KLARA HAD SURVIVED the Siege of Budapest in a women’s shelter at Szabadság tér, under the protection of the International Red Cross. The Allies would not bomb it; the Germans had little interest in it. The inhabitants, young mothers and babies, were of no use to them. Klara had gone there in early December, a few weeks after the Russians had reached the southeastern edge of the capital. By that time Horthy had been deposed, the Arrow Cross had come to power, and seventy thousand Jews had been deported from Budapest. Those who had escaped deportation had had to move twice: first from their original homes to yellow-star buildings, Jewish-only apartments in neighborhoods all over the city; and then to a tiny ghetto in the Seventh District, in the streets surrounding the Great Synagogue.
In the first wave of displacements, Klara and Ilana, the children, Klara’s mother, and Elza Hász had all been assigned to a building on Balzac utca, in the Sixth District. Polaner had gone with them. The diminutive Mrs. Klein, grandmother of Miklós Klein, had provided her goat cart to help them transport their things. Klara had seen Klein’s grandmother on a last desperate visit to the Margit körút prison, where György was supposed to have been interned; Mrs. Klein had been there to inquire about Miklós. There had been no news of either man that day, but as the women had walked together afterward along the Danube embankment, trying to distract each other from their fear and grief, they’d talked of the practical difficulties of the upcoming move. On the day designated for their departure from Nefelejcs utca, Klara had awakened to an early-morning knock at the door. It was Miklós Klein’s grandmother in her peasant skirt and black boots, with the news that her goat cart stood at the ready in the courtyard. Klara had looked over the balcony railing, and there was the cart beside the fountain, two white goats sniffing at the water. Miklós Klein’s grandmother, it turned out, had been assigned to a building not far from Klara’s own, and had already transported what she and her husband could salvage from their tiny homestead in Angyalföld. Seven goats had accompanied them to the inner district of the city: these two wethers, two milch does, three kids. Klara could see them herself that very afternoon, Klein’s grandmother said; she’d hidden the goats in a carriage house behind the yellow-star building on Csanády utca.
Even with the aid of the goat cart, they’d had to leave almost everything behind. They were moving into a single room in a three-room apartment with a shared bath; one family lived there already and a third would join them. Klara and Ilana, the children, the elder and younger Mrs. Hász, and Polaner, carrying his loaded gun—the seven of them had crossed the city on foot, through crowds of thousands of Jewish men and women and children pushing their possessions in wheelbarrows or carrying them on their backs or leading them along in horse carts. It took four hours to make the journey of two kilometers. When they carried their things upstairs, they found that all the rooms were occupied; a fourth family had been assigned to the apartment at the last moment. But there was nowhere else for any of them to go, so they would have to share. And that was the beginning of five months in that apartment on Balzac utca. Soon it came to seem to Klara that she had always slept on a pallet on the floor between her mother and her child, had always shared a bath with sixteen others, had always woken to the sound of her elder sister-in-law weeping. Miklós Klein’s grandmother arrived every few days with goat’s milk for the children and for Klara, reminding Klara that she must keep up her strength for the sake of the baby in her womb. But Klara’s pregnancy seemed a terrible irony, the mockery of a promise. As she waited in line for bread one day, two old women had spoken of her as though she weren’t there, or couldn’t hear: Look at that poor Jewish pregnant woman. What a shame she’s got no future.
In fact, the aperture to any future beyond the war seemed to contract by the day. They lived in constant fear of deportation; from the outlying towns came news of thousands sent away in closed trains. In the capital itself there were horrors enough: frequent Arrow Cross raids on the yellow-star buildings, the displaced families’ possessions stolen, men and women taken away for no reason other than that they happened to be home when the Nyilas men arrived. At times there was reason for hope, reason to think the nightmare might soon end; in July, Horthy stopped all deportations of Jews from Hungary. The Budapest Jews thought they were saved. Klara heard rumors in the streets of talks between Hungary and the Allies, plans for an armistice. Then in mid-October came Horthy’s announcement that Hungary had concluded a separate peace with the Russians. For a few hours there were mad celebrations in the streets. Men tore down the yellow-star signs above their doorways, and women ripped the yellow-star patches from their children’s coats. But then came the terrible double blow of the Arrow Cross coup and Szálasi’s installation as prime minister. The deportations began again, this time in Budapest: Tens of thousands of men and women were taken from their houses and marched to the brickyards at Óbuda, then onward toward Austria. The actions of the Arrow Cross seemed dictated purely by cruel whim. A gang of Nyilas men had raided the building across the street from their own, and had deported nearly a dozen men and women, many of them too old for active labor; Klara had expected their own building to be raided at any moment, but the men had never returned.
