"We were told you could help us," Tibor said.

"Who told you that?"

"A woman with two little girls. Initial B. She heard me talking to my brother at a cafe."

"Talking to your brother about what?"

"About getting out of Hungary," Tibor said. "One way or another."

"First of all," Klein said, pointing a narrow finger at Tibor, "you shouldn't have been talking to your brother about a thing like that at a cafe, where anyone could hear you. Secondly, I should strangle that woman, whoever she is, for giving you my address!

Initial B? Two little girls?" He put his fingers to his forehead and seemed to think.

"Bruner," he said. "Magdolna. It's got to be. I got her brother out. But that was two years ago."

"Is that what you do?" Andras said. "Arrange emigrations?"

"Used to," Klein said. "Not anymore."

"Then what's all this stuff?"

"Ongoing projects," Klein said. "But I'm not accepting new work."

"We've got to leave the country," Tibor said. "I've just been in the Delvidek.

They're killing Hungarian Jews there. It won't be long before they come for us. We understand you can help us get out."

"You don't understand," Klein said. "It's impossible now. Look at this." He understand," Klein said. "It's impossible now. Look at this." He produced a clipping from a Romanian newspaper. "This happened just a few weeks ago.

This ship left Constanta in December. The Struma Struma. Seven hundred and sixty-nine passengers, all Romanian Jews. They were told they'd get Palestinian entry visas once the ship reached Turkey. But the ship was a wreck. Literally. Its engine was salvaged from the bottom of the Danube. And there were no entry visas. It was all a scam. Maybe at one time they'd've gotten in without visas--the British used to allow some paperless immigrations. Not anymore! Britain wouldn't take the boat. They wouldn't take anyone, not even the children. A Turkish coast guard ship towed it into the Black Sea. No fuel, no water, no food for the passengers. Left it there. What do you think happened? It was torpedoed. Boom. End of story. They think it was the Soviets who did it."

Andras and Tibor sat silent, taking it in. Seven hundred and sixty-nine lives--a ship full of Jewish men, women, and children. An explosion in the night--how it must have sounded, how it must have felt from a berth deep inside the ship: the shock and quake of it, the sudden panic. And then the inrush of dark water.

"But what about Magdolna Bruner's brother?" Tibor asked. "How did you get him out?"

"Things were different then," Klein said. "I got people out along the Danube.

Smuggled them out on cargo barges and riverboats. We had contacts in Palestine. We had help from the Palestine Office here. I got a lot of people out, a hundred and sixty-eight of them. If I were smart, I'd have gone, too. But my grandparents were all alone. They couldn't make a trip like that, and I couldn't leave them. I thought I might be of more use here. But I won't do it anymore, so you might as well go home."

"But this a disaster for Palestine, this Struma," Struma," Andras said. "They'll have to Andras said. "They'll have to loosen the immigration restrictions now."

"I don't know what'll happen," Klein said. "They have a new colonial secretary now, a man called Cranborne. He's supposed to be more liberal-minded. But I don't know if he can convince the Foreign Office to relax its quotas. Even if he could, it's far too dangerous now."

"If it's a matter of money, we'll come up with it," Tibor said.

Andras gave his brother a sharp glance. Where did Tibor expect them to get the money? But Tibor wouldn't look at him. He kept his eyes fixed on Klein, who ran his hands through his electrified hair and leaned forward toward them.

"It's not the money," Klein said. "It's just that it's a mad thing to try."

"It might be madder to stay," Tibor said.

"Budapest is still one of the safest places for Jews in Europe," Klein said.

"Budapest lives in the shadow of Berlin."

Klein pushed back his chair and got up to pace his square of floor. "The horrible thing is that I know you're right. We're mad to feel any sense of security here. If you've been in the labor service, you know that well enough. But I can't take the lives of two young men into my hands. Not now."

"It's not just us," Tibor said. "It's our wives, too. And a couple of babies. And our younger brother, once he returns from Ukraine. And our parents in Debrecen. We all need to get out."

"You're crazy!" Klein said. "Plain crazy. I can't smuggle babies down the Danube while the country's at war. I can't be responsible for elderly parents. I refuse to discuss this. I'm sorry. You both seem like good men. Maybe we'll meet in happier times and have a drink together." He went to the door and opened it onto the hallway.

Tibor didn't move. He scanned the stacks of papers, the typewriters, the radio, the dossier-smothered furniture, as if they might offer a different answer. But it was Andras who spoke.

"Shalhevet Rosen," he said. "Have you heard that name?"

"No."

"She's in Palestine, working to get Jews out of Europe. She's the wife of a friend of mine from school."

"Well, maybe she can help you. I wish you luck."

"Maybe you've had some correspondence with her."

"Not that I recall."

"Maybe she can help get us visas."

"A visa means nothing," Klein said. "You've still got to get there."

Tibor glanced around the room again. He gave Klein a penetrating look. "This is what you do," he said. "Do you mean to say you're finished now?"

"I won't send people to another Struma," Struma," Klein said. "You can understand that. Klein said. "You can understand that.

