“I can’t become a fugitive. I’m engaged to be married. And the French borders are closed now, anyway.”
“Then go somewhere else. Belgium. Switzerland. You said yourself that Klara’s not safe here. Take her with you.”
“Ride the rails like vagrants, both of us?”
“Why not? It’s a lot better than being shipped off to Ruthenia.” But then he straightened from his work and regarded Andras for a long moment, his expression darkening. “You’ve really got to go, don’t you.”
“I can’t see any way around it. The first deployment’s only six months.”
“And then you’ll have a stingy furlough, and then you’ll be sent back for another six months. And then you’ll have to do that twice more.” Mátyás crossed his arms. “I still think you should run.”
“I wish I could, believe me.”
“Klara’s not going to be too happy about any of this.”
“I know. I’m on my way to see her now. She’s expecting me at her mother’s.”
Mátyás cuffed him on the shoulder for luck and held the little door open so he could slip through. He stepped down into the shop and went out through the bigger doors, waving to Mátyás through the glass as he made his way past the women who had gathered to watch. He could scarcely believe it was nearing October and he wasn’t on his way back to school; in recent days he’d found himself combing the Pesti Napló obsessively for news of Paris. Today’s papers had shown a crush at the railway stations as sixteen thousand children were evacuated to the countryside. If he and Klara had remained in France, perhaps they would have left the city too; or perhaps they would have chosen to stay, bracing themselves for whatever was to come. Instead here he was in Budapest, walking along Andrássy út toward the Városliget, toward the tree-shadowed avenues of Klara’s childhood. It had come to seem almost ordinary now to spend an afternoon at the house on Benczúr utca, though only a month had passed since they had first arrived in Budapest. At that time they’d been so uncertain about Klara’s situation that they’d been afraid even to go to the house; they’d taken a room under Andras’s name at a tiny out-of-the-way hotel on Cukor utca, and decided that the best course of action would be to warn Klara’s mother of her fugitive daughter’s presence in Budapest before Klara herself appeared at the house. The next afternoon he’d gone to Benczúr utca and presented himself to the housemaid as a friend of József’s. She had shown him into the same pink-and-gold-upholstered sitting room where he’d passed an uncomfortable hour on the day of his departure for Paris. The younger and elder Mrs. Hász were engaged in a card game at a gilt table by the window, and József was draped over a salmon-colored chair with a book in his lap. When he saw Andras in the doorway, József peeled himself from the chair and delivered the expected jovial greetings, the expected expressions of regret that Andras, too, had been forced to return to Budapest. The younger Mrs. Hász offered a polite nod, the elder a smile of welcome and recognition. But something about Andras’s look must have caught Klara’s mother’s attention, because a moment later she laid her fan of cards on the table and got to her feet.
“Mr. Lévi,” she said. “Are you well? You look a bit pale.” She crossed the room to take his hand, her expression stoic, as if she were bracing for bad news.
“I’m well,” he said. “And so is Klara.”
She regarded him with frank surprise, and József’s mother rose too. “Mr. Lévi,” she began, and paused, apparently unsure of how she might caution him without revealing too much to her son.
“Who is Klara?” József said. “Surely you don’t mean Klara Hász?”
“I do,” Andras said. And he explained how he’d carried a letter to Klara from her mother two years earlier, and then how he’d been introduced to her. “She lives under the name of Morgenstern now. You know her daughter. Elisabet.”
József sat down slowly on the damask chair, looking as though Andras had struck him with a fist. “Elisabet?” he said. “Do you mean to say that Elisabet Morgenstern is Klara’s daugher? Klara, my lost aunt?” And then he must have remembered the rumors of what had existed between Andras and the mother of Elisabet Morgenstern, because he seemed to focus more sharply on Andras, staring at him as if he’d never seen him before.
“Why have you come?” the younger Mrs. Hász asked. “What is it you want to tell us?”
And finally Andras broke the news he had come to deliver: that Klara was not only well, but here in Budapest, staying at a hotel in the Ferencváros. As soon as he’d spoken, Klara’s mother’s eyes filled with tears; then her expression became overshadowed with terror. Why, she asked, had Klara had undertaken such a terrible risk?
“I’m afraid I’m partly to blame,” Andras said. “I had to return to Budapest myself. And Klara and I are engaged to be married.”
