The Invisible Bridge (82 page)

Dear K
, he wrote that night.
Your nephew and I send greetings from the town of
T. I write with the hope that this letter will not reach you in Budapest, that you will have
already departed for the country. If you have postponed that trip, I beg you not to delay
longer for my sake. You must go at once if the opportunity arises. I am well, but would be
better if I knew you were proceeding with our plans
. And then the terrible news:
Our
friend M.H., I must tell you, was forced to depart a month ago for Lachaise
. A reference to the cemetery in Paris. Would she understand?
I feel as you might imagine. I miss you
and Tamas terribly and think of you day and night. Will write again as soon as possible.

With love, your A
.

He folded the letter and hid it in the inner pocket of his jacket, and the next day he put it into Erdo's hands. There was no way to know when or whether or how it might find its way to Klara, but the thought that it might do so eventually was the first consolation he'd had in recent memory.

If Andras was surprised when the young officers-in-training, his set-building crew, accepted his direction with respectful deference, the surprise faded quickly. After a few weeks of evening duty at the officers' training school, it came to seem ordinary to walk among them as a kind of foreman, checking their adherence to his plans. Between them there was little consciousness of difference and little formality. The officers-in-training and the work servicemen called each other by their first names, then by diminutives--Sanyi, Jozska, Bandi. They weren't allowed to eat together in the officers'

mess hall, but often the crew went to the back door of the kitchen at dinnertime and brought back food for all of them. They ate on the stage, cross-legged amid the construction projects and half-painted backdrops. Andras and Jozsef, locked in a wordless struggle, nonetheless gained weight and got the sets built. They waited for answers to their letters, hoping each time Erdo entered the officers' meeting hall that he would call them into his office and pull a smudged envelope from his breast pocket. But the weeks dragged on and no response came. Erdo told them to be patient; the mail service was notoriously slow, and even slower when the correspondence had to cross borders.

As the performance of
The Tatars in Hungary
drew nearer and still no response arrived, Andras grew half mad with worry. He was sure that Klara and Gyorgy and Elza had been arrested and thrown in jail, that Tamas had been left in the care of strangers.

Klara would be tried and convicted and killed. And he was trapped here in Ukraine, where he could do nothing, nothing; and once the play was finished he would lose his connection to Erdo, and with it the possibility of sending or receiving word from home.

On the twenty-ninth of October, the new Hungarian minister of defense arrived in Turka. There was to be an official procession through the village. All the companies in the vicinity were to be present. That morning, Major Kozma marched the men of the 79/6th to the central square of the village and commanded them to stand at attention along its western side. They had been ordered to wash and mend their torn uniforms in preparation for General Vilmos Nagy's visit; thread and patches had been provided. They had done what they could, but still they looked like scarecrows. Roadwork had destroyed their jackets and trousers. They had managed to cadge a few pieces of civilian clothing from the Ukrainian black-market ragmen, but they couldn't replace their torn uniforms with new ones; the army no longer supplied clothing for labor servicemen. Andras had observed the degeneration of his own uniform during his time at the officers' training school. His jacket and trousers had come to look more and more like a vagrant's costume alongside the young officers' starched khakis.

At the head of a company of scrubbed-looking officer-trainees on the opposite side of the square, Andras could make out Erdo's erect posture and winking monocle. His buttons flashed gold fire in the morning light. This was high drama for him, all of it. He was satisfied with the work Andras and Jozsef had done. When they'd displayed the finished sets and backdrops just before the dress rehearsal, he'd been so enthusiastic in his praise that he had burst a capillary in his left eye. The dress rehearsal itself had been perfect except for a few forgotten lines, but all had been rectified now, all had been polished to a military sheen. The sets, the costumes, even a grand curtain of red-and-gold-painted canvas, waited in readiness for the general's arrival. The play would make its debut that night.

