Andras wrote to Shalhevet, and a reply came four weeks later. She promised to speak to the people she knew in the Immigration Office. Though she couldn’t foresee how long the process might take or whether she would succeed, she thought she could make a strong case for Andras and Tibor’s being granted visas. As Andras must know, the department’s main concern at the moment was to extract Jews from German-occupied territories. But future doctors and architects would be of great value to the Jewish community of Palestine. She might even be able to do something for Andras’s friend, the political journalist and record-breaking athlete; he, too, was the kind of exceptional young man the Immigration Office liked to help. And if Andras and Tibor came, of course their families must come with them. What a shame that they hadn’t all emigrated together before the war! Rosen missed his Paris friends desperately. Had Andras heard from Polaner or Ben Yakov? Rosen had made dozens of inquiries, to no avail.

Andras sat on the edge of the courtyard fountain and reread the letter. He hadn’t heard from Polaner or Ben Yakov, not since the missives he’d received during his first Munkaszolgálat posting. If Ben Yakov was still with his parents in Rouen, he would be living in occupied France under the Nazi flag. And Polaner, who had been so eager to fight for his adopted country-where would he have been sent after his discharge from the French military? Where would he be now? What hardships, what humiliations, would he have had to face since the last time Andras had seen him? How would Andras ever learn what had become of him? He trailed his hand through the cold water of the fountain, released now from its winter ice. Beneath the surface, the shapes of the fish moved like slender ghosts. There had been coins at the bottom of the fountain last fall, five- and ten-fillér coins glinting against the blue tiles. Someone must have removed them when the ice thawed. Now, no one would throw coins into a fountain. No one could spare ten fillér for a wish.

In the darkness of the barracks in Subcarpathia and Transylvania and Bánhida, Andras had forced himself to consider the possibility that Polaner might be dead, that he might have been beaten or starved or infected or shot; but he had never allowed himself to think that he would not someday know what had happened-not know for certain whether to search or hope or mourn. He could not mourn by default. It ran against his nature. But it had been twenty-three months since there had been any word of Polaner-soft-voiced Eli Polaner, hidden somewhere within the dark explosive tangle of Europe. He dared not follow the thought around to its other side, where the image of his brother Mátyás waited, a white shape glimpsed through the veil of a blizzard. Mátyás, still lost. No word from his Munkaszolgálat company since last November. Now it was April. In Ukraine the steady cold would have just begun to relent. Soon it would become possible to bury the winter’s dead.

He had left Klara with the baby, the rest of the mail in a jumble on his desk. He would go and see if he could help her; it would only make him feel worse to sit at the edge of the fountain and consider all the things he could not know. He climbed the stairs and opened the apartment door, listening for the baby’s lifted voice. But a film of silence had settled over the rooms. The kettle had ceased to bubble on the stove. The baby’s bathwater stood cold in its little tin tub, still awaiting the addition of the hot. The baby’s towel lay folded on the kitchen table, his jacket and pants beside it.

Andras heard the baby make a noise, a brief two-note plaint; the sound came from the sitting room. He entered to find Klara on the sofa with the baby in her arms. An opened letter lay on the low table before her. She raised her eyes to Andras.

“What is it?” he said. “What’s happened?”

“You’ve been called again,” she said. “You’ve been called back to work duty.”

He scrutinized the letter, an abbreviated rectangle of thin white paper stamped with the insignia of the KMOF. He was to report to the Budapest Munkaszolgálat Office two mornings hence; he would be assigned to a new battalion and company, and given orders for six months of labor service.

“This can’t be,” he said. “I can’t leave you again, not with the baby.”

“But what can we do?”

“I still have General Martón’s card. I’ll go to his office. Maybe he can help us.”

The baby twisted in Klara’s arms and made another sound of protest. “Look at him,” she said. “Naked as a newborn. I forgot all about his bath. He must be freezing.” She got up and brought him into the kitchen, holding him against her. She emptied the kettle into his little tub and stirred the water with her hand.

“I’ll go tomorrow morning,” Andras said. “I’ll see what can be done.”