All that time, the front lines of the war had been drawing closer and closer. Hitler, determined to keep the Russians from reaching Vienna, decided to delay them at Budapest as long as possible; as winter approached, Nazi and Hungarian forces dug in for what everyone already knew to be a futile struggle. Red Army forces encircled the city in a tightening ring. Air raids drove the terrified civilians underground every night. At times it seemed to Klara they were living in the air-raid shelter, that they spent their entire lives huddling in the dark. There were moments when she almost wished for the shuddering blast she’d experienced a thousand times in her mind, the crushing darkness after which there would be nothing at all. But one morning when Klein’s grandmother came to deliver the goat’s milk, she brought a slip of hope: A few women and children from her building had moved to an International Red Cross shelter at Szabadság tér, at the very center of the city. Klara and Ilana must go there as soon as possible, must try to get in while there was still space. If Klara was lucky, she might be able to have her baby there. Surely there would be a better chance of getting medical help if she were under the protection of the International Red Cross.
The next day the order came that the Jews must move again at the end of November, this time to the ghetto in the Seventh District. It was clear that there was no time to waste. Klara and Ilana went that afternoon to make inquiries at the International Red Cross offices at Vadász utca, and learned that Klein’s grandmother had been correct: There was a shelter for women and babies at Szabadság tér. Klara and Ilana received papers that would allow them to bring the children there that very day. They went home and packed the last of their money and valuables, the children’s diapers and clothing, a few sheets and blankets; they loaded the bundles into Tamás’s and Ádám’s baby carriages and dressed the children in their warmest coats. Then, for the last time, Klara said goodbye to Elza Hász and to her own mother—though she had not known it was to be the last time. Her mother had pressed her wedding band and engagement ring into Klara’s hand.
“Don’t be sentimental,” her mother had said, her eyes calm and steady on Klara’s. “Trade them for bread if you have to.” She’d made Klara slip the rings onto her finger, had given her a brusque kiss of the kind she’d always given Klara in the mornings before school, and then she’d gone inside to pack what little she could take to the ghetto.
Polaner had volunteered to escort Klara and Ilana the fourteen blocks they would have to walk to the shelter. In his pocket he carried the Walther P-38 given to him by the officer who’d arranged his safe passage to Hungary, and in his arms he carried Tamás, who had become inseparable from Polaner during the turmoil of the past months. At the doorway of the Red Cross building on Perczel Mór utca, Tamás, faced with the prospect of Polaner’s departure, raised such an uproar that the shelter director told Polaner he could stay the night to help the women and children settle in. The director was the mother of a little girl whom Klara had taught a few years earlier. The girl, who had died of scarlet fever, had been a favorite of Klara’s, and her mother wanted to do whatever she could to help. In gratitude for her kindness, Polaner explained that his false papers and his Nazi Party identity card might allow him to be of help to the women and children of the shelter; at least until the Russians arrived, he would have a certain freedom of movement in the city. By morning he had taken an inventory of the many things the shelter’s inmates needed. Milk for the babies was at the top of the list. So the first gift he brought to the shelter was half a dozen goats: the wethers, the does, and two of the three kids that had been living in the carriage house behind the yellow-star building on Csanády utca. Klein’s grandmother had entrusted them to Polaner’s care that morning when she and her husband had departed for the Seventh District ghetto, taking the last kid with them.
