“Surely they won’t make you do hard labor,” Andras said. “Surely they’ll give you a job in an office, at least.”
“Now, Andras,” Novak said, with a note of reproach. “We both know that’s not true. What will happen will happen.”
“What about your son?” Andras said.
“Yes, what about my son?” Novak said. “What about him?” His voice trailed into silence, and they sat together without saying a word. Into Andras’s mind came the image of his own child, that boy or girl sitting cross-legged in Klara’s womb-that child who might never be born, and who, if born, might never live past babyhood, and who might then live only to see the world consumed by flames. Novak, watching Andras, seemed to apprehend a new grief of his own.
“So,” he said, finally. “You understand. You’re a father too.”
“Soon,” Andras said. “In a few months.”
“And you’ll be finished with the labor service by then?”
“Who knows? Anything might happen.”
“It’ll be all right,” he said. “You’ll make it home. You’ll be with Klara and the child. György will maintain his arrangement with the authorities. It’s not her they want, you know; it’s his money. If they prosecute her it will only bring their own guilt to light.”
Andras nodded, wanting to believe it. He was surprised to feel reassured, and then ashamed that it was Novak who had reassured him-Novak, who had lost everything but his young son. “Who will look after your boy?” he asked again.
“Edith’s parents. And my sister. It’s fortunate we came back when we did,” Novak said. “If we’d stayed in France, we might be in an internment camp by now. The boy too. They’re not sparing the children.”
“God,” Andras said, and put his head into his hands. “What’ll become of us? All of us?”
Novak looked up at him from beneath his graying brows; the last trace of anger had gone out of his eyes. “In the end, only one thing,” he said. “Some by fire, some by water. Some by the sword, some by wild beasts. Some by hunger, some by thirst. You know how the prayer goes, Andras.”
“Forgive me,” Andras said. “Forgive me for saying you weren’t a Jew.” For it was the verse from the Rosh Hashanah liturgy, the prayer that prefigured all ends. Soon he would say that prayer himself, in the camp at Bánhida among his workmates.
“I am a Jew,” Novak said. “That was why I hired you in Paris. You were my brother.”
“I’m sorry, Novak-úr,” Andras said. “I’m sorry. I never meant you any harm. You were always kind to me.”
“It’s not your fault,” Novak said. “I’m glad you came here. At least this way we can take leave of each other.”
Andras rose and put on his military cap. Novak extended his hand across the desk, and Andras took it. There was nothing more to do except bid each other farewell. They did it in few words, and then Andras left the office and pulled the door closed behind him.
CHAPTER THIRTY. Barna and the General
THAT EVENING, when he returned home to the apartment on Nefelejcs utca, he told Klara nothing of what had passed between him and her brother; nor did he mention that he had seen Novak. He said only that he’d been on a long walk around the city, that he had been thinking about what he might do when he returned from the service. He knew she’d taken note of his anxious distraction, but she didn’t ask him to explain his mood. The fact that he was going back to Bánhida the next day must have seemed explanation enough. They ate a quiet dinner in the kitchen, their chairs close together at the little table. Afterward, in the sitting room, they listened to Sibelius on the phonograph and watched the fire burning in the grate. Andras wore a flannel robe Klara had bought for him, and a pair of lambswool slippers. He couldn’t have imagined a setting more replete with comfort, but soon he’d be gone and Klara would be alone again to face whatever might come. The more comfortable he felt, the more contented and drowsy Klara looked as she lay back against the sofa cushions, the more painful it was to imagine what lay on the other side. György was right, he thought, to have protected Klara from the knowledge of what had happened. Her tranquility seemed worth his own dishonesty. She was utterly serene as she spoke of the changes pregnancy had brought about in her body, and of the comfort of being able to talk to her mother about them. She was tender with Andras, physically affectionate; she wanted to make love, and he was happy for the distraction. But when they were in bed, her body surprising in its new balance, he had to turn his face away. He was afraid she would sense he was keeping something from her, and would demand to know what it was.
