His most melancholy times that year were those he spent alone with Tibor.

Wherever they walked, whatever they did--whether they were occupying their usual table at the Artists' Cafe, or strolling the paths of the Varosliget, or standing at the railing of the Szechenyi Bridge and looking down into the twisting water--when he was with Tibor, Andras understood acutely that they were at the mercy of events beyond their control.

The Danube, which had once seemed a magic conduit along which they might slip out of Hungary, had become an ordinary river once more; Klein was in jail, their visas expired, the Trasnet Trasnet no more than the memory of a name. Before, Tibor's will had seemed to no more than the memory of a name. Before, Tibor's will had seemed to Andras an inexorable force. He had always had a preternatural talent for making the impossible come to pass. But their escape had not come to pass, and now they had no secret plan of action to balance against their fears. Tibor himself had undergone a change; he had been in the Munkaszolgalat for three years now, and like Andras he had been forced to learn its difficult lessons. He had carried a great weight since his return from the Eastern Front, it seemed to Andras--the weight of dozens of human bodies, the living and the dead, every sick or wounded man he'd cared for in the labor service and in the hospital where he'd been working in Budapest. "We couldn't save him," his stories often ended. He told Andras in detail about bleeding that couldn't be stopped, dysentery that turned men inside out, pneumonia that broke ribs and asphyxiated its victims.

And the bodies continued to accumulate, even in Budapest, far from the front lines of the war. One evening Tibor appeared at the offices of the Courier Courier and asked if and asked if Andras might want to knock off a bit early; a young man whom Tibor had tended had died a few hours earlier on the operating table, and Tibor needed a drink. Andras took his brother to a bar they had always liked, a narrow amber-lit place called the Trolley Bell.

There, over glasses of Aquincum beer, Tibor told Andras the story: The boy had been wounded months earlier in the battle of Voronezh, had taken shrapnel in both lungs and hadn't been able to breathe properly since. A risky operation to remove the fragments had severed the pulmonary artery, and the boy had died on the table. Tibor had been present in the waiting room when the doctor, a talented and well-respected surgeon named Keresztes, had delivered the news to the boy's parents. Tibor had expected cries, protests, a collapse, but the young man's mother had risen from her chair and calmly explained that her son could not be dead. She showed Keresztes the jersey she had just finished knitting for the boy. It was composed of wool that had been immersed in a well in Szentgotthard where the Blessed Virgin's face had appeared three times. She had just tied off the last stitch when the surgeon came in. She must be allowed to lay the jersey over her son; he was not dead, only in a state of deep sleep under the Virgin's watch. When Keresztes began to explain the circumstances of the boy's death, and the impossibility of his recovery, the young man's father had threatened to slit the surgeon's throat with his own scalpel if the mother were not allowed to do what she wished. The surgeon, weary from the long procedure, had escorted the parents to their son's bedside in a room near the operating theater and had left Tibor to oversee their visit with the dead boy. The mother had laid the jersey over the matrix of bandages on the boy's chest, and had commenced to pray the Rosary. But the Virgin's blessing failed to revive her son. The boy lay inert, and by the time she had reached the end of her line of beads she seemed to comprehend the situation. Her boy was gone, had died in Budapest after having survived the battle of Voronezh; nothing would bring him back now. When a nurse had come in to remove the body so the room might be used for another patient, Tibor had asked her to let the parents stay there with the boy as long as they wished. The nurse had insisted the room be cleared; the new patient would be out of surgery in a quarter of an hour. The boy's parents, understanding that they had no choice, shuffled toward the door. On the threshold, the mother had pressed the jersey into Tibor's hands. He must take it, she said, as it could no longer be of any use to her son.

Tibor opened his leather satchel now and took out the jersey, gray yarn knitted in close regular stitches. He laid it on his knees and smoothed the wool. "Do you know what the worst of it was?" he said. "When Keresztes left the room, he rolled his eyes at me.

What fools, these fanatics. I know the mother saw him." He rested his chin on his hand, regarding Andras with an expression so laced with pain as to make Andras's throat constrict. "The worst of it was, all my sympathies lay with Keresztes at that moment. I should have wanted to beat him to a pulp for rolling his eyes at a time like that, but all I could think was, My God, how long is this going to take? How soon can we get these My God, how long is this going to take? How soon can we get these people out of here?"

