"We were a tribal people before we were Hungarians," Tibor said. "Don't forget that."
"Pardon me, Doctor," Jozsef said. He liked to call Tibor "Doctor" as much as he liked to call Andras "Uncle." "And before that we were hunters and gatherers in Africa.
So perhaps we should bypass the Holy Land altogether and proceed directly to the darkest Congo."
"Jozsef," Gyorgy said.
"A thousand pardons, Father. I'm sure you'd rather I kept quiet. But it's hard, you know, to be the only sane person in the asylum."
Bela shifted in his delicate chair, feeling the pull of his city suit against his shoulders. He was thinking that he would have liked to take the younger Hasz by the shoulders and shake him. He wondered how the boy could dare speak so flippantly about what was about to befall Andras and Tibor and their wives and sons. If one of his own sons had spoken that way, Bela would have risen from his chair and given him a good tongue-lashing, even before guests. But he would never have raised a child who spoke that way. Not he, nor Flora. She put a hand on his wrist now as if she could see what was in his mind; he wasn't surprised she understood. Everyone could see that the boy was intolerable. At least Klara's mother had spoken to him sternly. Bela looked across the table at her, that grave gray-eyed woman who had lost and regained her child once already and now seemed stoic at the prospect of losing her again. They had raised fine children, this woman and Bela and Flora. He didn't wonder anymore at the connection between Andras and Klara; he knew now that they were made of the same stuff, whatever luxuries the girl had had as a child. There she was, sitting calm as grass with the baby in her arms, looking as though she were about to take a trip to the countryside rather than down a dangerous river and across a torpedo-salted sea. He told himself to take note of that tranquil look of hers, that radiant calm; in the days and weeks ahead he would want to remember it.
...
That week, their last in Budapest, was the hottest yet of the summer. On Thursday the bus to Szentendre was stifling even at six in the morning; this was the kind of day Andras's mother called gombas-ido-- mushroom-growing weather. A damp wind blew through the channel of the Danube. Birds hustled through the wet turbulence of air, and the trees across the water flashed the white undersides of their leaves. All that week, it seemed, the command ranks at Szentendre had been out of sorts. The same foremen who'd failed to take note of the subtle slackening of work now began to drive the laborers relentlessly. Ill temper seemed to have spread through the camp like a fever. There had been a series of arguments in the officers' headquarters between Major Varsadi and the black-market inspectors, with the result that Varsadi had unleashed a rare storm of anger upon his lieutenants; the lieutenants had behaved vilely to the guards and work foremen, and the foremen, in turn, swore at the labor servicemen, kicked them, and sliced at their backs and legs with doubled lengths of packing rope.
That morning there was to be an inspection lineup before work began. The men had been instructed in advance that their uniforms and equipment were to be in top shape.
Beginning at seven o'clock, the men were made to stand at attention beside the tracks for what seemed an interminable length of time. Rain began to fall, a barrage of fat hard drops that penetrated the fabric of the men's clothing. The waiting went on and on; the guards paced the rows of men, as bored as their charges.
"What a waste of time," Jozsef said. "Why don't they just send us home?"
"Hear hear," Mendel said. "Cut us loose."
"Quiet there, both of you," a guard called to them.
Andras kept an eye on the low brick building that housed Varsadi's headquarters.
Through a steam-hazed window he could make out the commander holding a phone receiver to his ear. Andras rocked back and forth from his heels to the balls of his feet; he studied the stippling of rain on the back of the man in front of him. In his mind he reviewed the tasks that lay ahead in next few days: the final packing, the rechecking of their lists of clothing and supplies, the tying up and locking of the suitcases, the departure from their apartment on Nefelejcs utca, the midnight meeting at Tibor's, the walk to the point just north of the Erzsebet Bridge where a barge would be waiting, their consignment to the damp dark hiding place where they would huddle together as the barge slipped into the current. He was there in his mind, so thoroughly hidden in the hold of that Danube barge, that at first he didn't notice the rumble of trucks on the road. He felt a low vibration in his sternum and thought, More thunder. But the rumble continued and increased, and when he looked up at last he saw a six-truck convoy bearing Hungarian soldiers. The trucks roared through the gates of Szentendre Yard, their tires turning up dry dust beneath the rain-damp surface of the road. They parked on the bare stretch of earth that lay between the tracks and the officers' building. The soldiers in back carried rifles fixed with bayonets; Andras could see the blades glinting in the olive-colored gloom of the canvas enclosures. When the trucks stopped, the soldiers jumped out onto the muddy gravel and held their weapons loosely at their sides. The officers in the first truck went into the low brick building, and the door closed behind them.