And I have to look out for my grandparents. If I get caught and thrown in jail, they'll be all alone."

Tibor paused at the door, his hat in his hands. "You'll change your mind," he said.

"I hope not."

"Let us leave our address, at least."

"I'm telling you, it's no use. Goodbye, gentlemen. Farewell. Adieu." He ushered them into the dim hallway and retreated into his room, latching the door behind him.

In the main room Andras and Tibor found the breakfast things cleared away and the elder Klein installed on the sofa, newspaper in hand. When he became aware of them standing before him, he lowered the paper and said, "Well?"

"Well," Tibor said. "We'll be going now. Please tell your wife we appreciate her kindness." He raised one of the paper-wrapped rounds of goat cheese.

"One of her best," Klein-the-elder said. "She must have taken a shine to you. She doesn't give those away lightly."

"She gave me two," Tibor said, and smiled.

"Ah! Now you're making me jealous."

"Maybe she can prevail upon your grandson to help us. I'm afraid he turned us away without much hope."

"Miklos is a moody boy," the elder Klein said. "His work is difficult. He changes his mind about it daily. Does he know how to reach you?"

Tibor took a small blunt pencil from his breast pocket and asked Klein's grandfather for a piece of paper, apologizing for the fact that he didn't have a name card.

He wrote his address on the scrap and left it on the breakfast table.

"There it is," Tibor said. "In case he changes his mind."

Klein's grandfather made a noise of assent. From the yard, the raised voices of goats made a pessimistic counterpoint. The wind clattered the shutters against the house, a sound directly from Andras's deepest childhood. He had the feeling of having stepped out of the flow of time--as if he and Tibor, when they passed through the doorway of this house, would reenter a different Budapest altogether, one in which the cars had been replaced by carriages, the electric streetlights by gaslights, the women's knee-length skirts by ankle-length ones, the metro system erased, the news of war expunged from the pages of the Pesti Naplo Pesti Naplo. The twentieth century cut clean away from the tissue of time like an act of divine surgery.

But when they opened the outer door it was all still there: the trucks rumbling along the broad cross-street at the end of the block, the towering smokestacks of the textile plant, the film advertisements plastered along a plywood construction wall. He and his brother walked in silence back toward the streetcar line and caught a near-empty train back toward the city center. It took them down Karpat utca, with its machine-repair shops, then over the bridge behind Nyugati Station, and finally to Andrassy ut, where they got off and headed toward home. But when they reached the corner of Harsfa utca, Tibor turned. Hands in his pockets, he walked the block to the gray stone building where they'd lived before Andras had gone to Paris. On the third floor were their windows, now uncurtained and dark. A row of broken flowerpots stood on the balcony; an empty bird feeder hung from the rail. Tibor looked up at the balcony, the wind lifting his collar.

"Can you blame me?" he said. "Do you understand why I want to get out?"

"I understand," Andras said.

"Think about what I told you at the cafe. That happened here in Hungary. Now think what must be happening in Germany and Poland. You wouldn't believe the things I've heard. People are being starved and crowded to death in ghettoes. People are being shot by the thousands. Horthy can't hold it off forever. And the Allies don't care about the Jews, not enough to make a difference on the ground. We have to take care of ourselves."

"But what's the use, if we die doing it?"

"If we have visas, we'll have some measure of protection. Write to Shalhevet. See if there's anything her organization can do."

"It'll take a long time. Months, maybe, just to exchange a few letters."

"Then you'd better start now," Tibor said.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO.

Szentendre Yard THAT AFTERNOON he told Klara about the cottage in Frangepan koz, and about Klein in his bedroom surrounded by the manila files of a thousand would-be emigrants. They were in the sitting room, the baby at Klara's breast, its hand clenching and unclenching in her hair.

"What do you think?" she said quietly. "Do you think we should try to get out?"

"It seems insane, doesn't it? But I haven't seen the things Tibor's seen."

"What about your parents? And my mother?"

"I know," he said. "It's a desperate thing to think about. Maybe it's not the right time. If we wait, things might get better. But maybe I should write to Shalhevet anyway.

Just in case there's something she can do."

"You can write," she said. "But if there were something she could do, wouldn't she have told us about it already?" The baby moved his head and released his grip on Klara's hair. She shifted him to the other side, draping herself with his blanket.

"I wrote to Rosen from the labor service," Andras said. "He knew I couldn't have left then, even if I'd wanted to."

"And now we have the baby," Klara said.

Andras tried to envision her feeding their son in the cargo hold of a Danube riverboat, under the cover of a tarpaulin. Did people make escape attempts with infants, he wondered? Did they drug their children with laudanum and pray they wouldn't cry?

The baby pulled the blanket away from Klara's breast and she arranged it again.

"There's no need to do that," Andras said. "Let me see you."

Klara smiled. "I suppose I got into the habit of covering up at my mother's house.

Elza can't abide the sight of it. She considers it unsanitary. She'd be scandalized to know I do it in your presence."

"It's perfectly natural. And look at him him. Doesn't he look happy?"