Andras could only nod in understanding. He knew Tibor didn't need reassurance that he was a good man, that under different circumstances his sympathies would have lain with the parents instead of with the exhausted surgeon; he and his brother had perfect comprehension of each other's minds and inward lives. Simply to have heard the story was enough. A long silence settled between them as they drank their beer. Then, finally, Tibor spoke again.

"I had a piece of good news on my way out of the hospital," he said. "One of the nurses caught it on the radio. The generals from the Delvidek massacres, FeketehalmyCzeydner and the others, are going to jail this Monday. Feketehalmy-Czeydner's in for fifteen years, I understand, and the others nearly as many. Let's hope they rot there."

Andras didn't have the heart to tell his brother the rest of that story, which he'd heard just before Tibor had arrived at the newsroom: Feketehalmy-Czeydner and the three other officers convicted in the Delvidek case, facing the start of their long prison sentences, had fled that very day to Vienna, where they'd been seen dining at a famous beer hall in the company of six Gestapo officers. The Evening Courier's Evening Courier's Viennese Viennese correspondent had been close enough to observe that the men had been eating veal sausage with peppers and toasting the health of the Supreme Commander of the Third Reich. The Fuhrer himself, it was rumored, had extended the officers a guarantee of political asylum. But Tibor would read about it soon enough in the papers. For now, Andras thought, let him have a moment of peace, if that was the word for it.

"To rotting in jail," he said, and raised his glass.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT.

Occupation IN M ARCH of 1944, not long after Klara had discovered she was pregnant again, the papers would report that Horthy had been called to Schloss Klessheim for a conference with Hitler. With him went the new minister of defense, Lajos Csatay, who had replaced Vilmos Nagy; and Ferenc Szombathelyi, chief of the General Staff. Prime Minister Kallay proclaimed to the newspapers that the Magyar nation had reason to be hopeful: What Hitler wanted to discuss was the withdrawal of Hungarian troops from the Eastern Front. Tibor speculated that this turn of events might bring Matyas home at last when all else had failed to do so.

The evening of the Klessheim conference found Andras and Jozsef at the Pineapple Club, the underground cabaret near Vorosmarty ter where Matyas had once danced on the lid of a white piano. The piano was still there; at the keyboard was Berta Turk, a vaudevillian of the old school, whose snaky coiffure called to mind a Beardsleyesque Medusa. Jozsef had received tickets to the show as payment for a housepainting job. Berta Turk had been an adolescent fad of his; he couldn't resist the chance to see her, and he insisted that Andras accompany him. He lent Andras a silk dinner jacket and outfitted himself in a tuxedo he had brought home from Paris five years earlier. For Madame Turk he had a bouquet of red hothouse roses that must have cost half his weekly earnings. He and Andras sat near the stage and drank tall narrow glasses of the club's special medicine, a rum cocktail flavored with coconut. Berta delivered her punning innuendoes in a low raw-honey voice, her eyebrows dipping and rising like a cartoon moll's. Andras liked that Jozsef-the-adolescent had fixed on this strange object of obsession instead of on some cold and voiceless beauty of the silver screen. But he found he had little heart for Berta's jokes; he was thinking of Matyas, feeling him present everywhere in that room--tapping out a jazz beat at the bar, or lounging on the lid of the piano, or laying a line of hot tin across the stage like Fred Astaire. At the break, Andras stepped outside to clear his head. The night was cool and damp, the streets full of people seeking distraction. A trio of perfumed young women brushed past him, heels clicking, evening coats swaying; from a jazz club across the way, "Bei Mir Bist Du Schon" filtered through a velvet-curtained entrance. Andras looked up past the scrolled cornice of the building to a sky illuminated by an egg-shaped moon, threads of cloud tracing illegible lines of text across its face. It seemed close enough for him to reach up and take it in his hand.

"Got a light?" a man asked him.

Andras blinked the moon away and shook his head. The man, a dark-haired young soldier in a Hungarian Army uniform, begged a match from a passerby and lit his friend's cigarette, then his own.

"It's true, I tell you," the man's friend said. "If Markus says there's going to be an occupation, there'll be an occupation."

"Your cousin's a fascist. He'd love nothing more than a German occupation. But he doesn't know what he's talking about. Horthy and Hitler are negotiating as we speak."

"Precisely! It's a distraction tactic."

