The Invisible Bridge (23 page)

Andras didn't know what to say. He'd been consumed with thoughts of Klara, with his anticipation of Tibor's visit, with his own work. He was aware of Polaner as a constant presence in his life, knew him to be guarded and circumspect, even knew him to brood at times; but he hadn't considered that Polaner might possess private woes as monumental as his own. If the affair with Klara had been difficult, how much harder might it have been for Polaner to nurse a secret attraction to Lemarque? He had spent little time imagining what it might be like to be a man who favored men. There were plenty of girlish men and boyish women in Paris, of course, and everyone knew the famous clubs and balls where they went to meet: Magic-City, the Monocle, the Bal de la Montagne-Sainte-Genevieve; but that world seemed remote from Andras's life. What hint of it had there been in his own experience? Things had gone on at gimnazium--boys cultivated friendships that seemed romantic in their intrigues and betrayals; and then there were those times when he and his classmates would stand in a row, their shorts around their ankles, bringing themselves off together in the semidark. There was one boy at school whom everyone said loved boys--Willi Mandl, a lanky blond boy who played piano, wore white embroidered socks, and had been glimpsed one afternoon in a secondhand store dreamily fondling a blue silk reticule. But that was all part of the fog of childhood, nothing that seemed to bear upon his current life.

Now Polaner opened his eyes and looked at Andras. Andras touched Ben Yakov's sleeve. "Polaner," Andras said. "Can you hear me?"

"Are they here?" Polaner said, almost unintelligibly.

"We're here," Andras said. "Go to sleep. We're not going to leave you."

ANDRAS HADN'T BEEN back to the Gare du Nord since he'd arrived from Budapest in September. Now, in late January, as he stood on the platform waiting for Tibor's train, it amazed him to consider the bulk of ignorance he'd hauled to Paris those few months ago. He'd known almost nothing about architecture. Nothing about the city.

Less than nothing about love. He had never touched a woman's naked body. Hadn't known French. Those
SORTIE
signs above the exits might as well have said
YOUIDIOT!

The past days' events had only served to remind him how little he still knew of the world.

He felt he was just beginning to sense the scope of his own inexperience, his own benightedness; he had scarcely begun to allay it. He'd hoped that by the time he saw his brother again he might feel more like a man, like someone conversant with the wider world. But there was nothing more he could do about that now. Tibor would have to take him as he was.

At a quarter past five the Western Europe Express pulled into the station, filling that glass-and-iron cavern with the screech of brakes. Porters lowered the steps and climbed down; passengers poured forth, men and women haggard from traveling all night. Young men his age, sleepless and uncertain-looking in the wintry light of the station, squinted at the signs and searched for their baggage. Andras scanned the faces of the passengers. As more and more of them passed without a sign of Tibor, he had a moment of fear that his brother had decided not to come after all. And then someone put a hand on his shoulder, and he turned, and there was Tibor Levi on the platform of the Gare du Nord.

"Fancy meeting you here," Tibor said, and pulled Andras close.

A carbonated joy rose up in Andras's chest, a dreamlike sense of relief. He held his brother at arm's length. Tibor scrutinized Andras from head to toe, his gaze coming to rest on Andras's hole-ridden shoes.

"It's a good thing you have a brother who's a shoe clerk," he said. "Or was one.

Those filthy oxfords wouldn't have lasted you another week."

They retrieved Tibor's bags and took a cab to the Latin Quarter, a trip Andras found surprisingly brief and direct, and he grasped how pro-foundry his first Parisian cab driver had cheated him. The streets flashed past almost too quickly; he wanted to show Tibor everything at once. They flew down the boulevard de Sebastopol and over the Ile de la Cite, and were turning onto the rue des Ecoles in what felt like an instant. The Latin Quarter crouched beneath a haze of rain, its sidewalks crowded with umbrellas. They rushed Tibor's bags through the drizzle and dragged them upstairs. When they reached Andras's garret, Tibor stood in the doorway and laughed.

"What?" Andras said. He was proud of his shabby room.

"It's exactly as I imagined," Tibor said. "Down to the last detail."

