The Invisible Bridge (60 page)

Encircling her knees with her arms, she said, "It's not just the war I've been thinking about. I've had all kinds of doubts."

"What

doubts?"

"About what sort of mother I'll be to this child. About the hundred thousand ways I failed Elisabet."

"You didn't fail Elisabet. She turned out a strong and beautiful woman. And your situation was different then. You were alone, and you were just a child yourself."

"And now I'm practically an old woman."

"That's nonsense, Klara."

"Not really." She frowned at her knees. "I'm thirty-four, you know. The birth was a near disaster last time. The obstetrician says my womb may have been damaged. My mother came to my last appointment, and I wish now that she hadn't. She's been driving herself mad with worry."

"Why, Klara? Is there a danger to the baby?" He took her chin and made her raise her eyes to him. "Are you in danger yourself?"

"Women give birth every day," she said, and tried to smile.

"What did the doctor say?"

"He says there's a risk of complication. He wants me to have the child at the hospital."

"Of course you'll have it at the hospital," Andras said. "I don't care what it costs.

We'll find a way to pay."

"My brother will help," she said.

"I'll get work," Andras said. "We'll make the money somehow."

"Gyorgy wouldn't begrudge us anything," Klara said. "No more than your own brothers would."

Andras didn't want to argue, not during the brief time they had together. "I know he'd help if we needed it," he said. "Let's hope we don't have to ask him."

"My mother wants me to move home to Benczur utca," Klara said, twisting her wet hair into a rope. "She doesn't understand why I insist that you and I must have our own apartment. She thinks it's a needless expense. And she doesn't like me to be alone.

What if something were to happen? she says. As if I hadn't spent all those years alone in Paris."

"She wants to protect you all the more, because of that," he said. "It must have tortured her not to be with you when you were pregnant with Elisabet."

"I understand, of course. But I'm not a child of fifteen anymore."

"Perhaps she's right, though. If there's a danger, wouldn't it be better for you to be at home?"

"Not you, too, Andraska!"

"I hate to think of you being alone."

"I'm not alone. Ilana is here with me almost every day. And I can walk to my mother's house in six minutes. But I can't live there again, and not just because I'm accustomed to being on my own. What if the authorities were to discover who I am? If I were living in my family's house, they'd be directly implicated."

"Ah, Klara! How I wish you didn't have to think about any of this."

"And how I wish you didn't either," she said. And then she stood from the bath, and the water fell from her skin in a glittering curtain, and he followed the new curves of her body with his hands.

Later that night, when he found he couldn't sleep, he got out of bed and went into the sitting room, to the drafting table Klara had bought for him; he ran his hands over that smooth hard surface devoid of paper or tools. There was a time when he might have comforted himself with work, even if it were just a project he had set himself; the pure concentration required to draw a series of fine unbroken black lines could turn his mind aside, even if just for a few moments, from the gravest of problems. But the fact was that he'd never before had to worry about the fate of his pregnant wife and his unborn child and the entire Western world. In any case, there was no project he could imagine taking up now; when it came to the study and practice of architecture, his mind was as blank and planless as the drafting table before him. The work he'd done those past two years when he wasn't cutting trees or building roads or shoveling coal--scratching in notebooks, doodling in the margins of Mendel's newspapers--might have kept his hands from lying idle; it might even have kept him from going mad. But it had also been a distraction from the fact that his life as a student of architecture was slipping farther and farther away, his hands losing their memory of how to make a perfect line, his mind losing its ability to solve problems of form and function. How far away he felt now from that atelier at the Ecole Speciale where he and Polaner had suspended a running track from the roof of a sports club. How astounding that such an idea had occurred to them. It seemed an eternity since he'd looked at a building with any thought in his mind beside the hope that its roof wouldn't leak and that it would keep out the wind. He'd hardly even taken note of what the facade of this building looked like.

He wished he could talk to Tibor. He would know what Andras should do, how he might protect Klara and begin to reclaim his life. But Tibor was three hundred kilometers away in the Carpathians. Andras couldn't imagine when they might next sit down together to make sense of who they were now, or at least to take some comfort in their shared uncertainty.

