The Invisible Bridge (63 page)

He ran to the front of the auditorium and climbed the steps at the side of the stage.

The carpenter didn't look up from his work. In the wings, a man who must have been the properties master was arranging props on their shelves; the whine of an electric saw rose from the set-building shop, and the smell of fresh-cut wood came to Andras with its layered suggestions of his father's lumberyard and the Sarah-Bernhardt and Monsieur Forestier's workshop and the labor camp in Subcarpathia. He wandered farther into the back hallways of the theater, up a set of stairs to the dressing rooms; the whitewashed doors, with their copperplate-lettered names in brass cardholders, chastely hid the disasters of makeup boxes and stained dressing gowns and plumed hats and torn stockings and dog-eared scripts and moldering armchairs and cracked mirrors and wilted bouquets that he knew must lie on the other side. When Klara had been a girl, he realized, she must have dressed for her performances in one of these rooms. He remembered a photograph from those days, Klara in a skirt of tattered leaves, her hair interwoven with twigs like a woodland fairy's. He could almost see her sylphid shadow slipping across the hall from one room to another.

He walked down the hallway and climbed a flight of stairs; at the top, a hallway held another row of dressing rooms. The hall ended at a wooden door with a white enameled nameplate, the same one Novak had used at the Sarah-Bernhardt in Paris.

There were the familiar words etched in black paint, their gold highlights and curlicues dimmed by the travel between Paris and Budapest:
Zoltan Novak, Directeur
. From behind the door came a deep cough. Andras raised a hand to knock, then let it drop. Now that he had arrived at this threshold, his courage had fled. He had no idea what he would say to Zoltan Novak. From within came another deep cough, and then a third, closer. The door opened, and Andras found himself face-to-face with Novak himself. He was pale, wasted, his eyes bright with what appeared to be fever; his moustache drooped, and his suit hung loose on his frame. When he saw Andras before him his shoulders went slack.

"Levi," he said. "What are you doing here?"

"I don't know," Andras said. "I suppose I wanted a word with you."

Novak stood for a long moment before Andras, taking in the Munkaszolgalat uniform and the other changes that accompanied it. He let out a long and labored exhalation, then lifted his eyes to Andras's.

"I must say you're the last person I would have expected to find outside my door,"

he said. "And, to be perfectly honest, among the last I might have wanted to see. But since you're here, you might as well come in."

Andras found himself following Novak into the dim sanctum of the office and standing before the large leather-topped desk. Novak waved a hand toward a chair, and Andras took off his cap and sat down. He glanced around at the shelves of libretti, the ledger books, the photographs of opera stars in costume. It was the Sarah-Bernhardt office refigured in a smaller, darker form.

"Well," Novak said. "You might as well tell me what brings you here, Levi."

Andras folded and unfolded his Munkaszolgalat cap. "I had some news this afternoon," he said. "I've just learned that your wife revealed Klara's identity to the Hungarian police."

"You learned that just this afternoon?" Novak said. "But it happened nearly two years ago."

Andras's face flamed, but he kept his eyes steady on Novak's. "Gyorgy Hasz saw to it that I knew nothing. I went to him today to see if he could help exempt my brother from front-line duty, and he told me that his funds were engaged in keeping my wife out of jail."

Novak got up to pour himself a drink from the decanter that stood on a table in the corner. He glanced back over his shoulder. Andras shook his head.

"It's just tea," Novak said. "I can't take spirits anymore."

"No, thank you," Andras said.

Novak returned to the desk with his glass of tea. He was pale and haggard, but his eyes burned with a terrible fierce light, the source of which Andras was afraid to guess.

"The government is a clever extortionist," Novak said.

"Thanks to Edith, Klara's life is in danger," Andras said. "And my brother is on a train to Belgorod as we speak. I'm to rejoin my company in Banhida tomorrow morning and can do nothing about any of it."

"We all have our tragedies," Novak said. "Those are yours. I've got mine."

"How can you speak that way?" Andras said. "It's your own wife who did this.

And it wouldn't surprise me if you'd had a hand in it."

