When the first bombs hit, the shelter shook as if the moon itself had fallen from its orbit and crashed to earth just overhead. Concrete dust rained from the ceiling, and the lightbulbs flickered in their wire cages. A few men cursed. Others closed their eyes as if in prayer. József asked an officer-in-training for a cigarette and began to smoke it.

“Put that out,” Andras whispered. “If there’s a gas leak down here, we’ll all be killed.”

“If I’m about to die, I’m going to smoke,” József said.

Andras shook his head. Beside him, József released a complex luxuriant cloud through his nostrils, as if he meant to take his time. But another concussive blast threw him against Andras, and he dropped the cigarette. A series of shuddering jolts rocketed through the foundation of the building like small earthquakes; this was anti-aircraft fire, the kick of the artillery installation housed not far from the assembly hall. Glass exploded above, and faint cries reached the men through the walls of the shelter.

“At attention, men!” one of the officers commanded. They stood at attention. It took some concentration, there in the flickering dark; they stood that way until the next bombs hit. As the foundation shuddered, Andras thought of the weight of building materials arranged above him: the heavy beams, the flooring, the walls, the tons of cinderblock and brickwork, the roof struts and frame, the thousands and thousands of slate tiles. He thought of all those materials raining down upon the architecture of his own body. Fragile skin, fragile muscle, fragile bone, the clever structures of the organs, the intricate arrangement of his cells-all the things Tibor had pointed out in Klara’s anatomy book a lifetime ago in Paris. Suddenly he couldn’t breathe. Another detonation knocked the room sideways, and a crack appeared in the ceiling.

Then there was a lull. The men stood silent, waiting. The anti-aircraft artillery must have been hit, or the gunners must have been waiting for the next wave of planes. That was worse-not to know when the next barrage was going to come. József’s lips moved with some whispered incantation. Andras leaned in, wondering what psalm or prayer might have brought such a look of tranquility to József’s features; when the words resolved into an intelligible line, he almost laughed aloud. It was a Cole Porter tune József had often played on his phonograph at parties. I’m with you once more under the stars / And down by the shore an orchestra’s playing / And even the palms seem to be swaying / When they begin the beguine. The quiet ended with the renewed staccato of anti-aircraft fire, then a percussive chord of blasts, as if a trio of bombs had struck all at once. The men fell to their knees and the lights went out. József made an animal noise of panic. So this was how it would happen, Andras thought: József would receive his retribution here in this tomb under the officers’ meeting hall. How like a fairy tale, where selfish wishes often carried a cruel price: József would die, but Andras would have to die with him. As the bombs continued to fall, József lowered his forehead to Andras’s collarbone and said, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” The cigarette smoke in his hair was the smell of evenings in Paris. For one unthinking moment, Andras put a hand on József’s head.

Then, all at once, the lights flickered on again. The men got to their feet. They dusted off their uniforms and pretended they hadn’t just been clutching each other’s arms, crushing their faces against each other’s chests, praying and crying and apologizing. They glanced around as if to confirm that none of them had really been afraid. The earth had gone still now; the bombing had stopped. Above, all was silent.

“All right, men,” said the officer who had commanded them to stand at attention. “Wait for the all clear.”

It was a long time before the signal sounded. When it came at last there was a push toward the hallways, a crush of men talking in shock-dulled voices. No one knew what they would find when they emerged. Andras thought of the labor camp where they were supposed to stay when they had first arrived in Turka-its mass grave, the wet dirt slumped into the ground like a sodden blanket. He and József shouldered into a stream of men making their way back toward the staircase. The air in the bunker seemed overbreathed, devoid of oxygen.

There was a bottleneck at the foot of the stairway. As Andras shuffled toward the stairs, someone bumped against him and pushed something into his hand. It was Erdő, his face red and wet, his monocle fallen. “I didn’t think of it earlier,” he said into Andras’s ear. “I was preoccupied with the play. I might have died and never given it to you, or you might have died and never gotten it.”

Andras looked down to see what he held in his hand. It was a piece of folded paper wrapped in a handkerchief.

He couldn’t wait. He had to see. He unwrapped the corner of the handkerchief, and there was Klara’s handwriting on a thin blue envelope. His heart lurched in his chest.

“Hide that,” Erdő said, and Andras did.

Back at the orphanage he wanted only to be alone-to get to some private place where he could read Klara’s letter. But the men of Company 79/6 met him and the others with a storm of questions. What had happened? Had they seen the planes? Had anyone been killed? Had they themselves been injured? What was the meaning of an air raid so far from the front lines? The guards had been listening to the radio in Kozma’s private quarters, but had told the men nothing, of course; the bombing had gone on for so long that the men thought everyone at the school must be dead.

Men had died. That much was true. When they’d come out of the meeting hall-the three walls that remained of it, in any case-they’d been swept into a stream of men running for one of the shelters, which had caved in upon the officers-in-training who had been huddled there. For three hours the labor servicemen and soldiers worked with shovels and pickaxes, ropes and jeeps, to move the mass of wood and concrete that had trapped the men. Seventeen of them had been killed outright by the cave-in. Dozens of others were injured. There were other casualties elsewhere: The mess hall had been flattened before the cooks and dishwashers could get to a shelter, and eleven men had died. It was deduced that General Vilmos Nagy had been the reason for the raid; intelligence of his visit must have reached the NKVD, and Soviet Air Force troops commissioned to attempt an assassination via bombing. But General Nagy had survived. He had personally supervised the attempt to rescue the men from the collapsed shelter, to the dismay of his young adjutant, who stood nearby surveying the firelit cloud cover as if another rain of Soviet YAK-1s might drop out of it at any moment.

All that time, Andras had carried Klara’s letter in his pocket, not daring to read it. Now, finally, he was at liberty to climb into his bunk and try to decipher her lines in the dark. József seemed nearly as anxious as Andras; he sat cross-legged on the bunk below, awaiting news. Andras slit the envelope carefully with his razor, then maneuvered into a position that would allow him to use the moonlight as a torch. He pulled the letter out and unfolded it with trembling hands.

15 October 1942

Budapest

Dear A,

Imagine my relief, and your brother’s, when we received your letter! We have all decided to postpone our trip to the country until you return. Tamás is well, and I am as well as might be expected. Your parents are in good health. Please send greetings to my nephew. His parents are well, too. As for what you wrote about M.H.’s departure for Lachaise, I must hope I have misunderstood you. Please write again soon.

As ever,

Your K.

We have all decided to postpone. It was just as he had feared, only worse. Not just Klara, but Tibor and Ilana too. He would have done the same, of course-would never have left Ilana and Ádám alone in Budapest three days after Tibor had disappeared-but it was sad and infuriating nonetheless. In one stroke the Hungarian Army had grounded the entire Lévi clan. For the sake of an underground business in army boots and tinned meat, ammunition and jeep tires, they had all been tied to a continent intent upon erasing its Jews from the earth. That horrible truth lodged beneath his diaphragm and made it impossible for him to draw a full breath. He put his hand over the side of the bed and slipped the letter to József, who reacted with a low note of distress-József, who had long argued the foolishness of the trip to Palestine. Now, after three months in Ukraine, and after what they had just experienced and seen at the officers’ training school, József knew what it meant to feel one’s own vulnerability, to taste the salt of one’s own mortality. He understood what it meant for Klara and Tamás, Tibor and Ilana and Ádám, to be stranded in Hungary while the war drew closer on all sides. He must have known what his own deportation would have meant to his parents; beneath the well in Klara’s single line about them, he must have sensed the truth.