THEY NAMED THE BABY after Klara’s father. The first weeks of his life were a blue haze to Andras: There were ten days in the hospital, during which the baby lost weight, fought his lung infection, nearly died, and recovered again; there was the homecoming to their apartment on Nefelejcs utca, which seemed not really to be their home at all, stuffed as it was with flowers and gifts and guests who had come to see the baby; there was Klara’s mother, unfailingly solicitous but incapable of doing anything practical to help, as her own babies had been tended entirely by nurses; there was Andras’s mother, who knew how to tend to the baby’s needs, but who also felt it important to show Klara the correct way to pin a diaper or elicit a baby’s eructation; there was Ilana, now seven months pregnant, cooking endless Italian meals for Andras and Klara and their well-wishers; there was Mendel Horovitz, liberated from the Munkaszolgálat, sitting in the kitchen until the middle of the night, sipping vodka and inviting Andras to describe in detail the vicissitudes of new parenthood; and then there was the plain relentless work of caring for a newborn child: the feedings every two hours, the diaper changes, the brief and broken sleep, the moments of incredulous joy and bottomless fear. Every time the baby cried it seemed to Andras he might never stop, that his crying would exhaust him and make him sick again. But Klara, who had already raised a child, understood that the baby was crying because he had a simple need, and she knew she could determine the need and meet it. Soon the baby would stop crying; the house would fall into a state of delicate peace. Andras and Klara would sit together and look at the baby, their Tamás, admiring the eyebrows that were like hers, the mouth that was like his, the chin with its dimple like Elisabet’s.
Through those dreamlike days he was aware of little else beside the ebb and flow of Tamás Lévi’s needs. The war seemed far away and irrelevant, the Munkaszolgálat a bad dream. But on the night of the seventh of December, the eve of Tamás’s bris, Andras’s father brought the news that the Japanese had bombed an American naval base in Hawaii. Pearl Harbor: The name conjured a tranquil image, pale gray sky above an expanse of nacreous water. But the attack had been a bloodbath. The Japanese had badly damaged or destroyed four U.S. battleships and nearly two hundred planes, and had killed more than twenty-four hundred men and wounded twelve hundred others. Andras knew that the States would declare war on Japan now, closing the ring of the war around the earth. And in fact the declaration came the next morning as Tamás Lévi entered the covenant of circumcision. Three days later Germany and Italy declared war on the United States, and then Hungary declared war on the Western Allies.
As Andras stood at the bedroom window that night, listening to a volley of voices from Bethlen Gábor tér, he found himself considering what the new declaration of war might mean for his little family, and for his brothers and his parents and Mendel Horovitz. The city might be bombed. What had become scarce would get scarcer. More troops would be called, more labor servicemen deployed. He had just told Klara that he was home for good, but how long would this spell of freedom last? The KMOF wouldn’t care that he was just now beginning to recover the health and strength he’d lost during his months in the Munkaszolgálat. They would use him as they’d used him all along, as a simple tool in a war whose aim was to destroy him. But they didn’t have him yet, he thought: Not yet. For the moment he was here at home, in this quiet bedroom with his sleeping wife and child. He could look for work, could begin to support Klara and the baby. And he could give something to György Hász, some small part of the vast sum he was paying each month to keep Klara out of the hands of the authorities. He had hoped he might approach Mendel Horovitz’s editor at the Evening Courier and speak to him about a position in layout or illustration, but Mendel had left the Courier when he’d been conscripted; his old job had long since been filled, and the editor himself had been fired and called into the Munkaszolgálat. Since his return, Mendel had been pounding the pavement every day with his portfolio of clips. In the afternoons he could be found at the Café Europa at Hunyadi tér, a cup of black coffee before him, a notebook open on the table. Well, Andras would go to Hunyadi tér the next day and approach Mendel with a proposition: the two of them might present themselves at the office of Frigyes Eppler, Andras’s former editor at Past and Future, and ask to be hired jointly as writer and illustrator. Frigyes Eppler now worked at the Magyar Jewish Journal. The paper’s offices were located on Wesselényi utca, a few blocks from the Café Europa.
At three o’clock the next afternoon, Andras walked through the gilt-scrolled doors of the café to find Mendel at the usual table with the usual notebook before him. He sat down across from his friend, ordered a cup of black coffee, and stated the proposition.
Mendel pulled the V of his mouth into a narrow point. “It would have to be the Magyar Jewish Journal,” he said.
“What’s wrong with the Journal?”
“Have you read it lately?”
“I’ve been the full-time servant of Tamás and Klara Lévi lately.”
“It’s been dishing up a steady diet of assimilationist drivel. Apparently, we’ve just got to put our faith in the Christian aristocrats in the government and all will be well. We’re supposed to keep saluting the flag and singing the anthem, just as though the anti-Jewish laws didn’t exist. Be Magyar first and Jewish second.”
“Well, we’re safer if the government considers us Magyar first.”
“But the government doesn’t consider us Magyar! I don’t have to tell you that. You’ve just done your time in the Munkaszolgálat. The government considers us Jews, plain and simple.”
“At least they consider us necessary.”
“For how much longer?” Mendel said. “We can’t work for that paper, Parisi. We should look for work at one of the left-wing rags.”
“I don’t have connections at any of those places. And I don’t have time to spare. I’ve got to start supporting this son of mine before I’m conscripted again.”
“What makes you think Eppler would consider taking us both?”
“He knows good work when he sees it. Once he reads you, he’ll want to hire you.”
Mendel gave a half laugh. “The Jewish Journal!” he said. “You’re going to drag me down there and get me a job, aren’t you.”
“Frigyes Eppler’s no conservative, or at least he wasn’t when I knew him. Past and Future was a Zionist operation if ever there was one. Every issue carried some romantic piece about Palestine and the adventures of emigration. And you might remember their lead story from May of ’36. It concerned a certain record-breaking sprinter who wasn’t to be allowed on the Hungarian Olympic team because he was a Jew. Eppler was the one who pushed that story. If he’s at the Jewish Journal now, it must be because he means to stir things up.”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Mendel said. “All right. We’ll talk to the man.” He closed his notebook and paid his bill, and they went off together toward Wesselényi utca.
