It was the tiny grandmother of Klein, and her goat cart, newly painted white.
“My God,” she said, and stared at him. “Is it Andras? Is it Andras Lévi?”
He took her hand and kissed it. “You remember me,” he said. “Thank God. Do you know anything about my wife? Klara Lévi? Do you remember her, too?”
“Get up,” she said. “Let me take you to my house.”
The house in Frangepán köz stood in its ancient silence, in a haze of dust suspended in the viscous light of late afternoon. In the yard, a quartet of tiny goatlets nosed at a bucket of breadcrusts. Andras ran the stone path to the door, which stood open as if to admit the breeze. Inside, on the sofa where Andras had first waited to see Klein, lay his wife, Klara Lévi, asleep, alive. At the other end of the sofa was his son, Tamás, deep in a nap, his mouth open. Andras knelt beside them as if in prayer. Tamás’s skin was flushed with sleep, his forehead pink, his eyes fluttering beneath the lids. Klara seemed farther away, scarcely breathing, her skin a luminous white film over her faintly beating life. Her hair had come out of its coil and lay over her shoulder in a twisted rope. Her arm was crooked around a sleeping baby in a white blanket, the baby’s hand an open star on Klara’s half-bare breast.
My pole star, Andras thought. My true north.
Klara stirred, opened her eyes, looked down at the baby and smiled. Then she became aware of another presence in the room, an unfamiliar shape. Instinctively she drew her blouse over her breast, covering that slip of damp white skin.
She raised her eyes to Andras and blinked as if he were the dead. She pressed her eyes with a thumb and forefinger and then looked again.
Andras.
Klara.
They wailed each other’s names into the ancient space of that room, into that dust-storm of antique sunlight; their little boy, their son, woke with a start and began to cry in panic, unable to distinguish joy from grief. And perhaps at that moment joy and grief were the same thing, a flood that filled the chest and opened the throat: This is what I have survived without you, this is what we have lost, this is what is left, what we have to live with now. The baby raised a high wet voice. They were together, Klara and Andras and Tamás, and this little girl whose name her father did not know.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE. The Dead
KLARA HAD SURVIVED the Siege of Budapest in a women’s shelter at Szabadság tér, under the protection of the International Red Cross. The Allies would not bomb it; the Germans had little interest in it. The inhabitants, young mothers and babies, were of no use to them. Klara had gone there in early December, a few weeks after the Russians had reached the southeastern edge of the capital. By that time Horthy had been deposed, the Arrow Cross had come to power, and seventy thousand Jews had been deported from Budapest. Those who had escaped deportation had had to move twice: first from their original homes to yellow-star buildings, Jewish-only apartments in neighborhoods all over the city; and then to a tiny ghetto in the Seventh District, in the streets surrounding the Great Synagogue.
In the first wave of displacements, Klara and Ilana, the children, Klara’s mother, and Elza Hász had all been assigned to a building on Balzac utca, in the Sixth District. Polaner had gone with them. The diminutive Mrs. Klein, grandmother of Miklós Klein, had provided her goat cart to help them transport their things. Klara had seen Klein’s grandmother on a last desperate visit to the Margit körút prison, where György was supposed to have been interned; Mrs. Klein had been there to inquire about Miklós. There had been no news of either man that day, but as the women had walked together afterward along the Danube embankment, trying to distract each other from their fear and grief, they’d talked of the practical difficulties of the upcoming move. On the day designated for their departure from Nefelejcs utca, Klara had awakened to an early-morning knock at the door. It was Miklós Klein’s grandmother in her peasant skirt and black boots, with the news that her goat cart stood at the ready in the courtyard. Klara had looked over the balcony railing, and there was the cart beside the fountain, two white goats sniffing at the water. Miklós Klein’s grandmother, it turned out, had been assigned to a building not far from Klara’s own, and had already transported what she and her husband could salvage from their tiny homestead in Angyalföld. Seven goats had accompanied them to the inner district of the city: these two wethers, two milch does, three kids. Klara could see them herself that very afternoon, Klein’s grandmother said; she’d hidden the goats in a carriage house behind the yellow-star building on Csanády utca.
Even with the aid of the goat cart, they’d had to leave almost everything behind. They were moving into a single room in a three-room apartment with a shared bath; one family lived there already and a third would join them. Klara and Ilana, the children, the elder and younger Mrs. Hász, and Polaner, carrying his loaded gun-the seven of them had crossed the city on foot, through crowds of thousands of Jewish men and women and children pushing their possessions in wheelbarrows or carrying them on their backs or leading them along in horse carts. It took four hours to make the journey of two kilometers. When they carried their things upstairs, they found that all the rooms were occupied; a fourth family had been assigned to the apartment at the last moment. But there was nowhere else for any of them to go, so they would have to share. And that was the beginning of five months in that apartment on Balzac utca. Soon it came to seem to Klara that she had always slept on a pallet on the floor between her mother and her child, had always shared a bath with sixteen others, had always woken to the sound of her elder sister-in-law weeping. Miklós Klein’s grandmother arrived every few days with goat’s milk for the children and for Klara, reminding Klara that she must keep up her strength for the sake of the baby in her womb. But Klara’s pregnancy seemed a terrible irony, the mockery of a promise. As she waited in line for bread one day, two old women had spoken of her as though she weren’t there, or couldn’t hear: Look at that poor Jewish pregnant woman. What a shame she’s got no future.
In fact, the aperture to any future beyond the war seemed to contract by the day. They lived in constant fear of deportation; from the outlying towns came news of thousands sent away in closed trains. In the capital itself there were horrors enough: frequent Arrow Cross raids on the yellow-star buildings, the displaced families’ possessions stolen, men and women taken away for no reason other than that they happened to be home when the Nyilas men arrived. At times there was reason for hope, reason to think the nightmare might soon end; in July, Horthy stopped all deportations of Jews from Hungary. The Budapest Jews thought they were saved. Klara heard rumors in the streets of talks between Hungary and the Allies, plans for an armistice. Then in mid-October came Horthy’s announcement that Hungary had concluded a separate peace with the Russians. For a few hours there were mad celebrations in the streets. Men tore down the yellow-star signs above their doorways, and women ripped the yellow-star patches from their children’s coats. But then came the terrible double blow of the Arrow Cross coup and Szálasi’s installation as prime minister. The deportations began again, this time in Budapest: Tens of thousands of men and women were taken from their houses and marched to the brickyards at Óbuda, then onward toward Austria. The actions of the Arrow Cross seemed dictated purely by cruel whim. A gang of Nyilas men had raided the building across the street from their own, and had deported nearly a dozen men and women, many of them too old for active labor; Klara had expected their own building to be raided at any moment, but the men had never returned.