The Invisible Bridge (78 page)

TYPKA. He didn't realize he'd said it aloud until the Ivory Tower, standing next to him, shook his head and corrected him. "Turka," he said. "It's written in Cyrillic."

And so it was, because they had reached Ukraine.

The camp where they were supposed to stay had been bombed a week earlier. A hundred and seventy men had been killed, the barracks leveled. The remaining men had had to dig vast graves to bury their comrades; the turned dirt had slumped into the pits with that week's rain. That labor company had left nothing behind but the bones of their dead--no sign or tool or scrap of comfort for the men of the 79/6th. Andras and the others camped in the mud of the assembly ground, and the next day they were installed in the main house and outbuildings of an empty Jewish orphanage half a kilometer away.

The place was built of Soviet cinderblock, its whitewash greened with mildew.

Everything inside the main house had been intended for the use of children. The bunks were absurdly short. The only way to lie on them was to curl one's knees to one's chest.

The sinks had running water, which was nothing less than a miracle, but they were built so low that it was necessary almost to kneel in order to wash one's face. The mess hall was furnished with tiny benches and low tables; the hallways were still marked with the children's heel-scuffs and muddy footprints. There was no other sign of them in the place.

Every shred of clothing, every shoe and book and spoon, had been removed as though the children had never existed.

Their new commander was a beefy-looking black-haired Magyar whose face was bisected by a spectacular keloid scar. The scar ran in an arc from the middle of his forehead to the tip of his chin, obliterating his right eyelid, skirting his nose by a millimeter, splitting his lips into four unequal parts. The lidless right eye gave his features a cast of perpetual surprise and horror, as if the initial shock of the wound had never left him. His name was Kozma. He came from Gyor. He had a gray wolfhound whom he alternately kicked and petted, and a lieutenant named Horvath whom he treated in the same manner. On their first morning at the orphanage, Kozma assembled the company in the yard and marched them five kilometers down the road, double-time, to a wet field where grass had grown unevenly over a long filled-in trench. This was where the children of the orphanage had been lined up and shot, their new commander told them, and this was where they, too, would be shot when their usefulness to the Hungarian Army had been exhausted. Their dog tags might return home, but
they
never would; they were filthier than pigs, lower than worms, already as good as dead. For now, though, their company would join the five hundred work servicemen who were rebuilding the road between Turka and Stryj. The old road flooded every time the Stryj River topped its banks. The new road would be laid on higher ground. Minefields posed a minor obstacle to the operation; on occasion, servicemen must clear the fields in order to allow the road to pass through. They were to finish the road by the time the snows came. Then they would be responsible for keeping it clear. The records-master, Orban, would see to their pay books. Tolnay, the medical officer, would treat them if they fell ill. But shirkers would not be tolerated. Tolnay was under strict orders to do everything in his power to keep the men from missing work. They were to obey the guards and officers in all matters; troublemakers would be punished, deserters shot.

When he'd concluded his speech, Kozma clicked his heels, swiveled the mass of his body with surprising speed, and stepped aside to let his lieutenant address the company. Lieutenant Horvath seemed a kind of collapsible model, his frame and features accordioned into a slimmer version of an ordinary man. He balanced a pair of spectacles on his nose and drew a memo from his breast pocket. There would be no electric light after dark, he told them in his thin monotone, no letter-writing, no canteen shop where they might replenish their supplies, no replacement uniforms if their uniforms got worn out or torn, no forming of groups, no fraternizing with guards, no pocketknives, no smoking, no hoarding of valuables, no shopping at stores in town or trading with the local peasantry. Their families would soon be informed of their transfer, but there was to be no postal communication between the 79/6th and the outside world--no packages, no letters, no telegrams. For safety's sake they must wear their armbands at all times. Without the proper identification, a person might be mistaken for the enemy and shot.

Horvath shouted them into five columns and marched them into the road again; they were to depart for their work site at once. The road was wet with deep sucking mud.

