Six days later, L wrote to him: “My love, I can’t stop thinking of you since I got your letter. We don’t deserve this fate.” Andor must have told her about his call-up to active duty. “Who knows if I will have a chance to say goodbye. It will be the end if I never saw you again. I’m with you every day in my dreams.”

  A letter from the third woman is dated three days later: “My dear but bad best love, is this what I deserve?”

  Andor opened another note from Asszonykád two days before Christmas: “My love, please don’t leave. I miss you. I’m yours. Why did you hurt me this afternoon? Tomorrow at 5, I will see you.”[34]

  But Andor did leave: He’d been assigned to escort fellow soldiers to distant postings. Some of the soldiers he would accompany were disabled or ailing, but it’s unclear why others required an escort. He would also courier medical supplies to various outposts and, for a time, help run a prison camp near the Black Sea. For the next two years, he would ricochet around Central and Eastern Europe: Graz, Semmering, Marburg, Wiener Neustadt, and Vienna (Austria); Maribor (present-day Slovenia); Horodok (present-day Ukraine); Orşova, Caransebeş, Timişoara, Craiova, Ploieşti, Brăila, and Bucharest (present-day Romania); Prague and Brno (present-day Czech Republic); Komárno (present-day Slovakia); Čakovec, Rijeka, and Slavonski Brod (present-day Croatia); Perast and Kotor (present-day Montenegro); Belgrade (present-day Serbia); Sarajevo and Mostar (present-day Bosnia and Herzegovina); Shkodër and Durrës (Albania); and all over Hungary. Lags and gaps in his diary make it impossible to track his week-to-week movements.

  Andor traveled mostly by military train, which was notoriously slow and unreliable. The different parts of the empire used incompatible rolling stock, so border crossings involved an interminable process of transferring people and goods from one train to another. One time he and his charge ended up in a louvered boxcar crowded with cattle, an episode Andor found hilarious. When the trains were impracticable, he resorted to hitching rides or even walking. Everywhere papers had to be obtained, signed, stamped, approved, and filed. The creakier the Habsburg Empire became, the more its bureaucrats cranked out passes, permits, passports, and other impediments to mobility.

  Everything piqued Andor’s interest. He photographed farmhouses, a kid smoking a cigar butt, a concert on a ship, trees and streams, a makeshift market set up among ruins, soldiers relieving themselves in a ditch, street cleaners, a sandal maker, and burned-out boxcars. Turks, Russians, Romanians, Germans. Himself. In Albania, he took a self-portrait with a Muslim man and his three sons. Judging from the picture, they were kindred spirits, though it’s unlikely that Andor had any language in common with the Albanians. The nationalism that was the root cause of the war was irrelevant.

  Along the way, Andor would diligently pull out his little notebook to record the names and addresses of people he encountered, those he befriended, and those he traveled or worked with. When he returned to Esztergom between assignments, he made prints, which he mailed along with letters or postcards. Many people wrote back, greeting him as Bandi, the typical nickname for Andor and one his Hungarian friends would use all his life: Kedves Bandi! (Dear Bandi!), Kedves Bandikám! (My dear Bandi!), and, jokingly, Kedves Bandi Bátyám! (Dear Uncle Bandi!).

  When photographing was impracticable, Andor would pick up the strands of his diary. The same powers of observation and delight in the odds and ends of everyday life that served him well as a photographer show up in diary entries that read like descriptions of the pictures he never took.

  Once, for instance, he had to shepherd a harmless braggart from Esztergom to Romania. Toilworn, malnourished, and ill, the fellow had a drooping mustache and a face like a rotting apple. Their journey included a several-hour layover in Budapest. So Andor took his charge to Mama, who spoiled the fellow with kindness and what food she could scare up. Then the two men caught the 9:10 train. They ended up in a compartment so packed and fetid, Andor observed, that it didn’t “smell like people” but rather “like soldiers.” He wrested a space next to a junior officer. “He put his head on my shoulder and he’s sleeping,” Andor recounted, “and I put my head on his shoulder, so we’re a pair.”[35]

  Another time Andor and others were milling around a provincial train station when one soldier pulled out a harmonica and started to play. A second jumped up to dance, clapping his hands and slapping his ankles. Then irritably and inexplicably, that man told the musician to stop. A third objected. A peacemaker then sliced up and doled out chunks of sausage and another shared his gingerbread. Andor held out his hand with the others.

