It didn’t take them long to find his parents’ apartment in Debrecen. They stopped at a kosher bakery near the synagogue, and Andras learned from the baker that his mother had just been there to buy matzoh; Passover began on Friday.
Passover. Last year the holiday had come and gone so quickly: a few Orthodox men had staged a seder in the bunkhouse, said the blessings just as if they’d had wine and greens and charoset and matzoh and bitter herbs before them, though all they had was potato soup. He vaguely remembered refusing the bread at dinner a few times, then becoming so weak that he had to start eating it again. He hadn’t bothered to hope that he might be with his parents for Passover this year. But now he led Klara and Mendel down the avenue that led to Simonffy utca, where the baker had said his parents lived. There, in an ancient apartment building with two white goats in the courtyard and a still-leafless vine strung from balcony to balcony, they found his mother scrubbing the tiles of the second-floor veranda. A bucket of hot water steamed beside her; she wore a printed blue kerchief, and her arms were bright pink to the elbow. When she saw Andras and Klara and Mendel, she got to her feet and ran downstairs.
His little mother. She crossed the courtyard in an instant, still nimble, and took Andras in her arms. Her quick dark eyes moved over him; she pressed him to her chest and held him there. After a long while she released him and embraced Klara, calling her kislányom, my daughter. Finally she put her arms around Mendel, who tolerated this with a good-natured side glance at Andras; she knew Mendel from Andras’s school days, and had always treated him as though he were another of her sons.
“You poor boys,” she said. “Look how they’ve used you.”
“We’ll be all right, Anya. We’ve got a two-week furlough.”
“Two weeks!” She shook her head. “After a year and a half, two weeks. But at least you’ll be here for Pesach.”
“And who’s that garden slug living in our house in Konyár?”
His mother put a hand to her mouth. “I hope you didn’t quarrel with him.”
“Quarrel with him?” Andras said. “No! He was delightful. I kissed his hand. We’re friends for life.”
“Oh, dear.”
“He chased us with a shotgun,” Mendel said.
“God, what a terrible man! It pains me to think of him living in that house.”
“I hope you got a good price for the place, at least,” Andras said.
“Your father arranged it all,” his mother said, and sighed. “He said we were lucky to get what we did. We’re comfortable here. There aren’t so many chores. And I still have Kicsi and Noni.” She nodded at the two little dairy goats who stood in their fenced enclosure in the yard.
“You ought to have telephoned me,” Klara said. “I would have come to help you move.”
His mother lowered her eyes. “We didn’t want to disturb you. We knew you were busy with your students.”
“You’re my family.”
“That’s kind of you,” Andras’s mother said, but there was a note of reserve in her voice, almost a hint of deference. The next moment Andras wondered if he’d only imagined it, because his mother had taken Klara’s arm and begun to lead her across the courtyard.
The apartment was small and bright, a three-room corner unit with French doors leading out onto the veranda. His mother had planted winter kale in terra-cotta pots; she boiled some of it for their lunch and served it to them with potatoes and eggs and red peppers, and Andras and Mendel took their vitamin pills and ate a few apples Klara had brought for them, each in its own square of green paper. As they ate, his mother told them the news of Mátyás and Tibor: Mátyás was stationed near Abaszéplak, where his labor company was building a bridge over the Torysa River. But that wasn’t all; before his conscription he’d created such a sensation at the Pineapple Club, dancing atop that piano in his white tie and tails, that the manager had offered him a two-year contract. In his letters he wrote that he was practicing, always practicing-working out steps in his mind while he and his mates built the Torysa Bridge, then keeping the poor fellows up at night while he danced the steps he’d worked out that day. By the time he got home, he said, he’d be tapping so fast they’d have to invent a new kind of music just to keep up with him.
