The Invisible Bridge (93 page)

The men walked through the storehouse as if through a museum of a bygone age. There on the shelves were luxuries they hadn't seen for months--tinned sausages, tinned pears, tinned peas; slender boxes of cigarettes; stacks of batteries and bars of soap. They packed those things into squares of canvas or empty cement bags, hoping they might sell or trade them on the way home. Then the Soviets marched the men to a processing camp thirty kilometers away on the Hungarian border, where they lived for three weeks in filthy overcrowded barracks before they were given liberation papers and released. They were two hundred and fifteen kilometers from Budapest. The only way to get there was to walk.

They trusted nobody, traveled at night, evaded the last few fleeing Nazis, who would shoot any Jews they met, and the Soviet liberators, who, it was rumored, could take away your liberation papers and send you off to work camps in Siberia for no reason at all. Jozsef's injured leg meant they had to travel slowly; he could manage no more than ten kilometers before the pain stopped him. From the direction of the city, reports of horrors drifted across the rolling hills of Transdanubia: Budapest bombed to rubble.

Hundreds of thousands deported. A winter of starvation. The part of Andras's mind that he was accustomed to sending in Klara's direction had shriveled to a hard knot, like scar tissue. He allowed himself to imagine nothing beyond the moment's necessary work; he fixed his mind on his own survival. He would not allow himself to remember the first weeks of the year, that gray-blue blur of horror that was January 1945. The surgical wound in his side had healed to a puckered pink seam; the injured spleen, the torn intestine, had resumed their invisible work. He would not think about his parents, about Matyas; would not think about Tibor, who had disappeared somewhere beyond the Austrian border. With Jozsef at his side he slept in the ruins of barns or dug into haystacks and bedded down in the sweet-smelling dark, then woke to nightmares of being buried alive. By night they walked in the thick brush beside a highway that led toward Budapest. One evening, when they stopped at the back door of a large country house to trade German cigarettes and batteries for eggs and bread, they learned from the cook that Russian tanks had entered Berlin. She showed them where they could conceal themselves in a stand of lilacs by an open window and listen to that night's radio broadcast. Amid the clusters of syringa they listened as a BBC announcer described the events transpiring in the German capital. To Andras the English words were a maze of sharp vowels and rapid-fire consonants, but Jozsef knew the language. The Russians, he translated, had surrounded the Reichstag, where Hitler had chosen to make his last stand; no one knew what was going on within.

One morning a few days later, as they slept in a boathouse on Lake Balaton beneath a mildewed canvas sail, they were awakened by the sound of bells. Every bell in the nearby town, Siofok, rang balefully, as though a great emergency were at hand.

Andras and Jozsef ran out of the boathouse to find the townspeople streaming into the streets, moving toward the center of town in a stunned procession. They followed the crowd to the town square, where the mayor--a war-starved grandfather in an ill-fitting Soviet jacket--climbed the steps of the courthouse and announced that the war in Europe was over. Hitler was dead. Germany had signed an agreement of unconditional surrender in Reims. A cease-fire would go into effect at midnight.

From the crowd, a single beat of silence; then they roared in celebration and threw their hats into the air. For that moment it didn't seem to matter that Hungary had been on the losing side, that its shining capital on the Danube had been bombed to rubble, that the country had fallen under Soviet control, that its people had nothing to eat, that its prisoners still hadn't returned, that its dead were gone forever. What mattered was that the war in Europe was over. Andras and Jozsef put their arms around each other and wept.

The hills east of Buda had come into their young leaves, insensate to the dead and the grieving. The flowering lindens and plane trees seemed almost obscene to Andras, inappropriate, like girls in transparent lawn dresses at a funeral. He and Jozsef hiked the ruined streets on the east side of Castle Hill; at the top they paused and stood looking out over the city in silence. The beautiful bridges of the Danube--Margaret Bridge, the Chain Bridge, the Elizabeth Bridge, all those bridges whose every inch Andras knew by heart, every one of them as far as he could see--lay in ruins, their steel cables and concrete supports melting into the sand-colored rush of the river. The Royal Palace had been bombed into the shape of a crumbling comb, a Roman lady's hair ornament excavated from an ancient city. The hotels on the far side of the river had fallen to ruins; they seemed to kneel on the riverbank in belated supplication.

