He and Tibor went to the École Spéciale to get the official letter, but when they tried the front doors they found them locked. Of course: The school was closed for the remainder of August. Everyone, even the office attendants, were on vacation; they wouldn’t return until the beginning of September. Andras threw a Hungarian profanity into the hot milky sky.
“How can we get letterhead?” Tibor said. “How can we get an official seal?”
Andras cursed again, but then he had an idea. If there was one thing he knew, it was the architecture of the École Spéciale. It was one of the first designs they’d studied in studio; they had made an exhaustive survey of every aspect of the building, from the stone foundation of the neoclassical entry hall to the pyramidal glass roof of the amphitheater. He knew every door, every window, even the coal-delivery chutes and the network of pneumatic tubes that allowed the central office to send messages to the professors’ studies. He knew, for example, that if you approached the school’s back wall through the Cimetière de Montparnasse, you would find a door behind a cataract of ivy-a door so well hidden it was never locked. It communicated with the courtyard, which allowed access to the office through windows that swung wide on loose hinges. By the aid of those passages Andras and Tibor found themselves inside the vacation-deadened sanctum of the school. A stationer’s box in the office yielded a supply of letterhead and envelopes, and Tibor located the official seal in a secretary’s desk drawer. Neither he nor Andras were adept with a typewriter; it took eight tries to come up with a fair copy of a letter declaring that Andras was indeed a registered student at the École Spéciale, and that he would continue to receive his scholarship in the fall term. They listed Pierre Vago as the author of the letter, and Tibor forged Vago’s signature with a flourish so grand Vago himself might have envied it. Then they embossed the letter with the school’s official stamp.
Before they left, Andras showed Tibor the plaque stating that he’d won the Prix du Amphithéâtre. Tibor stood for a long time looking at the plaque, his arms crossed over his chest. Finally he went back to the office, where he got two blank sheets of letterhead and a pencil. He laid the paper over the plaque and made two rubbings.
“One for our parents,” he said. “One for me.”
They had to go to the telegraph office to wire Mátyás that he was coming. He wouldn’t notify his parents until he got to Budapest; a telegram would only alarm them, and a letter from France might not reach them until he was back in Paris. At the office, worried-looking men and women bent over cards at the writing counters, composing accidentally elegant haiku which took as their subjects birth and love, money and death. Half-written messages littered the floor: MAMAN I RECEIVED-, MATHILDE: REGRET TO INFORM-. While Tibor consulted the train timetable, of which the telegraph office kept a copy, Andras went to the window to get his message card and pencil. The green-visored attendant pointed him toward one of the counters. He went to the appointed place and waited for his brother, who told him that the Danube Express would leave the next morning at seven thirty-three and arrive in Budapest seventy-two hours later.
“What do we write?” Andras asked. “There’s too much to say.”
“How about this,” Tibor suggested, and licked the end of the pencil.
“MÁTYÁS: ARRIVE BUDAPEST THURSDAY AM. PLEASE BATHE. LOVE ANDRAS.”
“Please bathe?”
“You’ll likely have to share a bed with him.”
“Good point. It’s lucky you’re here to help.”
They paid, and the telegram went into the queue. Now Andras had only to go to the rue de Sévigné to tell Klara of his plans. He dreaded the coversation, the news he would have to deliver: their wedding plans disrupted, his visa expired. The confirmation that she’d been right when she guessed something was the matter. With Europe’s fate so uncertain, how could he convince her that their own would be less so? But when they got to the apartment, they found that Klara and Ilana had gone off on a mysterious mission together-to where, Mrs. Apfel wouldn’t say. It was four o’clock; on an ordinary day, Klara would have been teaching. But her establishment had an August hiatus, too. Had it not been for Ilana’s divorce and Elisabet’s departure, they might have gone somewhere themselves, perhaps back to the stone cottage at Nice. Now they were here together in the city, the shops and restaurants closed all around them, the city drowsing in a gold haze. Andras wondered where Klara and Ilana might have gone in secret. They came home a quarter of an hour later with wet hair, their skin pink and luminous, a glow about them; they had been to the Turkish baths in the Sixth Arrondissement. He couldn’t keep from following Klara into her bedroom to watch her dress for dinner. She smiled over her shoulder as she let her summer dress fall to the floor. Her body was cool and pale, her skin velvety as a sage leaf. It was impossible to think of getting on a train that would take him away from her, even for a day.
“Klárika,” he said, and she turned to face him. Her hair had dried in soft tendrils around her neck and forehead; he had such a strong desire for her that he wanted almost to bite her.
“What is it?” She put a hand on the bare skin of his arm.
“Something’s happened,” he said. “I have to go to Budapest.”
She blinked at him in surprise. “But Andras-my God, did someone die?”
“No, no. My visa’s expired.”
“Can’t you just go to the consulate?”
“They’ve changed the rules. József was the one who told me. He had to leave, too-he was on his way to the Gare du Nord when I saw him. I’m here illegally now, according to the government. I have to leave at once. There’s a train tomorrow morning.”
She took a white silk robe and wrapped it around herself, then sat down on the low chair beside the vanity table, her face drained of color.
“Budapest,” she said.
“It’s only for a few days.”
“But what if you run into trouble? What if they won’t renew your visa? What if a war begins while you’re away?” Slowly, pensively, she untied the green ribbon that bound her hair at the nape of her neck, and for a long time she sat holding that bit of silk. When she spoke again, her voice had lost its careful balance. “We were supposed to be married next week. And now you’re going to Hungary, the one place I can’t go with you.”
