But Andras had been schooled in skepticism not only by Tibor but by the events of the past year; despite the hopeful news, he found it impossible to shake his sense of dread. More events accrued to reinforce it. As he followed the black-market trial in the newspaper that fall, it became increasingly clear that the accused officers, if they were convicted, would carry only nominal sentences. And Hitler, whose Wehrmacht had looked so vulnerable during the summer months, had halted the Allied attack south of Rome and secured Germany ’s southern borders. In Russia he continued to throw his troops at the Red Army, as though total defeat were impossible.

Then there was the absence of news about Mátyás, who had been missing now for twenty-two months. How could anyone continue to believe he had survived? But Tibor persisted in believing it, and his mother believed it, and though his father wouldn’t speak of it, Andras knew he believed it; as long as any of them did, none of them could claim even the bare comfort of grief.

The year’s final act of aborted justice concerned the Hász family and the extortion that had drained its fortunes almost to nothing. Once György’s monthly payments had dwindled to a few hundred forint, the extortionists decided that the rewards of the arrangement were no longer worth the risk. The Kállay administration seemed intent upon exposing corruption at all levels and in all branches of the government; seventeen members of the Ministry of Justice had already been indicted for financial improprieties, and György’s extortionists feared they would be next. On the twenty-fifth of October they called György to a midnight meeting in the basement of the Ministry of Justice. That night, Andras and Klara kept a vigil with Klara’s mother and Elza and József in the small dark front room of the Hász apartment. József chain-smoked a pack of Mirjam cigarettes; Elza sat with a basket of mending beside her, needling her way through the unfamiliar ravages of poverty upon clothing. The elder Mrs. Hász read aloud from Radnóti, the young Jewish poet Tibor admired, and whose fate in the Munkaszolgálat was unknown. Klara, her hands pinned between her knees, sat beside Andras as if in judgment herself. If her brother came to harm, Andras knew she would hold herself responsible.

At a quarter to three in the morning a key sounded in the lock. Here was György, soot-stained and breathless but otherwise unharmed. He removed his jacket and draped it over the back of the sofa, smoothed his pale gold tie, ran a hand through his silver-shot hair. He sat down in an empty chair and drained the glass of plum brandy his wife offered him. Then he set the empty glass on the low table before him and fixed his eyes on Klara, who sat close at his side.

“It’s over,” he said, covering her hand with his own. “You may exhale.”

“What’s over?” their mother asked. “What’s happened?”

There had been a great immolation of documents, he told them. The extortionists had taken György to his office and made him gather all evidence of the ministry’s illegal relationship with the Hász family-every letter, every telegram and payment record, every bill of sale and bank-deposit receipt-and had forced him to throw the lot into the building’s incinerator, making it impossible for the Hász family ever to mount a case against the Ministry of Justice. In return, the ministry officials produced a new set of papers for Klara, restoring the citzenship she’d lost as a young girl. Then they took the file containing all the documents pertaining to Klara’s alleged crime-the photographs of the murder scene and victims, the rapist’s sworn testimony revealing Klara’s identity, the depositions linking Klara to the Zionist organization Gesher Zahav, the police reports documenting Klara’s disappearance, and Edith Novak’s statement concerning Klara’s return to Hungary-and fed it, too, to the building’s central incinerator.

“You saw them burn those things?” Klara said. “The dossier, the photographs-everything?”

“Everything,” György said.

“How do you know they didn’t keep copies?” József said. “How do you know they don’t have other documents?”

“It’s possible, I suppose, but not likely. We must remember that any evidence they might retain would be evidence against them. That’s why they were so eager to destroy those papers.”

“But the evidence has always implicated them!” József said, rising from his chair. “That’s never bothered them before.”

“These men were frightened,” Hász said. “They did a poor job of hiding it. The administration isn’t on their side. They’ve seen seventeen of their colleagues fired, and a few imprisoned or sent to the labor service, for less than what they’ve done to us.”

“And you destroyed everything?” József said. “Truly everything? You didn’t keep a single copy? Nothing that would give us recourse later?”

György gave his son a hard and steady look. “They held a gun to my head as I emptied the files,” he said. “I would like to say I had duplicates elsewhere, but it was risky enough to keep what I had. Anyway, it’s finished now. They can’t open Klara’s case again. I saw the documents burn.”

József stood over his father’s chair, his hands clenched. He seemed ready to grab his father by the shoulders and shake him. His eyes flickered toward his grandmother, his mother; then his gaze fell upon Andras and rested there. Between them lay a history so terrible as to throw the moment’s frustration into a different light; to look at each other was to be reminded what it meant to escape with one’s life. József sat down again and spoke to his father.

“Thank God it’s over,” he said. “Thank God they didn’t kill you.”

…

In their bedroom that night, Andras held Klara as they lay awake in the dark. How many times over the past four years had he imagined her arrested and beaten and jailed, placed far beyond his reach? He could scarcely believe that the ever-present threat was gone. Klara herself was silent and dry-eyed beside him; he knew how keenly she felt the price of her own liberation. Her return to Hungary, a risk she had undertaken for his sake, had ruined her family. She was free now, but her freedom would never extend far enough to allow her to demand legal justice or the repayment of her family’s losses. Her silence wasn’t directed at him, he understood, but it lay between them nonetheless. Had he ever been close to her in the way married people were supposed to be close? he wondered. Of their forty-eight months married, he had spent only twelve at home. To survive their separation they’d had to place each other at a certain remove. Every time he’d been home, including this one, there had been the fear that he would be called up again; as much as they tried to ignore it, the fact was always there. And veiling all their intimacy, shadowing it like a pair of dark wings, was what they knew was happening in Europe, and what they feared would happen to them.

But here they were together, in their shared bed, out of the grasp of danger for the moment. They lived, and he loved her. It was was folly in the French sense-madness-to keep her at a remove. It was the last thing he wanted. He touched her bare shoulder, her face, pushed a lock of hair away from her brow, and she moved closer against him. Mindful of Polaner sleeping on the other side of the wall-of his losses, and his loneliness-they made love in clenched and straining silence. Afterward they lay together, his hand on her belly, his fingers moving along the familiar scars of her pregnancies. They hadn’t taken precautions against her becoming pregnant again, though neither wanted to imagine what it might mean if she were carrying a child when the Soviets crossed the Hungarian border. As they drifted toward sleep he described in a whisper the little house he would build beside the Danube when the war was over. It was the place he had envisioned when he’d been to Angyalföld the first time, a whitewashed brick house with a tile roof, a garden large enough for a pair of milking goats, an outdoor bread oven, a shaded patio, a pergola laced with grapevines. Klara slept at last, but Andras lay awake beside her, far from comfort. Once again, he thought, he had drawn a plan for an imaginary house, one in a long line of imaginary houses he had built since they’d been together; in his mind he could page through a deep stack of them, those ghostly blueprints of a life they had not yet lived and might never live.