The work servicemen eyed the soldiers. There must have been fifty of them at least. With their officers occupied inside headquarters, the soldiers leaned their rifles against the trucks and began to smoke. One of them pulled out a deck of cards and dealt poker. Another group of men clustered around a newspaper while one of the soldiers read the headlines aloud.
"What's going on?" whispered the man beside Andras, a tall hairless man who had been dubbed the Ivory Tower. He had been a history professor at the university; like Zoltan Novak he had been recruited to the Munkaszolgalat to fill a quota of Jewish luminaries. He was new to the work service, and had not yet learned to accept its mysteries and contradictions without protest.
"I don't know," Andras said. "We'll find out."
"Silence in the lines!" shouted a guard.
The wait continued. Some of the guards drifted toward the soldiers to trade cigarettes and news. A few of them seemed to know each other. They slapped each other on the back and shook hands. Another half hour passed, and still no one emerged from the headquarters. Finally the guards' captain gave the command for the labor servicemen to be at ease. They could eat or smoke if they wanted. Andras and Mendel sat down on a damp railroad tie and opened their tin lunch pails, and Jozsef drew a slim leather case from his breast pocket and extracted a cigarette.
A moment later, the door of the squat brick building opened and the officers emerged--first the army officers in their crisp brass-buttoned uniforms, then the familiar Munkaszolgalat officers who had commanded them since the beginning of their time at Szentendre. Varsadi's first lieutenant blew a whistle and ordered the servicemen to stand at attention. There was a moment of rustling confusion as the men put away their lunches.
Then the sergeant shouted his orders: The men were to form ranks at the supply trucks and move the goods to the boxcars as quickly as possible.
If it hadn't been for the presence of the soldiers, their bayonets needling skyward as if to pierce the underbellies of the low-hanging clouds, it would have seemed like any other afternoon at Szentendre Yard. The 79/6th carried crates of ammunition across the same expanse of gravel they'd crossed and recrossed a thousand times. If the guards kept a tighter rein on the men, if the officers were more strident as they shouted their orders, it seemed only an extension of the animus that had permeated the command ranks all week.
Farago, their foreman, failed to whistle a single show tune; instead he shouted Siessetek!
in his thin tenor and wondered aloud how he'd been cursed with the command of such slugs, such turtles.
Halfway through the unloading, when there were still five supply trucks' worth of goods to be transferred to the train, an adjutant of Varsadi's approached Andras's work group and drew Farago aside. A moment later, Farago was calling Andras and Mendel from their duties. The company commander, it seemed, wanted a word with them in his offic
e.
Mendel and Andras exchanged a look: It's nothing. Don't panic.
"Did the fellow say what it was about, sir?" Mendel asked, though there was only one thing it could be about, only one reason for the commander to call the two of them to his office.
"You'll find out soon enough," Farago said. And then, to the adjutant, "See they get back here as soon as Varsadi's finished with them. I can't spare them for long."
The major's young adjutant led them across the rail yard toward the low brick building. A clutch of armed soldiers stood at attention in the anteroom, rifles angled against their shoulders. Their eyes moved toward Andras and Mendel as they entered, but otherwise they remained still as sculptures. An orderly ushered Andras and Mendel into Varsadi's office and closed the door behind them, and they found themselves standing unaccompanied before their commander. Varsadi's uniform shirt was crisp despite the heat, his eyes narrow behind a pair of demilune glasses. On his desk, as Andras knew it would be, was a complete set of The Crooked Rail.