The baby's toes curled and uncurled. He waved a dark hank of Klara's hair in his fist. His eyes moved to her eyes, and he blinked, and blinked again more slowly, and his eyelids drifted closed. Intoxicated with milk, he released Klara's hair and let his legs fall limp against her arm. His hands opened into starfish. His mouth fell away from her breast.

Klara raised her eyes to Andras and held his gaze. "What if you you were to go?" she were to go?" she said. "You and Tibor? Get there safely and send for us when you can? At least it would keep you out of the Munkaszolgalat."

"Never," he said. "I'd sooner die than leave without the two of you."

"What a dramatic thing to say, darling."

"I don't care if it's dramatic. That's how I feel."

"Here, take your little son. My leg's asleep." She lifted the child and handed him to Andras, then fastened the buttons of her blouse. With a grimace of pain she got to her feet and walked the length of the room. "Write to Shalhevet," she said. "Just to see. At least then we'll know if there's another course of action to consider. Otherwise we're only speculating."

"I'm not going anywhere without you."

"I hope not," she said. "But it seems the wrong time for broad resolutions."

"Won't you let me preserve the illusion that I have a choice?"

"It's a dangerous time for illusions, too," she said, and came back to sit beside him on the sofa, laying her head on his shoulder. As they sat together and watched their son sleep, Andras felt a renewed pang of guilt: He was, in fact, allowing her to live inside an illusion--that she was safe, that the past was securely lodged in the past, that her fears of endangering her family by her return to Hungary had been unfounded.

The illusion continued all that spring. A reorganization in the Ministry of Justice slowed the mechanisms of extortion, and the need to give up the house on Benczur utca was temporarily relieved. Andras continued to work as a layout artist and illustrator, with Mendel penning articles nearby in the newsroom. If it seemed surreal at first to have as their legitimate employment what had until a few months earlier been a covert and guilty extracurricular, the feeling was soon replaced by the ordinary rhythms and pressures of work. Tibor, once he had recovered his health and strength, found employment too. He became a surgical assistant at a Jewish hospital in the Erzsebetvaros. In March there was news from Elisabet: Paul had joined the navy and would ship out to the South Pacific in late April. His parents, in a fit of remorse occasioned by their son's enlistment and by the birth of their first grandchild the previous summer, had by now relented entirely and had insisted that Elisabet and little Alvie come to live with them in Connecticut. Elisabet had enclosed a photograph of the family in sledding gear, herself in a dark hooded coat, the muffled-up Alvie in her arms, Paul standing beside them holding the ropes of a long toboggan. Another photograph showed Alvie by himself, propped in a chair with pillows all around him, wearing a velvet jacket and short pants. The high round forehead and wry mouth were all Paul, but the ice-hard penetration of his baby gaze could only have been Elisabet's. She promised that Paul's father would speak to his contacts in the government to see if anything could be done to secure entry visas for Andras, Klara, and the baby.

Andras wrote to Shalhevet, and a reply came four weeks later. She promised to speak to the people she knew in the Immigration Office. Though she couldn't foresee how long the process might take or whether she would succeed, she thought she could make a strong case for Andras and Tibor's being granted visas. As Andras must know, the department's main concern at the moment was to extract Jews from German-occupied territories. But future doctors and architects would be of great value to the Jewish community of Palestine. She might even be able to do something for Andras's friend, the political journalist and record-breaking athlete; he, too, was the kind of exceptional young man the Immigration Office liked to help. And if Andras and Tibor came, of course their families must come with them. What a shame that they hadn't all emigrated together before the war! Rosen missed his Paris friends desperately. Had Andras heard from Polaner or Ben Yakov? Rosen had made dozens of inquiries, to no avail.

Andras sat on the edge of the courtyard fountain and reread the letter. He hadn't heard from Polaner or Ben Yakov, not since the missives he'd received during his first Munkaszolgalat posting. If Ben Yakov was still with his parents in Rouen, he would be living in occupied France under the Nazi flag. And Polaner, who had been so eager to fight for his adopted country--where would he have been sent after his discharge from the French military? Where would he be now? What hardships, what humiliations, would he have had to face since the last time Andras had seen him? How would Andras ever learn what had become of him? He trailed his hand through the cold water of the fountain, released now from its winter ice. Beneath the surface, the shapes of the fish moved like slender ghosts. There had been coins at the bottom of the fountain last fall, five-and tenfiller coins glinting against the blue tiles. Someone must have removed them when the ice thawed. Now, no one would throw coins into a fountain. No one could spare ten filler for a wish.

In the darkness of the barracks in Subcarpathia and Transylvania and Banhida, Andras had forced himself to consider the possibility that Polaner might be dead, that he might have been beaten or starved or infected or shot; but he had never allowed himself to think that he would not someday know know what had happened--not know for certain what had happened--not know for certain whether to search or hope or mourn. He could not mourn by default. It ran against his nature. But it had been twenty-three months since there had been any word of Polaner-soft-voiced Eli Polaner, hidden somewhere within the dark explosive tangle of Europe.

He dared not follow the thought around to its other side, where the image of his brother Matyas waited, a white shape glimpsed through the veil of a blizzard. Matyas, still lost.