IN THE END, what astonished him most was not the vastness of it all—that was impossible to take in, the hundreds of thousands of dead from Hungary alone, and the millions from all over Europe—but the excruciating smallness, the pinpoint upon which every life was balanced. The scale might be tipped by the tiniest of things: the lice that carried typhus, the few thimblefuls of water that remained in a canteen, the dust of breadcrumbs in a pocket. On the tenth of January, at the cold disordered dawn of 1945, Andras lay on the floor of a boxcar in a Hungarian quarantine camp a few kilometers from the Austrian border. The nearby town was Sopron, with its famous Goat Church. A vague childhood memory—an art-history lesson, a white-haired master with a moustache like the disembodied wings of a dove, an image of the carved stone chancel where Ferdinand III had been crowned King of Hungary. According to the legend, a goat had unearthed an ancient treasure on that site; the treasure had been buried again when the church was built, as a tribute to the Virgin Mary. And so, somewhere up the hill, beneath the church whose blackened spire was visible from where he lay, an ancient treasure moldered; and here in the quarantine camp, three thousand men were dying of typhus. Andras climbed into the swirling heights of a fever through which his thoughts proceeded in carnival costume. He remembered, vaguely, having been told that the quarantined men were supposed to consider themselves lucky. Those not infected had been shipped over the Austrian border to labor camps.
Some facts he could grasp. He counted these certainties like marbles in a bag, each with its twist of blood- or sea-colored glass. Their bend of the Tisza had, in fact, been bombed. It had happened on an unseasonably warm night in late October, nearly five months after they’d arrived at the camp. He remembered crouching in the darkness with Tibor and József, the walls shuddering as shock waves rolled through the earth; only by an act of grace, it seemed, had their building remained intact. Thirty-three men had been crushed in another bunkhouse when it collapsed. Six bargemen and half a company of Hungarian soldiers, quartered that night on the riverbank, had all been killed. The 55/10th, in tatters, had fled west ahead of the advancing Soviet Army. For weeks their guards had shuffled them from one town to another, quartering them in peasants’ huts or barns or in the open fields, as the war rumbled and flared, always a few kilometers away. By that time Hungary had fallen into the hands of the Arrow Cross. Horthy had proved too difficult for Germany to control; under pressure from the Allies he had stopped the deportations of Jews, and on the eleventh of October he’d covertly negotiated a separate peace agreement with the Kremlin. When he announced the armistice a few days later, Hitler had forced him to abdicate and had exiled him to Germany with his family. The armistice was nullified. Ferenc Szálasi, the Arrow Cross leader, became prime minister. The news reached the labor servicemen in the form of new regulations: They were now to be treated not as forced laborers, but as prisoners of war.
Those things Andras remembered in detail. More confusing was what had passed between then and now. Through the haze of his fever he tried and tried to remember what had happened to Tibor. He remembered, weeks or months earlier, fleeing with Tibor and József along a road west of Trebišov on a bright day, pursued by the sound of Russian tanks and Russian gunfire. They’d been separated from their company; József had been sick and couldn’t keep up. German jeeps and armored cars shot along the road beside them. Approaching from behind, an earthquake: Russians in their rolling fortresses, guns blazing. As they fled along the road, József had stumbled into the path of a German armored car. He’d been thrown into a ditch, his leg twisted into an angle that was—the fevered Andras grasped in darkness for the word—unrealistic. It was unrealistic; it did not represent life. A leg did not bend in that way, or in that direction, in relation to a man’s body. When Andras reached him, József was open-eyed, breathing fast and shallow; he seemed in a state of strange exultation, as though in one quick stroke he’d been vindicated on a point he’d argued fruitlessly for years. Tibor bent beside him and put a careful hand to the leg, and József released an unforgettable sound: a grating three-toned shriek that seemed to crack the dome of the sky. Tibor drew back and gave Andras a look of despair: He was out of morphine, the supplies he’d hoarded in Budapest exhausted by now. Moments later, it seemed, an olive-colored van had appeared, Austrian Wehrmacht flags fluttering at its bumpers, a red cross painted on its side. Andras tore the yellow armband from his sleeve, from József’s, from Tibor’s; now they were just three men in a ditch, without identity. Austrian medics arrived, judged them all in need of immediate medical care, and loaded them into the van. Soon they were moving along the road at an incredible rate of speed—still fleeing before the Russians, Andras imagined. Then there was a burst of deafening noise, a brilliant explosion. The canvas of the van tore away, floor became ceiling, a tire traced an arc against a backdrop of clouds. A jolt of impact. A thrumming silence. From somewhere close by, József calling for his father, of all people. Tibor stood unharmed amid dry cornstalks, dusting snow from his sleeves. Andras, a wild white pain abloom in his side, lay in a furrow of the field and stared at the sky, an impossibly high milk blue stretching forever above him. In his memory a cloud took the shape of the Panthéon, a suggestion of columns and a dome. A moment later that milky blue, that dome, disappeared into an enfolding darkness.
