IN THE WEEKS that followed, he tried not to think about the Struma. He tried not to think about the deceived passengers who found themselves aboard a wreck of a ship, ill-provisioned and ill-equipped for the journey. He tried not to think about the prospect of their own passage down the Danube, the constant fear of discovery, his wife and son suffering for lack of food and water; he tried not to think about leaving his brother and his parents behind in Europe. He tried to think only of the necessity of getting out, and the means for arranging the trip. He wired Rosen to tell him of the change in their situation, the new urgency that had come upon them. Two weeks later, a reply came via air mail with the news that Shalhevet had secured six emergency visas—six!—enough for Andras and Klara, Tibor and Ilana, and the children. Once they arrived in Palestine, he wrote, it would be easier to arrange visas for the others—for Mendel Horovitz, who would be so valuable to the Yishuv; and for György and Elza and Andras’s parents and the rest of the family. There was no time to celebrate the news; there was too much to be done. Klara had to write to her solicitor in Paris to hasten the sale of the property. Andras had to write to his parents to explain what was happening, and why. And they had to see Klein.
It was Klara’s idea that they should go together, all six of them. She believed he might be more inclined to help if he met the people he’d be saving. They arranged to go on a Sunday afternoon; they dressed in visiting clothes and pushed the babies in their perambulators. Klara and Ilana walked ahead, their summer hats dipping toward each other like two bellflowers. Andras and Tibor followed. They might have been any Hungarian family out for a Sunday stroll. No one would have guessed that they were missing a seventh, a brother who was lost in Ukraine. No one would have guessed that they were trying to arrange an illegal flight from Europe. In her pocketbook Klara carried a telegram from her solicitor, stating that her property on the rue de Sévigné would be listed for ninety thousand francs, and that the transfer of the money from the sale, though difficult, might be accomplished through his contacts in Vienna, who had contacts in Budapest. Nothing would be done in Klara’s name; ownership of the building had already been officially transferred to the non-Jewish solicitor himself, because it had become illegal for Jews to own real estate in occupied France. Everyone would have to be paid along the way, of course, but if the sale went well, there would still be some seventy thousand francs left over. No one would have known, looking at Klara as she walked along Váci út that Sunday afternoon—her fine-boned back held straight, her features composed under the pale blue shadow of her hat—how unhappy she’d been two nights earlier as she’d drafted a telegram to her solicitor, instructing him to make the sale. It had been a long time since she and Andras had imagined they might go back someday to reclaim their Paris lives. But the apartment and the studio were real things that still belonged to her, things that marked out a territory for her in the city that had been her home for seventeen years. The property had made the impossible seem possible; it made them believe that everything might change, that they might return someday. The decision to sell the building carried a sense of finality. They were giving up that source of hope in order to fund a desperate journey that might fail, to a place that was utterly foreign to them—an embattled desert territory ruled by the British. But they had made their decision. They would try. And so Klara had written to her solicitor, directing him to forward the proceeds of the sale to his agents in Vienna and Budapest.
At the house in Frangepán köz, where time stood still and the very sunlight filtering down through the high clouds seemed antique, they found the milk goats bleating in their yard and pulling at a stack of sweet hay. Seven-month-old Tamás stared in fascination. He looked at Klara as though to ask if he should be alarmed. When he saw she was smiling, he turned again to the goats and pointed a finger.
“Our sons are city boys,” Tibor said. “By the time I was his age, I’d seen a thousand goats.”
“Perhaps they won’t be city boys for long,” Klara said.
They turned away from the goats and walked the stone path to the door. Tibor knocked, and Klein’s grandmother answered, her white hair hidden under a kerchief, her dress covered with a red-embroidered apron. From the kitchen came the smell of stuffed cabbage. Andras, exhausted from the week’s work, became suddenly and ravenously hungry. Klein’s grandmother beckoned them into the bright sitting room, where the elder Mr. Klein sat in an armchair with his feet soaking in a tin basin. He wore the same faded crimson robe he’d worn when Andras and Tibor had last visited; his hair stood up in the same winged style, as if his head meant to take flight. A haze of tea-scented steam wreathed his legs. He raised a hand in greeting.
“My husband’s bunions are bothering him,” his wife said. “Otherwise he would get up to welcome you.”
“I welcome you,” the old man said, and made a polite half bow. “Please sit.”
Mrs. Klein went off down the portrait-lined hall to get her grandson. None of them sat, despite the elder Klein’s invitation. Instead they waited in a close-shouldered group, glancing around at the room’s ancient furniture and its profusion of photographs. Andras saw Klara’s eyes move over the images of the little family—the boy that must have been the child Klein, the beautiful and mysterious woman, the sad-eyed man—and he felt again as though the house contained the ghost of some long-ago loss. Klara must have sensed it too; she drew Tamás closer and passed her thumb across his mouth, as if removing an invisible film of milk.
Klein followed his grandmother back down the hall and into the sitting room. She ducked into the kitchen; he came forward, blinking in the afternoon light. Andras had to wonder how long it had been since he’d last emerged from his den of dossiers and maps and radios. His eyes were dark-shadowed, his hair stiff for want of washing. He wore a cotton undershirt and a pair of ink-stained trousers. His feet were bare. He needed a shave. He scrutinized the group of them and shook his head.
“No,” he said. “No, I tell you. Not a chance.”
“Let me make some tea while you’re talking,” Klein’s grandmother called.
“No tea,” he called back to her. “We’re not talking. They’re leaving. Do you understand?” But they could hear a kitchen cabinet open and close, and water rolling into the metallic hollow of a teapot.
Klein raised his hands toward the ceiling.
