Polaner, who knew what it meant to wait for news, kept his own mourning private. He never spoke of his parents or his sisters, as though a mention of his loss might bring on the tragedy that Andras’s family dreaded. He insisted upon going alone to the Dohány Synagogue every afternoon to recite Kaddish. Tradition required him to do it for a year. But as the news continued to drift in from Poland, it began to seem as though no one could be exempt from mourning, as though no period of mourning would ever be long enough. In April, the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto had mounted an armed stand against the deportation of the ghetto’s last sixty thousand residents; no one had expected it to last more than a few days, but the ghetto fighters held out for four weeks. The Pesti Napló printed photographs of women throwing Molotov cocktails at German tanks, of Waffen-SS troops and Polish policemen setting buildings afire. The battle lasted until the middle of May, and ended, as everyone had known it would, with the clearing of the ghetto: a massacre of the Jewish fighters, and the deportation of those who had survived. The next day, the Pesti Napló reported that one and a half million Polish Jews had been killed in the war, according to the exiled Polish government’s estimate. Andras, who had translated every article and radio program about the uprising for Polaner, couldn’t bring himself to translate that number, to deliver that staggering statistic to a friend already in mourning. One and a half million Jewish men and women and children: How was anyone to understand a number like that? Andras knew it took three thousand to fill the seats of the Dohány Street Synagogue. To accommodate a million and a half, one would have had to replicate that building, its arches and domes, its Moorish interior, its balcony, its dark wooden pews and gilded ark, five hundred times. And then to envision each of those five hundred synagogues filled to capacity, to envision each man and woman and child inside as a unique and irreplaceable human being, the way he imagined Mendel Horovitz or the Ivory Tower or his brother Mátyás, each of them with desires and fears, a mother and a father, a birthplace, a bed, a first love, a web of memories, a cache of secrets, a skin, a heart, an infinitely complicated brain-to imagine them that way, and then to imagine them dead, extinguished for all time-how could anyone begin to grasp it? The idea could drive a person mad. He, Andras, was still alive, and people were dependent upon him; he couldn’t afford to lose his mind, and so he forced himself not to think about it.
Instead he buried himself in the work that had to be done every day. The single apartment, which had been full even when the men were away in the Munkaszolgálat, proved unlivable now that they were home. Tibor and Ilana took a flat across the street, and József moved with his parents into another small flat in the building next door. Polaner remained with Andras and Klara, sharing a room with Tamás. For all those living spaces, rent had to be paid. Andras went back to work as a newspaper illustrator and layout artist, not at the Magyar Jewish Journal but at the Evening Courier, Mendel’s former employer, where a new round of military conscriptions had decimated the ranks of graphic artists. He persuaded his editor to hire Polaner as well, arguing that Polaner had always been the true talent behind their collaborations in architecture school. Tibor, for his part, found a position as a surgical assistant in a military hospital, where the wounded of Voronezh were still being treated. József, who had never before had to earn a living, placed an ad in the Evening Courier and became a house painter, paid handsomely for his work. And Klara taught private students in the studio on Király utca. Few parents now could afford the full fee, but she allowed them to pay whatever they could.
In July, as Eisenhower’s armies bombed Rome, Budapest stood on the banks of the Danube in an excess of summer beauty, its palaces and grand old hotels still radiating an air of permanence. The Soviet bombardments of the previous September hadn’t touched those scrolled and gilded buildings; Allied raids had failed to materialize that spring, and the Red Army’s planes hadn’t returned. Now the clenched fists of dahlias opened in the Városliget, where Andras walked with Tibor and József and Polaner on Sunday afternoons, speculating about how much longer it might be before Germany capitulated and the war ended at last. Mussolini had fallen, and fascism had crumbled in Italy. On the Eastern Front, Germany ’s problems had multiplied and deepened: The Wehrmacht’s assault on a Soviet stronghold near Kursk had ended in a disastrous rout, and defeats at Orel and Kharkov had followed soon after. Even Tibor, who a year earlier had cautioned against wishful thinking, voiced the hope that the war might be over before he or Andras or József could be called to the Munkaszolgálat again, and that the Hungarian prisoners of war might begin to return.