Tibor, Andras’s mother told them, had joined a detachment of his labor-service battalion in Transylvania last November; his training in Modena had won him the job of company medic. His letters didn’t carry much news about his work-Andras’s mother suspected he didn’t want to horrify her-but he always told her what he was reading. At the moment it was Miklós Radnóti, a young Jewish poet from Budapest who’d been conscripted into the labor service last fall. Like Andras, Radnóti had lived in Paris for a time. Some of his poems-one about sitting with a Japanese doctor on the terrace of the Rotonde, another about indolent afternoons in the Jardin du Luxembourg-put Tibor in mind of the time he’d spent there. It was rumored that Radnóti’s battalion was serving not far from Tibor’s own; the thought had helped Tibor endure the winter.
To Andras it seemed a terrible and surreal luxury to sit in the kitchen of this clean sunny apartment while his mother delivered news of Mátyás and Tibor and their time in the labor service. How could he relax into this familiar chair, how could he eat apples with Klara and Mendel and listen to the bleating of white goats in the courtyard, while his brothers built bridges and treated sick men in Ruthenia and Transylvania? It was terrible to feel this sweet drowsiness, terrible to find himself anticipating an afternoon nap in his own childhood bed, if indeed his childhood bed had been brought here from Konyár. Even the table before him-the small yellow one from the outdoor summer kitchen-gave him a pang of displaced longing, as though he’d become the conduit of his brothers’ homesickness. This little table his father had built before Andras was born: He remembered sitting underneath it on a hot afternoon as his mother shelled peas for their dinner. He was eating a handful of peas as he watched an inchworm scale one of the table legs. He could see the inchworm in his mind even now, that snip of green elastic with its tiny blunt legs, coiling and stretching its way toward the tabletop, on a mission whose nature was a mystery. Survival, he understood now-that was all. That contracting and straining, that frantic rearing-up to look around: It was nothing less than the urgent business of staying alive.
“What are you thinking of?” his mother asked, and pressed his hand.
“The summer kitchen.”
She laughed. “You recognized this table.”
“Of course.”
“Andras used to keep me company while I baked,” his mother told Klara. “He used to draw in the dirt with a stick. I used to sweep the rest of the kitchen every day, but I would sweep around his drawings.”
There was a soft hoarse intake of breath from Mendel; he hadn’t waited to find a comfortable place for a nap. He’d fallen asleep at the kitchen table, his head pillowed on his arms. Andras led Mendel to the sofa and covered him with a quilt. Mendel didn’t wake, not through the walk across the room, nor through the arrangement of his limbs upon the sofa. It was a talent he had. Sometimes he’d sleep all the way through the morning march to the work site.
“Will you sleep too?” Klara asked Andras. “I’ll help your mother.”
But the bright sharp taste of the apples had woken him; now he didn’t feel like sleeping. What he wanted, what he couldn’t wait another moment to do, was to find his father.
It was a piece of raw Hungarian irony that his father was employed in the milling of timber-some of it, perhaps, the very same timber that Andras had cut in the forests of Transylvania and Subcarpathia. Debrecen Consolidated Lumber bore no resemblance to the lumberyard Lucky Béla had sold to the hateful young man in Konyár. This was a large-scale government-funded operation that processed hundreds of trees daily, and turned out thousands of cords of lumber for use in the building of army barracks and storage facilities and railroad stations. For months now Hungary had been girding itself for war, anticipating that it might be
forced to enter the conflict alongside Germany. If that were to happen, vast quantities of timber would be needed to support the army’s advance. Of course, if he’d had a choice, Lucky Béla would have preferred to work for a smaller company whose products were to be sold for peaceful purposes. But he knew how fortunate he was to have a job at all when so many Jews were out of work. And if Hungary went to war, even the smaller lumber companies would be drafted into government service. So he’d taken the job of second assistant foreman when the previous second assistant foreman had died of pneumonia that past winter. The first assistant foreman, a school friend of Béla’s, had offered him the job as a temporary measure, a way to see Béla through the lean winter months. For two months Béla had lived in Debrecen and gone home on weekends, leaving the care of his own mill to his foreman. When the school friend had offered the job on a permanent basis, Béla and Flóra had decided that the time had come to sell their tiny operation. They were getting older. The chores had become more difficult, their debt deeper. With the money from the sale, they could pay their creditors and rent a small apartment in Debrecen.
