The Invisible Bridge (52 page)

He and his workmates lived on an abandoned farm in an abandoned hamlet near a stone quarry that had long since given up all the granite anyone cared to take from it. He didn't know how long ago the farm had been deserted by its inhabitants; the barn held only the faintest ghost odor of animals. Fifty men slept in the barn, twenty in a converted chicken house, thirty in the stables, and fifty more in a newly constructed barracks. The platoon captains and the company commander and the doctor and the work foremen slept in the farmhouse, where they had real beds and indoor plumbing. In the barn, each man had a metal cot and a bare mattress stuffed with hay. At the foot of each cot was a wooden kit box stamped with its owner's identification number. The food was meager but steady: coffee and bread in the morning, potato soup or beans at noon, more soup and more bread at night. They had clothing enough to keep them warm: overcoats and winter uniforms, woolen underthings, woolen socks, stiff black boots. Their overcoats, shirts, and trousers were nearly identical to the uniforms worn by the rest of the Hungarian Army. The only difference was the green
M
sewn onto their lapels, for Munkaszolgalat, the labor service. No one ever said
Munkaszolgalat
, though; they called it
Musz
, a single resentful syllable. In the Musz, his company-mates told him, you were just like any other member of the military; the difference was that your life was worth even
less
than shit. In the Musz, they said, you got paid the same as any other enlisted man: just enough for your family to starve on. The Musz wasn't bent on killing you, just on using you until you wanted to kill yourself. And of course there was the other difference: Everyone in his labor-service company was Jewish. The Hungarian Ministry of Defense considered it dangerous to let Jews bear arms. The military classified them as unreliable, and sent them to cut trees, to build roads and bridges, to erect army barracks for the troops who would be stationed in Ruthenia.

There were privileges Andras hadn't foreseen. Because he was married, he received extra pay and a housing-assistance stipend. He had a pay book stamped with the Hungarian royal seal; he was paid twice a month in government checks. He could send and receive letters and packages, though everything was subject to inspection. And because he had his baccalaureate, he was given the status of labor-service officer. He was the leader of his squad of twenty men. He had an officer's cap and a double-chevron badge on his pocket, and the other members of the squad had to salute and call him sir.

He had to take roll and organize the night watch. His twenty men had to address their special requests or problems to him; he would adjudicate in cases of disagreement. Twice a week he had to report to the company commander on the status of his squad.

The 112/30th had been sent to clear a swath of forest where a road would be built in the spring. In the morning they rose in the dark and washed in snowmelt water; they dressed and shoved their feet into cold-hardened boots. In the dim red glow of the woodstove they drank bitter coffee and ate their ration of bread. There were morning calisthenics: push-ups, side bends, squat jumps. Then, at the sergeant's command, they formed a marching block in the courtyard, their axes slung over their shoulders like rifles, and struck out through the dark toward the work site.

The one miracle afforded to Andras in that place was the identity of his work partner. It was none other than Mendel Horovitz, who had spent six years at school with Andras in Debrecen, and who had broken the Hungarian record in the hundred-meter dash and the long jump in the 1936 Olympic trials. For all of ten minutes, Mendel had been a member of the Hungarian Olympic Team--after his final jump, someone had draped an official jacket around his shoulders and had led him to a registration table, where the team secretary was recording the personal information of all the athletes who had qualified. But the third question, after
name
and
city of origin
, had been
religion
, and that was where Mendel had failed. He had known in advance, of course, that Jews weren't allowed to participate; he'd gone to the trials as a form of protest, and in the wild hope that they might make an exception for him. They hadn't, of course, a decision the team officials later came to regret: Mendel's hundred-meter record was a tenth of a second shy of Jesse Owens's gold-medal time.

When Mendel and Andras first saw each other at the Labor Service rail yard in Budapest, there was so much back-slapping and exclamation that they had each begun their time in the Munkaszolgalat with a comportment demerit. Mendel had a craggy face and a wry
V
of a mouth and eyebrows like the feathery antennae of moths. He'd been born in Zalaszabar and educated at the Debrecen Gimnazium at the expense of a maternal uncle who insisted that his protege train for a future as a mathematician. But Mendel had no inclination toward mathematic abstraction; nor did he aspire to a career in athletics, despite his talents. What he wanted was to be a journalist. After the Olympic team disappointment, he'd gotten a copyediting job at the evening paper, the
Budapest Esti
Kurir
. Soon he'd started penning his own columns, satirical journalistic petits-fours which he slipped into the editor's mailbox under a pen name and which occasionally saw print.

