Extraordinary Renditions Read Online Free PDF

Surely those on the third and fourth floors could see that the roof was on fire, that fire was consuming the synagogue. The sound of it grew louder, steadily more vicious. He ran to the next doorway and pressed all of the buttons on the metallic interface until he found the word: “Tz!”
    “Tz! Tz!”
    He entered a glass Matáv booth, but the phone would not function without a pre-paid calling card and he was ignorant of the local version of 911. He smashed the receiver with all of his strength against the glass shell of the booth, but it refused to break. A pain carried through his arm and landed in his shoulder. Outside again, he removed the stone from his pocket and hurled it at the phone booth. The sound was amazing, like a crystal chandelier plunging, mid-performance, into an open concert-grand piano. He carefully rescued the stone from the rubble, wiped it off with his gloves, and returned to pressing random codes into the communication and locking mechanisms of the nearby apartment buildings. “Fire! Help!”
    Lights finally blinked on in the windows above. Angry oaths landed on him as if from overturned chamber pots, until the fire became blindingly obvious. A chorus picked up the refrain of “Tz! Tz!” until the entire block was alight. Men streamed from the buildings in their blue-and-white MTK Budapest sweatpants. A groggy crowd formed. The sidewalk itself opened to reveal a storage cellar. The smell of the basement, identical to those in which he had once hid, caused Harkályi’s racing heart to stop for an instant. A ladder flew out, then was raced across the street and pressed against the façade of the synagogue, where the flames had spread to the columns supporting the domes.
    With practiced efficiency, two dozen men got to synchronous work. One of them climbed the ladder, next to which five more men erected ascaffold with a pulley system to lift pails of water. A line formed across the street, into the foyer of one of the apartment buildings. Harkályi joined their ranks, dead in the center of Dohány Street. Heavy buckets of water came one after the other out of the building and were passed along the line. He took them in his right hand and twisted to deliver them to the next man, who rewarded him with an empty one traveling the opposite direction, slightly less fast, away from the burning building. Harkályi could not keep up. He could no longer breathe, and he slowed the entire chain, further endangering the synagogue he had traveled so far to visit. The air would not leave his chest; it expanded into a painful knot beneath his ribcage and he grew faint, staggered on his feet. The young man next to him said something he couldn’t understand. A woman appeared, took him by the arm, and led him to the curb, where he sat. The rescue operation continued seamlessly in his absence. The cold winter air found the perspiration that glued his clothes to his body and he started to shiver. The woman returned after a moment and handed him a tiny cup made of green ceramic. “Tessék,” she said, and he smelled the pálinka before she even poured it from a plastic bottle, its Coca-Cola label still intact.
    “Thank you,” Harkályi answered, breathless. “Köszönöm szépen.”
    “Nem Magyar?”
    “Amerikai vagyok.”
    “Igen, amerikai?”
    “Igen.”
    Another woman appeared with a blanket, which she wrapped over his shoulders. The liquor, a kind of homemade slivovitz, tasted surprisingly delicious; it prickled the lining of his chest, his stomach. He regained control of his breathing, and either from the booze or the embarrassment at his age and physical ineptitude, he felt his face glowing bright red. The women had further work to do and left him alone to watch the spectacle. The full buckets appeared from the foyer of a house and passed throughthe hands of twenty men, many of them half Harkályi’s age, and then were attached by their handles to a large hook and hoisted up using the pulley; the empty