The Red Cross shelter was housed on the second story of the building, in three rooms of what had once been an insurance office. Mothers who had arrived in fur coats and custom-made shoes sat on desk chairs or on the floor, nursing their babies alongside those who had come with their feet wrapped in newspaper. Day and night the women filled the shelter with urgent talk and weeping and low infrequent laughter. They soothed the babies with songs, tried to distract the two- and three-year-olds with hand games and improvised toys. Pebble-filled pillboxes became rattles; dirty rags became pigtailed dolls. The mothers took turns washing their babies’ diapers in a laundry room on the ground floor, their only source of running water. When bombs broke the windows and the building became so cold that the newly washed diapers froze, they wrapped the diapers around themselves at night and dried them with the heat of their bodies. Ten times a day, it seemed, they rushed down to the shelter beneath the building and huddled there while bombs fell all around Szabadság tér.
Polaner worked tirelessly for the women and children. He scrounged rags for diapers; he stole the women’s own winter clothing back from the apartments they’d been forced to leave. At night, in violation of the citywide curfew, he gleaned fodder for the goats from abandoned stables and from the garbage that had begun to pile in the streets. On his travels through the neighborhood he discovered the secret Jewish hospital on Zichy Jenő utca, a few blocks from the shelter, where an Armenian doctor named Ara Jerezian had assembled forty Jewish physicians and their families. The Arrow Cross flag flew over the shelter entrance, and Jerezian wore the official Nyilas uniform. He had renounced his party membership years earlier, in protest against the Arrow Cross’s anti-Jewish policies, but had taken it up again when he realized he might work secretly for the Jews from inside the party. Under the pretense of setting up a hospital for the Arrow Cross wounded, he’d assembled the Jewish doctors and their families and had laid in a store of food and medicine. Now, in those cramped apartments that had become a hospital, the doctors were treating the horrific casualties of the siege. Polaner brought sick women and babies from the Red Cross shelter to that hospital and took them back again when they were better. In return for the doctors’ attention, he gave their hungry children what little goat’s milk could be spared.
All over the city, people were beginning to starve. The first weeks of December the Red Cross shelter had been supplied with soup, which had to be transported on a cart from a kitchen on the other side of Szabadság tér. When the soup ran out there were soybeans and potatoes in their own cooking water; then just the soybeans; then, finally, nothing except what the goats produced on their own starvation diet. The women of the shelter pooled their jewelry and gave it to Polaner so he might trade it for food; Klara slipped her mother’s wedding band and engagement ring into the bag with the rest. But Polaner returned empty-handed. The women’s jewelry was worth nothing. There was no food to be had. Even the scant running water had ceased to run. Their only water now came from melted snow they’d brought in from the courtyard. The women became sick with hunger and thirst, and a drought of milk spread through the shelter. At first the children cried, but by the beginning of January they had become too weak to protest. One by one they went silent, their breathing a fluttering of wings beneath the breastbone. That was when Polaner did what Klein’s grandmother had instructed him to do if the situation grew dire. That gentle textile-maker’s son, the dovelike young man skilled with pen and protractor, killed the goats and their kids with his Walther P-38, then turned them over to one of the shelter’s inmates, a woman whose husband had been a butcher and who knew what to do with Polaner’s knife.
A week later, on the eighth of January, Klara’s labor began. Ilana insisted that she must go to the hospital on Zichy Jenő utca; after two cesarean sections, she could hardly risk labor at the shelter. Ilana herself would care for Tamás. She kissed Klara and assured her that all would be well. Then Klara and Polaner struggled through a network of smoke-darkened alleys to Ara Jerezian’s hospital. As the fighting drew closer, the halls of the hospital had become clogged with horrifically wounded soldiers; men lay crying and sweating and panting on cots along the walls, and the hallways were slick with blood. The doctors could scarcely pause to consider the situation of a healthy woman in labor, whatever her history. Klara and Polaner waited in a makeshift kitchen for three hours until a series of contractions brought her to her hands and knees. At last Polaner begged the help of Ara Jerezian himself, who took Klara to his office and made a pallet for her on the floor. Polaner brought water, sponged Klara’s forehead, changed her soaked sheets as she labored. When it became clear that the baby was in the breech position, and that Klara couldn’t deliver without a cesarean, Dr. Jerezian brought her to an impromptu operating theater—three metal tables lit only by a bank of high windows—and anesthetized her with morphine as the steadfast Polaner averted his eyes. Klara woke to learn she’d had a girl, whom she named Április in the hope that she would live to see the spring. And Polaner observed that the baby resembled her father.