Later he had opened his eyes to a vision so blinding he was certain he had died. Snow-white walls, snow-white bedstead, snow-white curtains, snow-white sky outside the window. He came to understand that he was lying on a hospital cot, under the excruciating weight of a thin cotton blanket. A doctor with a Yugoslav name, Dobek, removed a bandage from Andras’s side and examined a red-toothed wound that extended from beneath his lowest rib to just above his navel. The sight of it brought on a wave of nausea so deep that Andras looked around in panic for a bedpan, and the motion called forth a shearing pain inside the wound. The doctor begged Andras not to move. Andras understood, though the admonition came in a language he didn’t know. He lay back and fell into a dreamless sleep. When he woke, Tibor was sitting in a chair beside the cot, his glasses unbroken, his hair clean, his face washed, his labor-service rags exchanged for cotton pajamas. Andras had been wounded, he explained; the medical van had hit a mine. He’d had to have emergency surgery. His spleen had been damaged, his small intestine severed near the terminal ileum; but all had been repaired, and he was recovering well. Where were they? In Kassa, Slovakia, in a Catholic hospital, St. Elizabeth’s, under the care of Slovak nuns. And where was József? Recovering in a neighboring ward; his leg had been shattered, and he’d had a complicated surgery.
They lay in that Slovak hospital, he and József, for an indeterminate number of weeks; he lay there recovering from his terrible wound, and József from his complex fracture, while a war raged nearby. Tibor came and went. He was serving the nuns, the doctors, working at their side, assisting in surgery, triaging new patients who came in. He was exhausted, grim with the sight of bullet- and bomb-ravaged bodies, but there was a calm purpose in his expression: He was doing what he’d been trained to do. The Russians were making progress, he told Andras, slowly but steadily. If the hospital could survive the onslaught of the battle, they might all be safe soon.
But then the Nazis arrived to clear the hospital. Evacuate was the word they used, though the meaning wasn’t the same for everyone. In that place where no patient had been asked his religion, no distinction made between gentile and Jew, the Jews were now identified and herded into a corridor. Andras and Tibor supported József between them, his leg unwieldy in its plaster cast, and the three of them were marched to a train and loaded onto a boxcar. Again they rolled off into the unknown, south and west this time, toward Hungary.
For nearly a week they traveled across the country. Tibor gleaned what he could about their location from the shouts he overheard when the train stopped, or from the little he could see from the tiny window in the bolted door. They were at Alsóz-solca, then at Mezökövesd, then at Hatvan; there was a moment of wild hope that they might turn south toward Budapest, but the train rolled onward toward Vác. They skirted the border near Esztergom and traveled for a time along the ice-choked Danube, then through Komárom and Győr and Kapuvár, toward the western border. All that way, Tibor had cared for Andras and József, preserving their delicate recovery. When Andras vomited on the boxcar floor, Tibor cleaned him, and when József had to use the can at the back of the car, Tibor walked him there and helped him. He ministered to the other patients, too, many of whom were too sick to understand their luck. But there was little he could do. There was no food, no water, not a clean bandage or a dose of medicine. At night Tibor lay beside Andras for warmth, and whispered in Andras’s ear as if to keep them both from losing their minds. Let me tell you a story, Tibor said, as if Andras were the son Tibor had left behind. Once there was a man who could speak to animals. Here is what the man said. Here is what the animals said. A vast deep itching spread over every inch of Andras’s body, even inside the wound: the bites of lice. A few days later came the first tendrils of fever.
When the train stopped, it meant that they had reached the edge of the country. Again they were to be sorted into two groups: those who could cross and those who could not cross. Those who had typhus wouldn’t be allowed to cross. They would be placed in a quarantine camp on the border.
“Listen to me, Andras,” Tibor had said, just before the selection. “I’m going to pretend to be ill. I’m not going to be sent over the border. I’m going to stay with you here in the quarantine camp. Do you understand?”
