The Invisible Bridge (91 page)

What a luxury it had been, Lucky Bela thought, to have had the time and inclination for a quarrel. He had admired his son's defense of his choice of wife. In the end he had been right, too: Klara had been a good match for him--as good, it seemed, as Flora had been for Bela. Lucky. Yes, he was lucky, even now. Flora was there at his side, the policeman's hand on her shoulder--his wife, the mother of his sons, willing to risk her life for them in the middle of the night, despite his protests; unwilling to allow him to go alone.

At last the policeman delivered them to the courtyard that led to the cellar. With an antiquated and incongruous politeness, he held the door as they entered that tunnel back to their enclosed lives. Before long they had reached their own building and climbed the stairs to their apartment, where they undressed in the dark without a word. There would only be a few hours to sleep before they would rise to the circumscribed business of their day. In bed, Flora pulled the coverlet to her chin and let out a sigh. There was nothing more they could say to each other, nothing more to do. Their boys, their babies.

The little three, as they'd always called them. The little three adrift on the continent, like wooden boats. Flora turned over and put her head on Lucky Bela's chest, and he stroked the silver length of her hair.

For another few weeks they would share this bed while the Jews of Hajdu County were massed in Debrecen. Then, on a late June morning, as the nasturtium vine opened its trumpets on the veranda and the white goats bleated in the courtyard, they would descend the stairs, each with a single suitcase, and walk with their neighbors through the ghetto gates, down the familiar city streets, all the way to the Serly Brickyards west of town, where they would be loaded onto a train almost identical to the one that had carried their sons to no one knew where. The train would roll west, through the stations with the window boxes full of geraniums; it would roll west through Budapest. Then it would roll north, and north, and farther north, until its doors opened at Auschwitz.

The train carrying Andras and Tibor and Jozsef rolled east to the edge of the country. There, in a Carpatho-Ruthenian town whose name would change twice as it became part of Czechoslovakia again and then part of the Soviet Union, they were escorted by armed guards to a camp three kilometers from the Tisza River. Their task would be to load timber onto barges for transport through Hungary and on toward Austria. They were assigned to a windowless bunkhouse with five rows of three-tiered bunks; outside, along the edge of the building, was a line of open sinks where they could wash. That evening at dinnertime they drank a coffee that was not coffee, ate a soup that was not soup, and received ten decagrams of gritty bread, which Tibor made them save for the next day. It was the fifth of June, a mild night redolent of rain and new grass. The fighting had not yet reached the nearby border. They were permitted to sit outside after dinner; a man who'd brought a violin played Gypsy tunes while another man sang.

Andras could not know--and none of them would learn, not for months--that later the same night, a fleet of Allied ships would reach the coast of Normandy, and thousands of troops would struggle ashore under a hail of gunfire. Even if they'd known, they wouldn't have dared to hope that the Allied invasion of France might save a Hungarian labor company from the terrors of the German occupation, or keep their own bend of the Tisza from being bombed while they were loading the barges. Even if they'd known of the invasion, they would have known better than to attempt to determine one set of circumstances from another, to trace neat lines of causality between a beach at Viervillesur-Mer and a forced labor camp in Carpatho-Ruthenia. They knew their situation; they knew what to be grateful for. When Andras lay down that night on his wooden bunk, with Tibor on the tier above and Jozsef below, he thought only: Today at least we're together. Today we are alive.

IN THE END, what astonished him most was not the vastness of it all--that was impossible to take in, the hundreds of thousands of dead from Hungary alone, and the millions from all over Europe--but the excruciating smallness, the pinpoint upon which every life was balanced. The scale might be tipped by the tiniest of things: the lice that carried typhus, the few thimblefuls of water that remained in a canteen, the dust of breadcrumbs in a pocket. On the tenth of January, at the cold disordered dawn of 1945, Andras lay on the floor of a boxcar in a Hungarian quarantine camp a few kilometers from the Austrian border. The nearby town was Sopron, with its famous Goat Church. A vague childhood memory--an art-history lesson, a white-haired master with a moustache like the disembodied wings of a dove, an image of the carved stone chancel where Ferdinand III had been crowned King of Hungary. According to the legend, a goat had unearthed an ancient treasure on that site; the treasure had been buried again when the church was built, as a tribute to the Virgin Mary. And so, somewhere up the hill, beneath the church whose blackened spire was visible from where he lay, an ancient treasure moldered; and here in the quarantine camp, three thousand men were dying of typhus.