“Be civil,” the elder Klein said to his grandson. “They’ve come all this way.”
“What you’re asking is impossible,” Klein said, speaking to Andras and Tibor. “Impossible, and illegal. You could all end up in jail, or dead.”
“We’ve considered that,” Klara said, her tone demanding that he look at her. “We still want to go.”
“Impossible!” he repeated.
“But this is what you do,” Andras said. “You’ve done it before. We can pay you. We’ve got the money, or we’ll have it soon.”
“Lower your voice,” Klein said. “The windows are open. You don’t know who might be listening.”
Andras lowered his voice. “Our situation has become urgent,” he said. “We want you to arrange our transport, and then we want to get the rest of our family out.”
Klein sat down on the sofa and put his head in his hands. “Get someone else to help you,” he said.
“Why should they get someone else?” his grandfather said. “You’re the best.”
Klein made a sound of frustration in his throat. His grandmother, having finished her preparations in the kitchen, wheeled a little tea cart into the room, parked it beside the sofa, and began to fill ancient-looking Herend cups.
“If you don’t help them, they will try someone else,” she said, with a note of quiet reproach. She cocked her head, pausing in her tea-pouring to scrutinize Klara, as if the future were written upon the dotted swiss of her dress. “They’ll go to Pál Behrenbohm, and he’ll turn them away. They’ll go to Szászon. They’ll go to Blum. And if that fails, they’ll go to János Speitzer. And you know what will happen then.” She handed the cups around, offering sugar and cream, and poured a final cup for herself.
Klein looked from his grandmother to Andras and Klara, Tibor and Ilana and the babies. He wiped his palms against his undershirt. He was one man against all of them. He raised his hands in defeat. “It’s your funeral,” he said.
“Please sit and drink your tea,” Klein’s grandmother said. “And Miklós, you need not use that morbid language.”
They took their places around the table and drank the strange smoky tea she’d prepared for them. It tasted like wood fires burning, and it made Andras think of fall. In lowered voices they talked about the details: how Klein would arrange transport down the Danube with a friend who owned a barge, and how the families would be secreted away in two ingeniously built compartments in the cargo area, and how drugged milk must be prepared for the babies so they wouldn’t cry, and how they would need to bring emergency food enough for two weeks’ travel, because a trip that ordinarily took a few days might take much longer in wartime. Klein would have to make inquiries about ships leaving from Romania, and where and how they might gain passage aboard one of them. It might take a month or two to arrange the journey, if all went well. He, Klein, was not a swindler, not like János Speitzer. He would not book passage for them upon an unsound boat, nor tell them to bring less food than was needed so they would have to buy more from his friends at cruel prices. He would not place them in care of a crew that would steal their luggage or prevent them from going ashore to a doctor if they needed one. Nor would he make false promises about the safety or success of the trip. It might fail at any point. They had to understand that.
When Klein had finished, he sat back against the sofa and scratched his chest through his undershirt. “That’s how it works,” he concluded. “A hard, risky trip. No guarantees.”
Klara moved forward in her chair and placed her cup on the little table. “No guarantees,” she repeated. “But at least we’ll have a chance.”
“I’m not going to speculate about your chances,” Klein said. “But if you still want to engage my services, I’m willing to do the work.”
They exchanged a look—Andras and Klara, Tibor and Ilana. They were ready. This was what they’d hoped for. “By all means,” Tibor said. “We’ll take whatever risks we have to take.”
The men shook hands and arranged to meet again in a week. Klein bowed to the women and retreated back down the hallway, where they heard the door of his room open and close. Andras imagined him taking a new manila folder from a box and inscribing their family name upon its tab. The thought filled him with sudden panic. So many files. Stacks and stacks of them, all over the bed and desk and bureau. What had happened to those people? How many of them had made it to Palestine?
The next evening Klara went to her brother to ask his forgiveness. She and Andras walked together to the house on Benczúr utca, pushing the baby in his carriage. In György’s study, Klara took her brother’s hands in her own and asked that he excuse her, that he understand how surprised she’d been and how incapable, at that moment, of appreciating what he’d done. She hated the thought that he’d already lost so much of his estate. She had authorized the sale of her property in Paris, she told him, and would begin to repay her debt to him as soon as she had access to the money.
“You’re in no debt to me,” György said. “What’s mine is yours. Most of what I had came from our father’s estate, in any case. And it’ll do little good for you to put money into my hands now. Our extortionists will only find a way to take it.”
“But what can I do?” she said, on the verge of tears. “How can I repay you?”
“You can forgive me for operating on your behalf without your knowledge. And perhaps you can convince your husband to forgive me for requiring that he keep the secret from you.”
“I do, of course,” Klara said; and Andras said he did as well. Everyone agreed that György had acted in Klara’s best interest, and György expressed the hope that his son would seek Klara and Andras’s forgiveness too. But as he said it, his voice faltered and broke.
“What is it?” Klara said. “What’s happened?”
“He’s received another call-up notice,” György said. “This time he’ll have to go. There’s nothing more we can do about it. We’ve offered a percentage of the proceeds from the sale of the house, but it’s not the money they want. They want to make an example of young men like József.”
“Oh, György,” Klara said.
Andras found himself speechless. He could no more imagine József Hász in the Munkaszolgálat than he could imagine Miklós Horthy himself showing up one morning on the bus from Óbuda to Szentendre, a tattered coat on his back, a lunch pail in his hand. His first sensation was one of satisfaction. Why shouldn’t József have to serve, when he, Andras, had already served for two years and was serving still? But György’s pained expression brought him back to himself. Whatever else József was, he was György’s child.
