Lucky Béla stared at this son of his, this boy whose troubles had always been closest to his own heart. He himself had never been subject to fits of weeping, nor had he encouraged them in his sons. He’d taught them to turn their hurt into work. That was what had saved his own life, after all. He hadn’t raised his sons with much physical affection; that had been their mother’s domain, not his. But as he watched his boy, this sick and beaten-down young man, sobbing jaggedly into his knees, he knew what he had to do: He sat down beside Andras on the bench and put his arms around him. His love had always seemed to mean something particular to this boy. He hoped it would mean something still.
They stayed in Debrecen for a week. His mother fed him and tended his ravaged feet and made hot baths for him in the kitchen; she laughed at Mendel’s stories about their mates in the work service, and cleaned the house for Passover with Klara. The new kitchen maid, an aging spinster named Márika, developed a fierce attachment to Mendel, whom she claimed was the spitting image of her brother who’d been killed in the Great War. She left him surreptitious gifts of woolen socks and underclothes, which must have cost a good portion of her wages. When he protested that the gifts were too fine, she pretended to know nothing about them. To Andras the dull familiarity of Debrecen was a kind of relief. He was glad to walk with his friend and his wife through the old neighborhoods, to buy them conical doughnuts at the same doughnut shop where he’d spent his pennies as a child, to show Klara the Jewish Gimnázium and the outdoor skating rink on Piac utca. His body grew stronger, his spongy gums firm again. The patches of old blood beneath his skin began to fade.
He’d been painfully shy with Klara those first few days. He couldn’t stand to have her see his body in its weakened state, and he doubted he would be equal to the demands of lovemaking. But he was a twenty-five-year-old man, and she was the woman he loved; it wasn’t long before he moved toward her in the night, on the thin mattress they shared in the tiny extra room his mother used for sewing. All around them were garments his mother was mending or making to give to Andras or to send to his brothers in their work-service companies. The room was redolent of laundered cotton and the scorched sweetness of ironing. In that bower, in their second marriage bed, he reached for her and she came into his arms. He could scarcely believe that her physical being still existed, that he was allowed to revisit the parts of her he’d carried in his mind like talismans those eighteen months: her small high breasts, the silvery-white scar on her belly, the twin peaks of her hips. As they made love she kept her eyes open and steady on his. He couldn’t read their color in the faint light that filtered through the covered window, but he could see the sharp intensity he recognized and loved. At times they seemed to struggle like old foes; part of him wanted almost to punish her for the longing she had made him feel. She seemed to understand, and met his anger with her own. When he collapsed against her at last, his heart beating against her chest, he knew they would find their way back across the distance that their long separation had opened between them.
By the end of their week in Debrecen, a subtle change had occurred between Andras’s mother and Klara. Knowing looks passed between them during meals; his mother insisted upon having Klara along when she went to the market, and she had asked her to make the matzo balls for their Passover seder. The matzo balls were the glory of the meal, more highly anticipated even than the fried cutlets of chicken or the potato kugel or the gefilte fish she always made from a live carp, which in Konyár had lived in a large tin tub of water in the summer kitchen, but which in Debrecen was forced to reside in the courtyard, on public display. (Two children, a girl and her brother, had befriended the fish, feeding it bits of bread when they got home from school; when it disappeared to become the second course of the seder, Andras told them he’d taken it to the city park and set it free, which earned him their enmity forever-though he insisted that it was what the carp had wanted, its instructions whispered to him in Carpathian, a language he claimed to have learned in the Munkaszolgálat.) His mother’s matzo-ball recipe was written in a spidery lace of black ink upon a holy-looking piece of what could only have been parchment. It had been the property of Flóra’s great-grandmother Rifka, and it had been given to Flóra on her wedding day in a small silver box tooled with the Yiddish word Knaidlach.
One afternoon, when he came in from a walk with Mendel, he found his mother and Klara in the kitchen together, the silver box open on the table, the precious recipe in Klara’s hands. Her hair was tied back in a kerchief, and she wore an apron embroidered with strawberries; her skin was bright with the heat of the kitchen. She squinted at the spidery script and then at the ingredients Andras’s mother had laid out on the table.