  At a more contemplative moment, Andor watched people washing clothes in a flooded river somewhere at dusk. Suddenly a car spun into view, its silhouette twinned in the water’s dark shimmer. Fish were jumping, puckering the surface. The car sped off, kicking up gold dust, as the river absorbed its reflection. The incident felt, Andor wrote, like an “infinitely mysterious” kind of beauty “given by God.”[36]

  Elsewhere God was missing in action. Everyone was suffering, the empire lay in tatters, the world was grimly destroying itself. Travel became more and more arduous. Andor did not always eat. He fueled himself by taking pictures, making friends, and drinking ersatz coffee. In Albania, he slept in a stone farmhouse where his room had no ceiling, and he awoke one night to discover a scorpion on his blanket.[37] All the same, Andor found his life “exciting and colorful.”[38] His days were varied and his commanders far distant. Upset though he was by the suffering he saw on all sides, he was thrilled to be vagabonding at last.

  Back in Esztergom, Andor’s duties and physical therapy left plenty of time for rambles. One took him to a customs tollhouse on the outskirts of town. There the carts of peasants bound for Esztergom’s market squares were inspected, and their contents — chickens, vegetables, dairy products, grains — weighed and taxed. In Hungary, too, people had little to eat. Food riots were erupting. Bread, meat, maize, potatoes, and beans were rationed. (Andor’s weekly portion had been cut to a hundred grams of bread and three ounces of meat, typically horsemeat, plus a few dried vegetables.[39]) Accusing peasants of hoarding their produce and selling it on the black market, authorities were ransacking farmhouses and digging up courtyards and gardens.[40] Thus the customs tollhouse was a topical subject. Some photographers would have laid in wait for the arrival of a cart. But Andor was less interested in the news of the day than in the rhythms of the millennium. His photographs find abstract form in a telephone pole, toll bar, and rope; the tollhouse itself; the swathe of sky and band of land.

  It was also on the outskirts of Esztergom that Andor took pictures in a Romani camp. He had first visited the camp when his unit chanced upon a Romani lean-to as they were conducting drills. When they got a rest period, Andor pulled out his camera and headed over. Some of the children were capering around bare-bottomed, their fright-wig hair as wild as the grasses. Andor took a few exposures and vowed to return.

  Six months later, he had an opportunity. Travelers, fortune tellers, and escapees from the strictures of school and work, the Romani felt like kindred free spirits. Andor photographed an elderly woman called Aunt Didi, then turned to a couple tending their cooking pots. A graceful little tree stood behind them. All the while, two toddler siblings were running around naked.

  “Do you like your sister?” Andor inquired of one.

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t believe you,” he teased.[41]

  Andor had crept up to the two, low to the ground, awaiting the moment. As their lips met, their bloated bellies kissed too, and he clicked his shutter release.

  His portrait of Paprika Horváth catches something more subtle. Andor met the cheeky Romani adolescent, presumably a redhead, at a horse market.[42] Paprika had smooth skin, a cascade of ringlets, and, Andor quickly noticed, a beautiful body. When he asked if he could photograph her seminude, she agreed. But first she wanted a portrait for her fiancé, who was serving at the front.

  “Take it only when my eyes are smiling,” Paprika commanded.

  Andor did as he was told. She taught him that a smile is most beautiful just as it’s stealing onto a face because, at that instant, it’s a promise open to the beholder’s interpretation. “You don’t know how many times I used that,” Andor would tell a French gallerist decades later, “for the most sophisticated magazines.”[43]

  The Swing also catches a look, this time one of knowing familiarity between sister and brother. Walking to or from the barracks one day, Andor spotted a girl in a pinafore and hobnailed boots minding her toddler brother. The boy had been planted in a swing that was hung in a sunlit doorway. A blanket enveloped his legs. Andor tossed out a greeting, played a bit with the two, and then, when the moment was ripe, pushed his shutter release lever. In the picture, the little boy turns toward big sister as if to catch her expression. She props herself against a door panel in the stance of a chatty showgirl taking a breather.

