"Does it matter whether you can or not?" said the organizer. "I'm going to dance, after all ..." and he made a dismissive gesture with his hand. He was called Bela Lajtai and had been the ballet master at the Prague Opera. He was now the most skeletal person in the entire barracks. By comparison Nandor Csillag seemed almost fat, even though he had lost half his body weight.

"Well, then, let's set about rehearsing!"

In the evenings, bent double, he tensed himself against the barrack walls in the brace position, which he had not employed for so long. His diaphragm exercises involved little disturbance of others, but to do his scales he went out into the yard, thinking his fellows would not tolerate the noise. But no sooner had he begun than his fellow prisoners crowded around, hungry for the sound of music. He never could resist an audience: he did not need asking twice, and he sang for them from his former repertoire. His sob-filled tenor voice soared high above the darkness shrouding the camp, vibrating along the barracks, so that many of the thousands locked up were able to hear it. Here and there came sounds of clapping.

I'm a success, at last, he thought. If the great Caruso heard me now, perhaps he would offer a few words of praise.

For the show he made himself a makeshift clown's outfit from a torn bedsheet, drawing the big buttons on it with a branch he had burned at the end. "Laugh, clown, laugh!" he sang for the audience of twelve nationalities in Hungarian, and at the end of the aria, sank to his knees, weeping. The thunderous applause would not stop but he could not acknowledge it. He had a sudden bout of fever and slipped out of consciousness. In the morning he could not rise from his bunk, even after repeated kicks from the Schenfuhrer. He was shivering, his eyes had turned heavenwards, his skin came out in blotches.

Tivadar Fleisch helped him out to the Appel Platz. They were both ordered to go over to the line by the fence inching its way to the side building. They reached the anteroom of the showers. Tivadar Fleisch helped Nandor Csillag off with his clothes, lined up his shabby shoes neatly by the wall. When they were fighting for their lives under the roses of the showers, Tivadar Fleisch spoke again. "Mother, my dear mother!" He can speak when he wants to, thought Nandor Csillag. His own mother he remembered, then his children. Of Balazs he knew that he was in labor service somewhere in Russia. Ilse perhaps in the women's camp. Endre and Tamas though ...

As his throat constricted he could taste blackberries and cranberries. The final image on the screen of his mind was of a fleeing flock of deer, running up the hill, reddish-purple dust swirling round their hoofs, their antlers scraping and scratching the sky that covered the ground.

X.

AROUND NEW YEAR THE AIR BECOMES GRADUALLY CLEARER. Infinity dangles in the searing cold; end-of-year longings, resolutions, and hopes drift heavenward. The foggy rim of the moon bespeaks better weather. The pines jaggedly stab the air in all directions; in their cones the seeds of trees to come prepare for the journey of life. Many folk interrogate the skies from their homes or far away from them. Those already-or still-awake at daybreak can see that the Virgin Mary's gray clouds swallow up the moon and then the stars. At the end of nights like these it is common for the plumped-up cushions of the sky to burst and spill their filling: not snow, nor rain, but a variety of ice-clad hail, which augurs ill as it batters eaves, ledges, and roofs.

There were no lights on in the office; petroleum lamps had been dusted down and lit. Three old women were leafing through the large, brick-sized business books, their faded blue lab coats reeking of chemicals. The shades of death hovered about in the gloom of ancient smells, as every client's inquiry or scrap of information involved them. Their fingers swollen with all the writing, the three old women's hands trembled their way along the wide pages of the black-bound tomes. If they found the name they were looking for, they tapped the surface of the page with the same curl of their claws.

Balazs Csillag joined the end of the queue, guessing that it might take three-quarters of an hour to reach one of the shabby desks. His stomach gave a rumble. From the bakery in Jokai Street the wind brought the smell of fresh-baked loaves, which managed to penetrate the poorly insulated windows but was immediately overlaid by the doom-laden odor that suffused the huge room. Balazs Csillag suddenly remembered the Brotzettel Brotzettel. In the days when the family was still together he would fight to the bitter end with his brothers for the slice of bread with the baker's tiny label on the crust, bearing his name and the time and place where the loaf was baked. Mother strictly forbade the eating of the Brotzettel Brotzettel-printing ink is pure poison!-but they ate it anyway. They took it into their heads that the tastiest morsel of the whole loaf was where the paper has fused with the crust of the bread and they have together hardened into a special delicacy. They loved that little bit of crust more than any of the masterpieces of the baker's art conjured up by the cook, which the guests of the Csillags never tired of praising.