“Yes,” she said, and lowered the baby into the tub. She laid him back against her arm and rubbed soap into the fine brown fluff of his hair. “And if he can’t help, I’ll write to my solicitor in Paris. Maybe it’s time to sell the building.”

“No,” Andras said. “I won’t have you do it.”

“I won’t have you go back to the service,” she said. She wouldn’t look at him, but her voice was low and determined. “You know what goes on there now. They’re sending men to clean up minefields on the front. They’re starving them to death.”

“I survived it for two years. I can survive it for six more months.”

“Things were different before.”

“I won’t let you sell the building.”

“What do I care for the building?” she cried. The baby looked at her, startled.

“I’ll speak to Martón,” Andras said, putting a hand on her shoulder.

“And Shalhevet?” she said. “What did she write?”

“She knows some people in the Ministry of Immigration. She’ll try to make a case for our being granted visas.”

The baby kicked an arc of water into Klara’s hair, and she let out a sad laugh. “Maybe we should pray,” she said, and covered her eyes with one hand as if she were reciting the Shema. He wanted to believe that someone could be watching in pity and horror, someone who could change things if he chose. He wanted to believe that men were not in charge. But at the center of his sternum he felt a cold certainty that told him otherwise. He believed in God, yes, the God of his fathers, the one to whom he’d prayed in Konyár and Debrecen and Paris and in the work service, but that God, the One, was not One who intervened in the way they needed someone to intervene just then. He had designed the cosmos and thrown its doors open to man, and man had moved in and begun a life there. But God could no more step inside and rearrange that life than an architect could rearrange the lives of a building’s inhabitants. The world was their place now. They would use it in their fashion, live or die by their own actions. He touched Klara’s hand and she opened her eyes.

…

General Martón’s powers, though considerable, could not exempt Andras from work service. They could not even get his service postponed. But they prevented his being posted to the Eastern Front, and they won the same reprieve for Mendel Horovitz, who had been called at the same time. Andras and Mendel were assigned to Company 79/6 of the Budapest Labor Service Battalion. The company had been put to work in a rail yard so close to Budapest that the men who lived in the city could sleep at home rather than in barracks at the work site. Every morning Andras rose at four o’clock and drank his coffee in the dark kitchen, by the light of the stove; he slung his pack over his shoulder, took the tin pail of food Klara had prepared for him the night before, and slipped out into the predawn chill to meet Mendel. Now, instead of reporting to the offices of the Magyar Jewish Journal, they walked all the way to the river and crossed the Széchenyi Bridge, where the stone lions lay on their pedestals and the Romany women in black head scarves and cloaks slept with their arms around their thin-limbed children. In that blue hour a mist hovered above the surface of the Danube, rolling up from the braided currents of the water. Sometimes a barge would slide past, its low flat hull parting the vapor, and they might glimpse the bargeman’s wife standing at a glowing brazier and tending a pot of coffee. On the other side of the river they would take the tram to Óbuda, where they could get the bus that would take them to Szentendre. The bus ran along the river, and they liked to sit on the Danube side and watch the boats glide south. Often they would pass the time in silence; the subject most on their minds could not be discussed in public. Andras had received the news from Shalhevet that the Immigration Office had responded favorably to her first inquiries, and that the process was moving along more quickly than expected. There was reason to hope that they might have papers in hand by midsummer. But what then? He didn’t know whether or not he should dare to hope Klein might help them, or how much it would cost to make the journey, or how many visas Shalhevet could muster. And though spring had arrived in full force now, there was still no word from Mátyás. György’s most recent inquiries had proved fruitless. It seemed impossible to think of leaving Hungary while his brother was lost in Ukraine, perhaps dead, perhaps taken prisoner by the Soviets. But now that spring had come, Mátyás could materialize any day. It wasn’t beyond reason to hope that in three or six months they might all emigrate together. A year from now, Andras and his brothers might be going off to work in an orange grove in Palestine, perhaps at one of the kibbutzim Rosen had described, Degania or Ein Harod. Or they might be fighting for the British-Mendel had heard that there was a battalion of soldiers that had been formed from members of the Yishuv, the Jewish community of Palestine.