Then, one afternoon in early August-eight hours before the Enola Gay’s flight over Hiroshima, and eight days before end of the Second World War-as they stood scanning the lists of dead, Klara’s hand flew to her mouth and her shoulders curled. In that first moment Andras wondered only who she could have had left to lose; it didn’t occur to him that her reaction might have anything to do with him. But he must have sensed unconsciously what had happened. When he looked at the list, he found he couldn’t bring the names into focus.
Klara held his arm, trembling. “Oh, Andras,” she said. “Tibor. Oh, God.”
He moved away from her, unwilling to understand. He looked at the list again but couldn’t make sense of it. Already people were stepping away from them, giving them a respectful space, the way they did when people found their dead. He stepped forward and touched the list where it bled from K to L. Katz, Adolf. Kovály, Sarah. László, Béla. Lebowitz, Kati. Lévi, Tibor.
It couldn’t be his Tibor. He said this aloud: It’s not him. It’s someone else. It’s not our Tibor. Not our Tibor. A mistake. He pushed his way through the crowd around the list, toward the door of the synagogue, up the stairs to the administrative offices, where an explanation would be found. He terrified a woman at a desk by roaring for the person in charge. She took him to an anteroom where, unbelievably, they made him wait. Klara found him there; her eyes were red, and he thought, Ridiculous. Not our Tibor. And in the office of the person in charge, he sat in an ancient leather chair while the man leafed through manila envelopes. He handed one to Andras, labeled with the name LÉVI. The envelope held a brief typewritten note and a metal dog-tag locket, its clasp twisted. When Andras opened the dog tag he found the inner document still intact: Tibor’s name, his date and place of birth, his height and eye color and weight, the name of his commanding officer, his home address, his Munkaszolgálat number. Your dog tags might come home, but you never will. The brief typewritten note stated that the tag had been found on Tibor’s body in a mass grave in Hidegség, near the Austrian border.
That night Andras locked himself into the bedroom of the new apartment he shared with Klara and Polaner and the children. He sat on the floor, cried aloud, beat his head against the cold red tile. He would never leave that room, he decided; would stay there until he was an old man, and let the earth burn through its years around him.
Sometime in the night, Klara and Polaner came in and helped him to bed. In the vaguest way, he was aware of Klara unbuttoning his shirt, of Polaner sliding his arms into a new one; vaguely, through a veil, he saw Klara washing her face at the basin and getting into bed beside him. Her arm across his chest was a warm live thing, and he was dead beneath it. He couldn’t move to touch her or respond to anything she said. He lay spent and exhausted and awake, listening as her breathing fell into its familiar rhythm of sleep. He saw Tibor in those last weeks, the nightmare of their life at Sopron: Tibor going to the village for food. Tibor overturning Andras and József’s bowl of beans. Tibor bathing Andras’s forehead with a cold cloth. Tibor covering him with his own overcoat. Tibor walking thirty kilometers with a handful of strawberry jam. Tibor reminding him that it was Tamás’s birthday. Then he thought of Tibor in Budapest, his eyes dark behind his silver-rimmed glasses. Tibor in Paris, lying on Andras’s floor in an agony of love for Ilana. Tibor hauling Andras’s bags to Keleti Station one September morning a lifetime ago. Tibor at the opera, the night before Andras’s departure. Tibor dragging an extra mattress up the stairs to his own small room on Hársfa utca. Tibor in high school, a biology book open on the table before him. Tibor as a tall young boy, chasing Andras through the orchard, throwing him to the ground. Tibor pulling Andras from the millpond. Tibor bending over Andras where he sat on the kitchen floor, tipping a spoonful of sweet milk into his mouth.
He turned over and pulled Klara against him, cried and cried into the damp nebula of her hair.