“I’ll be gone just long enough to get there, see my parents, and come back.”
“I couldn’t stand it if something happened.”
“Do you think I want to go without you?” he said, and pulled her to her feet. “Do you think I can stand the thought of it? Two weeks without you, while Europe’s on the brink of war? Do you think I want that?”
“What if I came with you?”
He shook his head. “We know that’s impossible. We’ve talked about it. It’s too dangerous, particularly now.”
“I never would have considered it while Elisabet was here, but now I don’t need to protect myself for her sake. And Andras-now I know something of what my mother must have suffered when I had to go away. She’s getting older. Who knows when I’ll have a chance to see her? It’s been more than eighteen years. Perhaps I can arrange to meet her in secret, and no one will be the wiser. If we stay a short time, we won’t be in danger-I’ve been Claire Morgenstern for nearly two decades now. I have a French passport. Why would anyone question it? Please, Andras. Let me come.”
“I can’t,” he said. “I couldn’t forgive myself if you were discovered and arrested.”
“Would that be worse than being kept from you?”
“But it’s only two weeks, Klara.”
“Two weeks during which anything might happen!”
“If Europe goes to war, you’ll be far safer here.”
“My safety!” she said. “What does that mean to me?”
“Think of what it means to me,” he said. He kissed her pale forehead, her cheekbones, her mouth. “I can’t let you come,” he said. “There’s no use discussing it. I can’t. And very soon I’ve got to go home and
get my things together. My train leaves at half past seven tomorrow. So you’ve got to think now. You’ve got to sit down and think about what you’d like to send to Budapest. I can carry letters for you.”
“What small consolation!”
“Imagine what comfort a letter will be to your mother.” With trembling hands he touched her hair, her shoulders. “And I can speak to her, Klara. I can ask her if she’ll allow me to have you for my wife.”
She nodded and took his hand, but she was no longer looking at him; it seemed she’d retreated to some small and remote place of self-protection. As they went to the sitting room so she could write, he stood by the open window and watched the sapling chestnuts show the pale undersides of their leaves. The breeze outside smelled of thunderstorm. He knew he was acting for her safety, acting as a husband should. He knew he was doing what was right. Soon she would finish her letters, and then he would kiss her goodbye.
How could he have known it would be his last night as a resident of Paris? What might he have done, how might he have spent those hours, if he’d known? Would he have walked the streets all night to fix in his mind their unpredictable angles, their smells, their variances of light? Would he have gone to Rosen’s flat and shaken him from sleep, bid him luck with his political struggles and with Shalhevet? Would he have gone to see Ben Yakov at his bereft apartment one last time? Would he have gone to Polaner’s, crouched at his friend’s side and told him what was true: that he loved him as much as he had ever loved a friend, that he owed his life and happiness to him, that he had never felt such exhilaration as when they’d worked together in the studio at night, making something they believed to be daring and good? Would he have taken a last stroll by the Sarah-Bernhardt, that sleeping grande dame, its red velvet seats flocked with dust, its corridors empty and quiet, its dressing rooms still redolent of stage makeup? Would he have crept into Forestier’s studio to memorize his catalogue of disappearance and illusion? Would he have gone back through the secret door he knew about in the Cimetière du Montparnasse, back to his studio at school, to run his hands across the familiar smooth surface of his drawing table, the groove of the pencil rail, the mechanical pencils themselves, with their crosshatched finger rests, their hard smooth lead, the satisfying click that signified the end of one unit of work, the beginning of another? Would he have gone back to the rue de Sévigné, his heart’s first and last home in Paris, the place where he had first glimpsed Klara Morgenstern with a blue vase in her hands? The place where they had first made love, first argued, first spoken of their children?
But he didn’t know. He knew only that he was right to keep Klara from going with him. He would go, and then he would come back to her. No war could keep him from her, no law or regulation. He rolled himself into the blankets they’d shared and thought about her all night. Beside him, on the floor, Tibor slept on a borrowed mattress. There was an unspeakable comfort in the familiar rhythm of his breathing. They might almost have been back in the house in Konyár, both of them home from gimnázium on a weekend, their parents asleep on the other side of the wall, and Mátyás dreaming in his little cot.
All he had was his cardboard suitcase and his leather satchel. It wasn’t enough luggage to require a cab. Instead he and Tibor walked to the station, just as they had when Andras had left Budapest two years earlier. When they crossed the Pont au Change he considered turning once more toward Klara’s house, but there wasn’t time; the train would leave in an hour. He stopped only at a boulangerie to buy bread for the trip. In the windows of the tabac next door, the newspapers proclaimed that Count Csaky, the Hungarian foreign minister, had gone on a secret diplomatic mission to Rome; he’d been sent by the German government, and had gone directly from the airport to a meeting with Mussolini. The Hungarian government had refused to comment on the purpose of the visit, saying only that Hungary was happy to facilitate communication between its allies.
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 InvisibleBridge
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX. Subcarpathía
IN JANUARY OF 1940, Labor Service Company 112/30 of the Hungarian Army was stationed in Carpatho-Ruthenia, somewhere between the towns of Jalová and Stakčin, 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, Márkus Kovács, 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 École Spéciale 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 Soroksári út, 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 Mátyás at the lingerie shop on Váci utca where he was arranging a new display
window. A group of correctly dressed middle-aged ladies watched from the sidewalk as Mátyás 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, Mátyás 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?” Mátyás 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.”
Mátyás 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.
The InvisibleBridge Page 39