It would be difficult to say what they loved about that tiny flour-stained little label. Balazs Csillag clung grimly to this memory, and when he returned to Pecs his first port of call was the bakery of the Csaszars. The young woman there, whom he had known since childhood, burst into tears when she saw him and would not accept payment for the kilo loaf. Balazs Csillag sat down on the edge of the pavement in Szechenyi Square and ate the whole loaf in one go. First he took out the soft innards a handful at a time and only then did he attend to the crust, which he tore into strips. He left the Brotzettel Brotzettel to the very end. But it did not taste as good as when they had fought over it, he and Endrus and little Tomi. From now on, he knew, even the to the very end. But it did not taste as good as when they had fought over it, he and Endrus and little Tomi. From now on, he knew, even the Brotzettel Brotzettel won't be the same as in the old days. won't be the same as in the old days.

The others in the queue were all women. He was trying to work out which of the three old women he would get to. There were clients at all three desks and at this moment all three were in tears. Balazs Csillag listened to the sounds, which were like nothing else on this earth, and kept thinking that whatever happens in this world, it all ends in the crying of women. But if one is at least surrounded by crying women, that cannot be as bad as ... They are, at least, alive.

He had been told that the procedure that takes longest is formally declaring that someone has disappeared, and he hoped that the others had come for other reasons. When two of the old women apologetically disappeared into the cellars that they called the archive store to look for old documents, he was overcome by despondency. And yet: what is the rush? You have nothing to do.

Two months earlier he was still in Lager 7149/2, with fifteen thousand others. Mainly Germans, Italians, and Romanians. The Hungarian contingent came to about fifteen hundred. There were constant rumors that liberation was imminent.

"We're going to be exchanged!" was the mantra of one chap, a stockbreeder from Szilvasvarad who had had a gangrenous leg amputated in the prisoners' hospital. He never gave up hope, not for a single moment of the day; even in his sleep he kept mumbling something of the sort. There was a widespread belief that the end of the war was in sight, and everyone would be able to go home in peace.

Of the more impatient folks there were always a few with plans to escape, and those brave enough sometimes actually gave it a try. The oldest group of prisoners recalled that a small group of Romanians had succeeded, allegedly. But hardly a week would pass without would-be escapees being brought in, bound and gagged by the guards; they would then be taken to the basement of the command post and beaten to within an inch of their lives. Balazs Csillag had been in on three planned attempts to escape, none of which had come to fruition.

He had been taken prisoner with two of his labor service friends, Zoli Nagy and Dr. Pista Kadas, both of whom he had known back in Pecs. They had been surrounded at the bridge of Verete by a unit on skis in white snowsuits. By then not only the labor service battalion but the entire Hungarian Second Army had disbanded, and in the general chaos everyone fled wherever they could. The three of them wanted to drink from the river that had frozen over and were just trying to break the ice with a stick when they heard mellifluous Russian words of command behind them. There were 150 soldiers on the bridge, 150 snow-white ghosts.

Balazs Csillag began to run towards them, the warm flush of relief beginning to course in his veins. "Dobry den! Ne strelayesh! Mi vengerski!" he shouted. They all knew this much; in the camp it was passed on by word of mouth that this is what you must say. But instead of welcoming arms, he was received with pistol-butts and hit so hard in the chest that he fell back under the bridge, only just caught by his mates. Dr. Pista Kadas knew a little French and started to explain in the language of Rousseau that they were Hungarian Jews, who had been forced onto the minefields because of their origins. The Russian officer must have got hold of the wrong end of the stick, because at the word for "minefield" he gave a snort. "Shomp de mean?" he repeated in a threatening tone, then hit him. Balazs Csillag and Zoli Nagy would have knelt down to the motionless body of Dr. Pista Kadas, had they not been led away at gunpoint.

It was in the Lager that they met again. They didn't know why they ended up here, together with members of the Wehrmacht and other regular army units, but there was no one to ask. Zoli Nagy had been born in Beremend and knew the Goldbaum family well, and the Holatscheks, too. They had not yet heard that all the members of these families had been deported and not one of them was left to tell the tale. Zoli Nagy had been studying law at the Royal Elizabeth University of Pecs, until he was excluded by the second Jewish law. Because of the same law, Balazs Csillag could not even apply. Dr. Pista Kadas was a lawyer; he was excluded from the chamber by Law IV of 1939, after which he tried to maintain himself by writing and publishing under a nom de plume.

