General Nagy's plan for the rehabilitation of the 79/6th continued through the middle of November. The sick men were treated at the infirmary, and those who could still work gained weight on the extra rations. It helped that they had been assigned to kitchen duty. Though the cooks kept the food supply under careful watch, it was often possible to glean a stray carrot or potato or an extra measure of soup. If Andras missed his long walks to the end of the road with the surveyor, he had the pleasure of Szolomon's weekly visits to the officers' training school. The surveyor brought news of the war, and, when he could, slipped Andras and Jozsef some Ukrainian delicacy or a piece of warm clothing. One chilly afternoon Andras watched Jozsef tear open a paper-wrapped package of the rolled dumplings called holushky holushky--little ears--and felt he was watching his own ravenous self in Paris, unwrapping a poppyseed roll sent by the elder Mrs. Hasz. What were they now, he and Jozsef, but a pair of hungry men on the ragged edge of a country at war, at the mercy of forces beyond their control? All the barriers between them, or at least all the markers of class that had seemed to separate them when they had lived in Paris, were arbitrary to the point of absurdity now. When Jozsef offered him the package of holushky holushky, he took it and said koszonom koszonom. Jozsef sent him a look of surprised relief, a reaction that confused Andras until it occurred to him that this was the first time he'd spoken a kind word to Jozsef since Mendel's death. Strange, Andras thought, that war could lead you involuntarily to forgive a person who didn't deserve forgiveness, just as it might make you kill a man you didn't hate. It must have been the amnesiac effect of extremity, he thought, that bitter potion they ingested every day in Ukraine with their ration of soup and sandy bread.

One morning later that week, the men woke to find the courtyard of the orphanage blurred in a gray-white nimbus of snow. The clouds seemed intent upon giving up their contents all at once, the flakes speeding to earth in acorn-sized clusters. Here was the winter they'd dreaded, making its unambiguous entrance; the temperature had dropped twenty degrees overnight. At lineup, snow swarmed into their ears and mouths and noses.

It found its way into the crevices between their overcoats and neck wraps, worked itself in through the grommets of their boots. Major Balint took his place at the front of the assembly yard and announced with regret that the men had been removed from their duties at the officers' training school and assigned to snow removal. The guards unlocked the shed and handed the men their tools--the same pointed spades they'd used for roadbuilding, not the curved rectangular blades that would have suited the job--and marched them out toward the village to begin their winter work.

That afternoon, when Szolomon found Andras and Jozsef among the snowremoval teams, he delivered the news that he'd been posted to a mapping office in Voronezh, and would depart on a military train that afternoon. He wished them a safe passage through the winter, said a blessing over their heads, and stuffed their pockets with long-unseen varieties of food--tins of meat and sardines, jars of pickled herring, bags of walnuts, dense rye biscuits. Then, without a word of goodbye, their reticent patron and protector hurried down the road and disappeared behind a veil of snow.

All week the temperature fell and fell, far below zero. Andras's back burned with the work; his hands wept with new blisters. Nothing he had done in the Munkaszolgalat was as hard as clearing that snow, day after day, as the cold deepened. But it was impossible to give up hope when there was always a chance that a letter might arrive from Budapest. Every time they went to clear snow from the roads at the officers' training school, Andras and Jozsef looked for Captain Erdo; whenever he had mail for them he found a way to slip it into their pockets. At the beginning of December a letter came from Gyorgy Hasz: The family fortunes had dwindled further still, and Gyorgy, Elza, and the elder Mrs. Hasz had been obliged to abandon the high-ceilinged flat on Andrassy ut and move in with Klara. But they must not worry. K was safe. Everyone was fine. They must concern themselves only with their own survival.

Klara's next missive brought the news that Tibor had been called back to the Munkaszolgalat and sent to the Eastern Front. Ilana and Adam had come to live on Nefelejcs utca along with everyone else. Now the seven of them were getting by on the money that had been intended for the trip to Palestine, which Klara's lawyer forwarded in small increments each month. Andras tried to imagine it: the bright rooms of the apartment filled with all the things the Hasz family had brought from Andrassy ut, the remaining rugs and armoires and bric-a-brac of their princely estate; Elza Hasz, a mourning dove in a morning dress, her wings folded at her sides; Klara and Ilana trying to keep the babies clean and calm and fed in the midst of a crowd; Klara's mother stoic and silent in her corner; the constant smell of potatoes and paprika; the flat blond light of Budapest in winter, falling indifferently through the tall windows. Absent from the letter was any mention of Matyas, of whom Andras thought constantly as blizzards abraded the hills and fields of Ukraine.