"Edith did what she got it into her mind to do," Novak said curtly. "She heard a rumor from a friend that Klara had come back to town. Heard she'd married you, and that you'd gone to the work service. I suppose she thought I might go looking for Klara, or that Klara might look for me." He spoke the last words in a tone of bitter irony. "Edith wanted to give her what she thought she deserved. She thought it would be a simple matter, but she didn't count on the Ministry of Justice to be so willing to be bought off.

When she heard about the arrangement they'd made with your brother-in-law, she was furious."

"And now? How do I know she won't do something more, or worse?"

"Edith died of ovarian cancer last spring," Novak said. He gave Andras a challenging look, as if daring him to show pity.

"I'm sorry," Andras said.

"Spare me your condolences. If you're sorry, it's only because you've lost the chance to hold her accountable for what she did. But she was punished enough while she lived. Her death was a terrible one. My son and I had to watch her go through it. Carry that back with you to the work service, if you want something to ease your anger."

Andras twisted his hat in silence. There was no way to reply. Novak, seeing he'd rendered Andras mute, seemed to relent a little. "I miss her," he said. "I was never as good to her as she deserved. I suspect it's my own guilt that makes me cruel to you."

"I shouldn't have come here," Andras said.

"I'm glad you did. I'm glad to know Klara's still safe, at least. I've tried not to hear of her at all, but I'm glad to know that much." He began to cough deeply, and had to wipe his eyes and take a drink of his tea. "I won't know more of her for a long time, if ever. I'm leaving here in a month. I've been called too."

"Called

where?"

"To the labor service."

"But that's impossible," Andras said. "You're not of military age. You have your position here at the Opera. You're not even Jewish."

"I'm Jewish enough for them," Novak said. "My mother was a Jew. I converted as a young man, but no one cares much about that now. I shouldn't have been allowed to keep this job after the race laws changed, but some friends of mine in the Ministry of Culture chose to look the other way. They've all lost
their
jobs by now. As for my position in the community, that's part of the problem. They mean to remove me from it.

Apparently there's a new secret quota for the labor battalions. A certain percentage of conscripts must be so-called prominent Jews. I'll be in illustrious company. My colleague at the symphony was called to the same battalion, and we've just learned that the former president of the engineering college will be joining us too. Age isn't a factor. Nor, unfortunately, is fitness for service. I've never quite shaken the consumption that brought me back here in '37. You've been through the service yourself; you know as well as I do that I'm not likely to return."

"Surely

they

won't

make

you do hard labor," Andras said. "Surely they'll give you a job in an office, at least."

"Now, Andras," Novak said, with a note of reproach. "We both know that's not true. What will happen will happen."

"What about your son?" Andras said.

"Yes, what about my son?" Novak said. "What about him?" His voice trailed into silence, and they sat together without saying a word. Into Andras's mind came the image of his own child, that boy or girl sitting cross-legged in Klara's womb--that child who might never be born, and who, if born, might never live past babyhood, and who might then live only to see the world consumed by flames. Novak, watching Andras, seemed to apprehend a new grief of his own.

"So," he said, finally. "You understand. You're a father too."

"Soon," Andras said. "In a few months."

"And you'll be finished with the labor service by then?"

"Who knows? Anything might happen."

"It'll be all right," he said. "You'll make it home. You'll be with Klara and the child. Gyorgy will maintain his arrangement with the authorities. It's not her they want, you know; it's his money. If they prosecute her it will only bring their own guilt to light."

Andras nodded, wanting to believe it. He was surprised to feel reassured, and then ashamed that it was Novak who had reassured him--Novak, who had lost everything but his young son. "Who will look after your boy?" he asked again.

"Edith's parents. And my sister. It's fortunate we came back when we did," Novak said. "If we'd stayed in France, we might be in an internment camp by now. The boy too.

They're not sparing the children."

"God," Andras said, and put his head into his hands. "What'll become of us? All of us?"

Novak looked up at him from beneath his graying brows; the last trace of anger had gone out of his eyes. "In the end, only one thing," he said. "Some by fire, some by water. Some by the sword, some by wild beasts. Some by hunger, some by thirst. You know how the prayer goes, Andras."

"Forgive me," Andras said. "Forgive me for saying you weren't a Jew." For it was the verse from the Rosh Hashanah liturgy, the prayer that prefigured all ends. Soon he would say that prayer himself, in the camp at Banhida among his workmates.

