograph records, black-market delicacies, whatever Polaner might want. Polaner asked only for news of his family; he hadn’t heard from his parents or his sisters since he’d entered the Foreign Legion.

The high-ranking inspector returned as often as he could, bringing the promised drawing supplies and records and delicacies, but he was slow to produce news of Polaner’s family. Polaner waited, rarely venturing out of the apartment, thinking of little else but the fact that he might soon learn his parents’ and sisters’ fate. He nursed a hope that they might have found a way to emigrate, that against the odds they’d gotten themselves to some benign and distant place, Argentina or Australia or America; or, failing that, that the inspector might be able to lift them out of whatever hell they’d fallen into, might reunite them all in a neutral city where they would be safe. It wasn’t an entirely baseless hope; the inspector had often used his position to arrange favors for his lovers and protégés. In fact, during the six months Polaner lived on the Behrenstrasse, those past favors took their toll: a series of irregularities came to the attention of the inspector’s superiors, and the inspector fell under investigation. Fearing for his position and for Polaner’s life, the inspector concluded that Polaner must leave the country at once. He promised to get Polaner a visa that would allow him to travel anywhere within the area of the Reich’s influence. But what was Polaner supposed to do? Where was he supposed to go? News of his parents had failed to arrive; how was he to choose a destination?

Later that same week, the first week of January, 1943, the inspector’s inquiries about Polaner’s family yielded answers at last. Polaner’s parents and sisters had died in a labor camp at Plaszow-his mother and father in February of 1941, and his sisters eight and ten months later. The Nazis had appropriated his family home and the textile factory in Kraków. There was nothing left.

The night he received the news, Polaner had removed the gun from his bedside table-the inspector insisted he keep a pistol for protection-and had gone out onto the balcony and stood there in his nightclothes, in a cataract of freezing wind. He put the gun to his temple and leaned over the balcony railing. The snow below him was like an eiderdown, he told Andras-soft-looking, hillocked, blue-white; he imagined falling into that clean blankness and disappearing beneath a layer of new snow. The gun in his hand was an SS officer’s Walther P-38, a double-action pistol with a round in the chamber. He cocked the hammer and put a finger against the curve of the trigger, envisioned the bullet shattering the ingenious architecture of his skull. He would count to three and do it: eins, tsvey, dray. But as the Yiddish numbers sounded in his mind, he experienced a moment of clarity: If he killed himself with this gun, this Walther P-38-if he did this because the Nazis had killed his parents and sisters-then they, the Nazis, would be the ones who had killed him, the ones who had silenced the Yiddish inside his head. They would have succeeded at killing his entire family. He removed his finger from the trigger, reset the safety, and slid the round out of the chamber. It was the bullet, and not Polaner himself, that fell three stories to that eiderdown of snow.

The next morning he fixed upon Budapest as his destination, in the hope of finding Andras there. The high-ranking inspector provided Polaner with the letters and documents necessary to obtain legal residency in Hungary; he even got him a doctor’s certificate declaring Polaner unfit for military service due to a chronic weakness of the lungs. He gave Polaner twenty thousand reichsmarks and put him into a private compartment on a train. When Polaner arrived, he made his way to the grand synagogue on Dohány utca, where he found an ancient secretary who spoke Yiddish; he communicated that he was looking for Andras Lévi, and the secretary had directed him to the Budapest Izraelita Hitközség, which provided him with Andras’s address on Nefelejcs utca. Klara had taken him in, and here he’d remained ever since. Just a week ago he’d received his official Hungarian papers, which he produced now from a brown portfolio as if to prove to Andras it was all true. Andras unfolded Polaner’s passport. Teobald Kreizel. Permanent resident. The photograph showed a thin hollow-eyed Polaner, even paler and more horror-stricken than the young man who sat across the kitchen table from Andras now. This passport was as crisp and clean as Andras’s had been when he’d left for Paris; it lacked only the telltale Zs for Zsidó. The brown portfolio also contained a party identity card stamped with the ghost of a swastika, declaring Teobald Kreizel to be a member of the National Socialist Party of Germany.

“These papers will serve you well,” Andras said. “Your German friend knew what he was doing.”

Polaner shifted in his seat. “It’s a shameful thing, a Jew posing as a Nazi.”

“My God, Polaner! No one would begrudge you that protection. It’ll keep you out of the Munkaszolgálat, at the very least, and I know what that’s worth.”

“But you’ve had to serve for years. And if the war goes on, you’ll serve again.”

“You did your time,” Andras said. “Yours was far worse than mine.”

“Impossible to weigh them,” Polaner said.

But there were times when it was possible to weigh suffering, Andras knew. He, Andras, hadn’t been raped. He hadn’t lost his country or his family. Klara was asleep in the bedroom, their son beside her. Tibor and Ilana lay in each other’s arms on a mattress on the sitting-room floor. Their parents were well in Debrecen. Mátyás might be alive still, somewhere beyond the borders of Hungary. But Polaner had lost everything, everyone. Andras thought of the Rosh Hashanah dinner they’d eaten together at the student dining club five and a half years earlier-how Andras had marveled that Polaner’s mother had let him return to school after the attack, and what Polaner had said in reply: She’s never glad to see me go. She’s my mother. That woman who had loved her son was gone. Her husband was gone, and their daughters were gone. And the young Andras Lévi and Eli Polaner-those boys who had spent two years in Paris arguing about a war that might or might not come, drinking tea at the Blue Dove, making plans for a sports club at the center of the Quartier Latin-they, too, were gone, grown into these scarred and scraped-out men. And he lowered his head onto Polaner’s sleeve and mourned for what could never be returned.

All that spring they waited for news of Mátyás. When they celebrated Passover, Andras’s mother insisted upon setting a place for him; when they opened the door to welcome Elijah, they were calling him home too. In the time since Andras had been sent to Ukraine, his mother and father seemed to have grown old. His father’s hair had gone from gray to white. His mother’s back had acquired a curve. She curled into the tent of her cardigan like a dry grass stem. Even the sight of Tamás and Ádám failed to cheer her; it wasn’t her grandchildren she longed for, but her lost boy.

Polaner, who knew what it meant to wait for news, kept his own mourning private. He never spoke of his parents or his sisters, as though a mention of his loss might bring on the tragedy that Andras’s family dreaded. He insisted upon going alone to the Dohány Synagogue every afternoon to recite Kaddish. Tradition required him to do it for a year. But as the news continued to drift in from Poland, it began to seem as though no one could be exempt from mourning, as though no period of mourning would ever be long enough. In April, the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto had mounted an armed stand against the deportation of the ghetto’s last sixty thousand residents; no one had expected it to last more than a few days, but the ghetto fighters held out for four weeks. The Pesti Napló printed photographs of women throwing Molotov cocktails at German tanks, of Waffen-SS troops and Polish policemen setting buildings afire. The battle lasted until the middle of May, and ended, as everyone had known it would, with the clearing of the ghetto: a massacre of the Jewish fighters, and the deportation of those who had survived. The next day, the Pesti Napló reported that one and a half million Polish Jews had been killed in the war, according to the exiled Polish government’s estimate. Andras, who had translated every article and radio program about the uprising for Polaner, couldn’t bring himself to translate that number, to deliver that staggering statistic to a friend already in mourning. One and a half million Jewish men and women and children: How was anyone to understand a number like that? Andras knew it took three thousand to fill the seats of the Dohány Street Synagogue. To accommodate a million and a half, one would have had to replicate that building, its arches and domes, its Moorish interior, its balcony, its dark wooden pews and gilded ark, five hundred times. And then to envision each of those five hundred synagogues filled to capacity, to envision each man and woman and child inside as a unique and irreplaceable human being, the way he imagined Mendel Horovitz or the Ivory Tower or his brother Mátyás, each of them with desires and fears, a mother and a father, a birthplace, a bed, a first love, a web of memories, a cache of secrets, a skin, a heart, an infinitely complicated brain-to imagine them that way, and then to imagine them dead, extinguished for all time-how could anyone begin to grasp it? The idea could drive a person mad. He, Andras, was still alive, and people were dependent upon him; he couldn’t afford to lose his mind, and so he forced himself not to think about it.

Instead he buried himself in the work that had to be done every day. The single apartment, which had been full even when the men were away in the Munkaszolgálat, proved unlivable now that they were home. Tibor and Ilana took a flat across the street, and József moved with his parents into another small flat in the building next door. Polaner remained with Andras and Klara, sharing a room with Tamás. For all those living spaces, rent had to be paid. Andras went back to work as a newspaper illustrator and layout artist, not at the Magyar Jewish Journal but at the Evening Courier, Mendel’s former employer, where a new round of military conscriptions had decimated the ranks of graphic artists. He persuaded his editor to hire Polaner as well, arguing that Polaner had always been the true talent behind their collaborations in architecture school. Tibor, for his part, found a position as a surgical assistant in a military hospital, where the wounded of Voronezh were still being treated. József, who had never before had to earn a living, placed an ad in the Evening Courier and became a house painter, paid handsomely for his work. And Klara taught private students in the studio on Király utca. Few parents now could afford the full fee, but she allowed them to pay whatever they could.

In July, as Eisenhower’s armies bombed Rome, Budapest stood on the banks of the Danube in an excess of summer beauty, its palaces and grand old hotels still radiating an air of permanence. The Soviet bombardments of the previous September hadn’t touched those scrolled and gilded buildings; Allied raids had failed to materialize that spring, and the Red Army’s planes hadn’t returned. Now the clenched fists of dahlias opened in the Városliget, where Andras walked with Tibor and József and Polaner on Sunday afternoons, speculating about how much longer it might be before Germany capitulated and the war ended at last. Mussolini had fallen, and fascism had crumbled in Italy. On the Eastern Front, Germany ’s problems had multiplied and deepened: The Wehrmacht’s assault on a Soviet stronghold near Kursk had ended in a disastrous rout, and defeats at Orel and Kharkov had followed soon after. Even Tibor, who a year earlier had cautioned against wishful thinking, voiced the hope that the war might be over before he or Andras or József could be called to the Munkaszolgálat again, and that the Hungarian prisoners of war might begin to return.

The Jews of Hungary had been lucky, Andras knew. Thousands of men had died in the Munkaszolgálat, but not a million and a half. The rest of the Jewish population had survived the war intact. Though tens of thousands had lost their jobs and nearly all were struggling to make a living, it was still legal at least for a Jew to operate a business, own an apartment, go to synagogue to say the prayer for the dead. For more than a year and a half, Prime Minister Kállay had managed to stave off Hitler’s demands for more stringent measures against Hungary ’s Jews; what was more, his administration had begun to pursue justice for the crimes perpetrated earlier in the war. He had called for an investigation into the Délvidék massacres, and had vowed to punish the guilty parties as severely as they deserved. And General Vilmos Nagybaczoni Nagy, before he’d given up his control of the Ministry of Defense, had called for the indictment of the officers at the heart of the military black market.

But Andras had been schooled in skepticism not only by Tibor but by the events of the past year; despite the hopeful news, he found it impossible to shake his sense of dread. More events accrued to reinforce it. As he followed the black-market trial in the newspaper that fall, it became increasingly clear that the accused officers, if they were convicted, would carry only nominal sentences. And Hitler, whose Wehrmacht had looked so vulnerable during the summer months, had halted the Allied attack south of Rome and secured Germany ’s southern borders. In Russia he continued to throw his troops at the Red Army, as though total defeat were impossible.

Then there was the absence of news about Mátyás, who had been missing now for twenty-two months. How could anyone continue to believe he had survived? But Tibor persisted in believing it, and his mother believed it, and though his father wouldn’t speak of it, Andras knew he believed it; as long as any of them did, none of them could claim even the bare comfort of grief.

The year’s final act of aborted justice concerned the Hász family and the extortion that had drained its fortunes almost to nothing. Once György’s monthly payments had dwindled to a few hundred forint, the extortionists decided that the rewards of the arrangement were no longer worth the risk. The Kállay administration seemed intent upon exposing corruption at all levels and in all branches of the government; seventeen members of the Ministry of Justice had already been indicted for financial improprieties, and György’s extortionists feared they would be next. On the twenty-fifth of October they called György to a midnight meeting in the basement of the Ministry of Justice. That night, Andras and Klara kept a vigil with Klara’s mother and Elza and József in the small dark front room of the Hász apartment. József chain-smoked a pack of Mirjam cigarettes; Elza sat with a basket of mending beside her, needling her way through the unfamiliar ravages of poverty upon clothing. The elder Mrs. Hász read aloud from Radnóti, the young Jewish poet Tibor admired, and whose fate in the Munkaszolgálat was unknown. Klara, her hands pinned between her knees, sat beside Andras as if in judgment herself. If her brother came to harm, Andras knew she would hold herself responsible.

At a quarter to three in the morning a key sounded in the lock. Here was György, soot-stained and breathless but otherwise unharmed. He removed his jacket and draped it over the back of the sofa, smoothed his pale gold tie, ran a hand through his silver-shot hair. He sat down in an empty chair and drained the glass of plum brandy his wife offered him. Then he set the empty glass on the low table before him and fixed his eyes on Klara, who sat close at his side.

“It’s over,” he said, covering her hand with his own. “You may exhale.”

“What’s over?” their mother asked. “What’s happened?”

There had been a great immolation of documents, he told them. The extortionists had taken György to his office and made him gather all evidence of the ministry’s illegal relationship with the Hász family-every letter, every telegram and payment record, every bill of sale and bank-deposit receipt-and had forced him to throw the lot into the building’s incinerator, making it impossible for the Hász family ever to mount a case against the Ministry of Justice. In return, the ministry officials produced a new set of papers for Klara, restoring the citzenship she’d lost as a young girl. Then they took the file containing all the documents pertaining to Klara’s alleged crime-the photographs of the murder scene and victims, the rapist’s sworn testimony revealing Klara’s identity, the depositions linking Klara to the Zionist organization Gesher Zahav, the police reports documenting Klara’s disappearance, and Edith Novak’s statement concerning Klara’s return to Hungary-and fed it, too, to the building’s central incinerator.

“You saw them burn those things?” Klara said. “The dossier, the photographs-everything?”

“Everything,” György said.

“How do you know they didn’t keep copies?” József said. “How do you know they don’t have other documents?”

“It’s possible, I suppose, but not likely. We must remember that any evidence they might retain would be evidence against them. That’s why they were so eager to destroy those papers.”

“But the evidence has always implicated them!” József said, rising from his chair. “That’s never bothered them before.”

“These men were frightened,” Hász said. “They did a poor job of hiding it. The administration isn’t on their side. They’ve seen seventeen of their colleagues fired, and a few imprisoned or sent to the labor service, for less than what they’ve done to us.”

“And you destroyed everything?” József said. “Truly everything? You didn’t keep a single copy? Nothing that would give us recourse later?”

György gave his son a hard and steady look. “They held a gun to my head as I emptied the files,” he said. “I would like to say I had duplicates elsewhere, but it was risky enough to keep what I had. Anyway, it’s finished now. They can’t open Klara’s case again. I saw the documents burn.”

József stood over his father’s chair, his hands clenched. He seemed ready to grab his father by the shoulders and shake him. His eyes flickered toward his grandmother, his mother; then his gaze fell upon Andras and rested there. Between them lay a history so terrible as to throw the moment’s frustration into a different light; to look at each other was to be reminded what it meant to escape with one’s life. József sat down again and spoke to his father.

“Thank God it’s over,” he said. “Thank God they didn’t kill you.”

