"What a relief !" he said. "It's been three days since I slept lying down." He pulled the coverlet over himself and in another moment he was asleep.
Andras set up his books on the table and tried to study, but found he couldn't concentrate. He wanted news of Matyas and his parents. And he wanted news of Budapest--not of its politics or its problems, which anyone could read about in the Hungarian dailies, but of the neighborhood where they'd lived, the people they knew, the innumerable small changes that marked the flow of time. He wanted, too, to tell Tibor what had happened to Polaner, whom he'd seen again that morning. Polaner had looked even worse than before, swollen and livid and feverish. His breath had grated in his throat, and the nurses had bent over him with dressings for his bruises and doses of fluids to raise his blood pressure. A team of doctors gathered at the foot of his bed and debated the risks and benefits of surgery. The signs of internal bleeding persisted, but the doctors couldn't agree whether it was best to operate or whether the bleeding would stop on its own. Andras tried to decode their quick medical patter, tried to piece through the puzzle of French anatomical terms, but he couldn't grasp everything, and his fear prevented him from asking questions. It was horrible to think of Polaner cut open, and even worse to think of the bleeding unstinted inside him. Andras had stayed until Professor Vago arrived to take over the watch; he didn't want Polaner to wake and find himself alone.
Ben Yakov hadn't made an appearance that morning, and no one had heard from Rosen since he'd left the hospital in search of Lemarque.
Now he forced himself to look at his textbook: a list of statics problems swarming in an antlike blur. He willed the numbers and letters into an intelligible order, penciled neat columns of figures onto a clean sheet of graph paper. He calculated the force vectors acting upon fifty steel rods in a load-bearing wall of reinforced concrete, located the points of highest tension along a cathedral buttress, estimated the wind sway of a hypothetical steel structure twice as tall as the Eiffel Tower. Each building with its quiet internal math, the numbers floating within the structures. An hour passed as he made his way through the list of problems. At last Tibor groaned and sat up in bed.
"Orrh," he said. "Am I still in Paris?"
"I'm afraid so," Andras said.
Tibor insisted on taking Andras to dinner. They went to a Basque restaurant that was supposed to serve good oxtail soup. The waiter was a broad-shouldered bully who banged the plates onto the tables and shouted curses at the kitchen. The soup was thin, the meat overcooked, but they drank Basque beer that made Andras feel flushed and sentimental. Here was his brother at last, here they were together, dining in a foreign city like the grown men they'd become. Their mother would have laughed aloud to see them together in this mannish restaurant, leaning over their mugs of ale.
"Be honest," Andras said. "How's Anya? Her letters are too cheerful. I'm afraid she wouldn't tell me if something were wrong."
"I went to Konyar the weekend before I left," Tibor said. "Matyas was there, too.
Anya's trying to convince Apa to move to Debrecen for the winter. She wants him close to a good doctor if he gets pneumonia again. He won't go, of course. He insists he won't get sick, as though he had any control over that. And when I take Anya's side, he asks me who I think I am to tell him what to do. You're not a doctor yet, Tibi, he says. And he shakes his finger at me."
Andras laughed, though he knew it was a serious matter; they both knew how ill their father had been, and how their mother relied on him. "What will they do?"
"Stay in Konyar, for now."
"And
Matyas?"
Tibor shook his head. "A strange thing happened the night before I left. Matyas and I went walking out to the rail bridge above that creek, the one where we used to catch minnows in the summer."
"I know the one," Andras said.
"It was a cold night to be out walking. The bridge was icy. We never should have been up there in the first place. Well, we stood there for a while looking at the stars, and we started talking about Anya and Apa, about what Matyas might have to do if something happened to them, and he was angry at me, you know--I was leaving him to handle everything alone, he said. I tried to tell him they'd be fine, and that if anything truly bad happened, you and I would come home, and he said we'd never come home, that you were gone for good and that I would be soon. We were having this argument above that frozen creek, and then we heard a train coming."
"I don't know if I want to hear the end of this."
"So Matyas says, 'Stay on the bridge. Stand here beside the tracks, on the crossties. See if we can keep our balance when the train comes by. Think you can? Not scared, are you?' The train's coming fast now. And you know that bridge, Andras. The ties give you about a meter on each side of the tracks. And it's maybe twenty meters above the creek. So he jumps onto the ties between the rails and stands there facing the train. It's coming on. The light from the headlamp's already on him. I'm shouting at him to get off, but he's not going anywhere. 'I'm not afraid,' he says. 'Let it come.' So I run at him and put him over my shoulder like a sack of sawdust, and I swear to God, the bridge was iced so badly I nearly fell and killed us both. I got him off and threw him in the snow. The train came by about a second later. He stood up laughing like a madman afterward, and I got up and hit him across the jaw. I wanted to break his neck, the little idiot."
"I
would have broken his neck!"
