The Invisible Bridge (94 page)

In fact, the aperture to any future beyond the war seemed to contract by the day.

They lived in constant fear of deportation; from the outlying towns came news of thousands sent away in closed trains. In the capital itself there were horrors enough: frequent Arrow Cross raids on the yellow-star buildings, the displaced families'

possessions stolen, men and women taken away for no reason other than that they happened to be home when the Nyilas men arrived. At times there was reason for hope, reason to think the nightmare might soon end; in July, Horthy stopped all deportations of Jews from Hungary. The Budapest Jews thought they were saved. Klara heard rumors in the streets of talks between Hungary and the Allies, plans for an armistice. Then in mid-October came Horthy's announcement that Hungary had concluded a separate peace with the Russians. For a few hours there were mad celebrations in the streets. Men tore down the yellow-star signs above their doorways, and women ripped the yellow-star patches from their children's coats. But then came the terrible double blow of the Arrow Cross coup and Szalasi's installation as prime minister. The deportations began again, this time in Budapest: Tens of thousands of men and women were taken from their houses and marched to the brickyards at Obuda, then onward toward Austria. The actions of the Arrow Cross seemed dictated purely by cruel whim. A gang of Nyilas men had raided the building across the street from their own, and had deported nearly a dozen men and women, many of them too old for active labor; Klara had expected their own building to be raided at any moment, but the men had never returned.

All that time, the front lines of the war had been drawing closer and closer. Hitler, determined to keep the Russians from reaching Vienna, decided to delay them at Budapest as long as possible; as winter approached, Nazi and Hungarian forces dug in for what everyone already knew to be a futile struggle. Red Army forces encircled the city in a tightening ring. Air raids drove the terrified civilians underground every night. At times it seemed to Klara they were living in the air-raid shelter, that they spent their entire lives huddling in the dark. There were moments when she almost wished for the shuddering blast she'd experienced a thousand times in her mind, the crushing darkness after which there would be nothing at all. But one morning when Klein's grandmother came to deliver the goat's milk, she brought a slip of hope: A few women and children from her building had moved to an International Red Cross shelter at Szabadsag ter, at the very center of the city. Klara and Ilana must go there as soon as possible, must try to get in while there was still space. If Klara was lucky, she might be able to have her baby there. Surely there would be a better chance of getting medical help if she were under the protection of the International Red Cross.

The next day the order came that the Jews must move again at the end of November, this time to the ghetto in the Seventh District. It was clear that there was no time to waste. Klara and Ilana went that afternoon to make inquiries at the International Red Cross offices at Vadasz utca, and learned that Klein's grandmother had been correct: There was a shelter for women and babies at Szabadsag ter. Klara and Ilana received papers that would allow them to bring the children there that very day. They went home and packed the last of their money and valuables, the children's diapers and clothing, a few sheets and blankets; they loaded the bundles into Tamas's and Adam's baby carriages and dressed the children in their warmest coats. Then, for the last time, Klara said goodbye to Elza Hasz and to her own mother--though she had not known it was to be the last time. Her mother had pressed her wedding band and engagement ring into Klara's hand.

"Don't be sentimental," her mother had said, her eyes calm and steady on Klara's.

"Trade them for bread if you have to." She'd made Klara slip the rings onto her finger, had given her a brusque kiss of the kind she'd always given Klara in the mornings before school, and then she'd gone inside to pack what little she could take to the ghetto.

Polaner had volunteered to escort Klara and Ilana the fourteen blocks they would have to walk to the shelter. In his pocket he carried the Walther P-38 given to him by the officer who'd arranged his safe passage to Hungary, and in his arms he carried Tamas, who had become inseparable from Polaner during the turmoil of the past months. At the doorway of the Red Cross building on Perczel Mor utca, Tamas, faced with the prospect of Polaner's departure, raised such an uproar that the shelter director told Polaner he could stay the night to help the women and children settle in. The director was the mother of a little girl whom Klara had taught a few years earlier. The girl, who had died of scarlet fever, had been a favorite of Klara's, and her mother wanted to do whatever she could to help. In gratitude for her kindness, Polaner explained that his false papers and his Nazi Party identity card might allow him to be of help to the women and children of the shelter; at least until the Russians arrived, he would have a certain freedom of movement in the city. By morning he had taken an inventory of the many things the shelter's inmates needed. Milk for the babies was at the top of the list. So the first gift he brought to the shelter was half a dozen goats: the wethers, the does, and two of the three kids that had been living in the carriage house behind the yellow-star building on Csanady utca. Klein's grandmother had entrusted them to Polaner's care that morning when she and her husband had departed for the Seventh District ghetto, taking the last kid with them.