In wordless shock, avoiding each other's eyes, Andras and Jozsef stumbled down through the streets of the old city toward the bridgeless river. They knew they had to cross, knew that whatever waited for them waited on the far bank, amid the remains of Pest. Near Ybl Miklos ter, the square named for the architect who had designed the Operahaz, they found a slip where a line of boatmen waited to ferry passengers across.

For their passage they traded their last six packages of cigarettes and a dozen large batteries. The boatman, a red-faced boy in a straw hat, looked exceptionally well fed. As the boat cut toward the opposite shore, the feeling in Andras's chest was like a hand raked through the tissue of his lungs; his diaphragm contracted with a spasm so painful he couldn't breathe. The boat, a leaking skiff, made a shaky downstream progress across the river, twice threatening to capsize before it delivered them sick and shaking to the shore of Pest. They climbed out onto the wet sand beneath the embankment, the water lapping their shoes. Then they ascended the stone steps and stared up into a corridor of ruined buildings. On either side, a few buildings stood intact; some had even retained the colored tiles of their decorative mosaics, the leaves and flowers of their Baroque ornamentation. But Andras and Jozsef's path toward the center of town led them through a museum of destruction: endless piles of bricks, splintered beams, shattered tiles, fractured concrete. The dead had been moved out of the street long before, but crosses stood on every corner. Signs of ordinary life presented themselves as if in total ignorance of this disaster: a clean shop window full of dough twisted into the usual shapes; a red bicycle reclining against a stoop; from far away, the improbable clang of a streetcar bell.

Farther along, the skeleton of a German plane protruded from the top story of a building.

A section of burned wing had fallen to the ground; the rust along its edges suggested it had lain there for months. A dog sniffed the blackened steel ribs of the wing and trotted off down the street.

They went along together toward Nefelejcs utca, toward the buildings where their families had lived--the building where Jozsef had said goodbye to his mother and grandmother; the building where Tibor and Ilana had moved after Andras's return; the building where Andras and Klara had crouched together on the bathroom floor the night before his departure. They turned the corner from Thokoly ut and passed the familiar greengrocer's, empty of green, and the familiar sweet shop, empty of sweets. At the corner of Nefelejcs utca and Istvan ut was a pile of wreckage, a mountain of plaster and stone and wood and brick and tile. Across the street, where Jozsef's family and Tibor and Ilana had lived, there was nothing at all. Not even a ruin. Andras stood and stared.

Later he would say of himself, "That was when I lost my head." It was the closest he could come to describing the feeling: His head had departed from his body, had been sent, like the evacuated children of Europe, somewhere dull and distant and safe. His body went to its knees in the street. He wanted to tear his clothing but found he couldn't move. He wouldn't listen to Jozsef, wouldn't consider that his wife and child, or children, might have left the building before it had been destroyed. He couldn't see anyone or anything. Passersby moved around him as he knelt on the pavement.

He might have stayed there an hour, or two, or five. Jozsef seated himself on an upturned cinderblock and waited. Andras was aware of him as a kind of fine tether, a monofilament connecting him, against his will, to what was left of the world. His eyes, unfocused on the ruin of the building, filled and drained and filled again. And then a familiar sound resolved from the nebula of his dulled senses: the sound of delicate hooves on pavement, the jingle of twin bells. The sound approached until it reached him, then went still. He raised his eyes.

It was the tiny grandmother of Klein, and her goat cart, newly painted white.

"My God," she said, and stared at him. "Is it Andras? Is it Andras Levi?"

He took her hand and kissed it. "You remember me," he said. "Thank God. Do you know anything about my wife? Klara Levi? Do you remember her, too?"

"Get up," she said. "Let me take you to my house."

The house in Frangepan koz stood in its ancient silence, in a haze of dust suspended in the viscous light of late afternoon. In the yard, a quartet of tiny goatlets nosed at a bucket of breadcrusts. Andras ran the stone path to the door, which stood open as if to admit the breeze. Inside, on the sofa where Andras had first waited to see Klein, lay his wife, Klara Levi, asleep, alive. At the other end of the sofa was his son, Tamas, deep in a nap, his mouth open. Andras knelt beside them as if in prayer. Tamas's skin was flushed with sleep, his forehead pink, his eyes fluttering beneath the lids. Klara seemed farther away, scarcely breathing, her skin a luminous white film over her faintly beating life. Her hair had come out of its coil and lay over her shoulder in a twisted rope. Her arm was crooked around a sleeping baby in a white blanket, the baby's hand an open star on Klara's half-bare breast.

