The Invisible Bridge (53 page)

My thoughts are with you always
, Tibor wrote.
I hope you will never have use for
the medical supplies I'm sending with this letter, but just in case, I have made an attempt
to assemble a field hospital in miniature. Meanwhile I remain, in continual fear for your
safety and belief in your fortitude, your loving brother, TIBOR.

The next letter was from Matyas, dated May 29 and written in an angry scrawl.

I've been called up
, he informed Andras.
The stinking bastards. They'll never make me
work for them. Horthy says he will protect the Jews. Liar! My gimnazium friend Gyula
Kohn died in the labor service last month. He had a pain in his side and a fever but they
sent him to work anyway. It was appendicitis. He died three days later. He was my age,
nineteen
.

The final letter was from Klara herself, with a newspaper clipping that showed the German Eighteenth Army marching through the streets of Paris, and an enormous Nazi flag hanging from the Hotel de Ville. Andras sat on his cot and stared at the photographs.

He thought of his first brief passage through Germany what seemed a geologic age ago--his stopover in Stuttgart, when he'd tried to buy bread at a bakery that did not serve Jews.

That was where he'd seen the red flag hanging from the facade of the train station, a blast of National Socialist fervor five stories high. He refused to believe what the attached article told him: that the same flag now flew from every official building in Paris; that Paul Reynaud, successor to Daladier, had resigned; that the new premier, Philippe Petain, had declared that France would collaborate with Hitler in the formation of a New Europe.

Even
Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite
had been replaced with a new slogan:
Travail, Famille,
Patrie
. There was a rumor that all Jews who had volunteered for the French Army would be removed from their battalions and imprisoned in concentration camps, from which they would be deported to the East.

Polaner. He said it aloud into the damp hay-smelling air of the bunk. His eyes burned. Here he was, thousands of miles away, and helpless; there was nothing he could do, nothing anyone could do. Already Hitler had what he wanted of Poland. He had Luxembourg and Belgium and the Netherlands, he had Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, he had Italy as a member of the Tripartite Pact; he had Hungary as an ally, and now he had France. He would win the war, and what would happen to the Jews of the conquered nations? Would he force them to emigrate, deport them to marshlands at the center of ravaged Poland? It was impossible to conceive of what might happen.

He went out into the moonlit yard to read Klara's letter. It was a humid night; a mist hovered in the assembly field, where the grass had grown shaggy with the June rains. The soldier stationed beside the barn door tipped his hat at Andras. They were all familiar with each other by now, and no one really thought anyone would try to desert.

There was nowhere to go, here in Carpatho-Ruthenia. They would all be granted their first furlough soon, in any case--free transport to Budapest. Andras chose one of the large stones at the edge of the assembly field, where the moonlight came in strong and white through a few crumpled handkerchiefs of cloud.
My dear Andraska,
France has fallen. I can scarcely believe the words as I write them. It is a tragedy, a
horror. The world has lost its mind. Mrs. Apfel writes that all of Paris has fled to the
south. I am fortunate indeed to be here in Hungary now, rather than in France under the
Nazi flag
.
I was grateful for your letter of May 15. What a vast relief to know you're well
and have gotten through the winter. Now it is only a few months before you'll be here. In
the meantime, know that I am well--or as well as I can be without you. I have twenty-five
students now. All of them talented children, all Jewish. What will become of them,
Andras? I do not speak of my fears, of course; we practice and they improve
.
Mother is
well. Gyorgy and Elza are well. Jozsef is well. Your brothers are well. We are all well!

That is what one must write in letters. But you know how we are, my love. We are full of
apprehension. Our lives are shadowed by uncertainty. You are always in my thoughts:
That, at least, is certain. The days cannot pass fast enough until I see you
.
With love,
Your K

ALL SUMMER he sustained himself with the thought that he'd soon be with her--close enough to touch and smell and taste her, at liberty to lie in bed with her all day if he wanted, to tell her everything that had happened during the long months of his absence, and to hear what had been in her mind while he'd been away. He thought of seeing his mother and father, of taking her to their house in Konyar for the first time, of strolling with his parents and his wife through the apple orchards and into the flat grasslands. He thought, too, of seeing Tibor, who hadn't managed to get his student visa renewed after all, and was now stranded in Hungary with Ilana. But in August, when Andras's postponed furlough was due, Germany gave Hungary the gift of Northern Transylvania.