It was their bad luck that the only interested buyer had been a member of Hungary’s National Socialist Party, the Arrow Cross, and that the man’s offer was half of what the lumberyard was worth. Béla had no choice but to sell. It had been a hard winter. They’d had barely enough to eat, and for an entire month the trains had failed to come to Konyár. There had been a track failure that no one seemed inclined to fix. Certain normal processes-the delivery of mail, the restocking of provisions, the hauling away of milled lumber-had shut down altogether. But in Debrecen there was no food shortage, no slowdown at the mill. He would be paid twice what he could pay himself at his own lumberyard. It was a terrible shame to have had to sell at such a price, but the move had already done them good-Flóra had regained the weight she had lost during that long starved winter, and Béla’s cough and rheumatism had abated. His voice and gait were strong as he walked through the lumberyard with Andras, telling the story.
“What we need, you and I,” he concluded, as he hung his hard hat in the foremen’s locker room, “is a nice cold glass of lager.”
“I’d be a fool to argue,” Andras said, and they set off together toward his father’s favorite beer hall, a cavelike establishment not far from Rózsa utca, with taxidermied wolves’ heads and deer antlers hanging on the walls and a giant old-fashioned barrel of beer on a wooden stand. At the tables, men smoked Fox cigarettes and argued about the fate of Europe. The bartender was an enormous mustachioed man who looked as though he subsisted on fried doughnuts and beer.
“How’s the lager today, Rudolf?” his father asked.
Rudolf gave him a small-toothed smile. “Gets you drunk,” he said.
It seemed to be a routine of theirs. The bartender filled two glasses and poured himself a shot of whiskey, and they toasted each other’s health.
“Who’s this skinny lad?” Rudolf asked.
“My middle boy, the architect.”
“Architect, eh?” Rudolf raised an eyebrow. “Build anything around here?”
“Not yet,” Andras said.
“Army service?”
“Munkaszolgálat.”
“That who’s starving you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I was a huszár in the Great War, like your father. On the Serbian front. Nearly lost a leg at Varaždin. But the labor service, now, that’s a different story. Digging around in the muck all day, no excitement, no chance for glory, and a starvation diet on top of it.” He shook his head. “That’s no job for a smart boy like you. How much longer have you got?”
“Six months,” Andras said.
“Six months! That’s not so long. And good weather all the way. You’ll do fine. But have another round on me, just in case. Bottoms up. May we all cheat death a thousand times!”
They drank. Then Andras and his father retreated to their own table in a dark corner of the room, beneath a wolf head frozen in a howl. The head gave Andras a chill to the base of his spine. That winter in Transylvania he’d heard wolves howling at night, and had imagined their yellow teeth and silvered fur. There had been times when he’d felt so desperate he’d wanted to give himself up to them. As if to remind himself that he was home on furlough, he reached into his pocket and touched his father’s watch; he’d left it with Klara when he’d gone to the Munkaszolgálat. Now he took it out to show his father.
“It’s a good watch,” Béla said, turning it over in his fingers. “A great watch.”
“In Paris,” Andras said, “whenever I was in a bad spot, I used to take it out and think about what you might do.”
His father gave him a rueful smile. “I’ll bet you didn’t always do what I would have done.”
“Not always,” Andras said.
“You’re a good boy,” his father said. “A thoughtful boy. You’re always putting on a brave face in your letters from the Musz, to keep your mother’s spirits up. But I know it’s much worse than you let on. Look at you. They’ve half killed you.”
“It’s not so bad,” Andras said, feeling as he said it that it was true. It was just work, after all; he’d worked all his life. “We’ve been fed,” he said. “They give us clothes and boots. We have a roof over our heads.”
“But you’ve had to leave school. I think about that every day.”
“I’ll go back,” he said.
“To where? France doesn’t exist anymore, not as a place for Jews. And this country…” He shook his head in dismay and disgust. “But you’ll find a way to finish. You’ve got to. I don’t want to see you abandoning your studies.”
Andras understood what he was thinking. “You didn’t abandon your studies,” he said. “You left Prague because you had to.”
