As soon as the door had closed, Andras ran to Mendel at the wall, knelt beside him, put a hand to his neck, his chest. No drumbeat of life; nothing. In the courtyard, silence. Not even the guards made a move. The Ivory Tower stepped forward and bent to László Goldfarb; no one stopped him. Then he got up and spoke quietly to the guard called Lukás. When he’d finished speaking, Lukás gave a nod and went to the corner of the yard. He removed a key ring from his belt and unlocked the wooden shed that held the shovels. The Ivory Tower took out a shovel and began to dig a hole near the courtyard wall. Andras watched through the haze of a nightmare, saw other men join the Ivory Tower at that incomprehensible task. József stood in open-mouthed silence until someone prodded him in the back; then he, too, took up a shovel and began to dig. Someone else must have helped Andras to his feet. He found himself stumbling toward the shed, taking the shovel Lukás handed him, bending beside József. As if in a dream, he angled the shovel toward the earth and jammed it in with all his strength. The earth was hard, compacted; the jolt of the blade radiated up the handle and into his bones. Under his breath he began to murmur a series of words in Hebrew: You deliver us from the snare of the fowler and the pestilence of destruction, cover us with your pinions, protect us from the plague that stalks in darkness and the disease that wastes at noon. You are our protection. No evil will befall us. The angels guard us on our way, carrying us in their hands. He knew the words came from the Ninety-first Psalm, the one recited at funerals. He knew he was digging a grave. But he could not make himself believe that the body beside the wall belonged to Mendel Horovitz, could not believe that this man he’d loved since boyhood had been killed. He could not grasp that stunning absolute. He could not breathe, could not think. In his head, the Ninety-first Psalm, the flash and crack of gunshots, the sound of shovels against cold earth.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE. The Tatars in Hungary

THE MEN WERE BURIED at daybreak. There was no time for shivah, no time even to wash the bodies. Kozma considered it a kindness that he had let the 79/6th bury its fallen comrades. In compensation for that kindness, he withheld their soup rations for the rest of the week. The days passed in a kind of shocked silence, a vibrating disbelief. It was terrible enough to see older men worked to death, or dying of illness; it was another thing altogether to see young men shot. József Hász seemed to react with the deepest shock of all, as though it were new information that any action of his, any exercise of his will, might have disastrous consequences for another human being. After that first week, during which he ate little and slept less, he stunned the company by volunteering for Mendel’s position as the surveyor’s second assistant. By now the position was believed to be cursed; no one else would touch it. But József seemed to consider it a kind of penance. On the surveying runs he made himself Andras’s servant. If there was heavy equipment to carry, he carried it. He gathered wood, built the cooking fires, surrendered his share of any food the surveyor gleaned. The surveyor, who had heard the story of what had happened to Mendel Horovitz and László Goldfarb, accepted József’s servitude with quiet gravity. What had taken place was yet another of the Munkaszolgálat atrocities, playing out its second act now in the emotional torture of this inexperienced young man. But Andras, two decades younger than the surveyor and still capable of being stunned by human selfishness and cruelty, refused to forgive József, refused even to look at him. Every time he passed through Andras’s field of vision, the same ribbon of thoughts would unspool in Andras’s mind. Why had it been Mendel and not József? Why not József in the woods that night, József’s foot in a trap? Why could they not trade places still? Why not József, now, irrevocably gone? Andras had thought he’d tasted frustration and futility; he thought he’d been an intimate of grief. But what he felt now was sharper than any frustration, any grief, he’d ever known before. It seemed to refer not only to Mendel but to Andras too; it was not only the horror of Mendel’s death, the undeniable fact of Mendel’s being gone, but also the knowledge that Andras himself and all the 79/6th had entered another level of hell, that their lives were worthless to their commanding officers, that it was likely Andras would never see his wife and son again. József had done this, too, had brought Andras to this dangerous state of hopelessness. He found he could inhabit that place and still feel a burning anger at József for bringing him there. When a surveying assignment led Andras and József near a stretch of mined earth, he found himself wishing to see József subsumed in a deafening blast of fire. It seemed no worse than he deserved. Twice that year-once in Budapest, once in Ukraine -József had betrayed Andras at excruciating cost. The fact that József was connected by blood to Klara, the person Andras loved most in the world, was another agony; if he could have erased József from Klara’s memory, erased him from the Hász family altogether, he would have done it in an instant. But József stubbornly refused to be erased. He refused to trip a land mine. He hovered at the edge of Andras’s vision, a reminder that what had happened was not an illusion and would not change.

Evenings at the officers’ training school brought no relief. Andras and József were meant to be partners there too, Andras the set designer and József the artistic director. The play, Kisfaludy’s The Tatars in Hungary, was more than familiar to Andras; he’d studied it ad nauseam at his village school in Konyár. A strict schoolmaster had lodged the history soundly in his brain: Before Kisfaludy was a playwright, he’d been a soldier in the Napoleonic wars. When he came home from battle he wanted to bring his experience to the stage, but the recent wars seemed too fresh; instead he fixed his gaze on Hungary ’s distant past. Andras had written a long essay on Kisfaludy for his graduation from primary school. Now here he was, designing sets for The Tatars in Hungary at an officers’ training school in Ukraine in the midst of a world war, and his design partner was a man responsible, in some measure, for Mendel Horovitz’s death. But there was no time to dwell on that slice of irreality. Captain Erdő, the director of the project, was operating under a great urgency. The new minister of defense was soon to pay a visit to the officers’ training school; the play would make its debut in his honor.

On a Thursday evening early in October, Andras and József found themselves standing at attention in the cavernous meeting hall of the officers’ training school while Erdő reviewed their plans. The captain was a tall barrel-chested man with a corona of whitening hair cut close to the scalp. He cultivated a goatee and affected a monocle, but his air of self-mockery suggested it was all a farce, a costume: He considered himself ridiculous and wanted everyone else to be in on the joke. As he critiqued the plans, he spoke as if he were three or four people instead of just one. Instead of these painted trees, he said, might not a few real trees be brought in to suggest woods? Was that impractical? Terribly impractical! Real trees? Who had the time or inclination to dig up trees? But wasn’t it important to achieve an air of realism? Of course. Real trees, then; real trees. Real tents, too, might be used for the encampment. That was a fine idea. There were plenty of tents around, they wouldn’t cost a thing. This large-as-life cave meant to be constructed from chicken wire and papier-mâché, could it be built in two pieces to make it easier to move? Of course it could, if it were designed properly, and that was why he’d engaged József and Andras, wasn’t it? Everything had to be designed and carried out with the utmost professionalism. He didn’t have an enormous budget, but the school wanted to make a good impression upon the new minister of defense. He told Andras and József to make a list of building materials: wood, chicken wire, newspaper, canvas, whatever it was they needed. Then, leaning closer, he began to speak in a different tone.