Everyone had a theory; every man who had returned alive from the Eastern Front thought he knew how the war would unfold, on the large scale and the small. Every theory seemed as plausible as the last, or as implausible; every amateur military theorist believed just as fiercely that he alone he alone could beat order from the chaos of the war. Andras could beat order from the chaos of the war. Andras and Tibor, Jozsef and Polaner, were all guilty of bearing that illusion. Each had his own set of theories, and each believed the others to be hopelessly misguided. How long, Andras wondered, could they keep building arguments based on reason when the war defied reason at every turn? How long before they all fell silent? It might even be true that the Germans were carrying out an occupation of Hungary that very moment; anything might be true, anything at all. Matyas himself might be jumping from the mouth of a boxcar at Keleti Station, slinging his knapsack over his shoulder, and heading to the apartment on Nefelejcs utca.

Through a haze of coconut-scented rum, Andras drifted back inside and wandered toward their table beside the stage, where Jozsef had engaged Madame Turk's attention and was paying his compliments. Madame Turk, it seemed, was saying farewell for the evening; a piece of urgent news had made it necessary for her to leave at once. She suffered Jozsef to kiss her hand, tucked one of his roses behind her ear, and swept off across the stage.

"What was the piece of news?" Andras asked when she'd gone.

"I haven't the slightest idea," Jozsef said, afloat on his own delight. He insisted they have another round of drinks before they left, and suggested they take a cab home.

But when Andras reminded him what he'd already spent that evening, Jozsef allowed himself to be led to the streetcar stop on Vamhaz korut, where a noisy crowd had gathered to wait for the tram.

By that time everyone seemed to have heard the same set of rumors: A transport of SS troops, somewhere between five hundred and a thousand of them, had arrived at a station near the capital, were marching east, and would soon breach the city limits.

Armored and motorized German divisions were said to have advanced into Hungary from every direction; the airports at Ferihegy and Debrecen had been occupied. When the streetcar arrived, the ticket girl proclaimed loudly that if any German soldier tried to board her her car, she'd spit in his face and tell him where to go. A bawdy cheer rose from car, she'd spit in his face and tell him where to go. A bawdy cheer rose from the passengers. Someone started singing "Isten, ald meg a Magyart," and then everyone was shouting the national anthem as the streetcar rolled down Vamhaz korut.

Andras and Jozsef listened in silence. If the rumors were true, if a German occupation was under way, Kallay's government wouldn't last the night; Andras could well imagine the kind of regime that would replace it. For six years now, he and the rest of the world had been receiving a lesson in German occupation and its effects. But what could be the purpose of an occupation now? The war was as good as lost for Germany.

Everyone knew that. On all fronts, Hitler's armies were close to collapse. Where would he even find the troops necessary to carry out an occupation? The Hungarian military wouldn't take kindly to the idea of German command. There might be armed resistance, a patriotic backlash. The generals of the Honvedseg would never submit without a fight, not after Hitler had thrown away so many Hungarian lives on the Eastern Front.

At their stop, Andras and Jozsef got off and stood on the pavement, looking up and down the street as if for some sign of the Wehrmacht. Saturday night seemed to be proceeding as before. Cabs tore along the boulevard with their cargos of partygoers, and the sidewalks were full of men and women in evening clothes.

"Are we supposed to believe this?" Andras said. "Am I supposed to bring this news home to Klara?"

"If it's true, I'll bet the army will put up a fight."

"I was thinking that, too. But even if they do, how long can it last?"

Jozsef took out his cigarette case, and, finding it empty, drew a narrow silver flask from his breast pocket. He took a long pull, then offered it to Andras.

Andras shook his head. "I've had enough to drink," he said, and turned toward home. They walked up Wesselenyi to Nefelejcs utca, then turned and said a grim goodnight at the doorstep, promising to see each other in the morning.

Upstairs in the darkened apartment, Tamas had joined Klara in bed, his spine nestled against her belly. When Andras climbed into bed with them, Tamas turned over and backed up against him, his bottom needling into Andras's gut, his feet hot against Andras's thigh. Klara sighed in her sleep. Andras put an arm around them both, wide awake, and lay for hours listening to their breathing.

At seven o'clock the next morning they woke to a pounding at the door. It was Jozsef, hatless and coatless, his shirtsleeves stained with blood. His father had just been arrested by the Gestapo. Klara's mother had fallen into a dead faint moments after the men had taken Gyorgy, and had struck her head on a coal fender; Elza was on the verge of nervous collapse. Andras must get Tibor at once, and Klara must come with Jozsef.