At those words, a kind of pandemonium broke upon the sitting room. József’s mother lost her composure entirely; in a panic-laced soprano she demanded to know how such a thing could have come to pass, and then she declared that she didn’t want to know, that it was absurd and unthinkable. She called the housemaid and and asked for her heart medication, and then told József to fetch his father from the bank immediately. A moment later she retracted the command on the basis that György’s hasty exit in the middle of the day might raise unnecessary suspicion. Meanwhile, the elder Mrs. Hász implored Andras to tell her where Klara might be found, whether she was safe, and how she might be visited. Andras, at the center of this maelstrom, began to wonder whether he would emerge on the other side of it still engaged to Klara, or if her brother and his wife could exercise some esoteric power that would nullify any attachment between a member of Klara’s class and one of his own. Already József Hász was looking at Andras with an unfamiliar, perhaps even a hostile expression-of confusion, betrayal, and, most disturbingly to Andras, distrust.
Soon it became clear that the elder Mrs. Hász could not be prevented from going to Klara at once. She had already called for the car; she wanted Andras to accompany her. The chauffeur would drive them halfway to the tiny hotel on Cukor utca, and they would walk the remaining blocks. József, without a parting word to Andras, took his mother upstairs to tend to her nerves. Klara’s mother gave Andras a single look that seemed to indicate how ridiculous she considered her daughter-in-law’s behavior to be. She threw a coat over her dress and they ran outside to the waiting car. As they drove through the streets she begged him to tell her if Klara were well, and what she looked like now, and, finally, whether she wanted to see her mother.
“More than anything,” Andras said. “You must know that.”
“Eighteen years!” she said in a half whisper, and then fell silent, overcome.
A few moments later the car let them out at the base of Andrássy út, and Andras put a hand on Mrs. Hász’s elbow as they hurried through the streets. Her hair loosened from its knot as she went, and her hastily tied scarf fell from her neck; Andras caught the square of violet silk in his fingertips as they entered the narrow lobby of the hotel. At the foot of the cast-iron stair a wordless trepidation seemed to take Klara’s mother. She climbed the steps with a slow and deliberate tread, as though she needed time to rehearse in her mind a few of her thousand imaginings of this moment. When Andras indicated that they’d reached the correct floor, she followed him down the hall without a word and watched gravely as he took the key from his pocket. He unlocked the door and pushed it open. There was Klara at the window in her fawn-colored dress, midmorning light falling across her face, a handkerchief crushed in her hand. Her mother approached like a somnambulist; she went to the window, took Klara’s hands, touched her face, pronounced her name. Klara, trembling, laid her head on her mother’s shoulder and wept. And there they stood in shuddering silence as Andras watched. Here was the reverse of what he’d witnessed a few weeks earlier at Elisabet’s embarkation: a vanished child returned, the intangible made real. He knew the reunion was taking place on the shabby top floor of a cramped hotel room on an unl
ovely street in Budapest, but he felt he was witnessing a kind of unearthly reconnection, a conjunction so stunning he had to turn away. Here was the closing of the distance between Klara’s past life and her present; it seemed not unthinkable that he and she might enter a new life together now. At that time his difficulties at the Budapest visa office had not yet begun. The French border was still open. All seemed possible.
Now, four weeks later, what he had learned for certain was that he wouldn’t return to Paris as they’d hoped. Worse than that: He’d soon be sent far away from Klara, into a distant and unknown forest. When he arrived at Benczúr utca that afternoon with the news he’d just delivered to his brother-that he was to be deployed to Carpatho-Ruthenia in three weeks’ time-he found to his relief that no one was awaiting him besides Klara herself. She’d asked to have tea served in her favorite upstairs room, a pretty boudoir with a window seat that faced the garden. When she was a child, she told Andras, this was where she had come when she wanted to be alone. She called it the Rabbit Room because of the beautiful Dürer engraving that hung above the mantel: a young hare posed in half profile, its soft-furred haunches bunched, its ears rotated back. She’d lit a fire in the grate and requested pastries for their tea. But once he told her what he’d learned at the battalion office, they could only sit in silence and stare at the plate of walnut and poppyseed strudel.
“You’ve got to get home as soon as the French border opens again,” he said, finally. “It terrifies me to think of the danger you’re in.”
“ Paris won’t be safer,” she said. “It could be bombed at any time.”
“You could go to the countryside with Mrs. Apfel. You could go to Nice.”