  The titular swing sits perfectly still. But the picture sends the viewer’s eye back and forth between exterior and interior, brightness and shadow, texture and form, anecdote and abstraction. Andor was paying attention to geometric form. The doorjamb, the threshold, and the slatted door panel visually bar-clamp the scene. Triangles too — those of the swing’s ropes and the sunlit boards on the floor — have their roles. And there’s a third triangle, felt but not seen: the gaze from the photographer to sister and brother.[44]

  When Andor wasn’t photographing or performing his military duties, he was often at the glass-roofed Mala Swimming Pool, either attending his hydrotherapy sessions or swimming for fun. Even there, he kept his Goerz Tenax at the ready. Lounging at the pool one day before lunch, he shifted his attention from guys idling on the steps or plunging into the water to the optical interplay of light, water, and human body. A swimmer was gliding face down under the surface. Reflections flitted about. The stripes on the man’s bathing suit suggested a stylized version of the swashing water.

  Andor grabbed the shot. His friends scoffed: You’re crazy! Why bother with pictures like that?

  “Why only girl friends?” Andor retorted, referring to the pictures he took of his pals with their Esztergom sweethearts. “This also exists.”[45]

  In Underwater Swimmer, a man’s body registers as stretched, weightless, and nearly headless. Surrendered to the water, he hovers. His arms are wishboned in front of him. Only his feet rise to the surface. Below hangs his water-warped form. He exists in a state of sensory deprivation. He could be in a dream about flying, in which he’s both moving and still, out of body, out of time. Underwater Swimmer suggests that the self is unstable, and the everyday eerier than people assume.

  Andor’s photograph would itself become a kind of underwater swimmer. He loaned the negative to someone, perhaps for his postcard project, and that person lost it. Fortunately, Andor had made a print, which he would locate and use in the 1960s to create a copy negative. It was not until then that Underwater Swimmer resurfaced (as Man Diving, Esztergom) in a widely viewed exhibition and catalog. It won acclaim as the first modern photograph of a swimmer — an iconic image of the twentieth century.

  * * *

  —

  By 1918, defeat loomed for Hungary, and the nation was devolving into chaos. More than 660,000 men had perished. Families were shattered. Inflation was skyrocketing. In the absence of able-bodied men and horses, agricultural output had plummeted. Miserable and exhausted, people were scrounging for food and looking for scapegoats.

  Among the tensions ripping the nation apart were those between conservative and increasingly politicized Catholic Hungarians and Jewish Hungarians. Some politicians, journalists, and ecclesiastics accused Jews of being usurers, swindlers, and profiteers. Jews were behind the nation’s agony, they asserted. Hungary was a Christian nation, and the morally corrupt Jews were enriching themselves from the war and threatening basic Hungarian values.[46]

  Such tensions underpin Andor’s exchange with a cassocked priest one day around dusk. Walking along a road in Esztergom, the heart of Catholic Hungary, Andor caught sight of four priests cutting through a flowering orchard. They had emerged from the bishop’s residence and were heading to vespers. With his one good hand, Andor pulled his camera from his pocket and plunged into that same orchard, wondering if there was enough light to pull off a decent picture. When he was about seventy feet in, the youngest priest came rushing over.

  “You don’t have the right to come in. This is private property.”

  Andor lost it. “You s.o.b.!” he yelled. “I have the right because I am wounded for you.” Then, as Andor later told the story, he asserted that God had bestowed beauty on the blossoming orchard and that God-given beauty belonged to him as much as to the church. The priest scurried away, and Andor, an agnostic, got his picture. Organized religion irked him. “And I was in my uniform, and he was in his uniform,” Andor would observe of their two social roles.[47]

  Andor’s final missions took him, now as a noncommissioned officer, from Esztergom to Sarajevo and Shkodër in the Balkans, then to Brăila, a Romanian port and cargo station on the Danube. There he spent four months inventorying equipment and arms. Andor was a tallier and a list maker, and the job suited him, even though it was virtually impossible. As troops surged in and out of the city, Brăila’s rail yards and docks filled and emptied helter-skelter with machine parts, tools, lumber, and crates. Supply depots and ammunition dumps stood poorly guarded. Weapons and shells were pilfered by Bolsheviks, ethnic freedom fighters, and petty thieves.