In mid-December a note came from Jozsef's mother: Gyorgy had been admitted to the hospital with a burning pain in his chest and a high fever. The diagnosis was an infection of the pericardium, the membrane that surrounded the heart. His doctor wanted him to be treated with colchicine, pericardiocentesis, and three weeks of rest on a cardiac ward. The cost of this medical disaster, nearly five thousand pengo, threatened to unhouse them all; Klara was trying to arrange to have her lawyer send the money.

Jozsef was downcast and silent all day after he'd received the letter. That night at the orphanage he didn't get into bed at the ordinary hour. Instead he stood at the window and stared down into the snowy depths of the courtyard, a coarse blanket wrapped around him like a dressing gown.

Andras rolled over on his bunk and propped himself up on an elbow. "What is it?"

he said. "Your father?"

Jozsef gave a nod. "He hates to be sick," he said. "Hates to be a burden to anyone.

He's miserable if he has to miss a day of work." He pulled the blanket closer and looked down into the courtyard. "Meanwhile I've done nothing at all with my life. Nothing of use to anyone, certainly not my parents. Never had a job. Never even been in love, or been loved by anyone. Not by any of those girls in Paris. No one in Budapest, either. Not even Zsofia, who was pregnant with my child."

"Zsofia's pregnant?" Andras said.

"Not anymore. Last spring. She got rid of it somehow. She didn't want it any more than I did, that was how little she cared for me." He released a long breath. "I can't imagine you'd have any sympathy for me, Andras. But it's a hard thing to have to see oneself clearly all of a sudden. You must understand what I mean."

Andras said he believed he did.

"I know you don't think much of my paintings," Jozsef said. "I could see it when you came by last year, the time you and Klara brought the baby to my flat."

"On the contrary, I thought the new work was good. I told Klara as much."

"What if I were to try to contact my art dealer in Budapest?" Jozsef said, turning to Andras. "Have him sell something? I never considered the new pieces to be finished, but a collector might think otherwise. I might ask Papp to see what he can get for those nine big pieces."

"You'd sell your unfinished work?"

"I can't imagine what else I can do," Jozsef said, turning from the window. For a moment the curve of his forehead and the dark wing of his hair were like Klara's, and Andras experienced an unwelcome jolt of affection for him. He lay back in bed and stared at the dark plane of the ceiling.

"The pieces I saw were good," he told Jozsef. "They didn't seem unfinished. They might fetch a high price. But it might not be necessary to sell them. Klara may be able to get the money sent from Vienna."

"And what if she can?" Jozsef said. "Do you think they won't need more money for something else next month? What if one of the children gets sick, or my grandmother? What if it's something that can't wait for Klara to contact her lawyer?" The question hovered in the air for a long moment while they both considered that frightening possibility.

"What can I tell you?" Andras said. "I think it's a fine idea. If I had work to sell right now, I'd sell it."

"Give me your pen," Jozsef said. "I'll write my mother. Then I'll write to Papp."

Andras felt around in his knapsack for his pen and the last precious bottle of India ink left over from their set-design supplies. Using the windowsill as a desk and the moonlight as a lamp, Jozsef began to write. But a moment later he spoke again into the dark.

"I've never given my father a single thing," he said. "Not one thing."

"He'll know what it means for you to sell those paintings."

"What if he dies before my mother gets this letter?"

"Then at least your mother will know what you meant to do," Andras said. "And Klara will know too."

The next morning they woke and cleared snow, and the day after that they cleared snow, and the following day they encountered Captain Erdo as he was marching his trainees along the road, and Jozsef managed to slip the letters into his hand. Every day after that they cleared snow and cleared snow, until, on the twentieth of December, Major Balint announced that they were to pack their things and clean the orphanage from top to bottom; their unit was to move east the following day.

