The Invisible Bridge (58 page)

Fifty kilometers from Budapest! It was conceivable that he might be able to see Klara on a weekend furlough. And the mail might not take a month to travel between them. He and Mendel were sent to wait for the returning members of their new company at the rail yard, where they were divided into work groups and assigned to a passenger carriage. The men returning to Banhida seemed to have passed an easier winter than Andras and Mendel had. Their clothes were intact, their bodies solid-looking. Between them there was a casual jocularity, as though they were schoolmates returning to gimnazium after a holiday. As the train moved east through the green rolling hills of Buda, then into the wooded and cultivated country beyond, the passenger car filled with the earthy smell of spring. But the workers' conversation grew quieter the closer they got to Banhida. Their eyes seemed to take on a sober cast, their shoulders an invisible weight.

The greenery began to fall away outside the window, replaced at first by the low, desperate-looking habitations that always seemed to precede a train's arrival into a town, and then by the town itself with its twisting veinery of streets and its red-roofed houses, and then, as they passed through the railway station and moved toward the power plant, by an increasingly unlovely prospect of hard-packed dirt roads and warehouses and machine shops. Finally they came into view of the plant itself, a battleship with three smokestacks sending plumes of auburn smoke into the blue spring sky. The train shrieked to a halt in a rail yard choked with hundreds of rusted boxcars. Across a barren field were rows of cinderblock barracks behind a chain-link fence. Farther off still, men pushed small coal trolleys toward the power plant. Not a single tree or shrub interrupted the view of trampled mud. In the distance, like a sweet-voiced taunt, rose the cool green hills of the Gerecse and Vertes ranges.

Guards threw open the doors of the railcars and shouted the men off the train. In the barren field the new arrivals were separated from the returnees; the returnees were sent off to work at once. The rest of the men were ordered to deposit their knapsacks at their assigned barracks and then to report to the assembly ground at the center of the compound. The cinderblock barracks at Banhida looked to have been built without any consideration besides economy; the materials were cheap, the windows high and small and few. As he entered, Andras had the sensation of being buried underground. He and Mendel claimed bunks at the end of one of the rows, a spot that afforded the privacy of a wall. Then they followed their mates out to the assembly ground, a vast quadrangle carpeted in mud.

Two sergeants lined the men up in rows of ten; that day there were fifty new arrivals at Banhida Camp. They were ordered to stand at attention and wait for Major Barna, the company commander, who would inspect them. Then they would be divided into work groups and their new service would begin. They stood in the mud for nearly an hour, silent, listening to the far-off commands of work foremen and the electric throb of the power plant and the sound of metal wheels on rails. At last the new commander emerged from an administrative building, his cap trimmed with gold braid, a pair of high glossy boots on his feet. He walked the rows briskly, scanning the men's faces. Andras thought he resembled a schoolbook illustration of Napoleon; he was dark-haired, compact, with an erect bearing and an imperious look. On his second pass through Andras's line, he paused in front of Andras and asked him to state his position.

Andras saluted. "Squad captain, sir."

"What was that?"

"Squad captain," Andras said again, this time at a higher volume. Sometimes the commanders wanted the men to shout their responses, as if this were the real military and not just the work service. Andras found these episodes particularly depressing. Now Major Barna ordered him to step out of the ranks and march to the front.

He hated being told to march. He hated all of it. A few weeks at home had refreshed in him the dangerous awareness that he was a human being. When he reached the front of the lineup he stood at a tense and quivering attention while Major Barna looked him over. The man seemed to regard him with a kind of disgusted fascination, as if Andras were a freak in a traveling show. Then he pulled out a pearl-handled pocketknife and held it beneath Andras's nose. Andras sniffed. He thought he might sneeze. He could smell the metal of the blade. He didn't know what Barna meant to do.

The mayor's small dark eyes held a glint of mischief, as if he and Andras were meant to be co-conspirators in whatever was about to happen. With a wink he moved the knife away from Andras's face and wedged its tip under the officer's insignia on Andras's overcoat, and with a few quick strokes he tore the patch from Andras's chest. The patch fell into the mud; Barna pressed it down with his foot until it disappeared. Then he put a hand on Andras's head, on the new cap Klara had given him. Another few strokes of the knife and he'd removed the officer's insignia from the cap as well.