“But I didn’t go back, did I?”
“You didn’t have much of a choice.” He couldn’t see any point in continuing the line of conversation; he was powerless to do anything about school now, and his father knew it as well as he did. The thought that it had been almost two years since he’d been at the École Spéciale made him feel pressed under a great and immovable weight. He looked up at a cluster of men who were going over the sports page in the Pesti Hírlap, arguing over which wrestler would win a tournament at the National Sports Club that night. He had never heard any of the wrestlers’ names before.
“It’s good to see Klara, I’m sure,” his father said. “It’s hard to be away from your wife for so long. She’s a nice girl, your Klara.” But there was an echo of the look Andras had seen on his mother’s face earlier, a shadow of hesitation, of reserve.
“I wish you’d written to tell her you were moving,” Andras said. “She would have come out to help you.”
“Your mother’s kitchen girl helped. She was glad to have the extra work.”
“Klara’s our family, Apa.”
His father pushed his lips out and shrugged. “Why should we trouble her with our problems?”
Andras wasn’t going to say what had occurred to him as his father had narrated their story: that he wished Klara might have been the one to negotiate the sale of the lumberyard, that he was certain she would have insisted on a better price and gotten it. But such a negotiation, which might have taken place in Paris without raising the slightest notice, would have been unthinkable in Konyár; here on the Hajdú plains, women did not haggle over real estate with men. “Klara’s no stranger to hard work,” Andras said. “She’s had to support herself since she was sixteen. And in any case, she thinks of you and Anya as her own parents.”
“Now that’s a quaint notion,” Béla said, and shook his head. “Don’t forget, my boy, that we celebrated your wedding at her mother’s house. I’ve met Mrs. Hász. I’ve met Klara’s brother. I don’t think Klara could ever mistake us for her own family.”
“That’s not what I mean. You’re pretending not to understand me.”
“In Paris, maybe you and Klara were just two Hungarians keeping each o
ther company,” Béla said. “Here at home, things are different. Look around you. The rich don’t sit down with the poor.”
“She’s not the rich, Apa. She’s my wife.”
“Her family bought out that nephew of hers. He didn’t have to break his back in the work service. But they didn’t do the same for you.”
“I told her brother I wouldn’t consider it.”
“And he didn’t argue, did he?”
Andras felt the back of his neck grow warm; a flash of anger moved through him. “It’s not fair of you to hold that against Klara,” he said.
“What’s unfair is that some should have to work while others don’t.”
“I didn’t come here to argue with you.”
“Let’s not argue, then.”
But it was too late. Andras was furious. He didn’t want to be in his father’s presence a moment longer. He put money on the table for the beer, but his father pushed it away.
“I’m going for a walk,” Andras said, getting to his feet. “I need some air.”
“Well, let your old father walk with you.”
He couldn’t conceive of a way to say no. His father followed him out of the bar and they walked together in the blue light of evening. All along the avenue, yellow streetlamps had come on to illuminate the buildings with their flaking plaster and faded paint. He didn’t think about where he was walking; he wished he could walk faster, lose his father in the dusk, but the fact was that he was exhausted, anemic, and in need of sleep. He pressed onward past the Aranybika Hotel, an aging dowager in white wooden lace; he walked past the double towers of the Lutheran church with its stolid spires. He kept walking, head down, all the way to the park across the street from the Déri Museum, a squat Baroque-style building clad in yellow stucco. The April evening, soft at the edges, reminded him of a thousand evenings he’d spent here as a schoolboy, with friends or alone, worrying the edges of his adolescent problems like the pages of favorite books. In those days he could always console himself with thoughts of home, of that patch of land in Konyár with its orchard and barn and lumberyard and millpond. Now his home in Konyár would never be his home again. His past, his earliest childhood, had been stolen from him. And his future, the life he had imagined when he was a student here, had been stolen too. He sat on a bench and bent over his knees, his head in his hands; the hurt and dislocation he’d suffered for eighteen months seemed to come over him all at once, and he found himself choking out hoarse sobs into the night.
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