“Speed is the enemy of precision,” Andras said. “That’s what my drawing master in Paris used to tell us.”
His mother knotted the end of the thread and raised her eyes to him again. “It’s a long time since you left school, isn’t it?” she said.
“Forever.”
“You’ll go back to your studies when this is all over.”
“Yes, that’s what Apa says, too. But I don’t know what will happen. I have a wife and son now.”
“Well, it’s good news about the job,” his mother said. “You were wise to think of Eppler.”
“Yes, it’s good news,” Andras said, but it felt less like good news than he’d imagined it would. Though he was relieved to know he had a way to earn money, the idea of going back to work for Eppler seemed to erase his time in Paris entirely. He knew it made no sense; he’d met Klara in Paris, after all, and here on the table before him, asleep in a wicker basket, was Tamás Lévi, the miraculous evidence of their life together. But to arrive at work the next morning and receive the day’s assignments from Eppler-it was what he had been doing at nineteen, at twenty. It seemed to negate the possibility that he would ever complete his training, that he would ever get to do the work he craved. Everything in the world stood against his going back to school. The France in which he’d been a student had disappeared. His friends were dispersed. His teachers had fled. No school in Hungary would open its doors to him. No free country would open its borders to him. The war worsened daily. Their lives were in danger now. He suspected it wouldn’t be long before Budapest was bombed.
“Don’t give me such a dark look,” his mother said. “I’m not responsible for the situation. I’m just your mother.”
The baby began to stir in his basket. He shifted his head back and forth against the blankets, scrunched his face into a pink asterisk, and let out a cry. Andras bent over the basket and lifted the baby to his chest.
“I’ll walk him around the courtyard,” he said.
“You can’t take him outside,” his mother said. “He’ll catch his death of cold.”
“I won’t have him wake Klara. She’s been up every night for weeks.”
“Well, for pity’s sake, put a blanket over him. And put a coat over your shoulders. Here, hold him like this, and let me put his hat on. Keep his blanket over his head so he’ll stay warm.”
He let his mother swaddle them both against the cold. “Don’t stay out long,” she said, patting the baby’s back. “He’ll fall asleep after you walk him for a minute or two.”
It was a relief to get out of the close heat of the apartment. The night was clear and cold, with a frozen slice of moon suspended in the sky by an invisible filament. Beyond the haze of city lights he could make out the faint ice crystals of stars. The baby was cocooned against him, quiet. He could feel the rapid rise and fall of his son’s chest against his own. He walked around the courtyard and hummed a lullaby, circling the fountain where he and Klara had seen the little dark-haired girl trailing a hand through the water. The stone basin was crusted with ice now. The courtyard security light illuminated its depths, and as he leaned over it he could make out the fiery glints of goldfish beneath the surface. There, beneath the cover of the ice, their flickering lives went on. He wanted to know how they did it, how they withstood the slowing of their hearts, the chilling of their blood, through the long darkness of winter.
There was something otherworldly, it seemed to Andras, about the advertisements published in the Magyar Jewish Journal. As assistant layout editor it was his job to arrange those neatly illustrated boxes in the margins that flanked the articles; inside the bordered rectangles depicting clothes and shoes and soap, ladies’ perfume and hats, the war seemed not to exist. It was impossible to reconcile this ad for cordovan leather evening shoes with the idea of Mátyás spending a winter outdoors in Ukraine, perhaps without a good pair of boots or an adequate set of foot rags. It was impossible to read this druggist’s advertisement listing the merits of its Patented Knee Brace, and then to think of Tibor having to set a serviceman’s compound fracture with a length of wood torn from a barracks floor. The signs of war-the absence of silk stockings, the scarcity of metal goods, the disappearance of American and English products-were negations rather than additions; the blank spaces where the advertisements for those items would have appeared had been filled with other images, other distractions. The sporting-goods store on Szerb utca was the only one whose ad made reference to the war, however obliquely; it proclaimed the merits of a product called the Outdoorsman’s Equipage, a knapsack containing everything you would need for a sojourn in the Munkaszolgálat: a collapsible cup, a set of interlocking cutlery, a mess tin, an insulated canteen, a thick woolen blanket, stout boots, a camping knife, a waterproof slicker, a gas lantern, a first-aid kit. It wasn’t advertised for use in the Munkaszolgálat, but what else would Budapest residents be doing outdoors in the middle of January?
