The Invisible Bridge (72 page)

"I'll need to have some way to pay tuition," Andras said.

Eppler blew a stuttering breath, took out a large pocket handkerchief and wiped his brow, then glanced at the clock on the wall. "I've got to get back to work," he said.

"You can print fifty copies of your rag, and no more. Monday nights. Don't let anyone catch you at it."

"We kiss your hand, Eppler-ur," Mendel said. "You're a good man."

"I'm a bitter and disillusioned man," Eppler said. "But I like the idea that one of our presses might print a true word about the state we're in."

When Andras and Mendel presented Major Varsadi with the inaugural copy of
The Crooked Rail
, he gratified them by laughing so hard he was forced to remove his pocket handkerchief and wipe his eyes. He praised them for knowing how to make light of their situation, and opined that the other men might have something to learn from their attitude. The right state of mind, he said, pointing the burning tip of his cigar at them to make his point, could lighten any load. That night Andras brought home to Klara the news that they'd gotten permission to publish
The Crooked Rail
, and she gave him her reluctant blessing. The next day he and Mendel distributed fifty copies of the first issue, which spread as quickly and were consumed with as much relish as the first issues of
The
Snow Goose
and
The Biting Fly
. Before long Varsadi began the practice of reading the paper aloud to the Munkaszolgalat officers who paid lunchtime visits to Szentendre Yard; Andras and Mendel could hear their laughter drifting down from the artificial hill where they took their long lunches.

Everyone at Szentendre wanted to make an appearance in the paper, even the foremen and guards who had seemed so stern in comparison to Varsadi. Their own squad foreman, Farago, a mercurial man who liked to whistle American show tunes but had a habit of kicking his men from behind when his temper ran short, began to wink at Andras and Mendel in a companionate manner as they worked. To gratify him and avert his kicks, they wrote a piece entitled "Songbird of Szentendre," a music review in which they praised his ability to reproduce any Broadway melody down to the thirty-second note.

Their third week at the camp provided another fortuitous subject: The rail yard received a vast and mysterious shipment of ladies' underthings, and the men had gotten them half loaded onto a train before anyone thought to wonder why the soldiers at the front might need a hundred and forty gross of reinforced German brassieres. The inspectors, giddy with the prospect of the black-market demand for those garments, appropriated three squads of labor servicemen to get the German brassieres off the train and into the covered trucks; at midday, the lunch break devolved into a fashion show of the latest support garments from the Reich. Labor servicemen and guards alike paraded in the stiff-cupped brassieres, pausing in front of Andras so he might capture their likenesses. Though the rest of the afternoon was consumed with a harder variant of labor--a half-dozen truckloads of small munitions arrived and had to be transferred to the trains--Andras scarcely felt the strain in his back or the shipping-crate splinters in his hands. He was considering the set of fashion drawings he might make--
Berlin Chic angles into
Budapest!
--and calculating how long it might be before he and Mendel began to shift the paper toward their aim. As it turned out, the following week's shipments provided the ideal material. For three days the supply trucks contained nothing but medical supplies, as if to stanch a great flow of blood in the east. As the soldiers transferred crates of morphine and suture to the black-market trucks, Andras thought of Tibor's letters from his last company posting--
No splints or casting materials or antibiotics, of course
--and began to roll out a new section in his mind. "Complaints from the Front" it would be called, a series of letters from Munkaszolgalat conscripts in various states of illness and hunger and exposure, to which a representative of the KMOF would reply with admonitions to buck up and accept the hardships of war: Who did these whimpering fairies think they were? They should act like men, goddamn it, and consider that their suffering served the Magyar cause. Andras introduced the idea to Mendel that evening on the bus, and they mounted the series the following week, in a small box that ran on the back page.

By the end of the month an almost imperceptible shift had taken place among the ranks of the 79/6th. A few of the men seemed to be paying a different kind of attention to what went on each day in the inspection shed. In small huddled groups they watched the soldiers rushing to unload crates of food and clothing stamped with the KMOF logo.

