CHAPTER FORTY. Nightmare

IN THE END, what astonished him most was not the vastness of it all-that was impossible to take in, the hundreds of thousands of dead from Hungary alone, and the millions from all over Europe-but the excruciating smallness, the pinpoint upon which every life was balanced. The scale might be tipped by the tiniest of things: the lice that carried typhus, the few thimblefuls of water that remained in a canteen, the dust of breadcrumbs in a pocket. On the tenth of January, at the cold disordered dawn of 1945, Andras lay on the floor of a boxcar in a Hungarian quarantine camp a few kilometers from the Austrian border. The nearby town was Sopron, with its famous Goat Church. A vague childhood memory-an art-history lesson, a white-haired master with a moustache like the disembodied wings of a dove, an image of the carved stone chancel where Ferdinand III had been crowned King of Hungary. According to the legend, a goat had unearthed an ancient treasure on that site; the treasure had been buried again when the church was built, as a tribute to the Virgin Mary. And so, somewhere up the hill, beneath the church whose blackened spire was visible from where he lay, an ancient treasure moldered; and here in the quarantine camp, three thousand men were dying of typhus. Andras climbed into the swirling heights of a fever through which his thoughts proceeded in carnival costume. He remembered, vaguely, having been told that the quarantined men were supposed to consider themselves lucky. Those not infected had been shipped over the Austrian border to labor camps.

Some facts he could grasp. He counted these certainties like marbles in a bag, each with its twist of blood- or sea-colored glass. Their bend of the Tisza had, in fact, been bombed. It had happened on an unseasonably warm night in late October, nearly five months after they’d arrived at the camp. He remembered crouching in the darkness with Tibor and József, the walls shuddering as shock waves rolled through the earth; only by an act of grace, it seemed, had their building remained intact. Thirty-three men had been crushed in another bunkhouse when it collapsed. Six bargemen and half a company of Hungarian soldiers, quartered that night on the riverbank, had all been killed. The 55/10th, in tatters, had fled west ahead of the advancing Soviet Army. For weeks their guards had shuffled them from one town to another, quartering them in peasants’ huts or barns or in the open fields, as the war rumbled and flared, always a few kilometers away. By that time Hungary had fallen into the hands of the Arrow Cross. Horthy had proved too difficult for Germany to control; under pressure from the Allies he had stopped the deportations of Jews, and on the eleventh of October he’d covertly negotiated a separate peace agreement with the Kremlin. When he announced the armistice a few days later, Hitler had forced him to abdicate and had exiled him to Germany with his family. The armistice was nullified. Ferenc Szálasi, the Arrow Cross leader, became prime minister. The news reached the labor servicemen in the form of new regulations: They were now to be treated not as forced laborers, but as prisoners of war.

Those things Andras remembered in detail. More confusing was what had passed between then and now. Through the haze of his fever he tried and tried to remember what had happened to Tibor. He remembered, weeks or months earlier, fleeing with Tibor and József along a road west of Trebišov on a bright day, pursued by the sound of Russian tanks and Russian gunfire. They’d been separated from their company; József had been sick and couldn’t keep up. German jeeps and armored cars shot along the road beside them. Approaching from behind, an earthquake: Russians in their rolling fortresses, guns blazing. As they fled along the road, József had stumbled into the path of a German armored car. He’d been thrown into a ditch, his leg twisted into an angle that was-the fevered Andras grasped in darkness for the word-unrealistic. It was unrealistic; it did not represent life. A leg did not bend in that way, or in that direction, in relation to a man’s body. When Andras reached him, József was open-eyed, breathing fast and shallow; he seemed in a state of strange exultation, as though in one quick stroke he’d been vindicated on a point he’d argued fruitlessly for years. Tibor bent beside him and put a careful hand to the leg, and József released an unforgettable sound: a grating three-toned shriek that seemed to crack the dome of the sky. Tibor drew back and gave Andras a look of despair: He was out of morphine, the supplies he’d hoarded in Budapest exhausted by now. Moments later, it seemed, an olive-colored van had appeared, Austrian Wehrmacht flags fluttering at its bumpers, a red cross painted on its side. Andras tore the yellow armband from his sleeve, from József’s, from Tibor’s; now they were just three men in a ditch, without identity. Austrian medics arrived, judged them all in need of immediate medical care, and loaded them into the van. Soon they were moving along the road at an incredible rate of speed-still fleeing before the Russians, Andras imagined. Then there was a burst of deafening noise, a brilliant explosion. The canvas of the van tore away, floor became ceiling, a tire traced an arc against a backdrop of clouds. A jolt of impact. A thrumming silence. From somewhere close by, József calling for his father, of all people. Tibor stood unharmed amid dry cornstalks, dusting snow from his sleeves. Andras, a wild white pain abloom in his side, lay in a furrow of the field and stared at the sky, an impossibly high milk blue stretching forever above him. In his memory a cloud took the shape of the Panthéon, a suggestion of columns and a dome. A moment later that milky blue, that dome, disappeared into an enfolding darkness.

Later he had opened his eyes to a vision so blinding he was certain he had died. Snow-white walls, snow-white bedstead, snow-white curtains, snow-white sky outside the window. He came to understand that he was lying on a hospital cot, under the excruciating weight of a thin cotton blanket. A doctor with a Yugoslav name, Dobek, removed a bandage from Andras’s side and examined a red-toothed wound that extended from beneath his lowest rib to just above his navel. The sight of it brought on a wave of nausea so deep that Andras looked around in panic for a bedpan, and the motion called forth a shearing pain inside the wound. The doctor begged Andras not to move. Andras understood, though the admonition came in a language he didn’t know. He lay back and fell into a dreamless sleep. When he woke, Tibor was sitting in a chair beside the cot, his glasses unbroken, his hair clean, his face washed, his labor-service rags exchanged for cotton pajamas. Andras had been wounded, he explained; the medical van had hit a mine. He’d had to have emergency surgery. His spleen had been damaged, his small intestine severed near the terminal ileum; but all had been repaired, and he was recovering well. Where were they? In Kassa, Slovakia, in a Catholic hospital, St. Elizabeth’s, under the care of Slovak nuns. And where was József? Recovering in a neighboring ward; his leg had been shattered, and he’d had a complicated surgery.

They lay in that Slovak hospital, he and József, for an indeterminate number of weeks; he lay there recovering from his terrible wound, and József from his complex fracture, while a war raged nearby. Tibor came and went. He was serving the nuns, the doctors, working at their side, assisting in surgery, triaging new patients who came in. He was exhausted, grim with the sight of bullet- and bomb-ravaged bodies, but there was a calm purpose in his expression: He was doing what he’d been trained to do. The Russians were making progress, he told Andras, slowly but steadily. If the hospital could survive the onslaught of the battle, they might all be safe soon.