For five days Klara recovered in Jerezian’s office. Whatever food Polaner could find in the hospital, he brought to her. He tended her wound, cooled her forehead with wet cloths, held the baby while she slept. The baby, tiny at birth, gained weight on Klara’s milk. When at last they carried her home to the Red Cross shelter, they found Tamás silent and glassy-eyed in the director’s arms. Where was Ilana? they asked. Where was the boy’s aunt, who was supposed to care for him? The director regarded them for a moment in silence, her mouth trembling, and then she told them.
Ádám Lévi had died of a fever on the twelfth of January. In a delirium of grief, his mother had run out into the street, where a Russian shell had killed her.
The fighting continued in Pest for six more days. The Russian forces drew close now to the center of the city, seeming to converge upon Szabadság tér itself; artillery fire shook the building day and night. Klara, in a shock of grief and fear, huddled in the bomb shelter with the baby while Tamás clung to Polaner. She would die without seeing her husband again; if he lived, how would he even learn of her death, of their children’s deaths? It was possible he might never learn he’d had a daughter. A shame she doesn’t have a future. What kind of future could be imagined after such a time? That night, when Polaner ventured out to get water at a standpipe across the street, he returned with the news that Nyugati Station was on fire, and that Hungarian soldiers were fleeing in the direction of the Danube bridges. That infernal glow along the Danube was the conflagration of the grand hotels. Flames climbed the dome and spire of Parliament. Civilians rushed toward the river with their dogs and bags and children, but the bridges were under bombardment. In the whole city there was nothing left to eat. Klara received the last piece of news with the understanding that she would watch her children die. Later that night, when a shallow panicked sleep overtook her, she dreamed of feeding her own right hand to the children; she felt no pain, only a relief that she had arrived at this ingenious solution.
In the morning she woke to an unaccustomed quiet. In place of gunfire there was a resonant stillness. Now and then a burst of shots cut through the morning air, and from the west bank of the Danube, where the fighting continued, came the faint echo of battle. But the battle for Pest was over. The bridges had all been destroyed; the Soviets held the city. The last Nazis in Pest had been taken as prisoners of war, or were cowering in buildings where they had made others cower. In the Red Cross shelter, the women waited for some sign of what to do. They were faint with thirst and hunger, sick with grief; though the building had withstood the night’s bombing, two more babies had died. The children who had survived were quieter that day, as if they knew something had changed. By midday the shelter residents came out of the building and into the cold gray light of Szabadság tér. What they saw seemed like an image from a newsreel or a dream: the American flag flying brazenly above the shuttered embassy. Two Arrow Cross soldiers lay dead on the embassy steps, the breasts of their overcoats tattered with bullet holes. A pair of Russian military policemen stood at the edge of the square and stared at the smoking dome of the Parliament building. The director of the shelter crossed the square toward the Russian men and fell to her knees before them; they could understand nothing she said, but they offered her their canteens.