“But how much of everything?” she asked Flóra. “Where are the measures?”
“Don’t worry about that,” Andras’ mother said. “Just do it by feel.”
Klara gave Andras a panicked smile.
“Can I help?” Andras asked.
“Yes, darling boy,” Flóra said. “Get your father from work. If I know him, he’ll have forgotten he’s supposed to come home early.”
“All right,” Andras said. “But first I’d like a word with my wife.” He took the recipe from her and laid it with care in the silver box; then he grabbed Klara’s hand and pulled her into the little sewing room. He closed the door. Klara put her hands over her face and laughed.
“Oh, God!” she said. “I can’t make these matzo balls.”
“You could just surrender, you know.”
“What a recipe, that recipe! It might as well be written in secret code!”
“Maybe it’s magic. Maybe the quantities don’t matter.”
“If only Mrs. Apfel were here. Or Elisabet.” A wash of grief darkened her features, as it did every time she’d mentioned Elisabet’s name that week. Her expectations had come to pass: The parents who lived on an estate in Connecticut had wanted nothing to do with Elisabet, and had cut off their son entirely. Undaunted, Paul and Elisabet had taken an apartment in Manhattan and had gone to work-Paul as a graphic artist, Elisabet as a baker’s apprentice. Elisabet had excelled at the job, and had been promoted to assistant pastry chef; the fact that she was French gave her a certain cachet, and she had written a few months ago to say that a cake she’d decorated had served as the centerpiece for a grand wedding in the ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. The mothers of wealthy young ladies had begun to come to her with requests. But now there was a child on the way. That piece of news had arrived in the most recent letter, just a few weeks earlier.
“Klara,” he said, and touched her hand. “Elisabet will be all right, you know.”
She sighed. “It’s been a comfort to be here,” she said. “To be with you. And to spend time with your mother. She loves her children like I love that girl.”
“You have to tell me what you did,” he said. “You’ve bewitched her.”
“What are you talking about?”
“My mother’s fallen in love with you, that’s what.”
Klara leaned against the wall and crossed her slender ankles. “I took her into my confidence,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“I told her the truth. Everything. I wanted her to know what happened when I was a girl, and how I’ve lived since then. I was sure it would make a difference.”
“And it has.”
“Yes.”
“But now you’ve got to make matzo balls.”
“I think it’s a kind of final test,” Klara said, and smiled.
“I hope you pass,” he said.
“You don’t seem confident.”
“Of course I’m confident.”
“Go get your father,” she said, and pushed him toward the door.
By the time he and Mendel returned with Lucky Béla, there were matzo balls boiling in a pot on the stove. The gefilte fish was finished, the table laid with a white cloth, the plates and silverware gleaming in the light of two white tapers. At the center of
the table was a silver seder plate, the one they’d used every year since Andras could remember, with greens and bitter herbs, salt water and charoset, egg and shank bone laid out in its six silver cups.