…

In their bedroom that night, Andras held Klara as they lay awake in the dark. How many times over the past four years had he imagined her arrested and beaten and jailed, placed far beyond his reach? He could scarcely believe that the ever-present threat was gone. Klara herself was silent and dry-eyed beside him; he knew how keenly she felt the price of her own liberation. Her return to Hungary, a risk she had undertaken for his sake, had ruined her family. She was free now, but her freedom would never extend far enough to allow her to demand legal justice or the repayment of her family’s losses. Her silence wasn’t directed at him, he understood, but it lay between them nonetheless. Had he ever been close to her in the way married people were supposed to be close? he wondered. Of their forty-eight months married, he had spent only twelve at home. To survive their separation they’d had to place each other at a certain remove. Every time he’d been home, including this one, there had been the fear that he would be called up again; as much as they tried to ignore it, the fact was always there. And veiling all their intimacy, shadowing it like a pair of dark wings, was what they knew was happening in Europe, and what they feared would happen to them.

But here they were together, in their shared bed, out of the grasp of danger for the moment. They lived, and he loved her. It was was folly in the French sense-madness-to keep her at a remove. It was the last thing he wanted. He touched her bare shoulder, her face, pushed a lock of hair away from her brow, and she moved closer against him. Mindful of Polaner sleeping on the other side of the wall-of his losses, and his loneliness-they made love in clenched and straining silence. Afterward they lay together, his hand on her belly, his fingers moving along the familiar scars of her pregnancies. They hadn’t taken precautions against her becoming pregnant again, though neither wanted to imagine what it might mean if she were carrying a child when the Soviets crossed the Hungarian border. As they drifted toward sleep he described in a whisper the little house he would build beside the Danube when the war was over. It was the place he had envisioned when he’d been to Angyalföld the first time, a whitewashed brick house with a tile roof, a garden large enough for a pair of milking goats, an outdoor bread oven, a shaded patio, a pergola laced with grapevines. Klara slept at last, but Andras lay awake beside her, far from comfort. Once again, he thought, he had drawn a plan for an imaginary house, one in a long line of imaginary houses he had built since they’d been together; in his mind he could page through a deep stack of them, those ghostly blueprints of a life they had not yet lived and might never live.

…

On Saturday afternoons, when the weather was fine, Andras and Klara made a point of walking alone on Margaret Island for an hour or two while Polaner played with Tamás in the park. It was during those walks that they spoke of the things Andras could not write about in his brief and censored letters from Ukraine: the reasons for their deportation, and the role that The Crooked Rail may have played; the circumstances surrounding Mendel’s death; the long struggle with József afterward; and the strange conjunctions of the journey home. On the first subject, Andras’s greatest fear was that Klara herself might hold him responsible for what had happened, might blame him for keeping the family from attempting its escape. She had warned him; he hadn’t forgotten it for a moment. But she was at pains to reassure him that no one held him responsible for what had happened. Such an idea, she said, was a symptom of the loss of perspective caused by the Munkaszolgálat and the war. The journey to Palestine might easily have ended in disaster. His deportation may have saved them all. Now that he had returned, she was at liberty to be grateful that they’d been spared the uncertainties of the trip. To the second subject she reacted with grief and dismay, and Andras was reminded that she, too, had been present at the death of her closest friend and ally; she, too, had been witness to the senseless killing of a man she had loved since childhood. And on the third subject, she could say only that she understood what it must have required for Andras to keep from doing some great violence to József. But the time in Ukraine, and with Andras, had changed József in some deep-rooted way, she thought; he seemed a different man since his return, or perhaps he seemed finally to have become a man.

For reasons Andras found difficult to articulate, the most difficult subject was that of Zoltán Novak’s death. Months of Saturday walks passed before he could tell Klara that he had been with Novak on the last days of his life, and that he had buried Novak himself. She had read of Novak’s death in the newspapers and had mourned his loss before Andras’s return, but she wept afresh at that news. She asked Andras to tell her everything that had happened: how he had discovered Novak, what they had said to each other, how Novak had died. When he had finished, putting matters as gently as possible and omitting many painful details, Klara offered an admission of her own: She and Novak had exchanged nearly a dozen letters during his long months of service.

They had paused in their walk at the ruin of a Franciscan church halfway up the eastern side of the island: stones that looked as though they had risen from the earth, a rose window empty of glass, Gothic windows missing their topmost points. It was December, but the day was unseasonably mild; in the shadow of the ruin stood a bench where a husband and wife might make confession, even if they were Jewish. Even if no confessor was present except each other.

“How did he write to you?” Andras asked.

“He sent letters with officers who came and went on leave.”

“And you wrote back.”

She folded her wet handkerchief and looked toward the empty rose window. “He was alone and bereaved. He didn’t have anyone. Even his little son had died by then.”

“Your letters must have been a comfort,” Andras said with some effort, and followed her gaze toward the ruin. In one of the lobes of the rose window a bird had built its nest; the nest was long abandoned now, its dry grass streamers fluttering in the wind.

“I tried not to give him false hope,” Klara said. “He knew the limitations of my feelings for him.”

Andras had to believe her. The man he had seen in the granary in Ukraine could not have been operating under the illusion that someone was nursing a secret love for him. He was a man who had been forsaken by everything that had mattered, a man who had lived to see the ruin of all he had done on earth. “I don’t begrudge him your letters,” Andras said. “I can’t blame you for anything you might have written to him. He was always good to you. He was good to both of us.”

Klara put a hand on Andras’s knee. “He never regretted what he did for you,” she said. “He told me he’d spoken to you at the Operaház. He said you were much kinder than you might have been. He said, in fact, that if I had to marry anyone, he was glad it was you.”

Andras covered her hand with his own and looked up again at the bird’s nest shivering in the rose window. He had seen architectural drawings of this church in its unruined state, its Gothic lines graceful but unremarkable, indistinguishable from those of thousands of other Gothic chapels. As a ruin it had taken on something of the extraordinary. The perfect masonry of the far wall had been laid bare; the near wall had weathered into a jagged staircase, the edges of the stones worn to velvet. The rose window was more elegant for its lack of glass, the bones of its corolla scoured by wind and bleached white in the sun. The nest with its streamers was a final unbidden touch: It was what human hands had not brought to the building, and could not remove. It was like love, he thought, this crumbling chapel: It had been complicated, and thereby perfected, by what time had done to it.

His most melancholy times that year were those he spent alone with Tibor. Wherever they walked, whatever they did-whether they were occupying their usual table at the Artists’ Café, or strolling the paths of the Városliget, or standing at the railing of the Széchenyi Bridge and looking down into the twisting water-when he was with Tibor, Andras understood acutely that they were at the mercy of events beyond their control. The Danube, which had once seemed a magic conduit along which they might slip out of Hungary, had become an ordinary river once more; Klein was in jail, their visas expired, the Trasnet no more than the memory of a name. Before, Tibor’s will had seemed to Andras an inexorable force. He had always had a preternatural talent for making the impossible come to pass. But their escape had not come to pass, and now they had no secret plan of action to balance against their fears. Tibor himself had undergone a change; he had been in the Munkaszolgálat for three years now, and like Andras he had been forced to learn its difficult lessons. He had carried a great weight since his return from the Eastern Front, it seemed to Andras-the weight of dozens of human bodies, the living and the dead, every sick or wounded man he’d cared for in the labor service and in the hospital where he’d been working in Budapest. “We couldn’t save him,” his stories often ended. He told Andras in detail about bleeding that couldn’t be stopped, dysentery that turned men inside out, pneumonia that broke ribs and asphyxiated its victims.

And the bodies continued to accumulate, even in Budapest, far from the front lines of the war. One evening Tibor appeared at the offices of the Courier and asked if Andras might want to knock off a bit early; a young man whom Tibor had tended had died a few hours earlier on the operating table, and Tibor needed a drink. Andras took his brother to a bar they had always liked, a narrow amber-lit place called the Trolley Bell. There, over glasses of Aquincum beer, Tibor told Andras the story: The boy had been wounded months earlier in the battle of Voronezh, had taken shrapnel in both lungs and hadn’t been able to breathe properly since. A risky operation to remove the fragments had severed the pulmonary artery, and the boy had died on the table. Tibor had been present in the waiting room when the doctor, a talented and well-respected surgeon named Keresztes, had delivered the news to the boy’s parents. Tibor had expected cries, protests, a collapse, but the young man’s mother had risen from her chair and calmly explained that her son could not be dead. She showed Keresztes the jersey she had just finished knitting for the boy. It was composed of wool that had been immersed in a well in Szentgotthárd where the Blessed Virgin’s face had appeared three times. She had just tied off the last stitch when the surgeon came in. She must be allowed to lay the jersey over her son; he was not dead, only in a state of deep sleep under the Virgin’s watch. When Keresztes began to explain the circumstances of the boy’s death, and the impossibility of his recovery, the young man’s father had threatened to slit the surgeon’s throat with his own scalpel if the mother were not allowed to do what she wished. The surgeon, weary from the long procedure, had escorted the parents to their son’s bedside in a room near the operating theater and had left Tibor to oversee their visit with the dead boy. The mother had laid the jersey over the matrix of bandages on the boy’s chest, and had commenced to pray the Rosary. But the Virgin’s blessing failed to revive her son. The boy lay inert, and by the time she had reached the end of her line of beads she seemed to comprehend the situation. Her boy was gone, had died in Budapest after having survived the battle of Voronezh; nothing would bring him back now. When a nurse had come in to remove the body so the room might be used for another patient, Tibor had asked her to let the parents stay there with the boy as long as they wished. The nurse had insisted the room be cleared; the new patient would be out of surgery in a quarter of an hour. The boy’s parents, understanding that they had no choice, shuffled toward the door. On the threshold, the mother had pressed the jersey into Tibor’s hands. He must take it, she said, as it could no longer be of any use to her son.

Tibor opened his leather satchel now and took out the jersey, gray yarn knitted in close regular stitches. He laid it on his knees and smoothed the wool. “Do you know what the worst of it was?” he said. “When Keresztes left the room, he rolled his eyes at me. What fools, these fanatics. I know the mother saw him.” He rested his chin on his hand, regarding Andras with an expression so laced with pain as to make Andras’s throat constrict. “The worst of it was, all my sympathies lay with Keresztes at that moment. I should have wanted to beat him to a pulp for rolling his eyes at a time like that, but all I could think was, My God, how long is this going to take? How soon can we get these people out of here?”

Andras could only nod in understanding. He knew Tibor didn’t need reassurance that he was a good man, that under different circumstances his sympathies would have lain with the parents instead of with the exhausted surgeon; he and his brother had perfect comprehension of each other’s minds and inward lives. Simply to have heard the story was enough. A long silence settled between them as they drank their beer. Then, finally, Tibor spoke again.

“I had a piece of good news on my way out of the hospital,” he said. “One of the nurses caught it on the radio. The generals from the Délvidék massacres, Feketehalmy-Czeydner and the others, are going to jail this Monday. Feketehalmy-Czeydner’s in for fifteen years, I understand, and the others nearly as many. Let’s hope they rot there.”

Andras didn’t have the heart to tell his brother the rest of that story, which he’d heard just before Tibor had arrived at the newsroom: Feketehalmy-Czeydner and the three other officers convicted in the Délvidék case, facing the start of their long prison sentences, had fled that very day to Vienna, where they’d been seen dining at a famous beer hall in the company of six Gestapo officers. The Evening Courier’s Viennese correspondent had been close enough to observe that the men had been eating veal sausage with peppers and toasting the health of the Supreme Commander of the Third Reich. The Führer himself, it was rumored, had extended the officers a guarantee of political asylum. But Tibor would read about it soon enough in the papers. For now, Andras thought, let him have a moment of peace, if that was the word for it.

“To rotting in jail,” he said, and raised his glass.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT. Occupation

IN MARCH of 1944, not long after Klara had discovered she was pregnant again, the papers would report that Horthy had been called to Schloss Klessheim for a conference with Hitler. With him went the new minister of defense, Lajos Csatay, who had replaced Vilmos Nagy; and Ferenc Szombathelyi, chief of the General Staff. Prime Minister Kállay proclaimed to the newspapers that the Magyar nation had reason to be hopeful: What Hitler wanted to discuss was the withdrawal of Hungarian troops from the Eastern Front. Tibor speculated that this turn of events might bring Mátyás home at last when all else had failed to do so.

The evening of the Klessheim conference found Andras and József at the Pineapple Club, the underground cabaret near Vörösmarty tér where Mátyás had once danced on the lid of a white piano. The piano was still there; at the keyboard was Berta Türk, a vaudevillian of the old school, whose snaky coiffure called to mind a Beardsleyesque Medusa. József had received tickets to the show as payment for a house-painting job. Berta Türk had been an adolescent fad of his; he couldn’t resist the chance to see her, and he insisted that Andras accompany him. He lent Andras a silk dinner jacket and outfitted himself in a tuxedo he had brought home from Paris five years earlier. For Madame Türk he had a bouquet of red hothouse roses that must have cost half his weekly earnings. He and Andras sat near the stage and drank tall narrow glasses of the club’s special medicine, a rum cocktail flavored with coconut. Berta delivered her punning innuendoes in a low raw-honey voice, her eyebrows dipping and rising like a cartoon moll’s. Andras liked that József-the-adolescent had fixed on this strange object of obsession instead of on some cold and voiceless beauty of the silver screen. But he found he had little heart for Berta’s jokes; he was thinking of Mátyás, feeling him present everywhere in that room-tapping out a jazz beat at the bar, or lounging on the lid of the piano, or laying a line of hot tin across the stage like Fred Astaire. At the break, Andras stepped outside to clear his head. The night was cool and damp, the streets full of people seeking distraction. A trio of perfumed young women brushed past him, heels clicking, evening coats swaying; from a jazz club across the way, “Bei Mir Bist Du Schön” filtered through a velvet-curtained entrance. Andras looked up past the scrolled cornice of the building to a sky illuminated by an egg-shaped moon, threads of cloud tracing illegible lines of text across its face. It seemed close enough for him to reach up and take it in his hand.

“Got a light?” a man asked him.

Andras blinked the moon away and shook his head. The man, a dark-haired young soldier in a Hungarian Army uniform, begged a match from a passerby and lit his friend’s cigarette, then his own.

“It’s true, I tell you,” the man’s friend said. “If Markus says there’s going to be an occupation, there’ll be an occupation.”

“Your cousin’s a fascist. He’d love nothing more than a German occupation. But he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Horthy and Hitler are negotiating as we speak.”

“Precisely! It’s a distraction tactic.”

Everyone had a theory; every man who had returned alive from the Eastern Front thought he knew how the war would unfold, on the large scale and the small. Every theory seemed as plausible as the last, or as implausible; every amateur military theorist believed just as fiercely that he alone could beat order from the chaos of the war. Andras and Tibor, József and Polaner, were all guilty of bearing that illusion. Each had his own set of theories, and each believed the others to be hopelessly misguided. How long, Andras wondered, could they keep building arguments based on reason when the war defied reason at every turn? How long before they all fell silent? It might even be true that the Germans were carrying out an occupation of Hungary that very moment; anything might be true, anything at all. Mátyás himself might be jumping from the mouth of a boxcar at Keleti Station, slinging his knapsack over his shoulder, and heading to the apartment on Nefelejcs utca.

Through a haze of coconut-scented rum, Andras drifted back inside and wandered toward their table beside the stage, where József had engaged Madame Türk’s attention and was paying his compliments. Madame Türk, it seemed, was saying farewell for the evening; a piece of urgent news had made it necessary for her to leave at once. She suffered József to kiss her hand, tucked one of his roses behind her ear, and swept off across the stage.

