The Invisible Bridge (50 page)

"Would that be worse than being kept from you?"

"But it's only two weeks, Klara."

"Two weeks during which anything might happen!"

"If Europe goes to war, you'll be far safer here."

"My safety!" she said. "What does that mean to me?"

"Think of what it means to me," he said. He kissed her pale forehead, her cheekbones, her mouth. "I can't let you come," he said. "There's no use discussing it. I can't. And very soon I've got to go home and get my things together. My train leaves at half past seven tomorrow. So you've got to think now. You've got to sit down and think about what you'd like to send to Budapest. I can carry letters for you."

"What small consolation!"

"Imagine what comfort a letter will be to your mother." With trembling hands he touched her hair, her shoulders. "And I can speak to her, Klara. I can ask her if she'll allow me to have you for my wife."

She nodded and took his hand, but she was no longer looking at him; it seemed she'd retreated to some small and remote place of self-protection. As they went to the sitting room so she could write, he stood by the open window and watched the sapling chestnuts show the pale undersides of their leaves. The breeze outside smelled of thunderstorm. He knew he was acting for her safety, acting as a husband should. He knew he was doing what was right. Soon she would finish her letters, and then he would kiss her goodbye.

How could he have known it would be his last night as a resident of Paris? What might he have done, how might he have spent those hours, if he'd known? Would he have walked the streets all night to fix in his mind their unpredictable angles, their smells, their variances of light? Would he have gone to Rosen's flat and shaken him from sleep, bid him luck with his political struggles and with Shalhevet? Would he have gone to see Ben Yakov at his bereft apartment one last time? Would he have gone to Polaner's, crouched at his friend's side and told him what was true: that he loved him as much as he had ever loved a friend, that he owed his life and happiness to him, that he had never felt such exhilaration as when they'd worked together in the studio at night, making something they believed to be daring and good? Would he have taken a last stroll by the Sarah-Bernhardt, that sleeping grande dame, its red velvet seats flocked with dust, its corridors empty and quiet, its dressing rooms still redolent of stage makeup? Would he have crept into Forestier's studio to memorize his catalogue of disappearance and illusion? Would he have gone back through the secret door he knew about in the Cimetiere du Montparnasse, back to his studio at school, to run his hands across the familiar smooth surface of his drawing table, the groove of the pencil rail, the mechanical pencils themselves, with their crosshatched finger rests, their hard smooth lead, the satisfying click that signified the end of one unit of work, the beginning of another? Would he have gone back to the rue de Sevigne, his heart's first and last home in Paris, the place where he had first glimpsed Klara Morgenstern with a blue vase in her hands? The place where they had first made love, first argued, first spoken of their children?

But he didn't know. He knew only that he was right to keep Klara from going with him. He would go, and then he would come back to her. No war could keep him from her, no law or regulation. He rolled himself into the blankets they'd shared and thought about her all night. Beside him, on the floor, Tibor slept on a borrowed mattress. There was an unspeakable comfort in the familiar rhythm of his breathing. They might almost have been back in the house in Konyar, both of them home from gimnazium on a weekend, their parents asleep on the other side of the wall, and Matyas dreaming in his little cot.

All he had was his cardboard suitcase and his leather satchel. It wasn't enough luggage to require a cab. Instead he and Tibor walked to the station, just as they had when Andras had left Budapest two years earlier. When they crossed the Pont au Change he considered turning once more toward Klara's house, but there wasn't time; the train would leave in an hour. He stopped only at a boulangerie to buy bread for the trip. In the windows of the tabac next door, the newspapers proclaimed that Count Csaky, the Hungarian foreign minister, had gone on a secret diplomatic mission to Rome; he'd been sent by the German government, and had gone directly from the airport to a meeting with Mussolini. The Hungarian government had refused to comment on the purpose of the visit, saying only that Hungary was happy to facilitate communication between its allies.

The station was crowded with August travelers, its floor a maze of rucksacks and trunks, boxes and valises. Soon Tibor would get on a train and go back to Italy with Ilana; in the ticket line Andras touched Tibor's sleeve and said, "I wish I could be there to see you married."

