Jessie looked at Janson and then back at the old woman. “Well, if you’re having some.”

The old woman slowly rose and walked unsteadily to the glass-front sideboard. There, she lifted an enormous jug filled with a colorless liquid, and poured a small quantity into two shot glasses.

Jessie took one. The old woman settled back into her chair and watched as Jessie had a sip.

Explosively, she sprayed the liquid out. It was as involuntary as a sneeze. “Jeez, I’m sorry!” she got out in a strangled voice.

The old woman smiled mischievously.

Jessie was still struggling for breath. “What the …” Jessie gasped, her eyes watering.

“Around here, we make it ourselves,” the woman said. “A hundred and ninety proof. A bit stiff for you?”

“Little bit,” Jessie said hoarsely.

The old woman swallowed the rest of the brandy, and looked more relaxed than she had been. “It all goes back to the Treaty of Trianon, in 1920, and the lost territories. We had to give up almost three-quarters of our land to the Romanians and the Yugoslavs. Can you imagine what that felt like?”

“Like an amputation,” Janson offered.

“That’s it—there was a ghostly sense that a part of you was there and yet not there. Nem, nem soha! It was the national motto, and it means ‘No, no never.’ It is the answer to the question ‘Can it remain like this?’ Every stationmaster would inscribe the catechism in flowers in his garden. Justice for Hungary! But nobody in the world took it seriously, this thirst for the lost territories. Nobody but Hitler. Such madness—like riding a tiger. In Budapest, the government makes friends with this man. Soon they are in the belly of the beast. It was a mistake for which this country would suffer so terribly. But nobody suffered more than we did.”

“And were you around when …”

“All the houses were set on fire. The people who lived here—whose ancestors had worked here as long as anyone could remember—rousted from their beds, their fields, the breakfast tables. Rounded up and forced at gunpoint to walk along the iced-over waters of the Tisza until the ice broke and they fell in. Whole families, walking hand in hand—then, a minute later, drowning, freezing, in the icy waters. They say you could hear the ice cracking all the way up the vineyards. I was in the castle at the time, and it was being shelled. I thought the walls would collapse in on us. Much of it was destroyed. But in the cellars, we were safe. A day later, the army had moved on, and I wandered back to the village of my birth, the only home I had ever known, and—nothing.”