On the editorial floor of the Journal they found Frigyes Eppler embroiled in a shouting match with the managing editor inside the managing editor’s glassed-in office; through the windows that looked upon the newsroom, the two men could be seen carving a series of emphases into the air as they argued. Since Andras had last seen his former editor, Eppler had gone entirely bald and had adopted a pair of horn-rimmed glasses. He was round-shouldered and heavyset; his shirttails were apt to fly free of his trousers, and his tie often showed the mark of a hasty lunch. He never seemed to be able to find his hat or his keys or his cigarette case. But in his editorial work he missed no detail. Past and Future had won international awards every year Frigyes Eppler had edited it. His greatest triumph had been his placement of the young men and women who had worked for him; his efforts on Andras’s behalf were among the many generous acts he undertook to promote the careers of his writers and copy editors and graphic artists. He had shown no surprise when Andras had been offered a place at the École Spéciale. As he had told Andras then, his aim had always been to hire people who would quit for better work before he had a chance to fire them.
Andras couldn’t make out the content of the argument with the managing editor, but it was clear that Eppler was losing. His gestures increased in size, his shouts in volume, as the altercation went on; the managing editor, though wearing a look of triumph, backed toward the door of his own office as if he meant to flee as soon as his victory was complete. At last the door flew open and the managing editor stepped onto the newsroom floor. He called an order to his secretary, trundled off down the length of the room, and escaped into the stairwell as if he were afraid Eppler might chase him. The fuming and defeated Eppler stood alone in the empty office, polishing his scalp with both hands. Andras waved in greeting.
“What is it now?” Eppler said, not looking at Andras; then, recognizing him, he gave a cry and clapped his hands to his chest as if to keep his heart from falling out. “Lévi!” he shouted. “Andras Lévi! What in God’s name are you doing here?”
“I’m here to see you, Eppler-úr.”
“How long has it been now? A hundred years? A thousand? But I’d have recognized that face anywhere. What are you wasting your time at these days?”
“Not enough,” Andras said. “That’s the problem.”
“Well, I hope you haven’t come here looking for a job. I sent you off into the world long ago. Aren’t you an architect by now?”
Andras shook his head. “I’ve just finished a two-year spell in the Munkaszolgálat. This tall fellow is a childhood friend and company-mate of mine, Mendel Horovitz.”
Mendel gave a slight bow and touched his hat in greeting, and Frigyes Eppler looked him up and down. “Horovitz,” he said. “I’ve seen your picture somewhere.”
“Mendel holds the Hungarian record in the hundred-meter dash,” Andras said.
“That’s right! Wasn’t there some scandal about you a number of years back?”
“Scandal?” Mendel showed his wry grin. “Don’t I wish.”
“They wouldn’t allow him on the Hungarian Olympic team in ’36,” Andras said. “There was a piece about it in Past and Future. You edited it yourself.”
“Of course! What a fool I am. You’re that Horovitz. Whatever have you done with yourself since then?”
“Gotten into journalism, I’m afraid.”
“Well, of all ridiculous things! So you’re here as a supplicant too?”
“Parisi and I come as a team.”
“You mean Lévi, here? Ah, you call him Parisi because of that stint of his at the École Spéciale. I was responsible for that, you know. Not that he’d ever give me credit. He’d claim it was all due to his own talent.”
“Well, he’s not such a bad draughtsman. I hired him for the paper I was editing.”
“And what paper was that?”
From his satchel, Mendel produced a few dog-eared copies of The Biting Fly. “This is the one we made in the camp at Bánhida. It’s not as funny as the one we wrote when we were posted in Subcarpathia and Transylvania, but that one got us kicked out of our company. We were made to eat our words, in fact. Twenty pages of them apiece.”
For the first time, Frigyes Eppler’s expression grew serious; he looked carefully at Andras and Mendel, and then sat down at his managing editor’s desk to page through The Biting Fly. After reading for a while in silence, he glanced up at Mendel and gave a low chuckle. “I recognize your work,” he said. “You were the one writing that man-about-town column for the Evening Courier. A smart political instrument dressed up as a young good-for-nothing’s good-for-nothing ravings. But you were pretty sharp, weren’t you?”
Mendel smiled. “At my worst.”
“Tell me something,” Eppler said in a lowered tone. “Just what are you doing here? This paper doesn’t represent the leading edge of modern thought, you know.”
“With all respect, sir, we might ask you the same question,” Mendel said.
Eppler massaged the sallow dome of his head with one hand. “A man doesn’t always find himself where he wants to be,” he said. “I was at the Pesti Napló for a while, but they let some of us go. By which you understand what I mean.” He let out an unhappy laugh that was half wheeze; he was an inveterate smoker. “At least I stayed out of the Munkaszolgálat. I’m lucky they didn’t send me to the Eastern Front, just to make an example of me. In any case, to put it simply, I had to keep body and soul together—an old habit, you might say—so when a position opened here, I took it. Better than singing in the street for my bread.”
“Which is what we’ll be doing soon,” Mendel said. “Unless we find some work.”
“Well, I can’t say I recommend this place,” Eppler said. “As you may have gathered, I don’t always see eye to eye with the rest of the editorial staff. I’m supposed to be the chief, but, as you witnessed, my managing editor often ends up managing me.”
“Perhaps you could use someone to take your side,” Andras said.
“If I were to hire you, Lévi, it wouldn’t be to take sides. It would be to get a job done, just as when you were fresh from gimnázium.”
“I’ve learned a thing or two since then.”
“I’m sure you have. And your friend here seems an interesting fellow. I can’t say, Horovitz, that I would have hired you on the basis of your Biting Fly, but I did follow your column for a time.”
“I’m flattered.”
“Don’t be. I read every rag in this town. I consider it my job.”