"Believe me, I wanted to."
"He didn't want you to go. He's all alone there now."
"Not exactly," Tibor said. "He's got quite a life in Debrecen. Nothing like our school days. He and I made it up the next day, and I went back there with him on the way to Budapest. You should see what he's been doing at that nightclub where he performs!
He ought to be in movies. He's like Fred Astaire, but with back handsprings and somersaults. And they pay him to do it! I might be happy for him if I didn't think he's completely lost his mind. He's inches from being kicked out of school, you know. He's failing Latin and history and barely sliding by in his other classes. I'm sure he'll quit as soon as he saves enough for a ticket out of Hungary. Anya and Apa know it, too."
"You didn't tell them about that bridge business, did you?"
"Are you joking?"
They signaled to the waiter for another round of drinks. While they waited, Andras asked about Budapest and their old Harsfa utca and the Jewish Quarter.
"It's all much the same as when you left," Tibor said. "Though everyone's increasingly worried that Hitler's going to drag Europe into another war."
"If he does, the Jews will get the blame. Here in France, at least."
The waiter returned, and Tibor took a long, thoughtful drink of Basque beer. "Not as much fraternite or egalite as you once thought, is there?"
Andras told him about the meeting of Le Grand Occident, and then about what had happened to Polaner. Tibor took off his glasses, wiped the lenses with his handkerchief, and put them on again.
"I was talking to a man on the train who'd just been in Munich," he said. "A Hungarian journalist sent to report on a rally there. He saw three men beaten to death for destroying copies of a state-sponsored anti-Jewish newspaper. Insurgents, the German press called them. One of them was a decorated officer from the Great War."
Andras sighed and rubbed the bridge of his nose. "With Polaner the situation's personal," he said. "There are questions about his relationship with one of the men who did it."
"It's just the same brand of hatred writ small," Tibor said. "Horrible any way you look at it."
"I was a fool to think things would be different here."
"Europe's changing," Tibor said. "The picture's getting bleaker everywhere. But it hasn't all been grim for you here, I hope."
"It hasn't." He looked up at Tibor and managed a smile.
"What's that about, Andraska?"
"Nothing."
"Are you harboring secrets? Have you got some intrigue going on?"
At a nearby bar they ordered whiskey, and he told Tibor everything: about the invitation to the Morgensterns', and how he'd recognized the name and address from the letter; how he'd fallen in love with Klara, not Elisabet; how they'd failed to keep the attraction at bay. How Klara had told him nothing about what had brought her to Paris, or why her identity had to be kept a secret. When he'd finished, Tibor held on to his glass and stared.
"How much older is she?"
There was no way around it. "Nine years."
"Good God," Tibor said. "You're in love with a grown woman. This is serious, Andras, do you understand?"
"Serious as death."
"Put down that glass. I'm talking to you."
"I'm
listening."
"She's thirty-one," Tibor said. "She's not a girl. What are your intentions?"
A tightness gathered in Andras's throat. "I want to marry her," he said.
"Of course. And you'll live on what?"
"Believe me, I've thought about that."
"Four and a half more years," Tibor said. "That's how long it'll take you to get your degree. She'll be thirty-six. When you're her age, she'll be nearly forty. And when you're forty, she'll be--"
"Stop it," Andras said. "I can do the math."
"But have you?"
"So what? So what if she's forty-nine when I'm forty?"
"What happens when you're forty and a thirty-year-old woman starts paying attention to you? Do you think you'll stay faithful to your wife?"
"Tibi, do you have to do this?"
"What about the daughter? Does she know what's going on between you and her mother?"
Andras shook his head. "Elisabet detests me, and she's terrible to Klara. I doubt she'd take kindly to the situation."
"And Jozsef Hasz? Does he know you've fallen in love with his aunt?"
"No. He doesn't know his aunt's whereabouts. The family doesn't trust him with the information, whatever that means."
Tibor laced his fingers. "Good God, Andras, I don't envy you."
"I was hoping you'd tell me what to do."
"I know what I'd do. I'd break it off as soon as I could."
"You haven't even met her."
"What difference would that make?"
"I don't know. I was hoping you might want to. Aren't you even curious?"
"Desperately," he said. "But I won't participate in your undoing. Not even as a spectator." And he called the waiter over and requested the bill, then firmly changed the subject.
In the morning Andras brought Tibor to the Ecole Speciale, where they met Vago at his office. When they entered, Vago was sitting behind his desk and talking on the telephone in his particular manner: He held the mouthpiece between his cheek and shoulder and gesticulated with both hands. He sketched the shape of a flawed building in the air, then erased it with a sweep of his arm, then sketched another building, this one with a roof that seemed flat but was not flat, to allow for drainage--and then the conversation was over, and Andras introduced Tibor to Vago at last, there in the room where he had been the subject of so many morning conversations, as though the talking itself had caused Tibor to materialize.
