“Well,” Tibor said. “We’ll be going now. Please tell your wife we appreciate her kindness.” He raised one of the paper-wrapped rounds of goat cheese.

“One of her best,” Klein-the-elder said. “She must have taken a shine to you. She doesn’t give those away lightly.”

“She gave me two,” Tibor said, and smiled.

“Ah! Now you’re making me jealous.”

“Maybe she can prevail upon your grandson to help us. I’m afraid he turned us away without much hope.”

“Miklós is a moody boy,” the elder Klein said. “His work is difficult. He changes his mind about it daily. Does he know how to reach you?”

Tibor took a small blunt pencil from his breast pocket and asked Klein’s grandfather for a piece of paper, apologizing for the fact that he didn’t have a name card. He wrote his address on the scrap and left it on the breakfast table.

“There it is,” Tibor said. “In case he changes his mind.”

Klein’s grandfather made a noise of assent. From the yard, the raised voices of goats made a pessimistic counterpoint. The wind clattered the shutters against the house, a sound directly from Andras’s deepest childhood. He had the feeling of having stepped out of the flow of time-as if he and Tibor, when they passed through the doorway of this house, would reenter a different Budapest altogether, one in which the cars had been replaced by carriages, the electric streetlights by gaslights, the women’s knee-length skirts by ankle-length ones, the metro system erased, the news of war expunged from the pages of the Pesti Napló. The twentieth century cut clean away from the tissue of time like an act of divine surgery.

But when they opened the outer door it was all still there: the trucks rumbling along the broad cross-street at the end of the block, the towering smokestacks of the textile plant, the film advertisements plastered along a plywood construction wall. He and his brother walked in silence back toward the streetcar line and caught a near-empty train back toward the city center. It took them down Kárpát utca, with its machine-repair shops, then over the bridge behind Nyugati Station, and finally to Andrássy út, where they got off and headed toward home. But when they reached the corner of Hársfa utca, Tibor turned. Hands in his pockets, he walked the block to the gray stone building where they’d lived before Andras had gone to Paris. On the third floor were their windows, now uncurtained and dark. A row of broken flowerpots stood on the balcony; an empty bird feeder hung from the rail. Tibor looked up at the balcony, the wind lifting his collar.

“Can you blame me?” he said. “Do you understand why I want to get out?”

“I understand,” Andras said.

“Think about what I told you at the café. That happened here in Hungary. Now think what must be happening in Germany and Poland. You wouldn’t believe the things I’ve heard. People are being starved and crowded to death in ghettoes. People are being shot by the thousands. Horthy can’t hold it off forever. And the Allies don’t care about the Jews, not enough to make a difference on the ground. We have to take care of ourselves.”

“But what’s the use, if we die doing it?”

“If we have visas, we’ll have some measure of protection. Write to Shalhevet. See if there’s anything her organization can do.”

“It’ll take a long time. Months, maybe, just to exchange a few letters.”

“Then you’d better start now,” Tibor said.

THAT AFTERNOON he told Klara about the cottage in Frangepán köz, and about Klein in his bedroom surrounded by the manila files of a thousand would-be emigrants. They were in the sitting room, the baby at Klara’s breast, its hand clenching and unclenching in her hair.

“What do you think?” she said quietly. “Do you think we should try to get out?”

“It seems insane, doesn’t it? But I haven’t seen the things Tibor’s seen.”

“What about your parents? And my mother?”

“I know,” he said. “It’s a desperate thing to think about. Maybe it’s not the right time. If we wait, things might get better. But maybe I should write to Shalhevet anyway. Just in case there’s something she can do.”

“You can write,” she said. “But if there were something she could do, wouldn’t she have told us about it already?” The baby moved his head and released his grip on Klara’s hair. She shifted him to the other side, draping herself with his blanket.

“I wrote to Rosen from the labor service,” Andras said. “He knew I couldn’t have left then, even if I’d wanted to.”

“And now we have the baby,” Klara said.

Andras tried to envision her feeding their son in the cargo hold of a Danube riverboat, under the cover of a tarpaulin. Did people make escape attempts with infants, he wondered? Did they drug their children with laudanum and pray they wouldn’t cry? The baby pulled the blanket away from Klara’s breast and she arranged it again.

“There’s no need to do that,” Andras said. “Let me see you.”

Klara smiled. “I suppose I got into the habit of covering up at my mother’s house. Elza can’t abide the sight of it. She considers it unsanitary. She’d be scandalized to know I do it in your presence.”

“It’s perfectly natural. And look at him. Doesn’t he look happy?”

The baby’s toes curled and uncurled. He waved a dark hank of Klara’s hair in his fist. His eyes moved to her eyes, and he blinked, and blinked again more slowly, and his eyelids drifted closed. Intoxicated with milk, he released Klara’s hair and let his legs fall limp against her arm. His hands opened into starfish. His mouth fell away from her breast.

Klara raised her eyes to Andras and held his gaze. “What if you were to go?” she said. “You and Tibor? Get there safely and send for us when you can? At least it would keep you out of the Munkaszolgálat.”

“Never,” he said. “I’d sooner die than leave without the two of you.”

“What a dramatic thing to say, darling.”

“I don’t care if it’s dramatic. That’s how I feel.”

“Here, take your little son. My leg’s asleep.” She lifted the child and handed him to Andras, then fastened the buttons of her blouse. With a grimace of pain she got to her feet and walked the length of the room. “Write to Shalhevet,” she said. “Just to see. At least then we’ll know if there’s another course of action to consider. Otherwise we’re only speculating.”

“I’m not going anywhere without you.”

“I hope not,” she said. “But it seems the wrong time for broad resolutions.”

“Won’t you let me preserve the illusion that I have a choice?”

“It’s a dangerous time for illusions, too,” she said, and came back to sit beside him on the sofa, laying her head on his shoulder. As they sat together and watched their son sleep, Andras felt a renewed pang of guilt: He was, in fact, allowing her to live inside an illusion-that she was safe, that the past was securely lodged in the past, that her fears of endangering her family by her return to Hungary had been unfounded.

The illusion continued all that spring. A reorganization in the Ministry of Justice slowed the mechanisms of extortion, and the need to give up the house on Benczúr utca was temporarily relieved. Andras continued to work as a layout artist and illustrator, with Mendel penning articles nearby in the newsroom. If it seemed surreal at first to have as their legitimate employment what had until a few months earlier been a covert and guilty extracurricular, the feeling was soon replaced by the ordinary rhythms and pressures of work. Tibor, once he had recovered his health and strength, found employment too. He became a surgical assistant at a Jewish hospital in the Erzsébetváros. In March there was news from Elisabet: Paul had joined the navy and would ship out to the South Pacific in late April. His parents, in a fit of remorse occasioned by their son’s enlistment and by the birth of their first grandchild the previous summer, had by now relented entirely and had insisted that Elisabet and little Alvie come to live with them in Connecticut. Elisabet had enclosed a photograph of the family in sledding gear, herself in a dark hooded coat, the muffled-up Alvie in her arms, Paul standing beside them holding the ropes of a long toboggan. Another photograph showed Alvie by himself, propped in a chair with pillows all around him, wearing a velvet jacket and short pants. The high round forehead and wry mouth were all Paul, but the ice-hard penetration of his baby gaze could only have been Elisabet’s. She promised that Paul’s father would speak to his contacts in the government to see if anything could be done to secure entry visas for Andras, Klara, and the baby.