“No, Tibor. If you stay, you’ll get sick for certain.” He thought of Mátyás, the long-ago illness, his own desperate night in the orchard.
“And if I go on ahead?”
“You have a skill. They need it. They’ll keep you alive.”
“They don’t care about my skill. I’m going to stay here with you and József and the others.”
“No, Tibor.”
“Yes.”
The boxcars became the barracks of the quarantine camp. At the station they were left on the switching rails, rows and rows of them, each with its cargo of dead and dying men. Every day the dead were hauled out of the cars and lined up beneath them on the frozen ground; it was impossible to bury them at that time of year. Andras lay on the floor of the boxcar in a rising fever, floating just inches above his dead comrades. He’d had no word from Klara in months, and no way to get word to her. Their second child would already have been born, or would not have been. Tamás would be nearly three years old. They might have been deported, or might not have been. He drifted in and out, knowing and not knowing, thinking and unable to think, as his brother slipped out of the quarantine camp and walked into Sopron for food, medicine, news. Every day Tibor returned with what little he could glean; he befriended a pharmacist who supplied him with small amounts of antibiotic and aspirin and morphine, and whose radio picked up BBC News. Budapest had been under a grave threat since early November. Soviet tanks were on the approach from the southwest. Hitler had vowed to hold them off at all costs. Roads were blocked. Food and fuel supplies were running short. The capital had already begun to starve. Tibor would never have delivered that grim news to Andras, but Andras overheard him speaking to someone outside the boxcar; his fever-sharpened hearing carried every word.
He understood, too, that he and József were dying. Flecktyphus, he kept hearing, and dizentéria. One day Tibor had returned from town to find Andras and József with a bowl of beans between them; they’d managed to finish half of what they’d been given. He scolded them both and threw the beans out the boxcar door. Are you mad? For dysentery, nothing could be worse than barely cooked beans. Men died from eating them, but in the quarantine camp there was nothing else to eat. Instead, Tibor fed Andras and József the cooking liquid from the beans, sometimes with bits of bread. Once, bread with a slathering of jam that smelled faintly of petrol. Tibor explained: In his wanderings he’d come across a farmhouse that had been hit by a plane; he’d found a clay pot of preserves in the yard. Where was the clay pot? they asked. Shattered. Tibor had carried the jam in the palm of his hand, twenty kilometers.
As József got better on the food Tibor brought, Andras’s fever deepened. The flux rolled through him and emptied him. The skeleton of reality came apart, connective tissue peeling from the bones.
A constant foul smell that he knew was himself.
Cold.
Tibor weeping.
Tibor telling someone—József?—that Andras was near the end.
Tibor kneeling by his side, reminding him that today was Tamás’s birthday.
A resolution that he would not die that day, not on his son’s birthday.
Rising through his torn insides, a filament of strength.
Then, the next morning, a commotion in the quarantine camp. The sound of a megaphone. An announcement: All who could work were to be taken to Mürzzuschlag, in Austria. Soldiers searched the boxcars and pulled the living into a glare of cold light. A man in Nazi uniform dragged Andras outside and threw him onto the railroad tracks. Where was Tibor? Where was József? Andras lay with his cheek against the freezing rail, the metal burning his cheek, too weak to move, staring at the frost-rimed gravel, at the moving feet of men all around him. From somewhere nearby came the sound of metal on dirt: men shoveling. It seemed to go on for hours. He understood. Finally, the burial of the dead. And here he was, waiting to be buried. He had died, had gone across. He didn’t know when it had happened. He was surprised to find that it could be so simple. There was no alive, no dead; only this nightmare, always, and when the dirt covered him he would still feel cold and pain, would suffocate forever. A moment later he was caught up by the wrists and ankles and flung through the air. A moment of lightness, then falling. An impact he felt in all his joints, in his ravaged intestines. A stench. Beneath him, the bodies of men. Around him, walls of bare earth. A shovelful of earth in his face. The taste of it like something from childhood. He kept pushing and pushing it away from his face, but it came and came. The shoveler, a vigorous black form at the edge of the grave, pumped at a mound of dirt. Then, for no reason Andras could see, he stopped. A moment later he was gone, the task forgotten. And there Andras lay, not alive, not dead.
A night in an open grave, dirt for his blanket.
In the morning, someone dragging him out.