“I haven’t done a very good job of raising my son,” György said, turning his gaze toward the window. “I gave him everything he wanted, and tried to keep him from anything that would hurt him. But I gave him too much. I protected him too much. He’s come to believe that the world should present itself at his feet. He’s been living in comfort in Buda while other men serve in his place. Now he’ll have to get by on his strength and his wits, like everyone else. I hope he’s got enough of both.”
“Perhaps he can be assigned to one of the companies close to home,” Andras said.
“That won’t be up to him,” György said. “They’ll put him where they want to.”
“I can write to General Martón.”
“You don’t owe József anything,” György said.
“He helped me in Paris. More than once.”
György nodded slowly. “He can be generous when he wants to be.”
“Andras will write to the general,” Klara said. “And then maybe József will come to Palestine, with the rest of us.”
“To Palestine?” György said. “You’re not going to Palestine.”
“Yes,” Klara said. “We have no other choice.”
“But, darling, there’s no way to get to Palestine.”
Klara explained about Klein. György’s eyes grew stern as she spoke.
“Don’t you understand?” he said. “This is why I paid the Ministry of Justice. This is why I sold the paintings and the rugs and the furniture. This is why I’m selling the house! To keep you from taking a foolish risk like this.”
“It would be foolish to throw away what we have left,” Klara said.
György turned to Andras. “Please tell me you haven’t agreed to this wild scheme.”
“My brother witnessed the massacre in the Délvidék. He thinks it could happen here, and worse.”
György sank back in his chair, his face drained of blood. From outside came the drumbeat and brass of a military band; they must have been marching up Andrássy út to Heroes’ Square. “What about us?” he said, faintly. “What’s going to happen once they discover you’re gone? Who do you think they’ll question? Who’ll get the blame for spiriting you away?”
“You must join us in Palestine,” Klara said.
He shook his head. “Impossible. I’m too old to begin a new life.”
“What choice do you have?” she said. “They’ve taken away your position, your fortune, your home. Now they’re taking your son.”
“You’re dreaming,” he said.
“I wish you’d talk to Elza about it. By the end of the year they’ll call you to the labor service too. Elza and Mother will be left all alone.”
He touched the edge of his blotter with his thumbs. A stack of documents lay before him, thick sheaves of ivory legal paper. “Do you see this?” he said, pushing at the papers. “These are the documents assigning possession of the house to the new owner.”
“Who is it?” Klara asked.
“The son of the minister of justice. His wife has just given birth to their sixth child, I understand.”
“God help us,” Klara said. “The house will be a shambles.”
“Where will you live?” Andras said.
“I’ve found lodgings for us in a building at the head of Andrássy út—it’s really quite grand, or it was at one time. According to these papers, we’re allowed to take whatever furniture remains.” He swept an arm around the denuded room.
“Please speak to Elza,” Klara said.
“Six children in this house,” he said, and sighed. “What a disaster.”
General Martón’s reaction was quick and sympathetic, but he lacked range: His solution was to secure József a place in the 79/6th. When the news arrived, Andras felt as though he were being punished personally. Here was retribution for the moment of satisfaction he’d experienced when he’d first heard that József had been called. Now, every morning, József was there at the Óbuda bus stop, looking like an officer in his too-clean uniform and his unbroken military cap. He was assigned to Andras and Mendel’s work group and made to load boxcars like the rest of the conscripts. Through the first week of it he glared at Andras every chance he got, as if this were all his fault, as if Andras himself were responsible for the blisters on József’s feet and hands, the ache in his back, the peeling sunburn. He was roundly abused by the work foreman for his softness, his sloth; when he protested, Faragó kicked him to the ground and spat in his face. After that, he did his work without a word.
June turned into July and a dry spell ended. Every afternoon the sky broke open to drop sweet-tasting rain onto the tedium of Szentendre Yard. The yellow bricks of the rail yard buildings darkened to dun. On the hills across the river, the trees that had stood immobile in the dust now shook out their leaves and tossed their limbs in the wind. Weeds and wildflowers crowded between the railroad ties, and one morning a plague of tiny frogs descended upon Szentendre. They were everywhere underfoot, having arrived from no one knew where, coin-sized, the color of celery, sprinting madly toward the river. They made the work servicemen curse and dance for two days, then disappeared as mysteriously as they’d come. It was a time of year Andras had loved as a boy, the time to swim in the millpond, to eat sun-hottened strawberries directly from the vine, to hide in the shadow of the long cool grass and watch ants conduct their quick-footed business. Now there was only the slow toil of the rail yard and the prospect of escape. At night, during his few hours at home, he held his sleeping son while Klara read him passages from Bialik or Brenner or Herzl, descriptions of Palestine and of the miraculous transformation the settlers were enacting there. In his mind he had begun to see his family replanted among orange trees and honeybees, the bronze shield of the sea glittering far below, his boy growing tall in the salt-flavored air. He tried not to dwell upon the inevitable difficulties of the journey. He was no stranger to hardship, nor was Klara. Even his parents, whose recent move to Debrecen represented the most significant geographic displacement of their married lives, had agreed to undertake the trip if it was possible, if entry visas could be obtained for them; they refused to be separated from their children and grandchildren by a continent, a sea.
