CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN.

An Escape BY THE TIME his train reached Budapest, the forsythia had come into bloom.

All else was gray or vaguely yellow-green; a few of the trees along the outer ring road showed the swelling of buds, though the city retained the wet rawness of recent snowmelt. 1943 still felt unreal to him. He had lost his sense of time entirely through the last phase of the journey home. But he knew today's date: It was the twenty-fifth of March, seven months and three weeks since he'd been sent to Ukraine. Klara had come to meet his train at Keleti Station. He'd nearly gone faint at the sight of her on the platform with a child standing beside her--standing! His son, Tamas, in a knee-length coat and sturdy little boy's shoes. Tamas, almost a year and a half old now; Tamas who had been a baby in Klara's arms the last time Andras had seen him. Klara's brow showed a narrow

pleat of worry, but she was otherwise unchanged; her dark hair was caught in its loose knot at her nape, the beloved planes of her clavicles exposed by the neckline of her gray dress. She made no attempt to hide her dismay at Andras's physical state. She put a hand over her mouth, and her eyes filled. He knew what he looked like, knew he looked like a man who'd been threshed almost free of his body. His head had been shaved for delousing; his clothes, or what was left of them, hung loosely on his frame. His hands were crabbed and bent, his cheek scarred with three white rays where the glass from a shot-out barn window had cut him. When Klara took him into her arms he felt how careful she was with him, as though she might hurt him with an embrace. Jozsef was not there to witness their reunion; he was still in Debrecen, recovering at a military hospital.

His knee had been wounded during the border crossing, and he was receiving treatment for an infection of the soft tissues. He would return in another week or two. From a post office near the hospital, Andras had been able to wire Klara the news of his own return.

Darling. Darling. They would have stood there saying it to each other all night, looking at each other and kissing each other's hands, touching each other's faces, had not Tamas made his protest and begged to be picked up. Andras held him and looked into the round face with its inquisitive eyebrows and its large expressive eyes.

"Apa," Klara instructed the boy, and pointed to Andras's chest. But Tamas turned and put his arms out to Klara, afraid of this unfamiliar man.

Andras bent to his knapsack and opened the flap. Inside he found the red Indiarubber ball he'd bought for three filler from a street vendor in Debrecen. The ball had a white star at each of its poles and was bisected by a band of green paint. Tamas put out his hands for it. But Andras tossed it high into the air and caught it on his back, between his shoulder blades. He'd learned the trick from one of his schoolmates in Konyar. Now he plucked the ball from his back and bowed to Tamas, who opened his mouth and crowed with laughter.

"More," Tamas said.

It was the first word Andras had heard him speak. The trick proved equally funny a second and third time. At last Andras gave Tamas the ball, and he held it raptly as Klara carried him through the Erzsebetvaros toward home. Andras walked beside them with his hand at Klara's waist. No longer with him was the feeling he'd had when he'd returned home from the Munkaszolgalat before: that the continuation of ordinary life in Budapest was impossible after what he'd come from, that his mental and physical torment must necessarily have changed the rest of the world. There was a certain numbness where he had once experienced incredulity. It almost frightened him, that stillness. It was inarguable evidence of his having grown older.

As they walked, Klara told him the news of the family: how the money from the sale of Jozsef's paintings had allowed Gyorgy to regain his health in the hospital; how Klara's mother, who'd had pneumonia over the winter, was now hale enough to go to the market every morning for the day's vegetables and bread; how Ilana had mastered Hungarian and had proved to be a genius at economizing on their rations; how Elza Hasz, who before that past December had never even known how to boil an egg, had learned to make potato paprikas and chicken soup. There had even been news from Elisabet: She'd had another child, a girl. She was still living on the family estate in Connecticut while Paul served in the navy, but they planned to move to a larger apartment in New York when he returned. Of the possibility of emigrating to the States there had been no word.