That afternoon, the inhabitants of the shelter began to leave in search of food and water. Klara and Polaner lined the babies’ carriages with extra blankets and packed them with what remained of what they’d brought. Into Ádám’s empty carriage they put Tamás, who, for the past week, had had nothing to eat but the scant trickle of Klara’s milk. Into the other carriage they put the new baby. Klara, blind with exhaustion, could scarcely walk. They made their way through the rubble of the city, not knowing where they were going; they steered the carriages around crashed planes, horse carcasses, exploded German tanks, fallen chimneys, piles of rubbish, bodies of soldiers, bodies of women. At the corner of Király and Kazinczy utca they came across a group of Russian soldiers shoveling rubble into the back of a truck. Their leader, a decorated officer, stopped Klara and Polaner and made a loud demand in Russian. They knew he wanted their papers, but Polaner’s papers could only have gotten him arrested or shot; he replied in Hungarian that Klara was his wife and that they were bringing the children home. For a long time the officer looked at the gaunt, hollow-eyed Klara and Polaner, and peered into the carriages at the silent children. Finally he reached into the pocket of his coat and brought out a photograph of a round-faced woman with a round-faced child seated on her knee. While Klara held the photograph, the soldier went to the cab of the truck and took out a canvas rucksack. Kneeling, he drew out a paper bag that bulged as though it contained stones, then reached into the bag and withdrew a handful of wizened hazelnuts. These he passed to Klara. A second handful of nuts went to Polaner.
On those two handfuls of food, Klara would nurse both children for a week.
Because there was nowhere else to go, they went to the ghetto, which had been liberated by the Russians earlier that day. There, at the gates of the Great Synagogue on Dohány utca, they found Klein’s grandmother holding the single goat kid she’d nursed through the siege. Klein’s grandfather, that tiny bright-eyed man with his two uplifted wings of hair, had died of a stroke the first week of January. He’d been taken to the courtyard of the synagogue, where hundreds of Jewish dead lay waiting to be buried.
What about my mother? Klara had asked. What about my brother’s wife?
And in the same grief-raked voice, Klein’s grandmother delivered the news that Elza Hász and Klara’s mother had been shot, along with forty others, in the courtyard of a building on Wesselényi utca. She spoke the words with lowered eyes as she stroked the head of the last surviving kid, the remnant of the urban flock that had saved the lives of thirty women and children at Szabadság tér.
In the courtyard of the synagogue at Bethlen Gábor tér, where the concentration-camp survivors were supposed to register when they returned, those who had remained in Budapest begged the camp survivors for news of those who hadn’t come home. Nearly every day until Andras’s return, Klara had gone to that synagogue. Though she feared the answers to her questions, she had asked and asked. One week she met a man who’d been in a camp in Germany with her brother; they’d been workmates at an armaments factory there. This man took her into the synagogue sanctuary, where he sat down with her in a pew, took her hands in his own, and told her that her brother was dead. He’d been shot on New Year’s Eve along with twenty-five others.
For a week she sat shivah for him at the house on Frangepán kóz; as far as she knew, she was the only member of their family still alive. Then she went back to the synagogue again, hoping for news of Andras. Instead she learned something that she must tell him now. A woman from Debrecen had come to Bethlen Gábor tér to look for her children. Not long before, this woman had been in a camp herself; she had been in Oświęcim, in Poland. She had seen Andras’s parents on a railroad embankment there, before she herself had been moved into a group of those who were well enough to work. Of the other group, the old and sick and very young, nothing more had been seen, nothing heard.
As Klara delivered the news, Andras began to shake with silent grief. József sat beside him in hollow-eyed shock. In a single day, in this strange small house filled with photographs of the dead, they had both become orphans.
For months after Andras came home, they went to the synagogue at Bethlen Gábor tér every day. Hungarian Jews were being exhumed from graves all over Austria and Germany, Ukraine and Yugoslavia, and, whenever it was possible, identified by their papers or their dog tags. There were thousands of them. Every day, on the wall outside the building, endless lists of names. Abraham. Almasy. Arany. Banki. Böhm. Braun. Breuer. Budai. Csato. Czitrom. Dániel. Diamant. Einstein. Eisenberger. Engel. Fischer. Goldman. Goldner. Goldstein. Hart. Hauszmann. Heller. Hirsch. Honig. Horovitz. Idesz. János. Jáskiseri. Kemény. Kepecs. Kertész. Klein. Kovacs. Langer. Lázár. Lindenfeld. Markovitz. Martón. Nussbaum. Ócsai. Paley. Pollák. Róna. Rosenthal. Roth. Rubiczek. Rubin. Schoenfeld. Sebestyen. Sebök. Steiner. Szanto. Toronyi. Ungar. Vadas. Vámos. Vertes. Vida. Weisz. Wolf. Zeller. Zindler. Zucker. An alphabet of loss, a catalogue of grief. Almost every time they went, they witnessed someone learning that a person they loved had died. Sometimes the news would be received in silence, the only evidence a whitening of the skin around the mouth, or a tremor in the hands that clutched a hat. Other times there would be screams, protests, weeping. They looked day after day, every day, for so long that they almost forgot what they were looking for; after a while it seemed they were just looking, trying to memorize a new Kaddish composed entirely of names.
