The Invisible Bridge (77 page)

"The originals are at the
Journal,
" he said. "One copy of each issue, in a filing cabinet in the chief editor's office. No need to disturb anyone's family. We don't keep anything at home."

"Very good," said Varsadi. He replaced the gun in the desk drawer. "That's all I need from you now. Dismissed," he said, and waved a hand toward the door.

They moved as if through some viscous liquid, not looking at each other. They had compromised Frigyes Eppler, his person, his position; they both knew it. There was no telling what the consequences might be, or what price Eppler would be made to pay.

Outside, they found that the entire company had been moved to the assembly ground, where they stood now at uncomfortable attention. As Andras took his place in line, Jozsef threw him a look of frank curiosity. But there was no time to enlighten him; it seemed that the promised inspection was now to occur. The soldiers who had arrived that morning had dispersed themselves along the edge of the assembly ground, and the officers who had conferred with Varsadi stood at the head of the formation. When Andras looked across the expanse of gravel to the far edge of the field, he found that soldiers had lined up there as well. In front of Varsadi's headquarters, soldiers. Along the tracks behind them, more soldiers. All at once he understood: The 79/6th had been corralled, surrounded. The soldiers who had been smoking and laughing with the guards now stood at attention with their hands on their rifles, their eyes fixed at that dangerous military middle distance, the place from which it was impossible to recognize another human being.

Varsadi emerged from the low brick building, his back erect, his medals flashing in the afternoon sun. "Into your lines," he shouted. "Marching formation."

Andras told himself to keep calm. They were half an hour from Budapest. This wasn't the Delvidek. It was likely Varsadi meant to do nothing more than to scare them, make a show of control, correct for the laxity of his command. At his order the 79/6th marched out of the assembly ground and along the tracks, toward the south gate of the rail yard. The soldiers kept their lines tight around the block of work servicemen. They all stopped when they reached the end of the row of boxcars.

Three empty cars had been coupled to the end of the train, their sides emblazoned with the Munkaszolgalat acronym. Over the small, high windows of the boxcars, iron bars had been installed. The doors stood open as if in expectation. Far ahead, beyond the cars that had just been loaded with supplies, an engine exhaled brown smoke.

"At attention, men," Varsadi shouted. "Your orders have been changed. Your services are needed elsewhere. You will leave immediately. Your duties have become classified. We cannot give you further information."

There was a burst of incredulous protest from the men, a sudden din of shouting.

"Silence," the commander cried. "Silence! Silence at once!" He raised his pistol and fired it into the air. The men fell silent.

"Pardon me, sir," Jozsef said. He stood just a few feet from Andras, close enough for Andras to see a narrow vein pumping at his temple. "As I recall, the KMOF Rules of Duty Handbook says we've got to have a week's notice before any change of posting.

And if you don't mind my mentioning it, we've hardly got the supplies."

Major Varsadi strode toward Jozsef, pistol in hand. He took the gun by its short muzzle and delivered two swift blows with the butt-end across Jozsef's face. A bright stuttering dart of blood appeared on the shoulder of Andras's uniform.

"Take my advice and shut your mouth," Varsadi said. "Where you're going, you'd be shot for less."

The major gave another order; the soldiers tightened their lines around the labor servicemen and squeezed them toward the train cars. Andras found himself jammed between Mendel and Jozsef. Behind them was a crush of men. They had no choice but to climb into the open mouth of the boxcar. Through the single high window Andras could see the soldiers in a line around the cars, the dull glint of their bayonets against the marbled sky. More and more servicemen were pushed into the cars until the air seemed to be made of them. Andras inhaled wet canvas and hair oil and sweat, the smell of the morning's work cut with the tang of panic. His heart drummed in his ribcage, and his throat closed with terror. Klara would be home now, packing the last of their things. In an hour she would begin to look at the clock. He had to get off the train. He would plead illness; he would offer a bribe. He shoved and elbowed his way toward the door again, but before he could reach that rectangle of light there was an all-clear cry. Then the rattle of the door sliding closed, the descent of darkness, the sound of a chain against metal, the unmistakable click of a padlock.

