Andras fought to suppress a grin. He was particularly fond of that drawing.
“What are you laughing at, Squad Captain?”
“Nothing, sir,” Andras said. He’d known Kálozi for a year and a half now, and understood that he was soft at heart; in fact, he seemed to take a certain pride in his own reluctance to mete out harsh punishment. Andras had hoped Kálozi wouldn’t come across that particular issue of The Snow Goose, but he hadn’t felt any particular trepidation when he’d drawn the picture.
“I don’t mind a laugh now and then,” Kálozi said, “but I can’t have the men ridiculing me. This company will fall into chaos.”
“I understand, sir,” Andras said. “We meant no harm.”
“What do you know of harm?” Kálozi said, rising from his chair. A vein had begun to pump at his temple; for the first time since they’d entered the office, Andras felt a stirring of fear. “When I served in the Great War, an officer might have flayed a man who drew something like this.”
“You’ve always been kind to us,” Andras said.
“That’s right. I’ve coddled you flea-bitten Jews. I’ve kept you clothed and fed and I’ve let you loll in bed on cold days and driven you half as hard as I should have. And in return you produce this filth and spread it through the company.”
“Just for laughs, sir,” Mendel said.
“Not any longer. Not at my expense.”
Andras pressed his unsteady teeth with his tongue. The pain radiated deep into his gums, and he fought an urge to turn and flee. But he drew himself up to his full height and met Kálozi’s eye “I offer my sincere apologies,” he said.
“Why apologize?” Kálozi said. “In one sense you’ve done the Munkaszolgálat a great favor. It seems some people have been spreading lies about the gross mistreatment of work servicemen in our national armed forces. A rag like this will be a powerful piece of counterevidence.” He rolled a copy of The Snow Goose into a stiff tube. “The work service encourages fellowship and humor, et cetera. Conditions are so humane that you men are free to joke and laugh and make light of your situation. You’ve even had typewriters, drawing supplies, and mimeograph machines at your disposal. Free speech. It’s practically French.” He grinned, because they all knew what had become of free speech in France.
“But there is something I want from you,” Kálozi went on. “I think you’ll consider it fair, given the situation. Since you’ve humiliated me publicly, I think it’s fitting that you be punished publicly in return.”
Andras swallowed. At his side, Mendel had gone pale. They had both heard rumors of what went on in other labor-service companies, and neither was so naïve as to think those things couldn’t happen in the 112/30th. Most horrifying was the case of the brother of one of their own workmates, who had been a member of the Debrecen labor battalion. As a punishment for stealing a loaf of bread from the officers’ pantry, the man had been stripped naked and buried to his knees in mud; he’d been made to stand there for three days as the weather got progressively colder, until, on the third night, he’d died of exposure.
“I’m speaking to you, Squad Captain Lévi,” Kálozi said. “Look at me. Don’t hang your head like a dog.”
Andras raised his eyes to Kálozi’s. The major didn’t blink. “I’ve thought long and hard about an appropriate punishment,” he said. “As it happens, I’m rather fond of you boys. You’ve both been good workers. But you’ve shamed me. You’ve shamed me in front of my men. And so, Lévi and Horovitz”-here Kálozi paused for effect, tapping his rolled-up copy of The Snow Goose against the desk-“I’m afraid you will have to eat your words.”