Other possibilities of escape had evaporated. Klein, Klara revealed in a whisper as they paused at a street corner, had been arrested for arranging illegal emigrations. He'd been in jail since the previous November, awaiting trial. She had gone a few times to visit his grandparents, who demonstrated no sign of need. They persisted with their little flock of goats in the ancient cottage in Frangepan koz; perhaps the authorities considered them too old to be worth pursuing. The names of Klein's clients--former, current, and would-be emigrants--were concealed in his labyrinth of codes, but there was no telling how long it might be before the police found their way through the maze.

"And your parents?" she asked. "Are they well?"

"They're fine," Andras said. "Still sick with worry about Matyas, though. They haven't had a word of news. They weren't pleased to see me looking like this, either. I didn't tell them the half of what happened."

"Tibor's anxious to see you," she said. "Ilana had to resort to threats to keep him from coming to the station. But his doctor says he's got to rest."

"How is he? How does he look?"

Klara sighed. "Thin and exhausted. Quiet. Sometimes he seems to see terrible things in the air between himself and us. Every minute since he's been back he's had Adam in his arms. The boy is so attached to him now, Ilana can hardly feed him."

"And you?" He put a hand to her hair, her cheek. "Klarika."

She raised her chin to him and kissed him, there on the street with their child in her arms.

"Your letters," she said. "If I hadn't had them, I don't know."

"They can't always have been a comfort."

Tears came to her eyes again. "I wanted to think I'd miunderstood about Mendel. I read and reread that letter, hoping I was wrong. But it's true, isn't it."

"Yes, darling, it's true."

"Sometime soon you'll tell me everything," she said, and took his hand.

They walked on together until they reached the door of the apartment building. He looked up toward the window he knew to belong to their bedroom; she'd installed a window box full of early crocuses.

"There's one more piece of news," she said, so gravely that at first he was certain it was news of a death. "There's someone else staying with us now. Someone who traveled a long way to get here."

"Who?"

"Come upstairs," she said. "You'll see."

He followed her into the courtyard, his heartbeat quickening. He wasn't certain he could face a surprise guest. He wanted to sit down on the edge of the fountain at the center of the courtyard, stay there and gather himself for a few days. As they climbed the open stairway he could see the flicker of goldfish in the fountain's green depths.

They were at the door, and the door opened. There was Tibor, drawn and pale, his eyes full of tears behind his silver-framed glasses. He put his arms around his brother and they held each other in the hallway. Andras inhaled Tibor's faint smell of soap and sebum and clean cotton, not wanting to move or speak. But Tibor led him into the sitting room, where the family was waiting. There was his nephew, Adam, standing beside his mother; Ilana, her hair covered beneath an embroidered kerchief; Gyorgy Hasz, grayer and older; Elza Hasz austere in a cotton work dress; Klara's mother, smaller than ever, her eyes deep and bright. And beyond them, rising from the couch, a pale oval-faced man in a dark jersey that had belonged to Andras, a crumpled handkerchief in his hand.

Andras experienced a tilt of vertigo. He put a hand on the back of the sofa as the feeling passed through him like a pressure wave.

Eli Polaner.

"Not possible," Andras said. He looked from Klara to his brother to Ilana, and then again at Polaner himself. "Is it true?" he asked in French.

"True," Polaner said, in his familiar and long-lost voice.

It was a nightmare version of a fairy tale, a story grim enough to teach Andras new horrors after what he'd seen in Ukraine. He wished almost that he'd never had to know what had happened to Polaner at the concentration camp in Compiegne where he'd been sent after his removal from the Foreign Legion in 1940--how he'd been beaten and starved and deported half dead to Buchenwald, where he'd spent two years in forced labor and sexual slavery, his arm tattooed with his number, his chest bearing an inverted pink triangle superimposed over an upright yellow one. Polaner's homosexuality had remained a secret until one of his workmates had given up a list of names in exchange for a position as a kapo; afterward, Polaner had found himself at the lowest level of the camp hierarchy, marked with a symbol that made him a target for the guards and kept the other prisoners from getting too close to him. He'd been assigned to the stone quarry, where he hauled bags of crushed rock for fourteen hours a day. When his shift at the quarry was finished, he had to clean the latrines of his barracks block--a reminder, the block sergeant told him, that at this camp he was lower than shit, a servant to shit. Sometimes, late at night, he and a few of the others would be led to a back door of the officers' quarters, where they would be tied and raped, first by one of the officers and then by his secretaries and his orderly.