“Do you think you can find something for us?” Mendel asked. “I hate to be blunt, but someone’s got to be. Lévi here has a son to look out for.”
“A son! Good God. If you’ve got a son, Lévi, then I’m an old man.” He sighed and hitched up his trousers. “What the hell, boys. Come to work here if you want to work so badly. I’ll dig something up for you.”
That night Andras found himself at the kitchen table at home, sitting with his mother and the baby while Klara lay asleep on the sofa in the front room. His mother removed a pin from the nightshirt she was sewing and sank it into her gray velveteen pincushion, the same one she’d used for as long as Andras could remember. She had brought her old sewing box with her to Budapest, and Andras had been surprised to find that his mind contained a comprehensive record of its contents: the frayed tape measure, the round blue tin that held a minestrone of buttons, the black-handled scissors with their bright blades, the mysterious prickle-edged marking wheel, the spools and spools of colored silk and cotton. Her tiny whipstitches were as tight and precise as the ones that had edged Andras’s collars when he was a boy. When she finished her row of hemming, she tied off the thread and cut it with her teeth.
“You used to like to watch me sew when you were little,” she said.
“I remember. It seemed like magic.”
She raised an eyebrow. “If it were magic, it would go faster.”
“Speed is the enemy of precision,” Andras said. “That’s what my drawing master in Paris used to tell us.”
His mother knotted the end of the thread and raised her eyes to him again. “It’s a long time since you left school, isn’t it?” she said.
“Forever.”
“You’ll go back to your studies when this is all over.”
“Yes, that’s what Apa says, too. But I don’t know what will happen. I have a wife and son now.”
“Well, it’s good news about the job,” his mother said. “You were wise to think of Eppler.”
“Yes, it’s good news,” Andras said, but it felt less like good news than he’d imagined it would. Though he was relieved to know he had a way to earn money, the idea of going back to work for Eppler seemed to erase his time in Paris entirely. He knew it made no sense; he’d met Klara in Paris, after all, and here on the table before him, asleep in a wicker basket, was Tamás Lévi, the miraculous evidence of their life together. But to arrive at work the next morning and receive the day’s assignments from Eppler—it was what he had been doing at nineteen, at twenty. It seemed to negate the possibility that he would ever complete his training, that he would ever get to do the work he craved. Everything in the world stood against his going back to school. The France in which he’d been a student had disappeared. His friends were dispersed. His teachers had fled. No school in Hungary would open its doors to him. No free country would open its borders to him. The war worsened daily. Their lives were in danger now. He suspected it wouldn’t be long before Budapest was bombed.
“Don’t give me such a dark look,” his mother said. “I’m not responsible for the situation. I’m just your mother.”
The baby began to stir in his basket. He shifted his head back and forth against the blankets, scrunched his face into a pink asterisk, and let out a cry. Andras bent over the basket and lifted the baby to his chest.
“I’ll walk him around the courtyard,” he said.
“You can’t take him outside,” his mother said. “He’ll catch his death of cold.”
“I won’t have him wake Klara. She’s been up every night for weeks.”
“Well, for pity’s sake, put a blanket over him. And put a coat over your shoulders. Here, hold him like this, and let me put his hat on. Keep his blanket over his head so he’ll stay warm.”
He let his mother swaddle them both against the cold. “Don’t stay out long,” she said, patting the baby’s back. “He’ll fall asleep after you walk him for a minute or two.”
It was a relief to get out of the close heat of the apartment. The night was clear and cold, with a frozen slice of moon suspended in the sky by an invisible filament. Beyond the haze of city lights he could make out the faint ice crystals of stars. The baby was cocooned against him, quiet. He could feel the rapid rise and fall of his son’s chest against his own. He walked around the courtyard and hummed a lullaby, circling the fountain where he and Klara had seen the little dark-haired girl trailing a hand through the water. The stone basin was crusted with ice now. The courtyard security light illuminated its depths, and as he leaned over it he could make out the fiery glints of goldfish beneath the surface. There, beneath the cover of the ice, their flickering lives went on. He wanted to know how they did it, how they withstood the slowing of their hearts, the chilling of their blood, through the long darkness of winter.
There was something otherworldly, it seemed to Andras, about the advertisements published in the Magyar Jewish Journal. As assistant layout editor it was his job to arrange those neatly illustrated boxes in the margins that flanked the articles; inside the bordered rectangles depicting clothes and shoes and soap, ladies’ perfume and hats, the war seemed not to exist. It was impossible to reconcile this ad for cordovan leather evening shoes with the idea of Mátyás spending a winter outdoors in Ukraine, perhaps without a good pair of boots or an adequate set of foot rags. It was impossible to read this druggist’s advertisement listing the merits of its Patented Knee Brace, and then to think of Tibor having to set a serviceman’s compound fracture with a length of wood torn from a barracks floor. The signs of war—the absence of silk stockings, the scarcity of metal goods, the disappearance of American and English products—were negations rather than additions; the blank spaces where the advertisements for those items would have appeared had been filled with other images, other distractions. The sporting-goods store on Szerb utca was the only one whose ad made reference to the war, however obliquely; it proclaimed the merits of a product called the Outdoorsman’s Equipage, a knapsack containing everything you would need for a sojourn in the Munkaszolgálat: a collapsible cup, a set of interlocking cutlery, a mess tin, an insulated canteen, a thick woolen blanket, stout boots, a camping knife, a waterproof slicker, a gas lantern, a first-aid kit. It wasn’t advertised for use in the Munkaszolgálat, but what else would Budapest residents be doing outdoors in the middle of January?
As for the articles that occupied the space between the ads, Andras could only gape at the rigid and shortsighted optimism he saw reflected there. This paper was supposed to be the mouthpiece of the Jewish community; how could it proclaim, on its editorial page, that the Hungarian Jew was at one with the Magyar nation in language, spirit, culture, and feeling, when the Hungarian Jew was, in fact, being sent into the mouth of battle to remove mines, so that the Hungarian army might pass through to support its Nazi allies? Mendel had been right about the paper’s content. To the extent that it reported the news, it did so with the sole apparent aim of keeping Hungarian Jews from falling into a panic. His second week at the paper, it was reported with great relish that Admiral Horthy had fired the most staunchly pro-German members of his staff; here was concrete evidence of the solidarity of the Hungarian leadership with the Jewish people.