That was how Andras and Mendel came to find themselves stripped to their underclothes, their hands manacled behind their backs, kneeling before the assembled 112/30th at six o’clock on a cold March morning. Ten issues of The Snow Goose lay on a bench before them. While the labor servicemen watched, Lieutenant Grimasz tore off strips of the newspaper, crumpled them up, dunked them in water, and stuffed them into the mouths of co-publishers Lévi and Horovitz. Over a period of two hours they were each forced to eat twenty pages of The Snow Goose. As Andras clenched his teeth against Grimasz’s prodding hands, he began to understand for the first time what a comfortable and protected life he had led, relatively speaking, in the Munkaszolgálat. He had never before had his hands bound behind his back, or been forced to kneel coatless and pant-less in the snow for hours on end; he had, in fact, been fed and clothed and housed, his miseries eased by the knowledge that all the men of Company 112/30 were suffering similar miseries. Now he became aware of a new kind of hell, one he could scarcely allow himself to imagine. He knew that what was happening here, on the grand continuum of punishment, might still be classed as relatively humane; far off down that tunnel existed punishments that could make a man long for death. He forced himself to chew and swallow, chew and swallow, telling himself it was the only way to get through the hideous thing that was happening to him. Somewhere after the fifteenth page he tasted blood in his mouth and spat out a molar. His gums, spongy with scurvy, had finally begun to give up their teeth. He screwed his eyes shut and ate paper and ate paper and ate paper until finally he lost consciousness, and then he collapsed into the cold wet shock of the snow.
He was dragged to the infirmary and placed in the care of the company’s only doctor, a man named Báruch Imber, whose sole purpose in life had become to save labor servicemen from the ravages of the labor service. Imber nursed Andras and Mendel for five days in the infirmary, and when they had recovered from hypothermia and forced paper consumption, he diagnosed them both with advanced scurvy and anemia and sent them home to Budapest for treatment in the military hospital, to be followed by a two-week furlough.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT. Furlough
AFTER A WEEK-LONG train journey, during which their hair became infested with lice and their skin began to flake and bleed, they were transferred to an ambulance van that held sick and dying work servicemen. The floor of the van was lined with hay, but the men shivered in their coarse wool blankets. There were eight men in the van, most of whom were far worse off than Andras and Mendel. A man with tuberculosis had a massive tumor at his hip, another man had been blinded when a stove exploded, a third had a mouth full of abscesses. Andras put his head out the open back windows of the van as they entered Budapest. The sight of ordinary city life-of streetcars and pastry shops, boys and girls out for an evening, movie marquees with their clean black letters-filled him with unreasonable fury, as if it were all a mockery of his time in the Munkaszolgálat.
The van pulled up at the military hospital and the patients walked or were carried to a registration hall, where Andras and Mendel waited all night on a cold bench while hundreds of workers and soldiers had their names and numbers recorded in an official ledger. Sometime in the early morning, Mendel was inscribed in the hospital book and taken away to be bathed and treated. It was another two hours before they came to Andras, but at last, dazed with exhaustion, he found himself following a male nurse to a shower room, where the man stripped him of his filthy clothes, shaved his head, sprayed him with a burning disinfectant, and stood him in a torrent of hot water. The nurse washed his bruised skin all over with a kind of impersonal tenderness, a knowing forbearance for the failings of the human body. The man dried him and led him to a long ward heated by radiators that ran its entire length. Andras was shown to a narrow metal bed, and for the first time in a year and a half he slept on a real mattress, between real sheets. When he awoke after what seemed only a few moments, Klara was there at his bedside, her eyes red and raw. He pushed himself upright, took her hands, demanded the terrible news: Who had died? What new tragedy had befallen them?
“Andráska,” she said, in a voice fractured with pity; and he understood that he was the tragedy, that she was weeping over what remained of him. He didn’t know how much weight he’d lost in the work service, on that diet of coffee and soup and hard bread-only that he’d had to keep cinching the b
elt of his trousers tighter, and that his bones had become more prominent beneath the skin. His arms and legs were roped with the wiry muscles he’d built from the constant labor; even through the previous winter’s depression he’d never actually felt weak. But he saw how little his body disturbed the blanket that was pulled over him. He could only imagine how bony and strange he must look in his hospital pajamas, with his blood-blotched arms and his shaved head. He almost wished Klara had stayed away until he looked like a man again. He lowered his eyes and held his own elbows in what felt like self-protection. He watched her fold her hands in her lap; there was the gold glint of her wedding band. The ring was still smooth and reflective, her hands as white as they’d been when he’d last seen her. His own ring was scratched to dullness, his hands brown and cracked with work.