Tibor smiled and said, "Me too."

"I couldn't have guessed it would turn out this way for you."

"I didn't dare to hope it would," Tibor said.

"Lucky bastard," Andras said.

"Let's hope it runs in the family," Tibor said. His gaze had drifted toward the front of the line, where a slight, dark-haired woman had opened a wallet to count out notes.

Andras felt a pang: She wore her hair the way Klara did, in a loose knot at the nape of her neck. Her summer coat was cut like Klara's, her posture elegant and erect. How cruel of fate, he thought, to place a vision of her before him at that moment.

And then, as she turned to replace the wallet in her valise, it seemed his heart would stop: It was her. She met his eyes with her gray eyes and raised a hand to show him a ticket: She was going with him. Nothing he could say would keep her from it.

IN J ANUARY OF 1940, Labor Service Company 112/30 of the Hungarian Army was stationed in Carpatho-Ruthenia, somewhere between the towns of Jalova and Stakcin, not far from the Cirocha River. This was the territory Hungary had annexed from Czechoslovakia after Germany had taken back the Sudetenland. It was a craggy wild landscape of scrub-covered peaks and wooded hillsides, snow-filled valleys, frozen rock-choked streams. When Andras had read about the annexation of Ruthenia in the Paris newspapers or seen newsreel footage of its forested hills, the land had been nothing more than an abstraction to him, a pawn in a game of Hitlerian chess. Now he was living under the canopy of a Carpatho-Ruthenian forest, working as a member of a Hungarian Labor Service road-construction crew. After his return to Budapest, all hope of having his visa renewed had quickly evaporated. The clerk at the visa office, his breath reeking of onions and peppers, had met Andras'a request with laughter, pointing out that Andras was both a Jew and of military age; his chances of being granted a second two-year visa were comparable to the chances that
he
, Markus Kovacs, would spend his next holiday in Corfu with Lily Pons, ha ha ha. The man's superior, a more sober-minded but equally malodorous man--cigars, sausages, sweat--scrutinized the letter from the Ecole Speciale and declared, with a patriotic side-glance at the Hungarian flag, that he did not speak French. When Andras translated the letter for him, the superior proclaimed that if the school was so fond of him now, it would still want him after he'd finished his two years of military service. Andras had persisted, going to the office day after day with increasing frustration and urgency. August was coming to an end. They had to get back to Paris.

Klara's situation was perilous and could only become more so the longer they stayed.

Then, in the first week of September, Europe went to war.

On the flimsiest of pretexts--SS men dressed as Polish soldiers had faked an attack on a German radio station in the border town of Gleiwitz--Hitler sent a million and a half troops and two thousand tanks across the Polish border. The Budapest daily carried photographs of Polish horsemen riding with swords and lances against German panzer divisions. The next day's paper showed a battlefield littered with dismembered horses and the remnants of ancient armor; grinning panzer troops clutched the greaves and breastplates to their chests. The paper reported that the armor would be displayed in a new Museum of Conquest that was under construction in Berlin. A few weeks later, as Germany and Russia negotiated the division of the conquered territory, Andras received his labor-service call-up. It would be another eighteen months before Hungary entered the war, but the draft of Jewish men had begun in July. Andras reported to the battalion offices on Soroksari ut, where he learned that his company, the 112/30th, would be deployed to Ruthenia. He was to depart in three weeks' time.

He brought the news to Matyas at the lingerie shop on Vaci utca where he was arranging a new display window. A group of correctly dressed middle-aged ladies watched from the sidewalk as Matyas draped a line of dress forms with a series of progressively smaller underthings, a chaste burlesque captured in time. When Andras rapped on the glass, Matyas raised a finger to signal his brother to wait; he finished pinning the back of a lilac slip, then disappeared through an elf-sized door in the display window. A moment later he appeared at the human-sized door of the shop, a tape measure slung over his shoulders, his lapel laddered with pins. Over the past two years he had changed from a rawboned boy into a slim, compact youth; he moved through the mundane ballet of his day with a dancer's unselfconscious grace. At his jawline a perpetual shadow of stubble had emerged, and at his throat the neat small box of an Adam's apple. He had their mother's heavy dark hair and high sharp cheekbones.