The three of them had been called up for labor service on the same day. Balazs Csillag was not unduly upset. This was the fourth time he had been called up, and three times his father had managed to sort the matter out and got him off the call-up list. He thought his father would be able to do the same this time.

The call-up papers marked UHI-Urgent, Hurry, Immediate-said they were to present themselves at Nagykata. From the train he alighted in the company of Zoli Nagy and Dr. Pista Kadas as if they were young men on some study trip without a care in the world; in the yard of the company HQ they were transformed at a stroke into cannon fodder. The officer who bellowed at them inarticulately gave them to understand: if they had hitherto been suffering under the delusion that they were human beings, they were to forget at once this grave misconception, because they were nothing but filthy Jews. They could not speak to members of the guard staff; they were to reply only if they were asked a question, and even then they had to stand at a distance of three paces. Their civil possessions were to be placed on the table and they should bid them a fond farewell. Their wallets likewise: they are to retain a maximum of fifty pengo. Parcels from home are not permitted. Their letters will be subject to censorship. They may receive visitors once a month, exclusively from their nearest and dearest. They may not smoke, since the regulations do not entitle them to tobacco rations. They are obliged to wear the yellow armband day and night. Christians of Jewish origin receive a white armband, communists and other criminals a yellow armband with black polka dots. They are obliged to look after their regular uniform; they are liable to pay for any damage to it. Rosettes may not be worn in their camp caps.

Balazs Csillag could not help but guffaw. He found it amusing that any filthy Jew should obtain a rosette for his army cap, from which it had been carefully removed on arrival. His sense of humor was rewarded by being lashed to a tree by the full-throated officer, who they were soon to discover was Lieutenant-Colonel Lipot Muray, known among the labor battalion workers as the Hangman of Nagykata. His arms, which had been forced back, and his shoulders, which were all but dislocated, were, within three minutes of being tied to the tree, engulfed by agonizing pain; within five minutes this had spread to all of his body; and by the eighth minute he had lost consciousness. On the orders of Lieutenant-Colonel Muray a bucket of cold water restored him to the land of the living. The Hangman of Nagykata was not keen on his victims fainting; let the filthy Jews experience every single moment of their punishment.

He had no choice but to realize that he no longer enjoyed any kind of protection. There followed some weeks of "training," of which the daily high point was five o'clock tea, as Lieutenant-Colonel Muray designated his very own invention: precisely at five in the afternoon-seventeen zero-zero, as they called it-the Jews selected for this purpose would be herded into the cellars of the HQ and there the supervisory staff of the forced labor unit would beat them as long as they detected a single movement in any of the bodies. The blood-curdling screams for help were perhaps audible even in the surrounding villages. Balazs Csillag was never chosen; Zoli Nagy was, twice: the first time he returned with a broken arm, the second time with a shattered shinbone. He was still limping when they were wagoned up and taken to the front, as part of the 14th Light Infantry. The journey took several days by train, to Rechitsa, whence they continued on foot towards the east.

By the time they reached the Don, their numbers had halved. The staff became increasingly hysterical, but the cause of the majority of deaths was frostbite and hypothermia. Many remained by the roadside, turning with blank faces into the snow, thinking that they would stagger up again after forty winks. The soldiers knew there was no point wasting a bullet on them.

The work of the labor servicemen was to build mine-barrages and barbed-wire barriers and to repair railway lines repeatedly blown up by the Russian partisans. This Sisyphean task seemed increasingly pointless; sometimes the engines were able to move only for half a day. There were sections-Balazs Csillag counted them-where in the course of two weeks they changed the rails, bent and blasted by the explosions, no fewer than nine times, and the sleepers burned to charcoal.

In the freezing cold of January they received orders to clear the ground for the regular army; that is, to pick up the mines in a clearing, on the far side of which some tall pines were bending and bowing in the fierce wind. In the labor battalion the rumor went around that that forest already sheltered advance units of the Russian army. Balazs Csillag did not believe this. Those pine needles reminded him of Balatonszemes, Papa's holiday cottage. What if they were there? When one has to lie on one's stomach to dig antipersonnel mines out of the frozen soil with a trench spade and any one of them can explode at any time, shetsko jedno shetsko jedno whether there are Russian soldiers in the woods. whether there are Russian soldiers in the woods.