Then, one afternoon in early August—eight hours before the Enola Gay’s flight over Hiroshima, and eight days before the end of the Second World War—as they stood scanning the lists of dead, Klara’s hand flew to her mouth and her shoulders curled. In that first moment Andras wondered only who she could have had left to lose; it didn’t occur to him that her reaction might have anything to do with him. But he must have sensed unconsciously what had happened. When he looked at the list, he found he couldn’t bring the names into focus.
Klara held his arm, trembling. “Oh, Andras,” she said. “Tibor. Oh, God.”
He moved away from her, unwilling to understand. He looked at the list again but couldn’t make sense of it. Already people were stepping away from them, giving them a respectful space, the way they did when people found their dead. He stepped forward and touched the list where it bled from K to L. Katz, Adolf. Kovály, Sarah. László, Béla. Lebowitz, Kati. Lévi, Tibor.
It couldn’t be his Tibor. He said this aloud: It’s not him. It’s someone else. It’s not our Tibor. Not our Tibor. A mistake. He pushed his way through the crowd around the list, toward the door of the synagogue, up the stairs to the administrative offices, where an explanation would be found. He terrified a woman at a desk by roaring for the person in charge. She took him to an anteroom where, unbelievably, they made him wait. Klara found him there; her eyes were red, and he thought, Ridiculous. Not our Tibor. And in the office of the person in charge, he sat in an ancient leather chair while the man leafed through manila envelopes. He handed one to Andras, labeled with the name LÉVI. The envelope held a brief typewritten note and a metal dog-tag locket, its clasp twisted. When Andras opened the dog tag he found the inner document still intact: Tibor’s name, his date and place of birth, his height and eye color and weight, the name of his commanding officer, his home address, his Munkaszolgálat number. Your dog tags might come home, but you never will. The brief typewritten note stated that the tag had been found on Tibor’s body in a mass grave in Hidegség, near the Austrian border.
That night Andras locked himself into the bedroom of the new apartment he shared with Klara and Polaner and the children. He sat on the floor, cried aloud, beat his head against the cold red tile. He would never leave that room, he decided; would stay there until he was an old man, and let the earth burn through its years around him.
Sometime in the night, Klara and Polaner came in and helped him to bed. In the vaguest way, he was aware of Klara unbuttoning his shirt, of Polaner sliding his arms into a new one; vaguely, through a veil, he saw Klara washing her face at the basin and getting into bed beside him. Her arm across his chest was a warm live thing, and he was dead beneath it. He couldn’t move to touch her or respond to anything she said. He lay spent and exhausted and awake, listening as her breathing fell into its familiar rhythm of sleep. He saw Tibor in those last weeks, the nightmare of their life at Sopron: Tibor going to the village for food. Tibor overturning Andras and József’s bowl of beans. Tibor bathing Andras’s forehead with a cold cloth. Tibor covering him with his own overcoat. Tibor walking twenty kilometers with a handful of strawberry jam. Tibor reminding him that it was Tamás’s birthday. Then he thought of Tibor in Budapest, his eyes dark behind his silver-rimmed glasses. Tibor in Paris, lying on Andras’s floor in an agony of love for Ilana. Tibor hauling Andras’s bags to Keleti Station one September morning a lifetime ago. Tibor at the opera, the night before Andras’s departure. Tibor dragging an extra mattress up the stairs to his own small room on Hársfa utca. Tibor in high school, a biology book open on the table before him. Tibor as a tall young boy, chasing Andras through the orchard, throwing him to the ground. Tibor pulling Andras from the millpond. Tibor bending over Andras where he sat on the kitchen floor, tipping a spoonful of sweet milk into his mouth.