As it happened, it was his younger brother--the one whose function had always been to cause trouble, rather than to alleviate it--who materialized in Budapest during Andras's furlough. Matyas rolled into Nyugati Station with the rest of his company, which had been posted nearby while it awaited a transfer, and jumped off the train to enjoy a furlough of his own making. His company was directed by a lax young officer who allowed his men to buy an occasional exemption from work. Matyas, who had hoarded money during his window-trimming days, had bought a few days off to see a shopgirl he'd met on one of his jobs. He had no idea that Andras was home on furlough, too, and so it was purely by accident that, on Monday afternoon, Matyas jumped onto the back of a streetcar and found himself face-to-face with his brother. He was so surprised that he would have fallen off again if Andras hadn't grabbed his arm and held him.

"What are you doing here?" Matyas cried. "You're supposed to be slaving at a mine."

"And you're supposed to be--doing what?"

"Building bridges. But not today! Today I'm going to see a girl named Serafina."

An elderly woman in a kerchief gave them a disapproving look, as if they ought to know better than to engage in such loud and animated conversation on a streetcar. But Andras pulled Matyas's face close to his own and said to the woman, "It's my brother, do you see? My brother!"

"You must have had donkeys for parents," the woman said.

"Pardon us, your ladyship," Matyas said. He tipped his hat and executed a perfect backflip from the side rail of the streetcar to the pavement, so swiftly that the woman gave a little scream. As the passengers watched in astonishment, he tapped out a soft-shoe rhythm against the cobblestones and then fleetfooted his way up onto the curb, scattering the pedestrians there; he turned a double spin, whipped off his hat, and bowed to a young woman in a blue twill coat. Everyone who'd seen him gave a cheer. Andras jumped down from the streetcar and waited until his brother had finished taking his curtain calls.

"Needless foolishness," Andras said, once the applause had died down.

"I must emblazon that on a flag and carry it everywhere."

"You might well. Then everyone would have some warning."

"Where are you going with a market bag full of potatoes?" Matyas asked.

"Home to my apartment, where my wife is waiting for me."

"Your
apartment? What apartment?"

"Thirty-five

Nefelejcs

utca, third floor, apartment B."

"Since when do you live there? And for how long?"

"Since last night. And for another day and a half, until I have to go back to Banhida."

Matyas laughed. "Then I suppose I caught you by your shirttails."

"Or I caught you. Why don't you come for dinner?"

"I might be otherwise engaged."

"And what if this Serafina sees you for the glib young fool you are?"

"In that case I'll come over at once." Matyas kissed Andras on both cheeks and hopped aboard the next streetcar, which by that time had pulled up beside them.

For a few blocks, as Andras walked toward home, he felt inclined to tap-dance himself. Chance favored him at times; it had delivered the unexpected furlough, and now it had delivered Matyas. But not even that welcome surprise could divert his mind from its new channel of worry. The newspaper he'd bought that afternoon had delivered a sobering view of events in the east: Kiev had fallen to the Germans, and Hitler's armies lay within a hundred miles of Leningrad and Moscow. In a radio address earlier that week, the Fuhrer had proclaimed the imminent capitulation of the Soviet Union. Andras feared that the British, who had held out fiercely in the Mediterranean, would lose hope now; if their defenses crumbled, Hitler would rule all of Europe. He thought of Rosen at the Blue Dove three years earlier, declaring that Hitler wanted to make a Germany of the world. Not even Rosen could have predicted the degree to which that speculation would prove true. German territory had spread across the map of Europe like spilled ink. And the people of the conquered countries had been turned from their homes, deported to wastelands or clapped into ghettoes or sent to labor camps. He wanted to believe that Hungary might remain a refuge at the center of the firestorm; it was easier to believe such a thing here in Budapest, far from the heat and stink of Banhida Camp. But if Russia were to fall, no country in Europe would be safe, particularly not for Jews--certainly not Hungary, where the Arrow Cross had gained strength in every recent election. Into this baffling uncertainty, Andras and Klara's child would be born. He began to understand how his own parents must have felt when his mother had become pregnant with him during the Great War, though the situation had been different then: His father had been a Hungarian soldier, not a forced laborer, and there had been no crazed Fuhrer dreaming of a Jew-free Europe.