In the confused moments that followed, Klara insisted that it couldn't have been the Gestapo, that Jozsef must have been mistaken. As he pulled on his boots, Andras had to tell her that it could in fact have been the Gestapo, that the city had been burning with rumors of a German occupation the night before. Andras ran to Tibor's apartment and Klara to the Haszes'; a quarter of an hour later they were assembled around the bed of the elder Mrs. Hasz, who had by then regained consciousness and insisted upon relating what had happened before her fall. Two Gestapo men had arrived at half past six that morning, had dragged Gyorgy from his bed in his nightclothes, had shouted at him in German, and had pushed him into an armored car and taken him away. That was when she had lost her balance and taken a fall. She put a hand to her head, where a rectangle of gauze covered a gash from the fireplace fender.

"Why Gyorgy?" she said. "Why would they take him? What did he do?"

No one could answer her. And within a few hours they began to hear of other arrests: a former colleague of Gyorgy's from the bank; the Jewish vice president of a bond-trading company; a prominent Leftist writer, a non-Jew, who had authored a bitter anti-Nazi pamphlet; three of Miklos Kallay's closest advisors; and a liberal member of parliament, Endre Bajcsy-Zsilinszky, who had met the Gestapo with a pistol in hand and had engaged them in a firefight before he'd been wounded and dragged away. That night Jozsef took the risk of going to inquire at the jail on Margit korut, where political prisoners were held, but was told only that his father was in German custody, and would be held until it could be proved that he didn't constitute a threat to the occupation.

That was Sunday. By Monday the order had come for all Jewish citizens of Budapest to deliver their radios and telephones-- volunteer volunteer was the word the Nazis used-to an office of the Ministry of Defense at Szabadsag ter. By Wednesday it was decreed was the word the Nazis used-to an office of the Ministry of Defense at Szabadsag ter. By Wednesday it was decreed that any Jewish person who owned a car or bicycle had to sell it to the government for use in the war-- sell sell was the word the Nazis used, but there was no money exchanged; the was the word the Nazis used, but there was no money exchanged; the Nazis distributed payment vouchers that were soon discovered to be irredeemable for real currency. By Friday there were notices posted all over town notifying Jews that by April fifth they would be required to wear the yellow star. Soon afterward, the rumor began to circulate that the prominent Jews who had been arrested would be deported to labor camps in Germany. Klara went to the bank to withdraw what was left of their savings, hoping they might bribe someone into releasing Gyorgy. But she found she could get no more than a thousand pengo all Jewish accounts had been frozen. The next day a new German order required Jews to surrender all jewelry and gold items. Klara and her mother and Elza gave up a few cheap pieces, hid their wedding bands and engagement rings in a pillowcase at the bottom of the flour bin, and packed the rest into velvet pouches, which Jozsef carried to the Margit korut prison to plead for his father's release.

The guards confiscated the jewelry, beat Jozsef black and blue, and threw him into the street.

On the twentieth of April, Tibor lost his position at the hospital. Andras and Polaner were dismissed from the Evening Courier Evening Courier and informed that they wouldn't find and informed that they wouldn't find work at any daily paper in town. Jozsef, employed informally and paid under the table, went on with his painting business, but his list of clients began to shrink. By the first week of May, signs had gone up in the windows of shops and restaurants, cafes and movie theaters and public baths, declaring that Jews were not welcome. Andras, coming home one afternoon from the park with Tamas, stopped short on the sidewalk across from their neighborhood bakery. In the window was a sign almost identical to the one he'd seen at the bakery in Stuttgart seven years earlier. But this sign was written in Hungarian, his own language, and this was his own street, the street where he lived with his wife and son. Struck faint, he sat down on the curb with Tamas and stared across the way into the lighted window of the shop. All looked ordinary there: the girl in her white cap, the glossy loaves and pastries in the case, the gold curlicues of the bakery's name. Tamas pointed and said the name of the pastry he liked, makos keksz makos keksz. Andras had to tell him that there would be no makos keksz makos keksz that day. So much had become forbidden, and so quickly. that day. So much had become forbidden, and so quickly.