"What's your rank now, Serviceman?" Major Barna shouted, loud enough for the men at the back to hear.

Andras had never heard of such a thing happening. He hadn't known it was possible to be stripped of rank if you hadn't been convicted of a crime. With a surge of daring, he pulled himself up to his full height--a good six inches taller than Barna--and shouted, "Squad captain, sir!"

There was a flash of movement from Barna, and an explosion of pain at the back of Andras's skull. He fell to his hands and knees in the mud.

"Not at Banhida," Major Barna shouted. In his quivering hand he held a white beech walking-stick hazed with Andras's blood. Despite the pain, Andras almost let out a laugh. It all seemed so absurd. Hadn't he just been eating apples in his mother's kitchen?

Hadn't he just been making love to his wife? He put a hand to the back of his head: warm blood, a painful lump.

"Get to your feet, Labor Serviceman," the major shouted. "Rejoin ranks."

He had no choice. Without another word, he complied.

His welcome to Banhida was a taste of what was to come. Something had changed in the brief time Andras had been away from the Munkaszolgalat, or perhaps things were different in the 101/18th. There were no Jewish officers at any level; there were no Jewish medics or engineers or work foremen. The guards were crueler and shorter-tempered, the officers quicker to deliver punishment. Banhida was an unabashedly ugly place. Everything about it seemed designed for the discomfort or the unhappiness of its inhabitants. Day and night the power plant let forth its three great billows of brown coal smoke; the air reeked of sulfur, and everything was filmed with a fine orange-brown dust that turned to a chalky paste in the rain. The barracks smelled of mildew, the windows let in heat but little light or air, and the roofs leaked onto the bunks.

The paths and roads, it seemed, had been laid out to run through the wettest parts of camp. There was a downpour every afternoon promptly at three, turning the place into a treacherous mud-slick swamp. A hot wet breeze swept the smell of the latrines across the camp, and the men choked on the stench as they worked. Mosquitoes bred in the puddles and attacked the men, clustering on their foreheads and necks and arms. The flies were worse, though; their bites left tender red welts that were slow to heal.

Andras and Mendel had been assigned to shovel brown coal into mine carts and then to push the carts along rusted tracks to the power plant. The tracks were laid upon the ground but not fixed in place, and the reason for this soon became clear: as the rains increased, the tracks had to be taken up and redirected around puddles the size of small ponds. When there was no way to avoid the puddles, timbers had to be laid across them and the rails on top of those. The carts weighed hundreds of kilograms with their full loads. The men pulled and pushed and winched them, and when they still wouldn't move, the men cursed and struck them with their shovels. Each truck was emblazoned with the white letters KMOF, for Kozerdeku Munkaszolgalat Orszagos Felugyeloje, the National Administration of the Labor-Service System; but Mendel insisted that the letters stood for Kiralyi Marhak Ostobasagi Foldbirtoka, the Royal Idiots' Stupidity Farm.

There were things to be grateful for. It would have been worse if they'd had to work in the power plant, where the coal dust and chemical fumes turned the air into a thick unbreatheable stew. It would have been worse if they'd been sent down into the mines. It would have been worse to be there without each other. And it would have been worse to be hundreds of kilometers from Budapest, as they'd been in Ruthenia and Transylvania. At Banhida the mail moved quickly. His parents' letters took two weeks to arrive, and Klara's came in a week. Once she enclosed a missive from Rosen, five pages of large loose script sent all the way from Palestine. He and Shalhevet had slipped out of France just before its borders were closed to emigrating Jews, and had been married in Jerusalem, where they were both working for the Palestine Jewish Community: Rosen in the department of settlement planning, and Shalhevet in the immigration advocacy office.

They had a child on the way, due in November. There were even letters from Andras's brothers: Tibor, home to spend his furlough with Ilana, had taken her to the top of Castle Hill for the first time; a photograph showed the two of them before a parapet, Ilana's smile radiant, her hand enclosed in Tibor's. Matyas, still stuck in his labor-service company but struck with spring fever, had made a secret foray to a nearby town, where he had drunk beer, waltzed with girls at the local tavern, tap-danced on the zinc bar in his boots, and made it back to his battalion without getting caught.