After the drought broke, the journey began to take shape. Klein had identified a barge captain named Szabó who would take them as far as the Romanian border, and another, Ivanescu, who would conduct them to Constanţa; he booked them passage under the family name of Gedalya aboard the Trasnet, a former fishing boat that had been converted into a refugee-smuggling vessel. They must be prepared to be crowded and hungry, overheated, dehydrated, seasick, delayed for days in Turkish ports where they could not take the risk of disembarking; they must bring with them only what was necessary. They should be glad they were undertaking the trip in summer, when the seas were calm. They would travel through the Bosporus past Istanbul, through the Marmara Denizi and into the Aegean Sea; from there they would move into the Mediterranean, and if they evaded the patrol boats and submarines they would dock three days later at Haifa. From start to finish the journey would take two weeks, if all went well. They would leave on August second.
Klara had an old-fashioned wooden wall calendar painted with the image of a bluebird on a cherry branch. Three diminutive windows showed day, date, and month; each morning Andras rolled the little wheels forward before he left for Szentendre Yard. He rolled July through its thunderstorm-drenched days, from single digits into teens, as plans for the trip went forward. They assembled clothing, boots, hats; they packed and repacked suitcases, trying to determine the densest possible arrangement of their belongings. On Sunday afternoons they walked the city together, packing their minds with the things they wanted to remember: the green haze of river-cooled air around Margaret Island; the thrumming vibration of cars crossing the Széchenyi Bridge; the smells of cut grass and hot-spring sulfur in the Városliget; the dry concrete pan of the skating pond; the long gray Danube embankment where Andras had walked with his brother a lifetime ago, when they were recent gimnázium graduates living in a room on Hársfa utca. There was the synagogue where he and Klara had been married, the hospital where their son had been born, the small bright studio where Klara taught her private students. There was their own apartment on Nefelejcs utca, the first place they’d ever lived together. And then there were the haunted places they would not visit in farewell: the house on Benczúr utca, which now stood empty in preparation for the arrival of the son of the minister of justice; the Opera House, with its echoing corridors; the patch of pavement in an alley where what had happened long ago had happened.
One Sunday, two weeks before the second of August, Andras went alone to see Klein. The packet of entry visas had arrived from Palestine. That was the last thing they needed to complete their dossier, that set of crisp white documents imprinted with the seal of the British Home Office and the Star of David stamp of the Yishuv. Klein would make facsimile copies, which he would keep in case anything happened to the originals. When Andras arrived, Klein’s grandfather was in the yard, feeding the goats. He put a hand to his hat.
“You’ll be off soon,” he said.
“Fourteen more days.”
“I knew the boy would take care of things.”
“He seems to have a talent for it.”
“That’s our boy. He’s like his father was, always planning, planning, working with his gadgets, making things happen. His father was an inventor, a man whose name everyone would have known, if he’d lived.” He told Andras that Klein’s parents had died of influenza when Klein was still in short pants; they were the man and woman depicted in the photograph, as Andras had guessed. Another child might have been destroyed by the loss, the elder Klein said, but not Miklós. He’d gotten top marks in school, particularly in the social sciences, and had grown up to become a kind of inventor in his own right—a creator of possibilities where none existed.
“What a stroke of luck it was that we found him,” Andras said.
“May your luck continue,” the grandfather said. He spat thrice and knocked on the wooden lintel of the goat house. “May your journey to Palestine be exceptional only for its tedium.”
Andras tipped his cap to the elder Klein and walked the stone path to the door. Klein’s grandmother was there in the front room, sitting in the armchair with an embroidery hoop in her lap. The design, embroidered in tiny gold Xs, showed a braided challah and the word Shabbos in Hebrew letters.
“It’s for your table in the holy land,” she said.
“Oh, no,” Andras said. “It’s too fine.” He thought of their packed and repacked suitcases, into which not a single thing more could possibly fit.
But nothing could be hidden from Klein’s grandmother. “Your wife can sew it into the lining of her summer coat,” she said. “It’s got a good luck charm in it.”
“Where?”
She showed him two minuscule Hebrew letters cross-stitched into the end of the challah. “It’s the number eighteen. Chai. Life.”
Andras nodded his thanks. “It’s very kind of you,” he said. “You’ve been a help to us all along.”
“The boy’s waiting for you in his room. Go on.”
In his file-crowded den, Klein sat on the bed with his hair in wild disorder, shirtless, a radio disemboweled on the blanket before him. If he had been disheveled and ripe-smelling the first time Andras had met him, now, after a month of planning their escape, he seemed on his way to a prehistoric state of existence. His beard had grown in scraggly and black. Andras couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen him wear a shirt. His smell was reminiscent of the barracks in Subcarpathia. Had it not been for the open window and the breeze that riffled the topmost papers on the stacks, no one could have remained in that room for long. And yet, there on the desk was a cleared-away space in which a crisp folder lay open, a coded travel itinerary stapled to one side, a fat sheaf of instructions on the other. Gedalya, their code name, on the tab. And in Andras’s hand the final piece, the packet of documents that would complete the puzzle, the legal element of their illegal flight. Never before the planning of this trip had he imagined what a byzantine maze might lie between emigration and immigration. Klein tucked a tiny screwdriver into his belt and raised his eyebrows at Andras. Andras put the documents into his lap.
“Genuine,” Klein said, touching the raised letters of the British seal. His dark-circled eyes met Andras’s own. “Well, that’s it. You’re ready.”
“We haven’t talked about money.”
“Yes, we have.” Klein reached for the folder and extracted a page torn from an accountant’s notebook, a list of figures penned in his thin left-sloping script. The cost of false papers, in case they were discovered. The fees for the barge captains and the fishing-boat captains and their part of the petrol for the journey and the cost of food and water and the extra money set aside for bribes, and the harbor fees and taxes and the cost of extra insurance, because so many boats had accidentally been torpedoed in the Mediterranean in recent months. Everything to be paid in person, incrementally, along the way. “We’ve been through it all,” he said.