Even being out on the streets was dangerous. There was a new five o'clock curfew for Jews; those who failed to comply could be arrested or shot. Andras pulled out his father's pocket watch, as familiar now as if it were a part of his own body. Ten minutes to five.

He got to his feet and picked up his son, and when he reached home, Klara met him at the door with his call-up notice in her hand.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE.

Farewell THIS TIME they were together, Andras and Jozsef and Tibor; Polaner had been exempted, thanks to his false identity papers and medical-status documents. The labor battalions had been regrouped. Three hundred and sixty-five new companies had been added. Because Andras and Jozsef and Tibor lived in the same district, they had all been assigned to the 55/10th. Their send-off had been like a funeral at which the dead, the three young men, had been piled with goods to take into the next world. As much food as they could carry. Warm clothes. Woolen blankets. Vitamin pills and rolls of bandage.

And in Tibor's pack, drugs pilfered from the hospital where he had worked. Anticipating their call-up, he had felt no compunction about laying aside vials of antibiotic and morphine, packets of suture, sterile needles and scissors and clamps: a kit of tools he prayed he wouldn't have to use.

Klara had not been with them at the train station for their departure. Andras had said goodbye to her that morning at home, in their bedroom at Nefelejcs utca. The first nine weeks of her pregnancy had passed without event, but in the tenth she was seized with a violent nausea that began every morning at three o'clock and lasted almost until noon. That morning she'd been sick for hours; Andras had stayed with her as she bent over the toilet bowl and dry-heaved until her face streamed with tears. She begged him to go to bed, to get some sleep before he had to face the ordeal of his journey, but he wouldn't do it, wouldn't have left her side for anything in the world. At six in the morning her strength broke. Shaking with exhaustion, she cried and cried until she lost her voice.

It was intolerable, she whispered, impossible, that Andras could be here with her one day, intact and safe, and the next be taken away to the hell from which he'd come last spring.

Given to her and taken away. Given and taken away. When so much of what she'd loved had been taken away. He couldn't remember a time when she had stated her fear, her sense of desolation, so plainly. Even at their worst times in Paris, she had held something back; something had been hidden from him, some essential part of her being that she'd had to guard in order to survive the ordeals of her adolescence, her early motherhood, her solitary young womanhood. Since they'd been married, there had been the necessary holding back imposed by their circumstances. But now, in the vulnerability of her pregnancy, with Andras on the verge of departure and Hungary in the hands of the Nazis, she had lost the strength to defend her reserve.

She cried and cried, beyond consolation, beyond caring whether anyone heard; as he rocked her in his arms he had the sense that he was watching her mourn him--that he had already died and was witnessing her grief. He stroked her damp hair and said her name over and over again, there on the bathroom floor, feeling, strangely, as if they were finally married, as if what had existed between them before had only been preparation for this deeper and more painful connection. He kissed her temple, her cheekbone, the wet margin of her ear. And then he wept, too, at the thought of leaving her alone to face what might come.

At dawn, just before he had to dress, he took her to bed and slid in beside her. "I won't do it," he said. "They'll have to drag me away from you."

"I'll be fine," she tried to tell him. "My mother will be with me. And Ilana, and Elza. And Polaner."

"Tell my son his father loves him," Andras said. "Tell him that every night." He took his father's pocket watch from the nightstand and pressed it into Klara's palm. "I want him to have this, when it's time."

"No," she said. "Don't do that. You'll give it to him yourself." She folded it into his own hand. And then it was morning, and he had to go.

Again the boxcars. Again the darkness and the pressure of men. Here was Jozsef beside him, inevitable; and Tibor, his brother, his scent as familiar as their childhood bed.

This time they were headed, as if into the past, toward Debrecen. Andras knew exactly what was passing outside: the hills melting into flatlands, the fields, the farms. But now the fields, if they were worked, were worked by forced-labor companies; the farmers and their sons were all at war. The patient horses shied at the unfamiliar voices of their drivers. The dogs barked at the strangers, never growing accustomed to their scent. The women watched the workers with suspicion and kept their daughters inside. Maglod, Tapiogyorgy, Ujszasz, those one-street towns whose train stations still bore geraniums in window boxes: They had been stripped of their Christian men of military age, and their Jewish men of labor-service age, and would soon be stripped of the rest of their Jewish inhabitants. Already the concentrations and deportations had begun--deportations, when Horthy had vowed never to deport. Dome Sztojay was prime minister now, and he was doing what the Germans had told him to do. Concentrate the Jews of the small towns in ghettoes in the larger towns. Count them carefully. Make lists. Tell them they were needed for a great labor project in the east; hold out the promise of resettlement, of a better life elsewhere. Instruct them each to pack a single suitcase. Bring them to the rail yard. Load them onto trains. The trains left daily for the west, returned empty, and were filled again; an unspeakable dread settled over those who remained and waited. The few, like Polaner, who had already been inside German camps and had lived to tell about them, knew there was to be no resettlement. They knew the purpose of those camps; they knew the product of the great labor project. They told their stories and were disbelieved.