"Well, then," Varsadi said, straightening the pages before him. "I'll be brief. You know I like you boys and your newspaper. It's given the men a good laugh. But I'm afraid it's not--er--opportune to have it circulating at the moment."
Andras experienced a moment of confusion. He had believed this meeting was to be about the resistance he and Mendel had stirred up. The quickened pace of work, the shift in the foremen's attitude, had pointed in that direction. But Varsadi wasn't accusing them of agitating. He seemed only to be asking them to stop publishing.
"The paper's not really circulating, sir," Mendel said. "Not beyond the 79/6th."
"You've made fifty copies of each issue," Varsadi said. "The men take them home. Some of those copies might find their way out into the city. And then there's the matter of printing, the matter of your plates and originals. This is a sharp-looking paper. I know you're not hand-cranking copies at home."
Andras and Mendel exchanged the briefest of looks, and Mendel said, "We destroy the printing plates each week, sir. The circulation copies are all there are."
"I understand you were both recently employed at the Budapest Jewish Journal. If we were to inquire there, or take a look around, we wouldn't happen to find...?"
"You can look wherever you like, sir," Mendel said. "There's nothing to find."
Andras watched with a kind of dreamlike detachment as the commander opened his desk drawer, removed a small revolver, and held it loosely in his hand. The body of the gun was velvet black, the muzzle snub-nosed. "There can't be any mistake about this,"
Varsadi said. "Fifty copies of each paper. That's enough uncertainty in this equation. I need your originals and your printing plates. I need to know where those things are kept."
"We've destroyed--" Mendel began again, but his eyes flicked toward the gun.
"You're lying," Varsadi said, matter-of-factly. "I don't like that, after the leniency I've shown you." He turned the gun over and ran a thumb along the safety. "I need the truth, and then you'll be on your way. You printed this paper at the Budapest Jewish Journal. Can we find your originals there? I ask, gentlemen, because the only other place I can think to search is your homes. And I would prefer not to disturb your families." The words hung in the air between them as he polished the revolver with his thumb.
Andras saw it all: The apartment on Nefelejcs ransacked, every paper and book thrown onto the floor, every cabinet emptied, the sofa disemboweled, the walls and floorboards torn open. All the preparations for their trip to Palestine laid bare to official scrutiny. And Klara, huddled in a corner, or held by the wrists--How? By whom?--as the baby wailed. He met Mendel's eyes again and understood that Mendel had seen it, too, and had made his decision. If Andras himself didn't tell the truth, Mendel would. And in fact, a moment later, Mendel spoke.
"The originals are at the Journal, " he said. "One copy of each issue, in a filing cabinet in the chief editor's office. No need to disturb anyone's family. We don't keep anything at home."
"Very good," said Varsadi. He replaced the gun in the desk drawer. "That's all I need from you now. Dismissed," he said, and waved a hand toward the door.
They moved as if through some viscous liquid, not looking at each other. They had compromised Frigyes Eppler, his person, his position; they both knew it. There was no telling what the consequences might be, or what price Eppler would be made to pay.
Outside, they found that the entire company had been moved to the assembly ground, where they stood now at uncomfortable attention. As Andras took his place in line, Jozsef threw him a look of frank curiosity. But there was no time to enlighten him; it seemed that the promised inspection was now to occur. The soldiers who had arrived that morning had dispersed themselves along the edge of the assembly ground, and the officers who had conferred with Varsadi stood at the head of the formation. When Andras looked across the expanse of gravel to the far edge of the field, he found that soldiers had lined up there as well. In front of Varsadi's headquarters, soldiers. Along the tracks behind them, more soldiers. All at once he understood: The 79/6th had been corralled, surrounded. The soldiers who had been smoking and laughing with the guards now stood at attention with their hands on their rifles, their eyes fixed at that dangerous military middle distance, the place from which it was impossible to recognize another human being.
Varsadi emerged from the low brick building, his back erect, his medals flashing in the afternoon sun. "Into your lines," he shouted. "Marching formation."