“I mean your fee,” Andras said. “We haven’t talked about that.”
Klein scowled. “Don’t insult me.”
“I’m not insulting you.”
“Do I look like I need anything?”
“A shirt,” Andras said. “A bath. Maybe a new radio.”
“I won’t take money from you.”
“That’s absurd.”
“That’s the way it is.”
“Maybe you won’t take it for yourself. But take it for your grandparents.”
“They’ve got all they need.”
“Don’t be an idiot,” Andras said. “We can give you two thousand pengő. Think what that could mean.”
“Two thousand, five thousand, a hundred thousand, I don’t care! This is not paid work, do you understand? If you wanted to pay, you should have gone to Behrenbohm or Speitzer. My services aren’t for sale.”
“If you don’t want money, what do you want?”
Klein shrugged. “I want this to work. And then I want to do it again for someone else, and for someone else after that, until they stop me.”
“That’s not what you said when we first met you.”
“I was scared after the Struma,” Klein said. “I’m not scared anymore.”
“Why not?”
He shrugged. “Things got worse. Paralyzing fear came to seem like a luxury.”
“What if you wanted to leave? My friend could help you get a visa.”
“I know. That’s good. I’ll keep it in mind.”
“You’ll keep it in mind? That’s all?”
He nodded at Andras and took the screwdriver from his belt again. “If you’ll excuse me, I’ve got more work to do today. We’re done, unless you hear from me. You leave in two weeks.” He bent to the radio and began to loosen a screw that secured a copper wire to its base.
“So?” Andras said. “That’s it?”
“That’s it,” Klein said. “I’m not a sentimental person. If you want a long goodbye, talk to my grandmother.”
But Klein’s grandmother had fallen asleep in her chair. She’d finished embroidering the challah cover and had wrapped it in a piece of tissue paper, written Andras’s and Klara’s names on a little card, and affixed the card to the paper with a pin. Andras bent to her ear and whispered his thanks, but she didn’t wake. The goats made their remarks in the yard. From Klein’s room came a low curse and the clatter of a thrown tool. Andras tucked the parcel under his arm and let himself out without a sound.
And then it was the week before their journey. Andras and Mendel produced the last illustrated issue of The Crooked Rail, though Andras made Mendel promise that he would continue to publish until his own visa came through. The issue featured a faux interview with a star of Hungarian pornography, a crossword puzzle whose circled letters spelled the name of their own Major Károly Varsádi, and an optimistic economic column entitled “Black Market Review,” in which all indicators pointed to an unending series of lucrative shipments. “Ask Hitler,” which had become a permanent fixture of the newspaper, carried only one letter that week:
DEAR HITLER: When will this hot weather end? Sincerely, SUNSTRUCK.
DEAR SUNSTRUCK: It’ll end when I goddamn say it will, and not a moment sooner! Heil me, HITLER.
In midweek, Andras’s parents came to Budapest to see their children and grandchildren once more before they left. They went to dinner at the new residence of the Hász family, a high-ceilinged apartment with crumbling plaster moldings and a parquet floor in the herringbone pattern called points de Hongrie. It had been nearly five years now, Andras realized, since he’d studied parquetry at the École Spéciale; five years since he’d learned what kind of wood suited each design, and replicated the patterns in his sketchbook. Now here he was in this apartment with his stricken parents, his fierce and lovely wife, his baby son, preparing to say goodbye to Europe altogether. The architecture of this apartment mattered only insofar as it reminded him of what he would leave behind.
His brother and Ilana arrived, their boy asleep in Ilana’s arms. They sat close together on the sofa while József perched beside them on a gold chair and smoked one of his mother’s cigarettes. Andras’s father perused a tiny book of psalms, marking a few for his sons to repeat along the journey. The elder Mrs. Hász made conversation with Andras’s mother, who had learned that her own sister knew the remnant of Mrs. Hász’s family that remained in Kaba, not far from Konyár. György arrived from work, his shirtfront damp with perspiration, and kissed Andras’s mother and shook hands with Béla. Elza Hász ushered them all into the dining room and begged them to take their places at the table.
The room was decorated as if for a party. There were tapers in silver candelabra, clusters of roses in blue glass bowls, decanters of tawny wine, the gold-rimmed plates with their design of birds. Andras’s father made the blessing over the bread, and the usual grim serving man stepped forward to fill their plates. At first the conversation was about trivial things: the fluctuating prices of lumber, the almanac’s predictions of an early fall, the scandalous relationship between a certain member of parliament and a former star of the silent screen. But inevitably the conversation turned to the war. The morning papers had reported that German U-boats had sunk a million tons of British-American shipping that summer, seven hundred thousand tons in July alone. And the news from Russia was no better: The Hungarian Second Army, after a bloody battle at Voronezh in early July, was now pushing onward in the wake of the German Sixth toward Stalingrad. The Hungarian Second Army had already paid a heavy toll to support its ally. It had lost, György had read, more than nine hundred officers and twenty thousand soldiers. No one mentioned what they were all thinking: that there were fifty thousand labor servicemen attached to the Hungarian Second Army, nearly all of them Jewish, and that if the Hungarian Second had fared badly, the labor battalions were certain to have fared worse. From the street below, like a note of punctuation, came the familiar gold-toned clang of the streetcar bell. It was a sound peculiar to Budapest, a sound amplified and made resonant by the walls of the buildings that lined the streets. Andras couldn’t help but think of that other departure five years earlier, the one that had brought him from Budapest to Paris and to Klara. The journey that lay ahead now was more desperate but strangely less frightening; between himself and the terror of the unknown lay the comfort of Klara’s presence, and Tibor’s. And at the other end of the journey would be Rosen and Shalhevet, and the prospect of hard work he wanted to do, and the promise of an unfamiliar variety of freedom. Mendel Horovitz might join them in a few months; Andras’s parents might follow soon after. In Palestine his son would never have to wear a yellow armband or live in fear of his neighbors. He himself might finish his architecture training. He couldn’t help feeling a kind of pity for József Hász, who would remain here in Budapest and struggle on alone in Company 79/6 of the Munkaszolgálat.