The Red Cross shelter was housed on the second story of the building, in three rooms of what had once been an insurance office. Mothers who had arrived in fur coats and custom-made shoes sat on desk chairs or on the floor, nursing their babies alongside those who had come with their feet wrapped in newspaper. Day and night the women filled the shelter with urgent talk and weeping and low infrequent laughter. They soothed the babies with songs, tried to distract the two- and three-year-olds with hand games and improvised toys. Pebble-filled pillboxes became rattles; dirty rags became pigtailed dolls.

The mothers took turns washing their babies' diapers in a laundry room on the ground floor, their only source of running water. When bombs broke the windows and the building became so cold that the newly washed diapers froze, they wrapped the diapers around themselves at night and dried them with the heat of their bodies. Ten times a day, it seemed, they rushed down to the shelter beneath the building and huddled there while bombs fell all around Szabadsag ter.

Polaner worked tirelessly for the women and children. He scrounged rags for diapers; he stole the women's own winter clothing back from the apartments they'd been forced to leave. At night, in violation of the city-wide curfew, he gleaned fodder for the goats from abandoned stables and from the garbage that had begun to pile in the streets.

On his travels through the neighborhood he discovered the secret Jewish hospital on Zichy Jeno utca, a few blocks from the shelter, where an Armenian doctor named Ara Jerezian had assembled forty Jewish physicians and their families. The Arrow Cross flag flew over the shelter entrance, and Jerezian wore the official Nyilas uniform. He had renounced his party membership years earlier, in protest against the Arrow Cross's anti-Jewish policies, but had taken it up again when he realized he might work secretly for the Jews from inside the party. Under the pretense of setting up a hospital for the Arrow Cross wounded, he'd assembled the Jewish doctors and their families and had laid in a store of food and medicine. Now, in those cramped apartments that had become a hospital, the doctors were treating the horrific casualties of the siege. Polaner brought sick women and babies from the Red Cross shelter to that hospital and took them back again when they were better. In return for the doctors' attention, he gave their hungry children what little goat's milk could be spared.

All over the city, people were beginning to starve. The first weeks of December the Red Cross shelter had been supplied with soup, which had to be transported on a cart from a kitchen on the other side of Szabadsag ter. When the soup ran out there were soybeans and potatoes in their own cooking water; then just the soybeans; then, finally, nothing except what the goats produced on their own starvation diet. The women of the shelter pooled their jewelry and gave it to Polaner so he might trade it for food; Klara slipped her mother's wedding band and engagement ring into the bag with the rest. But Polaner returned empty-handed. The women's jewelry was worth nothing. There was no food to be had. Even the scant running water had ceased to run. Their only water now came from melted snow they'd brought in from the courtyard. The women became sick with hunger and thirst, and a drought of milk spread through the shelter. At first the children cried, but by the beginning of January they had become too weak to protest. One by one they went silent, their breathing a fluttering of wings beneath the breastbone. That was when Polaner did what Klein's grandmother had instructed him to do if the situation grew dire. That gentle textile-maker's son, the dovelike young man skilled with pen and protractor, killed the goats and their kids with his Walther P-38, then turned them over to one of the shelter's inmates, a woman whose husband had been a butcher and who knew what to do with Polaner's knife.