For Andras and Tibor and Jozsef, the four-hour trip to Debrecen took three days.

The train stopped at the platforms of the little towns; in some places they could hear other boxcars being coupled to their own, more work servicemen being fed into the combustion engine of the war. No food or water except what they'd brought. No place to relieve themselves except the can at the back of the car. Long before they pulled into the station at Debrecen, Andras recognized the pattern of track-switching that characterized the approach. In the semidarkness, Tibor's eyes met Andras's and held them. Andras knew he was thinking of their parents, who had withstood so many departures, who had already lost one son and whose two remaining sons were now headed toward the fighting again.

Two weeks earlier, Bela and Flora had been locked into a ghetto that happened to contain their building on Simonffy utca. There had been no way, no time, to say goodbye. Now Andras and Tibor were at Debrecen Station, not fifteen minutes' walk from that ghetto, if there had been any way to get off the train, and any way to walk through the city without being shot.

The boxcar sat on its track in Debrecen all night. It was too dark for Andras to read his father's pocket watch; there was no way to determine how late it was, how many hours until morning. They couldn't know whether they would leave that day or be forced to remain in the reeking dark while more cars were hitched to theirs, more men loaded aboard. They took turns sitting; they drowsed and woke. And then, in the stillest hour of the night, they heard footsteps on the gravel outside the car. Not the heavy tread of the guards, but tentative footsteps; then a quiet knocking on the side of the boxcar.

"Fredi Paszternak?"

"Geza Mohr?"

"Semyon Kovacs?"

No one responded. Everyone was awake now, everyone stilled with fear. If these seekers were caught, they would be killed. Everyone knew the consequences.

After a moment the footsteps moved on. More seekers approached. Rubin Gold?

Gyorgy Toronyi? The names came in a steady stream; soft excited voices could be heard from a nearby car, where someone had found who they were looking for. And then, in the next wave of seekers, Andras Levi? Tibor Levi?

Andras and Tibor rushed to the side of the car and called to their parents in hushed voices: Anyu, Apu. The diminutive forms not used since childhood. Andras and Tibor made young again in their extremity, by the impossible closeness and untouchability of their mother, Flora; their father, Bela. Inside the boxcar, men pushed aside to give them room, a measure of privacy in that packed enclosure.

"Andi! Tibi!" Their mother's voice, desperate with pain and relief.

"But how did you get here?" Tibor asked.

"Your father bribed a policeman," their mother said. "We had an official escort."

"Are you all right, boys?" Their father's voice again, asking a question whose answer was already known, and to which Andras and Tibor could only respond with a lie.

"Do you know where they're sending you?"

They did not.

There was little time to talk. Little time for Bela and Flora to do what they had come to do. A package appeared at the bars of the single high window, looped to a metal hook with a length of brown twine. The package, too large to fit through the window bars, had to be lowered again and broken down into its components. Two woolen sweaters. Two scarves. Tight-wrapped packages of food. A packet of money: two thousand pengo. How had they saved it? How had they kept it hidden? And two pairs of sturdy boots, which had to be left behind; no way to pass them through the window.

Then their father's voice again, saying the prayer for travel.