Lucky Béla stood beside his chair at the head of the table, silent with the news he’d received just before the boys had met him at work. In the foremen’s office he’d heard it come in on the radio: Horthy had decided to let Hitler invade Yugoslavia from Hungarian soil-Yugoslavia, with whom Hungary had signed an agreement of peace and friendship a year before. Nazi troops had gathered at Barcs and swarmed across the Drava River while Luftwaffe bombers decimated Belgrade. Béla knew what it was all about: Hitler was punishing the country for the military coup and the popular uprising that had followed Yugoslavia’s entry into the Tripartite Pact. Not a week earlier, Germany had pledged to guarantee the borders of Yugoslavia for a thousand years; now Hitler had set his armies against it. The invasion had begun that afternoon. Hungarian troops would be sent to Belgrade later that week to support the German Army. It would be Hungary’s first military action in the European conflict. It seemed clear to Béla that this was only the beginning, that Hungary could not avoid being drawn further into the war. Thousands of boys would lose their lives. His children would be sent to work on the front lines. He had listened to the news and let it sink into his bones, but when Andras and Mendel had arrived he’d kept it from them. Nor would he say anything now, in the presence of this sacred-looking table. He couldn’t bear the thought that the news might ruin what his wife and his son’s wife had created. He led the seder as usual, feeling the absence of his youngest and eldest sons as a sharp constriction in his chest. He retold the story of the exodus and let Mendel recite the Four Questions. He managed to eat the familiar meal, with the boiled egg on greens and the fresh gefilte fish and the matzo balls in their gold broth. He sang the blessings afterward as he always did, and was grateful for the fourth ceremonial glass of wine. When he opened the door at the end of the seder to give the prophet Elijah his welcome, he saw open doors all around the courtyard. It was a comfort to know he was surrounded by other Jews. But he couldn’t keep the news at bay forever. From the courtyard came the gritty sound of the national news station; someone downstairs had put a radio in the window so others could hear. A man was making a speech in a grave aristocratic voice: It was Miklós Horthy, their regent, mobilizing the country toward its glorious destiny within the new Europe. Béla could see the understanding come over his wife’s face, then his son’s. Hungary was involved now, irrevocably so. As they crowded out onto the balcony to listen to the broadcast, Béla pushed the door open a few more centimeters. Eliahu ha Navi, he sang, under his breath. Eliahu ha Tishbi. He stood with one hand on the doorframe, intoning the holy man’s name; he had not yet given up hope for a different kind of prophecy.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE. Bánhida Camp
WHEN ANDRAS AND MENDEL reported to the battalion office at the end of their furlough, they learned that they would not rejoin the 112/30th in Transylvania. Major Kálozi, they were told by the battalion secretary, had had enough of them. Instead they would be deployed at Bánhida, fifty kilometers northwest of Budapest, where they would join Company 101/18 at a coal mine and power plant.
Fifty kilometers from Budapest! It was conceivable that he might be able to see Klara on a weekend furlough. And the mail might not take a month to travel between them. He and Mendel were sent to wait for the returning members of their new company at the rail yard, where they were divided into work groups and assigned to a passenger carriage. The men returning to Bánhida seemed to have passed an easier winter than Andras and Mendel had. Their clothes were intact, their bodies solid-looking. Between them there was a casual jocularity, as though they were schoolmates returning to gimnázium after a holiday. As the train moved east through the green rolling hills of Buda, then into the wooded and cultivated country beyond, the passenger car filled with the earthy smell of spring. But the workers’ conversation grew quieter the closer they got to Bánhida. Their eyes seemed to take on a sober cast, their shoulders an invisible weight. The greenery began to fall away outside the window, replaced at first by the low, desperate-looking habitations that always seemed to precede a train’s arrival into a town, and then by the town itself with its twisting veinery of streets and its red-roofed houses, and then, as they passed through the railway station and moved toward the power plant, by an increasingly unlovely prospect of hard-packed dirt roads and warehouses and machine shops. Finally they came into view of the plant itself, a battleship with three smokestacks sending plumes of auburn smoke into the blue spring sky. The train shrieked to a halt in a rail yard choked with hundreds of rusted boxcars. Across a barren field were rows of cinderblock barracks behind a chain-link fence. Farther off still, men pushed small coal trolleys toward the power plant. Not a single tree or shrub interrupted the view of trampled mud. In the distance, like a sweet-voiced taunt, rose the cool green hills of the Gerecse and Vertes ranges.
Guards threw open the doors of the railcars and shouted the men off the train. In the barren field the new arrivals were separated from the returnees; the returnees were sent off to work at once. The rest of the men were ordered to deposit their knapsacks at their assigned barracks and then to report to the assembly ground at the center of the compound. The cinderblock barracks at Bánhida looked to have been built without any consideration besides economy; the materials were cheap, the windows high and small and few. As he entered, Andras had the sensation of being buried underground. He and Mendel claimed bunks at the end of one of the rows, a spot that afforded the privacy of a wall. Then they followed their mates out to the assembly ground, a vast quadrangle carpeted in mud.