A week later, on the eighth of January, Klara's labor began. Ilana insisted that she must go to the hospital on Zichy Jeno utca; after two cesarean sections, she could hardly risk labor at the shelter. Ilana herself would care for Tamas. She kissed Klara and assured her that all would be well. Then Klara and Polaner struggled through a network of smoke-darkened alleys to Ara Jerezian's hospital. As the fighting drew closer, the halls of the hospital had become clogged with horrifically wounded soldiers; men lay crying and sweating and panting on cots along the walls, and the hallways were slick with blood.

The doctors could scarcely pause to consider the situation of a healthy woman in labor, whatever her history. Klara and Polaner waited in a makeshift kitchen for three hours until a series of contractions brought her to her hands and knees. At last Polaner begged the help of Ara Jerezian himself, who took Klara to his office and made a pallet for her on the floor. Polaner brought water, sponged Klara's forehead, changed her soaked sheets as she labored. When it became clear that the baby was in the breech position, and that Klara couldn't deliver without a cesarean, Dr. Jerezian brought her to an impromptu operating theater--three metal tables lit only by a bank of high windows--and anesthetized her with morphine as the steadfast Polaner averted his eyes. Klara woke to learn she'd had a girl, whom she named Aprilis in the hope that she would live to see the spring. And Polaner observed that the baby resembled her father.

For five days Klara recovered in Jerezian's office. Whatever food Polaner could find in the hospital, he brought to her. He tended her wound, cooled her forehead with wet cloths, held the baby while she slept. The baby, tiny at birth, gained weight on Klara's milk. When at last they carried her home to the Red Cross shelter, they found Tamas silent and glassy-eyed in the director's arms. Where was Ilana? they asked. Where was the boy's aunt, who was supposed to care for him? The director regarded them for a moment in silence, her mouth trembling, and then she told them.

Adam Levi had died of a fever on the twelfth of January. In a delirium of grief, his mother had run out into the street, where a Russian shell had killed her.

The fighting continued in Pest for six more days. The Russian forces drew close now to the center of the city, seeming to converge upon Szabadsag ter itself; artillery fire shook the building day and night. Klara, in a shock of grief and fear, huddled in the bomb shelter with the baby while Tamas clung to Polaner. She would die without seeing her husband again; if he lived, how would he even learn of her death, of their children's deaths? It was possible he might never learn he'd had a daughter.
A shame she doesn't
have a future
. What kind of future could be imagined after such a time? That night, when Polaner ventured out to get water at a standpipe across the street, he returned with the news that Nyugati Station was on fire, and that Hungarian soldiers were fleeing in the direction of the Danube bridges. That infernal glow along the Danube was the conflagration of the grand hotels. Flames climbed the dome and spire of Parliament.

Civilians rushed toward the river with their dogs and bags and children, but the bridges were under bombardment. In the whole city there was nothing left to eat. Klara received the last piece of news with the understanding that she would watch her children die. Later that night, when a shallow panicked sleep overtook her, she dreamed of feeding her own right hand to the children; she felt no pain, only a relief that she had arrived at this ingenious solution.

In the morning she woke to an unaccustomed quiet. In place of gunfire there was a resonant stillness. Now and then a burst of shots cut through the morning air, and from the west bank of the Danube, where the fighting continued, came the faint echo of battle.

But the battle for Pest was over. The bridges had all been destroyed; the Soviets held the city. The last Nazis in Pest had been taken as prisoners of war, or were cowering in buildings where they had made others cower. In the Red Cross shelter, the women waited for some sign of what to do. They were faint with thirst and hunger, sick with grief; though the building had withstood the night's bombing, two more babies had died. The children who had survived were quieter that day, as if they knew something had changed.

By midday the shelter residents came out of the building and into the cold gray light of Szabadsag ter. What they saw seemed like an image from a newsreel or a dream: the American flag flying brazenly above the shuttered embassy. Two Arrow Cross soldiers lay dead on the embassy steps, the breasts of their overcoats tattered with bullet holes. A pair of Russian military policemen stood at the edge of the square and stared at the smoking dome of the Parliament building. The director of the shelter crossed the square toward the Russian men and fell to her knees before them; they could understand nothing she said, but they offered her their canteens.