The Invisible Bridge (67 page)

"Of course! What a fool I am. You're that Horovitz. Whatever have you done with yourself since then?"

"Gotten into journalism, I'm afraid."

"Well, of all ridiculous things! So you're here as a supplicant too?"

"Parisi and I come as a team."

"You mean Levi, here? Ah, you call him Parisi because of that stint of his at the Ecole Speciale. I was responsible for that, you know. Not that he'd ever give me credit.

He'd claim it was all due to his own talent."

"Well, he's not such a bad draughtsman. I hired him for the paper I was editing."

"And what paper was that?"

From his satchel, Mendel produced a few dog-eared copies of
The Biting Fly
.

"This is the one we made in the camp at Banhida. It's not as funny as the one we wrote when we were posted in Subcarpathia and Transylvania, but that one got us kicked out of our company. We were made to eat our words, in fact. Twenty pages of them apiece."

For the first time, Frigyes Eppler's expression grew serious; he looked carefully at Andras and Mendel, and then sat down at his managing editor's desk to page through
The
Biting Fly
. After reading for a while in silence, he glanced up at Mendel and gave a low chuckle. "I recognize your work," he said. "You were the one writing that man-about-town column for the
Evening Courier
. A smart political instrument dressed up as a young good-for-nothing's good-for-nothing ravings. But you were pretty sharp, weren't you?"

Mendel smiled. "At my worst."

"Tell me something," Eppler said in a lowered tone. "Just what are you doing here? This paper doesn't represent the leading edge of modern thought, you know."

"With all respect, sir, we might ask you the same question," Mendel said.

Eppler massaged the sallow dome of his head with one hand. "A man doesn't always find himself where he wants to be," he said. "I was at the
Pesti Naplo
for a while, but they let some of us go. By which you understand what I mean." He let out an unhappy laugh that was half wheeze; he was an inveterate smoker. "At least I stayed out of the Munkaszolgalat. I'm lucky they didn't send me to the Eastern Front, just to make an example of me. In any case, to put it simply, I had to keep body and soul together--an old habit, you might say--so when a position opened here, I took it. Better than singing in the street for my bread."

"Which is what we'll be doing soon," Mendel said. "Unless we find some work."

"Well, I can't say I recommend this place," Eppler said. "As you may have gathered, I don't always see eye to eye with the rest of the editorial staff. I'm supposed to be the chief, but, as you witnessed, my managing editor often ends up managing me."

"Perhaps you could use someone to take your side," Andras said.

"If I were to hire you, Levi, it wouldn't be to take sides. It would be to get a job done, just as when you were fresh from gimnazium."

"I've learned a thing or two since then."

"I'm sure you have. And your friend here seems an interesting fellow. I can't say, Horovitz, that I would have hired you on the basis of your
Biting Fly
, but I did follow your column for a time."

"I'm

flattered."

"Don't be. I read every rag in this town. I consider it my job."

"Do you think you can find something for us?" Mendel asked. "I hate to be blunt, but someone's got to be. Levi here has a son to look out for."

"A son! Good God. If you've got a son, Levi, then I'm an old man." He sighed and hitched up his trousers. "What the hell, boys. Come to work here if you want to work so badly. I'll dig something up for you."

That night Andras found himself at the kitchen table at home, sitting with his mother and the baby while Klara lay asleep on the sofa in the front room. His mother removed a pin from the nightshirt she was sewing and sank it into her gray velveteen pincushion, the same one she'd used for as long as Andras could remember. She had brought her old sewing box with her to Budapest, and Andras had been surprised to find that his mind contained a comprehensive record of its contents: the frayed tape measure, the round blue tin that held a minestrone of buttons, the black-handled scissors with their bright blades, the mysterious prickle-edged marking wheel, the spools and spools of colored silk and cotton. Her tiny whipstitches were as tight and precise as the ones that had edged Andras's collars when he was a boy. When she finished her row of hemming, she tied off the thread and cut it with her teeth.

"You used to like to watch me sew when you were little," she said.

"I remember. It seemed like magic."

She raised an eyebrow. "If it were magic, it would go faster."

"Speed is the enemy of precision," Andras said. "That's what my drawing master in Paris used to tell us."

His mother knotted the end of the thread and raised her eyes to him again. "It's a long time since you left school, isn't it?" she said.

"Forever."

"You'll go back to your studies when this is all over."

"Yes, that's what Apa says, too. But I don't know what will happen. I have a wife and son now."

