The men had fallen into a rapt silence. No one applauded now; they were all waiting for Nagy to go on. So seldom had they been told the truth, Andras thought, that it had struck them dumb.
“You men have been trained to fight intelligently and minimize our losses,” Nagy continued. “We want to bring you home alive. We won’t need you any less once the war is over.” He paused and gave a deep sigh; his hands were trembling now, as if the effort of delivering the speech had exhausted him. He glanced into the wings of the stage, into the darkness where Andras stood watching. His eyes settled on Andras for a long moment, and then he looked out at the young officers-in-training again. “And one more thing,” he said. “Respect the labor servicemen. They’re getting their hands dirty for you. They’re your brothers in this war. Some officers have chosen to treat them like dogs, but that’s going to change. Be good men, is what I’m saying. Give respect where it’s due.” He bowed his head as if in thought, and then shrugged. “That’s all,” he said. “You’re fine brave soldiers, all of you. I thank you for your work.”
He stepped down from the podium to an accompaniment of somber, bewildered applause. No one seemed to know quite what to think of this new minister of defense; some of the things he’d just said sounded as though they shouldn’t have been uttered in public, and certainly not at an officers’ training school. But there was little opportunity to react. It was time for the play to begin. The Magyars assembled onstage for the first scene, and the work servicemen dragged the Roman ruin into place and lowered a backdrop that depicted a wash of blue sky above the moss-colored hills of Buda. When they hoisted the curtain a flood of light filled the stage, illuminating the martial-looking Hungarians in their painted armor. The Magyar chieftain drew his sword and raised it aloft. Then, just before he could speak his opening line, the air itself seemed to break into a deep keening. The assembly hall reverberated with a rising and falling plaint of grief. Andras knew the sound: It was an air-raid siren. They had all practiced the drill, both here and at the orphanage. But there was no drill planned for this evening, nor was this part of the play. This was the real thing. They were going to be bombed.
All at once the audience got to its feet and began pushing toward the exits. A cluster of officers surrounded General Nagy, who lost his hat in the crush. He clutched at his bare head and glanced around him as his staff hustled him to a side door. The actors fled the stage, dropping their pasteboard weapons, and began to crowd toward a stairway at the back of the hall. Andras and József and the other work servicemen followed the actors down a flight of stairs that led to a shelter beneath the building. The shelter was a honeycomb of concrete rooms linked by low-ceilinged hallways. The men pushed into a dark enclosure at a turn of one of the hallways; more officers-in-training poured into the room after them. Far above, the air-raid sirens wailed.
When the first bombs hit, the shelter shook as if the moon itself had fallen from its orbit and crashed to earth just overhead. Concrete dust rained from the ceiling, and the lightbulbs flickered in their wire cages. A few men cursed. Others closed their eyes as if in prayer. József asked an officer-in-training for a cigarette and began to smoke it.
“Put that out,” Andras whispered. “If there’s a gas leak down here, we’ll all be killed.”
“If I’m about to die, I’m going to smoke,” József said.
Andras shook his head. Beside him, József released a complex luxuriant cloud through his nostrils, as if he meant to take his time. But another concussive blast threw him against Andras, and he dropped the cigarette. A series of shuddering jolts rocketed through the foundation of the building like small earthquakes; this was anti-aircraft fire, the kick of the artillery installation housed not far from the assembly hall. Glass exploded above, and faint cries reached the men through the walls of the shelter.
“At attention, men!” one of the officers commanded. They stood at attention. It took some concentration, there in the flickering dark; they stood that way until the next bombs hit. As the foundation shuddered, Andras thought of the weight of building materials arranged above him: the heavy beams, the flooring, the walls, the tons of cinderblock and brickwork, the roof struts and frame, the thousands and thousands of slate tiles. He thought of all those materials raining down upon the architecture of his own body. Fragile skin, fragile muscle, fragile bone, the clever structures of the organs, the intricate arrangement of his cells-all the things Tibor had pointed out in Klara’s anatomy book a lifetime ago in Paris. Suddenly he couldn’t breathe. Another detonation knocked the room sideways, and a crack appeared in the ceiling.
Then there was a lull. The men stood silent, waiting. The anti-aircraft artillery must have been hit, or the gunners must have been waiting for the next wave of planes. That was worse-not to know when the next barrage was going to come. József’s lips moved with some whispered incantation. Andras leaned in, wondering what psalm or prayer might have brought such a look of tranquility to József’s features; when the words resolved into an intelligible line, he almost laughed aloud. It was a Cole Porter tune József had often played on his phonograph at parties. I’m with you once more under the stars / And down by the shore an orchestra’s playing / And even the palms seem to be swaying / When they begin the beguine. The quiet ended with the renewed staccato of anti-aircraft fire, then a percussive chord of blasts, as if a trio of bombs had struck all at once. The men fell to their knees and the lights went out. József made an animal noise of panic. So this was how it would happen, Andras thought: József would receive his retribution here in this tomb under the officers’ meeting hall. How like a fairy tale, where selfish wishes often carried a cruel price: József would die, but Andras would have to die with him. As the bombs continued to fall, József lowered his forehead to Andras’s collarbone and said, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” The cigarette smoke in his hair was the smell of evenings in Paris. For one unthinking moment, Andras put a hand on József’s head.
Then, all at once, the lights flickered on again. The men got to their feet. They dusted off their uniforms and pretended they hadn’t just been clutching each other’s arms, crushing their faces against each other’s chests, praying and crying and apologizing. They glanced around as if to confirm that none of them had really been afraid. The earth had gone still now; the bombing had stopped. Above, all was silent.
“All right, men,” said the officer who had commanded them to stand at attention. “Wait for the all clear.”
It was a long time before the signal sounded. When it came at last there was a push toward the hallways, a crush of men talking in shock-dulled voices. No one knew what they would find when they emerged. Andras thought of the labor camp where they were supposed to stay when they had first arrived in Turka-its mass grave, the wet dirt slumped into the ground like a sodden blanket. He and József shouldered into a stream of men making their way back toward the staircase. The air in the bunker seemed overbreathed, devoid of oxygen.
There was a bottleneck at the foot of the stairway. As Andras shuffled toward the stairs, someone bumped against him and pushed something into his hand. It was Erdő, his face red and wet, his monocle fallen. “I didn’t think of it earlier,” he said into Andras’s ear. “I was preoccupied with the play. I might have died and never given it to you, or you might have died and never gotten it.”