The Invisible Bridge (49 page)

"I should have spoken to you sooner," Jozsef said. "We might have traveled together."

"It's my fault," Andras said. "I haven't been eager to see you since I got blind drunk in your bedroom."

"Never feel ashamed," Jozsef said. "Not with me. Not for that reason." And then he turned to Tibor. "What about you?" he said. "How's medical school? Was it Switzerland?"

"Italy."

"Of course. So you're nearly a doctor now."

"Not quite nearly."

"And what brings you to town?"

"That's a long story," Tibor said. "The short version is something like this: I'm courting someone who was recently married to a friend of Andras's. I'm glad you're leaving town before you can make me say more about it."

Jozsef laughed. "That's grand," he said. "I wish I had time for the long version."

They had reached the station, and the driver got out to untie the bags from the roof. Jozsef opened his wallet and counted out money. Andras and Tibor slid out after him and helped him carry the bags inside.

"I suppose you'd better go," Andras said, once they'd consigned the luggage to a porter. "You'll miss your train."

"Listen," Jozsef said. "If you do make it to Budapest, look me up. We'll have a drink. I'll introduce you to some girls I know."

"Monsieur Hasz, the playboy," Tibor said.

"Don't forget it," Jozsef said, and winked. Then he slung his chestnut-colored satchel over his shoulder and loped off into the crowded station.

Before a week had passed, Andras would be obliged to return to the Gare du Nord with his own suitcases, his own satchel. But all he knew, as he and Tibor began the long walk to the rue de Sevigne that evening, was that he had to go to the consulate and explain that he must be granted legal visitor status. Only until the end of the month--only as long as it would take to get a marriage license and wed his bride. Once they were married, wouldn't he have a claim to French citizenship? Couldn't he come and go, then, as he wished?

At Klara's, all the lights were burning and the women were cloistered in the bedroom. Ilana came out to tell Andras he was not to go in; the dressmaker was there, and behind Klara's door there were secret preparations regarding her wedding gown.

Andras made a noise of dismay. He and Tibor went to the front room and sat down on either side of the sofa, where Tibor pulled his own papers from his trouser pocket and scrutinized the visa.

"Mine's good until next January," he said. "And I've been enrolled in summer study, though I'm afraid I won't pass the course I've just abandoned."

"But you're enrolled. You ought to be all right."

"But what about you? What will you do?"

"I'll go to the consulate," Andras said. "Then I'll go to the Mairie. I'll do whatever I have to do. I've got to have valid papers before we can get a marriage license."

From the bedroom came a trio of exclamations, a crescendo of laughter. Tibor folded his papers again and set them on the table. "What'll you tell her?"

"Nothing yet," he said. "I don't want her to worry."

"We'll go to the consulate tomorrow," Tibor said. "If you explain the problem, maybe they'll grant you an extension. And if they give you trouble, watch out." He held up his fists in a threatening manner. But his hands were as elegant as a pianist's, long and lean; his knuckles had the polished look of river stones, and his tendons fanned like the delicate bones of a bird's wing.

"God help us all," Andras said, and managed a smile.

The Hungarian Consulate was located not far from the German Embassy, where Ernst vom Rath had met his assassin. At first glance the building might have made an expatriate long for home; its facade was inlaid with mosaics depicting scenes from Budapest and the countryside. But the artist had an uncanny knack for ugliness: his humans seemed to suffer from anemia and bloating, his landscapes from a failure of perspective just noticeable enough to evoke vague nausea in the viewer. Andras had had no appetite for breakfast, in any case; he'd hardly slept the night before. Somehow he'd made it through the previous evening without mentioning the situation to Klara, but she suspected something was wrong. After dinner, as Andras and Tibor were preparing to leave for the Latin Quarter, she'd stopped him in the passageway and asked if he were having misgivings about the wedding.

"Not at all," he said. "Just the opposite. I'm anxious for it to happen."