"Well, it's good news about the job," his mother said. "You were wise to think of Eppler."

"Yes, it's good news," Andras said, but it felt less like good news than he'd imagined it would. Though he was relieved to know he had a way to earn money, the idea of going back to work for Eppler seemed to erase his time in Paris entirely. He knew it made no sense; he'd met Klara in Paris, after all, and here on the table before him, asleep in a wicker basket, was Tamas Levi, the miraculous evidence of their life together. But to arrive at work the next morning and receive the day's assignments from Eppler--it was what he had been doing at nineteen, at twenty. It seemed to negate the possibility that he would ever complete his training, that he would ever get to do the work he craved.

Everything in the world stood against his going back to school. The France in which he'd been a student had disappeared. His friends were dispersed. His teachers had fled. No school in Hungary would open its doors to him. No free country would open its borders to him. The war worsened daily. Their lives were in danger now. He suspected it wouldn't be long before Budapest was bombed.

"Don't give me such a dark look," his mother said. "I'm not responsible for the situation. I'm just your mother."

The baby began to stir in his basket. He shifted his head back and forth against the blankets, scrunched his face into a pink asterisk, and let out a cry. Andras bent over the basket and lifted the baby to his chest.

"I'll walk him around the courtyard," he said.

"You can't take him outside," his mother said. "He'll catch his death of cold."

"I won't have him wake Klara. She's been up every night for weeks."

"Well, for pity's sake, put a blanket over him. And put a coat over your shoulders.

Here, hold him like this, and let me put his hat on. Keep his blanket over his head so he'll stay warm."

He let his mother swaddle them both against the cold. "Don't stay out long," she said, patting the baby's back. "He'll fall asleep after you walk him for a minute or two."

It was a relief to get out of the close heat of the apartment. The night was clear and cold, with a frozen slice of moon suspended in the sky by an invisible filament.

Beyond the haze of city lights he could make out the faint ice crystals of stars. The baby was cocooned against him, quiet. He could feel the rapid rise and fall of his son's chest against his own. He walked around the courtyard and hummed a lullaby, circling the fountain where he and Klara had seen the little dark-haired girl trailing a hand through the water. The stone basin was crusted with ice now. The courtyard security light illuminated its depths, and as he leaned over it he could make out the fiery glints of goldfish beneath the surface. There, beneath the cover of the ice, their flickering lives went on. He wanted to know how they did it, how they withstood the slowing of their hearts, the chilling of their blood, through the long darkness of winter.

There was something otherworldly, it seemed to Andras, about the advertisements published in the
Magyar Jewish Journal
. As assistant layout editor it was his job to arrange those neatly illustrated boxes in the margins that flanked the articles; inside the bordered rectangles depicting clothes and shoes and soap, ladies' perfume and hats, the war seemed not to exist. It was impossible to reconcile this ad for cordovan leather evening shoes with the idea of Matyas spending a winter outdoors in Ukraine, perhaps without a good pair of boots or an adequate set of foot rags. It was impossible to read this druggist's advertisement listing the merits of its Patented Knee Brace, and then to think of Tibor having to set a serviceman's compound fracture with a length of wood torn from a barracks floor. The signs of war--the absence of silk stockings, the scarcity of metal goods, the disappearance of American and English products--were negations rather than additions; the blank spaces where the advertisements for those items would have appeared had been filled with other images, other distractions. The sporting-goods store on Szerb utca was the only one whose ad made reference to the war, however obliquely; it proclaimed the merits of a product called the Outdoorsman's Equipage, a knapsack containing everything you would need for a sojourn in the Munkaszolgalat: a collapsible cup, a set of interlocking cutlery, a mess tin, an insulated canteen, a thick woolen blanket, stout boots, a camping knife, a waterproof slicker, a gas lantern, a first-aid kit. It wasn't advertised for use in the Munkaszolgalat, but what else would Budapest residents be doing outdoors in the middle of January?

As for the articles that occupied the space between the ads, Andras could only gape at the rigid and shortsighted optimism he saw reflected there. This paper was supposed to be the mouthpiece of the Jewish community; how could it proclaim, on its editorial page, that the Hungarian Jew was
at one with the Magyar nation in language,
spirit, culture, and feeling
, when the Hungarian Jew was, in fact, being sent into the mouth of battle to remove mines, so that the Hungarian army might pass through to support its Nazi allies? Mendel had been right about the paper's content. To the extent that it reported the news, it did so with the sole apparent aim of keeping Hungarian Jews from falling into a panic. His second week at the paper, it was reported with great relish that Admiral Horthy had fired the most staunchly pro-German members of his staff; here was concrete evidence of the solidarity of the Hungarian leadership with the Jewish people.

