He could not have anticipated how, or when. It came on a Sunday exactly a month after the funeral, the day Andras shaved his mourning beard. They were sitting at the breakfast table, eating barley porridge with goats’ milk; food was still scarce, and as the weather turned colder they had begun to wonder whether, having survived the war itself, they would die of its aftermath. Klara spooned her own porridge into the children’s mouths. Andras, who could not eat, passed his along to her. József and Polaner sat with the newspaper spread between them, Polaner reading aloud about the Communist Party’s struggle to recruit members before the upcoming general election.

It was Andras who rose when they heard a knock at the door. He crossed the room, drawing his robe closer against the morning chill; he unlocked the door and opened it. A red-faced young man stood on the doorstep, a knapsack on his back. His cap bore the Soviet military insignia. He reached into the pocket of his trousers and drew out a letter.

“I’ve been charged to deliver this to Andras or Tibor Lévi,” the man said.

“Charged by whom?” Andras said. With numb dispassion he noted how strange it was to hear his brother’s name in this soldier’s mouth. Tibor Lévi. As if he were still alive.

“By Mátyás Lévi,” the man said. “I was with him at a prisoner-of-war camp in Siberia.”

And so, Andras thought. The final piece of news. Mátyás dead, and this his last missive. He felt himself to be in a place so remote from human feeling, so far removed from the ability to experience pain or hope or love, that he did not hesitate to take the letter. He opened it as the young man stood watching, as his family looked at him for the news. And he learned that his brother Mátyás lived, and would be home the following Tuesday.

In the winter of 1942, just a month after he’d been sent to Ukraine, Mátyás Lévi had been taken prisoner by the Soviets, and along with the rest of his labor company had been sent to a mining camp in Siberia. The location was the region of Kolyma, bounded by the Arctic Ocean to the north and the Sea of Okhotsk to the south. They’d gone via the Trans-Siberian Railway to the end of its easternmost spike at Vladivostok, and then had been transported across the sea on the slave ship Dekabrist. The camp had two thousand inmates, Germans and Ukrainians and Hungarians and Serbs and Poles and Nazi-sympathizing French, along with Soviet criminals and political dissidents and writers and composers and artists. In the camp he’d been beaten with clubs and shovels and pickhandles. He’d been bitten by bedbugs and flies and lice. He’d been frozen almost to death. He’d worked seventeen-hour days at seventy degrees below zero, had received a daily ration of twenty decagrams of bread, had been thrown into isolation for disobedience, had nearly died of dysentery, had earned the respect of the guards and officers by painting bold Communist posters for the barracks walls, had been named official propaganda-poster designer and official snow sculptor of the camp (he had made ten-foot-high busts of Lenin and Stalin to preside over the parade ground), had learned Russian and had volunteered as a translator, had been called upon to interview Hungarian Nazis, had seen a hundred Arrow Cross members brought to trial and sentenced and in some cases executed, had been attacked by a secret coalition of Hungarian Arrow Cross members who broke both his legs, had convalesced in the infirmary for six months, and finally had been informed one morning that his time at the prison camp was through, and when he’d asked what had earned him the privilege of release, had been told that it was because his official designation, and that of five hundred twenty other prisoners, had been changed from Jewish Hungarian to Hungarian Jew, and that the prison camp was not in the business of detaining Jews, not after what the Nazis had done to them.

But nothing that happened to him those three cold years had prepared him for what waited at home. Nothing had prepared him for the news that four hundred thousand of Hungary’s Jews had been sent to death camps in Poland; nothing had prepared him for the bombed ruin of Budapest with its six severed bridges. And nothing had prepared him for the news that his mother and father, his brother and his sister-in-law and his nephew, had all vanished from the earth. It was Andras who delivered the news. Mátyás, grown into a lean, hard-eyed man with a short dark beard, sat before him on the sofa and took it in without a sound; the only sign he gave of having understood at all was a faint trembling of the jaw. He got up and smoothed his pant legs, as if, having been given a military briefing, he was ready now to incorporate the news into his plans and move onward. And then something seemed to change beneath the skin of his face, as though his muscles had received the news on a longdistance telephone delay. He went to his knees on the floor, his features twisting with grief. “Not true,” he cried, and moved his arms around his head as if birds were flying at him. It was the news, Andras thought, the unrelenting news, a troop of crows circling, their wings smelling of ash.

He knelt beside his brother and put his arms around him, held him against his own chest as Mátyás wailed. He said his brother’s name aloud, as if to remind him of the astonishing fact that at least, he, Mátyás, still lived. He would not let go until Mátyás pulled away and looked around at the unfamiliar room; when his eyes came to rest on Andras’s again, they were lucid and full of despair. Is it true? he seemed to be asking, though he hadn’t said a word. Tell me honestly. Is it true?

Andras held Mátyás’s gaze steady in his own. There was no need to speak or to make any sign. He put his arm around Mátyás’s shoulder again, drew him close and held him as he cried.

It was Andras who sat with him that night and the next and the one after that, Andras who urged him to eat and who changed the damp bedding on the sofa where he slept. As he did these things he felt the first thinning of the fog that had enveloped him since he’d learned that Tibor was dead. Over the past month he’d nearly forgotten how to be a man in the world, how to breathe and eat and sleep and speak to other people. He had let himself slip away, even though Klara and the children had survived the war, the siege; even though Polaner was there with him every day. On the third night after Mátyás’s return, after Mátyás had fallen asleep and he and Klara had retreated to their bedroom, Andras took her hands and begged her forgiveness.

“You know there’s nothing to forgive,” she said.

“I vowed to take care of you. I want to be a husband to you again.”

“You’ve never stopped,” she said.

He bent to kiss her; she was alive, his Klara, and she was there in his arms. Nest of my children, he thought, placing a hand on her womb. Cradle of my joy. And he remembered her with an orange-red dahlia behind her ear, and the way her skin felt beneath a film of bathwater, and what it was like to meet her eye and to know they were thinking the same thing. And he believed, for the first time since he had seen Tibor’s name on the list at Bethlen Gábor tér, that it might be possible to live beyond that terrible year; that he might look into Klara’s face, whose planes and curves he knew more intimately than any landscape in the world, and feel something like peace. And he took her to bed and made love to her as if for the first time in his life.