Andras climbed into the swirling heights of a fever through which his thoughts proceeded in carnival costume. He remembered, vaguely, having been told that the quarantined men were supposed to consider themselves lucky. Those not infected had been shipped over the Austrian border to labor camps.

Some facts he could grasp. He counted these certainties like marbles in a bag, each with its twist of blood- or sea-colored glass. Their bend of the Tisza had, in fact, been bombed. It had happened on an unseasonably warm night in late October, nearly five months after they'd arrived at the camp. He remembered crouching in the darkness with Tibor and Jozsef, the walls shuddering as shock waves rolled through the earth; only by an act of grace, it seemed, had their building remained intact. Thirty-three men had been crushed in another bunkhouse when it collapsed. Six bargemen and half a company of Hungarian soldiers, quartered that night on the riverbank, had all been killed. The 55/10th, in tatters, had fled west ahead of the advancing Soviet Army. For weeks their guards had shuffled them from one town to another, quartering them in peasants' huts or barns or in the open fields, as the war rumbled and flared, always a few kilometers away.

By that time Hungary had fallen into the hands of the Arrow Cross. Horthy had proved too difficult for Germany to control; under pressure from the Allies he had stopped the deportations of Jews, and on the eleventh of October he'd covertly negotiated a separate peace agreement with the Kremlin. When he announced the armistice a few days later, Hitler had forced him to abdicate and had exiled him to Germany with his family. The armistice was nullified. Ferenc Szalasi, the Arrow Cross leader, became prime minister.

The news reached the labor servicemen in the form of new regulations: They were now to be treated not as forced laborers, but as prisoners of war.

Those things Andras remembered in detail. More confusing was what had passed between then and now. Through the haze of his fever he tried and tried to remember what had happened to Tibor. He remembered, weeks or months earlier, fleeing with Tibor and Jozsef along a road west of Trebisov on a bright day, pursued by the sound of Russian tanks and Russian gunfire. They'd been separated from their company; Jozsef had been sick and couldn't keep up. German jeeps and armored cars shot along the road beside them. Approaching from behind, an earthquake: Russians in their rolling fortresses, guns blazing. As they fled along the road, Jozsef had stumbled into the path of a German armored car. He'd been thrown into a ditch, his leg twisted into an angle that was--the fevered Andras grasped in darkness for the word--
unrealistic
. It was unrealistic; it did not represent life. A leg did not bend in that way, or in that direction, in relation to a man's body. When Andras reached him, Jozsef was open-eyed, breathing fast and shallow; he seemed in a state of strange exultation, as though in one quick stroke he'd been vindicated on a point he'd argued fruitlessly for years. Tibor bent beside him and put a careful hand to the leg, and Jozsef released an unforgettable sound: a grating three-toned shriek that seemed to crack the dome of the sky. Tibor drew back and gave Andras a look of despair: He was out of morphine, the supplies he'd hoarded in Budapest exhausted by now.

Moments later, it seemed, an olive-colored van had appeared, Austrian Wehrmacht flags fluttering at its bumpers, a red cross painted on its side. Andras tore the yellow armband from his sleeve, from Jozsef's, from Tibor's; now they were just three men in a ditch, without identity. Austrian medics arrived, judged them all in need of immediate medical care, and loaded them into the van. Soon they were moving along the road at an incredible rate of speed--still fleeing before the Russians, Andras imagined. Then there was a burst of deafening noise, a brilliant explosion. The canvas of the van tore away, floor became ceiling, a tire traced an arc against a backdrop of clouds. A jolt of impact. A thrumming silence. From somewhere close by, Jozsef calling for his father, of all people.

Tibor stood unharmed amid dry cornstalks, dusting snow from his sleeves. Andras, a wild white pain abloom in his side, lay in a furrow of the field and stared at the sky, an impossibly high milk blue stretching forever above him. In his memory a cloud took the shape of the Pantheon, a suggestion of columns and a dome. A moment later that milky blue, that dome, disappeared into an enfolding darkness.