A moment later the train whistle let out an indifferent screech. Through the wooden floorboards, through the soles of his summer boots and the bones of his legs, came a deep mechanical shudder, the first grinding jolt of motion. The men fell against each other, against Andras; the weight of them seemed heavy enough to squeeze his heart to stillness in his chest. And then the train lurched into its rhythm and carried them forward through the north gates of Szentendre Yard, toward a destination none of them could name.

IN THE DAYS and nights he spent on the train, after he'd shouted himself hoarse with protest and exhausted all hope of escape, a kind of numbness seemed to overtake him. He stood with Mendel for hours at the small high window, watching the world pass by outside like a catalogue of the impossible: That motorbike, with its suggestion of a quick escape. That road, and the freedom to follow it home to Klara. That mail truck, which might carry a letter to her. He knew from the direction of the light that they were headed northeast. He would have known it anyway because the train was climbing. They ascended into the northern uplands through Gyongyos and Fuzesabony; at times the train crawled, and at other times it stopped for hours. Each time it stopped, Andras thought they might be led off to their new work site. On the second night they were actually ordered to leave the train, and herded into an empty warehouse that must have once been used to store the red wine of the region, Egri Bikaver, bull's blood. The air had the sweet oaky tang of wine barrels; the dirt floor was stained with faded purple rings. Two army cooks fed them a thin cabbage soup and hunks of hard dark bread, the familiar Munkaszolgalat food. They stood in line to wash at a spigot in a corner of the warehouse.

They weren't allowed to speak to each other, or to venture outside, not even for a piss; they had to use a barrel for that. The warehouse door was locked, the building guarded by soldiers. In the morning they were put back on the train and sent east again.

That was the third day of travel. He was supposed to have embarked for Palestine the next morning. What would Klara be doing now? He knew it was futile to hope she would have gone on without him. What would she have thought two nights before, when the hour grew later and later and he hadn't come home? He imagined her bending over the valises, packing the baby's things, checking the clock on the dresser; he imagined her mild worry when the usual hour of his return had passed--had he stopped to have a last drink in Budapest with Mendel, or a last stroll through the familiar streets? The dinner she'd made would have grown cold in the kitchen. She would have put Tamas to bed, her worry shading into fear as eight o'clock became nine, and nine became ten.

What did she imagine had happened to him? Did she think he'd been thrown in jail or killed? Had the work-service administration told her anything, even now? In all probability she still didn't know. And what about Varsadi's threat? Would he be content when his men found the originals of
The Crooked Rail
at Eppler's offices, or would he insist that the apartment be searched too?

There was constant speculation on the train about where they were going and what awaited them at the end of the journey. The prevailing opinion was that there had been some mistake about the company's transfer. They were supposed to have been sent northwest to Esztergom at the end of the month, to work at another rail yard. The orders must have gotten confused. The mix-up would soon be discovered, and they would be put on a westbound train. But that didn't explain why soldiers had been sent to Szentendre Yard to load the men onto the trains, nor why they'd been shipped off with such haste.

The Ivory Tower, the former professor of history, offered another theory: He believed they were being sent east because they had all been witness to a crime, the slow and systematic diversion of millions of pengos' worth of goods into the black market. The government had begun a campaign to rout out military embezzlement, the Ivory Tower said. The stealing of goods intended for use on the battlefront was considered an act of treason punishable by death. A panic had spread among the labor service company commanders, who were the worst offenders of all. The Jewish labor servicemen could not be trusted to vouch for the innocence of officers who had abused them daily; instead they had to be shunted away out of sight, perhaps even to the Eastern Front.

Jozsef was terrified. Andras could see it. He hardly spoke. He kept to himself, gingerly touching his face where Varsadi had struck him. He never slept, not that Andras saw; he sat up all night sorting and rearranging the few items in his pack. He wouldn't crack a joke. He wouldn't eat the Munkaszolgalat food, preferring instead to pick at a crust of challah left over from the last lunch he'd brought to Szentendre. He refused at first to use the communal toilet can in the corner of the train; when necessity forced him to use it at last, he returned looking as though he'd been beaten.

Day became night again and the train went on. There was no stop for food or water. There was no respite from the heat. The men couldn't lie down; there wasn't room.

