“Listen, men,” the Ivory Tower said. “This isn’t about The Crooked Rail, and it’s not a trial. We didn’t come here to decide who’s responsible for our being sent off. We’re hungry and there’s food to be got if someone’s willing to get it. Perhaps we’d have been better off drawing straws.”
A rumbling from the men, a shaking of heads: They weren’t going to leave the matter to chance now.
“Let me go to the village on my own,” Mendel said, his eyes set on the Ivory Tower’s. “I’m fast, you know. If I go alone I’ll be there and back in no time.”
The Ivory Tower protested. There were fifty men in their squad, all of them hungry; the hope was that the load of black-market goods would be too much for one person to carry.
The rest of the men looked at Goldfarb, at József Hász, and finally at Andras. Andras and Mendel were understood to be a team; what they did, they did together. A sense of expectation seemed to collect in the dim light of the bunkroom. Andras met Mendel’s eyes, ready to volunteer, but Mendel gave an almost imperceptible shake of his head. Hold out.
Another long silent moment passed before anyone spoke. József stood with his arms crossed over his chest, confident that his argument would have the desired result. And finally it was Goldfarb who stepped forward. “I’ll go,” he said. “It won’t be the last time we have to do this. Next time we’ll send Lévi and Hász, or whoever else we’re in the mood to blame.”
The 79/6th let out its breath. A decision had been reached: Horovitz and Goldfarb would make the trip. Much time had been wasted already; the night was slipping away, and the men had to depart at once. Mendel and his partner loaded the pooled valuables into their trouser pockets, wrapped themselves against the cold, and crept out into the dark. And the 79/6th climbed into its bunks to wait-all except Andras Lévi and József Hász, who could be heard conducting a hushed argument in the latrine. Before József could climb into his bunk, Andras had caught him by the collar and dragged him into the washroom with its tiny commodes, its line of child-sized sinks. He pushed József against the wall and twisted his collar until he was struggling for breath.
“Stop it,” József gasped. “Let me go.”
“I’ll stop when I’m ready to stop, you self-serving little worm!”
“I didn’t say anything that wasn’t true,” József said, and wrenched Andras’s hand from his collar. “You published that rag with Horovitz. You’re just as much to blame as he is. I could have made a point of that, but I didn’t.”
“What do you want me to do? Say thanks? Kiss your filthy hand?”
“I don’t care what you do. You can go to hell, Uncle.”
“You were right the other night,” Andras said. “You’re not cut out for labor camp. It’s going to kill you, and I hope it won’t take long.”
“I’m not so sure about that,” József said, cutting Andras his tilted smile. “After all, I’m in here now instead of out in the woods.”
And finally Andras did what he’d been longing to do for months: He pulled back his fist and hit József square across the face, hard enough to send him to the floor. József knelt on the concrete, holding his jaw with one hand, and spat blood into a metal drain. Andras rubbed his bruised knuckles. He expected to feel the familiar shock of remorse that always tempered his hatred for József, but the shock failed to arrive. All he felt now was hunger and exhaustion and the desire to hit József again, just as hard as the first time. With some effort he left József on the bathroom floor and went back to his bunk to wait for Mendel.
It was three miles to the village through the woods in the dark; Andras figured it might take them an hour to get there. Once they arrived they’d have to find their contact and negotiate the trade-all the while avoiding the night patrols who would shoot them on sight. If they did find their contact, and if the contact was willing to trade, and if he had anything worth trading for, it might be another hour before they could return; they might not be back until just before reveille. He lay awake picturing the two men making their way through the woods, Mendel’s long legs covering ground quickly, Goldfarb half running to keep up. It was a clear night, cold enough to make the men’s breath visible before them. The moon and stars were out; there would be light even in the forest. A wind would rile the fallen leaves and hide their trail. Mendel and Goldfarb would see the glow of the village from far off, would navigate through the trees toward that amber wash in the sky. They might be halfway there by now.
But then Andras began to hear a frenzied barking from the woods behind the orphanage. He knew the sound; they all did. It was Major Kozma’s ill-tempered dog, the gray wolfhound they hated and who hated them. A din of shouting rose from the woods. The men half fell out of their beds and rushed to the windows. The woods were full of the swinging beams of flashlights, the sound of branches snapping; unintelligible shouts drew closer and resolved into a stream of abusive Hungarian. Dark shadows struggled toward the light, flashed into momentary view, and disappeared before anyone could identify them. Men’s forms approached the orphanage wall and pushed through its gates. Five minutes later, Kozma himself was shouting all the men out of the bunk room and commanding them to file into the courtyard.
They stumbled outside bareheaded and coatless in the cold. The moon was bright enough to make midnight seem like day; the men’s shadows fell sharp against the brick wall of the yard. In the northwest corner there was a commotion of guards, the growl of a dog, a struggle, shouts of pain. Kozma commanded the men to stand at attention and keep their eyes on him. He climbed onto a little schoolroom chair so he could see them all. Andras and József stood close to the front. It was cold in the courtyard, the wind a skate blade across the back of Andras’s neck. Kozma barked a command; two guards marched László Goldfarb and Mendel Horovitz out of their corner. They were both covered in bleeding scratches, as though they had stumbled through a tangle of briars. The left leg of Goldfarb’s pants was torn away below the knee. In the hard moonlight they could see the marks of the dog’s teeth on his shin. Mendel held an arm against his chest. His blood-streaked face was contracted in pain, and on his right foot he dragged a small animal trap. The steel teeth had gone through his boot.
“Look what Erzsi turned up in the woods tonight,” Kozma said, petting the dog so roughly it whimpered. “Lieutenant Horvath was kind enough to go out and see what all the commotion was about, and he came across these two fine specimens in a culvert. Not what we thought we’d catch in our trap, was it, Erzsi?” He scoured the dog’s back with his gloved hand. Then he commanded Mendel and Goldfarb to strip to their skins.
When Goldfarb made a noise of protest, Lieutenant Horvath silenced him with a blow from the butt of his pistol. The two men struggled out of their clothes, Horvath shouting at them all the while; Mendel couldn’t remove his right pant leg around his boot and the trap, so he stood with his trousers at his feet until Horvath cut the pants off with his knife. Once they were naked, the men huddled against the wall and shivered violently, their hands crossed over their groins. Goldfarb looked out toward the rest of his comrades in a kind of stupefied daze, as if the lines of men were part of an incomprehensible show he’d been commanded to watch. Mendel met Andras’s eye for a single agonizing moment and gave a wink. The gesture was meant to reassure, Andras knew, but it clenched his insides in pain: That naked and bleeding man was Mendel Horovitz, his childhood friend and co-editor, not some clever simulacrum devised as another Munkaszolgálat torture. Kozma ordered one of the guards to blindfold the two men with their own shirts. The guard was someone who had become familiar to Andras, a former plumber’s assistant named Lukás, who escorted them to the officers’ school every evening and slipped them cigarettes whenever he could. His expression, too, was incredulous and fearful. But he covered the men’s eyes as he had been commanded. Goldfarb put a hand under the blindfold to loosen it a bit. Andras couldn’t bear to look at Mendel’s lowered head, his shaking arms. He dropped his gaze to Mendel’s feet, but then there was the trap, its teeth penetrating Mendel’s boot. Goldfarb was shoeless; he had crossed his feet to keep them warm. The quiet of the courtyard hummed with the men’s breathing.