There was a funeral at the Jewish cemetery outside the city, a reburial of Tibor’s remains and the remains of hundreds of others, a field of open graves, a thousand mourners. Afterward, for the second time that year, he observed a week of shivah. He and Klara burned a memorial candle and ate hard-boiled eggs, sat on the floor in silence, received a stream of guests. In accordance with the ritual, Andras did not shave for thirty days. He hid inside his beard, forgot to change his clothes, bathed only when Klara insisted. He had to work; he knew he couldn’t afford to lose his new job as a dismantler of bombed buildings. But he performed the work without speaking to the other men or seeing the houses he was taking apart or thinking of the people who had lived in them. After work he sat in the front room of the apartment they’d taken on Pozsonyi út, or in a dark corner of the bedroom, sometimes holding one of the children on his lap, stroking the baby’s hair or listening as Tamás described what had happened at the park that morning. He ate little, couldn’t concentrate on a book or newspaper, didn’t want to go out for a walk with József and Polaner. He said Kaddish every day. It seemed to him he could live this way forever, could make a permanent employment of grief. Klara, whose motherhood had prevented her from sinking into an all-consuming mourning for her own mother and György and Elza, understood and indulged him; and Polaner, whose grief had been as deep as Andras’s own, knew that even this abyss had a bottom, and that Andras would reach it soon.
He could not have anticipated how, or when. It came on a Sunday exactly a month after the funeral, the day Andras shaved his mourning beard. They were sitting at the breakfast table, eating barley porridge with goats’ milk; food was still scarce, and as the weather turned colder they had begun to wonder whether, having survived the war itself, they would die of its aftermath. Klara spooned her own porridge into the children’s mouths. Andras, who could not eat, passed his along to her. József and Polaner sat with the newspaper spread between them, Polaner reading aloud about the Communist Party’s struggle to recruit members before the upcoming general election.
It was Andras who rose when they heard a knock at the door. He crossed the room, drawing his robe closer against the morning chill; he unlocked the door and opened it. A red-faced young man stood on the doorstep, a knapsack on his back. His cap bore the Soviet military insignia. He reached into the pocket of his trousers and drew out a letter.
“I’ve been charged to deliver this to Andras or Tibor Lévi,” the man said.
“Charged by whom?” Andras said. With numb dispassion he noted how strange it was to hear his brother’s name in this soldier’s mouth. Tibor Lévi. As if he were still alive.
“By Mátyás Lévi,” the man said. “I was with him at a prisoner-of-war camp in Siberia.”
And so, Andras thought. The final piece of news. Mátyás dead, and this his last missive. He felt himself to be in a place so remote from human feeling, so far removed from the ability to experience pain or hope or love, that he did not hesitate to take the letter. He opened it as the young man stood watching, as his family looked at him for the news. And he learned that his brother Mátyás lived, and would be home the following Tuesday.
In the winter of 1942, just a month after he’d been sent to Ukraine, Mátyás Lévi had been taken prisoner by the Soviets, and along with the rest of his labor company had been sent to a mining camp in Siberia. The location was the region of Kolyma, bounded by the Arctic Ocean to the north and the Sea of Okhotsk to the south. They’d gone via the Trans-Siberian Railway to the end of its easternmost spike at Vladivostok, and then had been transported across the sea on the slave ship Dekabrist. The camp had two thousand inmates, Germans and Ukrainians and Hungarians and Serbs and Poles and Nazi-sympathizing French, along with Soviet criminals and political dissidents and writers and composers and artists. In the camp he’d been beaten with clubs and shovels and pickhandles. He’d been bitten by bedbugs and flies and lice. He’d been frozen almost to death. He’d worked seventeen-hour days at seventy degrees below zero, had received a daily ration of twenty decagrams of bread, had been thrown into isolation for disobedien
ce, had nearly died of dysentery, had earned the respect of the guards and officers by painting bold Communist posters for the barracks walls, had been named official propaganda-poster designer and official snow sculptor of the camp (he had made ten-foot-high busts of Lenin and Stalin to preside over the parade ground), had learned Russian and had volunteered as a translator, had been called upon to interview Hungarian Nazis, had seen a hundred Arrow Cross members brought to trial and sentenced and in some cases executed, had been attacked by a secret coalition of Hungarian Arrow Cross members who broke both his legs, had convalesced in the infirmary for six months, and finally had been informed one morning that his time at the prison camp was through, and when he’d asked what had earned him the privilege of release, had been told that it was because his official designation, and that of five hundred twenty other prisoners, had been changed from Jewish Hungarian to Hungarian Jew, and that the prison camp was not in the business of detaining Jews, not after what the Nazis had done to them.