As much as they hated the orphanage, as much as every man had loathed his tooshort bunk and cursed when he had to stoop to the child-sized sinks in the chill of a winter morning, as much as they had lived in terrified awareness of the killings that had taken place on the grounds, the murder of the children that had preceded their arrival, and the execution of Mendel Horovitz and Laszlo Goldfarb, as much as they had yearned to leave those rooms where they had been starved, beaten, and humiliated, they felt a strange resistance to the thought of turning the place over to another company, a group of unknown men. The 79/6th had become the caretakers of the graves of all their dead, the mounds marked with stones carried from the roadbed. They had kept the ground swept, the stones clean; they had placed smaller stones upon the larger ones in tribute to the men who had been shot or died of illness or overwork. They had become the caretakers, too, of the ghosts of the Jewish orphans of Turka; the 79/6th were the only ones who had seen those undersized footprints left behind in the hallways and the courtyard. They had eaten at the children's abandoned tables, memorized the shapes of the Cyrillic letters scratched into the tops of the schoolroom desks, been bitten at night by the same bedbugs that had bitten the children, stubbed their toes on the bed frames where the children had stubbed their toes. Now they would have to abandon them, too, those children who had already been abandoned three times: once by their own parents, once by the state, and finally by life itself. But the men of the 79/6th--those who survived the winter--would say Kaddish for the Jewish orphans of Turka every August for as long as they lived.

They moved east, on foot, in the direction of danger. The land all around looked just as it did in Turka: snow-laden hills, heavy pines, the papery remains of cornstalks stubbling the white fields, stands of cows chuffing cumuli into the freezing air. The towns were nothing more than scatterings of farmhouses in the shadowy folds of the hills. The wind came through the men's overcoats and settled into their bones. They had to quarter in stables with the workhorses or sleep on the floors of the peasants' houses, where they lay open-eyed all night in fear of the peasants, who lay open-eyed all night in fear of them. At times there was no stable or village at all, and they had to bivouac in the freezing cold under the aurora-lit sky. The temperature dropped at night to --20degC. The men always had a fire, but the fire itself was dangerous; it could mesmerize you, it could cause you to stop moving, it could distract you from the difficult work of staying alive. If you fell asleep beside it during the night watch, tricked by its warmth into letting your blanket drop from your shoulders, it might burn itself to ash and leave you exposed to the cold. One morning Andras found the Ivory Tower that way, his arms around his knees, his large head bent forward in what appeared to be sleep. In front of him was the dead black ring where the fire had burned out in the snow, and on his shoulders lay a dusting of ice and frost. Andras put a hand to the Ivory Tower's neck, but the skin was as cold and unyielding as the ground itself. They had to carry his body with them for three days before they came across a patch of earth soft enough to receive him. It was beside a stable, where the horses' warmth had kept the ground from being frozen solid. They buried the Ivory Tower in the middle of the night and scratched his name and the date of his death into the side of the barn. They said the Ninety-first Psalm again. By that time they could all recite it from memory.

The cold was with them day and night. Even inside the stables or the peasants'

houses it was impossible to get warm. They stitched clumsy mittens from the linings of their overcoats, but the mittens were thin and leaked cold at the seams. Their feet froze inside their cracked boots. The men tore horse blankets into foot rags and bound their feet like the Ukrainian peasants did. Their diet contained little to keep them warm, though Major Balint tried to maintain the rations prescribed by General Nagy. Every now and then the peasants took pity on them and gave them something extra: a tablespoon of goose fat for their bread, a marrow bone, a bit of jam. Andras thought of the surveyor and hoped he was eating too--hoped the army was feeding him in Voronezh.

By day they shoveled snow from the roads, often not as fast as it fell. Their backs became hunched with the work, their hands crabbed from gripping the shovels. Along the half-cleared roads came trucks, jeeps, artillery, men, tanks, airplane parts, ammunition.

Sometimes a German inspector would come to shout them into their lines and abuse them in his language of guttural consonants and air-starved vowels. News floated in like ash from a fire: The battle crawled onward in Stalingrad, killing tens of thousands every week; a strand of the Hungarian Second Army fought for its life at Voronezh, battered by superior Soviet forces. The men of the 79/6th shoveled their way toward that battle, though it seemed as distant as everything else. Sometimes they shoveled all night while the northern sky shouted a stream of bright curses. The men thought of their wives and girlfriends lying in warm beds in Budapest, their legs bare and smooth, their breasts asleep in the midwinter dark, their hands folded and fragrant like love letters. They repeated the names of those distant women in their minds, the twist of longing never abating, even when the names became abstractions and the men had to wonder whether the women really still existed, if they could be said to exist when their existence was taking place somewhere so far distant, beyond the granite grin of the Carpathians, across the flat cold plains of Hungarian winter. Klara Klara was the sound of a shovel hitting frozen was the sound of a shovel hitting frozen snow, the scrape of a blade against frozen ground. Andras told himself that if he could only clear this road, if he could only open the way for the trucks to speed toward the Eastern Front, then the war would flow in that direction and pool there, far away from Hungary and Klara and Tamas.

