CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Bánhida Camp

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

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

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

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

Andras saluted. “Squad captain, sir.”

“What was that?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What is it, Parisi?” Mendel said.

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

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

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

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

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

“Is it true?” he said.

“As you can see.”

“But is it really?”

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

“Where are we?” Andras asked.

“You’ll see.”

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

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

“Who else’s?”

“Impossible. It’s too fine.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Do you think we should try to emigrate?”

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

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

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

“What doubts?”

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

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

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

“That’s nonsense, Klara.”

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

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

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

“What did the doctor say?”

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

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

“My brother will help,” she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Not you, too, Andráska!”

“I hate to think of you being alone.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Your apartment? What apartment?”

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

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

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

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

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

“I might be otherwise engaged.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And so is Tibor,” Ilana said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Don’t you like my dancing?”

“Not at the moment, brother.”

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

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

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

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

“You’re truly going to be a father?”

“So it seems.”

He let out a low whistle. “Excited?”

“Terrified.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Then you’ll go back to school.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What experience?”

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

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

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

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

“We were never drinking companions,” Andras said.

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

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

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

“It couldn’t hurt,” Andras said.

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

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

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

“And?”

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

“You made her take her dress off?”

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

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

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

“Now, that’s a shame.”

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

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

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

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

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

“What big party?”

“Belgorod, in Russia. The front lines.”

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

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

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

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

“How much would it cost?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That is strange.”

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

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

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

“Is everything well with Klara?” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

“And you’re well? You seem well.”

“As well as can be expected.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m afraid so.”

“And she knows nothing about it?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Andras could only nod in silence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No, thank you,” Andras said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m sorry,” Andras said.

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

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

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

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

“Called where?”

“To the labor service.”

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

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

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

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

“What about your son?” Andras said.

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

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

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

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

“Who knows? Anything might happen.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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