As the light began to rise, Andras saw that they were in a broad river valley that stretched between foothills dense with evergreens. In the distance rose the jagged gray peaks of the Carpathians. Clouds lay on the hillsides, bleeding fog into the valley. The rain-swollen Stryj rushed past between steep brown banks. Before long, Andras could feel the upward slope of the road in his back and thighs. The list of prohibitions kept spooling itself through his head: no electric light after dark, no letter-writing, no postal communication.

No way to get word to Klara. No way to learn what had happened to her, or to Tibor and Ilana and Adam, or to Matyas, if news of Matyas ever came. During his other periods of service, it had been Klara's letters that had kept him from despairing; the need to write
I
am well
that had kept him, relatively speaking, well. How could he bear not to communicate, particularly after what had happened? He would have to find a way to send word to her, whatever the consequences. He'd bribe someone, sign promissory notes if he had to. He would write letters and his letters would find her. In the midst of the vast uncertainty that surrounded him, he knew that much.

It was ten kilometers to the work site; there, they were issued picks and shovels and divided into twenty teams of six. Each team had two wheelbarrow men and four shovelers. They could see hundreds of these teams shoveling dirt and carting it away, leveling the roadbed for the laying of gravel and asphalt. A line of leveled road stretched back toward Turka; a trail of red surveyors' markers pricked the green infinity between the work site and Skhidnytsya. Overseers snaked among the groups, slicing at the labor servicemen's backs and legs with narrow wooden rods.

They worked for five hours without pause. At noon they were given ten decagrams of a bread so gritty it must have been baked with sawdust, and a ladleful of watery turnip soup. Then they worked until nightfall and marched home in the dark. At the orphanage the company cook gave them each a cupful of onion broth. They were lined up in the courtyard and made to stand at attention for three hours before Kozma sent them to bed in their child-sized bunks. And that was to be the structure of their new lives.

Andras had a top bunk near a window, and Mendel had the bunk beside him, above the Ivory Tower. Jozsef occupied the bunk below Andras. Their first week at the orphanage Andras could hear Jozsef turning and shifting for hours on the hard wooden slats. Every time he turned, he shook Andras from the edge of sleep. By the fifth night Andras felt inclined to strangle him. All he wanted was to sleep so he wouldn't have to think about where he was, and why. But Jozsef wouldn't allow it. He rolled and shifted, rolled and shifted, for hours and hours.

"Stop it!" Andras hissed. "Go to sleep."

"Go to hell," Jozsef whispered.

"You go to hell."

"I'm in hell already," Jozsef said. "I'm going to die here. I know it."

"Something will kill us all, eventually," Mendel offered from the neighboring bunk.

"I've got a weak constitution and a short temper," Jozsef said. "I make bad decisions. I'm liable to talk back to someone with a gun."

"You've been in the work service for two months now," Andras said. "You haven't died yet."

"This isn't Szentendre," Jozsef said.

"Think of it as Szentendre with worse food and an uglier commander."

"For God's sake, Levi, aren't you listening? I need help."

"Keep it down!" someone said.

Andras climbed down from his bunk and sat at the edge of Jozsef's. He found Jozsef's eyes in the dark. "What is it?" he whispered. "What do you want?"

"I don't want to die before I'm thirty," Jozsef whispered back, his voice breaking like a boy's. He ran a hand under his nose. "I'm unprepared for this. I've done nothing these past five years but eat and drink and fuck and make paintings. I can't survive work camp."

"Yes, you can. You're young and healthy. You'll get through it."

They sat silent for a long moment, listening to the breathing of the men around them. The sound of fifty men breathing in their sleep: It was like the string section of an orchestra playing on stringless violins and violas and cellos, an endless shushing of horsehair on wood. Every now and then a woodwind sneeze or a brassy cough would break the stream of breathing, but the stringless music continued, a constant sighing in the dark.

"Is that all, then?" Jozsef said, finally. "That's what you've got for me?"

"Here's the truth," Andras said. "I don't have much heart to give you a pep talk."

"I don't want a pep talk," Jozsef whispered. "I want to know how to survive.

You've been doing this for almost three years. Don't you have any advice?"

"Well, don't publish a subversive newspaper, for one thing," Andras said. "You might find your commanding officer pointing a gun at you across his desk."

"Is that what happened?" Jozsef said. "What did he want?"

