He wished he could talk to Tibor. He would know what Andras should do, how he might protect Klara and begin to reclaim his life. But Tibor was three hundred kilometers away in the Carpathians. Andras couldn’t imagine when they might next sit down together to make sense of who they were now, or at least to take some comfort in their shared uncertainty.

As it happened, it was his younger brother-the one whose function had always been to cause trouble, rather than to alleviate it-who materialized in Budapest during Andras’s furlough. Mátyás rolled into Nyugati Station with the rest of his company, which had been posted nearby while it awaited a transfer, and jumped off the train to enjoy a furlough of his own making. His company was directed by a lax young officer who allowed his men to buy an occasional exemption from work. Mátyás, who had hoarded money during his window-trimming days, had bought a few days off to see a shopgirl he’d met on one of his jobs. He had no idea that Andras was home on furlough, too, and so it was purely by accident that, on Monday afternoon, Mátyás jumped onto the back of a streetcar and found himself face-to-face with his brother. He was so surprised that he would have fallen off again if Andras hadn’t grabbed his arm and held him.

“What are you doing here?” Mátyás cried. “You’re supposed to be slaving at a mine.”

“And you’re supposed to be-doing what?”

“Building bridges. But not today! Today I’m going to see a girl named Serafina.”

An elderly woman in a kerchief gave them a disapproving look, as if they ought to know better than to engage in such loud and animated conversation on a streetcar. But Andras pulled Mátyás’s face close to his own and said to the woman, “It’s my brother, do you see? My brother!”

“You must have had donkeys for parents,” the woman said.

“Pardon us, your ladyship,” Mátyás said. He tipped his hat and executed a perfect backflip from the side rail of the streetcar to the pavement, so swiftly that the woman gave a little scream. As the passengers watched in astonishment, he tapped out a soft-shoe rhythm against the cobblestones and then fleetfooted his way up onto the curb, scattering the pedestrians there; he turned a double spin, whipped off his hat, and bowed to a young woman in a blue twill coat. Everyone who’d seen him gave a cheer. Andras jumped down from the streetcar and waited until his brother had finished taking his curtain calls.

“Needless foolishness,” Andras said, once the applause had died down.

“I must emblazon that on a flag and carry it everywhere.”

“You might well. Then everyone would have some warning.”

“Where are you going with a market bag full of potatoes?” Mátyás asked.

“Home to my apartment, where my wife is waiting for me.”

“Your apartment? What apartment?”

“Thirty-five Nefelejcs utca, third floor, apartment B.”

“Since when do you live there? And for how long?”

“Since last night. And for another day and a half, until I have to go back to Bánhida.”

Mátyás laughed. “Then I suppose I caught you by your shirttails.”

“Or I caught you. Why don’t you come for dinner?”

“I might be otherwise engaged.”

“And what if this Serafina sees you for the glib young fool you are?”

“In that case I’ll come over at once.” Mátyás kissed Andras on both cheeks and hopped aboard the next streetcar, which by that time had pulled up beside them.

For a few blocks, as Andras walked toward home, he felt inclined to tap-dance himself. Chance favored him at times; it had delivered the unexpected furlough, and now it had delivered Mátyás. But not even that welcome surprise could divert his mind from its new channel of worry. The newspaper he’d bought that afternoon had delivered a sobering view of events in the east: Kiev had fallen to the Germans, and Hitler’s armies lay within a hundred miles of Leningrad and Moscow. In a radio address earlier that week, the Führer had proclaimed the imminent capitulation of the Soviet Union. Andras feared that the British, who had held out fiercely in the Mediterranean, would lose hope now; if their defenses crumbled, Hitler would rule all of Europe. He thought of Rosen at the Blue Dove three years earlier, declaring that Hitler wanted to make a Germany of the world. Not even Rosen could have predicted the degree to which that speculation would prove true. German territory had spread across the map of Europe like spilled ink. And the people of the conquered countries had been turned from their homes, deported to wastelands or clapped into ghettoes or sent to labor camps. He wanted to believe that Hungary might remain a refuge at the center of the firestorm; it was easier to believe such a thing here in Budapest, far from the heat and stink of Bánhida Camp. But if Russia were to fall, no country in Europe would be safe, particularly not for Jews-certainly not Hungary, where the Arrow Cross had gained strength in every recent election. Into this baffling uncertainty, Andras and Klara’s child would be born. He began to understand how his own parents must have felt when his mother had become pregnant with him during the Great War, though the situation had been different then: His father had been a Hungarian soldier, not a forced laborer, and there had been no crazed Führer dreaming of a Jew-free Europe.

At home he found Klara and Ilana sitting at the kitchen table and laughing over some intimacy, Ilana’s hands clasped in Klara’s own. It was clear to him, even at first glance, that the connection between them had deepened in his absence; in her letters Klara had often mentioned how grateful she was for Ilana’s companionship, and he’d been relieved to know that they lived just a few blocks from each other and crossed the distance often. If Klara had been Ilana’s confidante and protector in Paris, now she seemed to have become something like an older sister. Soon after Ilana had arrived in Budapest, Klara had told him, they’d begun a ritual of going to the market together every Monday and Thursday morning. When Tibor had gone to the Munkaszolgálat, Klara had seen to it that Ilana wasn’t lonely; they cooked together, spent evenings with Klara’s records or Ilana’s books, strolled the boulevards and parks on Sunday afternoons. That particular night, just before Andras had arrived, Ilana had delivered a piece of sweet and complicated news: She was pregnant. She repeated the news now in her tentative Hungarian. It had happened while Tibor was home on his last furlough. If all went well, the babies would be born two months apart. She’d written to Tibor and received a letter assuring her that he was well, that his labor company was far from the dangerous action farther east, that the summer weather had made everything more bearable, that her news had made him happier than he’d believed he could be.

But there was no happiness that fall of 1941 that wasn’t complicated by worry. Andras could see it in the narrow lines that had gathered on Ilana’s brow. He knew what this pregnancy must mean to her after her miscarriage, and how terrified she would be for the baby’s safety even if they weren’t in the midst of a war. He would have embraced her if her observance hadn’t forbidden it. As it was, he had to be content to congratulate her and express his fervent wish that all would go well. Then he told the two of them how he had run into Mátyás on the streetcar.

“Well,” Klara said. “It’s a good thing I bought extra pastries for dessert. That young goat would eat us into starvation otherwise.”

Mátyás arrived just as Klara was setting out the pastries in the sitting room after dinner. He gave her a kiss on the cheek and plucked a cream-filled mille-feuille from the silver tray. For Ilana he had a deep bow and a flourish of his hat.

“Your romancing must have gone well,” Andras said. “Your cheeks are on fire with lipstick.”

“It’s not lipstick,” Mátyás said. “It’s the stain of breached innocence. Serafina is far too worldly for me. I’m still blushing from what she said when we parted.”