He turned over and pulled Klara against him, cried and cried into the damp nebula of her hair.
There was a funeral at the Jewish cemetery outside the city, a reburial of Tibor’s remains and the remains of hundreds of others, a field of open graves, a thousand mourners. Afterward, for the second time that year, he observed a week of shivah. He and Klara burned a memorial candle and ate hard-boiled eggs, sat on the floor in silence, received a stream of guests. In accordance with the ritual, Andras did not shave for thirty days. He hid inside his beard, forgot to change his clothes, bathed only when Klara insisted. He had to work; he knew he couldn’t afford to lose his new job as a dismantler of bombed buildings. But he performed the work without speaking to the other men or seeing the houses he was taking apart or thinking of the people who had lived in them. After work he sat in the front room of the apartment they’d taken on Pozsonyi út, or in a dark corner of the bedroom, sometimes holding one of the children on his lap, stroking the baby’s hair or listening as Tamás described what had happened at the park that morning. He ate little, couldn’t concentrate on a book or newspaper, didn’t want to go out for a walk with József and Polaner. He said Kaddish every day. It seemed to him he could live this way forever, could make a permanent employment of grief. Klara, whose motherhood had prevented her from sinking into an all-consuming mourning for her own mother and György and Elza, understood and indulged him; and Polaner, whose grief had been as deep as Andras’s own, knew that even this abyss had a bottom, and that Andras would reach it soon.
He could not have anticipated how, or when. It came on a Sunday exactly a month after the funeral, the day Andras shaved his mourning beard. They were sitting at the breakfast table, eating barley porridge with goats’ milk; food was still scarce, and as the weather turned colder they had begun to wonder whether, having survived the war itself, they would die of its aftermath. Klara spooned her own porridge into the children’s mouths. Andras, who could not eat, passed his along to her. József and Polaner sat with the newspaper spread between them, Polaner reading aloud about the Communist Party’s struggle to recruit members before the upcoming general election.
It was Andras who rose when they heard a knock at the door. He crossed the room, drawing his robe closer against the morning chill; he unlocked the door and opened it. A red-faced young man stood on the doorstep, a knapsack on his back. His cap bore the Soviet military insignia. He reached into the pocket of his trousers and drew out a letter.
“I’ve been charged to deliver this to Andras or Tibor Lévi,” the man said.
“Charged by whom?” Andras said. With numb dispassion he noted how strange it was to hear his brother’s name in this soldier’s mouth. Tibor Lévi. As if he were still alive.
“By Mátyás Lévi,” the man said. “I was with him at a prisoner-of-war camp in Siberia.”
And so, Andras thought. The final piece of news. Mátyás dead, and this his last missive. He felt himself to be in a place so remote from human feeling, so far removed from the ability to experience pain or hope or love, that he did not hesitate to take the letter. He opened it as the young man stood watching, as his family looked at him for the news. And he learned that his brother Mátyás lived, and would be home the following Tuesday.