"So am I," she said, and put her arms around him in the shadowy hall. He'd kissed her, but his mind hadn't been present. He was thinking about what had troubled him most since the cab ride that afternoon: not the prospect of resistance at the consulate, nor the problem of how he might afford a ticket home, but the fact that the young man rushing to the station had been
Jozsef Hasz
, who had always seemed miraculously exempt from the difficulties of ordinary life--Jozsef Hasz, packed off to Budapest for the sake of a stamp on a document.

The next day at the consulate, a red-haired matron with a Hajdu accent told Andras that his visa had expired when his classes had ended at the beginning of the summer, and that he'd been staying in France illegally for a month and a half; he must leave the country at once if he didn't want to be arrested. He was given a copy of a form letter stating that he would be permitted to reenter Hungary. That seemed like an unnecessary measure; he was a Hungarian citizen, after all. But he was too upset to consider it for long. He needed to know what to do once he got to Budapest, how to return to Paris as soon as possible. Tibor, who had come along as promised, kept his hands in his pockets and asked polite questions when Andras might have demanded and shouted and raised arguments. Through Tibor's gentle inquiries, they learned that if Andras carried a letter from the school stating that he was a registered student, and that his scholarship would be renewed in the fall, he ought to be able to get another two-year visa once he was back in Budapest. Any faculty member at the school could write the letter; it was valid as long as it appeared on the school's letterhead and carried the school's official seal. Tibor was effusive in his thanks, and the red-haired woman went so far as to say she regretted the inconvenience. But her small watery eyes were impassive as she stamped a red
ERVENYTELEN
across Andras's visa. Expired. Invalid. He had to leave at once. There was no use going to the Mairie to apply for a marriage license; he could be arrested if he showed his expired documents there. The train ticket would exhaust his savings, but he had no choice. He could begin to save again when he returned.

He and Tibor went to the Ecole Speciale to get the official letter, but when they tried the front doors they found them locked. Of course: The school was closed for the remainder of August. Everyone, even the office attendants, were on vacation; they wouldn't return until the beginning of September. Andras threw a Hungarian profanity into the hot milky sky.

"How can we get letterhead?" Tibor said. "How can we get an official seal?"

Andras cursed again, but then he had an idea. If there was one thing he knew, it was the architecture of the Ecole Speciale. It was one of the first designs they'd studied in studio; they had made an exhaustive survey of every aspect of the building, from the stone foundation of the neoclassical entry hall to the pyramidal glass roof of the amphitheater. He knew every door, every window, even the coal-delivery chutes and the network of pneumatic tubes that allowed the central office to send messages to the professors' studies. He knew, for example, that if you approached the school's back wall through the Cimetiere de Montparnasse, you would find a door behind a cataract of ivy--a door so well hidden it was never locked. It communicated with the courtyard, which allowed access to the office through windows that swung wide on loose hinges. By the aid of those passages Andras and Tibor found themselves inside the vacation-deadened sanctum of the school. A stationer's box in the office yielded a supply of letterhead and envelopes, and Tibor located the official seal in a secretary's desk drawer. Neither he nor Andras were adept with a typewriter; it took eight tries to come up with a fair copy of a letter declaring that Andras was indeed a registered student at the Ecole Speciale, and that he would continue to receive his scholarship in the fall term. They listed Pierre Vago as the author of the letter, and Tibor forged Vago's signature with a flourish so grand Vago himself might have envied it. Then they embossed the letter with the school's official stamp.

Before they left, Andras showed Tibor the plaque stating that he'd won the Prix du Amphitheatre. Tibor stood for a long time looking at the plaque, his arms crossed over his chest. Finally he went back to the office, where he got two blank sheets of letterhead and a pencil. He laid the paper over the plaque and made two rubbings.

"One for our parents," he said. "One for me."

They had to go to the telegraph office to wire Matyas that he was coming. He wouldn't notify his parents until he got to Budapest; a telegram would only alarm them, and a letter from France might not reach them until he was back in Paris. At the office, worried-looking men and women bent over cards at the writing counters, composing accidentally elegant haiku which took as their subjects birth and love, money and death.

