…

On Saturday afternoons, when the weather was fine, Andras and Klara made a point of walking alone on Margaret Island for an hour or two while Polaner played with Tamás in the park. It was during those walks that they spoke of the things Andras could not write about in his brief and censored letters from Ukraine: the reasons for their deportation, and the role that The Crooked Rail may have played; the circumstances surrounding Mendel’s death; the long struggle with József afterward; and the strange conjunctions of the journey home. On the first subject, Andras’s greatest fear was that Klara herself might hold him responsible for what had happened, might blame him for keeping the family from attempting its escape. She had warned him; he hadn’t forgotten it for a moment. But she was at pains to reassure him that no one held him responsible for what had happened. Such an idea, she said, was a symptom of the loss of perspective caused by the Munkaszolgálat and the war. The journey to Palestine might easily have ended in disaster. His deportation may have saved them all. Now that he had returned, she was at liberty to be grateful that they’d been spared the uncertainties of the trip. To the second subject she reacted with grief and dismay, and Andras was reminded that she, too, had been present at the death of her closest friend and ally; she, too, had been witness to the senseless killing of a man she had loved since childhood. And on the third subject, she could say only that she understood what it must have required for Andras to keep from doing some great violence to József. But the time in Ukraine, and with Andras, had changed József in some deep-rooted way, she thought; he seemed a different man since his return, or perhaps he seemed finally to have become a man.

For reasons Andras found difficult to articulate, the most difficult subject was that of Zoltán Novak’s death. Months of Saturday walks passed before he could tell Klara that he had been with Novak on the last days of his life, and that he had buried Novak himself. She had read of Novak’s death in the newspapers and had mourned his loss before Andras’s return, but she wept afresh at that news. She asked Andras to tell her everything that had happened: how he had discovered Novak, what they had said to each other, how Novak had died. When he had finished, putting matters as gently as possible and omitting many painful details, Klara offered an admission of her own: She and Novak had exchanged nearly a dozen letters during his long months of service.

They had paused in their walk at the ruin of a Franciscan church halfway up the eastern side of the island: stones that looked as though they had risen from the earth, a rose window empty of glass, Gothic windows missing their topmost points. It was December, but the day was unseasonably mild; in the shadow of the ruin stood a bench where a husband and wife might make confession, even if they were Jewish. Even if no confessor was present except each other.

“How did he write to you?” Andras asked.

“He sent letters with officers who came and went on leave.”

“And you wrote back.”

She folded her wet handkerchief and looked toward the empty rose window. “He was alone and bereaved. He didn’t have anyone. Even his little son had died by then.”

“Your letters must have been a comfort,” Andras said with some effort, and followed her gaze toward the ruin. In one of the lobes of the rose window a bird had built its nest; the nest was long abandoned now, its dry grass streamers fluttering in the wind.

“I tried not to give him false hope,” Klara said. “He knew the limitations of my feelings for him.”

Andras had to believe her. The man he had seen in the granary in Ukraine could not have been operating under the illusion that someone was nursing a secret love for him. He was a man who had been forsaken by everything that had mattered, a man who had lived to see the ruin of all he had done on earth. “I don’t begrudge him your letters,” Andras said. “I can’t blame you for anything you might have written to him. He was always good to you. He was good to both of us.”

Klara put a hand on Andras’s knee. “He never regretted what he did for you,” she said. “He told me he’d spoken to you at the Operaház. He said you were much kinder than you might have been. He said, in fact, that if I had to marry anyone, he was glad it was you.”

Andras covered her hand with his own and looked up again at the bird’s nest shivering in the rose window. He had seen architectural drawings of this church in its unruined state, its Gothic lines graceful but unremarkable, indistinguishable from those of thousands of other Gothic chapels. As a ruin it had taken on something of the extraordinary. The perfect masonry of the far wall had been laid bare; the near wall had weathered into a jagged staircase, the edges of the stones worn to velvet. The rose window was more elegant for its lack of glass, the bones of its corolla scoured by wind and bleached white in the sun. The nest with its streamers was a final unbidden touch: It was what human hands had not brought to the building, and could not remove. It was like love, he thought, this crumbling chapel: It had been complicated, and thereby perfected, by what time had done to it.