They followed the movement of the boxes from the train to the covered trucks, then watched the trucks depart through the rail-yard gates. Andras and Mendel, who had attained a certain status thanks to their role as publishers of
The Crooked Rail
, began to approach the groups and speak to a few of the men. In lowered voices they pointed out how little time the soldiers had to move the goods; a few small adjustments on the part of the laborers might delay the siphoning just long enough to get a few more bandages, a few more crates of overcoats, sent to the men at the front.

By the next week, almost unnoticeably, the 79/6th had begun to drag its feet as it loaded goods onto the boxcars. The change happened slowly enough and subtly enough that the foremen failed to notice a general trend. But Andras and Mendel could see it.

They watched with a kind of quiet triumph, and compared their impressions in whispered conferences on the bus. All indications suggested that the small shift they'd hoped for had come to pass. Their conversations with the other men confirmed it. There was no way to know, of course, whether the change would make a difference to the men at the front, but it was something, at least: a tiny act of protest, a sole unit of drag inside the vast machine that was the Labor Service. The following week, when they brought the news to Frigyes Eppler at the
Journal
, he clapped them on the shoulders, offered them shots of rye from the bottle in his office, and took credit for the whole thing.

On Sundays, when Andras was free from Szentendre Yard, he and Klara went to lunch at the house on Benczur utca, which had been stripped by now of all but its most essential furnishings. As they dined in the garden at a long table spread with white linen, Andras had the sense that he had fallen into a different life altogether. He didn't understand how it was possible that he could have spent Saturday loading sacks of flour and crates of weapons into boxcars, and was now spending Sunday drinking sweet Tokaji wine and eating filets of Balatoni fogas in lemon sauce. Jozsef Hasz would sometimes show up at these Sunday family dinners, often with his girlfriend, the lank-limbed daughter of a real-estate magnate. Zsofia was her name. They had been childhood friends, playmates at Lake Balaton, where their families had owned neighboring summer houses.

The two of them would sit on a bench in a corner of the garden and smoke thin dark cigarettes, their heads bent close together as they talked. Gyorgy Hasz detested smoking.

He would have sent Jozsef to smoke in the street if the girl hadn't been with him. As it was, he pretended not to see them with their cigarettes. It was one of many pretenses that complicated the afternoons they spent at Benczur utca. Sometimes it was difficult to keep track, so numerous were they. There was the pretense that Andras hadn't spent the rest of the week loading freight cars at Szentendre while Jozsef painted at his atelier in Buda; the pretense that Klara's long exile in France had never occurred; the pretense that she was safe now, and that the purpose of the gradual but steady disappearance of the family's paintings and rugs and ornaments, of the younger Mrs. Hasz's jewelry and all but the most necessary servants, of the car and its driver, the piano and its gilded stool, the priceless old books and the inlaid furniture, was not to keep Klara out of the hands of the authorities but to keep Jozsef out of the Munkaszolgalat.

It was a testament to Jozsef's egotism that he considered himself worth his family's sacrifices. His own luxuries were undiminished. In his large bright flat in Buda, he lived among gleanings from the family home: antique rugs and furniture and crystal he'd removed before the slow, steady drain had begun. Andras had seen the flat once, a few months after the baby had been born, when they'd gone for an evening visit. Jozsef had provided them with a dinner ordered from Gundel, the famous old restaurant in the city park; he'd held the baby on his knee while Andras and Klara ate roasted game hens and white asparagus salad and a mushroom galette. He praised the shape of his baby cousin's head and hands and declared that he looked exactly like his mother. Jozsef's manner toward Andras was breezy and careless, though it had never quite lost the edge of resentment it had acquired when Andras had delivered the news of his relationship with Klara. It was Jozsef's habit to mask any social discomfort with humor; Andras was Uncle Andras now, as often as Jozsef could find occasion to say his name. After dinner he took Andras and Klara into the north-facing room he used as his studio, where large canvases were propped against the walls. Four of his previous works had been sold recently, he said; through a family connection he'd begun working with Moric Papp, the Vaci utca dealer who supplied Hungary's elite with contemporary art. Andras noted with chagrin that Jozsef's work had improved considerably since his student days in Paris. His collage paintings--nets of dark color thrown against backgrounds of fine-ground black gravel and scraps of old road signs and pieces of railroad track--might be called good, might even be seen as evocative of the uncertainty and terror into which Europe had plunged. When Andras praised the work, Jozsef responded as though accepting what was due to him. It had taken all of Andras's effort to remain civil through the evening.

On Sunday afternoons at Benczur utca, when Jozsef and his Zsofia joined the group at the table, what he generally had to talk about was how dull it was in Budapest during the warmer months--how much nicer it would have been at Lake Balaton, and what they'd be doing that very moment if they were there. He and Zsofia would start in on some memory from when they were children--how her brother had sailed them far out into the lake in a leaking boat, how they'd gotten sick from eating unripe melons, how Jozsef had tried to ride Zsofia's pony and had been thrown off into a blackberry bramble--and Zsofia would laugh, and the elder Mrs. Hasz would smile and nod, remembering it all, and Gyorgy and his wife would exchange a look, because it was the summer house that had kept Jozsef out of the labor service, after all.

One Sunday in early June, they arrived to find Jozsef's usual bench unoccupied.

For Andras, the prospect of an afternoon without him was a relief. Tibor and Ilana had arrived some time earlier, and Ilana played in the grass with young Adam while Tibor sat beside them on a wicker chaise longue, fixing the bent brim of Ilana's sun hat. Andras fell into a chair beside his brother. It was a hot and cloudless day, one of a series; the new grass had gone limp for want of rain. The week at Szentendre had been an unusually grueling one, bearable only because Andras knew that on Sunday he'd be sitting in this shady garden, drinking cold soda water flavored with raspberry syrup. Klara sat down on the grass with Ilana, holding Tamas on her lap. The babies stared at each other in their usual manner, as if astonished at the revelation that another baby existed in the world.

The younger Mrs. Hasz emerged from the house with a bottle of seltzer, a miniature pitcher of ruby-colored syrup, and half a dozen glasses. Andras sighed and closed his eyes, waiting for a glass of raspberry soda to materialize on the low table beside him.

"Where's your son today?" Tibor asked Elza Hasz.

"In the study with his father."

Andras caught a note of tension in her voice, and he emerged from his torpor to watch her closely as she handed the glasses of soda around. The past five years had aged her. Her dark hair, still cut fashionably short, was shot with silver now; the faint lines beside her eyes had grown deeper. She had lost weight since he'd last seen her--whether from worry or from undereating, he didn't know. He wondered with some anxiety what Gyorgy and Jozsef might be discussing in the study. He could hear their voices coming through the open windows--Gyorgy's low, grave tones, Jozsef's higher notes of indignation. A few minutes later Jozsef burst through the French doors and crossed the terra-cotta paving stones of the patio, then strode over the lawn toward his mother, who had seated herself in a low garden chair. When he reached her, he gave her a look so charged with fury that she got to her feet.

"Say you haven't agreed to this," he demanded.

"We're not going to discuss this now," Elza Hasz said, laying a hand on his arm.

"Why not? We're all here."

Elza sent a panicked glance in the direction of her husband, who had come out onto the patio and was hurrying toward the lawn. "Gyorgy!" she said. "Tell him he's not to discuss it."

"Jozsef, you will drop this subject at once," his father said as he reached them.

"I won't have you sell this house. This is
my
house. It's meant to be part of my property. I mean to bring my wife to live here someday."

"Sell the house?" Klara said. "What do you mean?"

"Tell her about it, Father," Jozsef said.

Gyorgy Hasz fixed his son in his cool, stern gaze. "Come inside," he said.

"No." It was the elder Mrs. Hasz who had spoken, her hands firm on the armrests of her wicker chair. "Klara deserves to know what's happening. It's time we told her."

Klara looked from Jozsef to her mother to Gyorgy, trying to understand what this meant. "The house belongs to you, Gyorgy," Klara said. "If you're thinking of selling it, I'm certain you must have a good reason. But is it true? Are you really?"

"You mustn't worry, Klara," Gyorgy said. "Nothing's certain yet. We can discuss the matter after dinner, if you'd like."