Once he was back at Bánhida he was spared that danger, at least. He had never been so glad to have to do heavy work. He could numb his mind with the endless loading of brown coal into dusty carts, the endless pulling and pushing of the carts along the tracks. He could stun his limbs with calisthenics in the evening lineup, could submit to the drudgery of chores-the cleaning of barracks, the cutting of firewood, the hauling away of kitchen garbage-in the hope that the exhaustion would allow him to fall asleep at once, before his mind opened its kit bag of worries and began to display them in graphic detail, one after the next. Even if he managed to avoid that grim parade, he was at the mercy of his dreams. In the one that recurred most frequently, he would come upon Ilana lying in the hospital in a place that wasn’t quite Paris but wasn’t Budapest either, on the brink of death; then it wasn’t Ilana but Klara, and he knew he had to give his blood to her, but he couldn’t figure out how to transfer it from his own veins into hers. He stood at her bedside with a scalpel in his hand, and she lay in bed pale and terrified, and he thought he must first press the scalpel to his wrist and then think of a solution. Night after night he woke in the dark among the coughs and snores of his squad-mates, certain that Klara had died and that he had done nothing to save her. His sole consolation was that his term of service would end on December fifteenth, two weeks before she was due. He knew that it was foolish to pin all his hopes on that release date when the Munkaszolgálat showed so little respect for the promises it had made to its conscripts; he tried to remember the hard lessons of disappointment he’d learned in his first year of service. But the date was all he had, and he held on to it like a talisman. December fifteenth, December fifteenth: He said it under his breath as he worked, as if the repetition might hasten its arrival.
One morning when he was feeling particularly desperate, he went to the prayer service before work. A group of men met in an empty storage building every day at dawn; some of them had tiny dog-eared prayer books, and there was a miniature Torah from which they read on Mondays, Thursdays, and Shabbos. Inside his tallis, Andras found himself thinking not of the prayers, but, as often happened when he performed any religious observance, of his parents. When he’d written to tell them Klara was pregnant, his father had written back to say they’d make a trip to Budapest at once. Andras had been skeptical. His parents hated to travel. They hated the noise and expense and crowds, and they hated the crush of Budapest. But a few weeks later they had gone to visit Klara and had stayed for three days. Andras’s mother had promised to come back before the baby was born and to stay as long as Klara needed her.
She must have known it would be a comfort to Andras. She was expert at comforting him, at making him feel safe; she had done it unfailingly all through his childhood. During the silent Amidah, what came to him was a memory from Konyár: For his sixth birthday he’d been given a wind-up tin circus train with little tin animals rattling behind the bars of their carriages. You could open the carriages to take out the elephants and lions and bears, who could then be made to perform in a circus ring you’d drawn in the dust. The toy had come from Budapest in a red cardboard box. It so exceeded any Konyár child’s imagining of a toy that it made Andras the subject of jealous rage among his classmates-most notably the two blond boys who chased him home from school one afternoon, trying to catch him and take the train away. He ran with the red cardboard box clutched against his chest, ran toward the figu
re of his mother, whom he could see up ahead in the yard: She was beating rugs on wooden racks at the edge of the orchard. She turned at the sound of the boys’ approaching footsteps. By that time Andras couldn’t have been three meters away. But before he could reach her, his foot caught on an apple-tree root and he flew forward, the red box leaving his hands in a rising arc as he threw out his hands to catch himself. In one graceful motion his mother dropped her rug-beating baton and caught the box. The footsteps of Andras’s pursuers came to a halt. Andras raised his head to see his mother tuck the train box under one arm and pick up her rug-beater in the other hand. She didn’t make a move, just stood there with the tool upraised. It was a stout branch with a sort of flat round basket fixed to one end. She took a single step toward the two blond boys. Though Andras knew his mother to be a gentle person-she had never struck any of her sons-her posture seemed to suggest that she was ready to beat Andras’s attackers with just as much fervor as she had employed in beating her rugs. Andras got up in time to see the blond boys fleeing up the road, their bare feet raising clouds of dust. His mother handed him the red box and suggested that he keep the train at home for a while. Andras had entered the house with the sense that his mother was a superhuman creature, ready to fly to his aid in moments of peril. The feeling had faded soon enough; not long afterward he’d left for school in Debrecen, where his mother couldn’t protect him. But the incident had left a deep imprint upon him. He could feel his mother’s power now as if it were all happening again: The red cardboard box of his life was flying through the air, and his mother had stretched out her hands to catch it.