"Off to Modena," Vago said. "I envy you. You'll love Italy. You won't ever want to go back to Budapest."
"I'm grateful for your help," Tibor said. "If I can ever repay the favor ..."
Vago waved the idea away. "You'll become a doctor," he said. "If I'm lucky, I won't need your favors." Then he gave them the news from the hospital: Polaner was holding steady; the doctors had decided not to operate yet. Of Lemarque there was still no sign. Rosen had kicked down the door of his rooming house the day before, but he was nowhere to be found.
Tibor sat through the morning classes with Andras. He heard Andras present his solution to the statics problem about the cathedral buttress, and he let Andras show him his drawings in studio. He met Ben Yakov and Rosen, who quickly exhausted the few words of Hungarian they'd learned from Andras; Tibor bantered with them in his sparse but fearless French. At noon, over lunch at the school cafe, Rosen talked about his trip to Lemarque's rooming house. He looked depleted now; his face had lost its angry flush, and his russet-colored freckles seemed to float on the surface of his skin. "What a rathole," he said. "A hundred cramped dark rooms full of smelly men. It stank worse than a prison. You could almost feel sorry for the bastard, living in a place like that." He paused to give a broad yawn. He'd been up all night at the hospital.
"And nothing?" Ben Yakov said. "Not a trace of him?"
Rosen shook his head. "I searched the place from basement to attic. Nobody had seen him, or at least they claimed they hadn't."
"And what if you'd found him?" Tibor asked.
"What would I have done, you mean? At the time, I would have choked him to death with my bare hands. But I would have been a fool to do it. We need to know who his accomplices were."
The student cafe began to clear. Doors opened and slammed all around the atrium as students filtered into the classrooms. Tibor watched them go, his eyes grave behind his silver-rimmed glasses.
"What are you thinking about?" Andras asked him in Hungarian.
"Lucky Bela," Tibor said. "Ember embernek farkasa."
"Speak French, Hungarians," Rosen said. "What are you talking about?"
"Something our father used to say," Andras said, and repeated the phrase.
"And what does that mean, in the parlance of the rest of the world?"
"Man is a wolf to man."
That night they were supposed to go to a party at Jozsef Hasz's on the boulevard Saint-Jacques. It was to be the first time Andras would spend an evening at Jozsef's since the beginning of his liaison with Klara. The idea made him anxious, but Jozsef had invited him in person a week earlier; a few of his paintings were to appear in a student show at the Beaux-Arts, which Andras must be sure to miss because it would be a terrible bore, but after the opening there would be drinks and dinner at Jozsef's. Andras had demurred on the basis that Tibor would be in town and that he couldn't burden Jozsef with another guest, but that had only made Jozsef insist all the more: If Tibor were in Paris for the first time, he couldn't miss a party at Jozsef Hasz's.
When they arrived, the company was already drunk. A trio of poets stood on the sofa and shouted verse in three-part cacophony while a girl in a green leotard performed acts of contortion on the Oriental rug. Jozsef himself presided over the card table, winning at poker while the other players scowled at their dwindling piles of money.
"The Hungarians have arrived!" Jozsef said when he saw them. "Now we'll have a real game. Pull up a chair, men! Play cards."
"I'm afraid we can't," Andras said. "We're broke."
Jozsef dealt a hand with dazzling speed. "Eat, then," he said. "If you're broke, you're probably hungry. Aren't you hungry?" He didn't look up from his cards. "Visit the buffet."
On the dining table was a raft of baguettes, three wheels of cheese, pickles, apples, figs, a chocolate torte, six bottles of wine.
"Now that's a welcome sight," Tibor said. "Free dinner."
They made sandwiches of figs and cheese and took them to the large front room, where they watched the contortionist become a circle, a bell, a Spanish knot. Afterward she posed erotically with another girl, while a third girl took photographs with an ancient-looking camera.
Tibor watched in a mesmeric trance. "Does Hasz have parties like this often?" he asked, following the girls with his eyes as they shifted to a new pose.
"More often than you'd imagine," Andras said.
"How many people live in this apartment?"
"Just
him."
Tibor let out a low whistle.
"There's hot water in the bathroom, too."
"Now you're exaggerating."
"No, I'm not. And a porcelain tub with lion feet. Come see." He led Tibor down the hall toward the back of the apartment and paused at the bathroom door
, which stood open just enough to show a sliver of white porcelain. A glow of candles emanated from within. Andras opened the door. There, blinking against the glare from the hallway, was a couple standing against the wall, the girl's hair disheveled, the top buttons of her shirt undone. The girl was Elisabet Morgenstern, one hand raised against the light.
"Pardon us, gentlemen," the man said in American-accented French, each word delivered with drink-soaked languor.
The Invisible Bridge Page 19