There was movement in the shadow of the trees. They hissed at each other to lie low. A smallish goat emerged and gently trotted over to the minefield, starting to graze on the tasty green scrub. The laborers held their breath to see when it would be blown sky-high, but the goat, it seems, was too light to trigger an explosion, the mines having been set to respond to a human's weight. Balazs Csillag watched the oddly graceful creature with great pleasure. The Russian goat is rather similar to the Hungarian goat, except that it is slimmer. Much, much slimmer.

About this time, some eight versts away, the Russians launched an offensive. They broke through the middle of the front, driving a wedge between the German, Italian, and Hungarian forces. Balazs Csillag's labor battalion was almost entirely wiped out. The three of them, however, by some miracle, managed to survive.

Zoli Nagy, Dr. Pista Kadas, and Balazs Csillag were always together, because of shared sympathies and identical fields of interest. The "legal eagles" the others called them. They formed an alliance, promising each other that they would use their joint strength to survive the war. This promise was not kept by Zoli Nagy, who suddenly, while loading wooden logs, felt dizzy and was torn to unrecognizable shreds by the sleepers and logs that collapsed upon him. His few possessions were shared out equally. Balazs Csillag ended up with a book and a photograph. A curly-haired brunette smiled back from the photograph, with unquenchable optimism, in a bathing suit of some soft fabric, on some kind of a beach, leaning against a blindingly white wall. On the back of the picture, in Zoli Nagy's careful script: "Yoli, the very first time. August 21, 1943." Balazs Csillag wondered any number of times what and how it was that very first time on August 21, 1943.

The book was a Household Companion from the turn of the century. Balazs Csillag tried to guess why Zoli Nagy had chosen to go to war with a specialized volume of this kind, but from the ex libris that said "The property of Helga Kondraschek-Not on loan, even to you!," he guessed that Zoli, too, had found it, or inherited it as he had done.

In his most difficult moments he always found refuge in this volume. If he was very hungry he read all the clever household tips and the five-or six-course meals that husbands returning exhausted from work could be dazzled by. If he was cold, he studied the knitting patterns. If he was plagued by fleas, he read up on the techniques of washing and ironing. He knew every paragraph of the 365 pages of the work. He could not get enough of it.

No sensible gentleman gives serious thought to marriage until he is assured of an income of at least three thousand crowns per annum. One thousand crowns is adequate to live on only if one draws the reins in tight and lives a singular life. A married couple require at least twice, but preferably three times, as much.A young couple of the middle classes can settle quite comfortably in a three-room flat. One bedroom, one lounge, and one dining room will be adequate for the official, civil servant, or young tradesman of limited means. Today it is no longer sensible to rent a flat without a bathroom; to have one built is not the modern way. The old-fashioned faience room basins or lavoirs no longer meet modern standards of cleanliness.A separate reception room, or as it is fashionable to call it nowadays in Hungarian, a salon, must be accounted a luxury, since it is always possible to furnish the living room so that it functions as a reception room.A reception room among the middle classes plays a role of unusual importance. This is the centerpiece of the home, the pride of the lady of the house; here are the most expensive pieces of furniture and the most eye-catching decor. A crushed velvet or patterned silk couch in the center along the wall, with armchairs on either side and cushioned chairs in a semicircle. On the table a visiting-card holder and books in fine bindings. Richly pleated heavy curtains for the windows; on the walls and on the furniture, paintings and pictures of various sizes and ornamental plates, Makartstil bouquets, and porcelain figurines. This is where we can receive more distant relatives, acquaintances, and business contacts, and here the family's celebrations can be held.

When he reached this point Balazs Csillag's eyes filled with tears. He remembered his grandfather's house in Apacza Street, then the one in Nepomuk Street, at Sunday lunch. When the grandfather clock struck twelve and Papa poured himself a thimbleful of bitters and tossed it down. The maid laid the big table. Half an hour later the cook sent the message, via her, that the family might take their places at the table. Papa insisted that they dress for the occasion and the three boys had in turn to go to Ilse, with her clockwork smile and drugged eyes, and give her hands a ritual kiss. He himself did so after them.