He'd been working at the
Esti Kurir
for a year before he was conscripted, having survived a round of firings that followed the new six percent quota on Jewish members of the press. Andras found him remarkably sanguine about having been shipped off to Subcarpathia. He liked being in the mountains, he said, liked being outside and working with his hands. He didn't even mind the relentless labor of woodcutting.

Andras might not have minded it himself had the tools been sharp and the food more plentiful, the season warm and the job a matter of choice. For every tree they cut at the vast work site in the forest, there was a kind of satisfying ritual. Mendel would make the first notch with the axe, and Andras would fit the crosscut saw into the groove. Then they would both take their handles and lean into the work. There was a sweet-smelling spray of sawdust as they breached the outer rings, and more friction as the blade of the saw sank into the bole. They had to shove thin steel wedges into the gap to keep it open; near the center, where the wood grew denser, the blade would start to shriek. Sometimes it took half an hour to get through thirty centimeters of core. Then there was the double-time march to the other side, the completion of the struggle. When they had a few centimeters to go, they inserted more wedges and withdrew the saw. Mendel would shout
All clear!
and give the tree a shove. Next came a series of creaking groans, momentum traveling the length of the trunk, the upper branches shouldering past their neighbors.

That was the true death of the tree, Andras thought, the instant it ceased to be an upward-reaching thing, the moment it became what they were making it:
timber
. The falling tree would push a great rush of wind before it; the branches cut the air with a hundred-toned whistle as the tree arced to the ground. When the trunk hit, the forest floor thrummed with the incredible weight of it, a shock that traveled through the soles of Andras's boots and up through his bones to the top of his head, where it ricocheted in his skull like a gunshot. A reverberant moment followed, the silent Kaddish of the tree. And into that emptiness would rush the foreman's shouted commands:
All right, men! Go! Keep
moving!
The branches had to be chopped for firewood, the bare trunks dragged to massive flatbed trucks for transportation to a railway station, from which they would be sent to mainland Hungary.

He and Mendel made a good team. They were among the fastest of their workmates, and had earned the foreman's praise. But there could be little satisfaction in any of it under the circumstances. He had been lifted out of his life, separated not just from Klara but from everything else that had mattered to him for the past two years. In October, while he was supposed to have been consulting with Le Corbusier over plans for a sports club in India, he was felling trees. In November, when he should have been constructing projects for the third-year exhibition, he was felling trees. And in December, when he would have been taking his midyear exams, he was felling trees. The war, he knew, would have disrupted the academic year temporarily, but it would likely have resumed by now; Polaner and Rosen and Ben Yakov--and worse, those sneering men who had taunted him after the Prix du Amphitheatre--would be sailing on toward their degrees, translating imagined buildings into sharp black lines on drafting paper. His friends would still be meeting nightly at the Blue Dove for drinks, living in the Quartier Latin, carrying on their lives.

Or so he imagined, until Klara sent a packet of letters that contained missives from Paris. Polaner, Andras learned, had joined the Foreign Legion.
If only you could
have enlisted with me
, he wrote.
I'm training at the Ecole Militaire now. This week I
learned to shoot a rifle. For the first time in my life I have a burning desire to operate
firearms. The newspapers carry frequent reports of horrors: SS Einsatzgruppen rounding
up professors, artists, boy scouts, executing them in town squares. Polish Jews being
loaded onto trains and relocated to miserable swamplands around Lublin. My parents
are still in Krakow for now, though Father has lost his factory. I'll fight the Reich and die
if I have to
.

Rosen, it had turned out, was planning to emigrate to Palestine with Shalhevet.

The city's dead boring without you
, he'd scrawled in his loose script.
Also, I find I've no
patience for my studies. With Europe at war, school seems futile. But I won't throw myself
in front of tanks like Polaner. I'd rather stay alive and work. Shalhevet thinks we can set
up a charitable foundation to get Jews out of Europe. Find wealthy Americans to fund it.

She's a bright girl. Perhaps she'll make it happen. If all goes well, we leave in May. From
now on I'm going to write to you only in Hebrew
.

Ben Yakov, mentally exhausted by the events of the previous year, had taken a leave of absence from school and decamped to his parents' home in Rouen. The news came not from him but from Rosen, who predicted that Ben Yakov would soon try to contact Andras himself. Sure enough, enclosed in the same packet of letters was a telegram sent to Klara's address in Budapest: ANDRAS: N O HARD FEELINGS

BETWEEN US. D ESPITE ALL, EVER YOUR FRIEND. G OD KEEP YOU SAFE. B

EN Y AKOV.

