The Invisible Bridge
Page 41
The station was crowded with August travelers, its floor a maze of rucksacks and trunks, boxes and valises. Soon Tibor would get on a train and go back to Italy with Ilana; in the ticket line Andras touched Tibor's sleeve and said, "I wish I could be there to see you married."
Tibor smiled and said, "Me too."
"I couldn't have guessed it would turn out this way for you."
"I didn't dare to hope it would," Tibor said.
"Lucky bastard," Andras said.
"Let's hope it runs in the family," Tibor said. His gaze had drifted toward the front of the line, where a slight, dark-haired woman had opened a wallet to count out notes.
Andras felt a pang: She wore her hair the way Klara did, in a loose knot at the nape of her neck. Her summer coat was cut like Klara's, her posture elegant and erect. How cruel of fate, he thought, to place a vision of her before him at that moment.
And then, as she turned to replace the wallet in her valise, it seemed his heart would stop: It was her. She met his eyes with her gray eyes and raised a hand to show him a ticket: She was going with him. Nothing he could say would keep her from it.
PART FOUR
The Invisible Bridge
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Subcarpathia
IN J ANUARY OF 1940, Labor Service Company 112/30 of the Hungarian Army was stationed in Carpatho-Ruthenia, somewhere between the towns of Jalova and Stakcin, not far from the Cirocha River. This was the territory Hungary had annexed from Czechoslovakia after Germany had taken back the Sudetenland. It was a craggy wild landscape of scrub-covered peaks and wooded hillsides, snow-filled valleys, frozen rock-choked streams. When Andras had read about the annexation of Ruthenia in the Paris newspapers or seen newsreel footage of its forested hills, the land had been nothing more than an abstraction to him, a pawn in a game of Hitlerian chess. Now he was living under the canopy of a Carpatho-Ruthenian forest, working as a member of a Hungarian Labor Service road-construction crew. After his return to Budapest, all hope of having his visa renewed had quickly evaporated. The clerk at the visa office, his breath reeking of onions and peppers, had met Andras'a request with laughter, pointing out that Andras was both a Jew and of military age; his chances of being granted a second two-year visa were comparable to the chances that he, Markus Kovacs, would spend his next holiday in Corfu with Lily Pons, ha ha ha. The man's superior, a more sober-minded but equally malodorous man--cigars, sausages, sweat--scrutinized the letter from the Ecole Speciale and declared, with a patriotic side-glance at the Hungarian flag, that he did not speak French. When Andras translated the letter for him, the superior proclaimed that if the school was so fond of him now, it would still want him after he'd finished his two years of military service. Andras had persisted, going to the office day after day with increasing frustration and urgency. August was coming to an end. They had to get back to Paris.
Klara's situation was perilous and could only become more so the longer they stayed.
Then, in the first week of September, Europe went to war.
On the flimsiest of pretexts--SS men dressed as Polish soldiers had faked an attack on a German radio station in the border town of Gleiwitz--Hitler sent a million and a half troops and two thousand tanks across the Polish border. The Budapest daily carried photographs of Polish horsemen riding with swords and lances against German panzer divisions. The next day's paper showed a battlefield littered with dismembered horses and the remnants of ancient armor; grinning panzer troops clutched the greaves and breastplates to their chests. The paper reported that the armor would be displayed in a new Museum of Conquest that was under construction in Berlin. A few weeks later, as Germany and Russia negotiated the division of the conquered territory, Andras received his labor-service call-up. It would be another eighteen months before Hungary entered the war, but the draft of Jewish men had begun in July. Andras reported to the battalion offices on Soroksari ut, where he learned that his company, the 112/30th, would be deployed to Ruthenia. He was to depart in three weeks' time.
