"More than anything," Andras said. "You must know that."

"Eighteen years!" she said in a half whisper, and then fell silent, overcome.

A few moments later the car let them out at the base of Andrassy ut, and Andras put a hand on Mrs. Hasz's elbow as they hurried through the streets. Her hair loosened from its knot as she went, and her hastily tied scarf fell from her neck; Andras caught the square of violet silk in his fingertips as they entered the narrow lobby of the hotel. At the foot of the cast-iron stair a wordless trepidation seemed to take Klara's mother. She climbed the steps with a slow and deliberate tread, as though she needed time to rehearse in her mind a few of her thousand imaginings of this moment. When Andras indicated that they'd reached the correct floor, she followed him down the hall without a word and watched gravely as he took the key from his pocket. He unlocked the door and pushed it open. There was Klara at the window in her fawn-colored dress, midmorning light falling across her face, a handkerchief crushed in her hand. Her mother approached like a somnambulist; she went to the window, took Klara's hands, touched her face, pronounced her name. Klara, trembling, laid her head on her mother's shoulder and wept. And there they stood in shuddering silence as Andras watched. Here was the reverse of what he'd witnessed a few weeks earlier at Elisabet's embarkation: a vanished child returned, the intangible made real. He knew the reunion was taking place on the shabby top floor of a cramped hotel room on an unlovely street in Budapest, but he felt he was witnessing a kind of unearthly reconnection, a conjunction so stunning he had to turn away. Here was the closing of the distance between Klara's past life and her present; it seemed not unthinkable that he and she might enter a new life together now. At that time his difficulties at the Budapest visa office had not yet begun. The French border was still open. All seemed possible.

Now, four weeks later, what he had learned for certain was that he wouldn't return to Paris as they'd hoped. Worse than that: He'd soon be sent far away from Klara, into a distant and unknown forest. When he arrived at Benczur utca that afternoon with the news he'd just delivered to his brother--that he was to be deployed to Carpatho-Ruthenia in three weeks' time--he found to his relief that no one was awaiting him besides Klara herself. She'd asked to have tea served in her favorite upstairs room, a pretty boudoir with a window seat that faced the garden. When she was a child, she told Andras, this was where she had come when she wanted to be alone. She called it the Rabbit Room because of the beautiful Durer engraving that hung above the mantel: a young hare posed in half profile, its soft-furred haunches bunched, its ears rotated back. She'd lit a fire in the grate and requested pastries for their tea. But once he told her what he'd learned at the battalion office, they could only sit in silence and stare at the plate of walnut and poppyseed strudel.

"You've got to get home as soon as the French border opens again," he said, finally. "It terrifies me to think of the danger you're in."

"Paris won't be safer," she said. "It could be bombed at any time."

"You could go to the countryside with Mrs. Apfel. You could go to Nice."

She shook her head. "I won't leave you here. We're going to be married."

"But it's madness to stay," he said. "Sooner or later they'll learn who you are."

"There's nothing for me in Paris now. Elisabet's gone. You're here. And my mother, and Gyorgy. I can't go back, Andras."

"What about your friends, your students, the rest of your life?"

She shook her head. "France is at war. My students are gone to the countryside.

I'd have to close the school in any case, at least for a time. Perhaps the war will be a short one. With any luck it'll be over before you finish your military service. Then you'll get another visa and we'll go home together."

"And all that time you'll stay here, in peril?"

"I'll live quietly under your surname. No one will have reason to come looking for me. I'll rent the apartment and studio in Paris and take a little place in the Jewish Quarter here. Maybe I'll teach a few private students."

He sighed and rubbed his face with both hands. "This will be the death of me," he said. "Thinking of you living in Budapest, outside the law."

"I was living outside the law in Paris."

"But the law was so much farther away!"

"I won't leave you here in Hungary," she said. "That's all."

He had never dared to imagine that he and Klara might be married at the Dohany Street Synagogue, nor that his parents and Matyas might be there to witness it; he had certainly never dreamed that Klara's family might be there, too--her mother, who had shed her widow's garb for a column of rose-colored silk, weeping with joy; the younger Mrs. Hasz tight-lipped and erect in a drooping Vionnet gown; Klara's brother, Gyorgy, his affection for Klara having overcome whatever reservations he might have had about Andras, striding about with as much bluster and anxiety as if he were the bride's father; and Jozsef Hasz, watching the proceedings with silent detachment. Their wedding canopy was Lucky Bela's prayer shawl, and Klara's wedding ring the simple gold band that had belonged to Bela's mother. They were married on an October afternoon in the synagogue courtyard. A grand ceremony in the sanctuary was out of the question. There could be nothing public about their union except the paperwork that would place the bride's name at a still-farther remove from the Klara Hasz she had once been. She couldn't become a citizen, thanks to a new anti-Jewish law that had been passed in May, but she could still legally change her surname to Andras's, and apply for a residence permit under that veil.

