Nights at the orphanage held unpredictable terrors. At two o’clock in the morning Kozma might wake all the men and command them to stand at attention until dawn; the guards would beat them if they fell asleep or dropped to their knees. Other nights, when Kozma and Horvath drank with their fellow officers in their quarters, four of the labor servicemen might be called to come before them and play a horrible game: two of the men would have to sit on the others’ shoulders and try to wrestle each other to the ground. Kozma would beat them with his riding crop if the fighting wasn’t fierce enough. The game ended only when one of the men had been knocked unconscious.
But Kozma’s cruelest form of torture, and the one he exercised most frequently, was the withholding of rations. He seemed to love knowing that his men were hungry, that he alone controlled their food supply; he seemed to enjoy the fact that they were at his mercy and desperate to have what he alone could give them. If it hadn’t been for the extra food Andras and Mendel brought back secretly from their surveying trips, the 79/6th might have starved outright. As it was, the younger men among them were always ravenous. Even the full ration wouldn’t have been enough to replace the energy they lost at work. They didn’t understand how the other labor companies in Turka could have withstood the hunger for months on end; what was keeping them alive? They began to ask, up and down the lines of servicemen who worked along the road, what one did to keep from starving. Soon the news came back that there was a thriving black market in the village, and that all kinds of provisions were available if the men had something to trade. It seemed a bitter irony that a company of men who’d been sent away because of their officers’ black-market dealings would now be forced to buy from the black market themselves, but the fact was that no other alternative existed.
One night in the bunk room, the men of the 79/6th pooled a few valuables-two watches, some paper money, a silver cigarette lighter, a pocketknife with an inlaid ebony handle-and held a hushed conference to decide who would risk the trip to the village. The perils were well known. How many times had Horvath reminded them that unaccompanied labor servicemen would be shot? The Ivory Tower, acting as moderator, began by laying out a set of parameters for their decision: No one who was sick would be allowed to go, and no one older than forty or younger than twenty. No one who had had to play Kozma’s horrible game that week, and no one who had recently been subjected to exposure in the courtyard. No one who had children at home. No one who was married. The men looked around at each other, trying to determine who was left.
“I’m still eligible,” Mendel said. “Anyone else?”
“I’m up,” said a man called Goldfarb, a sturdy shock-haired redhead whose nose looked to have been broken in a series of fights dating back to early boyhood. He was a pastry chef from the Sixth District of Budapest, a favorite among them.
“Is that all?” asked the Ivory Tower.
Andras knew who else had survived the elimination: József Hász. But József was edging toward the door of the bunk room as if he meant to slip away. Just before he could duck through, the Ivory Tower called him.
“How about you, Hász?”
“I believe I’m getting a fever,” József said.
The men of the 79/6th, who had been subjected to József’s complaints ever since his conscription three months earlier, had little patience for his excuses now. A few of them pulled him back into the room and stood him at the middle of their circle. A tense silence ensued, and József must have grasped his situation quickly: No one would mind seeing him risk his skin for the benefit of the group. Too often it was his shirking that brought Kozma’s anger down upon the rest of them. He seemed to shrink into himself, his shoulders curling.
“I’m no good at sneaking around in the woods,” he said. “I’m as obvious as day.”
“It’s time you started pulling your weight,” said Zilber, the electrician who worked with them at the officers’ training school. “You don’t hear Horovitz complaining, and he’s been scrounging extra food for the rest of us for weeks now.”
“Why would he complain?” József said. “He’s been walking the countryside with Szolomon while the rest of us shovel asphalt.”
“You’ll remember what happened to Szolomon’s last assistant,” the electrician said. “I wouldn’t take that job if it came with a private room and a pair of melon-titted farm girls.”
A number of men voiced their willingness to take Mendel’s job under those circumstances. Mendel assured them that the job carried no such benefits. But József Hász wasn’t laughing; he was scanning the circle, his expression shading toward panic as he failed to find an ally. Andras watched with a pang of sympathy-and, he had to admit, a certain guilty satisfaction. Here was Hász learning once again that he was not exempt from the forces that shaped the lives of mortal men. In this orphanage in Ukraine, no one cared whose heir he was or what he owned, nor were they impressed by his dark good looks or his side-leaning smile. They were hungry; they needed someone to go to town for food; he fit their parameters. In another moment he would have to capitulate.
But József Hász disliked being cornered, above all else. In a cool and reasonable tone that masked his panic, he said, “You can’t possibly choose me over Horovitz.”
“And why is that?” the electrician said.
“If it weren’t for him, you wouldn’t be here.”
Zilber laughed, and others joined in. “I suppose he put us on the train himself!” Zilber said. “I suppose he started the war.”
“No, but he did publish that newspaper full of articles about the black market. He let Varsádi know that we all knew what was going on.”
Andras couldn’t believe what was happening, what he was hearing. Among the men there was a moment of vibrating silence, then a rumble of discussion. The Ivory Tower called for order. “Quiet, all of you,” he whispered. “If the guards overhear us, this project is through.”
“You understand me,” József said, looking around at the men in the dim light. “If it weren’t for the paper, Varsádi might not have lost his head.” He glanced at Andras, but didn’t call attention to his role as illustrator; he must have been offering that omission as a form of thanks for Andras’s advice.
“That’s pure idiocy,” the electrician said. “No one shipped us off because of The Crooked Rail. We were all slowing down the operation, for the sake of the poor buggers in postings like the one we’re in now. Maybe that’s why Varsádi got scared of being found out.” But a few of the men had begun to whisper to each other and look at Mendel, then at Andras. Mendel lowered his eyes in shame; József Hász had only given voice to what he already felt.
József, sensing a shift in the sentiment of the group, grasped his advantage. “The day we were sent off,” he said. “Do you know what happened? Varsádi called Horovitz to his office for a conference. What do you think he wanted? It wasn’t to congratulate our colleague on his talents as a writer, I’m afraid.”
“That’s enough, Hász,” Andras said, stepping toward him.
“What’s the matter, Uncle?” József said, staring a threat back at Andras. “I’m just telling them what you told me.”
“What did he want?” one of the men asked.
“According to Lévi here, he wanted all the originals and printing plates of The Crooked Rail. He was desperate enough to turn a gun on our co-editors. I’m sure we can all understand, given the circumstances, why Horovitz berayed the editor at the Jewish Journal who’d been helping him print the paper. In any case, half an hour later we were all being loaded onto the train.”
The men stared at Mendel, who would not refute a word József had said. Andras wanted nothing more than to fly at József and knock him to the barracks floor; all that stopped him was the knowledge that a fight would bring the guards.