She shook her head. “I won’t leave you here. We’re going to be married.”
“But it’s madness to stay,” he said. “Sooner or later they’ll learn who you are.”
“There’s nothing for me in Paris now. Elisabet’s gone. You’re here. And my mother, and György. I can’t go back, Andras.”
“What about your friends, your students, the rest of your life?”
She shook her head. “ France is at war. My students are gone to the countryside. I’d have to close the school in any case, at least for a time. Perhaps the war will be a short one. With any luck it’ll be over before you finish your military service. Then you’ll get another visa and we’ll go home together.”
“And all that time you’ll stay here, in peril?”
“I’ll live quietly under your surname. No one will have reason to come looking for me. I’ll rent the apartment and studio in Paris and take a little place in the Jewish Quarter here. Maybe I’ll teach a few private students.”
He sighed and rubbed his face with both hands. “This will be the death of me,” he said. “Thinking of you living in Budapest, outside the law.”
“I was living outside the law in Paris.”
“But the law was so much farther away!”
“I won’t leave you here in Hungary,” she said. “That’s all.”
He had never dared to imagine that he and Klara might be married at the Dohány Street Synagogue, nor that his parents and Mátyás might be there to witness it; he had certainly never dreamed that Klara’s family might be there, too-her mother, who had shed her widow’s garb for a column of rose-colored silk, weeping with joy; the younger Mrs. Hász tight-lipped and erect in a drooping Vionnet gown; Klara’s brother, György, his affection for Klara having overcome whatever reservations he might have had about Andras, striding about with as much bluster and anxiety as if he were the bride’s father; and József Hász, watching the proceedings with silent detachment. Their wedding canopy was Lucky Béla’s prayer shawl, and Klara’s wedding ring the simple gold band that had belonged to Béla’s mother. They were married on an October afternoon in the synagogue courtyard. A grand ceremony in the sanctuary was out of the question. There could be nothing public about their union except the paperwork that would place the bride’s name at a still-farther remove from the Klara Hász she had once been. She couldn’t become a citizen, thanks to a new anti-Jewish law that had been passed in May, but she could still legally change her surname to Andras’s, and apply for a residence permit under that veil. Andras’s father himself read the marriage contract aloud, his rabbinical-school training in Aramaic having prepared him for the role. And Andras’s mother, shy before the few assembled guests, presented the glass to be broken under Andras’s foot.
What no one mentioned-not during the wedding itself, nor during the luncheon at Benczúr utca that followed-was Andras’s imminent departure for Carpatho-Ruthenia. But the awareness of it ran underneath every event of the day like an elegy. József, it turned out, had been saved from a similar fate; the Hász family had managed to secure his exemption from labor service by bribing a government official. The exemption had come at a price proportionate to the Hászes’ wealth: They had been forced to give the government official their chalet on Lake Balaton, where Klara had spent her childhood summers. József’s student visa had been renewed and he would return to France as soon as the borders opened, though no one knew when that might be, nor whether France would admit citizens of countries allied with Germany. Andras’s parents were in no position to buy him an exemption. The lumberyard barely supplied their existence. Klara had suggested that her brother might help, but Andras refused to discuss the possibility. There was the danger, first of all, of alerting the government authorities to the link between Andras and the Hász family; nor did Andras want to be a financial burden to György. In desperation, Klara suggested selling her apartment and studio in Paris, but Andras wouldn’t let her consider that either. The apartment on the rue de Sévigné was her home. If her situation in Hungary became more precarious, she would have to return there at once by whatever means possible. And there was a less practical element to the decision too: As long as Klara owned the apartment and studio, they could imagine themselves back in Paris someday. Andras would endure his two years in the work service; by then, as Klara had said, the war might be over, and they could return to France.
