For years now, he understood at last, he’d had to cultivate the habit of blind hope. It had become as natural to him as breathing. It had taken him from Konyár to Budapest to Paris, from the lonely chill of his room on the rue des Écoles to the close heat of the rue de Sévigné, from the despair of Carpathian winter to Forget-Me-Not Street in the Erzsébetváros. It was the inevitable by-product of love, the clear and potent distillate of fatherhood. It had prevented him from thinking too long or too hard about what might have happened to Polaner, to Ben Yakov, to his own younger brother. It had kept him from dwelling upon the possible consequences of publishing a paper like The Crooked Rail. It had stopped him from imagining himself shipped east into the mouth of the battle. But here he was, and here was Mendel Horovitz, watching the castle disappear into the fog.
The train went on and on, always climbing, moving slowly into thinner, drier air. The brutal heat began to fall away, and a scent of fir trees edged through the small high window. The men were silent, parched, faint with hunger and lack of sleep. They took turns sitting and standing. They drifted between sleep and wakefulness, their legs swaying with the motion of the train, their feet numb with the vibration of the wheels on the endless tracks. When the train stopped at a station on the fifth day, Andras could think only of how good it would feel to stretch himself out on the ground and sleep. From outside came the rattle of the door being unchained and drawn aside; a wave of fresh air moved through the stinking car, and the men pushed out onto the platform. Through the fog of his exhaustion, Andras read the station sign. TYPKA. A click at the front of the palate, a pursing of the lips around ka, the Hungarian diminutive. A shock of relief went through him: They weren’t on the Eastern Front after all. They were still within their own borders.
TYPKA. He didn’t realize he’d said it aloud until the Ivory Tower, standing next to him, shook his head and corrected him. “Turka,” he said. “It’s written in Cyrillic.”
And so it was, because they had reached Ukraine.
The camp where they were supposed to stay had been bombed a week earlier. A hundred and seventy men had been killed, the barracks leveled. The remaining men had had to dig vast graves to bury their comrades; the turned dirt had slumped into the pits with that week’s rain. That labor company had left nothing behind but the bones of their dead-no sign or tool or scrap of comfort for the men of the 79/6th. Andras and the others camped in the mud of the assembly ground, and the next day they were installed in the main house and outbuildings of an empty Jewish orphanage half a kilometer away.
The place was built of Soviet cinderblock, its whitewash greened with mildew. Everything inside the main house had been intended for the use of children. The bunks were absurdly short. The only way to lie on them was to curl one’s knees to one’s chest. The sinks had running water, which was nothing less than a miracle, but they were built so low that it was necessary almost to kneel in order to wash one’s face. The mess hall was furnished with tiny benches and low tables; the hallways were still marked with the children’s heel-scuffs and muddy footprints. There was no other sign of them in the place. Every shred of clothing, every shoe and book and spoon, had been removed as though the children had never existed.
Their new commander was a beefy-looking black-haired Magyar whose face was bisected by a spectacular keloid scar. The scar ran in an arc from the middle of his forehead to the tip of his chin, obliterating his right eyelid, skirting his nose by a millimeter, splitting his lips into four unequal parts. The lidless right eye gave his features a cast of perpetual surprise and horror, as if the initial shock of the wound had never left him. His name was Kozma. He came from Győr. He had a gray wolfhound whom he alternately kicked and petted, and a lieutenant named Horvath whom he treated in the same manner. On their first morning at the orphanage, Kozma assembled the company in the yard and marched them five kilometers down the road, double-time, to a wet field where grass had grown unevenly over a long filled-in trench. This was where the children of the orphanage had been lined up and shot, their new commander told them, and this was where they, too, would be shot when their usefulness to the Hungarian Army had been exhausted. Their dog tags might return home, but they never would; they were filthier than pigs, lower than worms, already as good as dead. For now, though, their company would join the five hundred work servicemen who were rebuilding the road between Turka and Stryj. The old road flooded every time the Stryj River topped its banks. The new road would be laid on higher ground. Minefields posed a minor obstacle to the operation; on occasion, servicemen must clear the fields in order to allow the road to pass through. They were to finish the road by the time the snows came. Then they would be responsible for keeping it clear. The records-master, Orbán, would see to their pay books. Tolnay, the medical officer, would treat them if they fell ill. But shirkers would not be tolerated. Tolnay was under strict orders to do everything in his power to keep the men from missing work. They were to obey the guards and officers in all matters; troublemakers would be punished, deserters shot.
When he’d concluded his speech, Kozma clicked his heels, swiveled the mass of his body with surprising speed, and stepped aside to let his lieutenant address the company. Lieutenant Horvath seemed a kind of collapsible model, his frame and features accordioned into a slimmer version of an ordinary man. He balanced a pair of spectacles on his nose and drew a memo from his breast pocket. There would be no electric light after dark, he told them in his thin monotone, no letter-writing, no canteen shop where they might replenish their supplies, no replacement uniforms if their uniforms got worn out or torn, no forming of groups, no fraternizing with guards, no pocketknives, no smoking, no hoarding of valuables, no shopping at stores in town or trading with the local peasantry. Their families would soon be informed of their transfer, but there was to be no postal communication between the 79/6th and the outside world-no packages, no letters, no telegrams. For safety’s sake they must wear their armbands at all times. Without the proper identification, a person might be mistaken for the enemy and shot.
Horvath shouted them into five columns and marched them into the road again; they were to depart for their work site at once. The road was wet with deep sucking mud. As the light began to rise, Andras saw that they were in a broad river valley that stretched between foothills dense with evergreens. In the distance rose the jagged gray peaks of the Carpathians. Clouds lay on the hillsides, bleeding fog into the valley. The rain-swollen Stryj rushed past between steep brown banks. Before long, Andras could feel the upward slope of the road in his back and thighs. The list of prohibitions kept spooling itself through his head: no electric light after dark, no letter-writing, no postal communication. No way to get word to Klara. No way to learn what had happened to her, or to Tibor and Ilana and Ádám, or to Mátyás, if news of Mátyás ever came. During his other periods of service, it had been Klara’s letters that had kept him from despairing; the need to write I am well that had kept him, relatively speaking, well. How could he bear not to communicate, particularly after what had happened? He would have to find a way to send word to her, whatever the consequences. He’d bribe someone, sign promissory notes if he had to. He would write letters and his letters would find her. In the midst of the vast uncertainty that surrounded him, he knew that much.