In the winter of 1942, just a month after he’d been sent to Ukraine, Mátyás Lévi had been taken prisoner by the Soviets, and along with the rest of his labor company had been sent to a mining camp in Siberia. The location was the region of Kolyma, bounded by the Arctic Ocean to the north and the Sea of Okhotsk to the south. They’d gone via the Trans-Siberian Railway to the end of its easternmost spike at Vladivostok, and then had been transported across the sea on the slave ship Dekabrist. The camp had two thousand inmates, Germans and Ukrainians and Hungarians and Serbs and Poles and Nazi-sympathizing French, along with Soviet criminals and political dissidents and writers and composers and artists. In the camp he’d been beaten with clubs and shovels and pickhandles. He’d been bitten by bedbugs and flies and lice. He’d been frozen almost to death. He’d worked seventeen-hour days at seventy degrees below zero, had received a daily ration of twenty decagrams of bread, had been thrown into isolation for disobedience, had nearly died of dysentery, had earned the respect of the guards and officers by painting bold Communist posters for the barracks walls, had been named official propaganda-poster designer and official snow sculptor of the camp (he had made ten-foot-high busts of Lenin and Stalin to preside over the parade ground), had learned Russian and had volunteered as a translator, had been called upon to interview Hungarian Nazis, had seen a hundred Arrow Cross members brought to trial and sentenced and in some cases executed, had been attacked by a secret coalition of Hungarian Arrow Cross members who broke both his legs, had convalesced in the infirmary for six months, and finally had been informed one morning that his time at the prison camp was through, and when he’d asked what had earned him the privilege of release, had been told that it was because his official designation, and that of five hundred twenty other prisoners, had been changed from Jewish Hungarian to Hungarian Jew, and that the prison camp was not in the business of detaining Jews, not after what the Nazis had done to them.
But nothing that happened to him those three cold years had prepared him for what waited at home. Nothing had prepared him for the news that four hundred thousand of Hungary’s Jews had been sent to death camps in Poland; nothing had prepared him for the bombed ruin of Budapest with its six severed bridges. And nothing had prepared him for the news that his mother and father, his brother and his sister-in-law and his nephew, had all vanished from the earth. It was Andras who delivered the news. Mátyás, grown into a lean, hard-eyed man with a short dark beard, sat before him on the sofa and took it in without a sound; the only sign he gave of having understood at all was a faint trembling of the jaw. He got up and smoothed his pant legs, as if, having been given a military briefing, he was ready now to incorporate the news into his plans and move onward. And then something seemed to change beneath the skin of his face, as though his muscles had received the news on a long-distance telephone delay. He went to his knees on the floor, his features twisting with grief. “Not true,” he cried, and moved his arms around his head as if birds were flying at him. It was the news, Andras thought, the unrelenting news, a troop of crows circling, their wings smelling of ash.
He knelt beside his brother and put his arms around him, held him against his own chest as Mátyás wailed. He said his brother’s name aloud, as if to remind him of the astonishing fact that at least, he, Mátyás, still lived. He would not let go until Mátyás pulled away and looked around at the unfamiliar room; when his eyes came to rest on Andras’s again, they were lucid and full of despair. Is it true? he seemed to be asking, though he hadn’t said a word. Tell me honestly. Is it true?
Andras held Mátyás’s gaze steady in his own. There was no need to speak or to make any sign. He put his arm around Mátyás’s shoulder again, drew him close and held him as he cried.
It was Andras who sat with him that night and the next and the one after that, Andras who urged him to eat and who changed the damp bedding on the sofa where he slept. As he did these things he felt the first thinning of the fog that had enveloped him since he’d learned that Tibor was dead. Over the past month he’d nearly forgotten how to be a man in the world, how to breathe and eat and sleep and speak to other people. He had let himself slip away, even though Klara and the children had survived the war, the siege; even though Polaner was there with him every day. On the third night after Mátyás’s return, after Mátyás had fallen asleep and he and Klara had retreated to their bedroom, Andras took her hands and begged her forgiveness.
“You know there’s nothing to forgive,” she said.
“I vowed to take care of you. I want to be a husband to you again.”
“You’ve never stopped,” she said.
He bent to kiss her; she was alive, his Klara, and she was there in his arms. Nest of my children, he thought, placing a hand on her womb. Cradle of my joy. And he remembered her with an orange-red dahlia behind her ear, and the way her skin felt beneath a film of bathwater, and what it was like to meet her eye and to know they were thinking the same thing. And he believed, for the first time since he had seen Tibor’s name on the list at Bethlen Gábor tér, that it might be possible to live beyond that terrible year; that he might look into Klara’s face, whose planes and curves he knew more intimately than any landscape in the world, and feel something like peace. And he took her to bed and made love to her as if for the first time in his life.