Two sergeants lined the men up in rows of ten; that day there were fifty new arrivals at Bánhida Camp. They were ordered to stand at attention and wait for Major Barna, the company commander, who would inspect them. Then they would be divided into work groups and their new service would begin. They stood in the mud for nearly an hour, silent, listening to the far-off commands of work foremen and the electric throb of the power plant and the sound of metal wheels on rails. At last the new commander emerged from an administrative building, his cap trimmed with gold braid, a pair of high glossy boots on his feet. He walked the rows briskly, scanning the men’s faces. Andras thought he resembled a schoolbook illustration of Napoleon; he was dark-haired, compact, with an erect bearing and an imperious look. On his second pass through Andras’s line, he paused in front of Andras and asked him to state his position.
Andras saluted. “Squad captain, sir.”
“What was that?”
“Squad captain,” Andras said again, this time at a higher volume. Sometimes the commanders wanted the men to shout their responses, as if this were the real military and not just the work service. Andras found these episodes particularly depressing. Now Major Barna ordered him to step out of the ranks and march to the front.
He hated being told to march. He hated all of it. A few weeks at home had refreshed in him the dangerous awareness that he was a human being. When he reached the front of the lineup he stood at a tense and quivering attention while Major Barna looked him over. The man seemed to regard him with a kind of disgusted fascination, as if Andras were a freak in a traveling show. Then he pulled out a pearl-handled pocketknife and held it beneath Andras’s nose. Andras sniffed. He thought he might sneeze. He could smell the metal of the blade. He didn’t know what Barna meant to do. The mayor’s small dark eyes held a glint of mischief, as if he and Andras were meant to be co-conspirators in whatever was about to happen. With a wink he moved the knife away from Andras’s face and wedged its tip under the officer’s insignia on Andras’s overcoat, and with a few quick strokes he tore the patch from Andras’s chest. The patch fell into the mud; Barna pressed it down with his foot until it disappeared. Then he put a hand on Andras’s head, on the new cap Klara had given him. Another few strokes of the knife and he’d removed the officer’s insignia from th
e cap as well.
“What’s your rank now, Serviceman?” Major Barna shouted, loud enough for the men at the back to hear.
Andras had never heard of such a thing happening. He hadn’t known it was possible to be stripped of rank if you hadn’t been convicted of a crime. With a surge of daring, he pulled himself up to his full height-a good six inches taller than Barna-and shouted, “Squad captain, sir!”
There was a flash of movement from Barna, and an explosion of pain at the back of Andras’s skull. He fell to his hands and knees in the mud.
“Not at Bánhida,” Major Barna shouted. In his quivering hand he held a white beech walking-stick hazed with Andras’s blood. Despite the pain, Andras almost let out a laugh. It all seemed so absurd. Hadn’t he just been eating apples in his mother’s kitchen? Hadn’t he just been making love to his wife? He put a hand to the back of his head: warm blood, a painful lump.
“Get to your feet, Labor Serviceman,” the major shouted. “Rejoin ranks.”
He had no choice. Without another word, he complied.
His welcome to Bánhida was a taste of what was to come. Something had changed in the brief time Andras had been away from the Munkaszolgálat, or perhaps things were different in the 101/18th. There were no Jewish officers at any level; there were no Jewish medics or engineers or work foremen. The guards were crueler and shorter-tempered, the officers quicker to deliver punishment. Bánhida was an unabashedly ugly place. Everything about it seemed designed for the discomfort or the unhappiness of its inhabitants. Day and night the power plant let forth its three great billows of brown coal smoke; the air reeked of sulfur, and everything was filmed with a fine orange-brown dust that turned to a chalky paste in the rain. The barracks smelled of mildew, the windows let in heat but little light or air, and the roofs leaked onto the bunks. The paths and roads, it seemed, had been laid out to run through the wettest parts of camp. There was a downpour every afternoon promptly at three, turning the place into a treacherous mud-slick swamp. A hot wet breeze swept the smell of the latrines across the camp, and the men choked on the stench as they worked. Mosquitoes bred in the puddles and attacked the men, clustering on their foreheads and necks and arms. The flies were worse, though; their bites left tender red welts that were slow to heal.
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