Andras's father himself read the marriage contract aloud, his rabbinical-school training in Aramaic having prepared him for the role. And Andras's mother, shy before the few assembled guests, presented the glass to be broken under Andras's foot.

What no one mentioned--not during the wedding itself, nor during the luncheon at Benczur utca that followed--was Andras's imminent departure for Carpatho-Ruthenia.

But the awareness of it ran underneath every event of the day like an elegy. Jozsef, it turned out, had been saved from a similar fate; the Hasz family had managed to secure his exemption from labor service by bribing a government official. The exemption had come at a price proportionate to the Haszes' wealth: They had been forced to give the government official their chalet on Lake Balaton, where Klara had spent her childhood summers. Jozsef's student visa had been renewed and he would return to France as soon as the borders opened, though no one knew when that might be, nor whether France would admit citizens of countries allied with Germany. Andras's parents were in no position to buy him an exemption. The lumberyard barely supplied their existence. Klara had suggested that her brother might help, but Andras refused to discuss the possibility.

There was the danger, first of all, of alerting the government authorities to the link between Andras and the Hasz family; nor did Andras want to be a financial burden to Gyorgy. In desperation, Klara suggested selling her apartment and studio in Paris, but Andras wouldn't let her consider that either. The apartment on the rue de Sevigne was her home. If her situation in Hungary became more precarious, she would have to return there at once by whatever means possible. And there was a less practical element to the decision too: As long as Klara owned the apartment and studio, they could imagine themselves back in Paris someday. Andras would endure his two years in the work service; by then, as Klara had said, the war might be over, and they could return to France.

For a few sweet hours, during the wedding festivities on Benczur utca, Andras found it possible almost to forget about his impending departure. In a large gallery that had been cleared of furniture, he was lifted on a chair beside his new bride while a pair of musicians played Gypsy music. Afterward, he and Matyas and their father danced together, holding each other by the arms and spinning until they stumbled. Jozsef Hasz, who could not resist the role of host even at a wedding of which he seemed to disapprove, kept everyone's champagne glasses full. And Matyas, in the tradition of making the bride and groom laugh, performed a Chaplinesque tap dance that involved a collapsing cane and a top hat that kept leaping away. Klara cried with laughter. Her pale forehead had flushed pink, and dark curls sprang from her chignon. But it was impossible for Andras to forget entirely that all of this was fleeting, that soon he would have to kiss his new bride goodbye and board a train for Carpatho-Ruthenia. Nor would his joy have been uncomplicated in any case. He couldn't ignore the younger Mrs. Hasz's coldness, nor the reminders on all sides of how different Klara's early life had been from his own. His mother, elegant as she was in her gray gown, seemed afraid to handle the delicate Hasz champagne flutes; his father had little to say to Klara's brother, and even less to say to Jozsef. If Tibor had been there, Andras thought, he might have found a way to bridge the divide. But Tibor was absent, of course, as were three others, the lack of whom made the day's events seem somehow unreal: Polaner and Rosen, who had nonetheless sent telegrams of congratulations, and Ben Yakov, from whom there had been continued silence. He knew Klara was experiencing her own private pain in the midst of her happiness: She must have been thinking of her father, and of Elisabet, thousands of miles away.

The war was discussed, and Hungary's possible role in it. Now that Poland had fallen, Gyorgy Hasz said, England and France might pressure Germany into a cease-fire before Hungary could be forced to come to the aid of its ally. It seemed to Andras a farfetched idea, but the day demanded an optimistic view. It was mid-October, one of the last warm afternoons of the year. The plane trees were filled with slanting light, and a gold haze pooled in the garden like a flood of honey. As the sun slipped toward the edge of the garden wall, Klara took Andras's hand and led him outside. She brought him to a corner of the garden behind a privet hedge, where a marble bench stood beneath a fall of ivy. He sat down and took her onto his lap. The skin of her neck was warm and damp, the scent of roses mingled with the faint mineral tang of her sweat. She inclined her face to his, and when he kissed her she tasted of wedding cake.