  Some of Andor’s Brăila pictures allude to going home. In one, a sailor seated on his duffel bag in a supply depot watches a hound attend to her puppy. They could be read as stand-ins for the subject’s distant family. In another, a long-suffering horse is loaded by a sling onto the Constantinople-bound Principessa Cristina. Andor also trained his lens on horses munching at their feeder boxes aboard the Turkish vessel Minna Horn. Straw is scattered around the deck, and sailors sit gabbing as if in a village square. Andor would photograph the port again, deserted after the Turkish debarkation. He took his last Brăila photographs on walks in the woods with a Viennese army clerk named Emmy.

  His flirtation with Emmy, if that’s what it was, came on the heels of his final break with Jolán. Andor had outgrown the relationship. The war had brought him face-to-face with all kinds of men and women. With Muslims and Christians, Russian and German prisoners of war, anti-Semites. With the suffering, the maimed, and the dying. He had survived typhoid fever, bullets, and malaria. The boy fascinated by tales of exotic travel had matured into a resourceful and well-traveled young man interested in human complexities.

  Earlier that summer, Andor asked Jenő to write the long-delayed letter for him, hand it to Jolán, and have her read it in his presence. Why not write Jolán himself? After more than a decade of courtship, did he not owe her that? Maybe the uncertainty of the mail was a factor. Maybe he wanted someone to be with her when she got the news. Why not wait to break up until after his return to Budapest? One charitable explanation is that Andor knew Jolán had other romantic interests and wanted to relieve her of any obligation. Besides, he would have been curious about her reaction.

  So Andor trusted Jenő with the task. Indeed, the letter was “very touching,” his brother reported, “just like it usually is in novels.” It was his heartrending prose, Jenő contended, not Jolán’s true feelings, that brought tears to her eyes. “She made a big show of crying,” yet “the woman left behind doesn’t think of it as tragic.”

  A second letter from Jenő to Andor suggests that no sooner had Andor learned that the deed was done than he wrote Jenő to say he regretted it. “Oh, why did you make this mistake?” Jenő chastised him. “Did we need this? Anyway, it doesn’t matter anymore.”[48] It was too late: one of Jolán’s sisters had told Jenő that Jolán was engaged. She soon married a mechanic named Ármin Gál. The last tears had been wrung from Andor’s thirteen-year romance.

  Ármin was a distant cousin of Jolán’s, but also, as it turned out, the Kertészes’ relative on the Klopfer and Grósz side of the family. At that thought, Jenő’s humor burst through. “The Balogs are going to accept the situation,” he informed Andor, “but I hope God saves us from the Grósz family.”[49]

  * * *

  —

  Meanwhile Bolshevik Russia had quit the war, the Central Powers were retreating, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire was coming unglued. Budapest proposed a peace conference. In October, Andor opened a telegram from Jóska Frankl, his best friend in Esztergom:

  Peace has broken out. Come home immediately. A huge national task is waiting for you. To procreate until the end! A vast amount of material is at your service … We send you comradely hugs and love: in the name of the Hungarian Autonomous Reproductive Committee.[50]

  Five days later, Andor squeezed into a military train or rode with the throng on the roof. He was not headed straight for home, peace, and procreation, however, but for Vienna with a sheaf of official papers. Near the Romanian-Transylvanian border, his train ran out of coal, and the men had to forage for more.[51] After the train finally delivered him to a slate-gray, rain-splattered Budapest, it went out of service. There was no coal in the Hungarian capital. Andor found other arrangements for the papers, then made his way to his base in Esztergom, where he expected to be demobilized. He also expected to retrieve his best war negatives, which he had entrusted to a friend named Antal. It was time to pull that work together and make the postcard book a reality.

  Esztergom was blanketed with snow. Arriving at the barracks, Andor was stunned to find the windows shattered, the doors splintered, and the offices in shambles. His regiment had turned into a mob and ravaged the place. No one was there. Not Antal, not Andor’s commander, no one. From the rubble on his friend’s desk, Andor plucked one and a half glass negatives. The others — his finest pictures, the ones he’d hoped would make his mark—had vanished. Shock. Disbelief. Heartbreak. The war’s parting shot.