Again, the boxcar. And now.
Now.
Beside him was a bowl of beans. He was ravenous for them. Instead he tilted the bowl to his mouth, sipped the liquid. With that mouthful he felt his bowels loosen, and then, beneath him, heat.
Another day passed and darkened. Another night. Someone—Tibor?—tipped water into his mouth; he choked, swallowed. In the morning he crawled out of the boxcar, trying to escape the smell of himself. Unaccountably his head felt clearer. He paused, kneeling, and thrust his hand into the pocket of his overcoat, where, when there had been bread, he had carried bread. The pocket was sandy with crumbs. He pulled himself to a puddle where the sun had melted the snow. In one hand he held the crumbs. With the other he scooped water from the puddle. He made a cold paste, put his hand to his mouth, ate. It was his first solid food in twenty days, though he did not know it.
Sometime later he woke in the boxcar. József Hász was bending over him, urging him to sit up. “Give it a try,” József said, and lifted him from beneath the shoulders.
Andras sat up. Black ocean waves seemed to close over his head. Then, like a miracle, they receded. Here was the familiar interior of the boxcar. Here was József kneeling beside him, supporting his back with both hands.
“You’re going to have to stand now,” József said.
“Why?”
“Someone’s coming to gather men for a work detail. Anyone who can’t work will be shot.”
He knew he wouldn’t be selected for a work detail. He could scarcely raise his head. And then he remembered again: “Tibor?”
József shook his head. “Just me.”
“Where’s my brother, József? Where’s my brother?”
“They’ve been desperate for workers,” József said. “If a man can stand, they take him.”
“Who?”
“The Germans.”
“They took Tibor?”
“I don’t know, Andráska,” József said, his voice breaking. “I don’t know where he is. I haven’t seen him for days.”
Outside the boxcar, a German voice called men to attention.
“We’re going to have to walk now,” József said.
Tears came to Andras’s eyes: To die now, after everything. But József took him from beneath the arms and hoisted him to his feet. Andras fell against him. József swayed and yelped in pain; his shattered leg, freed from its cast, could only have been half knit. But he caught Andras around the back and led him toward the door of the boxcar. Slid it aside. Took Andras down a ramp and out onto the cold bare dirt of the rail yard. Thin blades of pain shot up from Andras’s feet and through his legs. In his side, along the surgical wound, a dull orange burning.
A Nazi officer stood before a row of labor servicemen, inspecting their soiled, ribbon-torn overcoats and trousers, their rag-bound feet. Andras’s and József’s feet were bare.
The officer cleared his throat. “All those who want to work, step forward.”
All the men stepped forward. József pulled Andras, whose legs buckled. Andras fell forward onto his hands and knees on the bare ground. The officer came toward him and knelt; he put a hand to the back of Andras’s neck, and reached into his own overcoat pocket. Andras imagined the barrel of a pistol, a noise, an explosion of light. To his shame, he felt his bladder release.
The officer had drawn out a handkerchief. He mopped Andras’s brow and helped him to his feet.
“I want to work,” Andras said. He had managed the words in German: Ich möchte arbeiten.
“How can you work?” the officer said. “You can’t even walk.”
Andras looked into the man’s face. He appeared almost as hungry, almost as ragged, as the work servicemen themselves; his age was impossible to determine. His cheeks, slack and wind-burned, showed a growth of colorless stubble. A small oval scar marked his jawline. He rubbed the scar with his thumb as he looked at Andras contemplatively.
“A wagon will be here in a few minutes,” he said at last. “You’ll come with us.”
“Where are we going?” Andras dared to ask. Wohin gehen wir?
“To Austria. To a work camp. There’s a doctor there who can help you.”
Everything seemed to have a terrible second meaning. Austria. A work camp. A doctor who could help him. Andras put a hand on József’s arm to steady himself, pulled himself to his bare feet, and made himself look into the Nazi’s eyes. The Nazi held his gaze, then turned sharply and marched off through the rows of boxcars. Exhausted, Andras leaned against József until the wagon arrived. The Nazi officer quick-stepped alongside the wagon, carrying a pair of boots. He helped Andras and József into the wagon bed, then put the boots into Andras’s lap.
“Heil Hitler,” the officer said, saluting as the wagon pulled away.