"Dankschon!" intoned Ilse four times, identically, like a recording.

In Lager 7149/2 time had ground almost to a standstill. From here he could no longer write home on the Russian and Hungarian form-postcards of the Red Cross, which were pre-printed SENDER PRISONER OF WAR. There was room for only a few lines on the card, but Balazs Csillag did not need even those. I am fine. How are you all? Write back soon! Answer he received none. He often tried to imagine what it would be like to see his loved ones and his home town again; sometimes he even dreamed of this. Usually he was a child walking through the vaulted gate of the house in Nepomuk Street; it would be late at night, his mother and father would be sitting by the fire (though only the house in Apacza Street had a fireplace), by the light of candles; they would acknowledge him as he entered and then his mother would say in her German-accented Hungarian: "Go up to bed, quickly!" and he obeyed.

He was the mainstay of Dr. Pista Kadas, who was inclined to depression. "You'll see, we'll get out of here and get home sooner than you might think!"

In the evenings he would make him tell stories. The stories of Dr. Pista Kadas always ended up with his years as a lawyer, and his manner of speech also veered towards that of the courtroom, with its circumlocutory turns of phrase, liberally seasoned with "well, now"s and "be it noted"s. He revealed to Balazs Csillag a world into which he sought admission in vain, though everyone in the family assumed he was destined for the Bar. He was still at primary school when he made speeches for both the prosecution and the defense at the dining table.

"Bravo, bravissimo, my dear counselor!" said his father.

At school Balazs Csillag's most distinguished achievements were in Greek and Latin. He could recite poems by Homer, Virgil, and Ovid after just a few readings. Latin, too, seemed to be a milestone on the road to a legal career.

"I know I shall be a lawyer when I grow up!"

"How do you know?" asked Dr. Pista Kadas.

"In our family the first-born know a lot of things. I am not sure why this should be so."

Dr. Pista Kadas continued to press the matter until willy-nilly he explained how these things were in the Csillag family. Dr. Pista Kadas heard the account with mounting disquiet. It was not the first time in the Lager that someone hitherto completely sane appeared to lose his mind overnight. He did not dare challenge the story; rather, he probed further, hoping that his friend would suddenly burst out laughing, like someone playing a joke. Balazs Csillag, however, stuck to his guns and insisted that for some mysterious reason he was able to see the past and the future.

"So you knew that we would end up here, too?"

"No, all I knew was that there was going to be trouble, big trouble. The way it happens is that the pictures, the images are often very fuzzy."

"But then if your Papa also knew ... what would happen, why did you not emigrate while you could?"

"That's something that has been bothering me, too. Perhaps it's one thing to see, and another to believe what you see."

"Hm ... You wouldn't by any chance be able to see whether we will ever get out of here?"

"I told you: we are going home, sooner than you might think! And ... our liberation is in some way connected with milk ... Don't look at me like that. Really, I am not mad!"

"Milk ..." Dr. Pista Kadas gave a sigh. There was no more incongruous word that Balazs Csillag could have uttered. The prisoners of Lager 7149/2 never saw any milk; at most they might have caught sight of that sticky, white condensed stuff that made you nauseous even when stirred into ersatz coffee. It came in metal tins of the kind that the Csillag shoe shop sold as Csillag shoe polish.

In logging Balazs Csillag proved to have two left hands, but he was very good when it came to estimating the size of the tree trunks and calculating their volume, and the Russian guards soon made him responsible for producing the lists and the final figures on the dispatch notes. Balazs Csillag learned to speak Russian quite quickly and was therefore also used occasionally as an interpreter. He did all in his power to ensure that Dr. Pista Kadas was always by his side, but this did not always work out: the sickly, aquiline-nosed Kadas was for some reason found unsympathetic by the Russian soldiers. Balazs Csillag was certainly more like them physically, with his small, sharp gray eyes, quite long but somewhat bandy legs, and the black moustache that he grew in the Lager. This impression was reinforced when winter came around again and he wore the quilted jacket and ushanka ushanka that the Russian guards had cast off. that the Russian guards had cast off.