Under his gaze the Paris apartment seemed to come fully into Andras's possession perhaps for the first time, as if his seeing it made it continuous with the places Andras had lived before, with the life he had led before he climbed onto a train at Nyugati Station in September. "Come in," Andras said. "Take off your coat. Let me make a fire."

Tibor took off his coat, but he wouldn't let Andras make the fire. It couldn't have mattered less that this was Andras's apartment, nor that Tibor had been traveling for three days. This was how it had always been between them: The older took care of the younger. If this had been Matyas's apartment and Andras had been there to visit, Andras would have been the one cracking the kindling and piling the paper beneath the logs. In a few minutes Tibor had conjured a steady blaze. Only then would he take off his shoes and crawl into Andras's bed.

"What a relief !" he said. "It's been three days since I slept lying down." He pulled the coverlet over himself and in another moment he was asleep.

Andras set up his books on the table and tried to study, but found he couldn't concentrate. He wanted news of Matyas and his parents. And he wanted news of Budapest--not of its politics or its problems, which anyone could read about in the Hungarian dailies, but of the neighborhood where they'd lived, the people they knew, the innumerable small changes that marked the flow of time. He wanted, too, to tell Tibor what had happened to Polaner, whom he'd seen again that morning. Polaner had looked even worse than before, swollen and livid and feverish. His breath had grated in his throat, and the nurses had bent over him with dressings for his bruises and doses of fluids to raise his blood pressure. A team of doctors gathered at the foot of his bed and debated the risks and benefits of surgery. The signs of internal bleeding persisted, but the doctors couldn't agree whether it was best to operate or whether the bleeding would stop on its own. Andras tried to decode their quick medical patter, tried to piece through the puzzle of French anatomical terms, but he couldn't grasp everything, and his fear prevented him from asking questions. It was horrible to think of Polaner cut open, and even worse to think of the bleeding unstinted inside him. Andras had stayed until Professor Vago arrived to take over the watch; he didn't want Polaner to wake and find himself alone.

Ben Yakov hadn't made an appearance that morning, and no one had heard from Rosen since he'd left the hospital in search of Lemarque.

Now he forced himself to look at his textbook: a list of statics problems swarming in an antlike blur. He willed the numbers and letters into an intelligible order, penciled neat columns of figures onto a clean sheet of graph paper. He calculated the force vectors acting upon fifty steel rods in a load-bearing wall of reinforced concrete, located the points of highest tension along a cathedral buttress, estimated the wind sway of a hypothetical steel structure twice as tall as the Eiffel Tower. Each building with its quiet internal math, the numbers floating within the structures. An hour passed as he made his way through the list of problems. At last Tibor groaned and sat up in bed.

"Orrh," he said. "Am I still in Paris?"

"I'm afraid so," Andras said.

Tibor insisted on taking Andras to dinner. They went to a Basque restaurant that was supposed to serve good oxtail soup. The waiter was a broad-shouldered bully who banged the plates onto the tables and shouted curses at the kitchen. The soup was thin, the meat overcooked, but they drank Basque beer that made Andras feel flushed and sentimental. Here was his brother at last, here they were together, dining in a foreign city like the grown men they'd become. Their mother would have laughed aloud to see them together in this mannish restaurant, leaning over their mugs of ale.

"Be honest," Andras said. "How's Anya? Her letters are too cheerful. I'm afraid she wouldn't tell me if something were wrong."

"I went to Konyar the weekend before I left," Tibor said. "Matyas was there, too.

Anya's trying to convince Apa to move to Debrecen for the winter. She wants him close to a good doctor if he gets pneumonia again. He won't go, of course. He insists he won't get sick, as though he had any control over that. And when I take Anya's side, he asks me who I think I am to tell him what to do. You're not a doctor yet, Tibi, he says. And he shakes his finger at me."

Andras laughed, though he knew it was a serious matter; they both knew how ill their father had been, and how their mother relied on him. "What will they do?"

"Stay in Konyar, for now."

"And

Matyas?"

Tibor shook his head. "A strange thing happened the night before I left. Matyas and I went walking out to the rail bridge above that creek, the one where we used to catch minnows in the summer."