But nothing that happened to him those three cold years had prepared him for what waited at home. Nothing had prepared him for the news that four hundred thousand of Hungary’s Jews had been sent to death camps in Poland; nothing had prepared him for the bombed ruin of Budapest with its six severed bridges. And nothing had prepared him for the news that his mother and father, his brother and his sister-in-law and his nephew, had all vanished from the earth. It was Andras who delivered the news. Mátyás, grown into a lean, hard-eyed man with a short dark beard, sat before him on the sofa and took it in without a sound; the only sign he gave of having understood at all was a faint trembling of the jaw. He got up and smoothed his pant legs, as if, having been given a military briefing, he was ready now to incorporate the news into his plans and move onward. And then something seemed to change beneath the skin of his face, as though his muscles had received the news on a longdistance telephone delay. He went to his knees on the floor, his features twisting with grief. “Not true,” he cried, and moved his arms around his head as if birds were flying at him. It was the news, Andras thought, the unrelenting news, a troop of crows circling, their wings smelling of ash.
He knelt beside his brother and put his arms around him, held him against his own chest as Mátyás wailed. He said his brother’s name aloud, as if to remind him of the astonishing fact that at least, he, Mátyás, still lived. He would not let go until Mátyás pulled away and looked around at the unfamiliar room; when his eyes came to rest on Andras’s again, they were lucid and full of despair. Is it true? he seemed to be asking, though he hadn’t said a word. Tell me honestly. Is it true?
Andras held Mátyás’s gaze steady in his own. There was no need to speak or to make any sign. He put his arm around Mátyás’s shoulder again, drew him close and held him as he cried.
It was Andras who sat with him that night and the next and the one after that, Andras who urged him to eat and who changed the damp bedding on the sofa where he slept. As he did these things he felt the first thinning of the fog that had enveloped him since he’d learned that Tibor was dead. Over the past month he’d nearly forgotten how to be a man in the world, how to breathe and eat and sleep and speak to other people. He had let himself slip away, even though Klara and the children had survived the war, the siege; even though Polaner was there with him every day. On the third night after Mátyás’s return, after Mátyás had fallen asleep and he and Klara had retreated to their bedroom, Andras took her hands and begged her forgiveness.
“You know there’s nothing to forgive,” she said.
“I vowed to take care of you. I want to be a husband to you again.”
“You’ve never stopped,” she said.
He bent to kiss her; she was alive, his Klara, and she was there in his arms. Nest of my children, he thought, placing a hand on her womb. Cradle of my joy. And he remembered her with an orange-red dahlia behind her ear, and the way her skin felt beneath a film of bathwater, and what it was like to meet her eye and to know they were thinking the same thing. And he believed, for the first time since he had seen Tibor’s name on the list at Bethlen Gábor tér, that it might be possible to live beyond that terrible year; that he might look into Klara’s face, whose planes and curves he knew more intimately than any landscape in the world, and feel something like peace. And he took her to bed and made love to her as if for the first time in his life.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO. A Name
THE MORNING was crisp and blue, early December. From the window of their building on Pozsonyi út, Andras could see a line of schoolchildren being led into Szent István Park -gray woolen coats, crimson scarves, black boots that left herringbones of footprints in the snow. Beyond the park was the marbled span of the Danube. Farther still was the white prow of Margaret Island, where in the summertime Tamás and Április swam at Palatinus Strand. When, on a walk through the park last spring, he’d told them that the pool had once been closed to Jewish swimmers, Április had looked at him with pinched brows.
“I don’t see what being Jewish has to do with swimming,” she said.
“Neither do I,” Andras said, and put a hand at the nape of her neck, where her little gold chain closed. But Tamás had looked through the fence at the pool complex, his hands on the green-painted bars, then turned to meet his father’s eyes. He knew by now what had happened to his family during the war, what had happened to his uncles and grandparents. He had gone to Konyár and Debrecen with his father to see where Andras had lived as a boy, and where Andras’s parents had lived; he had watched his father place a stone on the doorstep of the house in Konyár as if at a grave.
“I’m going to train for the Olympics here,” he said. “I’ll set a new world record.”
“Me too,” Április said. “I’ll set a record in freestyle and backstroke.”
“I have no doubt you will,” Andras said.