Flora and Bela hurried through the darkened streets toward home, each carrying a pair of sturdy boots. Behind them, with a hand on their shoulders as though they were under arrest, was the bribed policeman, a former member of Bela's chess club, who had arranged for them to slip out through a cellar that joined two buildings, one inside the ghetto, one out. Others had slipped out in the same manner and returned safely, though some had failed to return and had not been heard from again. They were entirely at the mercy of this policeman with whom Bela had shared a few chess matches, a few glasses of beer. But they had little fear of what might happen now, little fear of being turned over to a less sympathetic member of the Debrecen police; now that they had delivered the food, the sweaters, the money, had exchanged a few words with the boys, had given them their blessing, what else mattered? What a waste it would have been to be caught with the packages in hand, but they'd been lucky; the streets had been nearly empty when they'd left the ghetto. Bela's intelligence sources, a rail-yard foreman of his long acquaintance and the bartender called Rudolf, had both proved reliable. The train was there, just where it was supposed to be, and the guards at the train yard engaged in a drinking party for which Rudolf had supplied the beer. Rudolf had remembered Andras from his visit to the beer hall, the evening when he had quarreled with his father over the choice of Klara.

What a luxury it had been, Lucky Bela thought, to have had the time and inclination for a quarrel. He had admired his son's defense of his choice of wife. In the end he had been right, too: Klara had been a good match for him--as good, it seemed, as Flora had been for Bela. Lucky. Yes, he was lucky, even now. Flora was there at his side, the policeman's hand on her shoulder--his wife, the mother of his sons, willing to risk her life for them in the middle of the night, despite his protests; unwilling to allow him to go alone.

At last the policeman delivered them to the courtyard that led to the cellar. With an antiquated and incongruous politeness, he held the door as they entered that tunnel back to their enclosed lives. Before long they had reached their own building and climbed the stairs to their apartment, where they undressed in the dark without a word. There would only be a few hours to sleep before they would rise to the circumscribed business of their day. In bed, Flora pulled the coverlet to her chin and let out a sigh. There was nothing more they could say to each other, nothing more to do. Their boys, their babies.

The little three, as they'd always called them. The little three adrift on the continent, like wooden boats. Flora turned over and put her head on Lucky Bela's chest, and he stroked the silver length of her hair.

For another few weeks they would share this bed while the Jews of Hajdu County were massed in Debrecen. Then, on a late June morning, as the nasturtium vine opened its trumpets on the veranda and the white goats bleated in the courtyard, they would descend the stairs, each with a single suitcase, and walk with their neighbors through the ghetto gates, down the familiar city streets, all the way to the Serly Brickyards west of town, where they would be loaded onto a train almost identical to the one that had carried their sons to no one knew where. The train would roll west, through the stations with the window boxes full of geraniums; it would roll west through Budapest. Then it would roll north, and north, and farther north, until its doors opened at Auschwitz.

The train carrying Andras and Tibor and Jozsef rolled east to the edge of the country. There, in a Carpatho-Ruthenian town whose name would change twice as it became part of Czechoslovakia again and then part of the Soviet Union, they were escorted by armed guards to a camp three kilometers from the Tisza River. Their task would be to load timber onto barges for transport through Hungary and on toward Austria. They were assigned to a windowless bunkhouse with five rows of three-tiered bunks; outside, along the edge of the building, was a line of open sinks where they could wash. That evening at dinnertime they drank a coffee that was not coffee, ate a soup that was not soup, and received ten decagrams of gritty bread, which Tibor made them save for the next day. It was the fifth of June, a mild night redolent of rain and new grass. The fighting had not yet reached the nearby border. They were permitted to sit outside after dinner; a man who'd brought a violin played Gypsy tunes while another man sang.

Andras could not know--and none of them would learn, not for months--that later the same night, a fleet of Allied ships would reach the coast of Normandy, and thousands of troops would struggle ashore under a hail of gunfire. Even if they'd known, they wouldn't have dared to hope that the Allied invasion of France might save a Hungarian labor company from the terrors of the German occupation, or keep their own bend of the Tisza from being bombed while they were loading the barges. Even if they'd known of the invasion, they would have known better than to attempt to determine one set of circumstances from another, to trace neat lines of causality between a beach at Viervillesur-Mer and a forced labor camp in Carpatho-Ruthenia. They knew their situation; they knew what to be grateful for. When Andras lay down that night on his wooden bunk, with Tibor on the tier above and Jozsef below, he thought only: Today at least we're together. Today we are alive.

CHAPTER FORTY.