That was the moment that came back to him again and again, those nights in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains. That moment, and the ones that came afterward in their suite at the Gellert Hotel. Their honeymoon had been a brief one: three days, that was all. Now it sustained him like bread: the moment they'd registered at the hotel as husband and wife; the look of relief she'd given him when they were alone in the room together at last; her surprising shyness in their bridal bed; the curve of her naked back in the tangled sheets when they woke in the morning; the wedding ring a surprising new weight on his hand. It seemed an incongruous luxury to wear the ring now as he worked, not just because of the contrast of the gold with the dirt and grayness of everything around him, but because it seemed part of their intimacy, sweetly private. Ani l'dodi Ani l'dodi v'dodi li, she had said in Hebrew when she'd given it to him, a line from the Song of Songs: I am my beloved's and my beloved is mine I am my beloved's and my beloved is mine. He was hers and she was his, even here in Carpatho-Ruthenia.

He and his workmates lived on an abandoned farm in an abandoned hamlet near a stone quarry that had long since given up all the granite anyone cared to take from it. He didn't know how long ago the farm had been deserted by its inhabitants; the barn held only the faintest ghost odor of animals. Fifty men slept in the barn, twenty in a converted chicken house, thirty in the stables, and fifty more in a newly constructed barracks. The platoon captains and the company commander and the doctor and the work foremen slept in the farmhouse, where they had real beds and indoor plumbing. In the barn, each man had a metal cot and a bare mattress stuffed with hay. At the foot of each cot was a wooden kit box stamped with its owner's identification number. The food was meager but steady: coffee and bread in the morning, potato soup or beans at noon, more soup and more bread at night. They had clothing enough to keep them warm: overcoats and winter uniforms, woolen underthings, woolen socks, stiff black boots. Their overcoats, shirts, and trousers were nearly identical to the uniforms worn by the rest of the Hungarian Army. The only difference was the green M M sewn onto their lapels, for Munkaszolgalat, sewn onto their lapels, for Munkaszolgalat, the labor service. No one ever said Munkaszolgalat Munkaszolgalat, though; they called it Musz Musz, a single resentful syllable. In the Musz, his company-mates told him, you were just like any other member of the military; the difference was that your life was worth even less less than shit. In than shit. In the Musz, they said, you got paid the same as any other enlisted man: just enough for your family to starve on. The Musz wasn't bent on killing you, just on using you until you wanted to kill yourself. And of course there was the other difference: Everyone in his labor-service company was Jewish. The Hungarian Ministry of Defense considered it dangerous to let Jews bear arms. The military classified them as unreliable, and sent them to cut trees, to build roads and bridges, to erect army barracks for the troops who would be stationed in Ruthenia.

There were privileges Andras hadn't foreseen. Because he was married, he received extra pay and a housing-assistance stipend. He had a pay book stamped with the Hungarian royal seal; he was paid twice a month in government checks. He could send and receive letters and packages, though everything was subject to inspection. And because he had his baccalaureate, he was given the status of labor-service officer. He was the leader of his squad of twenty men. He had an officer's cap and a double-chevron badge on his pocket, and the other members of the squad had to salute and call him sir.

He had to take roll and organize the night watch. His twenty men had to address their special requests or problems to him; he would adjudicate in cases of disagreement. Twice a week he had to report to the company commander on the status of his squad.

The 112/30th had been sent to clear a swath of forest where a road would be built in the spring. In the morning they rose in the dark and washed in snowmelt water; they dressed and shoved their feet into cold-hardened boots. In the dim red glow of the woodstove they drank bitter coffee and ate their ration of bread. There were morning calisthenics: push-ups, side bends, squat jumps. Then, at the sergeant's command, they formed a marching block in the courtyard, their axes slung over their shoulders like rifles, and struck out through the dark toward the work site.

The one miracle afforded to Andras in that place was the identity of his work partner. It was none other than Mendel Horovitz, who had spent six years at school with Andras in Debrecen, and who had broken the Hungarian record in the hundred-meter dash and the long jump in the 1936 Olympic trials. For all of ten minutes, Mendel had been a member of the Hungarian Olympic Team--after his final jump, someone had draped an official jacket around his shoulders and had led him to a registration table, where the team secretary was recording the personal information of all the athletes who had qualified. But the third question, after name name and and city of origin city of origin, had been religion religion, and that was where Mendel had failed. He had known in advance, of course, that Jews weren't allowed to participate; he'd gone to the trials as a form of protest, and in the wild hope that they might make an exception for him. They hadn't, of course, a decision the team officials later came to regret: Mendel's hundred-meter record was a tenth of a second shy of Jesse Owens's gold-medal time.