“You ought to be coming to Palestine, Hász,” he said. The journey to the Middle East would make Andras better traveled than József, a fact he had apprehended with a certain satisfaction.
“You wouldn’t want me,” József said flatly. “I’d be a terrible traveling companion. I’d get seasick. I’d complain constantly. And that would just be the beginning. I’d be useless in Palestine. I can’t plant trees or build houses. In any case, my mother can’t spare me, can you, Mother?”
Mrs. Hász looked first at Andras’s mother and then at her own dinner plate. “Maybe you’ll change your mind,” she said. “Maybe you’ll come with us when we go.”
“Please, Mother,” József said. “How long will you keep up that pretense? You’re not going to Palestine. You won’t even get into a boat at Lake Balaton.”
“No one’s pretending,” his mother said. “Your father and I mean to go as soon as our visas arrive. We certainly can’t stay here.”
“Grandmother,” József said. “Tell my mother she’s out of her mind.”
“I certainly will not,” said the elder Mrs. Hász. “I intend to go myself. I’ve always wanted to see the Holy Land.”
“See it, then. But don’t live there. We’re Hungarians, not desert Bedouins.”
“We were a tribal people before we were Hungarians,” Tibor said. “Don’t forget that.”
“Pardon me, Doctor,” József said. He liked to call Tibor “Doctor” as much as he liked to call Andras “Uncle.” “And before that we were hunters and gatherers in Africa. So perhaps we should bypass the Holy Land altogether and proceed directly to the darkest Congo.”
“József,” György said.
“A thousand pardons, Father. I’m sure you’d rather I kept quiet. But it’s hard, you know, to be the only sane person in the asylum.”
Béla shifted in his delicate chair, feeling the pull of his city suit against his shoulders. He was thinking that he would have liked to take the younger Hász by the shoulders and shake him. He wondered how the boy could dare speak so flippantly about what was about to befall Andras and Tibor and their wives and sons. If one of his own sons had spoken that way, Béla would have risen from his chair and given him a good tongue-lashing, even before guests. But he would never have raised a child who spoke that way. Not he, nor Flóra. She put a hand on his wrist now as if she could see what was in his mind; he wasn’t surprised she understood. Everyone could see that the boy was intolerable. At least Klara’s mother had spoken to him sternly. Béla looked across the table at her, that grave gray-eyed woman who had lost and regained her child once already and now seemed stoic at the prospect of losing her again. They had raised fine children, this woman and Béla and Flóra. He didn’t wonder anymore at the connection between Andras and Klara; he knew now that they were made of the same stuff, whatever luxuries the girl had had as a child. There she was, sitting calm as grass with the baby in her arms, looking as though she were about to take a trip to the countryside rather than down a dangerous river and across a torpedo-salted sea. He told himself to take note of that tranquil look of hers, that radiant calm; in the days and weeks ahead he would want to remember it.
That week, their last in Budapest, was the hottest yet of the summer. On Thursday the bus to Szentendre was stifling even at six in the morning; this was the kind of day Andras’s mother called gombás-idő—mushroom-growing weather. A damp wind blew through the channel of the Danube. Birds hustled through the wet turbulence of air, and the trees across the water flashed the white undersides of their leaves. All that week, it seemed, the command ranks at Szentendre had been out of sorts. The same foremen who’d failed to take note of the subtle slackening of work now began to drive the laborers relentlessly. Ill temper seemed to have spread through the camp like a fever. There had been a series of arguments in the officers’ headquarters between Major Varsádi and the black-market inspectors, with the result that Varsádi had unleashed a rare storm of anger upon his lieutenants; the lieutenants had behaved vilely to the guards and work foremen, and the foremen, in turn, swore at the labor servicemen, kicked them, and sliced at their backs and legs with doubled lengths of packing rope.
That morning there was to be an inspection lineup before work began. The men had been instructed in advance that their uniforms and equipment were to be in top shape. Beginning at seven o’clock, the men were made to stand at attention beside the tracks for what seemed an interminable length of time. Rain began to fall, a barrage of fat hard drops that penetrated the fabric of the men’s clothing. The waiting went on and on; the guards paced the rows of men, as bored as their charges.
“What a waste of time,” József said. “Why don’t they just send us home?”
“Hear hear,” Mendel said. “Cut us loose.”
“Quiet there, both of you,” a guard called to them.
Andras kept an eye on the low brick building that housed Varsádi’s headquarters. Through a steam-hazed window he could make out the commander holding a phone receiver to his ear. Andras rocked back and forth from his heels to the balls of his feet; he studied the stippling of rain on the back of the man in front of him. In his mind he reviewed the tasks that lay ahead in the next few days: the final packing, the rechecking of their lists of clothing and supplies, the tying up and locking of the suitcases, the departure from their apartment on Nefelejcs utca, the midnight meeting at Tibor’s, the walk to the point just north of the Erzsébet Bridge where a barge would be waiting, their consignment to the damp dark hiding place where they would huddle together as the barge slipped into the current. He was there in his mind, so thoroughly hidden in the hold of that Danube barge, that at first he didn’t notice the rumble of trucks on the road. He felt a low vibration in his sternum and thought, More thunder. But the rumble continued and increased, and when he looked up at last he saw a six-truck convoy bearing Hungarian soldiers. The trucks roared through the gates of Szentendre Yard, their tires turning up dry dust beneath the rain-damp surface of the road. They parked on the bare stretch of earth that lay between the tracks and the officers’ building. The soldiers in back carried rifles fixed with bayonets; Andras could see the blades glinting in the olive-colored gloom of the canvas enclosures. When the trucks stopped, the soldiers jumped out onto the muddy gravel and held their weapons loosely at their sides. The officers in the first truck went into the low brick building, and the door closed behind them.
