Andras and Mendel had been assigned to shovel brown coal into mine carts and then to push the carts along rusted tracks to the power plant. The tracks were laid upon the ground but not fixed in place, and the reason for this soon became clear: as the rains increased, the tracks had to be taken up and redirected around puddles the size of small ponds. When there was no way to avoid the puddles, timbers had to be laid across them and the rails on top of those. The carts weighed hundreds of kilograms with their full loads. The men pulled and pushed and winched them, and when they still wouldn’t move, the men cursed and struck them with their shovels. Each truck was emblazoned with the white letters KMOF, for Közérdekű Munkaszolgálat Országos Felügyelője, the National Administration of the Labor-Service System; but Mendel insisted that the letters stood for Királyi Marhák Ostobasági Földbirtoka, the Royal Idiots’ Stupidity Farm.

There were things to be grateful for. It would have been worse if they’d had to work in the power plant, where the coal dust and chemical fumes turned the air into a thick unbreatheable stew. It would have been worse if they’d been sent down into the mines. It would have been worse to be there without each other. And it would have been worse to be hundreds of kilometers from Budapest, as they’d been in Ruthenia and Transylvania. At Bánhida the mail moved quickly. His parents’ letters took two weeks to arrive, and Klara’s came in a week. Once she enclosed a missive from Rosen, five pages of large loose script sent all the way from Palestine. He and Shalhevet had slipped out of France just before its borders were closed to emigrating Jews, and had been married in Jerusalem, where they were both working for the Palestine Jewish Community: Rosen in the department of settlement planning, and Shalhevet in the immigration advocacy office. They had a child on the way, due in November. There were even letters from Andras’s brothers: Tibor, home to spend his furlough with Ilana, had taken her to the top of Castle Hill for the first time; a photograph showed the two of them before a parapet, Ilana’s smile radiant, her hand enclosed in Tibor’s. Mátyás, still stuck in his labor-service company but struck with spring fever, had made a secret foray to a nearby town, where he had drunk beer, waltzed with girls at the local tavern, tap-danced on the zinc bar in his boots, and made it back to his battalion without getting caught.

In the face of the misery of Bánhida, Mendel conceived a new publication called The Biting Fly. Though at first it seemed to Andras an act of audacity verging on foolhardiness to revive the idea of a newspaper after what had happened in the 112/30th, Mendel argued that they had to do something to keep from going mad. The new publication, he said, would maintain a tone of protest while avoiding direct ridicule of the camp authorities. If they were caught, there would be nothing for their commander to take personally. There would be a certain degree of risk involved, of course, but the alternative was to allow themselves to be silenced by the Munkaszolgálat. After the humiliation Andras had suffered on the assembly ground, how could he refuse to raise his voice in protest?

In the end, Andras agreed to join Mendel again as co-publisher. His decision was driven in part by vanity, he suspected, and in part by desire to maintain his dignity; a greater part was the idea that he and Mendel were conspiring on behalf of free speech and their workmates’ morale. In the 112/30th he had seen how The Snow Goose had become an emblem of the men’s struggle. It had given them a certain relief to see their daily miseries recorded-to see them recognized as outrages that demanded the publication of an underground paper, even one as absurd as The Snow Goose. Here at Bánhida, at least, it would be easier to get drawing materials; there was a black market for all sorts of things. In addition to Debrecen sausages, Fox cigarettes, pinups of Hedy Lamarr and Rita Hayworth, cans of peas, woolen socks, tooth powder, and vodka, one could buy paper and drawing pencils. And there was plenty to illustrate. The first issue of The Biting Fly contained a lexicon that defined such terms as Morning Lineup (a popular parlor game involving alternating rounds of boredom, calisthenics, and humiliation), Water Carrier (a laborman with an empty bucket and a full mouth), and Sleep (a rare natural phenomenon about which little is known). There was a horoscope promising woe for every sign of the Zodiac. There was an advertisement for the services of a private detective who would let you know if your wife or girlfriend had been unfaithful, with a disclaimer releasing the detective from blame if a relationship should inadvertently develop between himself and the subject of his investigation. There were classified ads (Wanted: Arsenic. Will pay in installments) and a serialized adventure novel about a North Pole expedition, increasingly popular at the weather grew hotter. With the aid of a Jewish clerk in the supply office, the paper was printed in weekly editions of fifty copies. Before long Andras and Mendel began to enjoy a quiet journalistic fame among the camp inhabitants.

But what The Biting Fly failed to provide was the one thing they all wanted most from a paper: real news of Budapest and the world. For that they had to rely on the few tattered copies of newspapers that had been sent by relatives or thrown out by the guards. Those papers would be passed around until they were unreadable and the news they contained had long ago gone stale. But there were some events of such great importance that they became known to the men not long after they occurred. In the third week of June, scarcely a year after France had fallen, Hitler’s troops invaded the Soviet Union along a twelve-hundred-kilometer front that ran from the Baltic to the Black Sea. The Kremlin seemed just as shocked by that turn of events as the men of Bánhida Camp. It appeared that Moscow had believed Germany to be committed to its nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union. But Hitler, Mendel pointed out, must have been planning the attack for months. How else would he have mustered so many hundreds of thousands of troops, so many planes, so many panzer divisions? Not a week later, Andras and Mendel learned from the camp postmaster that Soviet planes-or what had appeared at first to be Soviet planes, but might have been German planes in disguise-had bombed the Magyar border town of Kassa. The message was clear: Hungary had no choice but to send its armies into Russia. If Prime Minister Bárdossy refused, Hungary would lose all the territories Germany had returned to it. In fact, Bárdossy, who had long opposed Hungary ’s entry into the war, now seemed to view it as inevitable. Soon the headlines trumpeted a declaration of war against the Soviet Union, and Hungarian Army units were on their way to join the Axis invasion. The men of the 101/18th knew what that meant: For every Hungarian unit sent to the front, a unit of labor servicemen would be sent to support it.

No one knew how long the war might go on, or what the labor servicemen might be called upon to do. In the barracks there were rumors that they would be used as human shields, or sent first across the lines to draw enemy fire. But at Bánhida there was no immediate change; the coal came out of the ground, the men loaded it into the carts, the power plant burned it, the sulfurous dust rose into the air. In July, when the mud dried up and the spring insects died of thirst, the pace of work seemed to grow more urgent, as if more power were needed to fuel the engines of war. The heat was so intense that the men stripped down to their underwear each day by noon. There were no trees to provide shelter from the sun, no swimming hole to cool their sunburned skin. Andras knew that cold raspberry-flavored seltzer existed not far off, in the town they’d passed en route to the camp, and on the hottest days he thought he might abandon his cart-damn the consequences-and walk until he reached the cool umbrella forest of a sidewalk café. He began to see shimmering mirages of water beside the tracks; at times the whole expanse of the camp floated atop a glittering silver-black sea. How long had it been since he’d seen the real sea, with its aquamarine swells and its icy-looking whitecaps? He could see it just beyond the chain-link fence as he pushed the carts of coal: the Mediterranean, a hammered copper-blue, stretching away toward the unimaginable shores of Africa. There was Klara in her black swimsuit, her white bathing cap with racing stripes, stepping into the foam at the water’s edge; Klara submerged to her thighs, her legs zigzagging into watery distortion. Klara on the wooden diving tower; Klara executing an Odettelike swan dive.