“What was the piece of news?” Andras asked when she’d gone.

“I haven’t the slightest idea,” József said, afloat on his own delight. He insisted they have another round of drinks before they left, and suggested they take a cab home. But when Andras reminded him what he’d already spent that evening, József allowed himself to be led to the streetcar stop on Vámház körút, where a noisy crowd had gathered to wait for the tram.

By that time everyone seemed to have heard the same set of rumors: A transport of SS troops, somewhere between five hundred and a thousand of them, had arrived at a station near the capital, were marching east, and would soon breach the city limits. Armored and motorized German divisions were said to have advanced into Hungary from every direction; the airports at Ferihegy and Debrecen had been occupied. When the streetcar arrived, the ticket girl proclaimed loudly that if any German soldier tried to board her car, she’d spit in his face and tell him where to go. A bawdy cheer rose from the passengers. Someone started singing “Isten, áld meg a Magyart,” and then everyone was shouting the national anthem as the streetcar rolled down Vámház körut.

Andras and József listened in silence. If the rumors were true, if a German occupation was under way, Kállay’s government wouldn’t last the night; Andras could well imagine the kind of regime that would replace it. For six years now, he and the rest of the world had been receiving a lesson in German occupation and its effects. But what could be the purpose of an occupation now? The war was as good as lost for Germany. Everyone knew that. On all fronts, Hitler’s armies were close to collapse. Where would he even find the troops necessary to carry out an occupation? The Hungarian military wouldn’t take kindly to the idea of German command. There might be armed resistance, a patriotic backlash. The generals of the Honvédség would never submit without a fight, not after Hitler had thrown away so many Hungarian lives on the Eastern Front.

At their stop, Andras and József got off and stood on the pavement, looking up and down the street as if for some sign of the Wehrmacht. Saturday night seemed to be proceeding as before. Cabs tore along the boulevard with their cargos of partygoers, and the sidewalks were full of men and women in evening clothes.

“Are we supposed to believe this?” Andras said. “Am I supposed to bring this news home to Klara?”

“If it’s true, I’ll bet the army will put up a fight.”

“I was thinking that, too. But even if they do, how long can it last?”

József took out his cigarette case, and, finding it empty, drew a narrow silver flask from his breast pocket. He took a long pull, then offered it to Andras.

Andras shook his head. “I’ve had enough to drink,” he said, and turned toward home. They walked up Wesselényi to Nefelejcs utca, then turned and said a grim good-night at the doorstep, promising to see each other in the morning.

Upstairs in the darkened apartment, Tamás had joined Klara in bed, his spine nestled against her belly. When Andras climbed into bed with them, Tamás turned over and backed up against him, his bottom needling into Andras’s gut, his feet hot against Andras’s thigh. Klara sighed in her sleep. Andras put an arm around them both, wide awake, and lay for hours listening to their breathing.

At seven o’clock the next morning they woke to a pounding at the door. It was József, hatless and coatless, his shirtsleeves stained with blood. His father had just been arrested by the Gestapo. Klara’s mother had fallen into a dead faint moments after the men had taken György, and had struck her head on a coal fender; Elza was on the verge of nervous collapse. Andras must get Tibor at once, and Klara must come with József.

In the confused moments that followed, Klara insisted that it couldn’t have been the Gestapo, that József must have been mistaken. As he pulled on his boots, Andras had to tell her that it could in fact have been the Gestapo, that the city had been burning with rumors of a German occupation the night before. Andras ran to Tibor’s apartment and Klara to the Hászes’; a quarter of an hour later they were assembled around the bed of the elder Mrs. Hász, who had by then regained consciousness and insisted upon relating what had happened before her fall. Two Gestapo men had arrived at half past six that morning, had dragged György from his bed in his nightclothes, had shouted at him in German, and had pushed him into an armored car and taken him away. That was when she had lost her balance and taken a fall. She put a hand to her head, where a rectangle of gauze covered a gash from the fireplace fender.

“Why György?” she said. “Why would they take him? What did he do?”

No one could answer her. And within a few hours they began to hear of other arrests: a former colleague of György’s from the bank; the Jewish vice president of a bond-trading company; a prominent Leftist writer, a non-Jew, who had authored a bitter anti-Nazi pamphlet; three of Miklós Kállay’s closest advisors; and a liberal member of parliament, Endre Bajcsy-Zsilinszky, who had met the Gestapo with a pistol in hand and had engaged them in a firefight before he’d been wounded and dragged away. That night József took the risk of going to inquire at the jail on Margit körút, where political prisoners were held, but was told only that his father was in German custody, and would be held until it could be proved that he didn’t constitute a threat to the occupation.

That was Sunday. By Monday the order had come for all Jewish citizens of Budapest to deliver their radios and telephones-volunteer was the word the Nazis used-to an office of the Ministry of Defense at Szabadság tér. By Wednesday it was decreed that any Jewish person who owned a car or bicycle had to sell it to the government for use in the war-sell was the word the Nazis used, but there was no money exchanged; the Nazis distributed payment vouchers that were soon discovered to be irredeemable for real currency. By Friday there were notices posted all over town notifying Jews that by April fifth they would be required to wear the yellow star. Soon afterward, the rumor began to circulate that the prominent Jews who had been arrested would be deported to labor camps in Germany. Klara went to the bank to withdraw what was left of their savings, hoping they might bribe someone into releasing György. But she found she could get no more than a thousand pengő all Jewish accounts had been frozen. The next day a new German order required Jews to surrender all jewelry and gold items. Klara and her mother and Elza gave up a few cheap pieces, hid their wedding bands and engagement rings in a pillowcase at the bottom of the flour bin, and packed the rest into velvet pouches, which József carried to the Margit körút prison to plead for his father’s release. The guards confiscated the jewelry, beat József black and blue, and threw him into the street.

On the twentieth of April, Tibor lost his position at the hospital. Andras and Polaner were dismissed from the Evening Courier and informed that they wouldn’t find work at any daily paper in town. József, employed informally and paid under the table, went on with his painting business, but his list of clients began to shrink. By the first week of May, signs had gone up in the windows of shops and restaurants, cafés and movie theaters and public baths, declaring that Jews were not welcome. Andras, coming home one afternoon from the park with Tamás, stopped short on the sidewalk across from their neighborhood bakery. In the window was a sign almost identical to the one he’d seen at the bakery in Stuttgart seven years earlier. But this sign was written in Hungarian, his own language, and this was his own street, the street where he lived with his wife and son. Struck faint, he sat down on the curb with Tamás and stared across the way into the lighted window of the shop. All looked ordinary there: the girl in her white cap, the glossy loaves and pastries in the case, the gold curlicues of the bakery’s name. Tamás pointed and said the name of the pastry he liked, mákos keksz. Andras had to tell him that there would be no mákos keksz that day. So much had become forbidden, and so quickly. Even being out on the streets was dangerous. There was a new five o’clock curfew for Jews; those who failed to comply could be arrested or shot. Andras pulled out his father’s pocket watch, as familiar now as if it were a part of his own body. Ten minutes to five. He got to his feet and picked up his son, and when he reached home, Klara met him at the door with his call-up notice in her hand.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE. Farewell

THIS TIME they were together, Andras and József and Tibor; Polaner had been exempted, thanks to his false identity papers and medical-status documents. The labor battalions had been regrouped. Three hundred and sixty-five new companies had been added. Because Andras and József and Tibor lived in the same district, they had all been assigned to the 55/10th. Their send-off had been like a funeral at which the dead, the three young men, had been piled with goods to take into the next world. As much food as they could carry. Warm clothes. Woolen blankets. Vitamin pills and rolls of bandage. And in Tibor’s pack, drugs pilfered from the hospital where he had worked. Anticipating their call-up, he had felt no compunction about laying aside vials of antibiotic and morphine, packets of suture, sterile needles and scissors and clamps: a kit of tools he prayed he wouldn’t have to use.

Klara had not been with them at the train station for their departure. Andras had said goodbye to her that morning at home, in their bedroom at Nefelejcs utca. The first nine weeks of her pregnancy had passed without event, but in the tenth she was seized with a violent nausea that began every morning at three o’clock and lasted almost until noon. That morning she’d been sick for hours; Andras had stayed with her as she bent over the toilet bowl and dry-heaved until her face streamed with tears. She begged him to go to bed, to get some sleep before he had to face the ordeal of his journey, but he wouldn’t do it, wouldn’t have left her side for anything in the world. At six in the morning her strength broke. Shaking with exhaustion, she cried and cried until she lost her voice. It was intolerable, she whispered, impossible, that Andras could be here with her one day, intact and safe, and the next be taken away to the hell from which he’d come last spring. Given to her and taken away. Given and taken away. When so much of what she’d loved had been taken away. He couldn’t remember a time when she had stated her fear, her sense of desolation, so plainly. Even at their worst times in Paris, she had held something back; something had been hidden from him, some essential part of her being that she’d had to guard in order to survive the ordeals of her adolescence, her early motherhood, her solitary young womanhood. Since they’d been married, there had been the necessary holding back imposed by their circumstances. But now, in the vulnerability of her pregnancy, with Andras on the verge of departure and Hungary in the hands of the Nazis, she had lost the strength to defend her reserve.

She cried and cried, beyond consolation, beyond caring whether anyone heard; as he rocked her in his arms he had the sense that he was watching her mourn him-that he had already died and was witnessing her grief. He stroked her damp hair and said her name over and over again, there on the bathroom floor, feeling, strangely, as if they were finally married, as if what had existed between them before had only been preparation for this deeper and more painful connection. He kissed her temple, her cheekbone, the wet margin of her ear. And then he wept, too, at the thought of leaving her alone to face what might come.

At dawn, just before he had to dress, he took her to bed and slid in beside her. “I won’t do it,” he said. “They’ll have to drag me away from you.”

“I’ll be fine,” she tried to tell him. “My mother will be with me. And Ilana, and Elza. And Polaner.”

“Tell my son his father loves him,” Andras said. “Tell him that every night.” He took his father’s pocket watch from the nightstand and pressed it into Klara’s palm. “I want him to have this, when it’s time.”

“No,” she said. “Don’t do that. You’ll give it to him yourself.” She folded it into his own hand. And then it was morning, and he had to go.

Again the boxcars. Again the darkness and the pressure of men. Here was József beside him, inevitable; and Tibor, his brother, his scent as familiar as their childhood bed. This time they were headed, as if into the past, toward Debrecen. Andras knew exactly what was passing outside: the hills melting into flatlands, the fields, the farms. But now the fields, if they were worked, were worked by forced-labor companies; the farmers and their sons were all at war. The patient horses shied at the unfamiliar voices of their drivers. The dogs barked at the strangers, never growing accustomed to their scent. The women watched the workers with suspicion and kept their daughters inside. Maglód, Tápiogyörgy, Ujszász, those one-street towns whose train stations still bore geraniums in window boxes: They had been stripped of their Christian men of military age, and their Jewish men of labor-service age, and would soon be stripped of the rest of their Jewish inhabitants. Already the concentrations and deportations had begun-deportations, when Horthy had vowed never to deport. Döme Sztójay was prime minister now, and he was doing what the Germans had told him to do. Concentrate the Jews of the small towns in ghettoes in the larger towns. Count them carefully. Make lists. Tell them they were needed for a great labor project in the east; hold out the promise of resettlement, of a better life elsewhere. Instruct them each to pack a single suitcase. Bring them to the rail yard. Load them onto trains. The trains left daily for the west, returned empty, and were filled again; an unspeakable dread settled over those who remained and waited. The few, like Polaner, who had already been inside German camps and had lived to tell about them, knew there was to be no resettlement. They knew the purpose of those camps; they knew the product of the great labor project. They told their stories and were disbelieved.

For Andras and Tibor and József, the four-hour trip to Debrecen took three days. The train stopped at the platforms of the little towns; in some places they could hear other boxcars being coupled to their own, more work servicemen being fed into the combustion engine of the war. No food or water except what they’d brought. No place to relieve themselves except the can at the back of the car. Long before they pulled into the station at Debrecen, Andras recognized the pattern of track-switching that characterized the approach. In the semidarkness, Tibor’s eyes met Andras’s and held them. Andras knew he was thinking of their parents, who had withstood so many departures, who had already lost one son and whose two remaining sons were now headed toward the fighting again. Two weeks earlier, Béla and Flóra had been locked into a ghetto that happened to contain their building on Simonffy utca. There had been no way, no time, to say goodbye. Now Andras and Tibor were at Debrecen Station, not fifteen minutes’ walk from that ghetto, if there had been any way to get off the train, and any way to walk through the city without being shot.

The boxcar sat on its track in Debrecen all night. It was too dark for Andras to read his father’s pocket watch; there was no way to determine how late it was, how many hours until morning. They couldn’t know whether they would leave that day or be forced to remain in the reeking dark while more cars were hitched to theirs, more men loaded aboard. They took turns sitting; they drowsed and woke. And then, in the stillest hour of the night, they heard footsteps on the gravel outside the car. Not the heavy tread of the guards, but tentative footsteps; then a quiet knocking on the side of the boxcar.

“Fredi Paszternak?”

“Geza Mohr?”

“Semyon Kovács?”

No one responded. Everyone was awake now, everyone stilled with fear. If these seekers were caught, they would be killed. Everyone knew the consequences.

After a moment the footsteps moved on. More seekers approached. Rubin Gold? György Toronyi? The names came in a steady stream; soft excited voices could be heard from a nearby car, where someone had found who they were looking for. And then, in the next wave of seekers, Andras Lévi? Tibor Lévi?

Andras and Tibor rushed to the side of the car and called to their parents in hushed voices: Anyu, Apu. The diminutive forms not used since childhood. Andras and Tibor made young again in their extremity, by the impossible closeness and untouchability of their mother, Flóra; their father, Béla. Inside the boxcar, men pushed aside to give them room, a measure of privacy in that packed enclosure.

“Andi! Tibi!” Their mother’s voice, desperate with pain and relief.

“But how did you get here?” Tibor asked.

“Your father bribed a policeman,” their mother said. “We had an official escort.”

“Are you all right, boys?” Their father’s voice again, asking a question whose answer was already known, and to which Andras and Tibor could only respond with a lie. “Do you know where they’re sending you?”

They did not.

There was little time to talk. Little time for Béla and Flóra to do what they had come to do. A package appeared at the bars of the single high window, looped to a metal hook with a length of brown twine. The package, too large to fit through the window bars, had to be lowered again and broken down into its components. Two woolen sweaters. Two scarves. Tight-wrapped packages of food. A packet of money: two thousand pengő. How had they saved it? How had they kept it hidden? And two pairs of sturdy boots, which had to be left behind; no way to pass them through the window.

Then their father’s voice again, saying the prayer for travel.