“The doctor’s been here,” Klara said. “He says you’ll be all right. But you’ve got to take vitamin C and iron and have a long rest.”
“I don’t need rest,” Andras said, determined that she should see him on his feet. He wasn’t wounded or crippled, after all. He swung his legs off the bed and planted his feet on the cool linoleum. But then a wave of dizziness hit him, and he put a hand to his head.
“You have to eat,” she said. “You’ve been asleep for twenty hours.”
“I have?”
“I’m to give you some vitamin tablets and some broth, and later some bread.”
“Oh, Klara,” he said, and lowered his head into his hands. “Just leave me alone here. I’m a horror.”
She sat down on the bed next to him and put her arms around him. Her smell was vaguely different-he detected a hint of lilac soap or hair-dressing, something that reminded him of the long-ago Éva Kereny, his first love in Debrecen. She kissed his dry lips and put her head on his shoulder. He let her hold him, too exhausted to resist.
“Have some respect, Squad Captain,” came a voice from across the ward. It was Mendel, lying in his own clean bed. He, too, had had his head shaved bare.
Andras raised his hand and waved. “My apologies, Serviceman,” he said. It gave him a feeling of vertigo to be here in a military hospital with Mendel Horovitz, and to have Klara beside him at the same time. His head ached. He lay back against his pillow and let Klara give him his vitamins and broth. His wife. Klara Lévi. He opened his eyes to look at her, at the familiar sweep of her hair across her brow, the lean strength of her arms, the way she pressed her lips inward as she concentrated, her deep gray eyes resting on him, on him, at last.
It didn’t take him long to understand that the furlough was another form of torture, a lesson that had to be learned in preparation for a more difficult test. Before, when he’d gotten his call-up notice, he’d had only the vaguest idea of what it might mean to be separated from Klara. Now he knew. In the face of that misery, two weeks seemed an impossibly short time.
His furlough began officially when he was released from the military hospital, three days after he had entered it. Klara had had his uniform laundered and mended, and on the day of his release she brought him the miraculous gift of a new pair of boots. He had new underclothes, new socks, a new peaked cap with a shining brass button at the front. He felt more than a little ashamed to appear in front of Mendel Horovitz in those fine clean clothes. Mendel had no one to take care of him. He was unmarried, and his mother had died when he was a boy; his father was still in Zalaszabar. As he stood with Andras and Klara near the hospital gate, waiting for the streetcar, Andras asked him how he planned to spend the furlough.
Mendel shrugged. “An old roommate of mine still lives in Budapest. I can stay with him.”
Klara touched Andras’s arm, and they exchanged a glance. It was a difficult thing to decide without discussion; it had been so long since they’d been alone together. But Mendel was an old friend, and during their time in the 112/30th he’d become Andras’s family. They both knew Andras had to make the offer.
“We’re going to my parents’ house in the country,” he said. “There’s room, if you’d like to come. Nothing fancy. But I’m certain my mother would take good care of you.”
The shadows around Mendel’s eyes deepened into an expression of gratitude. “It’s good of you, Parisi,” he said.
So that morning it was the three of them together on the train to Konyár. They rode past Maglód, past Tápiogyörgy, past Újszász, into the Hajdú flatlands, sharing a thermos of coffee among them and eating cherry strudel. The tart sweetness of the fruit nearly brought tears to Andras’s eyes. He took Klara’s hand and pressed it between his own; she met his gaze and he felt she understood him. She was a person who knew something about shock, about returning from a state of desperation. He wondered how she had tolerated his own ignorance for so long.
It was the first week of April. The fields were still barren and cold, but a haze of green had begun to appear on the shrubs that clustered near the farmhouses; the bare branches of the creek willows had turned a brilliant yellow. He knew that the loveliness of the farm would still be hidden, its yard a disaster of mud, its stunted apple trees bare, its garden empty. He regretted that he couldn’t show it to Klara in the summertime. But when they finally arrived, when they disembarked at the familiar train station and saw the low whitewashed house with its dark thatched roof, the barn and the mill and the millpond where he and Mátyás and Tibor used to sail wooden boats, he thought he had never seen any place more beautiful. Smoke rose from the stone chimney; from the barn came the steady whine of the electric saw. Stacks of fresh-cut lumber had been piled around the yard. In the orchard, the bare apple trees held their branches toward the April sky. He dropped his army duffel in the yard, and, taking Klara’s hand, ran to the front door. He rapped on the windowpane and waited for his mother to come.