One night they had been presented as a secret gift to a visiting dignitary from the SS Economic-Administrative Main Office, a high-ranking concentration-camp inspector who was known to enjoy the company of young men. But the exalted official's preferences were not what had been assumed; he was a lover of young men, not a rapist.

He had the prisoners untied and washed and shaved and dressed in civilian clothes. What he wanted was to engage them in conversation, as though they were all at a party. He had them sit on sofas in his private quarters and share delicacies with him--tea and cakes, when what they'd lived on for the past three years was thin soup and beweeviled bread.

The inspector was charmed by Polaner's French and his knowledge of contemporary art and architecture. It turned out that the man had known the late vom Rath, to whom he had been a kind of political mentor. By the end of the evening he had decided to have Polaner transferred to his personal service at once. He brought Polaner to his private apartments at another camp a hundred kilometers away, and registered him as a kind of underservant, a hauler of coal and blacker of boots; in actuality Polaner was treated as a patient, kept in bed and nursed by the camp inspector's domestic staff.

At the end of two months, when Polaner had recovered his health, the inspector performed a kind of alchemy of identity: He had false records drawn up to show that Eli Polaner, the young Jewish man who had been transferred to his service, had contracted meningitis and died; then he procured for Polaner a set of forged papers declaring him to be a young Nazi Party member by the name of Teobald Kreizel, a junior secretary with the Economic-Administrative Main Office. With Polaner dressed as a member of the inspector's staff they traveled to Berlin, where the inspector installed Polaner in a small bright flat on the Behrenstrasse. He left Polaner with fifty thousand reichsmarks in cash and a promise that he would return as soon as possible, bringing with him books and magazines and drawing supplies, phonograph records, black-market delicacies, whatever Polaner might want. Polaner asked only for news of his family; he hadn't heard from his parents or his sisters since he'd entered the Foreign Legion.

The high-ranking inspector returned as often as he could, bringing the promised drawing supplies and records and delicacies, but he was slow to produce news of Polaner's family. Polaner waited, rarely venturing out of the apartment, thinking of little else but the fact that he might soon learn his parents' and sisters' fate. He nursed a hope that they might have found a way to emigrate, that against the odds they'd gotten themselves to some benign and distant place, Argentina or Australia or America; or, failing that, that the inspector might be able to lift them out of whatever hell they'd fallen into, might reunite them all in a neutral city where they would be safe. It wasn't an entirely baseless hope; the inspector had often used his position to arrange favors for his lovers and proteges. In fact, during the six months Polaner lived on the Behrenstrasse, those past favors took their toll: a series of irregularities came to the attention of the inspector's superiors, and the inspector fell under investigation. Fearing for his position and for Polaner's life, the inspector concluded that Polaner must leave the country at once. He promised to get Polaner a visa that would allow him to travel anywhere within the area of the Reich's influence. But what was Polaner supposed to do? Where was he supposed to go? News of his parents had failed to arrive; how was he to choose a destination?

Later that same week, the first week of January, 1943, the inspector's inquiries about Polaner's family yielded answers at last. Polaner's parents and sisters had died in a labor camp at Plaszow--his mother and father in February of 1941, and his sisters eight and ten months later. The Nazis had appropriated his family home and the textile factory in Krakow. There was nothing left.

The night he received the news, Polaner had removed the gun from his bedside table--the inspector insisted he keep a pistol for protection--and had gone out onto the balcony and stood there in his nightclothes, in a cataract of freezing wind. He put the gun to his temple and leaned over the balcony railing. The snow below him was like an eiderdown, he told Andras--soft-looking, hillocked, blue-white; he imagined falling into that clean blankness and disappearing beneath a layer of new snow. The gun in his hand was an SS officer's Walther P-38, a double-action pistol with a round in the chamber. He cocked the hammer and put a finger against the curve of the trigger, envisioned the bullet shattering the ingenious architecture of his skull. He would count to three and do it: eins, eins, tsvey, dray. But as the Yiddish numbers sounded in his mind, he experienced a moment of clarity: If he killed himself with this gun, this Walther P-38--if he did this because the Nazis had killed his parents and sisters--then they they, the Nazis, would be the ones who had killed him, the ones who had silenced the Yiddish inside his head. They would have succeeded at killing his entire family. He removed his finger from the trigger, reset the safety, and slid the round out of the chamber. It was the bullet, and not Polaner himself, that fell three stories to that eiderdown of snow.