When he wasn’t consumed with thoughts of Klara, he was thinking about his brothers. The mail distribution center had become a source of constant dread. Every time he passed it he imagined receiving a telegram that brought terrible news about Mátyás’s fate. There had been no word since his deployment to the east, and György’s efforts to help him had met with frustration. György had sent a series of letters to high Munkaszolgálat officials, but had been told that no one could bother with a problem of this scale when there was a war to be fought. If he wanted to arrange Mátyás’s exemption from service he would have to contact the boy’s battalion commander in Belgorod. Further inquiry revealed that Mátyás’s battalion had finished its service in Belgorod and had been sent farther east; now the battalion command headquarters was situated somewhere near Rostov-on-Don. György sent a barrage of telegrams to the commander but heard nothing for weeks. Then he received a brief handwritten note from a battalion secretary, who informed him that Mátyás’s company had slipped into the whiteout of the Russian winter. They had registered their location via wireless a few weeks earlier, but their communication lines had since been broken and their whereabouts could not be determined now with any certainty.
So this was what he had to picture: his brother Mátyás somewhere far away in the snow, the tether to his battalion command center severed, his company drifting with its army group toward deeper cold and danger. What was he eating? What was he wearing? Where was he sleeping? How could Andras lie in a bunk at night and eat bread every morning when his brother was lost in Ukraine? Did Mátyás imagine that Andras hadn’t tried to help him, or that György Hász had refused? Who was responsible for Mátyás’s current peril? Was it Edith Novak, who had spilled Klara’s secret? Was it Klara’s long-ago attackers? Was it Andras himself, whose connection to Klara had made the price of his brother’s freedom so high? Was it Miklós Horthy, whose desire to restore Hungary ’s territories had drawn him into the war, or Hitler, whose madness had driven him into Russia? How many other men besides Mátyás found themselves in extremis that winter, and how many more would die before the war was over?
It was some comfort to know that Tibor, at least, remained far from the front lines. His letters continued to drift in from Transylvania according to the whims of the military postal service. Three weeks would go by without a word, then a clutch of five letters would come, then a single postcard the next day, and then nothing for two weeks. During his time in the Carpathians, the tone of Tibor’s writing had devolved from its casual banter to a stricken monotone: Dear Andras, another day of bridge-building. I miss Ilana terribly. Worry about her every minute. Plenty of disaster here: Today my workmate Roszenzweig broke his arm. A complex open fracture. I have no splints or casting materials or antibiotics, of course. Had to set the fracture with strip of planking from the barracks floor. Or, Eight servicemen down with pneumonia last week. Three died. How it grieves me to think of it! I know I could have kept them hydrated if I hadn’t been sent out with the road crew. And another letter, in its entirety: Dear Andráska, I can’t sleep. Ilana is in her 21st week now. Last time the miscarriage occurred in the 22nd. Andras wished he could write to Tibor about what he’d learned in Budapest, but he didn’t want to compound Tibor’s fears with his own. He wasn’t alone in his anxiety, though; every week a pair of ivory-colored envelopes arrived from Benczúr utca with words of reassurance. One would be from György-No news, no new threats. All goes on as before-and the other would carry Klara’s mother’s seal-Dear Andras, know that we are all thinking of you and wishing you a speedy return. How Klara misses you, dear boy! And how happy it will make her when you come home. The doctor believes her to be getting on quite well. Once she sent Andras a small package, the contents of which had evidently been so attractive that nothing remained in the box except her note: Andráska, here are a few sweets for you. If you like them, I’ll send more. Andras had brought the box back to the barracks to show it to Mendel, who had roared with laughter and suggested they display it on a shelf as an icon of life at Bánhida. It was a comfort, too, to have Mendel there; they would finish their terms of service together and would travel back to Budapest on the same train. At least that was what they planned, marking off the boxes on their hand-drawn calendar as the days grew colder and the distant hills faded to winter brown.