A hundred times it might have been the end. It might have been the end when the wagon arrived at the work camp and the men were inspected, if the inspector hadn’t been a Jewish kapo who had taken pity on Andras and József—he’d assigned them to a work brigade rather than sending them to the infirmary, though they could scarcely walk. It might have been the end, again, on the day their group of a hundred men failed to meet its work quota: They were supposed to load fifty pallets of bricks onto flatbed trucks, and they’d only loaded forty-nine; as punishment, the guards selected two men, a gray-haired chemist from Budapest and a shoemaker from Kaposvár, and executed them behind the brick factory. It might have been the end when the food at the camp ran out, had not Andras and József, digging a trench for a latrine, come upon four clay jars buried in the ground: a cache of goose fat, a relic of a time when the camp had been a farm, and the farmer’s wife had foreseen lean days ahead. It might have been the end if the men at the camp had had time to finish their project, a vast crematorium in which their bodies would be burned after they had been gassed or shot. But it was not the end. On the first of April, as the exhausted and starving men waited to be marched from the assembly ground to the brickyard for the day’s work, József touched Andras’s shoulder and pointed toward a line of vehicles speeding along the military road beyond the barbed-wire fence.
“See that?” József said. “I don’t think we’re going to work today.”
Andras raised his eyes. “Why not?”
“Look.” He pointed along the curve of the road as it bent away toward the east. A confusion of German and Hungarian armored vehicles bumped along the rutted track, some leaving the roadbed to pass, others getting mired in the deep mud of the road, or spinning out of control into the ditches. Behind them, as far as Andras could see, a line of sleeker, swifter tanks barreled in their direction: Soviet T-34s, the kind he’d seen in Ukraine and Subcarpathia. That explained why their work foreman still hadn’t appeared, though it was half past seven: The Russians had come at last, and the Germans and Hungarians were running for their lives. At that moment the camp loudspeaker broadcast a command for all inmates to return to their quarters, gather their belongings, and meet at the camp gates to await orders for redeployment. But József sat down just where he was and crossed his legs before him.
“I’m not going anywhere,” he said, “Not a step. If the Russians are coming, I’m going to sit here and wait.”
The announcement raised a shout from the other men, some of whom threw their caps in the air. They stood in the assembly yard and watched their Nazi guards and work foremen flee the camp, some on foot, others in jeeps or trucks. No one seemed to take notice of the few men who’d gathered with their belongings near the gate. No further orders came over the loudspeaker; anyone who might have given orders had gone. Some of the inmates hid in the barracks, but Andras and József and many of the others climbed a low hill and watched a battle unfold in the neighboring fields. A battalion of German tanks had turned to meet the Soviets, and the cannons barked and roared for hours. All day and into the night they watched and cheered the Red Army. After dark, gunfire made an aurora in the eastern sky. Somewhere beyond that peony-colored light was the border of Hungary, and beyond that the road that led to Budapest.
At dawn the next day, a Soviet detachment arrived to take charge of the camp. The soldiers wore gray jackets and mud-smeared blue breeches. Their boots were miraculously intact, and their leather straps and belts gleamed with polish. They stopped just outside the gates and their captain made an announcement in Russian over a megaphone. The men of the camp had anticipated this moment. They’d made white flags from the canvas sacks that held cement dust, and had tied the flags to slender linden branches. A group of Russian-speaking prisoners, Carpathians from a Slovak border town, approached the Soviets with the branches held high. The absurdity of it, Andras thought—those gaunt and grief-shocked men carrying flags of surrender, as though they might be mistaken for their captors. The Soviets had brought a cartload of coarse black bread, which they distributed among the men. They broke the locks of the storehouses from which the camp officers had supplied themselves; after they’d taken as much as their cart could hold, they indicated that the prisoners should take whatever they wanted. The men walked through the storehouse as if through a museum of a bygone age. There on the shelves were luxuries they hadn’t seen for months—tinned sausages, tinned pears, tinned peas; slender boxes of cigarettes; stacks of batteries and bars of soap. They packed those things into squares of canvas or empty cement bags, hoping they might sell or trade them on the way home. Then the Soviets marched the men to a processing camp thirty kilometers away on the Hungarian border, where they lived for three weeks in filthy overcrowded barracks before they were given liberation papers and released. They were two hundred and fifteen kilometers from Budapest. The only way to get there was to walk.