The next morning he fixed upon Budapest as his destination, in the hope of finding Andras there. The high-ranking inspector provided Polaner with the letters and documents necessary to obtain legal residency in Hungary; he even got him a doctor's certificate declaring Polaner unfit for military service due to a chronic weakness of the lungs. He gave Polaner twenty thousand reichsmarks and put him into a private compartment on a train. When Polaner arrived, he made his way to the grand synagogue on Dohany utca, where he found an ancient secretary who spoke Yiddish; he communicated that he was looking for Andras Levi, and the secretary had directed him to the Budapest Izraelita Hitkozseg, which provided him with Andras's address on Nefelejcs utca. Klara had taken him in, and here he'd remained ever since. Just a week ago he'd received his official Hungarian papers, which he produced now from a brown portfolio as if to prove to Andras it was all true. Andras unfolded Polaner's passport. Teobald Kreizel. Teobald Kreizel.

Permanent resident. The photograph showed a thin hollow-eyed Polaner, even paler and more horror-stricken than the young man who sat across the kitchen table from Andras now. This passport was as crisp and clean as Andras's had been when he'd left for Paris; it lacked only the telltale Zs Zs for for Zsido Zsido. The brown portfolio also contained a party identity card stamped with the ghost of a swastika, declaring Teobald Kreizel to be a member of the National Socialist Party of Germany.

"These papers will serve you well," Andras said. "Your German friend knew what he was doing."

Polaner shifted in his seat. "It's a shameful thing, a Jew posing as a Nazi."

"My God, Polaner! No one would begrudge you that protection. It'll keep you out of the Munkaszolgalat, at the very least, and I know what that's worth."

"But you've had to serve for years. And if the war goes on, you'll serve again."

"You did your time," Andras said. "Yours was far worse than mine."

"Impossible to weigh them," Polaner said.

But there were times when it was possible to weigh suffering, Andras knew. He, Andras, hadn't been raped. He hadn't lost his country or his family. Klara was asleep in the bedroom, their son beside her. Tibor and Ilana lay in each other's arms on a mattress on the sitting-room floor. Their parents were well in Debrecen. Matyas might be alive still, somewhere beyond the borders of Hungary. But Polaner had lost everything, everyone. Andras thought of the Rosh Hashanah dinner they'd eaten together at the student dining club five and a half years earlier--how Andras had marveled that Polaner's mother had let him return to school after the attack, and what Polaner had said in reply: She's never glad to see me go. She's my mother. That woman who had loved her son was gone. Her husband was gone, and their daughters were gone. And the young Andras Levi and Eli Polaner--those boys who had spent two years in Paris arguing about a war that might or might not come, drinking tea at the Blue Dove, making plans for a sports club at the center of the Quartier Latin--they, too, were gone, grown into these scarred and scraped-out men. And he lowered his head onto Polaner's sleeve and mourned for what could never be returned.

All that spring they waited for news of Matyas. When they celebrated Passover, Andras's mother insisted upon setting a place for him; when they opened the door to welcome Elijah, they were calling him home too. In the time since Andras had been sent to Ukraine, his mother and father seemed to have grown old. His father's hair had gone from gray to white. His mother's back had acquired a curve. She curled into the tent of her cardigan like a dry grass stem. Even the sight of Tamas and Adam failed to cheer her; it wasn't her grandchildren she longed for, but her lost boy.