The general's motorcade was preceded by the officer-trainees' marching band: a few desperately earnest trumpeters, a phlegmatic trombonist, a fat flautist, a red-faced drummer. Behind them came a pair of armored trucks flying the Hungarian flag, then a string of military policemen on motorcycles, and finally General Vilmos Nagybaczoni Nagy in an open car, a glossy black Lada with white-rimmed tires. The general was younger than Andras had expected, not yet gray, still inhabiting a vigorous middle age.

His uniform bristled with decorations of every shape and color, including the turquoise-and-gold cross that represented the Honvedseg's highest award for bravery in combat.

Riding beside him was a younger man in a less resplendent uniform, apparently an adjutant or secretary. Every few moments the general would look away from the ranks of men to whisper something in the young officer's ear, and the young officer would scribble furiously on a stenographer's pad. The general's gaze seemed to linger over the companies of work servicemen in particular. Andras didn't dare look at him directly, but felt Nagy's eyes passing over him as the motorcade rolled by. The general bent his head and spoke to the adjutant, and the young man took notes. After the motorcade had made its turn around the square, the band stepped out of its way and the cars roared off in the direction of the officers' training school.

When Andras and Jozsef arrived at the meeting hall to make the last preparations for the show, they found that all had fallen into confusion. The stage sets had been shoved aside so the chief officer of the academy might give the official welcome speech, and in the process, two of the backdrops had been torn and one side of the papier-mache cave had been crushed. Erdo paced from one end of the stage to the other in panicked dismay, declaring at full volume that the repairs would never be finished in time, while Andras and Jozsef and the others rushed to make things right. Andras patched the cave with a bucket of paste and some brown paper; Jozsef mended a Roman ruin with a roll of canvas tape. The other men realigned and rehung the second torn backdrop. By the time the dinner hour was over, all was in order. The actors arrived to don their Tatar and Magyar costumes and practice their vocal exercises. They preened and buzzed and mumbled their lines backstage with as much gravity and self-importance as the actors at the Sarah-Bernhardt.

At half past eight the meeting hall filled with officers-in-training. There was a tense festivity in their clamor, a rising thrum of anticipation. Andras found a dim corner of the wings from which he could watch the speeches and the show. He caught a glimpse of the martial glitter of the general's jacket as he strode up the center aisle and took his seat in the front row of benches. The school's chief officer mounted the stage and made his address, a rhetorical pas de deux of deference and pomposity, punctuated with gestures that Andras recognized from newsreels of Hitler: the hammerlike fist on the podium, the uptwisting index finger, the conductorial palm. The chief officer's bluster earned him six seconds of dutiful applause from the officers-in-training. But when General Nagy rose to take the stage, the men got to their feet and roared. He had chosen them, had graced them with the first stop of his eastern tour; when he left them he would go directly to Hitler's headquarters at Vinnitsa. He raised a hand to thank them, and they sat down again and fell silent with anticipation.

"Soldiers," he began. "Young men. I won't make a long speech. I don't have to tell you that war is a terrible thing. You're far from home and family, and you'll go farther still before you return. You're brave boys, all of you." Vilmos Nagy had none of the swagger or dramatic fire of the school's commanding officer; he spoke with the rounded vowels of a Hajdu peasant, gripping the podium with his large red hands. "I'll speak frankly," he said. "The Soviets are stronger than we thought. You're here because we didn't take Russia in the spring. Many of your comrades have died already. You're being trained to lead more men into battle. But you are Magyars, boys. You've survived a thousand years of battle. No enemy can match you. No foe can defeat you. You slew the Tatars at Pest. You routed eighty thousand Turks at Eger Castle. You were better warriors and better leaders."

A round of wild cheers broke forth from the officers-in-training; the general waited until the noise had subsided. "Remember," he said, "you're fighting for Hungary.

For Hungary, and no one else. The Germans may be our allies, but they're not our masters. Their way is not our way. The Magyars are not an Aryan people. The Germans see us as a benighted nation. We've got barbarian blood, wild ideas. We refuse to embrace totalitarianism. We won't deport our Jews or our Gypsies. We cling to our strange language. We fight to win, not to die."