A young blond woman opened the door. On her hip was a red-faced infant with a macerated zwieback in its hand. When the woman saw Andras and Mendel in their military coats, her eyebrows lifted in fear.
“Jenő!” she cried. “Come quick!”
A stocky man in overalls came running from the barn. “What’s the matter?” he called. And when he’d reached them, “What’s your business here?”
Andras blinked. The sun had just come out from behind a cloud; it was difficult to focus on the man’s features. “I’m Captain Lévi,” he said. “This is my parents’ house.”
“Was their house,” the man said, with an edge of pride. He narrowed his eyes at Andras. “You don’t look like a military officer.”
“Squad Captain Lévi of Company 112/30,” Andras said, but the man wasn’t looking at Andras anymore. He glanced at Mendel, whose coat was devoid of officers’ bars. Then he turned his eyes upon Klara and raked her with a slow appreciative gaze.
“And you don’t look like a country girl,” he said.
Andras felt the blood rush to his face. “Where are my parents?” he said.
“How should I know?” the man said. “You people wander here and there.”
“Don’t be an ass, Jenő,” the woman said, and then to Andras, “They’re in Debrecen. They sold this place to us a month ago. Didn’t they write you?”
A month. It would have taken that long for a letter to reach Andras at the border. It was probably there now, moldering in the mail room, if they hadn’t burned it for tinder. He tried to look past the woman and into the kitchen; the old kitchen table, the one whose every knot and groove he knew by heart, was still there. The baby turned its head to see what had interested Andras, then began to chew the zwieback again.
“Listen,” the woman said. “Don’t you have family in Debrecen? Can’t someone tell you where your parents are staying?”
“I haven’t been there in years,” Andras said. “I don’t know.”
“Well, I’ve got work to do,” the man said. “I think you’re finished talking to my wife.”
“And I think you’re finished looking at mine,” Andras said.
But the man reached out at that moment and pinched Klara’s waist, and Kla
ra gasped. Without thinking, Andras put a fist into the man’s gut. The man blew out a breath and stumbled back. His heel hit a rock and he fell backwards into the dense rich mud of the yard. When he tried to get to his feet, he slid forward and fell onto his hands. By that time Andras and Klara and Mendel were running toward the station, their bags flying behind them. Until that moment Andras had never appreciated the advantage of living so close to the train; now he did something he’d seen Mátyás do countless times. He charged toward an open boxcar and swung his bag inside, and he gave Klara a leg up. Then he and Mendel jumped into the car, just as the train began to creak out of the station toward Debrecen. There was just enough time for them to witness the new owner of the lumberyard charging from the house with his shotgun in his hand, calling for his wife to find his goddamned shells.
In the chill of that April afternoon they rode toward Debrecen in the open boxcar, trying to catch their breath. Andras was certain Klara would be horrified, but she was laughing. Her shoes and the hem of her dress were black with mud.
“I’ll never forget the look on his face,” she said. “He didn’t see it coming.”
“Neither did I,” Andras said.
“He deserved worse,” Mendel said. “I would have liked to get a few licks in.”
“I wouldn’t advise you to go back for another try,” Klara said.
Andras sat back against the wall of the boxcar and put an arm around her, and Mendel took a cigarette from the pocket of his overcoat and lay on his side, smoking and laughing to himself. The breeze was so thrilling, the noontime sun so bright, that Andras felt something like triumph. It wasn’t until he looked at Klara again-her eyes serious now, as though to convey a private understanding of what had taken place in that mud-choked yard-that he realized he had just seen the last of his childhood home.
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