He brought the news to Matyas at the lingerie shop on Vaci utca where he was arranging a new display window. A group of correctly dressed middle-aged ladies watched from the sidewalk as Matyas draped a line of dress forms with a series of progressively smaller underthings, a chaste burlesque captured in time. When Andras rapped on the glass, Matyas raised a finger to signal his brother to wait; he finished pinning the back of a lilac slip, then disappeared through an elf-sized door in the display window. A moment later he appeared at the human-sized door of the shop, a tape measure slung over his shoulders, his lapel laddered with pins. Over the past two years he had changed from a rawboned boy into a slim, compact youth; he moved through the mundane ballet of his day with a dancer's unselfconscious grace. At his jawline a perpetual shadow of stubble had emerged, and at his throat the neat small box of an Adam's apple. He had their mother's heavy dark hair and high sharp cheekbones.
"I've got a couple more wire girls to dress," he said. "Why don't you join me? You can give me the news while I'm pinning."
They went into the shop and entered the display window through the elf-sized door. "What do you think?" Matyas said, turning to a narrowwaisted dress form. "The pink chemise or the blue?" It was his practice to trim his windows during business hours; he found it drew a steady stream of customers demanding to buy the very things he was installing.
"The blue," Andras said, and then, "Can you guess where I'll be in three weeks?"
"Not Paris, I'd imagine."
"Ruthenia, with my labor company."
Matyas shook his head. "If I were you, I'd run right now. Hop a train back to Paris and beg political asylum. Say you refuse to go into service for a country that takes gifts of land from the Nazis." He sank a pin into the strap of the blue chemise.
"I can't become a fugitive. I'm engaged to be married. And the French borders are closed now, anyway."
"Then go somewhere else. Belgium. Switzerland. You said yourself that Klara's not safe here. Take her with you."
"Ride the rails like vagrants, both of us?"
"Why not? It's a lot better than being shipped off to Ruthenia." But then he straightened from his work and regarded Andras for a long moment, his expression darkening. "You've really got to go, don't you."
"I can't see any way around it. The first deployment's only six months."
"And then you'll have a stingy furlough, and then you'll be sent back for another six months. And then you'll have to do that twice more." Matyas crossed his arms. "I still think you should run."
"I wish I could, believe me."
"Klara's not going to be too happy about any of this."
"I know. I'm on my way to see her now. She's expecting me at her mother's."
Matyas cuffed him on the shoulder for luck and held the little door open so he could slip through. He stepped down into the shop and went out through the bigger doors, waving to Matyas through the glass as he made his way past the women who had gathered to watch. He could scarcely believe it was nearing October and he wasn't on his way back to school; in recent days he'd found himself combing the Pesti Naplo obsessively for news of Paris. Today's papers had shown a crush at the railway stations as sixteen thousand children were evacuated to the countryside. If he and Klara had remained in France, perhaps they would have left the city too; or perhaps they would have chosen to stay, bracing themselves for whatever was to come. Instead here he was in Budapest, walking along Andrassy ut toward the Varosliget, toward the tree-shadowed avenues of Klara's childhood. It had come to seem almost ordinary now to spend an afternoon at the house on Benczur utca, though only a month had passed since they had first arrived in Budapest. At that time they'd been so uncertain about Klara's situation that they'd been afraid even to go to the house; they'd taken a room under Andras's name at a tiny out-of-the-way hotel on Cukor utca, and decided that the best course of action would be to warn Klara's mother of her fugitive daughter's presence in Budapest before Klara herself appeared at the
house. The next afternoon he'd gone to Benczur utca and presented himself to the housemaid as a friend of Jozsef's. She had shown him into the same pink-and-gold-upholstered sitting room where he'd passed an uncomfortable hour on the day of his departure for Paris. The younger and elder Mrs. Hasz were engaged in a card game at a gilt table by the window, and Jozsef was draped over a salmon-colored chair with a book in his lap. When he saw Andras in the doorway, Jozsef peeled himself from the chair and delivered the expected jovial greetings, the expected expressions of regret that Andras, too, had been forced to return to Budapest. The younger Mrs. Hasz offered a polite nod, the elder a smile of welcome and recognition. But something about Andras's look must have caught Klara's mother's attention, because a moment later she laid her fan of cards on the table and got to her feet.