It was deemed a special favor if someone was ordered to take goods into town. They left the Lager riding on two double-wheeled trucks through the iron gates; this was the most spine-tingling moment, when you left the barbed wire behind. Each driver had a Russian soldier in the cab, while the prisoners stood in the back, shaken and tossed about. On the way back they could lie on the goods they brought, hanging on for dear life with their hands and feet. Sometimes one of them might fall out of the truck. The truck would then brake and reverse, two men carried out the order to throw the lifeless body back, and it would be held all the way to make sure it did not fall off again. Alive or dead, the Russians didn't care, but a body was an item in the inventory and had to be accounted for.

Balazs Csillag was frequently chosen as transporter, Dr. Pista Kadas more rarely. There was one occasion when the trucks set off for the far end of town. They were rarely informed where they were headed; it was thought enough to tell the prisoners their duties when they got there. This time they drove into a yard, surrounded by a tarred wooden fence, where they saw a wooden structure resembling a barn. The prisoners jumped off and immediately lit up; the guards permitted this on arrival. One of them went into the office, the other joked with a fat woman who seemed to be the caretaker and was smoking a stubby cigar just like the soldier's. His companion soon returned and motioned Balazs Csillag to come closer: "You go in, bring out the churns, up into the truck, one row stands, one lies on top of them, got that?"

The building was the milk-collecting station of the kolkhoz. Well-built women were in charge of the large milk tap hanging from the ceiling, and drew the heavy-duty churns underneath it one at a time; these would clatter loudly on the hardwood floor. The prisoners longingly eyed the thick stream of milk flowing from the tap. The women offered them some. Almost all of them drank their fill and more from the carved wooden bowls, an overindulgence that resulted for many in a bout of severe diarrhea.

As the company began to carry the churns outside, Balazs Csillag stood to one side to relieve himself. Dr. Pista Kadas followed suit.

"There's no fence at the back," said Balazs Csillag. "Count to ten and then ...!"

Dr. Pista Kadas looked shocked. But as Balazs Csillag strode off determinedly in the direction of the wooden building, he followed like his shadow. They expected any moment to hear Russian words of command snarled out, and the metallic click that indicated the safety catches of guns being undone. But nothing happened. When they got beyond the missing part of the fence, they broke into a run, jumping over the stream that wound its way here (which Balazs Csillag thought looked familiar), to reach the reed beds as soon as possible; here they would stand more of a chance against any bullets fired at them. But there were no bullets. They ran as fast as their legs would carry them, knee-deep in the boggy soil, hampered by the reed grass that clung to their limbs. They ran for three-quarters of an hour, deep into the reed beds, stepping on each other's heels. The first to collapse into the bog was Dr. Pista Kadas; Balazs Csillag stopped above him, wheezing as he kept glancing back. Apart from their uneven breathing there was silence; only the drops of their sweat could be heard as they dripped into the stagnant water. We've had the milk, then, thought Balazs Csillag; but what now?

Two weeping willows marked the line where the bed of the stream must have run before the floodwaters at the end of winter altered the lie of the land. They climbed up the bigger one to dry out. Undressed, they shivered in the cold. Hissing in the freezing air, they slapped themselves and each other with their clothes.

"Let's go on, before they catch up!" said Dr. Pista Kadas.

"Take it easy. In wet clothes we're certain to fall ill, and a long journey lies ahead of us ... if we're lucky."

"Yes, if ...!"

As soon as their stuff dried out a little, they continued on their way. Balazs Csillag clung obstinately to the line of the stream, thinking that this was the best way of ensuring the dogs lost their trail. He had read something of this sort in his childhood in the Karl May stories about Red Indians. He battled on ahead, his boots raising spurts of liquid mud. Behind him, more slowly, came Dr. Pista Kadas. He could not imagine how they could ever, on foot, reach anything worth reaching. He was getting colder and colder, as hunger froze into an icy sponge in his stomach. He begged Balazs Csillag to stop and catch their breath.

"Impossible. If we survive the first day we have a chance. Come on!" He took him by the arm and pulled him along.

This forced march lasted until night fell. Then Balazs Csillag again sought out a suitable willow, whose trunk divided into four main limbs; they climbed up and perched on the thickest limb, propping each other up back to back.

"So far, so good," said Balazs Csillag.

"We shall die of hunger by morning."

"Nonsense!"

"Or freeze to death."

"Nonsense!"

"And we'll have no cares."

"How many times do I have to tell you: we're going to get home!"