Andras told himself to keep calm. They were half an hour from Budapest. This wasn't the Delvidek. It was likely Varsadi meant to do nothing more than to scare them, make a show of control, correct for the laxity of his command. At his order the 79/6th marched out of the assembly ground and along the tracks, toward the south gate of the rail yard. The soldiers kept their lines tight around the block of work servicemen. They all stopped when they reached the end of the row of boxcars.
Three empty cars had been coupled to the end of the train, their sides emblazoned with the Munkaszolgalat acronym. Over the small, high windows of the boxcars, iron bars had been installed. The doors stood open as if in expectation. Far ahead, beyond the cars that had just been loaded with supplies, an engine exhaled brown smoke.
"At attention, men," Varsadi shouted. "Your orders have been changed. Your services are needed elsewhere. You will leave immediately. Your duties have become classified. We cannot give you further information."
There was a burst of incredulous protest from the men, a sudden din of shouting.
"Silence," the commander cried. "Silence! Silence at once!" He raised his pistol and fired it into the air. The men fell silent.
"Pardon me, sir," Jozsef said. He stood just a few feet from Andras, close enough for Andras to see a narrow vein pumping at his temple. "As I recall, the KMOF Rules of Duty Handbook says we've got to have a week's notice before any change of posting.
And if you don't mind my mentioning it, we've hardly got the supplies."
Major Varsadi strode toward Jozsef, pistol in hand. He took the gun by its short muzzle and delivered two swift blows with the butt-end across Jozsef's face. A bright stuttering dart of blood appeared on the shoulder of Andras's uniform.
"Take my advice and shut your mouth," Varsadi said. "Where you're going, you'd be shot for less."
The major gave another order; the soldiers tightened their lines around the labor servicemen and squeezed them toward the train cars. Andras found himself jammed between Mendel and Jozsef. Behind them was a crush of men. They had no choice but to climb into the open mouth of the boxcar. Through the single high window Andras could see the soldiers in a line around the cars, the dull glint of their bayonets against the marbled sky. More and more servicemen were pushed into the cars until the air seemed to be made of them. Andras inhaled wet canvas and hair oil and sweat, the smell of the morning's work cut with the tang of panic. His heart drummed in his ribcage, and his throat closed with terror. Klara would be home n
ow, packing the last of their things. In an hour she would begin to look at the clock. He had to get off the train. He would plead illness; he would offer a bribe. He shoved and elbowed his way toward the door again, but before he could reach that rectangle of light there was an all-clear cry. Then the rattle of the door sliding closed, the descent of darkness, the sound of a chain against metal, the unmistakable click of a padlock.
A moment later the train whistle let out an indifferent screech. Through the wooden floorboards, through the soles of his summer boots and the bones of his legs, came a deep mechanical shudder, the first grinding jolt of motion. The men fell against each other, against Andras; the weight of them seemed heavy enough to squeeze his heart to stillness in his chest. And then the train lurched into its rhythm and carried them forward through the north gates of Szentendre Yard, toward a destination none of them could name.
PART FIVE
By Fire
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Turka
IN THE DAYS and nights he spent on the train, after he'd shouted himself hoarse with protest and exhausted all hope of escape, a kind of numbness seemed to overtake him. He stood with Mendel for hours at the small high window, watching the world pass by outside like a catalogue of the impossible: That motorbike, with its suggestion of a quick escape. That road, and the freedom to follow it home to Klara. That mail truck, which might carry a letter to her. He knew from the direction of the light that they were headed northeast. He would have known it anyway because the train was climbing. They ascended into the northern uplands through Gyongyos and Fuzesabony; at times the train crawled, and at other times it stopped for hours. Each time it stopped, Andras thought they might be led off to their new work site. On the second night they were actually ordered to leave the train, and herded into an empty warehouse that must have once been used to store the red wine of the region, Egri Bikaver, bull's blood. The air had the sweet oaky tang of wine barrels; the dirt floor was stained with faded purple rings. Two army cooks fed them a thin cabbage soup and hunks of hard dark bread, the familiar Munkaszolgalat food. They stood in line to wash at a spigot in a corner of the warehouse.
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