They trusted nobody, traveled at night, evaded the last few fleeing Nazis, who would shoot any Jews they met, and the Soviet liberators, who, it was rumored, could take away your liberation papers and send you off to work camps in Siberia for no reason at all. József’s injured leg meant they had to travel slowly; he could manage no more than ten kilometers before the pain stopped him. From the direction of the city, reports of horrors drifted across the rolling hills of Transdanubia: Budapest bombed to rubble. Hundreds of thousands deported. A winter of starvation. The part of Andras’s mind that he was accustomed to sending in Klara’s direction had shriveled to a hard knot, like scar tissue. He allowed himself to imagine nothing beyond the moment’s necessary work; he fixed his mind on his own survival. He would not allow himself to remember the first weeks of the year, that gray-blue blur of horror that was January 1945. The surgical wound in his side had healed to a puckered pink seam; the injured spleen, the torn intestine, had resumed their invisible work. He would not think about his parents, about Mátyás; would not think about Tibor, who had disappeared somewhere beyond the Austrian border. With József at his side he slept in the ruins of barns or dug into haystacks and bedded down in the sweet-smelling dark, then woke to nightmares of being buried alive. By night they walked in the thick brush beside a highway that led toward Budapest. One evening, when they stopped at the back door of a large country house to trade German cigarettes and batteries for eggs and bread, they learned from the cook that Russian tanks had entered Berlin. She showed them where they could conceal themselves in a stand of lilacs by an open window and listen to that night’s radio broadcast. Amid the clusters of syringa they listened as a BBC announcer described the events transpiring in the German capital. To Andras the English words were a maze of sharp vowels and rapid-fire consonants, but József knew the language. The Russians, he translated, had surrounded the Reichstag, where Hitler had chosen to make his last stand; no one knew what was going on within.
One morning a few days later, as they slept in a boathouse on Lake Balaton beneath a mildewed canvas sail, they were awakened by the sound of bells. Every bell in the nearby town, Sió-fok, rang balefully, as though a great emergency were at hand. Andras and József ran out of the boathouse to find the townspeople streaming into the streets, moving toward the center of town in a stunned procession. They followed the crowd to the town square, where the mayor—a war-starved grandfather in an ill-fitting Soviet jacket—climbed the steps of the courthouse and announced that the war in Europe was over. Hitler was dead. Germany had signed an agreement of unconditional surrender in Reims. A cease-fire would go into effect at midnight.
From the crowd, a single beat of silence; then they roared in celebration and threw their hats into the air. For that moment it didn’t seem to matter that Hungary had been on the losing side, that its shining capital on the Danube had been bombed to rubble, that the country had fallen under Soviet control, that its people had nothing to eat, that its prisoners still hadn’t returned, that its dead were gone forever. What mattered was that the war in Europe was over. Andras and József put their arms around each other and wept.
The hills east of Buda had come into their young leaves, insensate to the dead and the grieving. The flowering lindens and plane trees seemed almost obscene to Andras, inappropriate, like girls in transparent lawn dresses at a funeral. He and József hiked the ruined streets on the east side of Castle Hill; at the top they paused and stood looking out over the city in silence. The beautiful bridges of the Danube—Margaret Bridge, the Chain Bridge, the Elizabeth Bridge, all those bridges whose every inch Andras knew by heart, every one of them as far as he could see—lay in ruins, their steel cables and concrete supports melting into the sand-colored rush of the river. The Royal Palace had been bombed into the shape of a crumbling comb, a Roman lady’s hair ornament excavated from an ancient city. The hotels on the far side of the river had fallen to ruins; they seemed to kneel on the riverbank in belated supplication.
In wordless shock, avoiding each other’s eyes, Andras and József stumbled down through the streets of the old city toward the bridgeless river. They knew they had to cross, knew that whatever waited for them waited on the far bank, amid the remains of Pest. Near Ybl Miklós tér, the square named for the architect who had designed the Operaház, they found a slip where a line of boatmen waited to ferry passengers across. For their passage they traded their last six packages of cigarettes and a dozen large batteries. The boatman, a red-faced boy in a straw hat, looked exceptionally well fed. As the boat cut toward the opposite shore, the feeling in Andras’s chest was like a hand raked through the tissue of his lungs; his diaphragm contracted with a spasm so painful he couldn’t breathe. The boat, a leaking skiff, made a shaky downstream progress across the river, twice threatening to capsize before it delivered them sick and shaking to the shore of Pest. They climbed out onto the wet sand beneath the embankment, the water lapping their shoes. Then they ascended the stone steps and stared up into a corridor of ruined buildings. On either side, a few buildings stood intact; some had even retained the colored tiles of their decorative mosaics, the leaves and flowers of their Baroque ornamentation. But Andras and József’s path toward the center of town led them through a museum of destruction: endless piles of bricks, splintered beams, shattered tiles, fractured concrete. The dead had been moved out of the street long before, but crosses stood on every corner. Signs of ordinary life presented themselves as if in total ignorance of this disaster: a clean shop window full of dough twisted into the usual shapes; a red bicycle reclining against a stoop; from far away, the improbable clang of a streetcar bell. Farther along, the skeleton of a German plane protruded from the top story of a building. A section of burned wing had fallen to the ground; the rust along its edges suggested it had lain there for months. A dog sniffed the blackened steel ribs of the wing and trotted off down the street.