Dr. Pista Kadas was no longer able to reply; his teeth were chattering so loud, it was painful to hear. This noise irritated Balazs Csillag, who put his arms around Dr. Pista Kadas and rocked him like a child. The clan's ancestor, Kornel Csillag/Sternovszky, had survived for a long time living like the smaller creatures of the forest in an isolated clearing, even though he was but a child and lacked the use of his injured legs. Even so he managed to learn how to catch fish in the stream.

When dawn broke Balazs Csillag carefully disentangled himself from his still-sleeping companion, adjusted his position on the branch, and then climbed down. There is a stream here, too, wider than the other; surely it will see us through. He could test if the technique still worked some two and a half centuries later. Does man function the same way in the middle of the twentieth century, and do the fish also function likewise, the Russian fish, here in the boggy forest in the back of beyond? He lay flat on his stomach on the bank of the stream, dangled his arm in the ice-cold water, and waited for food to swim by.

He nodded off a little. He awoke to a hissing in the water. Less than a span under his fingers, frozen to insensibility, there fluttered a plump little fish with an opalescent back. Balazs Csillag thought he could see the foolish expression in its eyes: "What are these five red sticks? I have never seen the like!" as it warily approached. Balazs Csillag employed the technique of his ancient kinsman, waiting until the fish touched his skin and then closing his fingers around it with a slowness that was almost imperceptible. Provided he pays enough attention to this manipulation in time, suddenly it will be as if he has the fish in the palm of his hand and there will be nothing left to do but suddenly fling it onto the bank.

He counted silently to three and pounced: but the fish clung to his hand, producing a stabbing pain. Ouch, it's bitten me!-he shook his lower arm but no way could he free himself of its grip. The little dancing-dangling creature-it couldn't have been more than three spans long, it had looked bigger in the water-would not let go until he picked up a stone with his left hand and beat it into shreds. His index finger was left a bloody mass of flesh. He bound it up with a rag and watched in growing disbelief as the throbbing increased. Even the fish are thirsty for blood these days, he thought.

After this injury his index finger was never again to be straight and would always be awkward to use. But this did not bother him at the time. He experimented further, hunting for other types of fish. He came back to Dr. Pista Kadas clutching a dozen or so. They crunched them, raw, competing at spitting out the bones.

They spent two days hiding in the bog, moving west as they had intended. On several occasions, however, Dr. Pista Kadas became convinced that they were going round in circles. "We've been here before!"

"Impossible."

"But I remember this rotting tree!"

Balazs Csillag became uncertain. He tried to orient himself by the rising and the setting of the sun, and the mossy side of the tree-trunks-at school they were told that north was that way. But still ... they needed a map. Sooner or later they had to leave this boggy forest. Without the help of the locals, they stood no chance of survival. He tried to work out how far away they were from Pecs. He knew how many versts the Russian part of the distance was, and on this scale those sixty-seven meters extra per kilometer could be ignored. Even just saying it was appalling: some one thousand four hundred (that is: ONE THOUSAND FOUR HUNDRED) kilometers separated them from their birthplace.

Before he was called up, he and a couple of friends had walked to Budapest for a bet: it took six days; at night they asked if they could stay in barns and stables. On this basis, their tramp home would take about a month and a half, always assuming they did not have to break the journey, and further assuming that they were not caught by the Russians. Or the Germans. Or the Hungarian Military Police. Sooner or later they would have to cross the front line.

They were fighting their way through scrubland, the thorny branches tore at their skin. They lost track of the stream. They reached the trail that crossed the scrubland bleeding from a number of wounds. Fresh wheel tracks in the mud indicated that carts plied their way through here, and that meant there must be a settlement hidden somewhere nearby in the hills. Dr. Pista Kadas had a lucky coin that they tossed to decide which way to go. The track took whimsical turns to the left and right. Soon they reached a wooden hut with black smoke rising from its chimney towards the steel-gray sky. A chained wolfhound noticed them and began to bark loudly. They flattened themselves on the ground, just watching for a considerable while.

From behind the house there emerged a squat shape they at first took to be a man, but which turned out to be an old woman in a fur hat. She told the dog to stop that row, but the dog continued to bark away. The old woman threw him something and the dog jumped up and clamped the item in its jaws, gnawing and then swallowing it with much growling and snarling. It made Balazs Csillag and Dr. Pista Kadas salivate. They began to inch their way towards the house, slithering along the ground with great care. But the beast kept barking at them, though he could not even have seen them. The old woman again gave it a piece of her mind and a piece of something more solid, and when they heard the jawbone crack hard, a shiver ran down Dr. Pista Kadas's back.