But the Journal wasn’t the only paper in town, and the smaller left-leaning independents carried news that reflected the world Andras had glimpsed in the labor service. There were reports of a massacre carried out in Kamenets-Podolsk not long after Hungary entered the war against the Soviet Union; one paper printed an anonymous interview with a member of a Hungarian sapper platoon, a man who’d been present at the mass killing and had been consumed by guilt since his return. After the Hungarian Central Alien Control Office had rounded up Jews of dubious citizenship, this man reported, the detainees had been handed over to the German authorities in Galicia, trucked to Kolomyya, and marched ten kilometers to a string of bomb craters near Kamenets-Podolsk, under the guard of SS units and the source’s Hungarian sapper platoon. There, every one of them was shot to death, along with the original Jewish population of Kamenets-Podolsk—twenty-three thousand Jews in all. The idea had been to clear Hungary of Jewish aliens, but many of the Jews who were killed were Hungarians who hadn’t been able to produce their citizenship papers quickly enough. This, it seemed, was what had troubled the Hungarian who’d given the interview: He had killed his own countrymen in cold blood. So it seemed that the Hungarians did feel a certain solidarity with their Jewish brethren after all, though in the source’s case the solidarity hadn’t run deep enough to keep him from pulling the trigger.
Then, in the last week of February, there was a report published in the People’s Voice about another massacre of Jews, this one in the Délvidék, the strip of Yugoslavia that Hitler had returned to Hungary ten months earlier. A certain General Feketehalmy-Czeydner, the paper reported, had ordered the execution of thousands of Jews under the guise of routing Tito partisans. Refugees from the region had begun to drift back to Budapest with horrifying stories of the killings—people had been dragged to the Danube beach, made to strip in the freezing cold, lined up in rows of four on the diving board over a hole that had been cannon-blasted into the ice of the river, and machine-gunned into the water. Andras arrived early one morning at the Magyar Jewish Journal to find his employer sitting in the middle of the newsroom in a mute paroxysm of horror, a copy of the Voice open on the desk before him. He handed the paper to Andras and retreated into his office without a word. When the managing editor arrived, another glass-enclosed argument ensued, but no word about the massacre appeared in the Jewish Journal.
Later that same week, Ilana Lévi went to Gróf Apponyi Albert Hospital and gave birth to a baby boy. There had been a letter from Tibor only three days before: He hoped to be released from his labor company by Wednesday evening, and so hadn’t despaired of being home in time for the birth. But the event had come and gone without any sign of him. On Ilana’s first night home from the hospital, Andras and Klara brought her Shabbos dinner. Though she was still exhausted from the loss of blood, she had insisted upon setting the table herself; there were the candlesticks she’d received as a wedding present from Béla and Flóra, and the Florentine plates her mother had given her to take back to Hungary. She and Klara lit the candles, Andras blessed the wine, and they sat down to eat while the babies slept in their arms. The room held a deep and pervasive quiet that seemed to emanate from the architecture itself. The apartment was on the ground floor, three narrow rooms made smaller by the heavy wooden beams that supported them. The French doors of the dining room looked out onto the courtyard of the building, where a bicycle mechanic had cultivated a bone-yard of rusted frames and handlebars, clusters of spokes, mounds of petrified chains. The collection, dusted with snow, looked to Andras like a battlefield littered with bodies. He found himself staring out into it as the light grew blue and dim, his eyes moving between the shadows. He was the one who saw the figure through the frosty glass: a dark narrow form picking its way through the bicycles, like a ghost come back to look for his fallen comrades. At first he thought the form was nothing more than the congelation of his own fear; then, as the figure assumed a familiar shape, a manifestation of his desire. He hesitated to call Ilana’s attention to it because he thought at first that he might be imagining it. But the figure approached the windows and stared at the scene within—Andras at the head of the table with Klara at his side, a baby at Klara’s breast; Ilana with her back to the window, her arm crooked around something in a blanket—and the ghost’s hand flew to his mouth, and his legs folded beneath him. It was Tibor, home from his labor company. Andras shoved his chair away from the table and ran for the door. In an instant he was in the courtyard with his brother, both of them sitting in the snow amid the litter of dismembered bicycles, and then the women were beside them, and in another minute Tibor held his son and his wife in his arms.
Tibor. Tibor.
They shouted his name in a frenzy of insistence, as if trying to convince themselves he was real, and they brought him into the house. Tibor was deathly pale in the dim light of the sitting room. His small silver-rimmed glasses were gone, the bones of his face a sharp scaffolding beneath the skin. His coat was in rags, his trousers stiff with ice and dried blood, his boots a disaster of shredded leather. His military cap was gone. In its place he wore a fleece-lined motorcyclist’s cap from which one ear-covering had been torn away. The exposed ear was crimson with cold. Tibor tugged the cap from his head and let it fall to the floor. His hair looked as though it had been hacked to the scalp with dull scissors some weeks earlier. He had the smell of the Munkaszolgálat about him, the reek of men living together without adequate water or soap or tooth powder. That smell was mingled with the sulfurous odor of brown-coal smoke and the shit-and-sawdust stink of boxcars.
“Let me see my boy,” he said, his voice scarcely louder than a whisper, as if he hadn’t used it in days.
Ilana handed him the baby in its white swaddling of blankets. Tibor laid the baby on the sofa and knelt beside him. He took off the blanket, the cap covering the baby’s fine dark hair, the long-sleeved cotton shirt, the little pants, the socks, the diaper; through it all, the baby was silent and wide-eyed, its hands curled into fists. Tibor touched the dried remnant of the baby’s umbilical cord. He held the baby’s feet, the baby’s hands. He put his face against the crease of the baby’s neck. The baby’s name was Ádám. It was what Tibor and Ilana had decided in the letters they’d exchanged. He said the name now, as if trying to bring together the idea of this baby and the actual naked child lying on the sofa. Then he glanced up at Ilana.