Flóra and Béla hurried through the darkened streets toward home, each carrying a pair of sturdy boots. Behind them, with a hand on their shoulders as though they were under arrest, was the bribed policeman, a former member of Béla’s chess club, who had arranged for them to slip out through a cellar that joined two buildings, one inside the ghetto, one out. Others had slipped out in the same manner and returned safely, though some had failed to return and had not been heard from again. They were entirely at the mercy of this policeman with whom Béla had shared a few chess matches, a few glasses of beer. But they had little fear of what might happen now, little fear of being turned over to a less sympathetic member of the Debrecen police; now that they had delivered the food, the sweaters, the money, had exchanged a few words with the boys, had given them their blessing, what else mattered? What a waste it would have been to be caught with the packages in hand, but they’d been lucky; the streets had been nearly empty when they’d left the ghetto. Béla’s intelligence sources, a rail-yard foreman of his long acquaintance and the bartender called Rudolf, had both proved reliable. The train was there, just where it was supposed to be, and the guards at the train yard engaged in a drinking party for which Rudolf had supplied the beer. Rudolf had remembered Andras from his visit to the beer hall, the evening when he had quarreled with his father over the choice of Klara. What a luxury it had been, Lucky Béla thought, to have had the time and inclination for a quarrel. He had admired his son’s defense of his choice of wife. In the end he had been right, too: Klara had been a good match for him-as good, it seemed, as Flóra had been for Béla. Lucky. Yes, he was lucky, even now. Flóra was there at his side, the policeman’s hand on her shoulder-his wife, the mother of his sons, willing to risk her life for them in the middle of the night, despite his protests; unwilling to allow him to go alone.

At last the policeman delivered them to the courtyard that led to the cellar. With an antiquated and incongruous politeness, he held the door as they entered that tunnel back to their enclosed lives. Before long they had reached their own building and climbed the stairs to their apartment, where they undressed in the dark without a word. There would only be a few hours to sleep before they would rise to the circumscribed business of their day. In bed, Flóra pulled the coverlet to her chin and let out a sigh. There was nothing more they could say to each other, nothing more to do. Their boys, their babies. The little three, as they’d always called them. The little three adrift on the continent, like wooden boats. Flóra turned over and put her head on Lucky Béla’s chest, and he stroked the silver length of her hair.

For another few weeks they would share this bed while the Jews of Hajdú County were massed in Debrecen. Then, on a late June morning, as the nasturtium vine opened its trumpets on the veranda and the white goats bleated in the courtyard, they would descend the stairs, each with a single suitcase, and walk with their neighbors through the ghetto gates, down the familiar city streets, all the way to the Serly Brickyards west of town, where they would be loaded onto a train almost identical to the one that had carried their sons to no one knew where. The train would roll west, through the stations with the window boxes full of geraniums; it would roll west through Budapest. Then it would roll north, and north, and farther north, until its doors opened at Auschwitz.

The train carrying Andras and Tibor and József rolled east to the edge of the country. There, in a Carpatho-Ruthenian town whose name would change twice as it became part of Czechoslovakia again and then part of the Soviet Union, they were escorted by armed guards to a camp three kilometers from the Tisza River. Their task would be to load timber onto barges for transport through Hungary and on toward Austria. They were assigned to a windowless bunkhouse with five rows of three-tiered bunks; outside, along the edge of the building, was a line of open sinks where they could wash. That evening at dinnertime they drank a coffee that was not coffee, ate a soup that was not soup, and received ten decagrams of gritty bread, which Tibor made them save for the next day. It was the fifth of June, a mild night redolent of rain and new grass. The fighting had not yet reached the nearby border. They were permitted to sit outside after dinner; a man who’d brought a violin played Gypsy tunes while another man sang. Andras could not know-and none of them would learn, not for months-that later the same night, a fleet of Allied ships would reach the coast of Normandy, and thousands of troops would struggle ashore under a hail of gunfire. Even if they’d known, they wouldn’t have dared to hope that the Allied invasion of France might save a Hungarian labor company from the terrors of the German occupation, or keep their own bend of the Tisza from being bombed while they were loading the barges. Even if they’d known of the invasion, they would have known better than to attempt to determine one set of circumstances from another, to trace neat lines of causality between a beach at Viervillesur-Mer and a forced labor camp in Carpatho-Ruthenia. They knew their situation; they knew what to be grateful for. When Andras lay down that night on his wooden bunk, with Tibor on the tier above and József below, he thought only: Today at least we’re together. Today we are alive.

CHAPTER FORTY. Nightmare

IN THE END, what astonished him most was not the vastness of it all-that was impossible to take in, the hundreds of thousands of dead from Hungary alone, and the millions from all over Europe-but the excruciating smallness, the pinpoint upon which every life was balanced. The scale might be tipped by the tiniest of things: the lice that carried typhus, the few thimblefuls of water that remained in a canteen, the dust of breadcrumbs in a pocket. On the tenth of January, at the cold disordered dawn of 1945, Andras lay on the floor of a boxcar in a Hungarian quarantine camp a few kilometers from the Austrian border. The nearby town was Sopron, with its famous Goat Church. A vague childhood memory-an art-history lesson, a white-haired master with a moustache like the disembodied wings of a dove, an image of the carved stone chancel where Ferdinand III had been crowned King of Hungary. According to the legend, a goat had unearthed an ancient treasure on that site; the treasure had been buried again when the church was built, as a tribute to the Virgin Mary. And so, somewhere up the hill, beneath the church whose blackened spire was visible from where he lay, an ancient treasure moldered; and here in the quarantine camp, three thousand men were dying of typhus. Andras climbed into the swirling heights of a fever through which his thoughts proceeded in carnival costume. He remembered, vaguely, having been told that the quarantined men were supposed to consider themselves lucky. Those not infected had been shipped over the Austrian border to labor camps.

Some facts he could grasp. He counted these certainties like marbles in a bag, each with its twist of blood- or sea-colored glass. Their bend of the Tisza had, in fact, been bombed. It had happened on an unseasonably warm night in late October, nearly five months after they’d arrived at the camp. He remembered crouching in the darkness with Tibor and József, the walls shuddering as shock waves rolled through the earth; only by an act of grace, it seemed, had their building remained intact. Thirty-three men had been crushed in another bunkhouse when it collapsed. Six bargemen and half a company of Hungarian soldiers, quartered that night on the riverbank, had all been killed. The 55/10th, in tatters, had fled west ahead of the advancing Soviet Army. For weeks their guards had shuffled them from one town to another, quartering them in peasants’ huts or barns or in the open fields, as the war rumbled and flared, always a few kilometers away. By that time Hungary had fallen into the hands of the Arrow Cross. Horthy had proved too difficult for Germany to control; under pressure from the Allies he had stopped the deportations of Jews, and on the eleventh of October he’d covertly negotiated a separate peace agreement with the Kremlin. When he announced the armistice a few days later, Hitler had forced him to abdicate and had exiled him to Germany with his family. The armistice was nullified. Ferenc Szálasi, the Arrow Cross leader, became prime minister. The news reached the labor servicemen in the form of new regulations: They were now to be treated not as forced laborers, but as prisoners of war.

Those things Andras remembered in detail. More confusing was what had passed between then and now. Through the haze of his fever he tried and tried to remember what had happened to Tibor. He remembered, weeks or months earlier, fleeing with Tibor and József along a road west of Trebišov on a bright day, pursued by the sound of Russian tanks and Russian gunfire. They’d been separated from their company; József had been sick and couldn’t keep up. German jeeps and armored cars shot along the road beside them. Approaching from behind, an earthquake: Russians in their rolling fortresses, guns blazing. As they fled along the road, József had stumbled into the path of a German armored car. He’d been thrown into a ditch, his leg twisted into an angle that was-the fevered Andras grasped in darkness for the word-unrealistic. It was unrealistic; it did not represent life. A leg did not bend in that way, or in that direction, in relation to a man’s body. When Andras reached him, József was open-eyed, breathing fast and shallow; he seemed in a state of strange exultation, as though in one quick stroke he’d been vindicated on a point he’d argued fruitlessly for years. Tibor bent beside him and put a careful hand to the leg, and József released an unforgettable sound: a grating three-toned shriek that seemed to crack the dome of the sky. Tibor drew back and gave Andras a look of despair: He was out of morphine, the supplies he’d hoarded in Budapest exhausted by now. Moments later, it seemed, an olive-colored van had appeared, Austrian Wehrmacht flags fluttering at its bumpers, a red cross painted on its side. Andras tore the yellow armband from his sleeve, from József’s, from Tibor’s; now they were just three men in a ditch, without identity. Austrian medics arrived, judged them all in need of immediate medical care, and loaded them into the van. Soon they were moving along the road at an incredible rate of speed-still fleeing before the Russians, Andras imagined. Then there was a burst of deafening noise, a brilliant explosion. The canvas of the van tore away, floor became ceiling, a tire traced an arc against a backdrop of clouds. A jolt of impact. A thrumming silence. From somewhere close by, József calling for his father, of all people. Tibor stood unharmed amid dry cornstalks, dusting snow from his sleeves. Andras, a wild white pain abloom in his side, lay in a furrow of the field and stared at the sky, an impossibly high milk blue stretching forever above him. In his memory a cloud took the shape of the Panthéon, a suggestion of columns and a dome. A moment later that milky blue, that dome, disappeared into an enfolding darkness.

Later he had opened his eyes to a vision so blinding he was certain he had died. Snow-white walls, snow-white bedstead, snow-white curtains, snow-white sky outside the window. He came to understand that he was lying on a hospital cot, under the excruciating weight of a thin cotton blanket. A doctor with a Yugoslav name, Dobek, removed a bandage from Andras’s side and examined a red-toothed wound that extended from beneath his lowest rib to just above his navel. The sight of it brought on a wave of nausea so deep that Andras looked around in panic for a bedpan, and the motion called forth a shearing pain inside the wound. The doctor begged Andras not to move. Andras understood, though the admonition came in a language he didn’t know. He lay back and fell into a dreamless sleep. When he woke, Tibor was sitting in a chair beside the cot, his glasses unbroken, his hair clean, his face washed, his labor-service rags exchanged for cotton pajamas. Andras had been wounded, he explained; the medical van had hit a mine. He’d had to have emergency surgery. His spleen had been damaged, his small intestine severed near the terminal ileum; but all had been repaired, and he was recovering well. Where were they? In Kassa, Slovakia, in a Catholic hospital, St. Elizabeth’s, under the care of Slovak nuns. And where was József? Recovering in a neighboring ward; his leg had been shattered, and he’d had a complicated surgery.

They lay in that Slovak hospital, he and József, for an indeterminate number of weeks; he lay there recovering from his terrible wound, and József from his complex fracture, while a war raged nearby. Tibor came and went. He was serving the nuns, the doctors, working at their side, assisting in surgery, triaging new patients who came in. He was exhausted, grim with the sight of bullet- and bomb-ravaged bodies, but there was a calm purpose in his expression: He was doing what he’d been trained to do. The Russians were making progress, he told Andras, slowly but steadily. If the hospital could survive the onslaught of the battle, they might all be safe soon.

But then the Nazis arrived to clear the hospital. Evacuate was the word they used, though the meaning wasn’t the same for everyone. In that place where no patient had been asked his religion, no distinction made between gentile and Jew, the Jews were now identified and herded into a corridor. Andras and Tibor supported József between them, his leg unwieldy in its plaster cast, and the three of them were marched to a train and loaded onto a boxcar. Again they rolled off into the unknown, south and west this time, toward Hungary.

For nearly a week they traveled across the country. Tibor gleaned what he could about their location from the shouts he overheard when the train stopped, or from the little he could see from the tiny window in the bolted door. They were at Alsózsolca, then at Mezökövesd, then at Hatvan; there was a moment of wild hope that they might turn south toward Budapest, but the train rolled onward toward Vác. They skirted the border near Esztergom and traveled for a time along the ice-choked Danube, then through Komárom and Győr and Kapuvár, toward the western border. All that way, Tibor had cared for Andras and József, preserving their delicate recovery. When Andras vomited on the boxcar floor, Tibor cleaned him, and when József had to use the can at the back of the car, Tibor walked him there and helped him. He ministered to the other patients, too, many of whom were too sick to understand their luck. But there was little he could do. There was no food, no water, not a clean bandage or a dose of medicine. At night Tibor lay beside Andras for warmth, and whispered in Andras’s ear as if to keep them both from losing their minds. Let me tell you a story, Tibor said, as if Andras were the son Tibor had left behind. Once there was a man who could speak to animals. Here is what the man said. Here is what the animals said. A vast deep itching spread over every inch of Andras’s body, even inside the wound: the bites of lice. A few days later came the first tendrils of fever.

When the train stopped, it meant that they had reached the edge of the country. Again they were to be sorted into two groups: those who could cross and those who could not cross. Those who had typhus wouldn’t be allowed to cross. They would be placed in a quarantine camp on the border.

“Listen to me, Andras,” Tibor had said, just before the selection. “I’m going to pretend to be ill. I’m not going to be sent over the border. I’m going to stay with you here in the quarantine camp. Do you understand?”

“No, Tibor. If you stay, you’ll get sick for certain.” He thought of Mátyás, the long-ago illness, his own desperate night in the orchard.

“And if I go on ahead?”

“You have a skill. They need it. They’ll keep you alive.”

“They don’t care about my skill. I’m going to stay here with you and József and the others.”

“No, Tibor.”

“Yes.”

The boxcars became the barracks of the quarantine camp. At the station they were left on the switching rails, rows and rows of them, each with its cargo of dead and dying men. Every day the dead were hauled out of the cars and lined up beneath them on the frozen ground; it was impossible to bury them at that time of year. Andras lay on the floor of the boxcar in a rising fever, floating just inches above his dead comrades. He’d had no word from Klara in months, and no way to get word to her. Their second child would already have been born, or would not have been. Tamás would be nearly three years old. They might have been deported, or might not have been. He drifted in and out, knowing and not knowing, thinking and unable to think, as his brother slipped out of the quarantine camp and walked into Sopron for food, medicine, news. Every day Tibor returned with what little he could glean; he befriended a pharmacist who supplied him with small amounts of antibiotic and aspirin and morphine, and whose radio picked up BBC News. Budapest had been under a grave threat since early November. Soviet tanks were on the approach from the southwest. Hitler had vowed to hold them off at all costs. Roads were blocked. Food and fuel supplies were running short. The capital had already begun to starve. Tibor would never have delivered that grim news to Andras, but Andras overheard him speaking to someone outside the boxcar; his fever-sharpened hearing carried every word.

He understood, too, that he and József were dying. Flecktyphus, he kept hearing, and dizentéria. One day Tibor had returned from town to find Andras and József with a bowl of beans between them; they’d managed to finish half of what they’d been given. He scolded them both and threw the beans out the boxcar door. Are you mad? For dysentery, nothing could be worse than barely cooked beans. Men died from eating them, but in the quarantine camp there was nothing else to eat. Instead, Tibor fed Andras and József the cooking liquid from the beans, sometimes with bits of bread. Once, bread with a slathering of jam that smelled faintly of petrol. Tibor explained: In his wanderings he’d come across a farmhouse that had been hit by a plane; he’d found a clay pot of preserves in the yard. Where was the clay pot? they asked. Shattered. Tibor had carried the jam in the palm of his hand, twenty kilometers.

As József got better on the food Tibor brought, Andras’s fever deepened. The flux rolled through him and emptied him. The skeleton of reality came apart, connective tissue peeling from the bones.

A constant foul smell that he knew was himself.

Cold.

Tibor weeping.

Tibor telling someone-József?-that Andras was near the end.

Tibor kneeling by his side, reminding him that today was Tamás’s birthday.

A resolution that he would not die that day, not on his son’s birthday.

Rising through his torn insides, a filament of strength.