The Carpathians, that white ridge of granite between the civilized West and the wild East, Europe's natural barrier against its vast Communist neighbor: Horthy wanted it, even at the price of a deeper friendship with Germany; Hitler delivered it, and soon afterward the friendship was formalized by Hungary's entry into the Tripartite Pact. The 112/30th, having completed its road-building assignment in Subcarpathia ahead of schedule, was shipped off by railway car to Transylvania. There, in the virgin forest between Marmaros-Sziget and Borsa, the company embarked on a tree-clearing and ditch-digging project that was supposed to last through the rest of fall and winter.

When the weather began to grow cold again, it occurred to him that it had been a year,
a year
, since he'd seen Klara. Of their married life they'd spent a week together.

Every night in the barracks, men lay weeping or cursing over the loss of their girlfriends, their fiancees, their wives, women who had loved them but who'd grown tired of waiting.

What assurance did he have that Klara wouldn't tire of her solitude? She had always surrounded herself with people; her social circle in Paris had consisted of actors and dancers, writers and composers, people who offered her unstinting stimulation. What would keep her from making ties like that in Budapest? And once she did, what would prevent her from turning toward one of her new friends for more tangible comfort? The specter of Zoltan Novak appeared to Andras one night in a dream, walking barefoot through Wesselenyi utca in his smoking jacket, toward the Dohany Street Synagogue, where a woman who might have been Klara was waiting for him in the gloomy courtyard. Surely, Novak would have heard that she'd returned; surely he would try to see her. Perhaps he already had. Perhaps she was with him that moment, in some room he'd taken for their assignations.

At times Andras felt as though the work service were causing his mind to float away, piece by piece, like ashes from a fire. What would be left of him, he wondered, once he returned to Budapest? For months he'd struggled to keep his mind sharp as he worked, tried to design buildings and bridges on the slate of his brain when he couldn't draw them on paper, tried to sing himself the French names of architectural features to keep himself awake as he slung mud with his shovel or hacked branches with his axe.

Porte, fenetre, corniche, balcon
, a magic spell against mental deterioration. Now, as the prospect of a furlough slipped farther into the distance, his thoughts became a source of torment. He imagined Klara with Novak or with her memories of Sandor Goldstein; he thought about the grim progress of the war, which had gone on now for more than a year.

In a series of newspaper clippings that his father sent, he read about the brutal bombardment of London, the attack by Luftwaffe planes every night for fifty-seven nights. And as the war burned on in England, he and his workmates fought a smaller war against the ravages of the Munkaszolgalat. Gradually, man by man, the 112/30th was crumbling: One man broke a leg and had to be sent home, another had a diabetic seizure and died, a third shot himself with an officer's gun after learning that his fiancee had given birth to another man's child. Matyas was in the labor service now, and Tibor had just been called. Andras had heard stories of labor-service companies being sent to clear minefields in Ukraine. He imagined Matyas in a field at dawn, making his way through a fog; in his hand a stick, a broken branch, with which to prod the ground in search of mines.

In December, when a string of blizzards scoured the mountains and the workers were often confined to the bunkhouse, Andras fell into a paralyzing depression. Instead of reading or writing letters or drawing in his damp-swollen sketchbook, he lay in bed and nursed the mysterious bruises that had begun to appear beneath his skin. He was supposed to be a leader; nominally he was still squad captain, and he still had to march the men to the assembly field and supervise the cleaning of the barracks and the maintenance of the woodstove and all the small details of their straitened lives; but more and more often he felt as if they were leading him while he trailed behind, his boots filling with snow. He hardly took notice when, one Sunday afternoon during a grinding blizzard, Mendel Horovitz conceived the idea of a Munkaszolgalat newspaper. Mendel scratched away at a series of ideas in a notebook, then borrowed a sheaf of paper and a typewriter from one of the officers so he could make the thing look official. He was not a swift typist; it took him three nights to finish two pages of articles. He typed at all hours.