“Ilanka,” he said. “I’m so sorry. I wanted to be home in time.”
“No,” she said, bending to him. “Please don’t cry.”
But he was crying. There was nothing anyone could do to stop it. He cried, and they sat down on the floor with him as though they were all in mourning. But they were not in mourning, not then; they were together, the six of them, in what was still a city unghettoized, unburned, unbombed. They sat together on the floor until Tibor stopped crying, until he could draw a full breath. He drew one deep throaty breath after another, and finally took a slow inhale through his nose.
“Oh, God,” he said, with a horrified look at Andras. “I stink. Get me out of these clothes.” He began pulling at the collar of his shredded coat. “I shouldn’t have touched the baby before I washed. I’m filthy!” He got up off the floor and went to the kitchen, leaving a trail of stiff clothing behind him. They heard the clang of a tin washtub being dropped onto the kitchen tiles, and the roar of water in the sink.
“I’ll help him,” Ilana said. “Will you take the baby?”
“Give him to me,” Klara said, and handed Tamás to Andras. They sat together on the sofa, Andras and Klara and the two babies, while Ilana heated water for Tibor’s bath. In the meantime, Tibor ate dinner in his ragged undershirt and Munkaszolgálat trousers. Then Ilana undressed him and washed him from head to toe with a new cake of soap. The smell of almonds drifted in from the kitchen. When that was finished she dressed him in a pair of flannel-lined pajamas, and he moved toward the bedroom as though he were walking in a dream. Andras followed him to the bed and sat down beside him with Tamás in his arms. Klara was close behind, holding Tibor’s son. Ilana put a pair of hot towel-wrapped bricks into the bed at Tibor’s feet and pulled the eiderdown up to his chin. They all sat with him on the bed, still trying to believe he was there.
But Tibor, or part of Tibor, had not yet returned; as he drifted to the edge of sleep he made a frightened noise, as if a stone had fallen onto his chest and knocked the wind out of him. He looked at them all, eyes wide, and said, “I’m sorry.” His eyes closed again, and he drifted again, and made that frightened noise—Hunh!—and jerked awake. “I’m sorry,” he said again, and drifted, and woke. He was sorry. His eyelids closed; he breathed; he made his noise and jerked awake, haunted by something that waited on the other side of consciousness. They stayed with him through a full hour of it until he fell into a deeper sleep at last.
Tibor’s favorite coffeehouse, the Jókai, had been replaced by a barbershop with six gleaming new chairs and a brace of mustachioed barbers. That morning the barbers were practicing their art upon the heads of two boys in military uniform. The boys looked as though they could scarcely be out of high school. They had identical jutting chins and identical peaked eyebrows; their feet, on the barber-chair footrests, were identically pigeon-toed. They must have been brothers, if not twins. Andras glanced at Tibor, whose look seemed to ask what these two brothers meant, patronizing the barbers who had neatly razored away the Jókai Káveház and replaced it with this sterile black-and-white-tiled shop. There was no question of Andras and Tibor’s stopping in for a shave. The Jókai Barbershop was a traitor.
Instead they went back down Andrássy út to the Artists’ Café, a Belle Époque establishment with wrought-iron tables, amber-shaded lamps, and a glass case full of cakes. Andras insisted upon ordering a slice of Sachertorte, against Tibor’s objections—it was too expensive, too rich, he couldn’t eat more than a bite.
“You need something rich,” Andras said. “Something made with butter.”
Tibor mustered a wan smile. “You sound like our mother.”
“If I do, you should listen.”
That smile again—a pale, preserved-looking version of Tibor’s old smile, like something kept in a jar in a museum. When the torte arrived, he cut a piece with his fork and let it sit at the edge of the plate.
“You’ve heard the news from the Délvidék by now,” Tibor said.
Andras stirred his coffee and extracted the spoon. “I’ve read an article and heard some awful rumors.”
Tibor gave a barely perceptible nod. “I was there,” he said.
Andras raised his eyes to his brother’s. It was disconcerting to see Tibor without his glasses, which had refracted his unusually large eyes into balance with the rest of his features. Without them he looked raw and vulnerable. The diet of cabbage soup and brown bread and coffee had whittled him down to this elemental state; he was essence of Tibor, reduction of Tibor, the necessary ingredient that might be recombined with ordinary life to produce the Tibor that Andras knew. He wasn’t sure he wanted to hear what had happened to Tibor in the Délvidék. He bent to his coffee rather than meet those eyes.
“I was there a month and a half ago,” Tibor began, and told the story. It had been late January. His Munkaszolgálat company had been attached to the Fifth Army Corps; they’d been slaving for an infantry company in Szeged, building pontoon bridges on the Tisza so the company could move its materiel across. One morning their sergeant had called them away from that work and told them they were needed for a ditch-digging project. They were trucked to a town called Mošorin, marched to a field, and commanded to dig a trench. “I remember the dimensions,” Tibor said. “Twenty meters long, two and a half meters wide, two meters deep. We had to do it by nightfall.”
At the table beside them, a young woman sitting with her two little girls gave Tibor a long look and then glanced away. He touched the scroll embellishment at the end of his fork and continued in a lowered voice.
“We dug the trench,” he said. “We thought it was for a battle. But it wasn’t for a battle. After dark, they marched a group of people to the field. Men and women. A hundred and twenty-three of them. We were sitting on one side of the ditch eating our soup.”
The young woman had turned slightly in her chair. She was perhaps thirty years old; they saw now that she wore a silver Star of David on a narrow chain at her neck. She raised her eyes toward her children, who were sharing a cup of chocolate and finishing the last crumbs of a slice of poppyseed strudel.
When Tibor spoke again, his voice was scarcely louder than a whisper. “There were children there, too,” he said. “Teenagers. Some of them couldn’t have been older than twelve or thirteen.”