Later he had opened his eyes to a vision so blinding he was certain he had died.

Snow-white walls, snow-white bedstead, snow-white curtains, snow-white sky outside the window. He came to understand that he was lying on a hospital cot, under the excruciating weight of a thin cotton blanket. A doctor with a Yugoslav name, Dobek, removed a bandage from Andras's side and examined a red-toothed wound that extended from beneath his lowest rib to just above his navel. The sight of it brought on a wave of nausea so deep that Andras looked around in panic for a bedpan, and the motion called forth a shearing pain inside the wound. The doctor begged Andras not to move. Andras understood, though the admonition came in a language he didn't know. He lay back and fell into a dreamless sleep. When he woke, Tibor was sitting in a chair beside the cot, his glasses unbroken, his hair clean, his face washed, his labor-service rags exchanged for cotton pajamas. Andras had been wounded, he explained; the medical van had hit a mine.

He'd had to have emergency surgery. His spleen had been damaged, his small intestine severed near the terminal ileum; but all had been repaired, and he was recovering well.

Where were they? In Kassa, Slovakia, in a Catholic hospital, St. Elizabeth's, under the care of Slovak nuns. And where was Jozsef? Recovering in a neighboring ward; his leg had been shattered, and he'd had a complicated surgery.

They lay in that Slovak hospital, he and Jozsef, for an indeterminate number of weeks; he lay there recovering from his terrible wound, and Jozsef from his complex fracture, while a war raged nearby. Tibor came and went. He was serving the nuns, the doctors, working at their side, assisting in surgery, triaging new patients who came in. He was exhausted, grim with the sight of bullet- and bomb-ravaged bodies, but there was a calm purpose in his expression: He was doing what he'd been trained to do. The Russians were making progress, he told Andras, slowly but steadily. If the hospital could survive the onslaught of the battle, they might all be safe soon.

But then the Nazis arrived to clear the hospital.
Evacuate
was the word they used, though the meaning wasn't the same for everyone. In that place where no patient had been asked his religion, no distinction made between gentile and Jew, the Jews were now identified and herded into a corridor. Andras and Tibor supported Jozsef between them, his leg unwieldy in its plaster cast, and the three of them were marched to a train and loaded onto a boxcar. Again they rolled off into the unknown, south and west this time, toward Hungary.

For nearly a week they traveled across the country. Tibor gleaned what he could about their location from the shouts he overheard when the train stopped, or from the little he could see from the tiny window in the bolted door. They were at Alsozsolca, then at Mezokovesd, then at Hatvan; there was a moment of wild hope that they might turn south toward Budapest, but the train rolled onward toward Vac. They skirted the border near Esztergom and traveled for a time along the ice-choked Danube, then through Komarom and Gyor and Kapuvar, toward the western border. All that way, Tibor had cared for Andras and Jozsef, preserving their delicate recovery. When Andras vomited on the boxcar floor, Tibor cleaned him, and when Jozsef had to use the can at the back of the car, Tibor walked him there and helped him. He ministered to the other patients, too, many of whom were too sick to understand their luck. But there was little he could do.

There was no food, no water, not a clean bandage or a dose of medicine. At night Tibor lay beside Andras for warmth, and whispered in Andras's ear as if to keep them both from losing their minds.
Let me tell you a story
, Tibor said, as if Andras were the son Tibor had left behind.
Once there was a man who could speak to animals. Here is what the man
said. Here is what the animals said
. A vast deep itching spread over every inch of Andras's body, even inside the wound: the bites of lice. A few days later came the first tendrils of fever.

When the train stopped, it meant that they had reached the edge of the country.

Again they were to be sorted into two groups: those who could cross and those who could not cross. Those who had typhus wouldn't be allowed to cross. They would be placed in a quarantine camp on the border.

"Listen to me, Andras," Tibor had said, just before the selection. "I'm going to pretend to be ill. I'm not going to be sent over the border. I'm going to stay with you here in the quarantine camp. Do you understand?"