"I know the one," Andras said.

"It was a cold night to be out walking. The bridge was icy. We never should have been up there in the first place. Well, we stood there for a while looking at the stars, and we started talking about Anya and Apa, about what Matyas might have to do if something happened to them, and he was angry at me, you know--I was leaving him to handle everything alone, he said. I tried to tell him they'd be fine, and that if anything truly bad happened, you and I would come home, and he said we'd never come home, that you were gone for good and that I would be soon. We were having this argument above that frozen creek, and then we heard a train coming."

"I don't know if I want to hear the end of this."

"So Matyas says, 'Stay on the bridge. Stand here beside the tracks, on the crossties. See if we can keep our balance when the train comes by. Think you can? Not scared, are you?' The train's coming fast now. And you know that bridge, Andras. The ties give you about a meter on each side of the tracks. And it's maybe twenty meters above the creek. So he jumps onto the ties between the rails and stands there facing the train. It's coming on. The light from the headlamp's already on him. I'm shouting at him to get off, but he's not going anywhere. 'I'm not afraid,' he says. 'Let it come.' So I run at him and put him over my shoulder like a sack of sawdust, and I swear to God, the bridge was iced so badly I nearly fell and killed us both. I got him off and threw him in the snow. The train came by about a second later. He stood up laughing like a madman afterward, and I got up and hit him across the jaw. I wanted to break his neck, the little idiot."

"I

would
have broken his neck!"

"Believe me, I wanted to."

"He didn't want you to go. He's all alone there now."

"Not exactly," Tibor said. "He's got quite a life in Debrecen. Nothing like our school days. He and I made it up the next day, and I went back there with him on the way to Budapest. You should see what he's been doing at that nightclub where he performs!

He ought to be in movies. He's like Fred Astaire, but with back handsprings and somersaults. And they pay him to do it! I might be happy for him if I didn't think he's completely lost his mind. He's inches from being kicked out of school, you know. He's failing Latin and history and barely sliding by in his other classes. I'm sure he'll quit as soon as he saves enough for a ticket out of Hungary. Anya and Apa know it, too."

"You didn't tell them about that bridge business, did you?"

"Are you joking?"

They signaled to the waiter for another round of drinks. While they waited, Andras asked about Budapest and their old Harsfa utca and the Jewish Quarter.

"It's all much the same as when you left," Tibor said. "Though everyone's increasingly worried that Hitler's going to drag Europe into another war."

"If he does, the Jews will get the blame. Here in France, at least."

The waiter returned, and Tibor took a long, thoughtful drink of Basque beer. "Not as much
fraternite
or
egalite
as you once thought, is there?"

Andras told him about the meeting of Le Grand Occident, and then about what had happened to Polaner. Tibor took off his glasses, wiped the lenses with his handkerchief, and put them on again.

"I was talking to a man on the train who'd just been in Munich," he said. "A Hungarian journalist sent to report on a rally there. He saw three men beaten to death for destroying copies of a state-sponsored anti-Jewish newspaper. Insurgents, the German press called them. One of them was a decorated officer from the Great War."

Andras sighed and rubbed the bridge of his nose. "With Polaner the situation's personal," he said. "There are questions about his relationship with one of the men who did it."

"It's just the same brand of hatred writ small," Tibor said. "Horrible any way you look at it."

"I was a fool to think things would be different here."

"Europe's changing," Tibor said. "The picture's getting bleaker everywhere. But it hasn't all been grim for you here, I hope."

"It hasn't." He looked up at Tibor and managed a smile.

"What's that about, Andraska?"

"Nothing."

"Are you harboring secrets? Have you got some intrigue going on?"

"You'll have to buy me a stronger drink," Andras said.

At a nearby bar they ordered whiskey, and he told Tibor everything: about the invitation to the Morgensterns', and how he'd recognized the name and address from the letter; how he'd fallen in love with Klara, not Elisabet; how they'd failed to keep the attraction at bay. How Klara had told him nothing about what had brought her to Paris, or why her identity had to be kept a secret. When he'd finished, Tibor held on to his glass and stared.

"How much older is she?"