For a few sweet hours, during the wedding festivities on Benczúr utca, Andras found it possible almost to forget about his impending departure. In a large gallery that had been cleared of furniture, he was lifted on a chair beside his new bride while a pair of musicians played Gypsy music. Afterward, he and Mátyás and their father danced together, holding each other by the arms and spinning until they stumbled. József Hász, who could not resist the role of host even at a wedding of which he seemed to disapprove, kept everyone’s champagne glasses full. And Mátyás, in the tradition of making the bride and groom laugh, performed a Chaplinesque tap dance that involved a collapsing cane and a top hat that kept leaping away. Klara cried with laughter. Her pale forehead had flushed pink, and dark curls sprang from her chignon. But it was impossible for Andras to forget entirely that all of this was fleeting, that soon he would have to kiss his new bride goodbye and board a train for Carpatho-Ruthenia. Nor would his joy have been uncomplicated in any case. He couldn’t ignore the younger Mrs. Hász’s coldness, nor the reminders on all sides of how different Klara’s early life had been from his own. His mother, elegant as she was in her gray gown, seemed afraid to handle the delicate Hász champagne flutes; his father had little to say to Klara’s brother, and even less to say to József. If Tibor had been there, Andras thought, he might have found a way to bridge the divide. But Tibor was absent, of course, as were three others, the lack of whom made the day’s events seem somehow unreal: Polaner and Rosen, who had nonetheless sent telegrams of congratulations, and Ben Yakov, from whom there had been continued silence. He knew Klara was experiencing her own private pain in the midst of her happiness: She must have been thinking of her father, and of Elisabet, thousands of miles away.
The war was discussed, and Hungary ’s possible role in it. Now that Poland had fallen, György Hász said, England and France might pressure Germany into a cease-fire before Hungary could be forced
to come to the aid of its ally. It seemed to Andras a far-fetched idea, but the day demanded an optimistic view. It was mid-October, one of the last warm afternoons of the year. The plane trees were filled with slanting light, and a gold haze pooled in the garden like a flood of honey. As the sun slipped toward the edge of the garden wall, Klara took Andras’s hand and led him outside. She brought him to a corner of the garden behind a privet hedge, where a marble bench stood beneath a fall of ivy. He sat down and took her onto his lap. The skin of her neck was warm and damp, the scent of roses mingled with the faint mineral tang of her sweat. She inclined her face to his, and when he kissed her she tasted of wedding cake.
That was the moment that came back to him again and again, those nights in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains. That moment, and the ones that came afterward in their suite at the Gellért Hotel. Their honeymoon had been a brief one: three days, that was all. Now it sustained him like bread: the moment they’d registered at the hotel as husband and wife; the look of relief she’d given him when they were alone in the room together at last; her surprising shyness in their bridal bed; the curve of her naked back in the tangled sheets when they woke in the morning; the wedding ring a surprising new weight on his hand. It seemed an incongruous luxury to wear the ring now as he worked, not just because of the contrast of the gold with the dirt and grayness of everything around him, but because it seemed part of their intimacy, sweetly private. Ani l’dodi v’dodi li, she had said in Hebrew when she’d given it to him, a line from the Song of Songs: I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine. He was hers and she was his, even here in Carpatho-Ruthenia.
He and his workmates lived on an abandoned farm in an abandoned hamlet near a stone quarry that had long since given up all the granite anyone cared to take from it. He didn’t know how long ago the farm had been deserted by its inhabitants; the barn held only the faintest ghost odor of animals. Fifty men slept in the barn, twenty in a converted chicken house, thirty in the stables, and fifty more in a newly constructed barracks. The platoon captains and the company commander and the doctor and the work foremen slept in the farmhouse, where they had real beds and indoor plumbing. In the barn, each man had a metal cot and a bare mattress stuffed with hay. At the foot of each cot was a wooden kit box stamped with its owner’s identification number. The food was meager but steady: coffee and bread in the morning, potato soup or beans at noon, more soup and more bread at night. They had clothing enough to keep them warm: overcoats and winter uniforms, woolen underthings, woolen socks, stiff black boots. Their overcoats, shirts, and trousers were nearly identical to the uniforms worn by the rest of the Hungarian Army. The only difference was the green M sewn onto their lapels, for Munkaszolgálat, the labor service. No one ever said Munkaszolgálat, though; they called it Musz, a single resentful syllable. In the Musz, his company-mates told him, you were just like any other member of the military; the difference was that your life was worth even less than shit. In the Musz, they said, you got paid the same as any other enlisted man: just enough for your family to starve on. The Musz wasn’t bent on killing you, just on using you until you wanted to kill yourself. And of course there was the other difference: Everyone in his labor-service company was Jewish. The Hungarian Ministry of Defense considered it dangerous to let Jews bear arms. The military classified them as unreliable, and sent them to cut trees, to build roads and bridges, to erect army barracks for the troops who would be stationed in Ruthenia.
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