When Mendel and Andras first saw each other at the Labor Service rail yard in Budapest, there was so much back-slapping and exclamation that they had each begun their time in the Munkaszolgalat with a comportment demerit. Mendel had a craggy face and a wry V V of a mouth and eyebrows like the feathery antennae of moths. He'd been of a mouth and eyebrows like the feathery antennae of moths. He'd been born in Zalaszabar and educated at the Debrecen Gimnazium at the expense of a maternal uncle who insisted that his protege train for a future as a mathematician. But Mendel had no inclination toward mathematic abstraction; nor did he aspire to a career in athletics, despite his talents. What he wanted was to be a journalist. After the Olympic team disappointment, he'd gotten a copyediting job at the evening paper, the Budapest Esti Budapest Esti Kurir. Soon he'd started penning his own columns, satirical journalistic petits-fours which he slipped into the editor's mailbox under a pen name and which occasionally saw print.

He'd been working at the Esti Kurir Esti Kurir for a year before he was conscripted, having survived for a year before he was conscripted, having survived a round of firings that followed the new six percent quota on Jewish members of the press. Andras found him remarkably sanguine about having been shipped off to Subcarpathia. He liked being in the mountains, he said, liked being outside and working with his hands. He didn't even mind the relentless labor of woodcutting.

Andras might not have minded it himself had the tools been sharp and the food more plentiful, the season warm and the job a matter of choice. For every tree they cut at the vast work site in the forest, there was a kind of satisfying ritual. Mendel would make the first notch with the axe, and Andras would fit the crosscut saw into the groove. Then they would both take their handles and lean into the work. There was a sweet-smelling spray of sawdust as they breached the outer rings, and more friction as the blade of the saw sank into the bole. They had to shove thin steel wedges into the gap to keep it open; near the center, where the wood grew denser, the blade would start to shriek. Sometimes it took half an hour to get through thirty centimeters of core. Then there was the doubletime march to the other side, the completion of the struggle. When they had a few centimeters to go, they inserted more wedges and withdrew the saw. Mendel would shout All clear! and give the tree a shove. Next came a series of creaking groans, momentum and give the tree a shove. Next came a series of creaking groans, momentum traveling the length of the trunk, the upper branches shouldering past their neighbors.

That was the true death of the tree, Andras thought, the instant it ceased to be an upwardreaching thing, the moment it became what they were making it: timber timber. The falling tree would push a great rush of wind before it; the branches cut the air with a hundred-toned whistle as the tree arced to the ground. When the trunk hit, the forest floor thrummed with the incredible weight of it, a shock that traveled through the soles of Andras's boots and up through his bones to the top of his head, where it ricocheted in his skull like a gunshot. A reverberant moment followed, the silent Kaddish of the tree. And into that emptiness would rush the foreman's shouted commands: All right, men! Go! Keep All right, men! Go! Keep moving! The branches had to be chopped for firewood, the bare trunks dragged to The branches had to be chopped for firewood, the bare trunks dragged to massive flatbed trucks for transportation to a railway station, from which they would be sent to mainland Hungary.

He and Mendel made a good team. They were among the fastest of their workmates, and had earned the foreman's praise. But there could be little satisfaction in any of it under the circumstances. He had been lifted out of his life, separated not just from Klara but from everything else that had mattered to him for the past two years. In October, while he was supposed to have been consulting with Le Corbusier over plans for a sports club in India, he was felling trees. In November, when he should have been constructing projects for the third-year exhibition, he was felling trees. And in December, when he would have been taking his midyear exams, he was felling trees. The war, he knew, would have disrupted the academic year temporarily, but it would likely have resumed by now; Polaner and Rosen and Ben Yakov--and worse, those sneering men who had taunted him after the Prix du Amphitheatre--would be sailing on toward their degrees, translating imagined buildings into sharp black lines on drafting paper. His friends would still be meeting nightly at the Blue Dove for drinks, living in the Quartier Latin, carrying on their lives.

Or so he imagined, until Klara sent a packet of letters that contained missives from Paris. Polaner, Andras learned, had joined the Foreign Legion. If only you could If only you could have enlisted with me, he wrote. I'm training at the Ecole Militaire now. This week I I'm training at the Ecole Militaire now. This week I learned to shoot a rifle. For the first time in my life I have a burning desire to operate firearms. The newspapers carry frequent reports of horrors: SS Einsatzgruppen rounding up professors, artists, boy scouts, executing them in town squares. Polish Jews being loaded onto trains and relocated to miserable swamplands around Lublin. My parents are still in Krakow for now, though Father has lost his factory. I'll fight the Reich and die if I have to.

Rosen, it had turned out, was planning to emigrate to Palestine with Shalhevet.

