Extraordinary Renditions Read Online Free PDF Page B

ones were tossed down to a man on the ground and fed back into the line. It was beautiful. Harkályi expected the men to break out in song. Every so often, the man closest to the roof would climb down and allow another to take over, to plunge his face into the smoke and to throw water at the flames, which neither subsided nor spread. A small carload of reporters and photographers arrived to document the men working in unison like an efficient, steaming machine. Harkályi made a mental note of the rhythm.
    Sirens nipped at the edges of his hearing, still excellent despite the years, and soon some small degree of relief washed over the crowd. Exhaustion by then slowed even the younger men, yet they continued to pass the metal buckets back and forth. The sound of the fire brigade, which grew steadily louder, reminded him of the wartime air raid sirens, sounds once heard so frequently that they eventually lost all currency. The real danger came not from falling bombs or the buildings that collapsed under the weight of fire, but rather from the bitter Gentiles those bombs sent scurrying to join him underground. The mobs of desperate, anti-Semitic citizens were all-too-ready to denounce lifelong friends of the family, for only a tin of sardines as the reward. One ill-timed sneeze and young Lajos would have found himself unearthed and exiled—or worse.
    There were fates more capricious and incomprehensible than exile.
    The stone in his pocket, now collecting the sweat of his labors, was the only remaining totem of his childhood. Even Tibor had passed on; his brother, by some series of miracles, survived the war and the camps, but succumbed to a drunken gambler, newly destitute, swerving his way back to the city on the Atlantic City Expressway, and left Magda to Harkályi’s absentee care. The stone survived when everything else around him withered, and it traveled with him from Hungary toCzechoslovakia, Czechoslovakia to the U.S. Army hospital in Vienna, and then to London and, eventually, Philadelphia.
    He will leave the stone here at the Tabac-Schul, where it can, like him, complete its journey. It had never, in all of these many years, felt so unbearably heavy.
8.
    The sirens grew louder until three red trucks arrived, followed closely by a black sport utility vehicle full of rabbis and their bodyguards. Blue and red lights spun and danced around Harkályi, reflecting in the windows of the synagogue and the buildings facing it. What a scene! As the firemen emerged, the neighborhood men scurried to the safety of the sidewalk, where Harkályi climbed to his feet. Bottles of fresh wine appeared, and he drank heartily from every one that was passed. Photographers clamored for the attention of the sweating men. They did not recognize Harkályi, for which he was grateful. The crude, homemade alcohol burned his stomach, but helped to calm his nerves. The fire, although seemingly contained, continued to destroy the synagogue roof. The firemen uncoiled their hoses and dragged them toward the burning building. Reporters with television cameras positioned the rabbis with their backs to the synagogue and interviewed them with smoke rising behind them. One of them wept openly and the cameraman handed him a handkerchief.
    The apartment doors remained open so that the men could go upstairs to see the effects of their labors from the upper floors. Harkályi followed them through the cramped foyer and up a series of stone steps. The climb was not difficult, now that he had regained his breath and found strength in the fresh Bikavér wine—the so-called bull’s blood—still being passed freely around. A woman stood in the threshold, the one who had brought him the blanket, which he handed back in return. “Csókolom,” he said tohis hostess—I kiss your hand—and she giggled at the formality. The men did not remove their shoes, and they splashed mud across the wooden floors.
    “You are an American, yes?” someone asked. It was the man