Then, the next morning, a commotion in the quarantine camp. The sound of a megaphone. An announcement: All who could work were to be taken to Mürzzuschlag, in Austria. Soldiers searched the boxcars and pulled the living into a glare of cold light. A man in Nazi uniform dragged Andras outside and threw him onto the railroad tracks. Where was Tibor? Where was József? Andras lay with his cheek against the freezing rail, the metal burning his cheek, too weak to move, staring at the frost-rimed gravel, at the moving feet of men all around him. From somewhere nearby came the sound of metal on dirt: men shoveling. It seemed to go on for hours. He understood. Finally, the burial of the dead. And here he was, waiting to be buried. He had died, had gone across. He didn’t know when it had happened. He was surprised to find that it could be so simple. There was no alive, no dead; only this nightmare, always, and when the dirt covered him he would still feel cold and pain, would suffocate forever. A moment later he was caught up by the wrists and ankles and flung through the air. A moment of lightness, then falling. An impact he felt in all his joints, in his ravaged intestines. A stench. Beneath him, the bodies of men. Around him, walls of bare earth. A shovelful of earth in his face. The taste of it like something from childhood. He kept pushing and pushing it away from his face, but it came and came. The shoveler, a vigorous black form at the edge of the grave, pumped at a mound of dirt. Then, for no reason Andras could see, he stopped. A moment later he was gone, the task forgotten. And there Andras lay, not alive, not dead.

A night in an open grave, dirt for his blanket.

In the morning, someone dragging him out.

Again, the boxcar. And now.

Now.

Beside him was a bowl of beans. He was ravenous for them. Instead he tilted the bowl to his mouth, sipped the liquid. With that mouthful he felt his bowels loosen, and then, beneath him, heat.

Another day passed and darkened. Another night. Someone-Tibor?-tipped water into his mouth; he choked, swallowed. In the morning he crawled out of the boxcar, trying to escape the smell of himself. Unaccountably his head felt clearer. He paused, kneeling, and thrust his hand into the pocket of his overcoat, where, when there had been bread, he had carried bread. The pocket was sandy with crumbs. He pulled himself to a puddle where the sun had melted the snow. In one hand he held the crumbs. With the other he scooped water from the puddle. He made a cold paste, put his hand to his mouth, ate. It was his first solid food in twenty days, though he did not know it.

Sometime later he woke in the boxcar. József Hász was bending over him, urging him to sit up. “Give it a try,” József said, and lifted him from beneath the shoulders.

Andras sat up. Black ocean waves seemed to close over his head. Then, like a miracle, they receded. Here was the familiar interior of the boxcar. Here was József kneeling beside him, supporting his back with both hands.

“You’re going to have to stand now,” József said.

“Why?”

“Someone’s coming to gather men for a work detail. Anyone who can’t work will be shot.”

He knew he wouldn’t be selected for a work detail. He could scarcely raise his head. And then he remembered again: “Tibor?”

József shook his head. “Just me.”

“Where’s my brother, József? Where’s my brother?”

“They’ve been desperate for workers,” József said. “If a man can stand, they take him.”

“Who?”

“The Germans.”

“They took Tibor?”

“I don’t know, Andráska,” József said, his voice breaking. “I don’t know where he is. I haven’t seen him for days.”

Outside the boxcar, a German voice called men to attention.

“We’re going to have to walk now,” József said.

Tears came to Andras’s eyes: To die now, after everything. But József took him from beneath the arms and hoisted him to his feet. Andras fell against him. József swayed and yelped in pain; his shattered leg, freed from its cast, could only have been half knit. But he caught Andras around the back and led him toward the door of the boxcar. Slid it aside. Took Andras down a ramp and out onto the cold bare dirt of the rail yard. Thin blades of pain shot up from Andras’s feet and through his legs. In his side, along the surgical wound, a dull orange burning.

A Nazi officer stood before a row of labor servicemen, inspecting their soiled, ribbon-torn overcoats and trousers, their rag-bound feet. Andras’s and József’s feet were bare.

The officer cleared his throat. “All those who want to work, step forward.”

All the men stepped forward. József pulled Andras, whose legs buckled. Andras fell forward onto his hands and knees on the bare ground. The officer came toward him and knelt; he put a hand to the back of Andras’s neck, and reached into his own overcoat pocket. Andras imagined the barrel of a pistol, a noise, an explosion of light. To his shame, he felt his bladder release.

The officer had drawn out a handkerchief. He mopped Andras’s brow and helped him to his feet.

“I want to work,” Andras said. He had managed the words in German: Ich möchte arbeiten.

“How can you work?” the officer said. “You can’t even walk.”

Andras looked into the man’s face. He appeared almost as hungry, almost as ragged, as the work servicemen themselves; his age was impossible to determine. His cheeks, slack and windburned, showed a growth of colorless stubble. A small oval scar marked his jawline. He rubbed the scar with his thumb as he looked at Andras contemplatively.

“A wagon will be here in a few minutes,” he said at last. “You’ll come with us.”

“Where are we going?” Andras dared to ask. Wohin gehen wir?

“To Austria. To a work camp. There’s a doctor there who can help you.”

Everything seemed to have a terrible second meaning. Austria. A work camp. A doctor who could help him. Andras put a hand on József’s arm to steady himself, pulled himself to his bare feet, and made himself look into the Nazi’s eyes. The Nazi held his gaze, then turned sharply and marched off through the rows of boxcars. Exhausted, Andras leaned against József until the wagon arrived. The Nazi officer quick-stepped alongside the wagon, carrying a pair of boots. He helped Andras and József into the wagon bed, then put the boots into Andras’s lap.

“Heil Hitler,” the officer said, saluting as the wagon pulled away.

A hundred times it might have been the end. It might have been the end when the wagon arrived at the work camp and the men were inspected, if the inspector hadn’t been a Jewish kapo who had taken pity on Andras and József-he’d assigned them to a work brigade rather than sending them to the infirmary, though they could scarcely walk. It might have been the end, again, on the day their group of a hundred men failed to meet its work quota: They were supposed to load fifty pallets of bricks onto flatbed trucks, and they’d only loaded forty-nine; as punishment, the guards selected two men, a gray-haired chemist from Budapest and a shoemaker from Kaposvár, and executed them behind the brick factory. It might have been the end when the food at the camp ran out, had not Andras and József, digging a trench for a latrine, come upon four clay jars buried in the ground: a cache of goose fat, a relic of a time when the camp had been a farm, and the farmer’s wife had foreseen lean days ahead. It might have been the end if the men at the camp had had time to finish their project, a vast crematorium in which their bodies would be burned after they had been gassed or shot. But it was not the end. On the first of April, as the exhausted and starving men waited to be marched from the assembly ground to the brickyard for the day’s work, József touched Andras’s shoulder and pointed toward a line of vehicles speeding along the military road beyond the barbed-wire fence.

“See that?” József said. “I don’t think we’re going to work today.”

Andras raised his eyes. “Why not?”

“Look.” He pointed along the curve of the road as it bent away toward the east. A confusion of German and Hungarian armored vehicles bumped along the rutted track, some leaving the roadbed to pass, others getting mired in the deep mud of the road, or spinning out of control into the ditches. Behind them, as far as Andras could see, a line of sleeker, swifter tanks barreled in their direction: Soviet T-34s, the kind he’d seen in Ukraine and Subcarpathia. That explained why their work foreman still hadn’t appeared, though it was half past seven: The Russians had come at last, and the Germans and Hungarians were running for their lives. At that moment the camp loudspeaker broadcast a command for all inmates to return to their quarters, gather their belongings, and meet at the camp gates to await orders for redeployment. But József sat down just where he was and crossed his legs before him.

“I’m not going anywhere,” he said, “Not a step. If the Russians are coming, I’m going to sit here and wait.”

The announcement raised a shout from the other men, some of whom threw their caps in the air. They stood in the assembly yard and watched their Nazi guards and work foremen flee the camp, some on foot, others in jeeps or trucks. No one seemed to take notice of the few men who’d gathered with their belongings near the gate. No further orders came over the loudspeaker; anyone who might have given orders had gone. Some of the inmates hid in the barracks, but Andras and József and many of the others climbed a low hill and watched a battle unfold in the neighboring fields. A battalion of German tanks had turned to meet the Soviets, and the cannons barked and roared for hours. All day and into the night they watched and cheered the Red Army. After dark, gunfire made an aurora in the eastern sky. Somewhere beyond that peony-colored light was the border of Hungary, and beyond that the road that led to Budapest.

At dawn the next day, a Soviet detachment arrived to take charge of the camp. The soldiers wore gray jackets and mud-smeared blue breeches. Their boots were miraculously intact, and their leather straps and belts gleamed with polish. They stopped just outside the gates and their captain made an announcement in Russian over a megaphone. The men of the camp had anticipated this moment. They’d made white flags from the canvas sacks that held cement dust, and had tied the flags to slender linden branches. A group of Russian-speaking prisoners, Carpathians from a Slovak border town, approached the Soviets with the branches held high. The absurdity of it, Andras thought-those gaunt and grief-shocked men carrying flags of surrender, as though they might be mistaken for their captors. The Soviets had brought a cartload of coarse black bread, which they distributed among the men. They broke the locks of the storehouses from which the camp officers had supplied themselves; after they’d taken as much as their cart could hold, they indicated that the prisoners should take whatever they wanted. The men walked through the storehouse as if through a museum of a bygone age. There on the shelves were luxuries they hadn’t seen for months-tinned sausages, tinned pears, tinned peas; slender boxes of cigarettes; stacks of batteries and bars of soap. They packed those things into squares of canvas or empty cement bags, hoping they might sell or trade them on the way home. Then the Soviets marched the men to a processing camp thirty kilometers away on the Hungarian border, where they lived for three weeks in filthy overcrowded barracks before they were given liberation papers and released. They were two hundred and fifteen kilometers from Budapest. The only way to get there was to walk.

They trusted nobody, traveled at night, evaded the last few fleeing Nazis, who would shoot any Jews they met, and the Soviet liberators, who, it was rumored, could take away your liberation papers and send you off to work camps in Siberia for no reason at all. József’s injured leg meant they had to travel slowly; he could manage no more than ten kilometers before the pain stopped him. From the direction of the city, reports of horrors drifted across the rolling hills of Transdanubia: Budapest bombed to rubble. Hundreds of thousands deported. A winter of starvation. The part of Andras’s mind that he was accustomed to sending in Klara’s direction had shriveled to a hard knot, like scar tissue. He allowed himself to imagine nothing beyond the moment’s necessary work; he fixed his mind on his own survival. He would not allow himself to remember the first weeks of the year, that gray-blue blur of horror that was January 1945. The surgical wound in his side had healed to a puckered pink seam; the injured spleen, the torn intestine, had resumed their invisible work. He would not think about his parents, about Mátyás; would not think about Tibor, who had disappeared somewhere beyond the Austrian border. With József at his side he slept in the ruins of barns or dug into haystacks and bedded down in the sweet-smelling dark, then woke to nightmares of being buried alive. By night they walked in the thick brush beside a highway that led toward Budapest. One evening, when they stopped at the back door of a large country house to trade German cigarettes and batteries for eggs and bread, they learned from the cook that Russian tanks had entered Berlin. She showed them where they could conceal themselves in a stand of lilacs by an open window and listen to that night’s radio broadcast. Amid the clusters of syringa they listened as a BBC announcer described the events transpiring in the German capital. To Andras the English words were a maze of sharp vowels and rapid-fire consonants, but József knew the language. The Russians, he translated, had surrounded the Reichstag, where Hitler had chosen to make his last stand; no one knew what was going on within.

One morning a few days later, as they slept in a boathouse on Lake Balaton beneath a mildewed canvas sail, they were awakened by the sound of bells. Every bell in the nearby town, Siófok, rang balefully, as though a great emergency were at hand. Andras and József ran out of the boathouse to find the townspeople streaming into the streets, moving toward the center of town in a stunned procession. They followed the crowd to the town square, where the mayor-a war-starved grandfather in an ill-fitting Soviet jacket-climbed the steps of the courthouse and announced that the war in Europe was over. Hitler was dead. Germany had signed an agreement of unconditional surrender in Reims. A cease-fire would go into effect at midnight.

From the crowd, a single beat of silence; then they roared in celebration and threw their hats into the air. For that moment it didn’t seem to matter that Hungary had been on the losing side, that its shining capital on the Danube had been bombed to rubble, that the country had fallen under Soviet control, that its people had nothing to eat, that its prisoners still hadn’t returned, that its dead were gone forever. What mattered was that the war in Europe was over. Andras and József put their arms around each other and wept.

The hills east of Buda had come into their young leaves, insensate to the dead and the grieving. The flowering lindens and plane trees seemed almost obscene to Andras, inappropriate, like girls in transparent lawn dresses at a funeral. He and József hiked the ruined streets on the east side of Castle Hill; at the top they paused and stood looking out over the city in silence. The beautiful bridges of the Danube-Margaret Bridge, the Chain Bridge, the Elizabeth Bridge, all those bridges whose every inch Andras knew by heart, every one of them as far as he could see-lay in ruins, their steel cables and concrete supports melting into the sand-colored rush of the river. The Royal Palace had been bombed into the shape of a crumbling comb, a Roman lady’s hair ornament excavated from an ancient city. The hotels on the far side of the river had fallen to ruins; they seemed to kneel on the riverbank in belated supplication.

In wordless shock, avoiding each other’s eyes, Andras and József stumbled down through the streets of the old city toward the bridgeless river. They knew they had to cross, knew that whatever waited for them waited on the far bank, amid the remains of Pest. Near Ybl Miklós tér, the square named for the architect who had designed the Operaház, they found a slip where a line of boatmen waited to ferry passengers across. For their passage they traded their last six packages of cigarettes and a dozen large batteries. The boatman, a red-faced boy in a straw hat, looked exceptionally well fed. As the boat cut toward the opposite shore, the feeling in Andras’s chest was like a hand raked through the tissue of his lungs; his diaphragm contracted with a spasm so painful he couldn’t breathe. The boat, a leaking skiff, made a shaky downstream progress across the river, twice threatening to capsize before it delivered them sick and shaking to the shore of Pest. They climbed out onto the wet sand beneath the embankment, the water lapping their shoes. Then they ascended the stone steps and stared up into a corridor of ruined buildings. On either side, a few buildings stood intact; some had even retained the colored tiles of their decorative mosaics, the leaves and flowers of their Baroque ornamentation. But Andras and József’s path toward the center of town led them through a museum of destruction: endless piles of bricks, splintered beams, shattered tiles, fractured concrete. The dead had been moved out of the street long before, but crosses stood on every corner. Signs of ordinary life presented themselves as if in total ignorance of this disaster: a clean shop window full of dough twisted into the usual shapes; a red bicycle reclining against a stoop; from far away, the improbable clang of a streetcar bell. Farther along, the skeleton of a German plane protruded from the top story of a building. A section of burned wing had fallen to the ground; the rust along its edges suggested it had lain there for months. A dog sniffed the blackened steel ribs of the wing and trotted off down the street.

They went along together toward Nefelejcs utca, toward the buildings where their families had lived-the building where József had said goodbye to his mother and grandmother; the building where Tibor and Ilana had moved after Andras’s return; the building where Andras and Klara had crouched together on the bathroom floor the night before his departure. They turned the corner from Thököly út and passed the familiar greengrocer’s, empty of green, and the familiar sweet shop, empty of sweets. At the corner of Nefelejcs utca and István út was a pile of wreckage, a mountain of plaster and stone and wood and brick and tile. Across the street, where József’s family and Tibor and Ilana had lived, there was nothing at all. Not even a ruin. Andras stood and stared.

