Even more fantastical to Andras was the prospect of returning to school himself, the prospect of finishing his degree in architecture. He and Polaner had made a pact to do it, and Mátyás had agreed to join them. For the past eleven years, exhausted by their daily work, Andras and Polaner had struggled to retain what they’d learned at the École Spéciale. They had set each other exercises, had challenged each other to solve problems of design. They had even attended a few night classes, but had been so dispirited by the dullness of Soviet architecture that they had found themselves unwilling to continue. New York presented a different prospect. They knew nothing of the schools there, but József had written that the city was full of them. He and Polaner had sworn their pact over glasses of Tokaji on the evening of Polaner’s departure.
“We’ll be old men among boys,” Andras had said. “I can see us now.”
“We’re not old,” Polaner said. “We’re not even forty.”
“Don’t you remember what it was like? I don’t know if I have the stamina.”
“What’s going to happen?” Polaner said. “Are you going to get a nosebleed?”
“Without a doubt. And that’ll be just the beginning.”
“Here’s to the beginning,” Polaner said, and two hours later he had disappeared into the uncertain night, carrying only his knapsack and a green metal tube of drawings.
Now, on this clear December morning, Klara stood beside Andras at the window, following his gaze toward the park and the river. After the war she had left off teaching and had turned her attention to choreography. The Soviets loved that she had been trained by a Russian and spoke the language; never mind that her teacher had been a White Russian who had fled Petersburg in 1917. The Hungarian National Ballet gave her a permanent position, and the state newspaper praised the strength and angularity of her work. K. Lévi is a choreographer in the true Soviet style, the official dance critic wrote; and Klara, who for years had been plotting her family’s defection to the United States, sat at the kitchen table with the newspaper in her hand and laughed.
“Time to go,” she said now. “Mátyás will be waiting.”
Andras helped her into her gray coat and draped a cinnamon-colored scarf around her neck. “You’re as lovely as ever,” he said, touching her sleeve. “You used to wear a red hat in Paris. You’ll have one again in America.”
“As ever!” she said. “Has it come to that? Am I so old?”
“Ageless,” he said. “Timeless.”
They met Mátyás at the corner of Pozsonyi út and Szent István körút. In honor of the occasion he had worn a pink carnation in his buttonhole, a gesture that seemed to recall his younger self. He had returned from Siberia hardened and sharpened into a man, a fierce aggressive light radiating from his eyes. He had never returned to dancing, would never again wear a top hat, white tie, and tails. The part of him that had been inclined toward the physical expression of joy had been carved away in Siberia. But now, on the day of the name change, a pink carnation.
Klara pressed Andras’s arm as they crossed Perczel Mór utca. “I brought the camera,” she said. “I hope you’re feeling photogenic.”
“As ever,” said Andras, who detested any photograph of himself. But Mátyás straightened the carnation in his buttonhole and struck a pose against a streetlight.
“Not yet,” Klara said. “After we get the documents.”
They arrived at the gray monolith that housed the Ministry of the Interior-a building, Andras recalled, that stood in the footprint of the eighteenth-century palace of a famous courtesan. The palace had been destroyed in the siege of 1944, but a single elm that appeared in engravings of the building still stood behind its low iron fence. Andras touched the bark as if for luck, trying to imagine what it would be like to live in a city where he would not see ghosts of buildings and people everywhere he looked, where what existed now was all there was for him. Then he and Mátyás and Klara climbed the steps and entered the glass-and-concrete cavern of the building. They waited for an hour while the man in charge of name changes fingered his way through an endless series of documents, each of which had to be stamped thrice and signed by elusive functionaries before it could be delivered. But finally their name was called-their old name, one last time-and they had the papers in hand: new identification cards and work cards and residency certificates. Documents, Andras hoped, that would soon be of no use to them at all. But it had seemed important to know that the new name had been recorded in Hungarian record books, important that it be made official.
Outside, the high blue sky had gone metallic gray, and they stepped into a cloud of falling snow. Klara ran down the steps to prepare the camera while Andras and Mátyás stood with the new documents in their hands. Andras had not expected the sight of the cards and papers to bring tears to his eyes, but now he found himself weeping. It had become real at last: this memorial, this mark they would carry all their lives and pass to their children and grandchildren.
“Stop that,” Mátyás said, drawing the back of his sleeve across his own eyes. “It won’t change anything.”
He was right, of course. Nothing would change what had happened-not grief, not time, not memory, not retribution. But they could leave this place, would leave it in a few weeks. They could cross an ocean and live in a city where Április might grow up without the gravity that had marked her brother, without the sense of tragedy that seemed to hang in the air like the brown dust of bituminous coal. And Andras would become a student again-if not the young man who had arrived in Paris with a suitcase and a scholarship, then a man who knew something more of both the beauty and the ugliness of the world. And Klara would be with him-Klara, who stood before them now with her dark hair blowing, her hands raised, the camera hiding her face behind its glass eye. He put his arm around his brother and said, “Ready.” She counted to three in English, a daring act in the shadow of the Ministry of the Interior. And she captured them, the two men on the steps: Andras and Mátyás Tibor.
Epilogue
IN THE SPRING, on afternoons when she didn’t have soccer practice, she would skip her last class-orchestra-and take the 6 uptown to her grandfather’s building. She thought of it that way, his building, though he didn’t live there or own it. It was a four-story building set at an angle to the street; the façade was made up of hundreds of small rectangles of steel-framed glass, shunted skyward in a violent and asymmetrical upward thrust, like an exploding Japanese screen. Slim birches grew in the trapezoid of earth between building and sidewalk. The marble lintel above the door read AMOS MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART; her grandfather’s name was chiseled into the cornerstone, above the word ARCHITECT. The building housed a small collection of paintings and sculptures and photographs she’d seen a thousand times. In its central courtyard was a café where she always ordered her coffee black. At thirteen she considered herself on the cusp of womanhood. She liked to sit at a table and write letters to her brother at Brown, or to her friends from camp in the Berkshires. She would sit for hours, almost until dinnertime, and then she would run to catch the express, hoping to make it back to the apartment before her parents got home from work.
Her grandparents didn’t live in the city. They lived upstate, down the road from her great-uncle, and five miles away from the man whom she called uncle but who was her grandfather’s friend. Sometimes she went to visit them on weekends. Three hours by train, which passed quickly if you had a window seat. Her grandfather had a barn he’d converted into a workshop, with high windows that let in northern light. They all worked there still, her grandfather and her great-uncle and her not-uncle uncle, though they were old enough to retire. They let her sit at their sloping desks and use their ink-stained tools. She liked to draw oblique entryways, fractured rooflines, curvilinear façades. They gave her books about architects they’d known, Le Corbusier and Pingusson. They taught her the Latin names of arches and showed her how to use the French curve and the beam compass. They taught her the single-stroke Roman lettering they used to label their plans.