The Jews of Hungary had been lucky, Andras knew. Thousands of men had died in the Munkaszolgálat, but not a million and a half. The rest of the Jewish population had survived the war intact. Though tens of thousands had lost their jobs and nearly all were struggling to make a living, it was still legal at least for a Jew to operate a business, own an apartment, go to synagogue to say the prayer for the dead. For more than a year and a half, Prime Minister Kállay had managed to stave off Hitler’s demands for more stringent measures against Hungary ’s Jews; what was more, his administration had begun to pursue justice for the crimes perpetrated earlier in the war. He had called for an investigation into the Délvidék massacres, and had vowed to punish the guilty parties as severely as they deserved. And General Vilmos Nagybaczoni Nagy, before he’d given up his control of the Ministry of Defense, had called for the indictment of the officers at the heart of the military black market.
But Andras had been schooled in skepticism not only by Tibor but by the events of the past year; despite the hopeful news, he found it impossible to shake his sense of dread. More events accrued to reinforce it. As he followed the black-market trial in the newspaper that fall, it became increasingly clear that the accused officers, if they were convicted, would carry only nominal sentences. And Hitler, whose Wehrmacht had looked so vulnerable during the summer months, had halted the Allied attack south of Rome and secured Germany ’s southern borders. In Russia he continued to throw his troops at the Red Army, as though total defeat were impossible.
Then there was the absence of news about Mátyás, who had been missing now for twenty-two months. How could anyone continue to believe he had survived? But Tibor persisted in believing it, and his mother believed it, and though his father wouldn’t speak of it, Andras knew he believed it; as long as any of them did, none of them could claim even the bare comfort of grief.
The year’s final act of aborted justice concerned the Hász family and the extortion that had drained its fortunes almost to nothing. Once György’s monthly payments had dwindled to a few hundred forint, the extortionists decided that the rewards of the arrangement were no longer worth the risk. The Kállay administration seemed intent upon exposing corruption at all levels and in all branches of the government; seventeen members of the Ministry of Justice had already been indicted for financial improprieties, and György’s extortionists feared they would be next. On the twenty-fifth of October they called György to a midnight meeting in the basement of the Ministry of Justice. That night, Andras and Klara kept a vigil with Klara’s mother and Elza and József in the small dark front room of the Hász apartment. József chain-smoked a pack of Mirjam cigarettes; Elza sat with a basket of mending beside her, needling her way through the unfamiliar ravages of poverty upon clothing. The elder Mrs. Hász read aloud from Radnóti, the young Jewish poet Tibor admired, and whose fate in the Munkaszolgálat was unknown. Klara, her hands pinned between her knees, sat beside Andras as if in judgment herself. If her brother came to harm, Andras knew she would hold herself responsible.
At a quarter to three in the morning a key sounded in the lock. Here was György, soot-stained and breathless but otherwise unharmed. He removed his jacket and draped it over the back of the sofa, smoothed his pale gold tie, ran a hand through his silver-shot hair. He sat down in an empty chair and drained the glass of plum brandy his wife offered him. Then he set the empty glass on the low table befor
e him and fixed his eyes on Klara, who sat close at his side.
“It’s over,” he said, covering her hand with his own. “You may exhale.”
“What’s over?” their mother asked. “What’s happened?”
There had been a great immolation of documents, he told them. The extortionists had taken György to his office and made him gather all evidence of the ministry’s illegal relationship with the Hász family-every letter, every telegram and payment record, every bill of sale and bank-deposit receipt-and had forced him to throw the lot into the building’s incinerator, making it impossible for the Hász family ever to mount a case against the Ministry of Justice. In return, the ministry officials produced a new set of papers for Klara, restoring the citzenship she’d lost as a young girl. Then they took the file containing all the documents pertaining to Klara’s alleged crime-the photographs of the murder scene and victims, the rapist’s sworn testimony revealing Klara’s identity, the depositions linking Klara to the Zionist organization Gesher Zahav, the police reports documenting Klara’s disappearance, and Edith Novak’s statement concerning Klara’s return to Hungary-and fed it, too, to the building’s central incinerator.