Polaner, who knew what it meant to wait for news, kept his own mourning private. He never spoke of his parents or his sisters, as though a mention of his loss might bring on the tragedy that Andras's family dreaded. He insisted upon going alone to the Dohany Synagogue every afternoon to recite Kaddish. Tradition required him to do it for a year. But as the news continued to drift in from Poland, it began to seem as though no one could be exempt from mourning, as though no period of mourning would ever be long enough. In April, the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto had mounted an armed stand against the deportation of the ghetto's last sixty thousand residents; no one had expected it to last more than a few days, but the ghetto fighters held out for four weeks. The Pesti Pesti Naplo printed photographs of women throwing Molotov cocktails at German tanks, of printed photographs of women throwing Molotov cocktails at German tanks, of Waffen-SS troops and Polish policemen setting buildings afire. The battle lasted until the middle of May, and ended, as everyone had known it would, with the clearing of the ghetto: a massacre of the Jewish fighters, and the deportation of those who had survived.

The next day, the Pesti Naplo Pesti Naplo reported that one and a half million Polish Jews had been reported that one and a half million Polish Jews had been killed in the war, according to the exiled Polish government's estimate. Andras, who had translated every article and radio program about the uprising for Polaner, couldn't bring himself to translate that number, to deliver that staggering statistic to a friend already in mourning. One and a half million Jewish men and women and children: How was anyone to understand a number like that? Andras knew it took three thousand to fill the seats of the Dohany Street Synagogue. To accommodate a million and a half, one would have had to replicate that building, its arches and domes, its Moorish interior, its balcony, its dark wooden pews and gilded ark, five hundred times five hundred times. And then to envision each of those five hundred synagogues filled to capacity, to envision each man and woman and child inside as a unique and irreplaceable human being, the way he imagined Mendel Horovitz or the Ivory Tower or his brother Matyas, each of them with desires and fears, a mother and a father, a birthplace, a bed, a first love, a web of memories, a cache of secrets, a skin, a heart, an infinitely complicated brain--to imagine them that way, and then to imagine them dead, extinguished for all time--how could anyone begin to grasp it? The idea could drive a person mad. He, Andras, was still alive, and people were dependent upon him; he couldn't afford to lose his mind, and so he forced himself not to think about it.

Instead he buried himself in the work that had to be done every day. The single apartment, which had been full even when the men were away in the Munkaszolgalat, proved unlivable now that they were home. Tibor and Ilana took a flat across the street, and Jozsef moved with his parents into another small flat in the building next door.

Polaner remained with Andras and Klara, sharing a room with Tamas. For all those living spaces, rent had to be paid. Andras went back to work as a newspaper illustrator and layout artist, not at the Magyar Jewish Journal Magyar Jewish Journal but at the but at the Evening Courier Evening Courier, Mendel's former employer, where a new round of military conscriptions had decimated the ranks of graphic artists. He persuaded his editor to hire Polaner as well, arguing that Polaner had always been the true talent behind their collaborations in architecture school. Tibor, for his part, found a position as a surgical assistant in a military hospital, where the wounded of Voronezh were still being treated. Jozsef, who had never before had to earn a living, placed an ad in the Evening Courier Evening Courier and became a house painter, paid handsomely for his and became a house painter, paid handsomely for his work. And Klara taught private students in the studio on Kiraly utca. Few parents now could afford the full fee, but she allowed them to pay whatever they could.

In July, as Eisenhower's armies bombed Rome, Budapest stood on the banks of the Danube in an excess of summer beauty, its palaces and grand old hotels still radiating an air of permanence. The Soviet bombardments of the previous September hadn't touched those scrolled and gilded buildings; Allied raids had failed to materialize that spring, and the Red Army's planes hadn't returned. Now the clenched fists of dahlias opened in the Varosliget, where Andras walked with Tibor and Jozsef and Polaner on Sunday afternoons, speculating about how much longer it might be before Germany capitulated and the war ended at last. Mussolini had fallen, and fascism had crumbled in Italy. On the Eastern Front, Germany's problems had multiplied and deepened: The Wehrmacht's assault on a Soviet stronghold near Kursk had ended in a disastrous rout, and defeats at Orel and Kharkov had followed soon after. Even Tibor, who a year earlier had cautioned against wishful thinking, voiced the hope that the war might be over before he or Andras or Jozsef could be called to the Munkaszolgalat again, and that the Hungarian prisoners of war might begin to return.