The work servicemen eyed the soldiers. There must have been fifty of them at least. With their officers occupied inside headquarters, the soldiers leaned their rifles against the trucks and began to smoke. One of them pulled out a deck of cards and dealt poker. Another group of men clustered around a newspaper while one of the soldiers read the headlines aloud.
“What’s going on?” whispered the man beside Andras, a tall hairless man who had been dubbed the Ivory Tower. He had been a history professor at the university; like Zoltán Novak he had been recruited to the Munkaszolgálat to fill a quota of Jewish luminaries. He was new to the work service, and had not yet learned to accept its mysteries and contradictions without protest.
“I don’t know,” Andras said. “We’ll find out.”
“Silence in the lines!” shouted a guard.
The wait continued. Some of the guards drifted toward the soldiers to trade cigarettes and news. A few of them seemed to know each other. They slapped each other on the back and shook hands. Another half hour passed, and still no one emerged from the headquarters. Finally the guards’ captain gave the command for the labor servicemen to be at ease. They could eat or smoke if they wanted. Andras and Mendel sat down on a damp railroad tie and opened their tin lunch pails, and József drew a slim leather case from his breast pocket and extracted a cigarette.
A moment later, the door of the squat brick building opened and the officers emerged—first the army officers in their crisp brass-buttoned uniforms, then the familiar Munkaszolgálat officers who had commanded them since the beginning of their time at Szentendre. Varsádi’s first lieutenant blew a whistle and ordered the servicemen to stand at attention. There was a moment of rustling confusion as the men put away their lunches. Then the sergeant shouted his orders: The men were to form ranks at the supply trucks and move the goods to the boxcars as quickly as possible.
If it hadn’t been for the presence of the soldiers, their bayonets needling skyward as if to pierce the underbellies of the low-hanging clouds, it would have seemed like any other afternoon at Szentendre Yard. The 79/6th carried crates of ammunition across the same expanse of gravel they’d crossed and recrossed a thousand times. If the guards kept a tighter rein on the men, if the officers were more strident as they shouted their orders, it seemed only an extension of the animus that had permeated the command ranks all week. Faragó, their foreman, failed to whistle a single show tune; instead he shouted Siessetek! in his thin tenor and wondered aloud how he’d been cursed with the command of such slugs, such turtles.
Halfway through the unloading, when there were still five supply trucks’ worth of goods to be transferred to the train, an adjutant of Varsádi’s approached Andras’s work group and drew Faragó aside. A moment later, Faragó was calling Andras and Mendel from their duties. The company commander, it seemed, wanted a word with them in his office.
Mendel and Andras exchanged a look: It’s nothing. Don’t panic.
“Did the fellow say what it was about, sir?” Mendel asked, though there was only one thing it could be about, only one reason for the commander to call the two of them to his office.
“You’ll find out soon enough,” Faragó said. And then, to the adjutant, “See they get back here as soon as Varsádi’s finished with them. I can’t spare them for long.”
The major’s young adjutant led them across the rail yard toward the low brick building. A clutch of armed soldiers stood at attention in the anteroom, rifles angled against their shoulders. Their eyes moved toward Andras and Mendel as they entered, but otherwise they remained still as sculptures. An orderly ushered Andras and Mendel into Varsádi’s office and closed the door behind them, and they found themselves standing unaccompanied before their commander. Varsádi’s uniform shirt was crisp despite the heat, his eyes narrow behind a pair of demilune glasses. On his desk, as Andras knew it would be, was a complete set of The Crooked Rail.
“Well, then,” Varsádi said, straightening the pages before him. “I’ll be brief. You know I like you boys and your newspaper. It’s given the men a good laugh. But I’m afraid it’s not—er—opportune to have it circulating at the moment.”
Andras experienced a moment of confusion. He had believed this meeting was to be about the resistance he and Mendel had stirred up. The quickened pace of work, the shift in the foremen’s attitude, had pointed in that direction. But Varsádi wasn’t accusing them of agitating. He seemed only to be asking them to stop publishing.
“The paper’s not really circulating, sir,” Mendel said. “Not beyond the 79/6th.”
“You’ve made fifty copies of each issue,” Varsádi said. “The men take them home. Some of those copies might find their way out into the city. And then there’s the matter of printing, the matter of your plates and originals. This is a sharp-looking paper. I know you’re not hand-cranking copies at home.”
Andras and Mendel exchanged the briefest of looks, and Mendel said, “We destroy the printing plates each week, sir. The circulation copies are all there are.”
“I understand you were both recently employed at the Budapest Jewish Journal. If we were to inquire there, or take a look around, we wouldn’t happen to find …?”
“You can look wherever you like, sir,” Mendel said. “There’s nothing to find.”
Andras watched with a kind of dreamlike detachment as the commander opened his desk drawer, removed a small revolver, and held it loosely in his hand. The body of the gun was velvet black, the muzzle snub-nosed. “There can’t be any mistake about this,” Varsádi said. “Fifty copies of each paper. That’s enough uncertainty in this equation. I need your originals and your printing plates. I need to know where those things are kept.”