“You saw them burn those things?” Klara said. “The dossier, the photographs-everything?”
“Everything,” György said.
“How do you know they didn’t keep copies?” József said. “How do you know they don’t have other documents?”
“It’s possible, I suppose, but not likely. We must remember that any evidence they might retain would be evidence against them. That’s why they were so eager to destroy those papers.”
“But the evidence has always implicated them!” József said, rising from his chair. “That’s never bothered them before.”
“These men were frightened,” Hász said. “They did a poor job of hiding it. The administration isn’t on their side. They’ve seen seventeen of their colleagues fired, and a few imprisoned or sent to the labor service, for less than what they’ve done to us.”
“And you destroyed everything?” József said. “Truly everything? You didn’t keep a single copy? Nothing that would give us recourse later?”
György gave his son a hard and steady look. “They held a gun to my head as I emptied the files,” he said. “I would like to say I had duplicates elsewhere, but it was risky enough to keep what I had. Anyway, it’s finished now. They can’t open Klara’s case again. I saw the documents burn.”
József stood over his father’s chair, his hands clenched. He seemed ready to grab his father by the shoulders and shake him. His eyes flickered toward his grandmother, his mother; then his gaze fell upon Andras and rested there. Between them lay a history so terrible as to throw the moment’s frustration into a different light; to look at each other was to be reminded what it meant to escape with one’s life. József sat down again and spoke to his father.
“Thank God it’s over,” he said. “Thank God they didn’t kill you.”
…
In their bedroom that night, Andras held Klara as they lay awake in the dark. How many times over the past four years had he imagined her arrested and beaten and jailed, placed far beyond his reach? He could scarcely believe that the ever-present threat was gone. Klara herself was silent and dry-eyed beside him; he knew how keenly she felt the price of her own liberation. Her return to Hungary, a risk she had undertaken for his sake, had ruined her family. She was free now, but her freedom would never extend far enough to allow her to demand legal justice or the repayment of her family’s losses. Her silence wasn’t directed at him, he understood, but it lay between them nonetheless. Had he ever been close to her in the way married people were supposed to be close? he wondered. Of their forty-eight months married, he had spent only twelve at home. To survive their separation they’d had to place each other at a certain remove. Every time he’d been home, including this one, there had been the fear that he would be called up again; as much as they tried to ignore it, the fact was always there. And veiling all their intimacy, shadowing it like a pair of dark wings, was what they knew was happening in Europe, and what they feared would happen to them.
But here they were together, in their shared bed, out of the grasp of danger for the moment. They lived, and he loved her. It was was folly in the French sense-madness-to keep her at a remove. It was the last thing he wanted. He touched her bare shoulder, her face, pushed a lock of hair away from her brow, and she moved closer against him. Mindful of Polaner sleeping on the other side of the wall-of his losses, and his loneliness-they made love in clenched and straining silence. Afterward they lay together, his hand on her belly, his fingers moving along the familiar scars of her pregnancies. They hadn’t taken precautions against her becoming pregnant again, though neither wanted to imagine what it might mean if she were carrying a child when the Soviets crossed the Hungarian border. As they drifted toward sleep he described in a whisper the little house he would build beside the Danube when the war was over. It was the place he had envisioned when he’d been to Angyalföld the first time, a whitewashed brick house with a tile roof, a garden large enough for a pair of milking goats, an outdoor bread oven, a shaded patio, a pergola laced with grapevines. Klara slept at last, but Andras lay awake beside her, far from comfort. Once again, he thought, he had drawn a plan for an imaginary house, one in a long line of imaginary houses he had built since they’d been together; in his mind he could page through a deep stack of them, those ghostly blueprints of a life they had not yet lived and might never live.