“Zsuzsi, Anni,” the woman said. “Why don’t you go choose some little cakes to take to your grandmother?”
“I’m not done with my chocolate,” the smaller girl said.
“Tibor,” Andras said, laying a hand on his brother’s arm. “Tell me later.”
“No,” the woman said quietly, meeting Andras’s eye. “It’s all right.” To the girls she said, “Go ahead, I’ll come in a moment.” The older girl put on her coat and helped the younger one get her sleeves turned right side out. Then they went to the pastry counter and stared at the display of cakes, their fingers pressed against the glass. The woman folded her hands in her lap and looked down at her empty teacup.
“They lined up these people in front of the ditch,” Tibor said. “Hungarians. Jews, all of them. They made them strip naked and stand there in the freezing cold for half an hour. And they shot them,” he said. “Even the children. Then we had to bury them. Some of them weren’t dead yet. The soldiers turned their guns on us while we did it.”
Andras glanced at the woman beside them, who had covered her mouth with her hand. At the pastry counter beyond, her two little girls argued the merits of the cakes.
“What’s to stop them from doing it to us?” Tibor said. “We’re not safe here. Do you understand me?”
“I understand,” Andras said. Of course they weren’t safe. There wasn’t a minute that passed without his thinking about it. And the danger was deeper than Tibor knew: Andras still hadn’t told him about the situation with Klara and the Ministry of Justice.
“The threat is here inside the country,” Tibor said. “We’re lying to ourselves if we think we’ll be fine as long as Horthy holds off a German occupation. What about the Arrow Cross? What about plain old Hungarian bigotry?”
“What do you propose we do?” Andras said.
“Let me tell you something,” Tibor said. “I want to get off this continent. I want to get my wife and son out. If we stay in Europe we’re going to die.”
“How are we supposed to get out? The border’s closed. It’s impossible to get travel documents. No one will let us in. And there are the babies. It’s bad enough to imagine doing it by ourselves.” He looked over his shoulder; even to speak of these things in public seemed dangerous. “We can’t leave now,” he said. “It’s impossible.”
The woman at the next table sent a glance in Andras and Tibor’s direction, her dark eyes moving between the two of them. At the counter, her little girls had made their selections; the older one turned and called for her to come. She stood and put on her hat and coat. As she slipped through the narrow space between the tables, she gave Andras and Tibor a curt nod. It wasn’t until after she and her girls had disappeared through the beveled glass doors of the café that Andras noticed she’d dropped her handkerchief on the table. It was a fine linen handkerchief with a lace edge, embroidered with the letter B. Andras lifted it to reveal a folded scrap of paper, the stub of a streetcar ticket, onto which something had been scratched in pencil: K might be able to help you. And an address in Angyalföld, near the end of the streetcar line.
“Look at this,” Andras said, and handed the ticket stub to his brother.
Glassesless, Tibor squinted at the woman’s tiny writing. “K might be able to help you,” he said. “Who’s K?”
They rode out past the apartment blocks of central Pest, out into an industrial suburb where textile factories and machine works exhaled gray smoke into a mackerel sky. Military supply trucks rumbled down the streets, their beds stacked with steel tubes and I-beams, concrete flume sections and cinderblocks and giant parabolas of iron like leviathan ribs. They got off the streetcar at the end of the line and walked out past an ancient madhouse and a wool-washing plant, past three blocks of crumbling tenements, to a small side street called Frangepán köz, where a cluster of cottages seemed to have survived from the days when Angyalföld had been pastureland and vineyard; from behind the houses came the chatter and musk of goats. Number 18 was a plaster-and-timber cottage with a steep wood-shingled roof and flaking shutters. The window frames were peeling, the door scuffed and toothy along its edge. Winter remnants of ivy traced an unreadable map across the façade. As Andras and Tibor crossed the garden, a high gate at the side of the house opened to let forth a little green cart pulled by two strong white wethers with curving horns. The cart was packed with milk cans and crates of cheese. At the gate stood a tiny woman with a hazel switch in her hand. She wore an embroidered skirt and peasant boots, and her deep-set eyes were hard and bright as polished stones. She gave Andras a look so penetrating it seemed to touch the back of his skull.
“Does someone with the initial K live here?” he asked her.
“The initial K?” She must have been eighty, but she stood straight-backed against the wind. “Why do you want to know?”
Andras glanced at the ticket scrap on which the woman at the café had written the address. “This is 18 Frangepán köz, isn’t it?”
“What do you want with K?”
“A friend sent us here.”
“What friend?”
“A woman with two little girls.”
“You’re Jewish,” the old woman said; it was an observation, not a question. And something changed in her features as she said it, a certain softening of the lines around her eyes, an almost imperceptible relaxation of the shoulders.
“That’s right,” Andras said. “We’re Jewish.”
“And brothers. He’s the elder.” She pointed her hazel stick at Tibor.
They both nodded.
The woman lowered her stick and scrutinized Tibor as if she were trying to see beneath his skin. “You’re just back from the Munkaszolgálat,” she said.
“Yes.”
She reached into a basket for a paper-wrapped round of cheese and pressed it into his hand. When he protested, she gave him another.
“K is my grandson,” she said. “Miklós Klein. He’s a good boy, but he’s not a magician. I can’t promise he can help you. Talk to him if you like, though. Go to the door. My husband will let you in.” She closed and locked the gates of the yard behind her; then she touched the wethers on their backs with the hazel wand, and they tossed their white heads and pulled the cart into the street.
As soon as she had gone, a clutch of goats came up to the gate and bleated at Andras and Tibor. The goats seemed to expect some kind of gift. Andras showed them his empty pockets, but they wouldn’t back away. They wanted to butt their heads against Andras’s and Tibor’s hands. The kids wanted a sniff at their shoes. At the far end of the yard a stable had been converted into a goat house, sheltered from the wind and piled with new hay. Four does stood feeding at a tin trough, their coats glossy and thick.
“Not a bad place to be a goat,” Andras said. “Even in the middle of winter.”
