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And then the foreman was at Andras’s side, shouting his orders. The coal had to be shoveled, the carts had to be moved, because somewhere to the east a war had to be fought.
The most stu
When they reached the window at last, the mail clerk put two identical packages into the twins’ hands. Each had been opened and inspected as usual, and the wrappers of four chocolate bars lay nested inside the packages like a taunt. But there must have been a surplus of baked goods in the mail that day: the parcels still contained identical tins of ci
From across the quadrangle, Mendel Horovitz saw Andras sitting on the barracks steps with a letter in his hands. He hurried across the yard, hoping to catch his friend before he went to the sinks to wash for di
“What is it, Parisi?” Mendel said.
Andras couldn’t speak; he thought he might never speak again. Perhaps he had failed to understand. But he looked at the letter again, and there were the words in Klara’s neat slanted script.
She was pregnant. He, Andras Lévi, was going to be a father.
What did it matter now how many tons of coal he had to shovel? Who cared how many times the cart tipped from its unstable rails, how many times his blisters broke and bled, how brutally the guards abused him? What did it matter how hungry or thirsty he was, or how little sleep he got, or how long he had to stand in the quadrangle for lineup? What did he care for his own body? Fifty miles away in Budapest, Klara was pregnant with his child. All that mattered was that he survive the months between now and the date she’d projected in her letter-the twenty-ninth of December. By then he would have fulfilled his two years of military service. The war might even be finished, depending upon the outcome of Hitler’s campaign in Russia. Who knew what life might be like for Jews in Hungary then, but if Horthy was still regent it might not be an impossible place to live. Or maybe they would emigrate to America, to the dirty and glamorous city of New York. The day he got Klara’s letter he drew a calendar on the back of a copy of The Biting Fly. At the end of each workday he crossed off a square, and gradually the days began to queue up into a long succession of Xs. Letters flew between Budapest and Bánhida: Klara was still teaching private students, would continue to teach as long as she could demonstrate the steps. She was putting money away so they might rent a larger apartment when Andras came home. A friend of her mother’s owned a building on Nefelejcs utca; the neighborhood wasn’t fashionable, but the building was close to the house on Benczúr utca and only a few blocks from the city park. Nefelejcs was the name of the tiny blue flower that grew in the woods, the one with the infinitesimal yellow ring at its center: forget-me-not. He couldn’t, of course, not for a moment; his life seemed balanced on the edge of an unimaginable change.
In September a miracle occurred: Andras received a three-day furlough. There was no particular reason for that piece of luck, as far as he could determine; at Bánhida it seemed furloughs were granted at random except in the case of a death in the family. He learned of the furlough on a Thursday, received his papers on Friday, boarded a train to Budapest on Saturday morning. It was a luminous day, the air soft with the last radiant warmth of summer. The sky overhead burned a clear pale blue, and as they moved away from Bánhida the smell of sulfur faded into the sweet green smell of cut grass. Along the dirt roads that ran beside the tracks, farmers drove wagons heavy with hay and corn. The markets in Budapest would be full of squashes and apples and red cabbages, bell peppers and pears, late grapes, potatoes. It was astonishing to remember that such things still existed in the world-that they’d existed all along while he’d survived on a daily diet of coffee and thin soup and a couple hundred grams of sandy bread.
Klara was waiting for him at Keleti Station. He had never seen a woman so beautiful in all his life: She wore a dress of rose-colored jersey that grazed the swell of her belly, and a neat close-fitting hat of ci
“Is it true?” he said.
“As you can see.”
“But is it really?”
“I suppose we’ll find out in a few months.” She took his arm and led him from the station toward the Városliget. He could hardly believe it was possible to stroll through the September afternoon with Klara at his side, his work tools far away in Bánhida, nothing ahead of him but the prospect of pleasure and rest. Then, as they turned at István út and it became apparent that they were heading for her family’s house, he braced himself for the necessity of an interaction with her brother and sister-in-law and possibly even with József, who had rented an atelier in Buda so he could paint again. The absence of Andras’s officer’s insignia would have to be explained, his gauntness remarked over and regretted, and all that time he would have to look into the complacent and well-fed countenances of Klara’s relatives and feel the painful difference between their situation and his own. But when they reached the corner of István and Nefelejcs, Klara paused at the door of a gray stone building and took a key ring from her pocket. She held up an ornate key for Andras to admire. Then she fitted the key into the lock of the entry door, and the door swung inward to admit them.