But in mid-January something went wrong. The traffic, which until that point had largely flowed in the direction of Russia, began to run the other way. At first it was just a trickle: a few truckloads of provisions, a few companies of foot soldiers in jeeps. After a while it became a steady stream of men and vehicles and weaponry. Then, in late January, it became a deluge, and the river of it turned red with blood. There were Red Cross ambulances full of dead and horribly injured men, casualties of the battle that had raged in Stalingrad for five months, since August of 1942. One night the news came that the Hungarian Second Army, along with the thousands of work servicemen who had been attached to it, had suffered a final and brutal defeat at Voronezh. It came just as Andras received his ration of bread with its smear of margarine. As hungry as he was, he gave his ration to Jozsef and sat down in a corner of the barn where they were quartered that night.

They were sharing the barn with two dozen black-faced sheep whose wool had been allowed to grow long for the winter. The sheep nosed into the stall where Andras had sequestered himself; they lay their dusty bodies down in the hay, made their shuddering cries, snuffled at each other with their black velvet noses. It wasn't just the surveyor, Szolomon, that Andras was thinking of; it was Matyas, who had at one time been attached to the Hungarian Second Army. If he had lived through the last year's winter, he might have been one of the fifty thousand posted at Voronezh. Andras imagined his parents getting the dreaded news at last, his mother standing in the kitchen of their Debrecen apartment with a telegram in her hand, his father crumpled in his chair like an empty glove. Andras had been a father for only fourteen months, but he knew what it would mean to lose a son. He thought of Tamas, of the familiar whorl of his hair, the speed of his heartbeat, the folded landscape of his body. Then he put his face into his knees and saw Matyas standing on the rail of a Budapest streetcar, his blue shirt fluttering.

He swallowed the knot of coarse rope that had lodged itself in his throat, and drew an arm across his eyes. He would not mourn, he told himself. Not until he knew.

The river of blood continued, and before long it swept up Andras and Jozsef and the rest of the 79/6th and carried them west, back toward Hungary. Fragments of laborservice companies drifted through, men who had reached nightmarish states of emaciation. The 79/6th, whose rations had been steady, carried food each night to forced laborers who were nearly dead, whose commanders had abandoned them, who had no work now but to flee in the direction of home. They received more news of what had happened at Stalingrad--the bombing that had turned every block of the city to rubble, its buildings to a forest of broken brick and concrete; the surrounding of the German Sixth Army at the center of the city, its commander, General Paulus, hidden in a basement while the battle raged around him; the downing of the few Luftwaffe supply flights; then the Soviet Army pounding through to retake control of the Don bend, and to prevent the German Fourth from advancing to rescue the surrounded Sixth. No one knew how many had been killed--two hundred thousand? Five hundred thousand? A million?--or how many were dying still, of cold and starvation and untreated wounds, there at the dead center of winter, on the dark and barren steppes. The Soviets were said to be chasing the remnants of the Hungarian Army back across the plains. In the midst of his own fear, his own flight, Andras felt a fierce satisfaction. The German Sixth had failed to take the oil fields around Grozny; they had failed to take the city that carried Stalin's name. Those defeats might beget others. What had failed might continue to fail. It was a terrible thing to take pleasure in, Andras knew--the fate of Hungarian companies and labor servicemen were tied to the fate of the Wehrmacht, and in any case these were human beings who were dying, whatever their nationality. But Germany had to be defeated. And if it could be defeated while Hungary remained a sovereign state, then the Jews of Hungary might never have to live under Nazi rule.