They could take turns sitting on the floor of the boxcar or raising their faces to the window. There was some relief in those moments when they could breathe fresh air. But by the fourth day there was no way to ignore the deepening stink nor the clawing thirst that had come upon them, and Andras began to wonder if the true purpose of the trip was to keep them on the train until they died of thirst. In the haze of his dehydration, he came to understand that it was all his fault that they were imprisoned on this eastbound train.

The Crooked Rail
, however tongue-in-cheek, had in fact documented Szentendre's involvement in the black market; it had made the situation known to any labor serviceman too blind or naive to see it on his own, and might well have spread word of the operation beyond Szentendre. Klara had been right; he'd taken an absurd and unnecessary risk. The paper might have been a slender tree in a forest of incriminating evidence, but there it was nonetheless. Varsadi considered it important enough to have called a private conference with Andras and Mendel, important enough to have threatened them with a gun. If fifty copies of the paper hadn't made their way among the men each week, and perhaps out into the city, would Varsadi have been transformed from a tippling laxard into a man willing to send an entire company to the front just to save his own skin?

That afternoon, Andras stood at the window as they climbed through a rainstorm into a region of rock-strewn hills. A massive black shape emerged from behind a curtain of fog: the ruin of a medieval fortress, a jagged-toothed castle thrusting its black donjon into the sky. Andras prodded Mendel's shoulder and made him look. His own chest constricted with the sensation that he had dreamed this moment long ago. Everything about it seemed familiar: the sound of the wheels on the tracks, the filtered darkness of the boxcar, the stink of men packed close together, the chewed-off black shape of the fortress. A metallic taste came into his mouth, and his skin prickled with a feeling akin to shame. How had he let himself believe that he and Klara and Tamas, Tibor and Ilana and Adam, would be hidden in the hold of a Danube barge by now, making their way toward Romania, where they would board a boat that would take them to Palestine? How had he let himself believe they would safely cross a submarine-laced sea, that they would reach Haifa unscathed and start a new life in one of the settlements, that they would bring their parents over, that he himself would help to assemble the bones of a Jewish homeland? He had even let himself believe that Matyas would return from the work service alive and unhurt and join them in Palestine. But the castle on the hilltop, the fog, this train: Somehow he'd known it was coming all along. Somehow he'd known they would never leave Budapest together, that they would never make it out of Hungary and across the Mediterranean. He wondered if Klara had known too. If she had, how had they allowed each other to persist in their mutual delusion?

For years now, he understood at last, he'd had to cultivate the habit of blind hope.

It had become as natural to him as breathing. It had taken him from Konyar to Budapest to Paris, from the lonely chill of his room on the rue des Ecoles to the close heat of the rue de Sevigne, from the despair of Carpathian winter to Forget-Me-Not Street in the Erzsebetvaros. It was the inevitable by-product of love, the clear and potent distillate of fatherhood. It had prevented him from thinking too long or too hard about what might have happened to Polaner, to Ben Yakov, to his own younger brother. It had kept him from dwelling upon the possible consequences of publishing a paper like
The Crooked
Rail
. It had stopped him from imagining himself shipped east into the mouth of the battle.

But here he was, and here was Mendel Horovitz, watching the castle disappear into the fog.

The train went on and on, always climbing, moving slowly into thinner, drier air.

The brutal heat began to fall away, and a scent of fir trees edged through the small high window. The men were silent, parched, faint with hunger and lack of sleep. They took turns sitting and standing. They drifted between sleep and wakefulness, their legs swaying with the motion of the train, their feet numb with the vibration of the wheels on the endless tracks. When the train stopped at a station on the fifth day, Andras could think only of how good it would feel to stretch himself out on the ground and sleep. From outside came the rattle of the door being unchained and drawn aside; a wave of fresh air moved through the stinking car, and the men pushed out onto the platform. Through the fog of his exhaustion, Andras read the station sign. TYPKA. A click at the front of the palate, a pursing of the lips around
ka
, the Hungarian diminutive. A shock of relief went through him: They weren't on the Eastern Front after all. They were still within their own borders.