As for the articles that occupied the space between the ads, Andras could only gape at the rigid and shortsighted optimism he saw reflected there. This paper was supposed to be the mouthpiece of the Jewish community; how could it proclaim, on its editorial page, that the Hungarian Jew was at one with the Magyar nation in language, spirit, culture, and feeling, when the Hungarian Jew was, in fact, being sent into the mouth of battle to remove mines, so that the Hungarian army might pass through to support its Nazi allies? Mendel had been right about the paper’s content. To the extent that it reported the news, it did so with the sole apparent aim of keeping Hungarian Jews from falling into a panic. His second week at the paper, it was reported with great relish that Admiral Horthy had fired the most staunchly pro-German members of his staff; here was concrete evidence of the solidarity of the Hungarian leadership with the Jewish people.
But the Journal wasn’t the only paper in town, and the smaller left-leaning independents carried news that reflected the world Andras had glimpsed in the labor service. There were reports of a massacre carried out in Kamenets-Podolsk not long after Hungary entered the war against the Soviet Union; one paper printed an anonymous interview with a member of a Hungarian sapper platoon, a man who’d been present at the mass killing and had been consumed by guilt since his return. After the Hungarian Central Alien Control Office had rounded up Jews of dubious citizenship, this man reported, the detainees had been handed over to the German authorities in Galicia, trucked to Kolomyya, and marched ten miles to a string of bomb craters near Kamenets-Podolsk, under the guard of SS units and the source’s Hungarian sapper platoon. There, every one of them was shot to death, along with the original Jewish population of Kamenets-Podolsk-twenty-three thousand Jews in all. The idea had been to clear Hungary of Jewish aliens, but many of the Jews who were killed were Hungarians who hadn’t been able to produce their citizenship papers quickly enough. This, it seemed, was what had troubled the Hungarian who’d given the interview: He had killed his own countrymen in cold blood. So it seemed that the Hungarians did feel a certain solidarity with their Jewish brethren after all, though in the source’s case the solidarity hadn’t run deep enough to keep him from pulling the trigger.
Then, in the last week of February, there was a report published in the People’s Voice about another massacre of Jews, this one in the Délvidék, the strip of Yugoslavia that Hitler had returned to Hungary ten months earlier. A certain General Feketehalmy-Czeydner, the paper reported, had ordered the execution of thousands of Jews under the guise of routing Tito partisans. Refugees from the region had begun to drift back to Budapest with horrifying stories of the killings-people had been dragged to the Danube beach, made to strip in the freezing cold, lined up in rows of four on the diving board over a hole that had been cannon-blasted into the ice of the river, and machine-gunned into the water. Andras arrived early one morning at the Magyar Jewish Journal to find his employer sitting in the middle of the newsroom in a mute paroxysm of horror, a copy of the Voice open on the desk before him. He handed the paper to Andras and ret
reated into his office without a word. When the managing editor arrived, another glass-enclosed argument ensued, but no word about the massacre appeared in the Jewish Journal.