Later he would say of himself, “That was when I lost my head.” It was the closest he could come to describing the feeling: His head had departed from his body, had been sent, like the evacuated children of Europe, somewhere dull and distant and safe. His body went to its knees in the street. He wanted to tear his clothing but found he couldn’t move. He wouldn’t listen to József, wouldn’t consider that his wife and child, or children, might have left the building before it had been destroyed. He couldn’t see anyone or anything. Passersby moved around him as he knelt on the pavement.

He might have stayed there an hour, or two, or five. József seated himself on an upturned cinderblock and waited. Andras was aware of him as a kind of fine tether, a monofilament connecting him, against his will, to what was left of the world. His eyes, unfocused on the ruin of the building, filled and drained and filled again. And then a familiar sound resolved from the nebula of his dulled senses: the sound of delicate hooves on pavement, the jingle of twin bells. The sound approached until it reached him, then went still. He raised his eyes.

It was the tiny grandmother of Klein, and her goat cart, newly painted white.

“My God,” she said, and stared at him. “Is it Andras? Is it Andras Lévi?”

He took her hand and kissed it. “You remember me,” he said. “Thank God. Do you know anything about my wife? Klara Lévi? Do you remember her, too?”

“Get up,” she said. “Let me take you to my house.”

The house in Frangepán köz stood in its ancient silence, in a haze of dust suspended in the viscous light of late afternoon. In the yard, a quartet of tiny goatlets nosed at a bucket of breadcrusts. Andras ran the stone path to the door, which stood open as if to admit the breeze. Inside, on the sofa where Andras had first waited to see Klein, lay his wife, Klara Lévi, asleep, alive. At the other end of the sofa was his son, Tamás, deep in a nap, his mouth open. Andras knelt beside them as if in prayer. Tamás’s skin was flushed with sleep, his forehead pink, his eyes fluttering beneath the lids. Klara seemed farther away, scarcely breathing, her skin a luminous white film over her faintly beating life. Her hair had come out of its coil and lay over her shoulder in a twisted rope. Her arm was crooked around a sleeping baby in a white blanket, the baby’s hand an open star on Klara’s half-bare breast.

My pole star, Andras thought. My true north.

Klara stirred, opened her eyes, looked down at the baby and smiled. Then she became aware of another presence in the room, an unfamiliar shape. Instinctively she drew her blouse over her breast, covering that slip of damp white skin.

She raised her eyes to Andras and blinked as if he were the dead. She pressed her eyes with a thumb and forefinger and then looked again.

Andras.

Klara.

They wailed each other’s names into the ancient space of that room, into that dust-storm of antique sunlight; their little boy, their son, woke with a start and began to cry in panic, unable to distinguish joy from grief. And perhaps at that moment joy and grief were the same thing, a flood that filled the chest and opened the throat: This is what I have survived without you, this is what we have lost, this is what is left, what we have to live with now. The baby raised a high wet voice. They were together, Klara and Andras and Tamás, and this little girl whose name her father did not know.

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE. The Dead

KLARA HAD SURVIVED the Siege of Budapest in a women’s shelter at Szabadság tér, under the protection of the International Red Cross. The Allies would not bomb it; the Germans had little interest in it. The inhabitants, young mothers and babies, were of no use to them. Klara had gone there in early December, a few weeks after the Russians had reached the southeastern edge of the capital. By that time Horthy had been deposed, the Arrow Cross had come to power, and seventy thousand Jews had been deported from Budapest. Those who had escaped deportation had had to move twice: first from their original homes to yellow-star buildings, Jewish-only apartments in neighborhoods all over the city; and then to a tiny ghetto in the Seventh District, in the streets surrounding the Great Synagogue.

In the first wave of displacements, Klara and Ilana, the children, Klara’s mother, and Elza Hász had all been assigned to a building on Balzac utca, in the Sixth District. Polaner had gone with them. The diminutive Mrs. Klein, grandmother of Miklós Klein, had provided her goat cart to help them transport their things. Klara had seen Klein’s grandmother on a last desperate visit to the Margit körút prison, where György was supposed to have been interned; Mrs. Klein had been there to inquire about Miklós. There had been no news of either man that day, but as the women had walked together afterward along the Danube embankment, trying to distract each other from their fear and grief, they’d talked of the practical difficulties of the upcoming move. On the day designated for their departure from Nefelejcs utca, Klara had awakened to an early-morning knock at the door. It was Miklós Klein’s grandmother in her peasant skirt and black boots, with the news that her goat cart stood at the ready in the courtyard. Klara had looked over the balcony railing, and there was the cart beside the fountain, two white goats sniffing at the water. Miklós Klein’s grandmother, it turned out, had been assigned to a building not far from Klara’s own, and had already transported what she and her husband could salvage from their tiny homestead in Angyalföld. Seven goats had accompanied them to the inner district of the city: these two wethers, two milch does, three kids. Klara could see them herself that very afternoon, Klein’s grandmother said; she’d hidden the goats in a carriage house behind the yellow-star building on Csanády utca.

Even with the aid of the goat cart, they’d had to leave almost everything behind. They were moving into a single room in a three-room apartment with a shared bath; one family lived there already and a third would join them. Klara and Ilana, the children, the elder and younger Mrs. Hász, and Polaner, carrying his loaded gun-the seven of them had crossed the city on foot, through crowds of thousands of Jewish men and women and children pushing their possessions in wheelbarrows or carrying them on their backs or leading them along in horse carts. It took four hours to make the journey of two kilometers. When they carried their things upstairs, they found that all the rooms were occupied; a fourth family had been assigned to the apartment at the last moment. But there was nowhere else for any of them to go, so they would have to share. And that was the beginning of five months in that apartment on Balzac utca. Soon it came to seem to Klara that she had always slept on a pallet on the floor between her mother and her child, had always shared a bath with sixteen others, had always woken to the sound of her elder sister-in-law weeping. Miklós Klein’s grandmother arrived every few days with goat’s milk for the children and for Klara, reminding Klara that she must keep up her strength for the sake of the baby in her womb. But Klara’s pregnancy seemed a terrible irony, the mockery of a promise. As she waited in line for bread one day, two old women had spoken of her as though she weren’t there, or couldn’t hear: Look at that poor Jewish pregnant woman. What a shame she’s got no future.

In fact, the aperture to any future beyond the war seemed to contract by the day. They lived in constant fear of deportation; from the outlying towns came news of thousands sent away in closed trains. In the capital itself there were horrors enough: frequent Arrow Cross raids on the yellow-star buildings, the displaced families’ possessions stolen, men and women taken away for no reason other than that they happened to be home when the Nyilas men arrived. At times there was reason for hope, reason to think the nightmare might soon end; in July, Horthy stopped all deportations of Jews from Hungary. The Budapest Jews thought they were saved. Klara heard rumors in the streets of talks between Hungary and the Allies, plans for an armistice. Then in mid-October came Horthy’s announcement that Hungary had concluded a separate peace with the Russians. For a few hours there were mad celebrations in the streets. Men tore down the yellow-star signs above their doorways, and women ripped the yellow-star patches from their children’s coats. But then came the terrible double blow of the Arrow Cross coup and Szálasi’s installation as prime minister. The deportations began again, this time in Budapest: Tens of thousands of men and women were taken from their houses and marched to the brickyards at Óbuda, then onward toward Austria. The actions of the Arrow Cross seemed dictated purely by cruel whim. A gang of Nyilas men had raided the building across the street from their own, and had deported nearly a dozen men and women, many of them too old for active labor; Klara had expected their own building to be raided at any moment, but the men had never returned.

All that time, the front lines of the war had been drawing closer and closer. Hitler, determined to keep the Russians from reaching Vienna, decided to delay them at Budapest as long as possible; as winter approached, Nazi and Hungarian forces dug in for what everyone already knew to be a futile struggle. Red Army forces encircled the city in a tightening ring. Air raids drove the terrified civilians underground every night. At times it seemed to Klara they were living in the air-raid shelter, that they spent their entire lives huddling in the dark. There were moments when she almost wished for the shuddering blast she’d experienced a thousand times in her mind, the crushing darkness after which there would be nothing at all. But one morning when Klein’s grandmother came to deliver the goat’s milk, she brought a slip of hope: A few women and children from her building had moved to an International Red Cross shelter at Szabadság tér, at the very center of the city. Klara and Ilana must go there as soon as possible, must try to get in while there was still space. If Klara was lucky, she might be able to have her baby there. Surely there would be a better chance of getting medical help if she were under the protection of the International Red Cross.

The next day the order came that the Jews must move again at the end of November, this time to the ghetto in the Seventh District. It was clear that there was no time to waste. Klara and Ilana went that afternoon to make inquiries at the International Red Cross offices at Vadász utca, and learned that Klein’s grandmother had been correct: There was a shelter for women and babies at Szabadság tér. Klara and Ilana received papers that would allow them to bring the children there that very day. They went home and packed the last of their money and valuables, the children’s diapers and clothing, a few sheets and blankets; they loaded the bundles into Tamás’s and Ádám’s baby carriages and dressed the children in their warmest coats. Then, for the last time, Klara said goodbye to Elza Hász and to her own mother-though she had not known it was to be the last time. Her mother had pressed her wedding band and engagement ring into Klara’s hand.

“Don’t be sentimental,” her mother had said, her eyes calm and steady on Klara’s. “Trade them for bread if you have to.” She’d made Klara slip the rings onto her finger, had given her a brusque kiss of the kind she’d always given Klara in the mornings before school, and then she’d gone inside to pack what little she could take to the ghetto.

Polaner had volunteered to escort Klara and Ilana the fourteen blocks they would have to walk to the shelter. In his pocket he carried the Walther P-38 given to him by the officer who’d arranged his safe passage to Hungary, and in his arms he carried Tamás, who had become inseparable from Polaner during the turmoil of the past months. At the doorway of the Red Cross building on Perczel Mór utca, Tamás, faced with the prospect of Polaner’s departure, raised such an uproar that the shelter director told Polaner he could stay the night to help the women and children settle in. The director was the mother of a little girl whom Klara had taught a few years earlier. The girl, who had died of scarlet fever, had been a favorite of Klara’s, and her mother wanted to do whatever she could to help. In gratitude for her kindness, Polaner explained that his false papers and his Nazi Party identity card might allow him to be of help to the women and children of the shelter; at least until the Russians arrived, he would have a certain freedom of movement in the city. By morning he had taken an inventory of the many things the shelter’s inmates needed. Milk for the babies was at the top of the list. So the first gift he brought to the shelter was half a dozen goats: the wethers, the does, and two of the three kids that had been living in the carriage house behind the yellow-star building on Csanády utca. Klein’s grandmother had entrusted them to Polaner’s care that morning when she and her husband had departed for the Seventh District ghetto, taking the last kid with them.

The Red Cross shelter was housed on the second story of the building, in three rooms of what had once been an insurance office. Mothers who had arrived in fur coats and custom-made shoes sat on desk chairs or on the floor, nursing their babies alongside those who had come with their feet wrapped in newspaper. Day and night the women filled the shelter with urgent talk and weeping and low infrequent laughter. They soothed the babies with songs, tried to distract the two- and three-year-olds with hand games and improvised toys. Pebble-filled pillboxes became rattles; dirty rags became pigtailed dolls. The mothers took turns washing their babies’ diapers in a laundry room on the ground floor, their only source of running water. When bombs broke the windows and the building became so cold that the newly washed diapers froze, they wrapped the diapers around themselves at night and dried them with the heat of their bodies. Ten times a day, it seemed, they rushed down to the shelter beneath the building and huddled there while bombs fell all around Szabadság tér.

Polaner worked tirelessly for the women and children. He scrounged rags for diapers; he stole the women’s own winter clothing back from the apartments they’d been forced to leave. At night, in violation of the city-wide curfew, he gleaned fodder for the goats from abandoned stables and from the garbage that had begun to pile in the streets. On his travels through the neighborhood he discovered the secret Jewish hospital on Zichy Jenő utca, a few blocks from the shelter, where an Armenian doctor named Ara Jerezian had assembled forty Jewish physicians and their families. The Arrow Cross flag flew over the shelter entrance, and Jerezian wore the official Nyilas uniform. He had renounced his party membership years earlier, in protest against the Arrow Cross’s anti-Jewish policies, but had taken it up again when he realized he might work secretly for the Jews from inside the party. Under the pretense of setting up a hospital for the Arrow Cross wounded, he’d assembled the Jewish doctors and their families and had laid in a store of food and medicine. Now, in those cramped apartments that had become a hospital, the doctors were treating the horrific casualties of the siege. Polaner brought sick women and babies from the Red Cross shelter to that hospital and took them back again when they were better. In return for the doctors’ attention, he gave their hungry children what little goat’s milk could be spared.

All over the city, people were beginning to starve. The first weeks of December the Red Cross shelter had been supplied with soup, which had to be transported on a cart from a kitchen on the other side of Szabadság tér. When the soup ran out there were soybeans and potatoes in their own cooking water; then just the soybeans; then, finally, nothing except what the goats produced on their own starvation diet. The women of the shelter pooled their jewelry and gave it to Polaner so he might trade it for food; Klara slipped her mother’s wedding band and engagement ring into the bag with the rest. But Polaner returned empty-handed. The women’s jewelry was worth nothing. There was no food to be had. Even the scant running water had ceased to run. Their only water now came from melted snow they’d brought in from the courtyard. The women became sick with hunger and thirst, and a drought of milk spread through the shelter. At first the children cried, but by the beginning of January they had become too weak to protest. One by one they went silent, their breathing a fluttering of wings beneath the breastbone. That was when Polaner did what Klein’s grandmother had instructed him to do if the situation grew dire. That gentle textile-maker’s son, the dovelike young man skilled with pen and protractor, killed the goats and their kids with his Walther P-38, then turned them over to one of the shelter’s inmates, a woman whose husband had been a butcher and who knew what to do with Polaner’s knife.

A week later, on the eighth of January, Klara’s labor began. Ilana insisted that she must go to the hospital on Zichy Jenő utca; after two cesarean sections, she could hardly risk labor at the shelter. Ilana herself would care for Tamás. She kissed Klara and assured her that all would be well. Then Klara and Polaner struggled through a network of smoke-darkened alleys to Ara Jerezian’s hospital. As the fighting drew closer, the halls of the hospital had become clogged with horrifically wounded soldiers; men lay crying and sweating and panting on cots along the walls, and the hallways were slick with blood. The doctors could scarcely pause to consider the situation of a healthy woman in labor, whatever her history. Klara and Polaner waited in a makeshift kitchen for three hours until a series of contractions brought her to her hands and knees. At last Polaner begged the help of Ara Jerezian himself, who took Klara to his office and made a pallet for her on the floor. Polaner brought water, sponged Klara’s forehead, changed her soaked sheets as she labored. When it became clear that the baby was in the breech position, and that Klara couldn’t deliver without a cesarean, Dr. Jerezian brought her to an impromptu operating theater-three metal tables lit only by a bank of high windows-and anesthetized her with morphine as the steadfast Polaner averted his eyes. Klara woke to learn she’d had a girl, whom she named Április in the hope that she would live to see the spring. And Polaner observed that the baby resembled her father.

For five days Klara recovered in Jerezian’s office. Whatever food Polaner could find in the hospital, he brought to her. He tended her wound, cooled her forehead with wet cloths, held the baby while she slept. The baby, tiny at birth, gained weight on Klara’s milk. When at last they carried her home to the Red Cross shelter, they found Tamás silent and glassy-eyed in the director’s arms. Where was Ilana? they asked. Where was the boy’s aunt, who was supposed to care for him? The director regarded them for a moment in silence, her mouth trembling, and then she told them.

