The Invisible Bridge (83 page)

"Put that out," Andras whispered. "If there's a gas leak down here, we'll all be killed."

"If I'm about to die, I'm going to smoke," Jozsef said.

Andras shook his head. Beside him, Jozsef released a complex luxuriant cloud through his nostrils, as if he meant to take his time. But another concussive blast threw him against Andras, and he dropped the cigarette. A series of shuddering jolts rocketed through the foundation of the building like small earthquakes; this was anti-aircraft fire, the kick of the artillery installation housed not far from the assembly hall. Glass exploded above, and faint cries reached the men through the walls of the shelter.

"At attention, men!" one of the officers commanded. They stood at attention. It took some concentration, there in the flickering dark; they stood that way until the next bombs hit. As the foundation shuddered, Andras thought of the weight of building materials arranged above him: the heavy beams, the flooring, the walls, the tons of cinderblock and brickwork, the roof struts and frame, the thousands and thousands of slate tiles. He thought of all those materials raining down upon the architecture of his own body. Fragile skin, fragile muscle, fragile bone, the clever structures of the organs, the intricate arrangement of his cells--all the things Tibor had pointed out in Klara's anatomy book a lifetime ago in Paris. Suddenly he couldn't breathe. Another detonation knocked the room sideways, and a crack appeared in the ceiling.

Then there was a lull. The men stood silent, waiting. The anti-aircraft artillery must have been hit, or the gunners must have been waiting for the next wave of planes.

That was worse--not to know when the next barrage was going to come. Jozsef's lips moved with some whispered incantation. Andras leaned in, wondering what psalm or prayer might have brought such a look of tranquility to Jozsef's features; when the words resolved into an intelligible line, he almost laughed aloud. It was a Cole Porter tune Jozsef had often played on his phonograph at parties.
I'm with you once more under the
stars / And down by the shore an orchestra's playing / And even the palms seem to be
swaying / When they begin the beguine
. The quiet ended with the renewed staccato of anti-aircraft fire, then a percussive chord of blasts, as if a trio of bombs had struck all at once. The men fell to their knees and the lights went out. Jozsef made an animal noise of panic. So this was how it would happen, Andras thought: Jozsef would receive his retribution here in this tomb under the officers' meeting hall. How like a fairy tale, where selfish wishes often carried a cruel price: Jozsef would die, but Andras would have to die with him. As the bombs continued to fall, Jozsef lowered his forehead to Andras's collarbone and said, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry." The cigarette smoke in his hair was the smell of evenings in Paris. For one unthinking moment, Andras put a hand on Jozsef's head.

Then, all at once, the lights flickered on again. The men got to their feet. They dusted off their uniforms and pretended they hadn't just been clutching each other's arms, crushing their faces against each other's chests, praying and crying and apologizing. They glanced around as if to confirm that none of them had really been afraid. The earth had gone still now; the bombing had stopped. Above, all was silent.

"All right, men," said the officer who had commanded them to stand at attention.

"Wait for the all clear."

It was a long time before the signal sounded. When it came at last there was a push toward the hallways, a crush of men talking in shock-dulled voices. No one knew what they would find when they emerged. Andras thought of the labor camp where they were supposed to stay when they had first arrived in Turka--its mass grave, the wet dirt slumped into the ground like a sodden blanket. He and Jozsef shouldered into a stream of men making their way back toward the staircase. The air in the bunker seemed overbreathed, devoid of oxygen.

There was a bottleneck at the foot of the stairway. As Andras shuffled toward the stairs, someone bumped against him and pushed something into his hand. It was Erdo, his face red and wet, his monocle fallen. "I didn't think of it earlier," he said into Andras's ear. "I was preoccupied with the play. I might have died and never given it to you, or you might have died and never gotten it."

Andras looked down to see what he held in his hand. It was a piece of folded paper wrapped in a handkerchief.

He couldn't wait. He had to see. He unwrapped the corner of the handkerchief, and there was Klara's handwriting on a thin blue envelope. His heart lurched in his chest.

"Hide that," Erdo said, and Andras did.

