CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Subcarpathia

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Not Paris, I’d imagine.”

“Ruthenia, with my labor company.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I wish I could, believe me.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I was living outside the law in Paris.”

“But the law was so much farther away!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My dear Andráska,

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

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

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

With love, Your K.