"I am a Jew," Novak said. "That was why I hired you in Paris. You were my brother."

"I'm sorry, Novak-ur," Andras said. "I'm sorry. I never meant you any harm. You were always kind to me."

"It's not your fault," Novak said. "I'm glad you came here. At least this way we can take leave of each other."

Andras rose and put on his military cap. Novak extended his hand across the desk, and Andras took it. There was nothing more to do except bid each other farewell. They did it in few words, and then Andras left the office and pulled the door closed behind him.

THAT EVENING, when he returned home to the apartment on Nefelejcs utca, he told Klara nothing of what had passed between him and her brother; nor did he mention that he had seen Novak. He said only that he'd been on a long walk around the city, that he had been thinking about what he might do when he returned from the service. He knew she'd taken note of his anxious distraction, but she didn't ask him to explain his mood. The fact that he was going back to Banhida the next day must have seemed explanation enough. They ate a quiet dinner in the kitchen, their chairs close together at the little table. Afterward, in the sitting room, they listened to Sibelius on the phonograph and watched the fire burning in the grate. Andras wore a flannel robe Klara had bought for him, and a pair of lambswool slippers. He couldn't have imagined a setting more replete with comfort, but soon he'd be gone and Klara would be alone again to face whatever might come. The more comfortable he felt, the more contented and drowsy Klara looked as she lay back against the sofa cushions, the more painful it was to imagine what lay on the other side. Gyorgy was right, he thought, to have protected Klara from the knowledge of what had happened. Her tranquility seemed worth his own dishonesty.

She was utterly serene as she spoke of the changes pregnancy had brought about in her body, and of the comfort of being able to talk to her mother about them. She was tender with Andras, physically affectionate; she wanted to make love, and he was happy for the distraction. But when they were in bed, her body surprising in its new balance, he had to turn his face away. He was afraid she would sense he was keeping something from her, and would demand to know what it was.

Once he was back at Banhida he was spared that danger, at least. He had never been so glad to have to do heavy work. He could numb his mind with the endless loading of brown coal into dusty carts, the endless pulling and pushing of the carts along the tracks. He could stun his limbs with calisthenics in the evening lineup, could submit to the drudgery of chores--the cleaning of barracks, the cutting of firewood, the hauling away of kitchen garbage--in the hope that the exhaustion would allow him to fall asleep at once, before his mind opened its kit bag of worries and began to display them in graphic detail, one after the next. Even if he managed to avoid that grim parade, he was at the mercy of his dreams. In the one that recurred most frequently, he would come upon Ilana lying in the hospital in a place that wasn't quite Paris but wasn't Budapest either, on the brink of death; then it wasn't Ilana but Klara, and he knew he had to give his blood to her, but he couldn't figure out how to transfer it from his own veins into hers. He stood at her bedside with a scalpel in his hand, and she lay in bed pale and terrified, and he thought he must first press the scalpel to his wrist and then think of a solution. Night after night he woke in the dark among the coughs and snores of his squad-mates, certain that Klara had died and that he had done nothing to save her. His sole consolation was that his term of service would end on December fifteenth, two weeks before she was due. He knew that it was foolish to pin all his hopes on that release date when the Munkaszolgalat showed so little respect for the promises it had made to its conscripts; he tried to remember the hard lessons of disappointment he'd learned in his first year of service. But the date was all he had, and he held on to it like a talisman. December fifteenth, December fifteenth: He said it under his breath as he worked, as if the repetition might hasten its arrival.

One morning when he was feeling particularly desperate, he went to the prayer service before work. A group of men met in an empty storage building every day at dawn; some of them had tiny dog-eared prayer books, and there was a miniature Torah from which they read on Mondays, Thursdays, and Shabbos. Inside his tallis, Andras found himself thinking not of the prayers, but, as often happened when he performed any religious observance, of his parents. When he'd written to tell them Klara was pregnant, his father had written back to say they'd make a trip to Budapest at once. Andras had been skeptical. His parents hated to travel. They hated the noise and expense and crowds, and they hated the crush of Budapest. But a few weeks later they had gone to visit Klara and had stayed for three days. Andras's mother had promised to come back before the baby was born and to stay as long as Klara needed her.