He swallowed the knot of coarse rope that had lodged itself in his throat, and drew an arm across his eyes. He would not mourn, he told himself. Not until he knew.
The river of blood continued, and before long it swept up Andras and József and the rest of the 79/6th and carried them west, back toward Hungary. Fragments of labor-service companies drifted through, men who had reached nightmarish states of emaciation. The 79/6th, whose rations had been steady, carried food each night to forced laborers who were nearly dead, whose commanders had abandoned them, who had no work now but to flee in the direction of home. They received more news of what had happened at Stalingrad-the bombing that had turned every block of the city to rubble, its buildings to a forest of broken brick and concrete; the surrounding of the German Sixth Army at the center of the city, its commander, General Paulus, hidden in a basement while the battle raged around him; the downing of the few Luftwaffe supply flights; then the Soviet Army pounding through to retake control of the Don bend, and to prevent the German Fourth from advancing to rescue the surrounded Sixth. No one knew how many had been killed-two hundred thousand? Five hundred thousand? A million?-or how many were dying still, of cold and starvation and untreated wounds, there at the dead center of winter, on the dark and barren steppes. The Soviets were said to be chasing the remnants of the Hungarian Army back across the plains. In the midst of his own fear, his own flight, Andras felt a fierce satisfaction. The German Sixth had failed to take the oil fields around Grozny; they had failed to take the city that carried Stalin’s name. Those defeats might beget others. What had failed might continue to fail. It was a terrible thing to take pleasure in, Andras knew-the fate of Hungarian companies and labor servicemen were tied to the fate of the Wehrmacht, and in any case these were human beings who were dying, whatever their nationality. But Germany had to be defeated. And if it could be defeated while Hungary remained a sovereign state, then the Jews of Hungary might never have to live under Nazi rule.
The confusion of the retreat toward Hungary begat strange convergences, foldings of fate that arose from the mingling of dozens of labor-service companies. Again and again they came across men they knew from the far-off life before the war. One night they quartered with a group of men from Debrecen, among whom were several old schoolmates of Tibor’s. Another night they encountered a group from Konyár itself, including the baker’s son, the elder brother of Orsolya Korcsolya. A third night, stranded in a March blizzard, Andras found himself sharing a corner of a granary-turned-infirmary with the managing editor of the Magyar Jewish Journal, the man who had been Frigyes Eppler’s colleague and adversary. The man was scarcely recognizable, so stripped down by cold and hunger as to seem only the wire armature upon which his former self had been built; no one could have imagined that this ravenous thin-armed man, his eyes glittering with fever, had once been a bellicose editor in an Irish tweed jacket.
The managing editor had news of Frigyes Eppler, who had lost his job after the military police had found a file of incriminating documents in his office, a set of papers rumored to have connected him to a black-market operation at Szentendre, of all places. Not long afterward, Eppler had been conscripted into the Munkaszolgálat; no one had heard from him since, or at least not as far as the managing editor knew. He himself had been called up into a different company a few weeks later. Now the managing editor was part of a group of sick and wounded men whose commander had left them in the granary to starve or to succumb to fever. Major Bálint had ordered the 79/6th to tend to the sick men-to bring them food and water and change the dirty makeshift dressings on their wounds. As Andras performed these duties for the managing editor, he learned the fate of another member of their company, a man whose story was so grim that he had earned the nickname of Uncle Job. This man, the editor told him, had once been married to a beautiful woman, a former actress, with whom he’d had a child; it was rumored that he had lived in Paris, where he had run a grand theater at the center of town. Before the war he had been forced to return to Budapest, where, for a brief time, he had taken over the directorship of the Opera. It was in Budapest that his wife had become ill and died. Soon afterward, the man, already suffering from tuberculosis, had been conscripted into the labor service-made an example of, to be certain-and had been placed into service with the labor company that the editor would join sometime later. Last fall they had been sent through the waystation of the Royal Hungarian Field Gendarmerie at Staryy Oskol, where they had been interrogated and beaten and robbed of everything they had brought with them. The Hungarian Field Gendarmerie knew who this great man was, this former luminary of the theater; they stood him up in front of the others and beat him with their rifles, and then they produced a telegram in which it was reported that the man’s son had died of measles. The telegram had been sent by the boy’s aunt to a relative in Szeged; it had been intercepted in Budapest and forwarded all the way to Staryy Oskol apparently for the express torment of this gentleman. The man begged them to kill him, too, but they left him alone with the rest of the battalion, and the next day they were all sent east again.
“But what happened to him?” Andras asked, his hands on his knees, looking into the hollowed-out eyes of the managing editor. “Did he die at Voronezh?”
“That’s the pity of it,” the editor said. “He never did die, though he kept trying. He volunteered to clear land mines. Ran into the line of fire every chance he got. Survived it all. Even the consumption couldn’t kill him.”
“How did you leave him? Where did you last see him?”
“He’s there in the corner, where your friend is sitting now.”
Andras looked over his shoulder. József had knelt to give water to a man who lay propped on a pile of folded grain sacks; the man turned his head away, and through the veil of illness and emaciation Andras recognized Zoltán Novak.
“I know him,” Andras told the editor.
“Of course. Who didn’t? He was well known.”
“Personally, I mean.”
“Go pay your regards, then.” He put a hand to Andras’s chest and gave him a push in the man’s direction, the gesture like a dim ghost of his old energy, his old vehemence.
Andras approached József and the man supported on the grain sacks. He caught József’s eye and beckoned him into a corner.
“That’s Zoltán Novak,” Andras whispered.
József wrinkled his forehead and glanced back toward the man. “Novak?” he said. “Are you certain?”
Andras nodded.
“God help us,” József said. “He’s nearly dead.”
But the man raised his head from the grain sacks and looked at Andras and József.
“I’ll be right back,” József said.
“Give me water,” said Novak, his voice a raw whisper in his throat.
“I’ll go to him,” Andras said.
“Why?”
“He knows me.”
“Somehow I don’t think that’ll be a comfort,” József said.
But Andras went to kneel on the floor beside Novak, who raised himself an inch or two on the folded sacks, his eyes closed, his breath rattling like the stroked edge of a comb.
“Give me water, there,” he said again.
Andras raised his canteen and Novak drank. When he was done, he cleared his throat and looked at Andras. A slow heat came to his expression, a faint flushing of the skin around the eyelids. He pushed himself up onto his elbows.