His most melancholy times that year were those he spent alone with Tibor. Wherever they walked, whatever they did-whether they were occupying their usual table at the Artists’ Café, or strolling the paths of the Városliget, or standing at the railing of the Széchenyi Bridge and looking down into the twisting water-when he was with Tibor, Andras understood acutely that they were at the mercy of events beyond their control. The Danube, which had once seemed a magic conduit along which they might slip out of Hungary, had become an ordinary river once more; Klein was in jail, their visas expired, the Trasnet no more than the memory of a name. Before, Tibor’s will had seemed to Andras an inexorable force. He had always had a preternatural talent for making the impossible come to pass. But their escape had not come to pass, and now they had no secret plan of action to balance against their fears. Tibor himself had undergone a change; he had been in the Munkaszolgálat for three years now, and like Andras he had been forced to learn its difficult lessons. He had carried a great weight since his return from the Eastern Front, it seemed to Andras-the weight of dozens of human bodies, the living and the dead, every sick or wounded man he’d cared for in the labor service and in the hospital where he’d been working in Budapest. “We couldn’t save him,” his stories often ended. He told Andras in detail about bleeding that couldn’t be stopped, dysentery that turned men inside out, pneumonia that broke ribs and asphyxiated its victims.

And the bodies continued to accumulate, even in Budapest, far from the front lines of the war. One evening Tibor appeared at the offices of the Courier and asked if Andras might want to knock off a bit early; a young man whom Tibor had tended had died a few hours earlier on the operating table, and Tibor needed a drink. Andras took his brother to a bar they had always liked, a narrow amber-lit place called the Trolley Bell. There, over glasses of Aquincum beer, Tibor told Andras the story: The boy had been wounded months earlier in the battle of Voronezh, had taken shrapnel in both lungs and hadn’t been able to breathe properly since. A risky operation to remove the fragments had severed the pulmonary artery, and the boy had died on the table. Tibor had been present in the waiting room when the doctor, a talented and well-respected surgeon named Keresztes, had delivered the news to the boy’s parents. Tibor had expected cries, protests, a collapse, but the young man’s mother had risen from her chair and calmly explained that her son could not be dead. She showed Keresztes the jersey she had just finished knitting for the boy. It was composed of wool that had been immersed in a well in Szentgotthárd where the Blessed Virgin’s face had appeared three times. She had just tied off the last stitch when the surgeon came in. She must be allowed to lay the jersey over her son; he was not dead, only in a state of deep sleep under the Virgin’s watch. When Keresztes began to explain the circumstances of the boy’s death, and the impossibility of his recovery, the young man’s father had threatened to slit the surgeon’s throat with his own scalpel if the mother were not allowed to do what she wished. The surgeon, weary from the long procedure, had escorted the parents to their son’s bedside in a room near the operating theater and had left Tibor to oversee their visit with the dead boy. The mother had laid the jersey over the matrix of bandages on the boy’s chest, and had commenced to pray the Rosary. But the Virgin’s blessing failed to revive her son. The boy lay inert, and by the time she had reached the end of her line of beads she seemed to comprehend the situation. Her boy was gone, had died in Budapest after having survived the battle of Voronezh; nothing would bring him back now. When a nurse had come in to remove the body so the room might be used for another patient, Tibor had asked her to let the parents stay there with the boy as long as they wished. The nurse had insisted the room be cleared; the new patient would be out of surgery in a quarter of an hour. The boy’s parents, understanding that they had no choice, shuffled toward the door. On the threshold, the mother had pressed the jersey into Tibor’s hands. He must take it, she said, as it could no longer be of any use to her son.