The Jews of Hungary had been lucky, Andras knew. Thousands of men had died in the Munkaszolgalat, but not a million and a half. The rest of the Jewish population had survived the war intact. Though tens of thousands had lost their jobs and nearly all were struggling to make a living, it was still legal at least for a Jew to operate a business, own an apartment, go to synagogue to say the prayer for the dead. For more than a year and a half, Prime Minister Kallay had managed to stave off Hitler's demands for more stringent measures against Hungary's Jews; what was more, his administration had begun to pursue justice for the crimes perpetrated earlier in the war. He had called for an investigation into the Delvidek massacres, and had vowed to punish the guilty parties as severely as they deserved. And General Vilmos Nagybaczoni Nagy, before he'd given up his control of the Ministry of Defense, had called for the indictment of the officers at the heart of the military black market.

But Andras had been schooled in skepticism not only by Tibor but by the events of the past year; despite the hopeful news, he found it impossible to shake his sense of dread. More events accrued to reinforce it. As he followed the black-market trial in the newspaper that fall, it became increasingly clear that the accused officers, if they were convicted, would carry only nominal sentences. And Hitler, whose Wehrmacht had looked so vulnerable during the summer months, had halted the Allied attack south of Rome and secured Germany's southern borders. In Russia he continued to throw his troops at the Red Army, as though total defeat were impossible.

Then there was the absence of news about Matyas, who had been missing now for twenty-two months. How could anyone continue to believe he had survived? But Tibor persisted in believing it, and his mother believed it, and though his father wouldn't speak of it, Andras knew he believed it; as long as any of them did, none of them could claim even the bare comfort of grief.

The year's final act of aborted justice concerned the Hasz family and the extortion that had drained its fortunes almost to nothing. Once Gyorgy's monthly payments had dwindled to a few hundred forint, the extortionists decided that the rewards of the arrangement were no longer worth the risk. The Kallay administration seemed intent upon exposing corruption at all levels and in all branches of the government; seventeen members of the Ministry of Justice had already been indicted for financial improprieties, and Gyorgy's extortionists feared they would be next. On the twenty-fifth of October they called Gyorgy to a midnight meeting in the basement of the Ministry of Justice. That night, Andras and Klara kept a vigil with Klara's mother and Elza and Jozsef in the small dark front room of the Hasz apartment. Jozsef chain-smoked a pack of Mirjam cigarettes; Elza sat with a basket of mending beside her, needling her way through the unfamiliar ravages of poverty upon clothing. The elder Mrs. Hasz read aloud from Radnoti, the young Jewish poet Tibor admired, and whose fate in the Munkaszolgalat was unknown.

Klara, her hands pinned between her knees, sat beside Andras as if in judgment herself. If her brother came to harm, Andras knew she would hold herself responsible.

At a quarter to three in the morning a key sounded in the lock. Here was Gyorgy, soot-stained and breathless but otherwise unharmed. He removed his jacket and draped it over the back of the sofa, smoothed his pale gold tie, ran a hand through his silver-shot hair. He sat down in an empty chair and drained the glass of plum brandy his wife offered him. Then he set the empty glass on the low table before him and fixed his eyes on Klara, who sat close at his side.

"It's over," he said, covering her hand with his own. "You may exhale."

"What's over?" their mother asked. "What's happened?"

There had been a great immolation of documents, he told them. The extortionists had taken Gyorgy to his office and made him gather all evidence of the ministry's illegal relationship with the Hasz family--every letter, every telegram and payment record, every bill of sale and bank-deposit receipt--and had forced him to throw the lot into the building's incinerator, making it impossible for the Hasz family ever to mount a case against the Ministry of Justice. In return, the ministry officials produced a new set of papers for Klara, restoring the citzenship she'd lost as a young girl. Then they took the file containing all the documents pertaining to Klara's alleged crime--the photographs of the murder scene and victims, the rapist's sworn testimony revealing Klara's identity, the depositions linking Klara to the Zionist organization Gesher Zahav, the police reports documenting Klara's disappearance, and Edith Novak's statement concerning Klara's return to Hungary--and fed it, too, to the building's central incinerator.