Ádám Lévi had died of a fever on the twelfth of January. In a delirium of grief, his mother had run out into the street, where a Russian shell had killed her.

The fighting continued in Pest for six more days. The Russian forces drew close now to the center of the city, seeming to converge upon Szabadság tér itself; artillery fire shook the building day and night. Klara, in a shock of grief and fear, huddled in the bomb shelter with the baby while Tamás clung to Polaner. She would die without seeing her husband again; if he lived, how would he even learn of her death, of their children’s deaths? It was possible he might never learn he’d had a daughter. A shame she doesn’t have a future. What kind of future could be imagined after such a time? That night, when Polaner ventured out to get water at a standpipe across the street, he returned with the news that Nyugati Station was on fire, and that Hungarian soldiers were fleeing in the direction of the Danube bridges. That infernal glow along the Danube was the conflagration of the grand hotels. Flames climbed the dome and spire of Parliament. Civilians rushed toward the river with their dogs and bags and children, but the bridges were under bombardment. In the whole city there was nothing left to eat. Klara received the last piece of news with the understanding that she would watch her children die. Later that night, when a shallow panicked sleep overtook her, she dreamed of feeding her own right hand to the children; she felt no pain, only a relief that she had arrived at this ingenious solution.

In the morning she woke to an unaccustomed quiet. In place of gunfire there was a resonant stillness. Now and then a burst of shots cut through the morning air, and from the west bank of the Danube, where the fighting continued, came the faint echo of battle. But the battle for Pest was over. The bridges had all been destroyed; the Soviets held the city. The last Nazis in Pest had been taken as prisoners of war, or were cowering in buildings where they had made others cower. In the Red Cross shelter, the women waited for some sign of what to do. They were faint with thirst and hunger, sick with grief; though the building had withstood the night’s bombing, two more babies had died. The children who had survived were quieter that day, as if they knew something had changed. By midday the shelter residents came out of the building and into the cold gray light of Szabadság tér. What they saw seemed like an image from a newsreel or a dream: the American flag flying brazenly above the shuttered embassy. Two Arrow Cross soldiers lay dead on the embassy steps, the breasts of their overcoats tattered with bullet holes. A pair of Russian military policemen stood at the edge of the square and stared at the smoking dome of the Parliament building. The director of the shelter crossed the square toward the Russian men and fell to her knees before them; they could understand nothing she said, but they offered her their canteens.

That afternoon, the inhabitants of the shelter began to leave in search of food and water. Klara and Polaner lined the babies’ carriages with extra blankets and packed them with what remained of what they’d brought. Into Ádám’s empty carriage they put Tamás, who, for the past week, had had nothing to eat but the scant trickle of Klara’s milk. Into the other carriage they put the new baby. Klara, blind with exhaustion, could scarcely walk. They made their way through the rubble of the city, not knowing where they were going; they steered the carriages around crashed planes, horse carcasses, exploded German tanks, fallen chimneys, piles of rubbish, bodies of soldiers, bodies of women. At the corner of Király and Kazinczy utca they came across a group of Russian soldiers shoveling rubble into the back of a truck. Their leader, a decorated officer, stopped Klara and Polaner and made a loud demand in Russian. They knew he wanted their papers, but Polaner’s papers could only have gotten him arrested or shot; he replied in Hungarian that Klara was his wife and that they were bringing the children home. For a long time the officer looked at the gaunt, hollow-eyed Klara and Polaner, and peered into the carriages at the silent children. Finally he reached into the pocket of his coat and brought out a photograph of a round-faced woman with a round-faced child seated on her knee. While Klara held the photograph, the soldier went to the cab of the truck and took out a canvas rucksack. Kneeling, he drew out a paper bag that bulged as though it contained stones, then reached into the bag and withdrew a handful of wizened hazelnuts. These he passed to Klara. A second handful of nuts went to Polaner.

On those two handfuls of food, Klara would nurse both children for a week.

Because there was nowhere else to go, they went to the ghetto, which had been liberated by the Russians earlier that day. There, at the gates of the Great Synagogue on Dohány utca, they found Klein’s grandmother holding the single goat kid she’d nursed through the siege. Klein’s grandfather, that tiny bright-eyed man with his two uplifted wings of hair, had died of a stroke the first week of January. He’d been taken to the courtyard of the synagogue, where hundreds of Jewish dead lay waiting to be buried.

What about my mother? Klara had asked. What about my brother’s wife?

And in the same grief-raked voice, Klein’s grandmother delivered the news that Elza Hász and Klara’s mother had been shot, along with forty others, in the courtyard of a building on Wesselényi utca. She spoke the words with lowered eyes as she stroked the head of the last surviving kid, the remnant of the urban flock that had saved the lives of thirty women and children at Szabadság tér.

In the courtyard of the synagogue at Bethlen Gábor tér, where the concentration-camp survivors were supposed to register when they returned, those who had remained in Budapest begged the camp survivors for news of those who hadn’t come home. Nearly every day until Andras’s return, Klara had gone to that synagogue. Though she feared the answers to her questions, she had asked and asked. One week she met a man who’d been in a camp in Germany with her brother; they’d been workmates at an armaments factory there. This man took her into the synagogue sanctuary, where he sat down with her in a pew, took her hands in his own, and told her that her brother was dead. He’d been shot on New Year’s Eve along with twenty-five others.

For a week she sat shivah for him at the house on Frangepán kóz; as far as she knew, she was the only member of their family still alive. Then she went back to the synagogue again, hoping for news of Andras. Instead she learned something that she must tell him now. A woman from Debrecen had come to Bethlen Gábor tér to look for her children. Not long before, this woman had been in a camp herself; she had been in Oświęcim, in Poland. She had seen Andras’s parents on a railroad embankment there, before she herself had been moved into a group of those who were well enough to work. Of the other group, the old and sick and very young, nothing more had been seen, nothing heard.

As Klara delivered the news, Andras began to shake with silent grief. József sat beside him in hollow-eyed shock. In a single day, in this strange small house filled with photographs of the dead, they had both become orphans.

…

For months after Andras came home, they went to the synagogue at Bethlen Gábor tér every day. Hungarian Jews were being exhumed from graves all over Austria and Germany, Ukraine and Yugoslavia, and, whenever it was possible, identified by their papers or their dog tags. There were thousands of them. Every day, on the wall outside the building, endless lists of names. Abraham. Almasy. Arany. Banki. Böhm. Braun. Breuer. Budai. Csato. Czitrom. Dániel. Diamant. Einstein. Eisenkberger. Engel. Fischer. Goldman. Goldner. Goldstein. Hart. Hauszmann. Heller. Hirsch. Honig. Horovitz. Idesz. János. Jáskiseri. Kemény. Kepecs. Kertész. Klein. Kovacs. Langer. Lázár. Lindenfeld. Markovitz. Martón. Nussbaum. Ócsai. Paley. Pollák. Róna. Rosenthal. Roth. Rubiczek. Rubin. Schoenfeld. Sebestyen. Sebök. Steiner. Szanto. Toronyi. Ungar. Vadas. Vámos. Vertes. Vida. Weisz. Wolf. Zeller. Zindler. Zucker. An alphabet of loss, a catalogue of grief. Almost every time they went, they witnessed someone learning that a person they loved had died. Sometimes the news would be received in silence, the only evidence a whitening of the skin around the mouth, or a tremor in the hands that clutched a hat. Other times there would be screams, protests, weeping. They looked day after day, every day, for so long that they almost forgot what they were looking for; after a while it seemed they were just looking, trying to memorize a new Kaddish composed entirely of names.

Then, one afternoon in early August-eight hours before the Enola Gay’s flight over Hiroshima, and eight days before end of the Second World War-as they stood scanning the lists of dead, Klara’s hand flew to her mouth and her shoulders curled. In that first moment Andras wondered only who she could have had left to lose; it didn’t occur to him that her reaction might have anything to do with him. But he must have sensed unconsciously what had happened. When he looked at the list, he found he couldn’t bring the names into focus.

Klara held his arm, trembling. “Oh, Andras,” she said. “Tibor. Oh, God.”

He moved away from her, unwilling to understand. He looked at the list again but couldn’t make sense of it. Already people were stepping away from them, giving them a respectful space, the way they did when people found their dead. He stepped forward and touched the list where it bled from K to L. Katz, Adolf. Kovály, Sarah. László, Béla. Lebowitz, Kati. Lévi, Tibor.

It couldn’t be his Tibor. He said this aloud: It’s not him. It’s someone else. It’s not our Tibor. Not our Tibor. A mistake. He pushed his way through the crowd around the list, toward the door of the synagogue, up the stairs to the administrative offices, where an explanation would be found. He terrified a woman at a desk by roaring for the person in charge. She took him to an anteroom where, unbelievably, they made him wait. Klara found him there; her eyes were red, and he thought, Ridiculous. Not our Tibor. And in the office of the person in charge, he sat in an ancient leather chair while the man leafed through manila envelopes. He handed one to Andras, labeled with the name LÉVI. The envelope held a brief typewritten note and a metal dog-tag locket, its clasp twisted. When Andras opened the dog tag he found the inner document still intact: Tibor’s name, his date and place of birth, his height and eye color and weight, the name of his commanding officer, his home address, his Munkaszolgálat number. Your dog tags might come home, but you never will. The brief typewritten note stated that the tag had been found on Tibor’s body in a mass grave in Hidegség, near the Austrian border.

That night Andras locked himself into the bedroom of the new apartment he shared with Klara and Polaner and the children. He sat on the floor, cried aloud, beat his head against the cold red tile. He would never leave that room, he decided; would stay there until he was an old man, and let the earth burn through its years around him.

Sometime in the night, Klara and Polaner came in and helped him to bed. In the vaguest way, he was aware of Klara unbuttoning his shirt, of Polaner sliding his arms into a new one; vaguely, through a veil, he saw Klara washing her face at the basin and getting into bed beside him. Her arm across his chest was a warm live thing, and he was dead beneath it. He couldn’t move to touch her or respond to anything she said. He lay spent and exhausted and awake, listening as her breathing fell into its familiar rhythm of sleep. He saw Tibor in those last weeks, the nightmare of their life at Sopron: Tibor going to the village for food. Tibor overturning Andras and József’s bowl of beans. Tibor bathing Andras’s forehead with a cold cloth. Tibor covering him with his own overcoat. Tibor walking thirty kilometers with a handful of strawberry jam. Tibor reminding him that it was Tamás’s birthday. Then he thought of Tibor in Budapest, his eyes dark behind his silver-rimmed glasses. Tibor in Paris, lying on Andras’s floor in an agony of love for Ilana. Tibor hauling Andras’s bags to Keleti Station one September morning a lifetime ago. Tibor at the opera, the night before Andras’s departure. Tibor dragging an extra mattress up the stairs to his own small room on Hársfa utca. Tibor in high school, a biology book open on the table before him. Tibor as a tall young boy, chasing Andras through the orchard, throwing him to the ground. Tibor pulling Andras from the millpond. Tibor bending over Andras where he sat on the kitchen floor, tipping a spoonful of sweet milk into his mouth.

He turned over and pulled Klara against him, cried and cried into the damp nebula of her hair.

There was a funeral at the Jewish cemetery outside the city, a reburial of Tibor’s remains and the remains of hundreds of others, a field of open graves, a thousand mourners. Afterward, for the second time that year, he observed a week of shivah. He and Klara burned a memorial candle and ate hard-boiled eggs, sat on the floor in silence, received a stream of guests. In accordance with the ritual, Andras did not shave for thirty days. He hid inside his beard, forgot to change his clothes, bathed only when Klara insisted. He had to work; he knew he couldn’t afford to lose his new job as a dismantler of bombed buildings. But he performed the work without speaking to the other men or seeing the houses he was taking apart or thinking of the people who had lived in them. After work he sat in the front room of the apartment they’d taken on Pozsonyi út, or in a dark corner of the bedroom, sometimes holding one of the children on his lap, stroking the baby’s hair or listening as Tamás described what had happened at the park that morning. He ate little, couldn’t concentrate on a book or newspaper, didn’t want to go out for a walk with József and Polaner. He said Kaddish every day. It seemed to him he could live this way forever, could make a permanent employment of grief. Klara, whose motherhood had prevented her from sinking into an all-consuming mourning for her own mother and György and Elza, understood and indulged him; and Polaner, whose grief had been as deep as Andras’s own, knew that even this abyss had a bottom, and that Andras would reach it soon.

He could not have anticipated how, or when. It came on a Sunday exactly a month after the funeral, the day Andras shaved his mourning beard. They were sitting at the breakfast table, eating barley porridge with goats’ milk; food was still scarce, and as the weather turned colder they had begun to wonder whether, having survived the war itself, they would die of its aftermath. Klara spooned her own porridge into the children’s mouths. Andras, who could not eat, passed his along to her. József and Polaner sat with the newspaper spread between them, Polaner reading aloud about the Communist Party’s struggle to recruit members before the upcoming general election.

It was Andras who rose when they heard a knock at the door. He crossed the room, drawing his robe closer against the morning chill; he unlocked the door and opened it. A red-faced young man stood on the doorstep, a knapsack on his back. His cap bore the Soviet military insignia. He reached into the pocket of his trousers and drew out a letter.

“I’ve been charged to deliver this to Andras or Tibor Lévi,” the man said.

“Charged by whom?” Andras said. With numb dispassion he noted how strange it was to hear his brother’s name in this soldier’s mouth. Tibor Lévi. As if he were still alive.

“By Mátyás Lévi,” the man said. “I was with him at a prisoner-of-war camp in Siberia.”

And so, Andras thought. The final piece of news. Mátyás dead, and this his last missive. He felt himself to be in a place so remote from human feeling, so far removed from the ability to experience pain or hope or love, that he did not hesitate to take the letter. He opened it as the young man stood watching, as his family looked at him for the news. And he learned that his brother Mátyás lived, and would be home the following Tuesday.

In the winter of 1942, just a month after he’d been sent to Ukraine, Mátyás Lévi had been taken prisoner by the Soviets, and along with the rest of his labor company had been sent to a mining camp in Siberia. The location was the region of Kolyma, bounded by the Arctic Ocean to the north and the Sea of Okhotsk to the south. They’d gone via the Trans-Siberian Railway to the end of its easternmost spike at Vladivostok, and then had been transported across the sea on the slave ship Dekabrist. The camp had two thousand inmates, Germans and Ukrainians and Hungarians and Serbs and Poles and Nazi-sympathizing French, along with Soviet criminals and political dissidents and writers and composers and artists. In the camp he’d been beaten with clubs and shovels and pickhandles. He’d been bitten by bedbugs and flies and lice. He’d been frozen almost to death. He’d worked seventeen-hour days at seventy degrees below zero, had received a daily ration of twenty decagrams of bread, had been thrown into isolation for disobedience, had nearly died of dysentery, had earned the respect of the guards and officers by painting bold Communist posters for the barracks walls, had been named official propaganda-poster designer and official snow sculptor of the camp (he had made ten-foot-high busts of Lenin and Stalin to preside over the parade ground), had learned Russian and had volunteered as a translator, had been called upon to interview Hungarian Nazis, had seen a hundred Arrow Cross members brought to trial and sentenced and in some cases executed, had been attacked by a secret coalition of Hungarian Arrow Cross members who broke both his legs, had convalesced in the infirmary for six months, and finally had been informed one morning that his time at the prison camp was through, and when he’d asked what had earned him the privilege of release, had been told that it was because his official designation, and that of five hundred twenty other prisoners, had been changed from Jewish Hungarian to Hungarian Jew, and that the prison camp was not in the business of detaining Jews, not after what the Nazis had done to them.