Back at the orphanage he wanted only to be alone--to get to some private place where he could read Klara's letter. But the men of Company 79/6 met him and the others with a storm of questions. What had happened? Had they seen the planes? Had anyone been killed? Had they themselves been injured? What was the meaning of an air raid so far from the front lines? The guards had been listening to the radio in Kozma's private quarters, but had told the men nothing, of course; the bombing had gone on for so long that the men thought everyone at the school must be dead.

Men had died. That much was true. When they'd come out of the meeting hall--the three walls that remained of it, in any case--they'd been swept into a stream of men running for one of the shelters, which had caved in upon the officers-in-training who had been huddled there. For three hours the labor servicemen and soldiers worked with shovels and pickaxes, ropes and jeeps, to move the mass of wood and concrete that had trapped the men. Seventeen of them had been killed outright by the cave-in. Dozens of others were injured. There were other casualties elsewhere: The mess hall had been flattened before the cooks and dishwashers could get to a shelter, and eleven men had died. It was deduced that General Vilmos Nagy had been the reason for the raid; intelligence of his visit must have reached the NKVD, and Soviet Air Force troops commissioned to attempt an assassination via bombing. But General Nagy had survived.

He had personally supervised the attempt to rescue the men from the collapsed shelter, to the dismay of his young adjutant, who stood nearby surveying the firelit cloud cover as if another rain of Soviet YAK-1s might drop out of it at any moment.

All that time, Andras had carried Klara's letter in his pocket, not daring to read it.

Now, finally, he was at liberty to climb into his bunk and try to decipher her lines in the dark. Jozsef seemed nearly as anxious as Andras; he sat cross-legged on the bunk below, awaiting news. Andras slit the envelope carefully with his razor, then maneuvered into a position that would allow him to use the moonlight as a torch. He pulled the letter out and unfolded it with trembling hands.
15 October 1942

BudapestDear A,

Imagine my relief, and your brother's, when we received your letter! We have all decided
to postpone our trip to the country until you return. Tamas is well, and I am as well as
might be expected. Your parents are in good health. Please send greetings to my nephew.

His parents are well, too. As for what you wrote about M.H.'s departure for Lachaise, I
must hope I have misunderstood you. Please write again soon
.
As ever,
Your K
.

We have all decided to postpone
. It was just as he had feared, only worse. Not just Klara, but Tibor and Ilana too. He would have done the same, of course--would never have left Ilana and Adam alone in Budapest three days after Tibor had disappeared--but it was sad and infuriating nonetheless. In one stroke the Hungarian Army had grounded the entire Levi clan. For the sake of an underground business in army boots and tinned meat, ammunition and jeep tires, they had all been tied to a continent intent upon erasing its Jews from the earth. That horrible truth lodged beneath his diaphragm and made it impossible for him to draw a full breath. He put his hand over the side of the bed and slipped the letter to Jozsef, who reacted with a low note of distress--Jozsef, who had long argued the foolishness of the trip to Palestine. Now, after three months in Ukraine, and after what they had just experienced and seen at the officers' training school, Jozsef knew what it meant to feel one's own vulnerability, to taste the salt of one's own mortality. He understood what it meant for Klara and Tamas, Tibor and Ilana and Adam, to be stranded in Hungary while the war drew closer on all sides. He must have known what his own deportation would have meant to his parents; beneath the
well
in Klara's single line about them, he must have sensed the truth.

But at least he and Andras had this letter, this evidence that life continued at home. Andras could hear Klara's voice reading the coded lines of the letter aloud; for a moment it was as though she were with him, curled small against him in his impossibly short bunk. Her skin hot beneath her close-wrapped dress. The warm black scent of her hair. Her mouth forming a string of spy words, dropping them into his ear like cool glass beads.
We have decided to postpone our trip to the country
. In another moment he would reply, would tell her all that had happened. Then the illusion vanished, and he was alone in his bunk again. He rolled over and stared into the cold muddy square of the courtyard, where the footprints of his comrades had long ago obscured the child-sized prints that had been there when they'd first arrived. In the moonlight he could make out the twin mounds of earth that were Mendel's and Goldfarb's graves, and beyond them the high brick wall, and above it the tops of the trees, and, farther still, a mesh of stars against the blue-black void of the sky.