My pole star, Andras thought. My true north.

Klara stirred, opened her eyes, looked down at the baby and smiled. Then she became aware of another presence in the room, an unfamiliar shape. Instinctively she drew her blouse over her breast, covering that slip of damp white skin.

She raised her eyes to Andras and blinked as if he were the dead. She pressed her eyes with a thumb and forefinger and then looked again.

Andras.

Klara.

They wailed each other's names into the ancient space of that room, into that dust-storm of antique sunlight; their little boy, their son, woke with a start and began to cry in panic, unable to distinguish joy from grief. And perhaps at that moment joy and grief were the same thing, a flood that filled the chest and opened the throat: This is what I have survived without you, this is what we have lost, this is what is left, what we have to live with now. The baby raised a high wet voice. They were together, Klara and Andras and Tamas, and this little girl whose name her father did not know.

KLARA HAD SURVIVED the Siege of Budapest in a women's shelter at Szabadsag ter, under the protection of the International Red Cross. The Allies would not bomb it; the Germans had little interest in it. The inhabitants, young mothers and babies, were of no use to them. Klara had gone there in early December, a few weeks after the Russians had reached the southeastern edge of the capital. By that time Horthy had been deposed, the Arrow Cross had come to power, and seventy thousand Jews had been deported from Budapest. Those who had escaped deportation had had to move twice: first from their original homes to yellow-star buildings, Jewish-only apartments in neighborhoods all over the city; and then to a tiny ghetto in the Seventh District, in the streets surrounding the Great Synagogue.

In the first wave of displacements, Klara and Ilana, the children, Klara's mother, and Elza Hasz had all been assigned to a building on Balzac utca, in the Sixth District.

Polaner had gone with them. The diminutive Mrs. Klein, grandmother of Miklos Klein, had provided her goat cart to help them transport their things. Klara had seen Klein's grandmother on a last desperate visit to the Margit korut prison, where Gyorgy was supposed to have been interned; Mrs. Klein had been there to inquire about Miklos. There had been no news of either man that day, but as the women had walked together afterward along the Danube embankment, trying to distract each other from their fear and grief, they'd talked of the practical difficulties of the upcoming move. On the day designated for their departure from Nefelejcs utca, Klara had awakened to an early-morning knock at the door. It was Miklos Klein's grandmother in her peasant skirt and black boots, with the news that her goat cart stood at the ready in the courtyard. Klara had looked over the balcony railing, and there was the cart beside the fountain, two white goats sniffing at the water. Miklos Klein's grandmother, it turned out, had been assigned to a building not far from Klara's own, and had already transported what she and her husband could salvage from their tiny homestead in Angyalfold. Seven goats had accompanied them to the inner district of the city: these two wethers, two milch does, three kids. Klara could see them herself that very afternoon, Klein's grandmother said; she'd hidden the goats in a carriage house behind the yellow-star building on Csanady utca.

Even with the aid of the goat cart, they'd had to leave almost everything behind.

They were moving into a single room in a three-room apartment with a shared bath; one family lived there already and a third would join them. Klara and Ilana, the children, the elder and younger Mrs. Hasz, and Polaner, carrying his loaded gun--the seven of them had crossed the city on foot, through crowds of thousands of Jewish men and women and children pushing their possessions in wheelbarrows or carrying them on their backs or leading them along in horse carts. It took four hours to make the journey of two kilometers. When they carried their things upstairs, they found that all the rooms were occupied; a fourth family had been assigned to the apartment at the last moment. But there was nowhere else for any of them to go, so they would have to share. And that was the beginning of five months in that apartment on Balzac utca. Soon it came to seem to Klara that she had always slept on a pallet on the floor between her mother and her child, had always shared a bath with sixteen others, had always woken to the sound of her elder sister-in-law weeping. Miklos Klein's grandmother arrived every few days with goat's milk for the children and for Klara, reminding Klara that she must keep up her strength for the sake of the baby in her womb. But Klara's pregnancy seemed a terrible irony, the mockery of a promise. As she waited in line for bread one day, two old women had spoken of her as though she weren't there, or couldn't hear:
Look at that poor Jewish
pregnant woman. What a shame she's got no future
.