"Mr. Levi," she said. "Are you well? You look a bit pale." She crossed the room to take his hand, her expression stoic, as if she were bracing for bad news.
"I'm well," he said. "And so is Klara."
She regarded him with frank surprise, and Jozsef's mother rose too. "Mr. Levi,"
she began, and paused, apparently unsure of how she might caution him without revealing too much to her son.
"Who is Klara?" Jozsef said. "Surely you don't mean Klara Hasz?"
"I do," Andras said. And he explained how he'd carried a letter to Klara from her mother two years earlier, and then how he'd been introduced to her. "She lives under the name of Morgenstern now. You know her daughter. Elisabet."
Jozsef sat down slowly on the damask chair, looking as though Andras had struck him with a fist. "Elisabet?" he said. "Do you mean to say that Elisabet Morgenstern is Klara's daugher? Klara, my lost aunt?" And then he must have remembered the rumors of what had existed between Andras and the mother of Elisabet Morgenstern, because he seemed to focus more sharply on Andras, staring at him as if he'd never seen him before.
"Why have you come?" the younger Mrs. Hasz asked. "What is it you want to tell us?"
And finally Andras broke the news he had come to deliver: that Klara was not only well, but here in Budapest, staying at a hotel in the Ferencvaros. As soon as he'd spoken, Klara's mother's eyes filled with tears; then her expression became overshadowed with terror. Why, she asked, had Klara had undertaken such a terrible risk?
"I'm afraid I'm partly to blame," Andras said. "I had to return to Budapest myself.
And Klara and I are engaged to be married."
At those words, a kind of pandemonium broke upon the sitting room. Jozsef's mother lost her composure entirely; in a panic-laced soprano she demanded to know how such a thing could have come to pass, and then she declared that she didn't want to know, that it was absurd and unthinkable. She called the housemaid and and asked for her heart medication, and then told Jozsef to fetch his father from the bank immediately. A moment later she retracted the command on the basis that Gyorgy's hasty exit in the middle of the day might raise unnecessary suspicion. Meanwhile, the elder Mrs. Hasz implored Andras to tell her where Klara might be found, whether she was safe, and how she might be visited. Andras, at the center of this maelstrom, began to wonder whether he would emerge on the other side of it still engaged to Klara, or if her brother and his wife could exercise some esoteric power that would nullify any attachment between a member of Klara's class and one of his own. Already Jozsef Hasz was looking at Andras with an unfamiliar, perhaps even a hostile expression--of confusion, betrayal, and, most disturbingly to Andras, distrust.
Soon it became clear that the elder Mrs. Hasz could not be prevented from going to Klara at once. She had already called for the car; she wanted Andras to accompany her.
The chauffeur would drive them halfway to the tiny hotel on Cukor utca, and they would walk the remaining blocks. Jozsef, without a parting word to Andras, took his mother upstairs to tend to her nerves. Klara's mother gave Andras a single look that seemed to indicate how ridiculous she considered her daughter-in-law's behavior to be. She threw a coat over her dress and they ran outside to the waiting car. As they drove through the streets she begged him to tell her if Klara were well, and what she looked like now, and, finally, whether she wanted to see her mother.
"More than anything," Andras said. "You must know that."
"Eighteen years!" she said in a half whisper, and then fell silent, overcome.