The men threw boots at him to stop the racket, but his desire to finish the paper exceeded his fear of flying objects. He worked every day for a week, every chance he had.

When at last he'd finished typing, he brought his pages to Andras and sat down on the edge of his cot. Outside, the wind set up a noise like the wailing of foxes. It was the third consecutive day of the worst-yet storm of the season, and the snow had reached the high windows of the bunkhouse. Work had been cancelled that day. While the other men mended their uniforms or smoked damp cigarettes or talked by the stove, Andras lay in bed, staring at the ceiling and pushing at his teeth with his tongue. His back teeth felt frighteningly loose, his gums spongy. Earlier that day he'd had a slow nosebleed that had lasted for hours. He wasn't in the mood to talk. He didn't care what was typed on the pages Mendel held in his hand. He pulled the coarse blanket over his head and turned away.

"All right, Parisi," Mendel said, and pulled the blanket down. "Enough sulking."

Parisi: It was Mendel's nickname for him; he was envious of Andras's time in France, and had wanted to hear about it in detail--particularly about evenings at Jozsef's, and the backstage drama of the Sarah-Bernhardt, and the romantic exploits of Andras's friends.

"Leave me alone," Andras said.

"I can't. I need your help."

Andras sat up in bed. "Look at me," he said, holding out his arms. Clusters of blood-violets bloomed beneath the skin. "I'm sick. I don't know what's wrong with me.

Do I look like a person who can be of help to anyone?"

"You're the squad captain," Mendel said. "It's your duty."

"I don't want to be squad captain anymore."

"I'm afraid that's not up to you, Parisi."

Andras sighed. "What is it, exactly, that you want me to do?"

"I want you to illustrate the newspaper." He dropped his typed pages onto Andras's lap. "Nothing fancy. None of your art-school nonsense. Just some crude drawings. I've left space for you around the articles." He deposited a modest cache of pencils into Andras's hand, some of them colored.

Andras couldn't remember the last time he'd seen colored pencils. These were sharp and clean and unbroken, a small revelation in the smoky dark of the bunkhouse.

"Where did you get these?" he asked.

"Stole them from the office."

Andras pushed himself up onto his elbows. "What do you call that rag of yours?"

"The Snow Goose."

"All right. I'll take a look. Now leave me alone."

In addition to news of the war,
The Snow Goose
had weather reports
(Monday:
Snow. Tuesday: Snow. Wednesday: Snow.);
a fashion column
(Report from a Fashion
Show at Dawn: The dreaming labor workers lined up in handsome suits of coarse
blanket, this winter's most stylish fabric. Mangold Bela Kolos, Budapest's premier
fashion dictator, predicts that this picturesque style will spread throughout Hungary in
no time);
a sports page
(The Golden Youth of Transylvania love the sporting life.

Yesterday at 5:00 a.m., the woods were full of youth disporting themselves at today's
most popular amusements: wheelbarrow-pushing, snow-shoveling, and tree-felling);
an advice column
(Dear Miss Coco: I'm a twenty-year-old woman. Will it hurt my
reputation if I spend the night in the officers' quarters? Love, Virgin. Dear Virgin: Your
question is too general. Please describe your plans in detail so I can give an appropriate
reply. Love, Miss Coco);
travel ads
(Bored? Want a change of scene? Try our deluxe tour
of rural Ukraine!);
and in honor of Andras, an article about a feat of architecture
(Engineering Marvel! Paris-trained architect-engineer Andras Levi has designed an
invisible bridge. The materials are remarkably lightweight and it can be constructed in
almost no time. It is undetectable by enemy forces. Tests suggest that the design of the
bridge may still need some refinement; a battalion of the Hungarian Army mysteriously
plunged into a chasm while crossing. Some argue, however, that the bridge has already
attained its perfect form)
. And then there was the piece de resistance, the Ten Commandments a la Munkaszolgalat: