The Invisible Bridge (75 page)

Weeds and wildflowers crowded between the railroad ties, and one morning a plague of tiny frogs descended upon Szentendre. They were everywhere underfoot, having arrived from no one knew where, coin-sized, the color of celery, sprinting madly toward the river. They made the work servicemen curse and dance for two days, then disappeared as mysteriously as they'd come. It was a time of year Andras had loved as a boy, the time to swim in the millpond, to eat sun-hottened strawberries directly from the vine, to hide in the shadow of the long cool grass and watch ants conduct their quick-footed business.

Now there was only the slow toil of the rail yard and the prospect of escape. At night, during his few hours at home, he held his sleeping son while Klara read him passages from Bialik or Brenner or Herzl, descriptions of Palestine and of the miraculous transformation the settlers were enacting there. In his mind he had begun to see his family replanted among orange trees and honeybees, the bronze shield of the sea glittering far below, his boy growing tall in the salt-flavored air. He tried not to dwell upon the inevitable difficulties of the journey. He was no stranger to hardship, nor was Klara. Even his parents, whose recent move to Debrecen represented the most significant geographic displacement of their married lives, had agreed to undertake the trip if it was possible, if entry visas could be obtained for them; they refused to be separated from their children and grandchildren by a continent, a sea.

After the drought broke, the journey began to take shape. Klein had identified a barge captain named Szabo who would take them as far as the Romanian border, and another, Ivanescu, who would conduct them to Constanta; he booked them passage under the family name of Gedalya aboard the
Trasnet
, a former fishing boat that had been converted into a refugee-smuggling vessel. They must be prepared to be crowded and hungry, overheated, dehydrated, seasick, delayed for days in Turkish ports where they could not take the risk of disembarking; they must bring with them only what was necessary. They should be glad they were undertaking the trip in summer, when the seas were calm. They would travel through the Bosporus past Istanbul, through the Marmara Denizi and into the Aegean Sea; from there they would move into the Mediterranean, and if they evaded the patrol boats and submarines they would dock three days later at Haifa.

From start to finish the journey would take two weeks, if all went well. They would leave on August second.

Klara had an old-fashioned wooden wall calendar painted with the image of a bluebird on a cherry branch. Three diminutive windows showed day, date, and month; each morning Andras rolled the little wheels forward before he left for Szentendre Yard.

He rolled July through its thunderstorm-drenched days, from single digits into teens, as plans for the trip went forward. They assembled clothing, boots, hats; they packed and repacked suitcases, trying to determine the densest possible arrangement of their belongings. On Sunday afternoons they walked the city together, packing their minds with the things they wanted to remember: the green haze of river-cooled air around Margaret Island; the thrumming vibration of cars crossing the Szechenyi Bridge; the smells of cut grass and hot-spring sulfur in the Varosliget; the dry concrete pan of the skating pond; the long gray Danube embankment where Andras had walked with his brother a lifetime ago, when they were recent gimnazium graduates living in a room on Harsfa utca. There was the synagogue where he and Klara had been married, the hospital where their son had been born, the small bright studio where Klara taught her private students. There was their own apartment on Nefelejcs utca, the first place they'd ever lived together. And then there were the haunted places they would not visit in farewell: the house on Benczur utca, which now stood empty in preparation for the arrival of the son of the minister of justice; the Opera House, with its echoing corridors; the patch of pavement in an alley where what had happened long ago had happened.

One Sunday, two weeks before the second of August, Andras went alone to see Klein. The packet of entry visas had arrived from Palestine. That was the last thing they needed to complete their dossier, that set of crisp white documents imprinted with the seal of the British Home Office and the Star of David stamp of the Yishuv. Klein would make facsimile copies, which he would keep in case anything happened to the originals.

When Andras arrived, Klein's grandfather was in the yard, feeding the goats. He put a hand to his hat.

"You'll be off soon," he said.

"Fourteen more days."

"I knew the boy would take care of things."

"He seems to have a talent for it."

"That's our boy. He's like his father was, always planning, planning, working with his gadgets, making things happen. His father was an inventor, a man whose name everyone would have known, if he'd lived." He told Andras that Klein's parents had died of influenza when Klein was still in short pants; they were the man and woman depicted in the photograph, as Andras had guessed. Another child might have been destroyed by the loss, the elder Klein said, but not Miklos. He'd gotten top marks in school, particularly in the social sciences, and had grown up to become a kind of inventor in his own right--a creator of possibilities where none existed.

"What a stroke of luck it was that we found him," Andras said.

"May your luck continue," the grandfather said. He spat thrice and knocked on the wooden lintel of the goat house. "May your journey to Palestine be exceptional only for its tedium."

Andras tipped his cap to the elder Klein and walked the stone path to the door.

Klein's grandmother was there in the front room, sitting in the armchair with an embroidery hoop in her lap. The design, embroidered in tiny gold
Xs
, showed a braided challah and the word
Shabbos
in Hebrew letters.

"It's for your table in the holy land," she said.

"Oh, no," Andras said. "It's too fine." He thought of their packed and repacked suitcases, into which not a single thing more could possibly fit.

But nothing could be hidden from Klein's grandmother. "Your wife can sew it into the lining of her summer coat," she said. "It's got a good luck charm in it."

"Where?"

She showed him two minuscule Hebrew letters cross-stitched into the end of the challah. "It's the number eighteen.
Chai
. Life."

Andras nodded his thanks. "It's very kind of you," he said. "You've been a help to us all along."

"The boy's waiting for you in his room. Go on."

In his file-crowded den, Klein sat on the bed with his hair in wild disorder, shirtless, a radio disemboweled on the blanket before him. If he had been disheveled and ripe-smelling the first time Andras had met him, now, after a month of planning their escape, he seemed on his way to a prehistoric state of existence. His beard had grown in scraggly and black. Andras couldn't remember the last time he'd seen him wear a shirt.

His smell was reminiscent of the barracks in Subcarpathia. Had it not been for the open window and the breeze that riffled the topmost papers on the stacks, no one could have remained in that room for long. And yet, there on the desk was a cleared-away space in which a crisp folder lay open, a coded travel itinerary stapled to one side, a fat sheaf of instructions on the other. Gedalya, their code name, on the tab. And in Andras's hand the final piece, the packet of documents that would complete the puzzle, the legal element of their illegal flight. Never before the planning of this trip had he imagined what a byzantine maze might lie between emigration and immigration. Klein tucked a tiny screwdriver into his belt and raised his eyebrows at Andras. Andras put the documents into his lap.

"Genuine," Klein said, touching the raised letters of the British seal. His dark-circled eyes met Andras's own. "Well, that's it. You're ready."

"We haven't talked about money."

"Yes, we have." Klein reached for the folder and extracted a page torn from an accountant's notebook, a list of figures penned in his thin left-sloping script. The cost of false papers, in case they were discovered. The fees for the barge captains and the fishing-boat captains and their part of the petrol for the journey and the cost of food and water and the extra money set aside for bribes, and the harbor fees and taxes and the cost of extra insurance, because so many boats had accidentally been torpedoed in the Mediterranean in recent months. Everything to be paid in person, incrementally, along the way. "We've been through it all," he said.

"I mean your fee," Andras said. "We haven't talked about that."

Klein scowled. "Don't insult me."

"I'm not insulting you."

"Do I look like I need anything?"

"A shirt," Andras said. "A bath. Maybe a new radio."

"I won't take money from you."

"That's

absurd."

"That's the way it is."

"Maybe you won't take it for yourself. But take it for your grandparents."

"They've got all they need."

"Don't be an idiot," Andras said. "We can give you two thousand pengo. Think what that could mean."

"Two thousand, five thousand, a hundred thousand, I don't care! This is not paid work, do you understand? If you wanted to pay, you should have gone to Behrenbohm or Speitzer. My services aren't for sale."

"If you don't want money, what do you want?"

Klein shrugged. "I want this to work. And then I want do it again for someone else, and for someone else after that, until they stop me."

"That's not what you said when we first met you."

"I was scared after the
Struma,"
Klein said. "I'm not scared anymore."

"Why

not?"

He shrugged. "Things got worse. Paralyzing fear came to seem like a luxury."

"What

if

you
wanted to leave? My friend could help you get a visa."

"I know. That's good. I'll keep it in mind."

"You'll keep it in mind? That's all?"

He nodded at Andras and took the screwdriver from his belt again. "If you'll excuse me, I've got more work to do today. We're done, unless you hear from me. You leave in two weeks." He bent to the radio and began to loosen a screw that secured a copper wire to its base.

"So?" Andras said. "That's it?"

"That's it," Klein said. "I'm not a sentimental person. If you want a long goodbye, talk to my grandmother."

But Klein's grandmother had fallen asleep in her chair. She'd finished embroidering the challah cover and had wrapped it in a piece of tissue paper, written Andras's and Klara's names on a little card, and affixed the card to the paper with a pin.

Andras bent to her ear and whispered his thanks, but she didn't wake. The goats made their remarks in the yard. From Klein's room came a low curse and the clatter of a thrown tool. Andras tucked the parcel under his arm and let himself out without a sound.

And then it was the week before their journey. Andras and Mendel produced the last illustrated issue of
The Crooked Rail
, though Andras made Mendel promise that he would continue to publish until his own visa came through. The issue featured a faux interview with a star of Hungarian pornography, a crossword puzzle whose circled letters spelled the name of their own Major Karoly Varsadi, and an optimistic economic column entitled "Black Market Review," in which all indicators pointed to an unending series of lucrative shipments. "Ask Hitler," which had become a permanent fixture of the newspaper, carried only one letter that week: DEAR HITLER: When will this hot weather end? Sincerely, SUNSTRUCK.DEAR SUNSTRUCK: It'll end when I goddamn say it will, and not a moment sooner! Heil me, HITLER.

In midweek, Andras's parents came to Budapest to see their children and grandchildren once more before they left. They went to dinner at the new residence of the Hasz family, a high-ceilinged apartment with crumbling plaster moldings and a parquet floor in the herringbone pattern called
points de Hongrie
. It had been nearly five years now, Andras realized, since he'd studied parquetry at the Ecole Speciale; five years since he'd learned what kind of wood suited each design, and replicated the patterns in his sketchbook. Now here he was in this apartment with his stricken parents, his fierce and lovely wife, his baby son, preparing to say goodbye to Europe altogether. The architecture of this apartment mattered only insofar as it reminded him of what he would leave behind.

His brother and Ilana arrived, their boy asleep in Ilana's arms. They sat close together on the sofa while Jozsef perched beside them on a gold chair and smoked one of his mother's cigarettes. Andras's father perused a tiny book of psalms, marking a few for his sons to repeat along the journey. The elder Mrs. Hasz made conversation with Andras's mother, who had learned that her own sister knew the remnant of Mrs. Hasz's family that remained in Kaba, not far from Konyar. Gyorgy arrived from work, his shirtfront damp with perspiration, and kissed Andras's mother and shook hands with Bela. Elza Hasz ushered them all into the dining room and begged them to take their places at the table.

The room was decorated as if for a party. There were tapers in silver candelabra, clusters of roses in blue glass bowls, decanters of tawny wine, the gold-rimmed plates with their design of birds. Andras's father made the blessing over the bread, and the usual grim serving man stepped forward to fill their plates. At first the conversation was about trivial things: the fluctuating prices of lumber, the almanac's predictions of an early fall, the scandalous relationship between a certain member of parliament and a former star of the silent screen. But inevitably the conversation turned to the war. The morning papers had reported that German U-boats had sunk a million tons of British-American shipping that summer, seven hundred thousand tons in July alone. And the news from Russia was no better: The Hungarian Second Army, after a bloody battle at Voronezh in early July, was now pushing onward in the wake of the German Sixth toward Stalingrad. The Hungarian Second Army had already paid a heavy toll to support its ally. It had lost, Gyorgy had read, more than nine hundred officers and twenty thousand soldiers. No one mentioned what they were all thinking: that there were fifty thousand labor servicemen attached to the Hungarian Second Army, nearly all of them Jewish, and that if the Hungarian Second had fared badly, the labor battalions were certain to have fared worse.