But nothing that happened to him those three cold years had prepared him for what waited at home. Nothing had prepared him for the news that four hundred thousand of Hungary’s Jews had been sent to death camps in Poland; nothing had prepared him for the bombed ruin of Budapest with its six severed bridges. And nothing had prepared him for the news that his mother and father, his brother and his sister-in-law and his nephew, had all vanished from the earth. It was Andras who delivered the news. Mátyás, grown into a lean, hard-eyed man with a short dark beard, sat before him on the sofa and took it in without a sound; the only sign he gave of having understood at all was a faint trembling of the jaw. He got up and smoothed his pant legs, as if, having been given a military briefing, he was ready now to incorporate the news into his plans and move onward. And then something seemed to change beneath the skin of his face, as though his muscles had received the news on a longdistance telephone delay. He went to his knees on the floor, his features twisting with grief. “Not true,” he cried, and moved his arms around his head as if birds were flying at him. It was the news, Andras thought, the unrelenting news, a troop of crows circling, their wings smelling of ash.

He knelt beside his brother and put his arms around him, held him against his own chest as Mátyás wailed. He said his brother’s name aloud, as if to remind him of the astonishing fact that at least, he, Mátyás, still lived. He would not let go until Mátyás pulled away and looked around at the unfamiliar room; when his eyes came to rest on Andras’s again, they were lucid and full of despair. Is it true? he seemed to be asking, though he hadn’t said a word. Tell me honestly. Is it true?

Andras held Mátyás’s gaze steady in his own. There was no need to speak or to make any sign. He put his arm around Mátyás’s shoulder again, drew him close and held him as he cried.

It was Andras who sat with him that night and the next and the one after that, Andras who urged him to eat and who changed the damp bedding on the sofa where he slept. As he did these things he felt the first thinning of the fog that had enveloped him since he’d learned that Tibor was dead. Over the past month he’d nearly forgotten how to be a man in the world, how to breathe and eat and sleep and speak to other people. He had let himself slip away, even though Klara and the children had survived the war, the siege; even though Polaner was there with him every day. On the third night after Mátyás’s return, after Mátyás had fallen asleep and he and Klara had retreated to their bedroom, Andras took her hands and begged her forgiveness.

“You know there’s nothing to forgive,” she said.

“I vowed to take care of you. I want to be a husband to you again.”

“You’ve never stopped,” she said.

He bent to kiss her; she was alive, his Klara, and she was there in his arms. Nest of my children, he thought, placing a hand on her womb. Cradle of my joy. And he remembered her with an orange-red dahlia behind her ear, and the way her skin felt beneath a film of bathwater, and what it was like to meet her eye and to know they were thinking the same thing. And he believed, for the first time since he had seen Tibor’s name on the list at Bethlen Gábor tér, that it might be possible to live beyond that terrible year; that he might look into Klara’s face, whose planes and curves he knew more intimately than any landscape in the world, and feel something like peace. And he took her to bed and made love to her as if for the first time in his life.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO. A Name

THE MORNING was crisp and blue, early December. From the window of their building on Pozsonyi út, Andras could see a line of schoolchildren being led into Szent István Park -gray woolen coats, crimson scarves, black boots that left herringbones of footprints in the snow. Beyond the park was the marbled span of the Danube. Farther still was the white prow of Margaret Island, where in the summertime Tamás and Április swam at Palatinus Strand. When, on a walk through the park last spring, he’d told them that the pool had once been closed to Jewish swimmers, Április had looked at him with pinched brows.

“I don’t see what being Jewish has to do with swimming,” she said.

“Neither do I,” Andras said, and put a hand at the nape of her neck, where her little gold chain closed. But Tamás had looked through the fence at the pool complex, his hands on the green-painted bars, then turned to meet his father’s eyes. He knew by now what had happened to his family during the war, what had happened to his uncles and grandparents. He had gone to Konyár and Debrecen with his father to see where Andras had lived as a boy, and where Andras’s parents had lived; he had watched his father place a stone on the doorstep of the house in Konyár as if at a grave.

“I’m going to train for the Olympics here,” he said. “I’ll set a new world record.”

“Me too,” Április said. “I’ll set a record in freestyle and backstroke.”

“I have no doubt you will,” Andras said.

That was before the escape had come to seem like a reality, before the children had begun to envision their future lives taking place on the other side of the Atlantic. It wouldn’t be long now; only a few details remained, including the business Andras would conclude that morning at the Ministry of the Interior. Tamás had wanted to come along with Andras and Klara and Mátyás to pick up the new identification cards. Last night he’d stood before Andras in the sitting room with a grave expression on his face, his arms crossed over his chest. He had already prepared his lessons for the next two days, he announced. He’d miss nothing at all by going with them.

“You have to go to school,” Andras said. He rose from his chair and put an arm around Tamás’s shoulders. “You don’t want the students in America to get ahead of you.”

“I’m not worried about that,” Tamás said. “Not if I miss just one afternoon. They get Saturdays and Sundays off every week.”

“I’ll leave your new papers on your desk,” Andras said. “They’ll be waiting for you when you get home from school.”

Tamás sent a glance toward Klara, who sat at her writing desk by the window; she shook her head and said, “You heard your father.”

Shrugging, sighing, declaring it all to be unfair, Tamás gave up the argument and loped off down the hallway to his room. “As if I’d get behind,” they heard him say as he closed the bedroom door.

Klara lifted her eyes to Andras, trying to restrain her laughter. “He’s been a grown man for years, hasn’t he?” she said. “What on earth will he do in America, among those kids with their banana splits and their rock and roll?”

“He’ll eat banana splits and listen to rock and roll,” Andras predicted, which turned out, in fact, to be true.

Andras and Mátyás had taken the day off work to go to the Ministry of the Interior. They were employed at Magyar Nation, one of the secondary communist newspapers, where they directed the design department; they had been up late the previous night judging a contest of winter-themed drawings by gimnázium students. The winning drawing had depicted a skating race, athletics being a safe subject under the judging regulations, which disqualified any drawing that made reference to Christmas. That holiday belonged to the old Hungary, at least officially. Of course, people still celebrated it; they were relying on that fact, all of them-Andras and Mátyás, Klara and Tamás and Április. In a few weeks, on Christmas Eve, they would take a train to Sopron, and then they would walk six miles in the snow to a place where they might cross the Austrian border unnoticed; they would slip through while the border patrol drank vodka and listened to Christmas carols in their warm quarters. In Austria they would catch a train that would take them to Vienna, where Polaner had been living since his own border crossing in November. From there they would travel together to Salzburg, and then to Marseilles. On the tenth of January, if all went well, they would board an ocean liner for New York, where József Hász had secured an apartment for them.

But first they had to settle the business about the name change and the new identity cards. They had submitted the application eight weeks earlier, in October; it had gotten delayed, like all other government business, in the confusion surrounding the abortive revolution that fall. Even now, less than a month after it had been quelled, Andras found it difficult to believe the revolution had occurred-that the public debates of the Petőfi Society, a small group of Budapest intellectuals, had blossomed into vast student demonstrations; that the students and their supporters had unseated Ernő Gerő, Moscow’s puppet, and had installed the reformist Imre Nagy as prime minister; that they had pulled down the twenty-meter-high statue of Stalin near Heroes’ Square, and planted Hungarian flags in his empty boots. The demonstrators had called for free elections, a multiparty system, a free press. They wanted Hungary to disengage from the Warsaw Pact, and more than anything they wanted the Red Army to go home. They wanted to be Hungarian again, even after what it had meant to be Hungarian during the war. And at first, Khrushchev had conceded. He had recognized Nagy as prime minister, and began to call the occupying troops back to Russia. For a few days in late October it seemed to Andras that the Hungarian Revolution would be the swiftest, the cleanest, the most successful revolution Europe had ever known. Then Polaner came home one afternoon having heard a rumor that Soviet tanks were massing at the Romanian and Ruthenian borders. That evening, in the Erzsébetváros café where Andras and Polaner went to hear Jewish artists and writers argue long into the night, the item of hottest debate was whether the Western nations would come to Hungary ’s aid. Radio Free Europe had led many to believe it would be so, but others insisted that no Western nation would risk itself for a Soviet-bloc state. The cynics turned out to be correct. France and Britain, preoccupied with the Suez Crisis, scarcely cast an eye toward Central Europe; America was caught up in a presidential election, and kept to itself.

More than twenty-five hundred people were killed, and nineteen thousand wounded, when Khrushchev’s tanks and planes arrived to crush the uprising. Imre Nagy had hidden himself in the Yugoslav embassy, and was imprisoned as soon as he emerged. Within days the fighting was over. In the weeks that followed, nearly two hundred thousand people fled to the West-among them Polaner, whose image had appeared in one of the many newspapers that had arisen during Hungary’s fortnight of freedom. He had been photographed tending a young woman who’d been shot in the leg at Heroes’ Square; the woman turned out to be a student organizer, and Polaner had been tagged as a revolutionary. Grim tales of torture had emerged from the Secret Police detainment center at 60 Andrássy út; rather than test their truth, Polaner had decided to risk the border crossing. To his good fortune, and that of the two hundred thousand refugees, the brief conflict had left the Iron Curtain riddled with holes: Many of the border guards had been called in to fight smaller uprisings in the towns and cities of the interior.

Those conflicts, too, had since been put down, but the border remained more permeable than it had been for years. It was decided that the rest of the family would follow Polaner. How long now had they been waiting for a chance to leave? There was no future for them in Hungary. They’d known it to be true before the revolution, and it was all the more apparent now. József Hász, who had made his own escape to New York five years earlier, had been at pains to convince them that they were fools to stay. He had found them the apartment and promised to help them find work. Tamás and Április were old enough to make the border crossing on foot; Christmas Eve would provide the aperture. So at last they decided to take the risk. They had written the news, in carefully veiled language, to József and Elisabet and Paul. And now, on the other side of the ocean, Elisabet was beginning to prepare the apartment, furnishing the rooms and laying in everything they would need. Andras had resisted thinking about the flat itself; such detailed imagining of their future lives seemed to invite bad luck. But he and Klara told the children about the junior high and high schools they would attend, the movie theaters with their pink neon-lit towers, the stores with great bins of fruit from all over the world. Elisabet had been writing to them about those things for years; by now they had attained the quality of images from a legend.

Even more fantastical to Andras was the prospect of returning to school himself, the prospect of finishing his degree in architecture. He and Polaner had made a pact to do it, and Mátyás had agreed to join them. For the past eleven years, exhausted by their daily work, Andras and Polaner had struggled to retain what they’d learned at the École Spéciale. They had set each other exercises, had challenged each other to solve problems of design. They had even attended a few night classes, but had been so dispirited by the dullness of Soviet architecture that they had found themselves unwilling to continue. New York presented a different prospect. They knew nothing of the schools there, but József had written that the city was full of them. He and Polaner had sworn their pact over glasses of Tokaji on the evening of Polaner’s departure.

“We’ll be old men among boys,” Andras had said. “I can see us now.”

“We’re not old,” Polaner said. “We’re not even forty.”

“Don’t you remember what it was like? I don’t know if I have the stamina.”

“What’s going to happen?” Polaner said. “Are you going to get a nosebleed?”

“Without a doubt. And that’ll be just the beginning.”

“Here’s to the beginning,” Polaner said, and two hours later he had disappeared into the uncertain night, carrying only his knapsack and a green metal tube of drawings.

Now, on this clear December morning, Klara stood beside Andras at the window, following his gaze toward the park and the river. After the war she had left off teaching and had turned her attention to choreography. The Soviets loved that she had been trained by a Russian and spoke the language; never mind that her teacher had been a White Russian who had fled Petersburg in 1917. The Hungarian National Ballet gave her a permanent position, and the state newspaper praised the strength and angularity of her work. K. Lévi is a choreographer in the true Soviet style, the official dance critic wrote; and Klara, who for years had been plotting her family’s defection to the United States, sat at the kitchen table with the newspaper in her hand and laughed.

“Time to go,” she said now. “Mátyás will be waiting.”

Andras helped her into her gray coat and draped a cinnamon-colored scarf around her neck. “You’re as lovely as ever,” he said, touching her sleeve. “You used to wear a red hat in Paris. You’ll have one again in America.”

“As ever!” she said. “Has it come to that? Am I so old?”

“Ageless,” he said. “Timeless.”

They met Mátyás at the corner of Pozsonyi út and Szent István körút. In honor of the occasion he had worn a pink carnation in his buttonhole, a gesture that seemed to recall his younger self. He had returned from Siberia hardened and sharpened into a man, a fierce aggressive light radiating from his eyes. He had never returned to dancing, would never again wear a top hat, white tie, and tails. The part of him that had been inclined toward the physical expression of joy had been carved away in Siberia. But now, on the day of the name change, a pink carnation.

Klara pressed Andras’s arm as they crossed Perczel Mór utca. “I brought the camera,” she said. “I hope you’re feeling photogenic.”

“As ever,” said Andras, who detested any photograph of himself. But Mátyás straightened the carnation in his buttonhole and struck a pose against a streetlight.

“Not yet,” Klara said. “After we get the documents.”

They arrived at the gray monolith that housed the Ministry of the Interior-a building, Andras recalled, that stood in the footprint of the eighteenth-century palace of a famous courtesan. The palace had been destroyed in the siege of 1944, but a single elm that appeared in engravings of the building still stood behind its low iron fence. Andras touched the bark as if for luck, trying to imagine what it would be like to live in a city where he would not see ghosts of buildings and people everywhere he looked, where what existed now was all there was for him. Then he and Mátyás and Klara climbed the steps and entered the glass-and-concrete cavern of the building. They waited for an hour while the man in charge of name changes fingered his way through an endless series of documents, each of which had to be stamped thrice and signed by elusive functionaries before it could be delivered. But finally their name was called-their old name, one last time-and they had the papers in hand: new identification cards and work cards and residency certificates. Documents, Andras hoped, that would soon be of no use to them at all. But it had seemed important to know that the new name had been recorded in Hungarian record books, important that it be made official.

Outside, the high blue sky had gone metallic gray, and they stepped into a cloud of falling snow. Klara ran down the steps to prepare the camera while Andras and Mátyás stood with the new documents in their hands. Andras had not expected the sight of the cards and papers to bring tears to his eyes, but now he found himself weeping. It had become real at last: this memorial, this mark they would carry all their lives and pass to their children and grandchildren.

“Stop that,” Mátyás said, drawing the back of his sleeve across his own eyes. “It won’t change anything.”

He was right, of course. Nothing would change what had happened-not grief, not time, not memory, not retribution. But they could leave this place, would leave it in a few weeks. They could cross an ocean and live in a city where Április might grow up without the gravity that had marked her brother, without the sense of tragedy that seemed to hang in the air like the brown dust of bituminous coal. And Andras would become a student again-if not the young man who had arrived in Paris with a suitcase and a scholarship, then a man who knew something more of both the beauty and the ugliness of the world. And Klara would be with him-Klara, who stood before them now with her dark hair blowing, her hands raised, the camera hiding her face behind its glass eye. He put his arm around his brother and said, “Ready.” She counted to three in English, a daring act in the shadow of the Ministry of the Interior. And she captured them, the two men on the steps: Andras and Mátyás Tibor.