"Steady," whispered Balazs Csillag.

And that was when the old woman noticed them. She stared in their direction and then went back indoors.

"Let's get out of here!" said Balazs Csillag. Dr. Pista Kadas shook his head in resignation; he felt he could not stand up.

By then the old woman had popped up again. She brought steaming hot food in a wooden bowl and left it on the snow-covered grass. The dog detected the smell, but his chain did not stretch that far and his eyes swam in blood as he threw himself around and whined. Balazs Csillag straightened up and ran for the food. He wanted to thank the old woman, but she had gone indoors again. The bowl contained potato soup, with two dark-brown Russian rolls on the side. Not having a spoon, they used the crust of the rolls to measure the food into their mouths. It was, they thought, a feast fit for a prince. After so long on almost empty stomachs, they were a little unwell after they had had their fill.

In the course of their seemingly endless wanderings they received food any number of times in this manner. It was as if the old women of Russia were hoping that this would ensure that their sons and grandsons, ordered to fight so far from home, would also be fed like this in other lands. Balazs Csillag reminded himself a thousand times, and Dr. Pista Kadas a hundred thousand times, that such experiences should not make them lower their guard. They were in an enemy empire, where they were prey to at least four sets of uniforms. To make real progress they continued to consider the dark of night safer. Since they had no map, they walked for a long time northwards instead of west, almost as far as Kursk. They had difficulty crossing the rivers Sosna and Tuskar; at the former they built a simple raft, while the latter, where they were disturbed as they were slipping the mooring rope of a boat, they decided to swim across.

From the shoulder bag of a dead German they liberated a map, a compass, binoculars, and a quantity of marks and rubles, so they were now able to buy themselves bread and salt fish on the way. Using the map they could plan their route more accurately: Glukhov, Konotop, Nyezhin. They were on the Ukrainian slopes. They had to cross two more wide rivers before reaching the vicinity of Kiev. Here they spent a few days in an abandoned granary, where the former owner had left two dogs on chains; both had starved to death.

Then they set off towards the southwest. For days they were battered by icy sleet. One night Dr. Pista Kadas felt unwell and voided all of his contents through every orifice. Balazs Csillag suspected that his friend was beyond saving; here exanthematic typhoid was untreatable.

They hitched a ride on a cart. Balazs Csillag feared that the peasant with the deeply lined face would realize what state his friend was in, whip up his horse in terror, and leave them standing. The elderly Ukrainian was, however, made of sterner stuff. He helped to lay Dr. Pista Kadas, who was now delirious and babbling continuously, on an improvised stretcher. He was imploring his mother not to beat him on account of the Chinese vase.

Balazs Csillag sat up on the driver's seat. The Ukrainian peasant could manage a little Russian and complained that times were hard and that everything had been destroyed by the Nemetska. Balazs Csillag thought this was the local term for the Germans but it turned out to be the name of the river. "All three villages," the Ukrainian explained, "are waist-deep in water, the foundations of the houses are being washed away; they will slide down the hill and we shall all be made homeless." Then he asked where the two of them were from. Balazs Csillag explained as best he could with the vocabulary at his disposal. Every time he mentioned their word for Jew, "Yevrei," a flash of fear lit up the peasant's eyes. Balazs Csillag did not take any notice; he thought the man would say if their company was proving burdensome. At the end of his story, they were silent for a while, then the Ukrainian mumbled: "Nye kharasho."

"Da," nodded Balazs Csillag in agreement.

The peasant offered him some Mahorka tobacco. He had five sons, he said, three at the front, one already in the ground, having fallen at Volokalamsk, and one buried by the chimneystack-he had been born limbless.

"A blessing not to die here," said Balazs Csillag.

"Da," agreed the Ukrainian.

He then came up with the suggestion that his friend should perhaps be taken to Doroshich as soon as possible ... The kolkhoz village of Doroshich lies west of Kiev, near Zhitomir; there the authorities had set up a temporary typhoid hospital where the unfortunate victims were being sent from all over the Ukraine-there was an epidemic. They say no papers of any kind are asked for.

"Are you not afraid you will catch it from him?" asked Balazs Csillag.