A few moments later the car let them out at the base of Andrassy ut, and Andras put a hand on Mrs. Hasz's elbow as they hurried through the streets. Her hair loosened from its knot as she went, and her hastily tied scarf fell from her neck; Andras caught the square of violet silk in his fingertips as they entered the narrow lobby of the hotel. At the foot of the cast-iron stair a wordless trepidation seemed to take Klara's mother. She climbed the steps with a slow and deliberate tread, as though she needed time to rehearse in her mind a few of her thousand imaginings of this moment. When Andras indicated that they'd reached the correct floor, she followed him down the hall without a word and watched gravely as he took the key from his pocket. He unlocked the door and pushed it open. There was Klara at the window in her fawn-colored dress, midmorning light falling across her face, a handkerchief crushed in her hand. Her mother approached like a somnambulist; she went to the window, took Klara's hands, touched her face, pronounced her name. Klara, trembling, laid her head on her mother's shoulder and wept. And there they stood in shuddering silence as Andras watched. Here was the reverse of what he'd witnessed a few weeks earlier at Elisabet's embarkation: a vanished child returned, the intangible made real. He knew the reunion was taking place on the shabby top floor of a cramped hotel room on an unlovely street in Budapest, but he felt he was witnessing a kind of unearthly reconnection, a conjunction so stunning he had to turn away. Here was the closing of the distance between Klara's past life and her present; it seemed not unthinkable that he and she might enter a new life together now. At that time his difficulties at the Budapest visa office had not yet begun. The French border was still open. All seemed possible.
Now, four weeks later, what he had learned for certain was that he wouldn't return to Paris as they'd hoped. Worse than that: He'd soon be sent far away from Klara, into a distant and unknown forest. When he arrived at Benczur utca that afternoon with the news he'd just delivered to his brother--that he was to be deployed to Carpatho-Ruthenia in three weeks' time--he found to his relief that no one was awaiting him besides Klara herself. She'd asked to have tea served in her favorite upstairs room, a pretty boudoir with a window seat that faced the garden. When she was a child, she told Andras, this was where she had come when she wanted to be alone. She called it the Rabbit Room because of the beautiful Durer engraving that hung above the mantel: a young hare posed in half profile, its soft-furred haunches bunched, its ears rotated back. She'd lit a fire in the grate and requested pastries for their tea. But once he told her what he'd learned at the battalion office, they could only sit in silence and stare at the plate of walnut and poppyseed strudel.
"You've got to get home as soon as the French border opens again," he said, finally. "It terrifies me to think of the danger you're in."
"Paris won't be safer," she said. "It could be bombed at any time."
"You could go to the countryside with Mrs. Apfel. You could go to Nice."
She shook her head. "I won't leave you here. We're going to be married."
"But it's madness to stay," he said. "Sooner or later they'll learn who you are."
"There's nothing for me in Paris now. Elisabet's gone. You're here. And my mother, and Gyorgy. I can't go back, Andras."
"What about your friends, your students, the rest of your life?"
She shook her head. "France is at war. My students are gone to the countryside.
I'd have to close the school in any case, at least for a time. Perhaps the war will be a short one. With any luck it'll be over before you finish your military service. Then you'll get another visa and we'll go home together."
"And all that time you'll stay here, in peril?"
He sighed and rubbed his face with both hands. "This will be the death of me," he said. "Thinking of you living in Budapest, outside the law."
"I was living outside the law in Paris."
"But the law was so much farther away!"
"I won't leave you here in Hungary," she said. "That's all."
He had never dared to imagine that he and Klara might be married at the Dohany Street Synagogue, nor that his parents and Matyas might be there to witness it; he had certainly never dreamed that Klara's family might be there, too--her mother, who had shed her widow's garb for a column of rose-colored silk, weeping with joy; the younger Mrs. Hasz tight-lipped and erect in a drooping Vionnet gown; Klara's brother, Gyorgy, his affection for Klara having overcome whatever reservations he might have had about Andras, striding about with as much bluster and anxiety as if he were the bride's father; and Jozsef Hasz, watching the proceedings with silent detachment. Their wedding canopy was Lucky Bela's prayer shawl, and Klara's wedding ring the simple gold band that had belonged to Bela's mother. They were married on an October afternoon in the synagogue courtyard. A grand ceremony in the sanctuary was out of the question. There could be nothing public about their union except the paperwork that would place the bride's name at a still-farther remove from the Klara Hasz she had once been. She couldn't become a citizen, thanks to a new anti-Jewish law that had been passed in May, but she could still legally change her surname to Andras's, and apply for a residence permit under that veil.