laws, ghettoization, the Holocaust. “If you wear the yellow star they will kill you,” he once told Ági, tossing hers and her mother’s and his into the flames, “and if you do not they will kill you.” He stirred the fire. “So why bother?” But he had done more than just that, drawing up papers for many others—Jews, but also members of the resistance, fellow communists, British soldiers parachuted into the capital, others who needed to escape, for one reason or another, from the powers bearing down on them—whatever he could do to subvert the fascist cause. As a result, Ági’s father, like so many other communists, was arrested after the Soviet occupation on Malinovsky’s orders, not so much for his vocal criticism of the Russian “liberator”—for asking what good it had done them to await liberation when it meant free looting for the Red Army, rape, robbery, extortion, the requisitioning and hoarding of the country’s food for the military while the general population starved, the ransacking of the nation in the way of reparations, mass arrests, murder—but because he wasn’t afraid for his life. They were to be sent to a prison camp, one of the many the Soviets had set up, in Gödöllő, when Zoltán stepped in, saying he needed someone adept at “paperwork.” Malinovsky had reported to Moscow that he had captured 110,000 fascists, but as he only had 60,000, the rest had to be made up by dragging people at random from the streets and their homes, and Zoltán was put in charge of making these substitutes look legitimate.
Naturally, Ági’s father objected, and so Zoltán took him aside, reminding him that the youngest women raped by the Red Army were 12, and the oldest 90, which meant that both his wife and daughter were within the normative range; he spoke, too, of the sorts of venereal diseases they could expect, not to mention how long it would last, given that some women were locked up for two weeks “entertaining” as many as thirty soldiers at a time. In the end, Ági’s father agreed, and to soften the blow Zoltán made sure they were provided for, keeping his promise even after Ági’s parents, having done the work they were asked to do, were visited one night by the ÁVÓ and taken away for “unauthorized forgery of government documents,” and Zoltán inherited Ági.
He made a nominal attempt to save her parents, trying to get her on his side, to make her believe he wasn’t really an apparatchik, that he was just using the system until he could make his escape. So he made sure she was there when he made inquiries and phone calls, made sure that when they came to the villa for her as well, agents of the ÁVÓ knocking on the door, he was there to bar the entrance, listing off his decorations and accomplishments and contacts to make it clear he, and by extension she, was “protected,” though in truth, no one was protected, no matter how high up your friends were, for the most dangerous friend of all was the highest ranking, Stalin himself.
It was an act of bravery, maybe the only act of bravery he’d ever performed, though it was only due to his hope that Ági would fix the printing press hidden beneath the villa. He knew that she could repair and operate the press with her eyes closed, the old man had said as much, boasting that she’d been more than his little helper. When her father was called away on business, she’d run the whole show.
Ági was silent through it all, absolutely quiet, the look in her eyes exactly the same as Karola’s had been, too hard for a girl of nineteen—still lithe, a little boyish—meeting his gaze with one in every way its equal. The war had made them old. He saw it in the way her eyes left him isolated, a lesson on shouldering what he’d done alone rather than lessening the burden by passing it on, by turning it into a secret she had to share.
It always seemed to be winter, down in the hole, Ági squatting above the trap door peering at him, listening to the clack and whir as Zoltán tried, without expertise or success, to start up Tíbor’s old machinery, the presses and lamps and generators. Nothing worked. All that happened was the clashing of parts, the tearing and spewing and grinding of paper, the flickering of lamps. The generator hummed dangerously, and charged every metal object around it so badly Zoltán was continuously cursing the jolts and shocks.
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