Klara herself wrote weekly. Her official residence permit had arrived without event; as far as the government was concerned she was Claire Levi, the French-born wife of a Hungarian labor serviceman. She had rented her apartment on the rue de Sevigne to a Polish composer who had fled to Paris; the composer knew a ballet teacher who would be glad to have a new studio, so the practice space was rented too. Klara was living now in an apartment on Kiraly utca and had found a studio, as she'd hoped. She had taken on a few private students, and might soon begin to teach small classes. She was living a life of quiet seclusion, seeing her mother daily, walking in the park with her brother on Sunday afternoons; they had gone together to visit the grave of her teacher Viktor Romankov, who had died of a stroke after twenty years of teaching at the Royal Ballet School.

Budapest was cobwebbed with memories, she wrote. Sometimes she forgot entirely that she was a grown woman; she would find herself wandering toward the house on Benczur utca, expecting to find her father still alive, her brother a tall young gimnazium student, her girlhood room intact. At times she was melancholy, and most of all she missed Andras. But he must not fear for her. She was well. All seemed safe.

He worried still, of course, but it was a comfort to hear from her--to hear at least that she felt safe, or safe enough to tell him so. He always kept her most recent letter in his overcoat pocket. When a new one came, he would move the old one to his kit box and add it to the sheaf he kept tied with her green hair-ribbon. He had their wedding photograph in a marbled folder from Pomeranz and Sons. He counted the days before his furlough, counted and counted, through what seemed the longest winter of his life.

In spring the forest filled with the scent of black earth and the dawn-to-dusk cacophony of birdsong. Overnight, new curtains appeared in the windows of the empty houses along the way to the work site. There were children in the fields, bicyclists on the roads, the smell of grilled sausage from the roadside inns. The promised furlough had been postponed until the end of summer; there was too much work, their commander told them, to allow any of their company a break.
Thank God the winter's over
, his mother wrote.
Every day I worried. My Andraska in those mountains, in that terrible cold. I know
you are strong, but a mother imagines the worst. Now I can imagine something better:
You are warm, your work is easier, and before long you will be home
. In the same circlet of foothills where Andras and his workmates had suffered endless months of labor, Hungarians now gathered to take the air and eat berries with fresh cream and swim in the freezing lakes. But for the labor servicemen, the work went on. Now that the ground had thawed and softened, now that the trees in the path of the road had been cleared, Labor Company 112/30 had to uproot the giant stumps so the roadbed might be leveled, the gravel spread for the road. The summer months appeared on the horizon with their promise of hot days amid asphalt and tar. The solstice came and went. It seemed nothing would ever change. Then, in early July, another packet of letters came from Klara, and with it news of Tibor and of France.

Tibor and Ilana had been married in May, after a long engagement and a period of reconciliation with her parents. A certain Rabbi di Samuele had interceded on behalf of the couple. He had proved such a good intermediary that Ilana's mother and father had at last invited Tibor to Shabbos dinner.
Even so
, Tibor wrote,
I thought her father would
punch me in the eye. I was the villain, you see, not Ben Yakov; I was the man who had
accompanied their daughter on the train. Every time I ventured a comment on a point of
biblical interpretation, her father laughed as if my ignorance delighted him. Ilana's
mother deliberately neglected to pass me food. Halfway through the meal, the Holy One
made a risky intervention: Ilana's father fell out of his chair, half dead of a heart attack. I
kept him alive with chest compressions until a real doctor was called in. In the end he
survived; I was the hero of the evening; Signor and Signora di Sabato changed their
views. Ilana and I were married within the month. We returned to Hungary when my visa
expired and have been living here in Budapest, not far from your own lovely bride, doing
what we can to keep her company and to get my papers in order for a return to Italy. I
have brought my Ilana to meet Anya and Apa. They loved her, she loved them, and our
father became tipsy and encouraged us at the end of the evening to go make
grandchildren. As for our younger brother, he continues to run wild. This month he
makes his debut at the Pineapple Club, where people will pay good money to see him tap-dance atop a white piano. Somehow he has also managed to pass his baccalaureate
exams. He is still arranging shop windows and has more clients than he can serve. His
girlfriend, however, has deserted him for a scoundrel. He sends his regards and the
enclosed photo
. The photo showed Matyas in top hat, white tie, and tails, a cane in his hand, one foot cocked over the other to flash a glint of tap metal at the sole.