Lili waited patiently for another half-hour, her ears open like cockleshells, waiting to hear the troops, the megaphones. She thought she heard the crack of distant gunfire again—machine-gun fire—and then a burning silence. Lili’s heart beat against the prison of her ribs.
And then the telephone rang downstairs. Who could it possibly be? Was it her father? Was it Ferenc? Someone needing medical help? Someone hurting, wanting Lili’s father to attend to them? The phone continued to ring for what seemed like several minutes, but Lili didn’t answer, and then it stopped.
The cake burned gloriously now, its sunny sweetness melting into a lava flow in the thick chamber of the oven. None of these alarms could lure Lili out of her hiding place. Not the telephone, not the burning cake, not the soldiers who’d come and gone, who’d checked the Bandel house, then checked it off their list.
And not Dobo. Lili heard his voice, now. Dobo—his name was Artur Dobo, but everyone called him by his surname only, or sometimes even Captain Dobo. He was the town’s crazy beggar, who got his meals at a different house each night, many nights at the Bandels’ house, where not only did Helen feed him, but David calmed him down with a sip of brandy and gave him a cot to settle down on. They would even have the Captain for the Sabbath, and he prayed with them. Each child who was able had to recite a passage by heart from the Torah, the older ones longer passages, and after that the Bandels prayed. Her father and brother also prayed each morning with their tefillin. Lili would sometimes watch the ritual, as each placed a small box containing a hand-written biblical passage on his arm, wound a leather strap around the arm and also around the head, where another small square box containing another biblical passage was placed against the forehead.
Lili had forgotten altogether about Captain Dobo until she heard his mad voice, suddenly, next door. Where had he been all this time? What hole had he crawled out of? He must have been standing now under the crabapple tree, which had bloomed then withered inexplicably very early that spring. Where Dobo had come from, and how he’d escaped the notice of the invaders, she couldn’t even guess.
Dobo was determined to attract notice. “Hey!” he was yelling. “Hey! Hey! Hey!” Lili did not dare move at first. “Get back up there!” Dobo shouted. “What are you doing?”
It sounded for a moment as though Dobo were addressing Lili, standing below her window and calling out to her. She had to look—she had to peek at least. “What’s going on!” he bellowed. “Get back up there!”
From where she crouched, Lili looked out of the corner of her window at the sky’s blue insistence. She crept out far enough to peer into Tzipi’s yard, where Dobo stood, hurling dry leaves up at the branches which had released them. “Hey! What are you doing!” he said. He threw armfuls of leaves up and then stood tall, his arms open to the heavens, pleading with the crabapple tree to hang on. “Hey!” His voice was dying down. “Hey.” The call was melodic almost, like the song of an oversized bird. “What?” he asked the tree. He held out his arms. The geese in the pen behind him honked. A single dog barked from down the street.
Then shots rang out. Lili hadn’t seen anyone approach. She darted back behind the wardrobe and covered her ears. But the shots sounded again. And then Lili heard men’s laughter, the language that travels. Then still more laughter, right below her window. Minutes later, departing footsteps.
Lili spent the night behind the wardrobe. She heard German voices outside in the dark, then drunk Hungarian ones. But not a single Yiddish voice. For long hours, she feared someone would come tripping into her house again, help himself to some food, tumble on a bed. But night passed quietly into morning. Lili did not sleep. She waited dutifully for someone to come get her, tell her it was all right to come out, come and eat, rest. Where had everyone got to? Surely, the soldiers had not scoured the fields and woods far from the village. Surely, her brothers and sisters were staying put, waiting, like Lili, for the alien noises to be carried off over the Carpathian Mountains with the moon.
The images of the previous morning wheeled through her head. Her sister