“A better place to be a goat than a man,” Tibor said, glancing toward the factory chimneys in the near distance.
But Andras thought he wouldn’t mind living farther from the city center someday. Not, preferably, in the shadow of a textile factory, but maybe in a place where they could have a house, a yard big enough for goats and chickens and a few fruit trees. He wanted to come back with his notebook and drawing tools and study the construction of this cottage, the layout of these grounds. It was the first time in months he’d had the desire to do an architectural drawing. As he followed his brother up the walk he experienced a strange sensation in his chest, a feeling of rising, as if his lungs were filled with yeast.
When Tibor knocked on the door, a dust of yellow paint drifted down like pollen. There were shuffling footsteps from inside; the door opened to reveal a tiny dried man with two uplifted wings of gray hair. He wore a white undershirt and a dressing gown of faded crimson wool. From behind him came a strain of scratchy Bartók and the smell of pancakes.
“The same.”
“Does Miklós Klein live here?”
“Who wants to know?”
“Tibor and Andras Lévi. We were told to come see him. Your wife said he was at home.”
The man opened the door and beckoned them into a small bright room with a red-painted concrete floor. On a table near the window, the remains of breakfast lay beside a crisply folded newspaper. “Wait here,” the elder Klein said. He went to the end of a brief hallway decorated with portraits of men and women in antique-looking costumes, the men in military uniform, the women in the cinch-waisted gowns of the previous century. A door opened and closed at the end of the hall. On the wall, a cuckoo clock struck the hour and the cuckoo sang eleven times. A collection of photographs on a side table showed a bright-eyed boy of six or seven holding the hands of a beautiful dark-haired young woman and a melancholy, intelligent-looking man; there were photographs of the three of them at the beach, on bicycles, in a park, on the steps of a synagogue. The collection conveyed the sense of a shrine or a memorial.
After a few minutes the door opened at the end of the hall, and the elder Klein shuffled toward them and beckoned with one hand. “Please,” he said. “This way.”
Andras followed his brother down the hall, past the portraits of the military men and tight-laced women. At the door, the old man stepped aside to let them in, then retreated to the sitting room.
The doorway was a portal to another world still. On one side was the universe they had just left, where breakfast things lay on a wooden table in a shaft of sun, and the bleating of goats floated in from the yard, and a dozen photographs suggested what had vanished; on the other side, in this room, were what looked like the accoutrements of a spy operation. The walls were plastered with pin-studded maps of Europe and the Mediterranean, with intricate flowcharts and newspaper clippings and photographs of men and women working the dry soil in desert settlements. On the desk, wedged between towering stacks of official-looking documents, stood a brace of typewriters, one with a Hungarian keyboard and the other with a Hebrew one. An Orion radio whined and crackled on a low table, and a quartet of clocks beside it showed the time in Constanţa, Istanbul, Cairo, and Jerusalem. Papers and dossiers rose in waist-high columns all around the room, crowding the desk, the bed, every centimeter of windowsill and table. At the center of it all stood a pale young person in a moth-eaten sweater, his short black hair like a ragged crown, his eyes raw and red as if from drink or grief. He looked to be about Andras’s age, and was unmistakably the little boy from the photographs, grown into this haggard young man. He pulled out the desk chair, moved a stack of dossiers onto the floor, and sat down to face the brothers.
“It’s all over,” he said by way of greeting. “I’m not doing it anymore.”
“We were told you could help us,” Tibor said.
“Who told you that?”
“A woman with two little girls. Initial B. She heard me talking to my brother at a café.”
“Talking to your brother about what?”
“About getting out of Hungary,” Tibor said. “One way or another.”
“First of all,” Klein said, pointing a narrow finger at Tibor, “you shouldn’t have been talking to your brother about a thing like that at a café, where anyone could hear you. Secondly, I should strangle that woman, whoever she is, for giving you my address! Initial B? Two little girls?” He put his fingers to his forehead and seemed to think. “Bruner,” he said. “Magdolna. It’s got to be. I got her brother out. But that was two years ago.”
“Is that what you do?” Andras said. “Arrange emigrations?”
“Used to,” Klein said. “Not anymore.”
“Then what’s all this stuff?”
“Ongoing projects,” Klein said. “But I’m not accepting new work.”
“We’ve got to leave the country,” Tibor said. “I’ve just been in the Délvidék. They’re killing Hungarian Jews there. It won’t be long before they come for us. We understand you can help us get out.”
“You don’t understand,” Klein said. “It’s impossible now. Look at this.” He produced a clipping from a Romanian newspaper. “This happened just a few weeks ago. This ship left Constanţa in December. The Struma. Seven hundred and sixty-nine passengers, all Romanian Jews. They were told they’d get Palestinian entry visas once the ship reached Turkey. But the ship was a wreck. Literally. Its engine was salvaged from the bottom of the Danube. And there were no entry visas. It was all a scam. Maybe at one time they’d’ve gotten in without visas—the British used to allow some paperless immigrations. Not anymore! Britain wouldn’t take the boat. They wouldn’t take anyone, not even the children. A Turkish coast guard ship towed it into the Black Sea. No fuel, no water, no food for the passengers. Left it there. What do you think happened? It was torpedoed. Boom. End of story. They think it was the Soviets who did it.”
Andras and Tibor sat silent, taking it in. Seven hundred and sixty-nine lives—a ship full of Jewish men, women, and children. An explosion in the night—how it must have sounded, how it must have felt from a berth deep inside the ship: the shock and quake of it, the sudden panic. And then the inrush of dark water.
“But what about Magdolna Bruner’s brother?” Tibor asked. “How did you get him out?”
“Things were different then,” Klein said. “I got people out along the Danube. Smuggled them out on cargo barges and riverboats. We had contacts in Palestine. We had help from the Palestine Office here. I got a lot of people out, a hundred and sixty-eight of them. If I were smart, I’d have gone, too. But my grandparents were all alone. They couldn’t make a trip like that, and I couldn’t leave them. I thought I might be of more use here. But I won’t do it anymore, so you might as well go home.”