A Fire in the Snow

THE DAY AFTER the air raid, work on the Turka--Skhidnytsya highway came to a temporary halt. All the Hungarian labor companies in the area were sent to the officers'

training school to repair the damage. The bombed buildings had to be rebuilt, the torn-up roads repaired. General Vilmos Nagy was still in residence; he couldn't go on to Hitler's headquarters in Vinnitsa until it could be determined that the way was safe. Major Kozma, energized by Nagy's presence but not yet appraised of his unconventional political views, took the opportunity to arrange a work circus for his entertainment. The broken bricks and splintered timbers of the officers' dining hall were supposed to be hauled away by horse cart, but there were more carts than there were horses to fill the traces; the stables, too, had suffered in the raid. So Kozma put his men into the traces instead. Eight forced laborers, Andras and Jozsef among them, were lashed in with leather harness straps and made to pull cartloads of detritus from the ruined mess hall to the assembly ground, which had become a salvage yard for building materials. The distance could not have been more than three hundred meters, but the cart was always loaded to overflowing. The men moved as if through a lake of hardening cement. When they fell to their knees in exhaustion, the guards climbed down from the driver's bench and laid into them with whips. A group of officer trainees had stopped their own work to watch the spectacle. They booed when the men fell to their knees, and applauded when Andras and Jozsef and the others struggled to their feet again and dragged the cart a few meters farther toward the unloading area.

By midmorning the spectacle had generated enough talk to come to the attention of Nagy himself. Against the protests of his young adjutant he emerged from the bunker where he'd taken shelter and marched across the assembly ground to the ruin of the mess hall. With his thumbs hooked into his belt, he paused to watch the work servicemen toss debris into the bed of the cart and draw it forward. The general walked from cart bed to harness line, running his hand along the leather straps that connected the men to the traces. Kozma hustled across the mess-hall ruin and positioned himself close to the general. He pulled himself up to his full height and snapped a hand to his forehead.

The general didn't return the salute. "Why are these men harnessed to the wagon?"

he asked Kozma.

"They're the best horses we've got," Kozma said, and winked his good eye.

The general removed his glasses. He was a long time cleaning them with his handkerchief, and then he put them on and gave Kozma a cool stare. "Cut your men loose," he said. "All of them."

Kozma looked disappointed, but he raised a hand to signal one of the guards.

"Not him," the general said. "You do it."

The words sent a shock of energy through the line of harnessed men, a frisson Andras felt through the leather straps at his chest and shoulders.

"At once, Major," Nagy said. "I don't like to repeat an order."

And Kozma had to go to each man and cut the leather straps with his pocketknife, which required him to get closer to them than he'd gotten since they had first come under his command--close enough to smell them, Andras thought, close enough to put himself in danger of catching their chronic cough, their body lice. The major's hands trembled as he fumbled with the interlaced straps. It took him a quarter of an hour to free the eight of them. The officer-trainees who had stopped to watch had disappeared now.

"Have your guards bring a truckload of wheelbarrows from the supply warehouse," the general ordered Kozma. To the men he said, "You will rest here until the wheelbarrows arrive. Then you will remove the debris by the barrow-load." He watched as the work foremen broke the men into their groups as they waited for the carts. Kozma stood silent at the general's side, twisting and twisting his hands as if he meant to shuck them of their skins. The general seemed to have forgotten that his life was in danger, that the NKVD was aware of his presence at the camp. He paid no attention to his adjutant's urgent request that he return to the bunker. At lunchtime, Nagy and the adjutant escorted the men to the new mess tent and saw that they received an extra twenty decagrams of bread and ten grams of margarine. The general had his adjutant drag a bench over to the patch of bare earth where the work servicemen were eating; he took his lunch with them, asking questions about their lives before the war and what they planned to do when it was over. The men responded tentatively at first, uncertain whether or not to trust this exalted person in his decorated jacket, but before long they began to speak more freely. Andras didn't speak; he hovered at the edge of the group, aware that he was witnessing something extraordinary.