"You saw them burn those things?" Klara said. "The dossier, the photographs-everything?"

"Everything," Gyorgy said.

"How do you know they didn't keep copies?" Jozsef said. "How do you know they don't have other documents?"

"It's possible, I suppose, but not likely. We must remember that any evidence they might retain would be evidence against them them. That's why they were so eager to destroy those papers."

"But the evidence has always implicated them!" Jozsef said, rising from his chair.

"That's never bothered them before."

"These men were frightened," Hasz said. "They did a poor job of hiding it. The administration isn't on their side. They've seen seventeen of their colleagues fired, and a few imprisoned or sent to the labor service, for less than what they've done to us."

"And you destroyed everything?" Jozsef said. "Truly everything? You didn't keep a single copy? Nothing that would give us recourse later?"

Gyorgy gave his son a hard and steady look. "They held a gun to my head as I emptied the files," he said. "I would like to say I had duplicates elsewhere, but it was risky enough to keep what I had. Anyway, it's finished now. They can't open Klara's case again. I saw the documents burn."

Jozsef stood over his father's chair, his hands clenched. He seemed ready to grab his father by the shoulders and shake him. His eyes flickered toward his grandmother, his mother; then his gaze fell upon Andras and rested there. Between them lay a history so terrible as to throw the moment's frustration into a different light; to look at each other was to be reminded what it meant to escape with one's life. Jozsef sat down again and spoke to his father.

"Thank God it's over," he said. "Thank God they didn't kill you."

In their bedroom that night, Andras held Klara as they lay awake in the dark. How many times over the past four years had he imagined her arrested and beaten and jailed, placed far beyond his reach? He could scarcely believe that the ever-present threat was gone. Klara herself was silent and dry-eyed beside him; he knew how keenly she felt the price of her own liberation. Her return to Hungary, a risk she had undertaken for his sake, had ruined her family. She was free now, but her freedom would never extend far enough to allow her to demand legal justice or the repayment of her family's losses. Her silence wasn't directed at him, he understood, but it lay between them nonetheless. Had he ever been close to her in the way married people were supposed to be close? he wondered. Of their forty-eight months married, he had spent only twelve at home. To survive their separation they'd had to place each other at a certain remove. Every time he'd been home, including this one, there had been the fear that he would be called up again; as much as they tried to ignore it, the fact was always there. And veiling all their intimacy, shadowing it like a pair of dark wings, was what they knew was happening in Europe, and what they feared would happen to them.

But here they were together, in their shared bed, out of the grasp of danger for the moment. They lived, and he loved her. It was was folly in the French sense--madness--to keep her at a remove. It was the last thing he wanted. He touched her bare shoulder, her face, pushed a lock of hair away from her brow, and she moved closer against him.

Mindful of Polaner sleeping on the other side of the wall--of his losses, and his loneliness--they made love in clenched and straining silence. Afterward they lay together, his hand on her belly, his fingers moving along the familiar scars of her pregnancies.

They hadn't taken precautions against her becoming pregnant again, though neither wanted to imagine what it might mean if she were carrying a child when the Soviets crossed the Hungarian border. As they drifted toward sleep he described in a whisper the little house he would build beside the Danube when the war was over. It was the place he had envisioned when he'd been to Angyalfold the first time, a whitewashed brick house with a tile roof, a garden large enough for a pair of milking goats, an outdoor bread oven, a shaded patio, a pergola laced with grapevines. Klara slept at last, but Andras lay awake beside her, far from comfort. Once again, he thought, he had drawn a plan for an imaginary house, one in a long line of imaginary houses he had built since they'd been together; in his mind he could page through a deep stack of them, those ghostly blueprints of a life they had not yet lived and might never live.