The confusion of the retreat toward Hungary begat strange convergences, foldings of fate that arose from the mingling of dozens of labor-service companies. Again and again they came across men they knew from the far-off life before the war. One night they quartered with a group of men from Debrecen, among whom were several old schoolmates of Tibor's. Another night they encountered a group from Konyar itself, including the baker's son, the elder brother of Orsolya Korcsolya. A third night, stranded in a March blizzard, Andras found himself sharing a corner of a granary-turned-infirmary with the managing editor of the Magyar Jewish Journal Magyar Jewish Journal, the man who had been Frigyes Eppler's colleague and adversary. The man was scarcely recognizable, so stripped down by cold and hunger as to seem only the wire armature upon which his former self had been built; no one could have imagined that this ravenous thin-armed man, his eyes glittering with fever, had once been a bellicose editor in an Irish tweed jacket.

The managing editor had news of Frigyes Eppler, who had lost his job after the military police had found a file of incriminating documents in his office, a set of papers rumored to have connected him to a black-market operation at Szentendre, of all places.

Not long afterward, Eppler had been conscripted into the Munkaszolgalat; no one had heard from him since, or at least not as far as the managing editor knew. He himself had been called up into a different company a few weeks later. Now the managing editor was part of a group of sick and wounded men whose commander had left them in the granary to starve or to succumb to fever. Major Balint had ordered the 79/6th to tend to the sick men--to bring them food and water and change the dirty makeshift dressings on their wounds. As Andras performed these duties for the managing editor, he learned the fate of another member of their company, a man whose story was so grim that he had earned the nickname of Uncle Job. This man, the editor told him, had once been married to a beautiful woman, a former actress, with whom he'd had a child; it was rumored that he had lived in Paris, where he had run a grand theater at the center of town. Before the war he had been forced to return to Budapest, where, for a brief time, he had taken over the directorship of the Opera. It was in Budapest that his wife had become ill and died. Soon afterward, the man, already suffering from tuberculosis, had been conscripted into the labor service--made an example of, to be certain--and had been placed into service with the labor company that the editor would join sometime later. Last fall they had been sent through the waystation of the Royal Hungarian Field Gendarmerie at Staryy Oskol, where they had been interrogated and beaten and robbed of everything they had brought with them. The Hungarian Field Gendarmerie knew who this great man was, this former luminary of the theater; they stood him up in front of the others and beat him with their rifles, and then they produced a telegram in which it was reported that the man's son had died of measles. The telegram had been sent by the boy's aunt to a relative in Szeged; it had been intercepted in Budapest and forwarded all the way to Staryy Oskol apparently for the express torment of this gentleman. The man begged them to kill him, too, but they left him alone with the rest of the battalion, and the next day they were all sent east again.

"But what happened to him?" Andras asked, his hands on his knees, looking into the hollowed-out eyes of the managing editor. "Did he die at Voronezh?"

"That's the pity of it," the editor said. "He never did die, though he kept trying. He volunteered to clear land mines. Ran into the line of fire every chance he got. Survived it all. Even the consumption couldn't kill him."

"How did you leave him? Where did you last see him?"

"He's there in the corner, where your friend is sitting now."

Andras looked over his shoulder. Jozsef had knelt to give water to a man who lay propped on a pile of folded grain sacks; the man turned his head away, and through the veil of illness and emaciation Andras recognized Zoltan Novak.

"I know him," Andras told the editor.

"Of course. Who didn't? He was well known."

"Personally, I mean."

"Go pay your regards, then." He put a hand to Andras's chest and gave him a push in the man's direction, the gesture like a dim ghost of his old energy, his old vehemence.

Andras approached Jozsef and the man supported on the grain sacks. He caught Jozsef's eye and beckoned him into a corner.

"That's Zoltan Novak," Andras whispered.

Jozsef wrinkled his forehead and glanced back toward the man. "Novak?" he said.

"Are you certain?"

Andras nodded.

"God help us," Jozsef said. "He's nearly dead."

But the man raised his head from the grain sacks and looked at Andras and Jozsef.

"I'll be right back," Jozsef said.

"Give me water," said Novak, his voice a raw whisper in his throat.

"I'll go to him," Andras said.

"Why?"

"He knows me."

"Somehow I don't think that'll be a comfort," Jozsef said.

But Andras went to kneel on the floor beside Novak, who raised himself an inch or two on the folded sacks, his eyes closed, his breath rattling like the stroked edge of a comb.

"Give me water, there," he said again.

Andras raised his canteen and Novak drank. When he was done, he cleared his throat and looked at Andras. A slow heat came to his expression, a faint flushing of the skin around the eyelids. He pushed himself up onto his elbows.