The city's dead boring without you, he'd scrawled in his loose script. Also, I find I've no Also, I find I've no patience for my studies. With Europe at war, school seems futile. But I won't throw myself in front of tanks like Polaner. I'd rather stay alive and work. Shalhevet thinks we can set up a charitable foundation to get Jews out of Europe. Find wealthy Americans to fund it.

She's a bright girl. Perhaps she'll make it happen. If all goes well, we leave in May. From now on I'm going to write to you only in Hebrew.

Ben Yakov, mentally exhausted by the events of the previous year, had taken a leave of absence from school and decamped to his parents' home in Rouen. The news came not from him but from Rosen, who predicted that Ben Yakov would soon try to contact Andras himself. Sure enough, enclosed in the same packet of letters was a telegram sent to Klara's address in Budapest: ANDRAS: N O HARD FEELINGS BETWEEN US. D ESPITE ALL, EVER YOUR FRIEND. G OD KEEP YOU SAFE. B.

EN Y AKOV.

Klara herself wrote weekly. Her official residence permit had arrived without event; as far as the government was concerned she was Claire Levi, the French-born wife of a Hungarian labor serviceman. She had rented her apartment on the rue de Sevigne to a Polish composer who had fled to Paris; the composer knew a ballet teacher who would be glad to have a new studio, so the practice space was rented too. Klara was living now in an apartment on Kiraly utca and had found a studio, as she'd hoped. She had taken on a few private students, and might soon begin to teach small classes. She was living a life of quiet seclusion, seeing her mother daily, walking in the park with her brother on Sunday afternoons; they had gone together to visit the grave of her teacher Viktor Romankov, who had died of a stroke after twenty years of teaching at the Royal Ballet School.

Budapest was cobwebbed with memories, she wrote. Sometimes she forgot entirely that she was a grown woman; she would find herself wandering toward the house on Benczur utca, expecting to find her father still alive, her brother a tall young gimnazium student, her girlhood room intact. At times she was melancholy, and most of all she missed Andras. But he must not fear for her. She was well. All seemed safe.

He worried still, of course, but it was a comfort to hear from her--to hear at least that she felt safe, or safe enough to tell him so. He always kept her most recent letter in his overcoat pocket. When a new one came, he would move the old one to his kit box and add it to the sheaf he kept tied with her green hair-ribbon. He had their wedding photograph in a marbled folder from Pomeranz and Sons. He counted the days before his furlough, counted and counted, through what seemed the longest winter of his life.

In spring the forest filled with the scent of black earth and the dawn-to-dusk cacophony of birdsong. Overnight, new curtains appeared in the windows of the empty houses along the way to the work site. There were children in the fields, bicyclists on the roads, the smell of grilled sausage from the roadside inns. The promised furlough had been postponed until the end of summer; there was too much work, their commander told them, to allow any of their company a break. Thank God the winter's over Thank God the winter's over, his mother wrote. Every day I worried. My Andraska in those mountains, in that terrible cold. I know Every day I worried. My Andraska in those mountains, in that terrible cold. I know you are strong, but a mother imagines the worst. Now I can imagine something better: You are warm, your work is easier, and before long you will be home. In the same circlet of foothills where Andras and his workmates had suffered endless months of labor, Hungarians now gathered to take the air and eat berries with fresh cream and swim in the freezing lakes. But for the labor servicemen, the work went on. Now that the ground had thawed and softened, now that the trees in the path of the road had been cleared, Labor Company 112/30 had to uproot the giant stumps so the roadbed might be leveled, the gravel spread for the road. The summer months appeared on the horizon with their promise of hot days amid asphalt and tar. The solstice came and went. It seemed nothing would ever change. Then, in early July, another packet of letters came from Klara, and with it news of Tibor and of France.

Tibor and Ilana had been married in May, after a long engagement and a period of reconciliation with her parents. A certain Rabbi di Samuele had interceded on behalf of the couple. He had proved such a good intermediary that Ilana's mother and father had at last invited Tibor to Shabbos dinner. Even so Even so, Tibor wrote, I thought her father would I thought her father would punch me in the eye. I was the villain, you see, not Ben Yakov; I was the man who had accompanied their daughter on the train. Every time I ventured a comment on a point of biblical interpretation, her father laughed as if my ignorance delighted him. Ilana's mother deliberately neglected to pass me food. Halfway through the meal, the Holy One made a risky intervention: Ilana's father fell out of his chair, half dead of a heart attack. I kept him alive with chest compressions until a real doctor was called in. In the end he survived; I was the hero of the evening; Signor and Signora di Sabato changed their views. Ilana and I were married within the month. We returned to Hungary when my visa expired and have been living here in Budapest, not far from your own lovely bride, doing what we can to keep her company and to get my papers in order for a return to Italy. I have brought my Ilana to meet Anya and Apa. They loved her, she loved them, and our father became tipsy and encouraged us at the end of the evening to go make grandchildren. As for our younger brother, he continues to run wild. This month he makes his debut at the Pineapple Club, where people will pay good money to see him tap- dance atop a white piano. Somehow he has also managed to pass his baccalaureate exams. He is still arranging shop windows and has more clients than he can serve. His girlfriend, however, has deserted him for a scoundrel. He sends his regards and the enclosed photo. The photo showed Matyas in top hat, white tie, and tails, a cane in his hand, one foot cocked over the other to flash a glint of tap metal at the sole.