Half-written messages littered the floor: MAMAN I RECEIVED--, M ATHILDE: R

EGRET TO INFORM--. While Tibor consulted the train timetable, of which the telegraph office kept a copy, Andras went to the window to get his message card and pencil. The green-visored attendant pointed him toward one of the counters. He went to the appointed place and waited for his brother, who told him that the Danube Express would leave the next morning at seven thirty-three and arrive in Budapest seventy-two hours later.

"What do we write?" Andras asked. "There's too much to say."

"How about this," Tibor suggested, and licked the end of the pencil.

"MATYAS: A RRIVE B UDAPEST T HURSDAY AM. P LEASE BATHE. L

OVE A NDRAS."

"Please

bathe?"

"You'll likely have to share a bed with him."

"Good point. It's lucky you're here to help."

They paid, and the telegram went into the queue. Now Andras had only to go to the rue de Sevigne to tell Klara of his plans. He dreaded the coversation, the news he would have to deliver: their wedding plans disrupted, his visa expired. The confirmation that she'd been right when she guessed something was the matter. With Europe's fate so uncertain, how could he convince her that their own would be less so? But when they got to the apartment, they found that Klara and Ilana had gone off on a mysterious mission together--to where, Mrs. Apfel wouldn't say. It was four o'clock; on an ordinary day, Klara would have been teaching. But her establishment had an August hiatus, too. Had it not been for Ilana's divorce and Elisabet's departure, they might have gone somewhere themselves, perhaps back to the stone cottage at Nice. Now they were here together in the city, the shops and restaurants closed all around them, the city drowsing in a gold haze.

Andras wondered where Klara and Ilana might have gone in secret. They came home a quarter of an hour later with wet hair, their skin pink and luminous, a glow about them; they had been to the Turkish baths in the Sixth Arrondissement. He couldn't keep from following Klara into her bedroom to watch her dress for dinner. She smiled over her shoulder as she let her summer dress fall to the floor. Her body was cool and pale, her skin velvety as a sage leaf. It was impossible to think of getting on a train that would take him away from her, even for a day.

"Klarika," he said, and she turned to face him. Her hair had dried in soft tendrils around her neck and forehead; he had such a strong desire for her that he wanted almost to bite her.

"What is it?" She put a hand on the bare skin of his arm.

"Something's happened," he said. "I have to go to Budapest."

She blinked at him in surprise. "But Andras--my God, did someone die?"

"No, no. My visa's expired."

"Can't you just go to the consulate?"

"They've changed the rules. Jozsef was the one who told me. He had to leave, too-

-he was on his way to the Gare du Nord when I saw him. I'm here illegally now, according to the government. I have to leave at once. There's a train tomorrow morning."

She took a white silk robe and wrapped it around herself, then sat down on the low chair beside the vanity table, her face drained of color.

"Budapest,"

she

said.

"It's only for a few days."

"But what if you run into trouble? What if they won't renew your visa? What if a war begins while you're away?" Slowly, pensively, she untied the green ribbon that bound her hair at the nape of her neck, and for a long time she sat holding that bit of silk.

When she spoke again, her voice had lost its careful balance. "We were supposed to be married next week. And now you're going to Hungary, the one place I can't go with you."

"I'll be gone just long enough to get there, see my parents, and come back."

"I couldn't stand it if something happened."

"Do you think I want to go without you?" he said, and pulled her to her feet. "Do you think I can stand the thought of it? Two weeks without you, while Europe's on the brink of war? Do you think I want that?"

"What if I came with you?"

He shook his head. "We know that's impossible. We've talked about it. It's too dangerous, particularly now."

"I never would have considered it while Elisabet was here, but now I don't need to protect myself for her sake. And Andras--now I know something of what my mother must have suffered when I had to go away. She's getting older. Who knows when I'll have a chance to see her? It's been more than eighteen years. Perhaps I can arrange to meet her in secret, and no one will be the wiser. If we stay a short time, we won't be in danger--I've been Claire Morgenstern for nearly two decades now. I have a French passport. Why would anyone question it? Please, Andras. Let me come."

"I can't," he said. "I couldn't forgive myself if you were discovered and arrested."