At home he found Klara and Ilana sitting at the kitchen table and laughing over some intimacy, Ilana's hands clasped in Klara's own. It was clear to him, even at first glance, that the connection between them had deepened in his absence; in her letters Klara had often mentioned how grateful she was for Ilana's companionship, and he'd been relieved to know that they lived just a few blocks from each other and crossed the distance often. If Klara had been Ilana's confidante and protector in Paris, now she seemed to have become something like an older sister. Soon after Ilana had arrived in Budapest, Klara had told him, they'd begun a ritual of going to the market together every Monday and Thursday morning. When Tibor had gone to the Munkaszolgalat, Klara had seen to it that Ilana wasn't lonely; they cooked together, spent evenings with Klara's records or Ilana's books, strolled the boulevards and parks on Sunday afternoons. That particular night, just before Andras had arrived, Ilana had delivered a piece of sweet and complicated news: She was pregnant. She repeated the news now in her tentative Hungarian. It had happened while Tibor was home on his last furlough. If all went well, the babies would be born two months apart. She'd written to Tibor and received a letter assuring her that he was well, that his labor company was far from the dangerous action farther east, that the summer weather had made everything more bearable, that her news had made him happier than he'd believed he could be.

But there was no happiness that fall of 1941 that wasn't complicated by worry.

Andras could see it in the narrow lines that had gathered on Ilana's brow. He knew what this pregnancy must mean to her after her miscarriage, and how terrified she would be for the baby's safety even if they weren't in the midst of a war. He would have embraced her if her observance hadn't forbidden it. As it was, he had to be content to congratulate her and express his fervent wish that all would go well. Then he told the two of them how he had run into Matyas on the streetcar.

"Well," Klara said. "It's a good thing I bought extra pastries for dessert. That young goat would eat us into starvation otherwise."

Matyas arrived just as Klara was setting out the pastries in the sitting room after dinner. He gave her a kiss on the cheek and plucked a cream-filled mille-feuille from the silver tray. For Ilana he had a deep bow and a flourish of his hat.

"Your romancing must have gone well," Andras said. "Your cheeks are on fire with lipstick."

"It's not lipstick," Matyas said. "It's the stain of breached innocence. Serafina is far too worldly for me. I'm still blushing from what she said when we parted."

"We won't ask what it was," Klara said.

"I wouldn't tell anyway," he said, and winked. He looked around him at the furnishings of the sitting room. "What a place," he said. "All of this just for the two of you!"

"For the three of us, soon," Klara said.

"Of course. I nearly forgot. Andras is going to be a papa."

"And so is Tibor," Ilana said.

"Good God!" Matyas said. "Is it true? Both of you?"

"It's true," Ilana said, and then pointed a teasing finger at him. "Now your anya and apa will want you to be married, too, just to complete the picture."

"Not a chance," Matyas said, with another wink. He laid down a quick combination of syncopated steps across the parquet floor of the sitting room, then mock-fell over the back of the sofa and landed upright beside the low table. "Tell me I haven't got talent," he demanded, and knelt before Klara with his arms outstretched. "You should know, dancing mistress."

"We don't call that dancing where I come from," Klara said, and smiled.

"How about this, then?" Matyas got to his feet and executed a double-pirouette with his arms above his head. But at the end he lost his balance and had to catch himself on the mantel. He stood for a moment breathing hard, shaking his head as if to clear it of a gyrational ghost, and for the first time Andras noticed how exhausted and ravenous he looked. He took Matyas by the shoulder and led him to one of the striped ivory chairs.

"Sit here for a while," Andras said. "You'll feel better when you get up."

"Don't you like my dancing?"

"Not at the moment, brother."

Klara made a plate of pastries for Matyas, and Andras poured him a glass of slivovitz. For a while they all sat together and talked as though there were no such thing as war or worry or the work service. Andras kept the dessert plates and coffee cups filled.