“Zsófia’s pregnant?” Andras said.

“Not anymore. Last spring. She got rid of it somehow. She didn’t want it any more than I did, that was how little she cared for me.” He released a long breath. “I can’t imagine you’d have any sympathy for me, Andras. But it’s a hard thing to have to see oneself clearly all of a sudden. You must understand what I mean.”

Andras said he believed he did.

“I know you don’t think much of my paintings,” József said. “I could see it when you came by last year, the time you and Klara brought the baby to my flat.”

“On the contrary, I thought the new work was good. I told Klara as much.”

“What if I were to try to contact my art dealer in Budapest?” József said, turning to Andras. “Have him sell something? I never considered the new pieces to be finished, but a collector might think otherwise. I might ask Papp to see what he can get for those nine big pieces.”

“You’d sell your unfinished work?”

“I can’t imagine what else I can do,” József said, turning from the window. For a moment the curve of his forehead and the dark wing of his hair were like Klara’s, and Andras experienced an unwelcome jolt of affection for him. He lay back in bed and stared at the dark plane of the ceiling.

“The pieces I saw were good,” he told József. “They didn’t seem unfinished. They might fetch a high price. But it might not be necessary to sell them. Klara may be able to get the money sent from Vienna.”

“And what if she can?” József said. “Do you think they won’t need more money for something else next month? What if one of the children gets sick, or my grandmother? What if it’s something that can’t wait for Klara to contact her lawyer?” The question hovered in the air for a long moment while they both considered that frightening possibility.

“What can I tell you?” Andras said. “I think it’s a fine idea. If I had work to sell right now, I’d sell it.”

“Give me your pen,” József said. “I’ll write my mother. Then I’ll write to Papp.”

Andras felt around in his knapsack for his pen and the last precious bottle of India ink left over from their set-design supplies. Using the windowsill as a desk and the moonlight as a lamp, József began to write. But a moment later he spoke again into the dark.

“I’ve never given my father a single thing,” he said. “Not one thing.”

“He’ll know what it means for you to sell those paintings.”

“What if he dies before my mother gets this letter?”

“Then at least your mother will know what you meant to do,” Andras said. “And Klara will know too.”

The next morning they woke and cleared snow, and the day after that they cleared snow, and the following day they encountered Captain Erdő as he was marching his trainees along the road, and József managed to slip the letters into his hand. Every day after that they cleared snow and cleared snow, until, on the twentieth of December, Major Bálint announced that they were to pack their things and clean the orphanage from top to bottom; their unit was to move east the following day.

As much as they hated the orphanage, as much as every man had loathed his too-short bunk and cursed when he had to stoop to the child-sized sinks in the chill of a winter morning, as much as they had lived in terrified awareness of the killings that had taken place on the grounds, the murder of the children that had preceded their arrival, and the execution of Mendel Horovitz and László Goldfarb, as much as they had yearned to leave those rooms where they had been starved, beaten, and humiliated, they felt a strange resistance to the thought of turning the place over to another company, a group of unknown men. The 79/6th had become the caretakers of the graves of all their dead, the mounds marked with stones carried from the roadbed. They had kept the ground swept, the stones clean; they had placed smaller stones upon the larger ones in tribute to the men who had been shot or died of illness or overwork. They had become the caretakers, too, of the ghosts of the Jewish orphans of Turka; the 79/6th were the only ones who had seen those undersized footprints left behind in the hallways and the courtyard. They had eaten at the children’s abandoned tables, memorized the shapes of the Cyrillic letters scratched into the tops of the schoolroom desks, been bitten at night by the same bedbugs that had bitten the children, stubbed their toes on the bed frames where the children had stubbed their toes. Now they would have to abandon them, too, those children who had already been abandoned three times: once by their own parents, once by the state, and finally by life itself. But the men of the 79/6th-those who survived the winter-would say Kaddish for the Jewish orphans of Turka every August for as long as they lived.

They moved east, on foot, in the direction of danger. The land all around looked just as it did in Turka: snow-laden hills, heavy pines, the papery remains of cornstalks stubbling the white fields, stands of cows chuffing cumuli into the freezing air. The towns were nothing more than scatterings of farmhouses in the shadowy folds of the hills. The wind came through the men’s overcoats and settled into their bones. They had to quarter in stables with the workhorses or sleep on the floors of the peasants’ houses, where they lay open-eyed all night in fear of the peasants, who lay open-eyed all night in fear of them. At times there was no stable or village at all, and they had to bivouac in the freezing cold under the aurora-lit sky. The temperature dropped at night to -20°C. The men always had a fire, but the fire itself was dangerous; it could mesmerize you, it could cause you to stop moving, it could distract you from the difficult work of staying alive. If you fell asleep beside it during the night watch, tricked by its warmth into letting your blanket drop from your shoulders, it might burn itself to ash and leave you exposed to the cold. One morning Andras found the Ivory Tower that way, his arms around his knees, his large head bent forward in what appeared to be sleep. In front of him was the dead black ring where the fire had burned out in the snow, and on his shoulders lay a dusting of ice and frost. Andras put a hand to the Ivory Tower’s neck, but the skin was as cold and unyielding as the ground itself. They had to carry his body with them for three days before they came across a patch of earth soft enough to receive him. It was beside a stable, where the horses’ warmth had kept the ground from being frozen solid. They buried the Ivory Tower in the middle of the night and scratched his name and the date of his death into the side of the barn. They said the Ninety-first Psalm again. By that time they could all recite it from memory.

…

The cold was with them day and night. Even inside the stables or the peasants’ houses it was impossible to get warm. They stitched clumsy mittens from the linings of their overcoats, but the mittens were thin and leaked cold at the seams. Their feet froze inside their cracked boots. The men tore horse blankets into foot rags and bound their feet like the Ukrainian peasants did. Their diet contained little to keep them warm, though Major Bálint tried to maintain the rations prescribed by General Nagy. Every now and then the peasants took pity on them and gave them something extra: a tablespoon of goose fat for their bread, a marrow bone, a bit of jam. Andras thought of the surveyor and hoped he was eating too-hoped the army was feeding him in Voronezh.

By day they shoveled snow from the roads, often not as fast as it fell. Their backs became hunched with the work, their hands crabbed from gripping the shovels. Along the half-cleared roads came trucks, jeeps, artillery, men, tanks, airplane parts, ammunition. Sometimes a German inspector would come to shout them into their lines and abuse them in his language of guttural consonants and air-starved vowels. News floated in like ash from a fire: The battle crawled onward in Stalingrad, killing tens of thousands every week; a strand of the Hungarian Second Army fought for its life at Voronezh, battered by superior Soviet forces. The men of the 79/6th shoveled their way toward that battle, though it seemed as distant as everything else. Sometimes they shoveled all night while the northern sky shouted a stream of bright curses. The men thought of their wives and girlfriends lying in warm beds in Budapest, their legs bare and smooth, their breasts asleep in the midwinter dark, their hands folded and fragrant like love letters. They repeated the names of those distant women in their minds, the twist of longing never abating, even when the names became abstractions and the men had to wonder whether the women really still existed, if they could be said to exist when their existence was taking place somewhere so far distant, beyond the granite grin of the Carpathians, across the flat cold plains of Hungarian winter. Klara was the sound of a shovel hitting frozen snow, the scrape of a blade against frozen ground. Andras told himself that if he could only clear this road, if he could only open the way for the trucks to speed toward the Eastern Front, then the war would flow in that direction and pool there, far away from Hungary and Klara and Tamás.