My thoughts are with you always, Tibor wrote. I hope you will never have use for I hope you will never have use for the medical supplies I'm sending with this letter, but just in case, I have made an attempt to assemble a field hospital in miniature. Meanwhile I remain, in continual fear for your safety and belief in your fortitude, your loving brother, TIBOR.

The next letter was from Matyas, dated May 29 and written in an angry scrawl.

I've been called up, he informed Andras. The stinking bastards. They'll never make me The stinking bastards. They'll never make me work for them. Horthy says he will protect the Jews. Liar! My gimnazium friend Gyula Kohn died in the labor service last month. He had a pain in his side and a fever but they sent him to work anyway. It was appendicitis. He died three days later. He was my age, nineteen.

The final letter was from Klara herself, with a newspaper clipping that showed the German Eighteenth Army marching through the streets of Paris, and an enormous Nazi flag hanging from the Hotel de Ville. Andras sat on his cot and stared at the photographs.

He thought of his first brief passage through Germany what seemed a geologic age ago-his stopover in Stuttgart, when he'd tried to buy bread at a bakery that did not serve Jews.

That was where he'd seen the red flag hanging from the facade of the train station, a blast of National Socialist fervor five stories high. He refused to believe what the attached article told him: that the same flag now flew from every official building in Paris; that Paul Reynaud, successor to Daladier, had resigned; that the new premier, Philippe Petain, had declared that France would collaborate with Hitler in the formation of a New Europe.

Even Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite had been replaced with a new slogan: had been replaced with a new slogan: Travail, Famille, Travail, Famille, Patrie. There was a rumor that all Jews who had volunteered for the French Army would be removed from their battalions and imprisoned in concentration camps, from which they would be deported to the East.

Polaner. He said it aloud into the damp hay-smelling air of the bunk. His eyes burned. Here he was, thousands of miles away, and helpless; there was nothing he could do, nothing anyone could do. Already Hitler had what he wanted of Poland. He had Luxembourg and Belgium and the Netherlands, he had Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, he had Italy as a member of the Tripartite Pact; he had Hungary as an ally, and now he had France. He would win the war, and what would happen to the Jews of the conquered nations? Would he force them to emigrate, deport them to marshlands at the center of ravaged Poland? It was impossible to conceive of what might happen.

He went out into the moonlit yard to read Klara's letter. It was a humid night; a mist hovered in the assembly field, where the grass had grown shaggy with the June rains. The soldier stationed beside the barn door tipped his hat at Andras. They were all familiar with each other by now, and no one really thought anyone would try to desert.

There was nowhere to go, here in Carpatho-Ruthenia. They would all be granted their first furlough soon, in any case--free transport to Budapest. Andras chose one of the large stones at the edge of the assembly field, where the moonlight came in strong and white through a few crumpled handkerchiefs of cloud. My dear Andraska, My dear Andraska, France has fallen. I can scarcely believe the words as I write them. It is a tragedy, a horror. The world has lost its mind. Mrs. Apfel writes that all of Paris has fled to the south. I am fortunate indeed to be here in Hungary now, rather than in France under the Nazi flag. I was grateful for your letter of May 15. What a vast relief to know you're well I was grateful for your letter of May 15. What a vast relief to know you're well and have gotten through the winter. Now it is only a few months before you'll be here. In the meantime, know that I am well--or as well as I can be without you. I have twenty-five students now. All of them talented children, all Jewish. What will become of them, Andras? I do not speak of my fears, of course; we practice and they improve. Mother is Mother is well. Gyorgy and Elza are well. Jozsef is well. Your brothers are well. We are all well!

That is what one must write in letters. But you know how we are, my love. We are full of apprehension. Our lives are shadowed by uncertainty. You are always in my thoughts: That, at least, is certain. The days cannot pass fast enough until I see you. With love, With love, Your K

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN.