“We’ve destroyed—” Mendel began again, but his eyes flicked toward the gun.
“You’re lying,” Varsádi said, matter-of-factly. “I don’t like that, after the leniency I’ve shown you.” He turned the gun over and ran a thumb along the safety. “I need the truth, and then you’ll be on your way. You printed this paper at the Budapest Jewish Journal. Can we find your originals there? I ask, gentlemen, because the only other place I can think to search is your homes. And I would prefer not to disturb your families.” The words hung in the air between them as he polished the revolver with his thumb.
Andras saw it all: The apartment on Nefelejcs ransacked, every paper and book thrown onto the floor, every cabinet emptied, the sofa disemboweled, the walls and floorboards torn open. All the preparations for their trip to Palestine laid bare to official scrutiny. And Klara, huddled in a corner, or held by the wrists—How? By whom?—as the baby wailed. He met Mendel’s eyes again and understood that Mendel had seen it, too, and had made his decision. If Andras himself didn’t tell the truth, Mendel would. And in fact, a moment later, Mendel spoke.
“The originals are at the Journal,” he said. “One copy of each issue, in a filing cabinet in the chief editor’s office. No need to disturb anyone’s family. We don’t keep anything at home.”
“Very good,” said Varsádi. He replaced the gun in the desk drawer. “That’s all I need from you now. Dismissed,” he said, and waved a hand toward the door.
They moved as if through some viscous liquid, not looking at each other. They had compromised Frigyes Eppler, his person, his position; they both knew it. There was no telling what the consequences might be, or what price Eppler would be made to pay. Outside, they found that the entire company had been moved to the assembly ground, where they stood now at uncomfortable attention. As Andras took his place in line, József threw him a look of frank curiosity. But there was no time to enlighten him; it seemed that the promised inspection was now to occur. The soldiers who had arrived that morning had dispersed themselves along the edge of the assembly ground, and the officers who had conferred with Varsádi stood at the head of the formation. When Andras looked across the expanse of gravel to the far edge of the field, he found that soldiers had lined up there as well. In front of Varsádi’s headquarters, soldiers. Along the tracks behind them, more soldiers. All at once he understood: The 79/6th had been corralled, surrounded. The soldiers who had been smoking and laughing with the guards now stood at attention with their hands on their rifles, their eyes fixed at that dangerous military middle distance, the place from which it was impossible to recognize another human being.
Varsádi emerged from the low brick building, his back erect, his medals flashing in the afternoon sun. “Into your lines,” he shouted. “Marching formation.”
Andras told himself to keep calm. They were half an hour from Budapest. This wasn’t the Délvidék. It was likely Varsádi meant to do nothing more than to scare them, make a show of control, correct for the laxity of his command. At his order the 79/6th marched out of the assembly ground and along the tracks, toward the south gate of the rail yard. The soldiers kept their lines tight around the block of work servicemen. They all stopped when they reached the end of the row of boxcars.
Three empty cars had been coupled to the end of the train, their sides emblazoned with the Munkaszolgálat acronym. Over the small, high windows of the boxcars, iron bars had been installed. The doors stood open as if in expectation. Far ahead, beyond the cars that had just been loaded with supplies, an engine exhaled brown smoke.
“At attention, men,” Varsádi shouted. “Your orders have been changed. Your services are needed elsewhere. You will leave immediately. Your duties have become classified. We cannot give you further information.”
There was a burst of incredulous protest from the men, a sudden din of shouting.
“Silence,” the commander cried. “Silence! Silence at once!” He raised his pistol and fired it into the air. The men fell silent.
“Pardon me, sir,” József said. He stood just a few feet from Andras, close enough for Andras to see a narrow vein pumping at his temple. “As I recall, the KMOF Rules of Duty Handbook says we’ve got to have a week’s notice before any change of posting. And if you don’t mind my mentioning it, we’ve hardly got the supplies.”
Major Varsádi strode toward József, pistol in hand. He took the gun by its short muzzle and delivered two swift blows with the butt-end across József’s face. A bright stuttering dart of blood appeared on the shoulder of Andras’s uniform.
“Take my advice and shut your mouth,” Varsádi said. “Where you’re going, you’d be shot for less.”
The major gave another order; the soldiers tightened their lines around the labor servicemen and squeezed them toward the train cars. Andras found himself jammed between Mendel and József. Behind them was a crush of men. They had no choice but to climb into the open mouth of the boxcar. Through the single high window Andras could see the soldiers in a line around the cars, the dull glint of their bayonets against the marbled sky. More and more servicemen were pushed into the cars until the air seemed to be made of them. Andras inhaled wet canvas and hair oil and sweat, the smell of the morning’s work cut with the tang of panic. His heart drummed in his ribcage, and his throat closed with terror. Klara would be home now, packing the last of their things. In an hour she would begin to look at the clock. He had to get off the train. He would plead illness; he would offer a bribe. He shoved and elbowed his way toward the door again, but before he could reach that rectangle of light there was an all-clear cry. Then the rattle of the door sliding closed, the descent of darkness, the sound of a chain against metal, the unmistakable click of a padlock.
A moment later the train whistle let out an indifferent screech. Through the wooden floorboards, through the soles of his summer boots and the bones of his legs, came a deep mechanical shudder, the first grinding jolt of motion. The men fell against each other, against Andras; the weight of them seemed heavy enough to squeeze his heart to stillness in his chest. And then the train lurched into its rhythm and carried them forward through the north gates of Szentendre Yard, toward a destination none of them could name.