Another cheer from the men, this one more tentative. The young officers-in-training had been taught to revere German authority absolutely; they had been taught to speak of Hungary's all-important and all-powerful ally with unconditional respect.

"Remember what happened this summer on the banks of the Don," Nagy said.

"Our General Jany's ten divisions were spread over a hundred kilometers between Voronezh and Pavlovsk. With just those ten light divisions, Generalfeldmarschall von Weichs expected us to keep the Russians on the east bank. But you know the story: Our tanks were defenseless against the Soviets' T-34s. Our arms were outmatched. Our supply chain failed. Our men were dying. So Jany pulled his divisions back and made them take defensive positions. He saw where he stood and made a decision that saved the lives of thousands of men. For this, von Weichs and General Halder accused us of cowardice!

Perhaps they would have admired us more if we'd let forty or sixty thousand of our men die, instead of only twenty thousand. Perhaps they would have liked to see us spill every last drop of our barbarian blood." He paused and looked out across the rows of silent men, seeming to meet their eyes in the dark. "Germany is our ally. Her victory will strengthen us. But never believe that Germany has any other aim besides the survival of the Reich.
Our
aim is Hungary's survival--and by that I mean not just the preservation of our sovereignty and our territories, but of our young men's lives."

The men had fallen into a rapt silence. No one applauded now; they were all waiting for Nagy to go on. So seldom had they been told the truth, Andras thought, that it had struck them dumb.

"You men have been trained to fight intelligently and minimize our losses," Nagy continued. "We want to bring you home alive. We won't need you any less once the war is over." He paused and gave a deep sigh; his hands were trembling now, as if the effort of delivering the speech had exhausted him. He glanced into the wings of the stage, into the darkness where Andras stood watching. His eyes settled on Andras for a long moment, and then he looked out at the young officers-in-training again. "And one more thing," he said. "Respect the labor servicemen. They're getting their hands dirty for you.

They're your brothers in this war. Some officers have chosen to treat them like dogs, but that's going to change. Be good men, is what I'm saying. Give respect where it's due." He bowed his head as if in thought, and then shrugged. "That's all," he said. "You're fine brave soldiers, all of you. I thank you for your work."

He stepped down from the podium to an accompaniment of somber, bewildered applause. No one seemed to know quite what to think of this new minister of defense; some of the things he'd just said sounded as though they shouldn't have been uttered in public, and certainly not at an officers' training school. But there was little opportunity to react. It was time for the play to begin. The Magyars assembled onstage for the first scene, and the work servicemen dragged the Roman ruin into place and lowered a backdrop that depicted a wash of blue sky above the moss-colored hills of Buda. When they hoisted the curtain a flood of light filled the stage, illuminating the martial-looking Hungarians in their painted armor. The Magyar chieftain drew his sword and raised it aloft. Then, just before he could speak his opening line, the air itself seemed to break into a deep keening. The assembly hall reverberated with a rising and falling plaint of grief.

Andras knew the sound: It was an air-raid siren. They had all practiced the drill, both here and at the orphanage. But there was no drill planned for this evening, nor was this part of the play. This was the real thing. They were going to be bombed.

All at once the audience got to its feet and began pushing toward the exits. A cluster of officers surrounded General Nagy, who lost his hat in the crush. He clutched at his bare head and glanced around him as his staff hustled him to a side door. The actors fled the stage, dropping their pasteboard weapons, and began to crowd toward a stairway at the back of the hall. Andras and Jozsef and the other work servicemen followed the actors down a flight of stairs that led to a shelter beneath the building. The shelter was a honeycomb of concrete rooms linked by low-ceilinged hallways. The men pushed into a dark enclosure at a turn of one of the hallways; more officers-in-training poured into the room after them. Far above, the air-raid sirens wailed.

When the first bombs hit, the shelter shook as if the moon itself had fallen from its orbit and crashed to earth just overhead. Concrete dust rained from the ceiling, and the lightbulbs flickered in their wire cages. A few men cursed. Others closed their eyes as if in prayer. Jozsef asked an officer-in-training for a cigarette and began to smoke it.