The Snow Goose ALL SUMMER he sustained himself with the thought that he'd soon be with her-close enough to touch and smell and taste her, at liberty to lie in bed with her all day if he wanted, to tell her everything that had happened during the long months of his absence, and to hear what had been in her mind while he'd been away. He thought of seeing his mother and father, of taking her to their house in Konyar for the first time, of strolling with his parents and his wife through the apple orchards and into the flat grasslands. He thought, too, of seeing Tibor, who hadn't managed to get his student visa renewed after all, and was now stranded in Hungary with Ilana. But in August, when Andras's postponed furlough was due, Germany gave Hungary the gift of Northern Transylvania.

The Carpathians, that white ridge of granite between the civilized West and the wild East, Europe's natural barrier against its vast Communist neighbor: Horthy wanted it, even at the price of a deeper friendship with Germany; Hitler delivered it, and soon afterward the friendship was formalized by Hungary's entry into the Tripartite Pact. The 112/30th, having completed its road-building assignment in Subcarpathia ahead of schedule, was shipped off by railway car to Transylvania. There, in the virgin forest between Marmaros-Sziget and Borsa, the company embarked on a tree-clearing and ditch-digging project that was supposed to last through the rest of fall and winter.

When the weather began to grow cold again, it occurred to him that it had been a year, a year a year, since he'd seen Klara. Of their married life they'd spent a week together.

Every night in the barracks, men lay weeping or cursing over the loss of their girlfriends, their fiancees, their wives, women who had loved them but who'd grown tired of waiting.

What assurance did he have that Klara wouldn't tire of her solitude? She had always surrounded herself with people; her social circle in Paris had consisted of actors and dancers, writers and composers, people who offered her unstinting stimulation. What would keep her from making ties like that in Budapest? And once she did, what would prevent her from turning toward one of her new friends for more tangible comfort? The specter of Zoltan Novak appeared to Andras one night in a dream, walking barefoot through Wesselenyi utca in his smoking jacket, toward the Dohany Street Synagogue, where a woman who might have been Klara was waiting for him in the gloomy courtyard. Surely, Novak would have heard that she'd returned; surely he would try to see her. Perhaps he already had. Perhaps she was with him that moment, in some room he'd taken for their assignations.

At times Andras felt as though the work service were causing his mind to float away, piece by piece, like ashes from a fire. What would be left of him, he wondered, once he returned to Budapest? For months he'd struggled to keep his mind sharp as he worked, tried to design buildings and bridges on the slate of his brain when he couldn't draw them on paper, tried to sing himself the French names of architectural features to keep himself awake as he slung mud with his shovel or hacked branches with his axe.

Porte, fenetre, corniche, balcon, a magic spell against mental deterioration. Now, as the prospect of a furlough slipped farther into the distance, his thoughts became a source of torment. He imagined Klara with Novak or with her memories of Sandor Goldstein; he thought about the grim progress of the war, which had gone on now for more than a year.

In a series of newspaper clippings that his father sent, he read about the brutal bombardment of London, the attack by Luftwaffe planes every night for fifty-seven nights. And as the war burned on in England, he and his workmates fought a smaller war against the ravages of the Munkaszolgalat. Gradually, man by man, the 112/30th was crumbling: One man broke a leg and had to be sent home, another had a diabetic seizure and died, a third shot himself with an officer's gun after learning that his fiancee had given birth to another man's child. Matyas was in the labor service now, and Tibor had just been called. Andras had heard stories of labor-service companies being sent to clear minefields in Ukraine. He imagined Matyas in a field at dawn, making his way through a fog; in his hand a stick, a broken branch, with which to prod the ground in search of mines.

In December, when a string of blizzards scoured the mountains and the workers were often confined to the bunkhouse, Andras fell into a paralyzing depression. Instead of reading or writing letters or drawing in his damp-swollen sketchbook, he lay in bed and nursed the mysterious bruises that had begun to appear beneath his skin. He was supposed to be a leader; nominally he was still squad captain, and he still had to march the men to the assembly field and supervise the cleaning of the barracks and the maintenance of the woodstove and all the small details of their straitened lives; but more and more often he felt as if they were leading him while he trailed behind, his boots filling with snow. He hardly took notice when, one Sunday afternoon during a grinding blizzard, Mendel Horovitz conceived the idea of a Munkaszolgalat newspaper. Mendel scratched away at a series of ideas in a notebook, then borrowed a sheaf of paper and a typewriter from one of the officers so he could make the thing look official. He was not a swift typist; it took him three nights to finish two pages of articles. He typed at all hours.

The men threw boots at him to stop the racket, but his desire to finish the paper exceeded his fear of flying objects. He worked every day for a week, every chance he had.