“But this is a disaster for Palestine, this Struma,” Andras said. “They’ll have to loosen the immigration restrictions now.”
“I don’t know what’ll happen,” Klein said. “They have a new colonial secretary now, a man called Cranborne. He’s supposed to be more liberal-minded. But I don’t know if he can convince the Foreign Office to relax its quotas. Even if he could, it’s far too dangerous now.”
“If it’s a matter of money, we’ll come up with it,” Tibor said.
Andras gave his brother a sharp glance. Where did Tibor expect them to get the money? But Tibor wouldn’t look at him. He kept his eyes fixed on Klein, who ran his hands through his electrified hair and leaned forward toward them.
“It’s not the money,” Klein said. “It’s just that it’s a mad thing to try.”
“It might be madder to stay,” Tibor said.
“Budapest is still one of the safest places for Jews in Europe,” Klein said.
“Budapest lives in the shadow of Berlin.”
Klein pushed back his chair and got up to pace his square of floor. “The horrible thing is that I know you’re right. We’re mad to feel any sense of security here. If you’ve been in the labor service, you know that well enough. But I can’t take the lives of two young men into my hands. Not now.”
“It’s not just us,” Tibor said. “It’s our wives, too. And a couple of babies. And our younger brother, once he returns from Ukraine. And our parents in Debrecen. We all need to get out.”
“You’re crazy!” Klein said. “Plain crazy. I can’t smuggle babies down the Danube while the country’s at war. I can’t be responsible for elderly parents. I refuse to discuss this. I’m sorry. You both seem like good men. Maybe we’ll meet in happier times and have a drink together.” He went to the door and opened it onto the hallway.
Tibor didn’t move. He scanned the stacks of papers, the typewriters, the radio, the dossier-smothered furniture, as if they might offer a different answer. But it was Andras who spoke.
“Shalhevet Rosen,” he said. “Have you heard that name?”
“No.”
“She’s in Palestine, working to get Jews out of Europe. She’s the wife of a friend of mine from school.”
“Well, maybe she can help you. I wish you luck.”
“Maybe you’ve had some correspondence with her.”
“Not that I recall.”
“Maybe she can help get us visas.”
“A visa means nothing,” Klein said. “You’ve still got to get there.”
Tibor glanced around the room again. He gave Klein a penetrating look. “This is what you do,” he said. “Do you mean to say you’re finished now?”
“I won’t send people to another Struma,” Klein said. “You can understand that. And I have to look out for my grandparents. If I get caught and thrown in jail, they’ll be all alone.”
Tibor paused at the door, his hat in his hands. “You’ll change your mind,” he said.
“I hope not.”
“Let us leave our address, at least.”
“I’m telling you, it’s no use. Goodbye, gentlemen. Farewell. Adieu.” He ushered them into the dim hallway and retreated into his room, latching the door behind him.
In the main room Andras and Tibor found the breakfast things cleared away and the elder Klein installed on the sofa, newspaper in hand. When he became aware of them standing before him, he lowered the paper and said, “Well?”
“Well,” Tibor said. “We’ll be going now. Please tell your wife we appreciate her kindness.” He raised one of the paper-wrapped rounds of goat cheese.
“One of her best,” Klein-the-elder said. “She must have taken a shine to you. She doesn’t give those away lightly.”
“She gave me two,” Tibor said, and smiled.
“Ah! Now you’re making me jealous.”
“Maybe she can prevail upon your grandson to help us. I’m afraid he turned us away without much hope.”
“Miklós is a moody boy,” the elder Klein said. “His work is difficult. He changes his mind about it daily. Does he know how to reach you?”
Tibor took a small blunt pencil from his breast pocket and asked Klein’s grandfather for a piece of paper, apologizing for the fact that he didn’t have a name card. He wrote his address on the scrap and left it on the breakfast table.
“There it is,” Tibor said. “In case he changes his mind.”
Klein’s grandfather made a noise of assent. From the yard, the raised voices of goats made a pessimistic counterpoint. The wind clattered the shutters against the house, a sound directly from Andras’s deepest childhood. He had the feeling of having stepped out of the flow of time—as if he and Tibor, when they passed through the doorway of this house, would reenter a different Budapest altogether, one in which the cars had been replaced by carriages, the electric streetlights by gaslights, the women’s knee-length skirts by ankle-length ones, the metro system erased, the news of war expunged from the pages of the Pesti Napló. The twentieth century cut clean away from the tissue of time like an act of divine surgery.
But when they opened the outer door it was all still there: the trucks rumbling along the broad cross-street at the end of the block, the towering smokestacks of the textile plant, the film advertisements plastered along a plywood construction wall. He and his brother walked in silence back toward the streetcar line and caught a near-empty train back toward the city center. It took them down Kárpát utca, with its machine-repair shops, then over the bridge behind Nyugati Station, and finally to Andrássy út, where they got off and headed toward home. But when they reached the corner of Hársfa utca, Tibor turned. Hands in his pockets, he walked the block to the gray stone building where they’d lived before Andras had gone to Paris. On the third floor were their windows, now uncurtained and dark. A row of broken flowerpots stood on the balcony; an empty bird feeder hung from the rail. Tibor looked up at the balcony, the wind lifting his collar.
“Can you blame me?” he said. “Do you understand why I want to get out?”
“I understand,” Andras said.
“Think about what I told you at the café. That happened here in Hungary. Now think what must be happening in Germany and Poland. You wouldn’t believe the things I’ve heard. People are being starved and crowded to death in ghettoes. People are being shot by the thousands. Horthy can’t hold it off forever. And the Allies don’t care about the Jews, not enough to make a difference on the ground. We have to take care of ourselves.”
“But what’s the use, if we die doing it?”
“If we have visas, we’ll have some measure of protection. Write to Shalhevet. See if there’s anything her organization can do.”
“It’ll take a long time. Months, maybe, just to exchange a few letters.”
“Then you’d better start now,” Tibor said.