They went along together toward Nefelejcs utca, toward the buildings where their families had lived—the building where József had said goodbye to his mother and grandmother; the building where Tibor and Ilana had moved after Andras’s return; the building where Andras and Klara had crouched together on the bathroom floor the night before his departure. They turned the corner from Thököly út and passed the familiar greengrocer’s, empty of green, and the familiar sweet shop, empty of sweets. At the corner of Nefelejcs utca and István út was a pile of wreckage, a mountain of plaster and stone and wood and brick and tile. Across the street, where József’s family and Tibor and Ilana had lived, there was nothing at all. Not even a ruin. Andras stood and stared.
Later he would say of himself, “That was when I lost my head.” It was the closest he could come to describing the feeling: His head had departed from his body, had been sent, like the evacuated children of Europe, somewhere dull and distant and safe. His body went to its knees in the street. He wanted to tear his clothing but found he couldn’t move. He wouldn’t listen to József, wouldn’t consider that his wife and child, or children, might have left the building before it had been destroyed. He couldn’t see anyone or anything. Passersby moved around him as he knelt on the pavement.
He might have stayed there an hour, or two, or five. József seated himself on an upturned cinderblock and waited. Andras was aware of him as a kind of fine tether, a monofilament connecting him, against his will, to what was left of the world. His eyes, unfocused on the ruin of the building, filled and drained and filled again. And then a familiar sound resolved from the nebula of his dulled senses: the sound of delicate hooves on pavement, the jingle of twin bells. The sound approached until it reached him, then went still. He raised his eyes.
It was the tiny grandmother of Klein, and her goat cart, newly painted white.
“My God,” she said, and stared at him. “Is it Andras? Is it Andras Lévi?”
He took her hand and kissed it. “You remember me,” he said. “Thank God. Do you know anything about my wife? Klara Lévi? Do you remember her, too?”
“Get up,” she said. “Let me take you to my house.”
The house in Frangepán köz stood in its ancient silence, in a haze of dust suspended in the viscous light of late afternoon. In the yard, a quartet of tiny goatlets nosed at a bucket of bread-crusts. Andras ran the stone path to the door, which stood open as if to admit the breeze. Inside, on the sofa where Andras had first waited to see Klein, lay his wife, Klara Lévi, asleep, alive. At the other end of the sofa was his son, Tamás, deep in a nap, his mouth open. Andras knelt beside them as if in prayer. Tamás’s skin was flushed with sleep, his forehead pink, his eyes fluttering beneath the lids. Klara seemed farther away, scarcely breathing, her skin a luminous white film over her faintly beating life. Her hair had come out of its coil and lay over her shoulder in a twisted rope. Her arm was crooked around a sleeping baby in a white blanket, the baby’s hand an open star on Klara’s half-bare breast.
My polestar, Andras thought. My true north.
Klara stirred, opened her eyes, looked down at the baby and smiled. Then she became aware of another presence in the room, an unfamiliar shape. Instinctively she drew her blouse over her breast, covering that slip of damp white skin.
She raised her eyes to Andras and blinked as if he were the dead. She pressed her eyes with a thumb and forefinger and then looked again.
Andras.
Klara.
They wailed each other’s names into the ancient space of that room, into that dust-storm of antique sunlight; their little boy, their son, woke with a start and began to cry in panic, unable to distinguish joy from grief. And perhaps at that moment joy and grief were the same thing, a flood that filled the chest and opened the throat: This is what I have survived without you, this is what we have lost, this is what is left, what we have to live with now. The baby raised a high wet voice. They were together, Klara and Andras and Tamás, and this little girl whose name her father did not know.