"Our printing plates and originals. He threatened to search our houses if we didn't produce them."

"Oh, God. What did you tell him?"

"The truth. The originals are in our editor's office at the
Jewish News
. Or were.

Varsadi's got them by now, I'm sure."

Jozsef let out a long breath. "That'll have been a bad day at work for your editor."

"I know. I've been sick about it. But what were we going to do? We couldn't send Varsadi's men to Nefelejcs utca."

"All right," Jozsef whispered. "I'll be certain not to publish a subversive newspaper. What else?"

Andras told Jozsef what he knew: Keep quiet. Become invisible. Don't make enemies of the other work servicemen. Don't talk back to the guards. Eat what they give you, no matter how bad it is, and always save something for later. Keep as clean as you can. Keep your feet dry. Take care of your clothes so they don't fall apart. Know which guards are sympathetic. Follow all the rules you can stand to follow; when you break the rules, don't get caught. Don't let yourself forget the life back home. Don't forget that your term of service is finite.

He went silent, remembering the other list he and Mendel had made long ago, the ten commandments of the Munkaszolgalat. Had it only been three years since he'd been sent to Carpatho-Ruthenia? By whose reckoning could the term of service be called finite? Suddenly he couldn't stand to think or talk about it a moment longer. "I've got to get to sleep," he said.

"All right," Jozsef said. "Listen, though. Thanks."

"Shut up, you idiots," Mendel whispered from the neighboring bunk.

"You're welcome," Andras said. "Now go to sleep."

Andras climbed up into his own bunk and wrapped himself in his blanket. Jozsef didn't make another sound; his tossing and shifting had stilled. But Andras lay awake and listened to the other men's breathing. He remembered quiet nights like this from the beginning of his first conscription. Before long there would be no easy sleep for any of them; someone would always be coughing or groaning or running for the latrine, and there would be the torment of lice, and the dull nauseating pain of hunger. Midnight lineups, too, if Kozma was inclined. The Munkaszolgalat was like a chronic disease, he thought--its symptoms abated at times, but always returned. When he'd begun his service in Transylvania he'd felt precisely what Jozsef was feeling now, the deep injustice of it all. This couldn't possibly be happening to him, not to him and Klara, not to his mind, not to his body, that sturdy and faithful machine. He couldn't believe that all the great urgencies of his time in Paris--everything that had seemed important, all his studies, every project, every moment with Klara, every secret, every worry about money or school or work or food--had been boxed away, stripped of context, made nonsensical, made small, consigned to impossibility, crammed into a space too narrow to admit life.

But today as he'd marched to work and shoveled dirt and eaten the miserable food and slogged home through the mud, he hadn't felt indignant; he'd hardly felt anything at all.

He was just an animal on the earth, one of billions. The fact that he'd had a happy childhood in Konyar, had gone to school, learned to draw, gone to Paris, fallen in love, studied, worked, had a son--none of it was predictive of what might happen in the future; it was largely a matter of luck. None of it was a reward, no more than the Munkaszolgalat was a punishment; none of it entitled him to future happiness or comfort. Men and women suffered all over the world. Hundreds of thousands had already died in this war, and he himself might die here in Turka. He suspected the chances were heavily in favor of it. The things he could control were few and small; he was a particle of life, a speck of human dust, lost on the eastern edge of Europe. He knew there would come a time, perhaps not far off, when he would find it hard to follow the rules he'd just set out for Jozsef.

He had to think of Klara, he told himself. He had to think of Tamas. And his parents, and Tibor, and Matyas. He had to pretend it wasn't hopeless; he had to allow himself to be fooled into staying alive. He had to make himself a willing party to the insidious trick of love.

At the end of Andras's second week in Turka, the road surveyor's assistant was killed by a land mine. It happened at the cusp of the new road, a few kilometers from Andras's work site, but word traveled quickly through the line of work teams. The surveyor's assistant had been one of them, a labor serviceman. He'd been helping the surveyor map the road through a Soviet minefield. The field was supposed to have been cleared months earlier by another labor company, but that group must have been anxious to call the job finished. The assistant had tripped the mine as he'd been setting up the tripod. The explosion had killed him instantly.