In the face of the misery of Banhida, Mendel conceived a new publication called
The Biting Fly
. Though at first it seemed to Andras an act of audacity verging on foolhardiness to revive the idea of a newspaper after what had happened in the 112/30th, Mendel argued that they had to do something to keep from going mad. The new publication, he said, would maintain a tone of protest while avoiding direct ridicule of the camp authorities. If they were caught, there would be nothing for their commander to take personally. There would be a certain degree of risk involved, of course, but the alternative was to allow themselves to be silenced by the Munkaszolgalat. After the humiliation Andras had suffered on the assembly ground, how could he refuse to raise his voice in protest?

In the end, Andras agreed to join Mendel again as co-publisher. His decision was driven in part by vanity, he suspected, and in part by desire to maintain his dignity; a greater part was the idea that he and Mendel were conspiring on behalf of free speech and their workmates' morale. In the 112/30th he had seen how
The Snow Goose
had become an emblem of the men's struggle. It had given them a certain relief to see their daily miseries recorded--to see them recognized as outrages that demanded the publication of an underground paper, even one as absurd as
The Snow Goose
. Here at Banhida, at least, it would be easier to get drawing materials; there was a black market for all sorts of things. In addition to Debrecen sausages, Fox cigarettes, pinups of Hedy Lamarr and Rita Hayworth, cans of peas, woolen socks, tooth powder, and vodka, one could buy paper and drawing pencils. And there was plenty to illustrate. The first issue of
The Biting Fly
contained a lexicon that defined such terms as Morning Lineup
(a popular parlor game
involving alternating rounds of boredom, calisthenics, and humiliation)
, Water Carrier
(a
laborman with an empty bucket and a full mouth)
, and Sleep
(a rare natural phenomenon
about which little is known)
. There was a horoscope promising woe for every sign of the Zodiac. There was an advertisement for the services of a private detective who would let you know if your wife or girlfriend had been unfaithful, with a disclaimer releasing the detective from blame if a relationship should inadvertently develop between himself and the subject of his investigation. There were classified ads
(Wanted: Arsenic. Will pay in
installments)
and a serialized adventure novel about a North Pole expedition, increasingly popular at the weather grew hotter. With the aid of a Jewish clerk in the supply office, the paper was printed in weekly editions of fifty copies. Before long Andras and Mendel began to enjoy a quiet journalistic fame among the camp inhabitants.

But

what

The Biting Fly
failed to provide was the one thing they all wanted most from a paper: real news of Budapest and the world. For that they had to rely on the few tattered copies of newspapers that had been sent by relatives or thrown out by the guards.

Those papers would be passed around until they were unreadable and the news they contained had long ago gone stale. But there were some events of such great importance that they became known to the men not long after they occurred. In the third week of June, scarcely a year after France had fallen, Hitler's troops invaded the Soviet Union along a twelve-hundred-kilometer front that ran from the Baltic to the Black Sea. The Kremlin seemed just as shocked by that turn of events as the men of Banhida Camp. It appeared that Moscow had believed Germany to be committed to its nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union. But Hitler, Mendel pointed out, must have been planning the attack for months. How else would he have mustered so many hundreds of thousands of troops, so many planes, so many panzer divisions? Not a week later, Andras and Mendel learned from the camp postmaster that Soviet planes--or what had appeared at first to be Soviet planes, but might have been German planes in disguise--had bombed the Magyar border town of Kassa. The message was clear: Hungary had no choice but to send its armies into Russia. If Prime Minister Bardossy refused, Hungary would lose all the territories Germany had returned to it. In fact, Bardossy, who had long opposed Hungary's entry into the war, now seemed to view it as inevitable. Soon the headlines trumpeted a declaration of war against the Soviet Union, and Hungarian Army units were on their way to join the Axis invasion. The men of the 101/18th knew what that meant: For every Hungarian unit sent to the front, a unit of labor servicemen would be sent to support it.