"Levi," he said, and shook his head. He made three burrs of noise that might have been consternation or laughter. The exertion seemed to have drained him. He lay back again and closed his eyes. It was a long time before he spoke again, and when he did, the words came slowly and with effort. "Levi," he said. "I must have died, thank God. I've died and gone down to Gehenna. And here you are with me, also dead, I hope."

"No," Andras said. "Still alive and here in Ukraine, both of us."

Novak opened his eyes again. There was a softness in his gaze, a complicated pity that did not exclude himself but was not focused upon himself alone; it seemed to take in all of them, Andras and Jozsef and the editor and the other sick and dying men and the laborers who were bringing them water and tending their wounds.

"You see how it stands with me," Novak said. "Maybe it gives you some satisfaction to see me like this."

"Of course not, Novak-ur. Tell me what I can do for you."

"There's only one thing I want," Novak said. "But I can't ask for it without making a murderer of you." He gave a half smile, pausing again to catch his breath. Then he coughed painfully and turned onto his side. "I've wished to die for months. But I'm quite strong, as it turns out. Isn't that a lovely thing? And I'm too much of a coward to take my own life."

"Are you hungry?" Andras asked. "I've got some bread in my knapsack."

"Do you think I want bread?"

Andras glanced away.

"That other man's her nephew, isn't he," Novak said. "He resembles her."

"I'd like to think she's a good deal better looking than that," Andras said.

Novak coughed out a laugh. "You're right, there," he said, and then shook his head. "Andras Levi. I hoped I wouldn't see you again after that day at the Opera."

"I'll go away if you want."

Novak shook his head again, and Andras waited for him to say something more.

But he had exhausted himself with speaking; he fell into a shallow open-mouthed sleep.

Andras sat with him as he struggled for breath. Outside, the wind was shrill with the force of the blizzard. Andras put his head on his arm and fell asleep, and when he woke it had grown dark inside the granary. No one had a candle; those who still had flashlights hadn't had batteries for months. The sound and smell of sick men closed in around him like a close-woven veil. Novak was wide awake now and looking intently at him, his breathing more labored than before. Each intake of breath sounded as though he were building a complicated structure from inappropriate materials with broken tools; each exhalation was the defeated collapse of that ugly and imbalanced structure. He spoke again, so quietly that Andras had to lean close to hear.

"It's all right now," he was saying. "Everything's all right."

It was unclear whether he meant to reassure Andras or himself or both of them at once; he seemed almost to be addressing someone who wasn't present, though his eyes were fixed on Andras in the darkness. Soon he went quiet and fell asleep again. Andras stayed beside him all night as he wandered in and out of sleep, and the next day he gave Novak his ration of bread. Novak couldn't eat it dry, but Andras mashed it into crumbs and mixed it with melted snow. They spent three days that way, Novak drifting awake and sleeping, Andras giving him small measures of food and water, until the weather had cleared and the snow had melted enough for the 79/6th to go on again toward the border.

When Balint announced that the men would move out the following morning, Andras's relief was cut with dismay. He begged a moment's conference with the major; they couldn't leave the other men there to die.

"How do you propose to move them, Serviceman?" Balint asked, his tone stern, though not unkind. "We don't have ambulances. We don't have materials for litters. And we can't possibly stay here."

"We can improvise something, sir."

Balint shook his shaggy head. "These men are better off inside. The medical corps will be along in a few days. Those who can be moved will be moved then."

"Some of them will be dead by then," Andras said.

"In that case, Levi, dragging them into the cold and snow won't save them."

"One of those men saved my life when I was a student in Paris. I can't abandon him."

"Listen to me," Balint said, his large earth-colored eyes steady on Andras's. "I have a son and daughter at home. The others are husbands and fathers, too, many of them. We're young men. We've got to get home alive. That's the principle by which I've commanded this company since we turned back. We're still a hundred kilometers from the border, five days' walk at least. If we carry sick men with us we'll slow the entire company. We could lose our lives."

"Let me stay, then, sir."

"That's not in my orders."

"Let me."

"No!" Balint said, angry now. "I'll march you out at gunpoint if I have to."

But in the end there was no need for a show of force. Zoltan Novak, former husband and father, former director of the Theatre Sarah-Bernhardt and the Budapest Operahaz, the man Klara Morgenstern had loved for eleven years and in some measure must have loved still, fell asleep that night and did not wake again.