Nightmare IN THE END, what astonished him most was not the vastness of it all--that was impossible to take in, the hundreds of thousands of dead from Hungary alone, and the millions from all over Europe--but the excruciating smallness, the pinpoint upon which every life was balanced. The scale might be tipped by the tiniest of things: the lice that carried typhus, the few thimblefuls of water that remained in a canteen, the dust of breadcrumbs in a pocket. On the tenth of January, at the cold disordered dawn of 1945, Andras lay on the floor of a boxcar in a Hungarian quarantine camp a few kilometers from the Austrian border. The nearby town was Sopron, with its famous Goat Church. A vague childhood memory--an art-history lesson, a white-haired master with a moustache like the disembodied wings of a dove, an image of the carved stone chancel where Ferdinand III had been crowned King of Hungary. According to the legend, a goat had unearthed an ancient treasure on that site; the treasure had been buried again when the church was built, as a tribute to the Virgin Mary. And so, somewhere up the hill, beneath the church whose blackened spire was visible from where he lay, an ancient treasure moldered; and here in the quarantine camp, three thousand men were dying of typhus.

Andras climbed into the swirling heights of a fever through which his thoughts proceeded in carnival costume. He remembered, vaguely, having been told that the quarantined men were supposed to consider themselves lucky. Those not infected had been shipped over the Austrian border to labor camps.

Some facts he could grasp. He counted these certainties like marbles in a bag, each with its twist of blood-or sea-colored glass. Their bend of the Tisza had, in fact, been bombed. It had happened on an unseasonably warm night in late October, nearly five months after they'd arrived at the camp. He remembered crouching in the darkness with Tibor and Jozsef, the walls shuddering as shock waves rolled through the earth; only by an act of grace, it seemed, had their building remained intact. Thirty-three men had been crushed in another bunkhouse when it collapsed. Six bargemen and half a company of Hungarian soldiers, quartered that night on the riverbank, had all been killed. The 55/10th, in tatters, had fled west ahead of the advancing Soviet Army. For weeks their guards had shuffled them from one town to another, quartering them in peasants' huts or barns or in the open fields, as the war rumbled and flared, always a few kilometers away.

By that time Hungary had fallen into the hands of the Arrow Cross. Horthy had proved too difficult for Germany to control; under pressure from the Allies he had stopped the deportations of Jews, and on the eleventh of October he'd covertly negotiated a separate peace agreement with the Kremlin. When he announced the armistice a few days later, Hitler had forced him to abdicate and had exiled him to Germany with his family. The armistice was nullified. Ferenc Szalasi, the Arrow Cross leader, became prime minister.

The news reached the labor servicemen in the form of new regulations: They were now to be treated not as forced laborers, but as prisoners of war.

Those things Andras remembered in detail. More confusing was what had passed between then and now. Through the haze of his fever he tried and tried to remember what had happened to Tibor. He remembered, weeks or months earlier, fleeing with Tibor and Jozsef along a road west of Trebisov on a bright day, pursued by the sound of Russian tanks and Russian gunfire. They'd been separated from their company; Jozsef had been sick and couldn't keep up. German jeeps and armored cars shot along the road beside them. Approaching from behind, an earthquake: Russians in their rolling fortresses, guns blazing. As they fled along the road, Jozsef had stumbled into the path of a German armored car. He'd been thrown into a ditch, his leg twisted into an angle that was--the fevered Andras grasped in darkness for the word-- unrealistic unrealistic. It was unrealistic; it did not represent life. A leg did not bend in that way, or in that direction, in relation to a man's body. When Andras reached him, Jozsef was open-eyed, breathing fast and shallow; he seemed in a state of strange exultation, as though in one quick stroke he'd been vindicated on a point he'd argued fruitlessly for years. Tibor bent beside him and put a careful hand to the leg, and Jozsef released an unforgettable sound: a grating three-toned shriek that seemed to crack the dome of the sky. Tibor drew back and gave Andras a look of despair: He was out of morphine, the supplies he'd hoarded in Budapest exhausted by now.

Moments later, it seemed, an olive-colored van had appeared, Austrian Wehrmacht flags fluttering at its bumpers, a red cross painted on its side. Andras tore the yellow armband from his sleeve, from Jozsef's, from Tibor's; now they were just three men in a ditch, without identity. Austrian medics arrived, judged them all in need of immediate medical care, and loaded them into the van. Soon they were moving along the road at an incredible rate of speed--still fleeing before the Russians, Andras imagined. Then there was a burst of deafening noise, a brilliant explosion. The canvas of the van tore away, floor became ceiling, a tire traced an arc against a backdrop of clouds. A jolt of impact. A thrumming silence. From somewhere close by, Jozsef calling for his father, of all people.