Her voice faded to an inexorable whisper. “Nothing but pillage and destruction. Charred ruins, black embers. The occasional farmhouse on the mountain had escaped destruction. But the village of Molnár, which had survived the Romanian pillage, the Tartars and the Turks, was no more. No more. And in the river, so many bodies were floating, like an ice floe. And among them, naked, bloated, bluish, were the bodies of my very own parents.” She raised a hand to her forehead. “When you see what human beings can do to each other, it makes you … ashamed to be alive.”

The two Americans were silent for a moment.

“How did you find yourself in the castle?” Janson asked after a while.

The old woman smiled, remembering. “Janós Ferenczi-Novak—a wonderful man, and so was his Illana. To serve them was a privilege, I never forgot that. You see, my parents and my grandparents and my great-grandparents worked the land. They were peasants, but over time, the nobleman deeded them small parcels of land. They grew potatoes, and grapes, and berries of all sorts. They had hopes for me, I think. I was a pretty little girl. It’s true. They thought if I worked as a servant at the castle, I would learn a thing or two. Perhaps the count would take me with him to Budapest, where I might meet a special man. My mother nurtured these sorts of dreams. She knew one of the women who helped run Ferenczi-Novak’s household, and had her meet her little girl. And one thing led to another, and I met the great man himself, Count Ferenczi-Novak, and his beautiful blue-eyed wife, Illana. The count was spending more and more time in Budapest, in the circles of the government of the Regent Horthy. He was close to Miklós Kállay, who would become prime minister. I think he was some sort of high minister in Kállay’s government. The count was an educated man. The government needed such men as he, and he had a strong sense of public service. But even then, he would spend several weeks at a time in his country estates, in Molnár. A tiny village. A tavern owner. The grocer, a Jew from Hódmezövásárhely. But mostly farmers and woodcutters. Humble folk, eking out a living along the Tisza River. Then came the day my mother took me to the castle on the hill—the castle we had somehow imagined, growing up, to be part of the mountain itself.”

“It must be hard to remember something that happened so long ago,” Jessie ventured.