But on the twenty-fifth of November, a day whose gray blankness yielded in the evening to a confetti storm of snow, there was a telegram from György waiting for Andras at the central office. He tore it open with shaking hands and read that Klara had given birth the previous night, five weeks before her due date. They had a son, but he was very ill. Andras must come home at once.
It was a long time before he could move or speak. Other work servicemen tried to shuffle him aside to get to the counter; was he going to stand there all day? He made his way to the door of the office and staggered out into the snow. The lights of the camp had been lit early that evening. They formed a brilliant halo around the quadrangle, broken only by a brace of brighter, taller lights on either side of the administrative offices. Andras moved toward that bracket of lights as if toward a portal through which he might be conducted to Budapest. He had a son, but he was very ill. A son. A boy. His boy, and Klara’s. Fifty miles away. Two hours by train.
The guards who usually flanked the door had gone to supper. Andras went in unhindered. He passed by offices with electric heaters, telephones, mimeograph machines. He didn’t know where Major Barna’s office was, but he felt his way into the heart of the building, following the architectural lines of force. There, where he would have placed the major’s office if he had designed this building, was the major’s office. But its door was locked. Barna, too, had gone to supper. Andras went back outside into the blowing snow.
Everyone knew where the officers’ mess hall was. It was the only place at Bánhida from which the smell of real food issued. No thin broth, no hard bread there; instead they ate chicken and potatoes and mushroom soup, veal paprikás, stuffed cabbage, all of it with white bread. Servicemen who had been assigned to deliver coal or remove garbage from the officers’ mess hall had to suffer the aromas of those dishes. No serviceman, except those who waited on the officers, could enter the mess hall; it was guarded by soldiers with guns. But Andras approached the building without fear. He had a son. The first flush of his joy had mingled with the physical need to protect thi
s child, to interpose his own body between him and whatever might do him harm. And Klara: If their child was dangerously ill, she needed him too. Guards with guns were of no consequence. The only thing that mattered was that he get out of Bánhida.
The guards at the door were not ones he recognized; they must have been fresh from Budapest. That was to Andras’s advantage. He approached the door and addressed himself to the shorter and stockier guard, a fellow who looked as though the smells of meat and roasted peppers were a torment to him.
“Telegram for Major Barna,” Andras said, raising the blue envelope in one hand.
The guard squinted at him in the glow of the electric lights. Snow swirled between them. “Where’s the adjutant?” he asked.
“He’s at dinner, too, sir,” Andras said. “Kovács at the communications center ordered me to bring it myself.”
“Leave it with me,” the guard said. “I’ll see he gets it.”
“I was ordered to deliver it in person and wait for a reply.”
The short stocky guard glanced at his counterpart, a bullish young soldier half asleep at his post. Then he beckoned Andras closer and bent his head to him. “What do you really want?” he asked. “Work servicemen don’t deliver telegrams to camp commanders. I may be new here, but I’m not an idiot.” He held Andras’s gaze steady with his own, and Andras’s instinct was to answer truthfully.
“My wife just gave birth five weeks early,” he said. “The baby’s sick. I have to get home. I want to ask for a special leave.”
The InvisibleBridge Page 50