…
On Saturday afternoons, when the weather was fine, Andras and Klara made a point of walking alone on Margaret Island for an hour or two while Polaner played with Tamás in the park. It was during those walks that they spoke of the things Andras could not write about in his brief and censored letters from Ukraine: the reasons for their deportation, and the role that The Crooked Rail may have played; the circumstances surrounding Mendel’s death; the long struggle with József afterward; and the strange conjunctions of the journey home. On the first subject, Andras’s greatest fear was that Klara herself might hold him responsible for what had happened, might blame him for keeping the family from attempting its escape. She had warned him; he hadn’t forgotten it for a moment. But she was at pains to reassure him that no one held him responsible for what had happened. Such an idea, she said, was a symptom of the loss of perspective caused by the Munkaszolgálat and the war. The journey to Palestine might easily have ended in disaster. His deportation may have saved them all. Now that he had returned, she was at liberty to be grateful that they’d been spared the uncertainties of the trip. To the second subject she reacted with grief and dismay, and Andras was reminded that she, too, had been present at the death of her closest friend and ally; she, too, had been witness to the senseless killing of a man she had loved since childhood. And on the third subject, she could say only that she understood what it must have required for Andras to keep from doing some great violence to József. But the time in Ukraine, and with Andras, had changed József in some deep-rooted way, she thought; he seemed a different man since his return, or perhaps he seemed finally to have become a man.
For reasons Andras found difficult to articulate, the most difficult subject was that of Zoltán Novak’s death. Months of Saturday walks passed before he could tell Klara that he had been with Novak on the last days of his life, and that he had buried Novak himself. She had read of Novak’s death in the newspapers and had mourned his loss before Andras’s return, but she wept afresh at that news. She asked Andras to tell her everything that had happened: how he had discovered Novak, what they had said to each other, how Novak had died. When he had finished, putting matters as gently as possible and omitting many painful details, Klara offered an admission of her own: She and Novak had exchanged nearly a dozen letters during his long months of service.
They had paused in their walk at the ruin of a Franciscan church halfway up the eastern side of the island: stones that looked a
s though they had risen from the earth, a rose window empty of glass, Gothic windows missing their topmost points. It was December, but the day was unseasonably mild; in the shadow of the ruin stood a bench where a husband and wife might make confession, even if they were Jewish. Even if no confessor was present except each other.
“How did he write to you?” Andras asked.
“He sent letters with officers who came and went on leave.”
“And you wrote back.”
She folded her wet handkerchief and looked toward the empty rose window. “He was alone and bereaved. He didn’t have anyone. Even his little son had died by then.”
“Your letters must have been a comfort,” Andras said with some effort, and followed her gaze toward the ruin. In one of the lobes of the rose window a bird had built its nest; the nest was long abandoned now, its dry grass streamers fluttering in the wind.
“I tried not to give him false hope,” Klara said. “He knew the limitations of my feelings for him.”
Andras had to believe her. The man he had seen in the granary in Ukraine could not have been operating under the illusion that someone was nursing a secret love for him. He was a man who had been forsaken by everything that had mattered, a man who had lived to see the ruin of all he had done on earth. “I don’t begrudge him your letters,” Andras said. “I can’t blame you for anything you might have written to him. He was always good to you. He was good to both of us.”
Klara put a hand on Andras’s knee. “He never regretted what he did for you,” she said. “He told me he’d spoken to you at the Operaház. He said you were much kinder than you might have been. He said, in fact, that if I had to marry anyone, he was glad it was you.”
Andras covered her hand with his own and looked up again at the bird’s nest shivering in the rose window. He had seen architectural drawings of this church in its unruined state, its Gothic lines graceful but unremarkable, indistinguishable from those of thousands of other Gothic chapels. As a ruin it had taken on something of the extraordinary. The perfect masonry of the far wall had been laid bare; the near wall had weathered into a jagged staircase, the edges of the stones worn to velvet. The rose window was more elegant for its lack of glass, the bones of its corolla scoured by wind and bleached white in the sun. The nest with its streamers was a final unbidden touch: It was what human hands had not brought to the building, and could not remove. It was like love, he thought, this crumbling chapel: It had been complicated, and thereby perfected, by what time had done to it.
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