On Saturday afternoons, when the weather was fine, Andras and Klara made a point of walking alone on Margaret Island for an hour or two while Polaner played with Tamas in the park. It was during those walks that they spoke of the things Andras could not write about in his brief and censored letters from Ukraine: the reasons for their deportation, and the role that The Crooked Rail The Crooked Rail may have played; the circumstances may have played; the circumstances surrounding Mendel's death; the long struggle with Jozsef afterward; and the strange conjunctions of the journey home. On the first subject, Andras's greatest fear was that Klara herself might hold him responsible for what had happened, might blame him for keeping the family from attempting its escape. She had warned him; he hadn't forgotten it for a moment. But she was at pains to reassure him that no one held him responsible for what had happened. Such an idea, she said, was a symptom of the loss of perspective caused by the Munkaszolgalat and the war. The journey to Palestine might easily have ended in disaster. His deportation may have saved them all. Now that he had returned, she was at liberty to be grateful that they'd been spared the uncertainties of the trip. To the second subject she reacted with grief and dismay, and Andras was reminded that she, too, had been present at the death of her closest friend and ally; she, too, had been witness to the senseless killing of a man she had loved since childhood. And on the third subject, she could say only that she understood what it must have required for Andras to keep from doing some great violence to Jozsef. But the time in Ukraine, and with Andras, had changed Jozsef in some deep-rooted way, she thought; he seemed a different man since his return, or perhaps he seemed finally to have become a man.

For reasons Andras found difficult to articulate, the most difficult subject was that of Zoltan Novak's death. Months of Saturday walks passed before he could tell Klara that he had been with Novak on the last days of his life, and that he had buried Novak himself. She had read of Novak's death in the newspapers and had mourned his loss before Andras's return, but she wept afresh at that news. She asked Andras to tell her everything that had happened: how he had discovered Novak, what they had said to each other, how Novak had died. When he had finished, putting matters as gently as possible and omitting many painful details, Klara offered an admission of her own: She and Novak had exchanged nearly a dozen letters during his long months of service.

They had paused in their walk at the ruin of a Franciscan church halfway up the eastern side of the island: stones that looked as though they had risen from the earth, a rose window empty of glass, Gothic windows missing their topmost points. It was December, but the day was unseasonably mild; in the shadow of the ruin stood a bench where a husband and wife might make confession, even if they were Jewish. Even if no confessor was present except each other.

"How did he write to you?" Andras asked.

"He sent letters with officers who came and went on leave."

"And you wrote back."

She folded her wet handkerchief and looked toward the empty rose window. "He was alone and bereaved. He didn't have anyone. Even his little son had died by then."

"Your letters must have been a comfort," Andras said with some effort, and followed her gaze toward the ruin. In one of the lobes of the rose window a bird had built its nest; the nest was long abandoned now, its dry grass streamers fluttering in the wind.

"I tried not to give him false hope," Klara said. "He knew the limitations of my feelings for him."

Andras had to believe her. The man he had seen in the granary in Ukraine could not have been operating under the illusion that someone was nursing a secret love for him. He was a man who had been forsaken by everything that had mattered, a man who had lived to see the ruin of all he had done on earth. "I don't begrudge him your letters,"

Andras said. "I can't blame you for anything you might have written to him. He was always good to you. He was good to both of us."

Klara put a hand on Andras's knee. "He never regretted what he did for you," she said. "He told me he'd spoken to you at the Operahaz. He said you were much kinder than you might have been. He said, in fact, that if I had to marry anyone, he was glad it was you."

Andras covered her hand with his own and looked up again at the bird's nest shivering in the rose window. He had seen architectural drawings of this church in its unruined state, its Gothic lines graceful but unremarkable, indistinguishable from those of thousands of other Gothic chapels. As a ruin it had taken on something of the extraordinary. The perfect masonry of the far wall had been laid bare; the near wall had weathered into a jagged staircase, the edges of the stones worn to velvet. The rose window was more elegant for its lack of glass, the bones of its corolla scoured by wind and bleached white in the sun. The nest with its streamers was a final unbidden touch: It was what human hands had not brought to the building, and could not remove. It was like love, he thought, this crumbling chapel: It had been complicated, and thereby perfected, by what time had done to it.