When at last he'd finished typing, he brought his pages to Andras and sat down on the edge of his cot. Outside, the wind set up a noise like the wailing of foxes. It was the third consecutive day of the worst-yet storm of the season, and the snow had reached the high windows of the bunkhouse. Work had been cancelled that day. While the other men mended their uniforms or smoked damp cigarettes or talked by the stove, Andras lay in bed, staring at the ceiling and pushing at his teeth with his tongue. His back teeth felt frighteningly loose, his gums spongy. Earlier that day he'd had a slow nosebleed that had lasted for hours. He wasn't in the mood to talk. He didn't care what was typed on the pages Mendel held in his hand. He pulled the coarse blanket over his head and turned away.

"All right, Parisi," Mendel said, and pulled the blanket down. "Enough sulking."

Parisi: It was Mendel's nickname for him; he was envious of Andras's time in France, and had wanted to hear about it in detail--particularly about evenings at Jozsef's, and the backstage drama of the Sarah-Bernhardt, and the romantic exploits of Andras's friends.

"Leave me alone," Andras said.

"I can't. I need your help."

Andras sat up in bed. "Look at me," he said, holding out his arms. Clusters of blood-violets bloomed beneath the skin. "I'm sick. I don't know what's wrong with me.

Do I look like a person who can be of help to anyone?"

"You're the squad captain," Mendel said. "It's your duty."

"I don't want to be squad captain anymore."

"I'm afraid that's not up to you, Parisi."

Andras sighed. "What is it, exactly, that you want me to do?"

"I want you to illustrate the newspaper." He dropped his typed pages onto Andras's lap. "Nothing fancy. None of your art-school nonsense. Just some crude drawings. I've left space for you around the articles." He deposited a modest cache of pencils into Andras's hand, some of them colored.

Andras couldn't remember the last time he'd seen colored pencils. These were sharp and clean and unbroken, a small revelation in the smoky dark of the bunkhouse.

"Where did you get these?" he asked.

"Stole them from the office."

Andras pushed himself up onto his elbows. "What do you call that rag of yours?"

"The Snow Goose."

"All right. I'll take a look. Now leave me alone."

In addition to news of the war, The Snow Goose The Snow Goose had weather reports had weather reports (Monday: (Monday: Snow. Tuesday: Snow. Wednesday: Snow.); a fashion column a fashion column (Report from a Fashion (Report from a Fashion Show at Dawn: The dreaming labor workers lined up in handsome suits of coarse blanket, this winter's most stylish fabric. Mangold Bela Kolos, Budapest's premier fashion dictator, predicts that this picturesque style will spread throughout Hungary in no time); a sports page a sports page (The Golden Youth of Transylvania love the sporting life. (The Golden Youth of Transylvania love the sporting life.

Yesterday at 5:00 a.m., the woods were full of youth disporting themselves at today's most popular amusements: wheelbarrow-pushing, snow-shoveling, and tree-felling); an an advice column (Dear Miss Coco: I'm a twenty-year-old woman. Will it hurt my (Dear Miss Coco: I'm a twenty-year-old woman. Will it hurt my reputation if I spend the night in the officers' quarters? Love, Virgin. Dear Virgin: Your question is too general. Please describe your plans in detail so I can give an appropriate reply. Love, Miss Coco); travel ads travel ads (Bored? Want a change of scene? Try our deluxe tour (Bored? Want a change of scene? Try our deluxe tour of rural Ukraine!); and in honor of Andras, an article about a feat of architecture and in honor of Andras, an article about a feat of architecture (Engineering Marvel! Paris-trained architect-engineer Andras Levi has designed an invisible bridge. The materials are remarkably lightweight and it can be constructed in almost no time. It is undetectable by enemy forces. Tests suggest that the design of the bridge may still need some refinement; a battalion of the Hungarian Army mysteriously plunged into a chasm while crossing. Some argue, however, that the bridge has already attained its perfect form). And then there was the piece de resistance, the Ten Commandments a la Munkaszolgalat: IF THOU MAKEST A GRAVE MISTAKE, THOU SHALT NOT TELL. T HOU.

SHALT LET OTHERS TAKE THE BLAME FOR THEE.

THOU SHALT NOT SHARPEN THINE OWN SAW. L EAVE THE.

SHARPENING TO WHOMSOEVER MAY USE IT NEXT.

THOU SHALT NOT BOTHER TO WASH THYSELF. T HY WORKMATES.

STINKETH ANYWAY.

WHEN THOU STANDEST IN LINE FOR LUNCH, THOU SHALT ELBOW.

TO THE FRONT. O THERWISE THOU GETTEST NOT THE SINGLE POTATO IN.