Later that same week, Ilana Lévi went to Gróf Apponyi Albert Hospital and gave birth to a baby boy. There had been a letter from Tibor only three days before: He hoped to be released from his labor company by Wednesday evening, and so hadn’t despaired of being home in time for the birth. But the event had come and gone without any sign of him. On Ilana’s first night home from the hospital, Andras and Klara brought her Shabbos dinner. Though she was still exhausted from the loss of blood, she had insisted upon setting the table herself; there were the candlesticks she’d received as a wedding present from Béla and Flóra, and the Florentine plates her mother had given her to take back to Hungary. She and Klara lit the candles, Andras blessed the wine, and they sat down to eat while the babies slept in their arms. The room held a deep and pervasive quiet that seemed to emanate from the architecture itself. The apartment was on the ground floor, three narrow rooms made smaller by the heavy wooden beams that supported them. The French doors of the dining room looked out onto the courtyard of the building, where a bicycle mechanic had cultivated a boneyard of rusted frames and handlebars, clusters of spokes, mounds of petrified chains. The collection, dusted with snow, looked to Andras like a battlefield littered with bodies. He found himself staring out into it as the light grew blue and dim, his eyes moving between the shadows. He was the one who saw the figure through the frosty glass: a dark narrow form picking its way through the bicycles, like a ghost come back to look for his fallen comrades. At first he thought the form was nothing more than the congelation of his own fear; then, as the figure assumed a familiar shape, a manifestation of his desire. He hesitated to call Ilana’s attention to it because he thought at first that he might be imagining it. But the figure approached the windows and stared at the scene within-Andras at the head of the table with Klara at his side, a baby at Klara’s breast; Ilana with her back to the window, her arm crooked around something in a blanket-and the ghost’s hand flew to his mouth, and his legs folded beneath him. It was Tibor, home from his labor company. Andras shoved his chair away from the table and ran for the door. In an instant he was in the courtyard with his brother, both of them sitting in the snow amid the litter of dismembered bicycles, and then the women were beside them, and in another minute Tibor held his son and his wife in his arms.
Tibor. Tibor.
They shouted his name in a frenzy of insistence, as if trying to convince themselves he was real, and they brought him into the house. Tibor was deathly pale in the dim light of the sitting room. His small silver-rimmed glasses were gone, the bones of his face a sharp scaffolding beneath the skin. His coat was in rags, his trousers stiff with ice and dried blood, his boots a disaster of shredded leather. His military cap was gone. In its place he wore a fleece-lined motorcyclist’s cap from which one ear-covering had been torn away. The exposed ear was crimson with cold. Tibor tugged the cap from his head and let it fall to the floor. His hair looked as though it had been hacked to the scalp with dull scissors some weeks earlier. He had the smell of the Munkaszolgálat about him, the reek of men living together without adequate water or soap or tooth powder. That smell was mingled with the sulfurous odor of brown-coal smoke and the shit-and-sawdust stink of boxcars.
“Let me see my boy,” he said, his voice scarcely louder than a whisper, as if he hadn’t used it in days.
Ilana handed him the baby in its white swaddling of blankets. Tibor laid the baby on the sofa and knelt beside him. He took off the blanket, the cap covering the baby’s fine dark hair, the long-sleeved cotton shirt, the little pants, the socks, the diaper; through it all, the baby was silent and wide-eyed, its hands curled into fists. Tibor touched the dried remnant of the baby’s umbilical cord. He held the baby’s feet, the baby’s hands. He put his face against the crease of the baby’s neck. The baby’s name was Ádám. It was what Tibor and Ilana had decided in the letters they’d exchanged. He said the name now, as if trying to bring together the idea of this baby and the actual naked child lying on the sofa. Then he glanced up at Ilana.
“Ilanka,” he said. “I’m so sorry. I wanted to be home in time.”
“No,” she said, bending to him. “Please don’t cry.”
But he was crying. There was nothing anyone could do to stop it. He cried, and they sat down on the floor with him as though they were all in mourning. But they were not in mourning, not then; they were together, the six of them, in what was still a city unghettoized, unburned, unbombed. They sat together on the floor until Tibor stopped crying, until he could draw a full breath. He drew one deep throaty breath after another, and finally took a slow inhale through his nose.
“Oh, God,” he said, with a horrified look at Andras. “I stink. Get me out of these clothes.” He began pulling at the collar of his shredded coat. “I shouldn’t have touched the baby before I washed. I’m filthy!” He got up off the floor and went to the kitchen, leaving a trail of stiff clothing behind him. They heard the clang of a tin washtub being dropped onto the kitchen tiles, and the roar of water in the sink.
“I’ll help him,” Ilana said. “Will you take the baby?”