"I've got a couple more wire girls to dress," he said. "Why don't you join me? You can give me the news while I'm pinning."

They went into the shop and entered the display window through the elf-sized door. "What do you think?" Matyas said, turning to a narrowwaisted dress form. "The pink chemise or the blue?" It was his practice to trim his windows during business hours; he found it drew a steady stream of customers demanding to buy the very things he was installing.

"The blue," Andras said, and then, "Can you guess where I'll be in three weeks?"

"Not Paris, I'd imagine."

"Ruthenia, with my labor company."

Matyas shook his head. "If I were you, I'd run right now. Hop a train back to Paris and beg political asylum. Say you refuse to go into service for a country that takes gifts of land from the Nazis." He sank a pin into the strap of the blue chemise.

"I can't become a fugitive. I'm engaged to be married. And the French borders are closed now, anyway."

"Then go somewhere else. Belgium. Switzerland. You said yourself that Klara's not safe here. Take her with you."

"Ride the rails like vagrants, both of us?"

"Why not? It's a lot better than being shipped off to Ruthenia." But then he straightened from his work and regarded Andras for a long moment, his expression darkening. "You've really got to go, don't you."

"I can't see any way around it. The first deployment's only six months."

"And then you'll have a stingy furlough, and then you'll be sent back for another six months. And then you'll have to do that twice more." Matyas crossed his arms. "I still think you should run."

"I wish I could, believe me."

"Klara's not going to be too happy about any of this."

"I know. I'm on my way to see her now. She's expecting me at her mother's."

Matyas cuffed him on the shoulder for luck and held the little door open so he could slip through. He stepped down into the shop and went out through the bigger doors, waving to Matyas through the glass as he made his way past the women who had gathered to watch. He could scarcely believe it was nearing October and he wasn't on his way back to school; in recent days he'd found himself combing the
Pesti Naplo
obsessively for news of Paris. Today's papers had shown a crush at the railway stations as sixteen thousand children were evacuated to the countryside. If he and Klara had remained in France, perhaps they would have left the city too; or perhaps they would have chosen to stay, bracing themselves for whatever was to come. Instead here he was in Budapest, walking along Andrassy ut toward the Varosliget, toward the tree-shadowed avenues of Klara's childhood. It had come to seem almost ordinary now to spend an afternoon at the house on Benczur utca, though only a month had passed since they had first arrived in Budapest. At that time they'd been so uncertain about Klara's situation that they'd been afraid even to go to the house; they'd taken a room under Andras's name at a tiny out-of-the-way hotel on Cukor utca, and decided that the best course of action would be to warn Klara's mother of her fugitive daughter's presence in Budapest before Klara herself appeared at the house. The next afternoon he'd gone to Benczur utca and presented himself to the housemaid as a friend of Jozsef's. She had shown him into the same pink-and-gold-upholstered sitting room where he'd passed an uncomfortable hour on the day of his departure for Paris. The younger and elder Mrs. Hasz were engaged in a card game at a gilt table by the window, and Jozsef was draped over a salmon-colored chair with a book in his lap. When he saw Andras in the doorway, Jozsef peeled himself from the chair and delivered the expected jovial greetings, the expected expressions of regret that Andras, too, had been forced to return to Budapest. The younger Mrs. Hasz offered a polite nod, the elder a smile of welcome and recognition. But something about Andras's look must have caught Klara's mother's attention, because a moment later she laid her fan of cards on the table and got to her feet.

"Mr. Levi," she said. "Are you well? You look a bit pale." She crossed the room to take his hand, her expression stoic, as if she were bracing for bad news.

"I'm well," he said. "And so is Klara."

She regarded him with frank surprise, and Jozsef's mother rose too. "Mr. Levi,"

she began, and paused, apparently unsure of how she might caution him without revealing too much to her son.

"Who is Klara?" Jozsef said. "Surely you don't mean Klara Hasz?"