That was before the escape had come to seem like a reality, before the children had begun to envision their future lives taking place on the other side of the Atlantic. It wouldn’t be long now; only a few details remained, including the business Andras would conclude that morning at the Ministry of the Interior. Tamás had wanted to come along with Andras and Klara and Mátyás to pick up the new identification cards. Last night he’d stood before Andras in the sitting room with a grave expression on his face, his arms crossed over his chest. He had already prepared his lessons for the next two days, he announced. He’d miss nothing at all by going with them.
“You have to go to school,” Andras said. He rose from his chair and put an arm around Tamás’s shoulders. “You don’t want the students in America to get ahead of you.”
“I’m not worried about that,” Tamás said. “Not if I miss just one afternoon. They get Saturdays and Sundays off every week.”
“I’ll leave your new papers on your desk,” Andras said. “They’ll be waiting for you when you get home from school.”
Tamás sent a glance toward Klara, who sat at her writing desk by the window; she shook her head and said, “You heard your father.”
Shrugging, sighing, declaring it all to be unfair, Tamás gave up the argument and loped off down the hallway to his room. “As if I’d get behind,” they heard him say as he closed the bedroom door.
Klara lifted her eyes to Andras, trying to restrain her laughter. “He’s been a grown man for years, hasn’t he?” she said. “What on earth will he do in America, among those kids with their banana splits and their rock and roll?”
“He’ll eat banana splits and listen to rock and roll,” Andras predicted, which turned out, in fact, to be true.
Andras and Mátyás had taken the day off work to go to the Ministry of the Interior. They were employed at Magyar Nation, one of the secondary communist newspapers, where they directed the design department; they had been up late the previous night judging a contest of winter-themed drawings by gimnázium students. The winning drawing had depicted a skating race, athletics being a safe subject under the judging regulations, which
disqualified any drawing that made reference to Christmas. That holiday belonged to the old Hungary, at least officially. Of course, people still celebrated it; they were relying on that fact, all of them-Andras and Mátyás, Klara and Tamás and Április. In a few weeks, on Christmas Eve, they would take a train to Sopron, and then they would walk six miles in the snow to a place where they might cross the Austrian border unnoticed; they would slip through while the border patrol drank vodka and listened to Christmas carols in their warm quarters. In Austria they would catch a train that would take them to Vienna, where Polaner had been living since his own border crossing in November. From there they would travel together to Salzburg, and then to Marseilles. On the tenth of January, if all went well, they would board an ocean liner for New York, where József Hász had secured an apartment for them.
But first they had to settle the business about the name change and the new identity cards. They had submitted the application eight weeks earlier, in October; it had gotten delayed, like all other government business, in the confusion surrounding the abortive revolution that fall. Even now, less than a month after it had been quelled, Andras found it difficult to believe the revolution had occurred-that the public debates of the Petőfi Society, a small group of Budapest intellectuals, had blossomed into vast student demonstrations; that the students and their supporters had unseated Ernő Gerő, Moscow’s puppet, and had installed the reformist Imre Nagy as prime minister; that they had pulled down the twenty-meter-high statue of Stalin near Heroes’ Square, and planted Hungarian flags in his empty boots. The demonstrators had called for free elections, a multiparty system, a free press. They wanted Hungary to disengage from the Warsaw Pact, and more than anything they wanted the Red Army to go home. They wanted to be Hungarian again, even after what it had meant to be Hungarian during the war. And at first, Khrushchev had conceded. He had recognized Nagy as prime minister, and began to call the occupying troops back to Russia. For a few days in late October it seemed to Andras that the Hungarian Revolution would be the swiftest, the cleanest, the most successful revolution Europe had ever known. Then Polaner came home one afternoon having heard a rumor that Soviet tanks were massing at the Romanian and Ruthenian borders. That evening, in the Erzsébetváros café where Andras and Polaner went to hear Jewish artists and writers argue long into the night, the item of hottest debate was whether the Western nations would come to Hungary ’s aid. Radio Free Europe had led many to believe it would be so, but others insisted that no Western nation would risk itself for a Soviet-bloc state. The cynics turned out to be correct. France and Britain, preoccupied with the Suez Crisis, scarcely cast an eye toward Central Europe; America was caught up in a presidential election, and kept to itself.
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