“Give him to me,” Klara said, and handed Tamás to Andras. They sat together on the sofa, Andras and Klara and the two babies, while Ilana heated water for Tibor’s bath. In the meantime, Tibor ate dinner in his ragged undershirt and Munkaszolgálat trousers. Then Ilana undressed him and washed him from head to toe with a new cake of soap. The smell of almonds drifted in from the kitchen. When that was finished she dressed him in a pair of flannel-lined pajamas, and he moved toward the bedroom as though he were walking in a dream. Andras followed him to the bed and sat down beside him with Tamás in his arms. Klara was close behind, holding Tibor’s son. Ilana put a pair of hot towel-wrapped bricks into the bed at Tibor’s feet and pulled the eiderdown up to his chin. They all sat with him on the bed, still trying to believe he was there.
But Tibor, or part of Tibor, had not yet returned; as he drifted to the edge of sleep he made a frightened noise, as if a stone had fallen onto his chest and knocked the wind out of him. He looked at them all, eyes wide, and said, “I’m sorry.” His eyes closed again, and he drifted again, and made that frightened noise-Hunh!-and jerked awake. “I’m sorry,” he said again, and drifted, and woke. He was sorry. His eyelids closed; he breathed; he made his noise and jerked awake, haunted by something that waited on the other side of consciousness. They stayed with him through a full hour of it until he fell into a deeper sleep at last.
Tibor’s favorite coffeehouse, the Jókai, had been replaced by a barbershop with six gleaming new chairs and a brace of mustachioed barbers. That morning the barbers were practicing their art upon the heads of two boys in military uniform. The boys looked as though they could scarcely be out of high school. They had identical jutting chins and identical peaked eyebrows; their feet, on the barber-chair footrests, were identically pigeon-toed. They must have been brothers, if not twins. Andras glanced at Tibor, whose look seemed to ask what these two brothers meant, patronizing the barbers who had neatly razored away the Jókai Káveház and replaced it with this sterile black-and-white-tiled shop. There was no question of Andras and Tibor’s stopping in for a shave. The Jókai Barbershop was a traitor.
Instead they went back down Andrássy út to the Artists’ Café, a Belle Époque establishment with wrought-iron tables, amber-shaded lamps, and a glass case full of cakes. Andras insisted upon ordering a slice of Sachertorte, against Tibor’s objections-it was too expensive, too rich, he couldn’t eat more than a bite.
“You need something rich,” Andras said. “Something made with butter.”
Tibor mustered a wan smile. “You sound like our mother.”
“If I do, you should listen.”
That smile again-a pale, preserved-looking version of Tibor’s old smile, like something kept in a jar in a museum. When the tor
te arrived, he cut a piece with his fork and let it sit at the edge of the plate.
“You’ve heard the news from the Délvidék by now,” Tibor said.
Andras stirred his coffee and extracted the spoon. “I’ve read an article and heard some awful rumors.”
Tibor gave a barely perceptible nod. “I was there,” he said.
Andras raised his eyes to his brother’s. It was disconcerting to see Tibor without his glasses, which had refracted his unusually large eyes into balance with the rest of his features. Without them he looked raw and vulnerable. The diet of cabbage soup and brown bread and coffee had whittled him down to this elemental state; he was essence of Tibor, reduction of Tibor, the necessary ingredient that might be recombined with ordinary life to produce the Tibor that Andras knew. He wasn’t sure he wanted to hear what had happened to Tibor in the Délvidék. He bent to his coffee rather than meet those eyes.
“I was there a month and a half ago,” Tibor began, and told the story. It had been late January. His Munkaszolgálat company had been attached to the Fifth Army Corps; they’d been slaving for an infantry company in Szeged, building pontoon bridges on the Tisza so the company could move its materiel across. One morning their sergeant had called them away from that work and told them they were needed for a ditch-digging project. They were trucked to a town called Mošorin, marched to a field, and commanded to dig a trench. “I remember the dimensions,” Tibor said. “Twenty meters long, two and a half meters wide, two meters deep. We had to do it by nightfall.”
At the table beside them, a young woman sitting with her two little girls gave Tibor a long look and then glanced away. He touched the scroll embellishment at the end of his fork and continued in a lowered voice.
“We dug the trench,” he said. “We thought it was for a battle. But it wasn’t for a battle. After dark, they marched a group of people to the field. Men and women. A hundred and twenty-three of them. We were sitting on one side of the ditch eating our soup.”
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