But

the

Journal
wasn't the only paper in town, and the smaller left-leaning independents carried news that reflected the world Andras had glimpsed in the labor service. There were reports of a massacre carried out in Kamenets-Podolsk not long after Hungary entered the war against the Soviet Union; one paper printed an anonymous interview with a member of a Hungarian sapper platoon, a man who'd been present at the mass killing and had been consumed by guilt since his return. After the Hungarian Central Alien Control Office had rounded up Jews of dubious citizenship, this man reported, the detainees had been handed over to the German authorities in Galicia, trucked to Kolomyya, and marched ten miles to a string of bomb craters near Kamenets-Podolsk, under the guard of SS units and the source's Hungarian sapper platoon. There, every one of them was shot to death, along with the original Jewish population of Kamenets-Podolsk--twenty-three thousand Jews in all. The idea had been to clear Hungary of Jewish aliens, but many of the Jews who were killed were Hungarians who hadn't been able to produce their citizenship papers quickly enough. This, it seemed, was what had troubled the Hungarian who'd given the interview: He had killed his own countrymen in cold blood. So it seemed that the Hungarians did feel a certain solidarity with their Jewish brethren after all, though in the source's case the solidarity hadn't run deep enough to keep him from pulling the trigger.

Then, in the last week of February, there was a report published in the
People's
Voice
about another massacre of Jews, this one in the Delvidek, the strip of Yugoslavia that Hitler had returned to Hungary ten months earlier. A certain General Feketehalmy-Czeydner, the paper reported, had ordered the execution of thousands of Jews under the guise of routing Tito partisans. Refugees from the region had begun to drift back to Budapest with horrifying stories of the killings--people had been dragged to the Danube beach, made to strip in the freezing cold, lined up in rows of four on the diving board over a hole that had been cannon-blasted into the ice of the river, and machine-gunned into the water. Andras arrived early one morning at the
Magyar Jewish Journal
to find his employer sitting in the middle of the newsroom in a mute paroxysm of horror, a copy of the
Voice
open on the desk before him. He handed the paper to Andras and retreated into his office without a word. When the managing editor arrived, another glass-enclosed argument ensued, but no word about the massacre appeared in the
Jewish Journal
.

Later that same week, Ilana Levi went to Grof Apponyi Albert Hospital and gave birth to a baby boy. There had been a letter from Tibor only three days before: He hoped to be released from his labor company by Wednesday evening, and so hadn't despaired of being home in time for the birth. But the event had come and gone without any sign of him. On Ilana's first night home from the hospital, Andras and Klara brought her Shabbos dinner. Though she was still exhausted from the loss of blood, she had insisted upon setting the table herself; there were the candlesticks she'd received as a wedding present from Bela and Flora, and the Florentine plates her mother had given her to take back to Hungary. She and Klara lit the candles, Andras blessed the wine, and they sat down to eat while the babies slept in their arms. The room held a deep and pervasive quiet that seemed to emanate from the architecture itself. The apartment was on the ground floor, three narrow rooms made smaller by the heavy wooden beams that supported them. The French doors of the dining room looked out onto the courtyard of the building, where a bicycle mechanic had cultivated a boneyard of rusted frames and handlebars, clusters of spokes, mounds of petrified chains. The collection, dusted with snow, looked to Andras like a battlefield littered with bodies. He found himself staring out into it as the light grew blue and dim, his eyes moving between the shadows. He was the one who saw the figure through the frosty glass: a dark narrow form picking its way through the bicycles, like a ghost come back to look for his fallen comrades. At first he thought the form was nothing more than the congelation of his own fear; then, as the figure assumed a familiar shape, a manifestation of his desire. He hesitated to call Ilana's attention to it because he thought at first that he might be imagining it. But the figure approached the windows and stared at the scene within--Andras at the head of the table with Klara at his side, a baby at Klara's breast; Ilana with her back to the window, her arm crooked around something in a blanket--and the ghost's hand flew to his mouth, and his legs folded beneath him. It was Tibor, home from his labor company. Andras shoved his chair away from the table and ran for the door. In an instant he was in the courtyard with his brother, both of them sitting in the snow amid the litter of dismembered bicycles, and then the women were beside them, and in another minute Tibor held his son and his wife in his arms.